The Long Pull: Spread Your Wings

"Can you copy this on your office computer?" Jamie asked. "I can't let you take it, because then they'll know it's gone. But if you can copy it before we leave, then maybe we can release it and blow this open before the episode comes out."

"I don't know if audio would be enough to prove anything." Belle said. "Audio is more easily manipulated than video. It'd be better if there was some uncut video."

"I can't just walk off with those cards. They'll know it was me." Jamie said. "Besides, I don't know if there's video of him actually saying it. Chances are good the cameras weren't on him."

"Even if we got it, I don't think the old office PC has enough hard drive space to pull three hours of 4K footage." Carol said. "That thing still runs XP. We need a moderncomputer."

Carol looked up with sudden clarity.

"Belle, can you go back out there and take over for Anne?"

She looked apprehensive. "What if they put the camera on me again?"

"Let them. If they're looking to show how emotionally compromised you were after what happened to splice in wherever they like, don't give them what they're looking for. Just go out there like you always do, all smiles and squeaky orgasms... and they won't get their shot. I'll bet that they won't even be able to tell what footage was shot before or after their little prank."

Belle smiled, as she often did, and went out to the floor.

Anne came into the break room and brought out her bad-ass gaming laptop. There was no public Wi-Fi connection at Pythons, something that a lot of patrons complained about. The official response was: what's on your phone that you'd rather look at instead of the waitresses? That shut most people up.

Jamie had somehow come back with a memory card with one colossal video file. It was about two and a half hours of uninterrupted and unedited footage... but it was also one of the primary camera recording the competition between Carol and Belle.

The cameraperson, whoever they were, also had somewhat abandoned their duty of filming Georgia eat the remaining wings... and instead filmed the scene underneath the table, where Belle and Carol had made love.

Carol was mortified. Anne watched this with an enormous grin.

"There's no way this is getting on Food Network or TLC or whatever."

"Can you go back to the part where that guy puts the implants in? Can we see that he messed with Belle's?"

She rewound to that part. Even in the shockingly high fidelity of 4k photography, his hands moved too fast to tell if the shroud was on there. This wasn't really the proof they were looking for, either.

"I need to get this card back before they notice it's gone." Jamie said. "I replaced it with a blank one, but we can just say they got mislabeled or something. But it definitely has to leave with us."

"Before you run off..." Anne called from her seat. "About what time did you hear that producer say that?"

"Not long before the event started. Maybe ten minutes?"

Anne handed her back the two SD cards. Jamie scrurried off, leaving Anne to search through the video approximately ten minutes before the competition. Still nothing. She moved further back.

She got a shot of the producer walking up with a ghost pepper implant in each hand. The one in his right hand had the shroud... the other one didn't.

"Got it!" Anne hit a keyboard shortcut to get screenshots of several frames in a row. "There it is. He totally stripped the shroud off one of the implants."

"Bastard." Carol said softly. "I wish we could find that broken shroud piece, but he probably threw it away."

"There's no hope trying to look through the trash tonight. We made so many bags of trash, it would take forever to go through them all. The kitchen crew has been taking them out like every forty minutes. Luckily, we got the next best thing."

A small silence, as they both stared at the screen.

"Carol, maybe you can go out there and distract the crew with your nudity, so Jamie can get the cards back without anyone noticing?"

"Sounds like a plan." She kissed her on the cheek and ran out, possibly to announce some substantial discount on bad American beer sold in brown bottles.

Anne ran the footage back to later on, where Carol and Belle were making love, as they made out with jizz on their faces. Anne started to tug on herself as the scene continued.

What a shame it would have been, for this footage to sit in some vault, unseen forever, just because it was entirely unfit for cable television? This clip really SHOULD get to an audience that would appreciate it.

---

Ten o'clock rolled around. The patrons filtered out, the crew had packed up their stuff. Jamie got the SD cards back where they belonged before anyone noticed. Nobody should think anything was amiss. Anne, unsatisfied with the slow performance of the Wi-Fi, did what she always dreamed of: she pulled the Internet cord out of the router and directly into her computer. From here, she uploaded the 'evidence' of the malfeasance to a porn streaming service. She'd keep her copy on her hard drive in case it got taken down. The story would probably truly break tomorrow, as all the East coasters started waking up.

But for now, Pythons was calm.

All the waitstaff stuffed into the break room to change out of their uniforms and into something a little warmer for this cool March evening. Belle put on her fashionable coat and scarf, even though it wasn't quite cold enough to warrant it.

And Carol finally, finally took out the ghost pepper implant. Over the hours, she'd grown quite used to it. At first, she thought it'd make her skin red like the devil. But today, she was the rock, and the gates of hell did not prevail against her. She looked at it before ditching it in the little waste basket in the locker room that was almost exclusively for implant disposal and wads of gum.

"Belle?" Carol said.

"Yes?" She turned, seeing the mostly melted implant in Carol's hands.

There was no shroud on it.

Anne joined in staring at it. "YOU... had the implant that guy tampered with?"

"Maybe the producer did it to both of us?" Belle offered.

"No, the video we stole showed one of them still had the shroud on."

"So, I couldn't even take the ghost pepper implant... normally?"

"Don't feel bad, Belle." Carol insisted. "That thing is not for amateurs. Even doing it once is difficult to tolerate."

"But why sabotage yours and not Belle's?" Anne asked. "We assumed that they wanted to craft a story about the pretty newcomer not being able to handle the pressure."

"Clearly, what they REALLY wanted was for the old-timer to crack and to get lots of shots of the glamorous Belle showing me up."

"Well, we certainly flipped that script on them." Anne said.

"You think I'm glamorous?" Belle held her hands together between her, almost as if in prayer.

