Would You Like Fries With That? (Patreon)

Night City was a massive city, although despite what its name may entail, the city wasn’t entirely covered in dark and bleak looking districts; there were some colorful ones in there, too. And that’s exactly the district Alex worked in. Bright colorful lights, clean streets, and dozens of high-rise skyscrapers that offered the best of the best in luxury accommodation. Despite working there, the tigress did not live in that lively district. But once she was in her work clothes and was all dolled up pretty, one wouldn’t be able to tell that she was from the darker and dirtier “bottomless” district of Night City. To all the patrons she served as a waitress in the café, Alex was just another cute stripey local with a happy-to-serve attitude.

The hair on one side of her head was shaven, while the rest was done in a ponytail. She also wore the café-provided uniform; a cute red and white blouse with a matching miniskirt. The blouse obviously intentionally left a huge chunk of fabric out around the upper chest area for maximum cleavage visibility whilst still keeping the place a café and not a gentlemen’s club. Alex was a favorite with the frequent customers of the café, and who could blame them? She was a cute tigress, after all.

It was a rather busy Monday morning at the café, with it being rush hour, everyone was either running late and needed to get their coffee fix, or they were running late because they decided to make a stop for their coffee fix. Mondays were the worst days, and the morning shift was the shittiest shift of all. Alex had to run around serving multiple customers at tables, the counter, and those who wanted their items to go. The café was severely understaffed, despite the overall sales revenue, customer foot traffic, and profit being high enough to justify getting more hands on deck. The owners figured they would rather pay their current staff more than spend more on hiring new staff. Working the Monday rush hour shift did pay exceptionally better, though, so there was that. The significant increase in hourly wages was easily enough for Alex to volunteer for a few Monday morning shifts a month.

Alex was wiping down a table after the previous customer who sat there spilled absolutely everything he had that was spillable onto the table. The tigress didn’t even think it was possible to spill every condiment ever made in one sitting. A spray bottle filled with a disinfectant in hand, and a multi-purpose cleaning cloth in the other, the feline sprayed and wiped down the table until there wasn’t a trace of the spillage left to be seen. She let out a soft sigh once she was done and walked towards the back to wash out the cloth she just used. After she did that, she returned to the main dining area and looked around to see if there were any new tables that hadn’t had their orders taken yet.

Seeing no new tables, she took the opportunity to take a breather and let out a soft sigh as she shifted her body weight from one foot to the other. High heels sure made her look pretty and tall, but they were not very practical shoes when it came to waiting tables. She bent down to touch her toes a few times before putting her hands at her hips and sighing again. Right after she sighed, a new customer entered the café and went and seated himself at the table she had just wiped clean. Adjusting her posture a tad and affixing a smile on her face, the tigress quickly made her way to the new customer. She pulled out her tablet as she approached him and was ready to take his order.

“Good morning, sir. Welcome to The Café, what can I get for ya?” the big cat waitress smiled and pointed playfully at the customer who sat alone in his booth with her free hand. Her large saber teeth along with the rest of her smaller teeth on display.

The customer turned his attention away from the barbaric paper menu that he had been glossing over and looked at the tigress. He looked as if something was bothering him, but did eventually smile once he saw who had come to take his order.

“Good morning, Alex, I was hoping you’d be in this morning,” he said as he set the menu down on the table and slid it away from him. “I’d like one of your signature coffees, please, and my usual. You still remember my usual, right?”

“Of course! Your usual, but I’ll have to charge you a little extra fee for remembering what you always order oh so well,” Alex chuckled as she brought the tablet up to her and began tapping in what he had ordered. “It’s nice to see you again, though! I haven’t seen you in a while, thought you might have found another café or something.” The tigress smirked and waggled her eyebrows at the customer that she seemed to know a little better than other usual customers.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” the man chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t think any other café has this cute of a waitress working there.” The man was known to be a charmer and a womanizer, but Alex couldn’t stop herself from eating up any compliment he gave her, hearing him call her cute and compliment her on her looks from time to time made her feel really good. Despite the conversations they had whenever he came around to the café, Alex didn’t know too much about the mysterious man. The fact that he was always dressed in something dapper didn’t help make him look less mysterious, even if the eatery was in the richer and more developed district, it was still what one would consider a casual place. The man knew more about Alex than she did about him, that was for sure.

“Alright! Would you like fries with that?” Alex asked as she blushed a soft red from the compliment. The stripes she had on her cheeks did a good job at helping her mask her blushes.

“Yes, please, always,” he cooed.

The tigress tapped the screen of her tablet some more, “Aaaaaand would you like anything else?”

“Nah, that’ll be all. I wouldn’t mind your company once my order is out, though,” he smiled.

“I’m not sure I can just sit and chit chat, it does like to get really busy here Monday morning,” the tiger turned left and right as she spoke, making sure that there weren’t any new customers coming in that needed her attention.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.” He looked up at her and smiled wide. “If anyone comes in you can just get up and go to them, then we can continue our conversation another time. What do you say? Sit with me after? I think you’ll like what I have to tell you,” he grinned and chuckled softly under his breath. “Scratch that, I guarantee it,” he raised one brow and had a flair of confidence in his tone.