"We all think you're a lot of things, Belle." Anne said.

Carol shivered involuntarily.

"You OK?" Anne asked.

Carol brought her hands in to her chest. "I suddenly feel so... cold."

"Well, put some clothes on, you naughty thing." Anne slapped Carol's rear and clenched it for a moment before releasing it.

Carol put her clothes back on with very little enthusiasm. The waitstaff slowly moved out the back, filtering out to their cars.

"Where are you going?" Anne asked.

"I had to park across the street, because there was no room at the time."

"Before you go... I heard you got next Friday off."

"Yeah, I thought that was the day this silly TV thing was happening, so I took it off." Carol felt very silly now, trying to avoid all this fun.

"Well...." Anne said. "I talked to the bosses, and they gave me next Friday off, too." She leaned in closer, rubbing her nose on Carol's cheek. "So.. I don't know if you made any plans for then, but if you wanted... we could... hang out."

"You're not... jealous or anything? After I banged Belle under the table?"

"I'm jealous... of her. Because she got to have you tonight. And I have to wait." Anne purred. "Unless you don't want to wait, either. Don't think I won't pull down your pants right here and lick your hot rim like a margarita..."

After the grueling shift Carol had just had, after being wrung out like a sponge until she was nearly empty, and yes, after the lovely coitus with her ten-out-of-ten babe of a co-worker... Carol had thought that nothing could get her to want any more right now.

God, Friday couldn't get there fast enough.

---

The leaked footage caused a minor stir in the challenge-eating community, if such a thing exists. Nobody could impugn the integrity of Georgia, who had taken the challenge head-on and prevailed. But anything that would question the verisimilitude of the program was something she could not tolerate, so that producer was let go for tampering with the event. It would have been more satisfying if his 'career' in reality television was scuppered forever, but proving that you can interfere in the lives of beautiful people is the only skill set needed to thrive in that field, so that producer simply moved on to a different reality project out of the competitive eating sphere.

The news coverage led to inflated traffic to all Pythons locations, but especially the Fort Worth location, where the featured waitresses were treated as minor celebrities. Even Pablo, the noble chef who had stopped the cameraman from following Belle in her escape, found himself turned into a handful of memes, mostly involving the first Lord of the Rings film and the Balrog.

Of course, what Anne didn't know before she released it... was there was a B-roll interview where the producer had coached him into saying which waitress he liked the best. He didn't even have to think about it: he said Jeanette, a waitress who barely appeared in the footage at all.

This news, of course, eventually got to Jeanette.

"Why... why didn't you tell me?" Jeanette asked him in private.

His answer: "Why would you sit under the shade of a tree... in a forest of redwoods?"

Something positive did come out from this silliness after all.

---

The foot traffic at the Fort Worth Pythons thinned out as the summer progressed, returning to its pre-viral levels. At this point, Belle had been there for months, and knew about everything one needed to know to work there. She's even nearly mastered that important waitressing skill: asking how the food was when the customer's mouth was full.

Belle walked up to a customer sitting in a corner of Pythons. She had curly dark hair and a brace on her left hand. She must have been very confident in her dexterity, eating wings in a pure white outfit. To her credit, she was sucking down wings with amazing efficiency. The wing entered her mouth and came out as two bones next to each other like crossed fingers. She didn't eat with haste or greed. She would eat one wing, chew it maybe twenty times like Grandma instructed, swallowed, licked her fingers clean of sauce, and took another one. It reminded her of the way Georgia had fought those ghost pepper wings, but with somehow even less haste.

She wasn't Belle's customer, but she felt compelled to ask, "You enjoying those wings?"

The customer looked up from her plate with sudden embarrassment, as if her fly was open. She delicately dabbed her mouth with a napkin and nodded. "They're fantastic. I'm glad I flew in."

"Oh, where are you from?"

The woman fidgeted a bit. "A place pretty far from here."

"Well, I'm Belle, and I'm pleased you came so far for our wings. If you need anything, give us the high sign and we'll come running."

In that time, the customer finished another wing. "I didn't come here just for the wings."

"The sights, then?" Belle turned in place, showing off her profile.

"No, though they are lovely."

"Then what?"

The customer slipped two fingers into her cleavage and retrieved a business card. "How would you like to come work for us?"

"I just got settled in workin' here."

Belle finally looked at the card.

"Oh, my." She said. "I didn't expect an opportunity like this until... I was much older."

"Our work might not be quite what you expect, if you'd read about it." She said. "There's a lot of... misconceptions that float around."

"I'm just flattered you think I'm up to snuff." Belle smiled. "I thought all the... self-gratification would disqualify me."

"We've recently updated our view on most things involving burdens of the flesh." The customer said. "I wouldn't sweat it."

Glancing over her shoulder, Belle saw Carol standing at a distant table. She was in the process of making a new set of wings. Anne held the bowl across from her and cheered her on, licking her lips suggestively.

Belle turned back. "I don't think I'm ready to leave this place just yet." She said. "Is this a one-time offer?"

"Not at all. Unless there's some drastic changes, the offer will still be on the table if you reconsider." She said.

"I'll... keep the faith." She looked down at the card again before hiding it in her cleavage. When she looked up, the woman was gone. So were all her plates, her chicken bones... but the woman had given her an enormous tip.

Which Belle split among the other waitresses.

From a great distance away, the customer was still watching. She KNEW that Belle would do that. One more point in her favor, she thought.

"What's she saying?" One of her associates appeared behind her, watching over her shoulder.

"Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers..." Colette repeated what Belle was saying. "for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

Colette's associate blinked, rolling her wings with a twitch. "What's THAT from?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's Chicken Soup for the Soul."