Alex bit her lower lip a little bit before she nodded. “Okay! I’ll come back in a bit with your food and come join you for a chat,” the tigress chuffed, turned around, and walked back to the counter to standby and wait for the food to be sent out from the kitchen. While she waited, she cleaned up a few tables that had left and also stood behind the counter area filing her claws as she idly watched the door for new customers.

“Order up!” a voice shouted out from the kitchen as a plate of chicken and waffles was placed at the little window into the kitchen. The big cat ran over to the window to pick up the plate of food and the coffee and brought it over to the man at his booth.

“Here ya go!” Alex set the plate of food down in front of him along with his signature cold brew coffee. Once she had set the food down in front of him, the man looked up at her and gestured to the seat opposite him. The waitress sat down across from him and watched him take a few bites out of his dish, waiting patiently for him to begin the conversation. After he swallowed his bites and washed it down with some of his drink, he looked the tigress right in her green eyes.

“Anyway, I have something that I want to show you,” the man shuffled a little bit to pull something out from his jacket pocket; a transparent slab of glass. He glanced at it and it lit up. He then did a few swipes and taps before he placed it on the table and slid it over to Alex.

Alex leaned forward a little to look at what he had put up on the screen. It was a video filmed inside a speakeasy, retro-looking bar, and Alex could be seen sitting behind a piano on a small stage. The tiger’s eyes widened immediately when she recognized herself, but she tried to hide her reaction and looked up from the phone.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“You tell me…” he stabbed his fork into some chicken, then some waffle, and put it into his mouth. “To me, it looks like some tigress belting songs from her heart at a modest gig.”

The tigress looked down at the phone again and watched herself sing and play the piano on the stage. Alex took the odd gig singing at clubs and bars all over the city from time to time, she never thought she was good enough for anyone to record her, though. She sat there quite dumbfounded and a bit embarrassed that her friend had uncovered her secret side job.

“I take on gigs like that here and there, small places, when they don’t have any good people on hand,” Alex shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, then… It seems I don’t know everything about you, after all,” he chuckled and reached for his phone to watch the video for a few seconds before he turned the screen off and set it next to his plate.

Alex rolled her eyes, “It’s not like I know everything about you, mister Chicken and Waffles,” she teased. “You refuse to tell me what your ‘line of work’ is. Sometimes I think you’re an assassin, mercenary, or something totally in a grey area.” A chuckle came out from Alex, but then the realization hit her that it was entirely possible he was an assassin.

“I’m not an assassin, Alex,” he shook his head dismissively. “I’m a head hunter.”

“That sounds EXACTLY like an assassin.” The tigress furrowed her brows concerningly.

The man let out a laugh, “No, no, head hunter, as in, I look for people with potential, for Ynos Music, have you heard of that?”

The tigress’s jaw almost dropped and she stared at him for a moment. “You work for Ynos Music… Wait, for real?”

After another bite of the chicken and waffle plate in front of him, he chuckled and began nodding his head at the dumbfounded tigress. “I think you might have an idea where I’m going with this…” He chuckled again and took a large sip of his coffee.

“You want me to join the label?” Alex’s jaw dropped for real this time; her mouth agape and her eyes wide as they could be.

“Well, not just yet, just come with me to the label and y’know, we’ll have a tour, maybe you can sing for some of the producers, that kind of thing, then we see how it goes from there.”

This left the tigress speechless. It was her dream to make music for a living, she could not believe what was happening. “This isn’t a prank, is it?” She broke her silence and raised her brows at him, her heart pounding, she was ready to throw a punch at him if this was all just an elaborate prank.

“No, no, this is all real... It’s why I came to the café today,” the man nodded to himself and smiled. He seemed very content with himself. Alex’s reaction was exactly what he expected from the tigress, but seeing it still made him feel happy inside, he did something good. “So what do you say? I’ll meet you here after your morning shift tomorrow and we can head straight there.”

“But what about my clothes?” Alex tilted her head to the side slightly before she looked down at her waitress uniform.

“It suits you, besides, you don’t need to wear a suit, you’re the artist, not corporate, like me,” the man chuckled and looked down at his clothes. “A little color would be nice to see in the building. Also, you don’t need to prepare too much. Just sing the songs you were singing in the video, I’m sure they will be impressed.” He nodded, scraped what remained of his plate onto his fork, and chowed it all down. “Damn, that was good, could I get another one?”

Still processing all the information she was given, Alex was staring at the man across from her, but she wasn’t listening to what he was saying. Who could blame her though? She had just been offered a boost to get just that much closer to her lifelong dream. She caught the last sentence from his speech and blinked rapidly before pushing herself up from the booth and pulling the tablet out from its holster at her hip again.

“Yes, yes, of course, sorry, I think I’m going to pass out..” she chuckled nervously and breathily. She tapped the screen of her tablet, but before sending the order in, her gaze came up from the tablet and met with her favorite customer’s. “Would you like fries with that?” she asked with an oddly confident grin out of nowhere. The man just stared at her with a blank expression.

“Hah!” Alex jumped up, stuck one leg out in front of the other, and pointed at him with her other hand. “I’m just kidding, fries it is.” She sent the order in and quickly excused herself to the back of the café to scream with excitement.

This was going to be it.

Her big break was finally at arm’s length.

(Also bonus Cyberpunk 2077 version! Enjoy!)

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Art is by Stoopix