“This was your idea, Kierra,” Monica said.
“But that was before.” She didn’t finish the sentence. It was obvious. That was before the last two days, before this trip. She’d never told them why she wanted to leave and she didn’t have to. It was clear. As their personal assistant, Lane and Monica would never cross the lines they had this entire week. Being with them was too dangerous. No matter how much they wanted each other. No matter how high her heels or how tight her skirts or how many times they called her ‘sweet girl’ like an erotic endearment. Whoever they worked for would not approve. Their line of work was far too dangerous for an aspiring poet with low-level security clearance. There were a million reasons.
Kierra had memorized them all. But she wanted them to say that none of it mattered.
Lane leaned down to kiss her instead. It was a hard press of his mouth, his tongue sliding roughly against hers, his semi-hard dick pressed against her mound.
And then it was Monica’s turn. Her mouth was gentler, but no less greedy. Her hands roamed over Kierra’s body, sliding that thin silk around her overheated flesh.
It was over all too soon. “We’re gonna miss you,” Monica whispered in her hard and demanding voice, as if she understood just how much Kierra needed to hear it just one more time.
And then Monica turned and opened the door.
“Take care of yourself, sweet girl,” Lane whispered into her ear and then moved past her into the club, his hand sliding around Monica’s waist. They didn’t look back.
Kierra slipped down the hallway, smiling politely at the women and men who admired her nearly naked body openly, fighting tears the whole way. She turned around to make sure that the hallway was clear and then pushed the door open into the night.
She lifted her dress to keep it from the muck of the alley.
Out on the main drag, their hired car was there. The chauffeur opened the door, coolly and professionally. He didn’t rush her into the back seat. He didn’t run back to the driver’s side. He drove at a reasonable speed until he turned the corner away from the club and then he sped away. Kierra wasn’t sure what the speed limit was in Novi Sad, but if there was one, their driver exceeded it by a lot. And she was thankful that he did.
Kierra found the bag with her clothing on the seat next to her. She raised the partition and pulled out the same outfit she’d just five days ago been agonizing over in front of her floor length mirror. She slid into her underwear, pulled on her bra, slipped the cropped band t-shirt over her head. She shimmied into the pencil skirt, but was happy to find a pair of flats inside. She didn’t have the heart for a pair of skinny heels right now.
Inside she also found her purse, which held her real passport, wallet and cell phone. There was also that purple dress that Monica loved and the mesh dress that, even after everything that had happened, made her sex clench as she remembered Monica’s fingers between her legs and Lane’s hard cock beneath her.
She felt tears pushing at the back of her eyes as she pushed the beautiful silk dress into the bag and zipped it closed. The pressure of tears was almost painful but she refused to let them fall. Not yet.
At the airport, she sped through security. Apparently Serbia didn’t care so much about foreigners leaving. And then she boarded Monica and Lane’s jet. They were in the air in no time.
Kierra walked to the back of the plane and collapsed on the bed.
It seemed impossible to believe, but she was no longer Monica and Lane Peters’s personal assistant. She finally let the tears fall down her face and then fell asleep alone.
PART TWO
nine
Kierra was depression cleaning.
She was unemployed, hadn’t written a word in over a week and sitting around idly was playing havoc with her brain. But that wasn’t what was fueling her mood. She missed Monica and Lane. It had been over a week since she’d slipped out of Club Ménage and she’d foolishly thought that they would contact her. But apparently that wasn’t how spies operated. Go figure.
She’d returned to her apartment and all of the small knickknacks she’d brought to work (a picture of her parents, a picture of her and Maya at their college graduation, a cactus that she had somehow managed to keep alive for two years and a batgirl bobble head that Monica and Lane had given her for her first anniversary as their PA) were all in a box on their kitchen table. On top of the box she found an impersonal letter thanking her for her three years of service on stationary with a letterhead from a company she’d never heard of.
The finality of that letter and the box of her things sent her to bed for four days. She’d only managed to pull herself out her stupor when her roommate Maya accidentally set off the fire alarm while making a quesadilla.
Mentally she was still lying in that bed, leaking tears.
But now that she was up, she decided to make the best of this brief reprieve from her crippling sadness by giving the kitchen a good scrub and disinfecting literally every surface. The smell of bleach stung her eyes, which her mother had always considered a sign that you were on the right path. An emo playlist of Rhythm & Blues ballads about heartbreak, inventively titled “Tracks of My Tears,” was blaring through the Bluetooth speaker.
Kierra was on her hands and knees scrubbing the space between the fridge and the counter when the music abruptly shut off. She turned to find Maya standing over her, clearly pissed.
Maya was half dressed in a skimpy lace bodysuit that showed off her thick thighs and slightly rounded stomach and made her breasts look absolutely amazing. She had a full face of soft makeup that most men would assume wasn’t makeup at all and her cute, dyed honey blonde hair was styled in tousled waves that almost kissed her shoulders.
Kierra nodded her approval. “Cute,” she said.
Maya dropped the hand on her hip and smiled, “I know, right?” Maya could never resist a compliment. But then she got back to business. “So look Kiki, I realize that you’re going through something and you don’t want to tell me. And that’s chill. No pressure. I’m here whenever you’re ready.
But girl this loud ass music reminds me of when my mama used to break up with her trifling boyfriends and sit in her room drinking brown liquor and chain smoking Newports. And girl,” she said, letting that word trail on for a few seconds, “that is not the kind of mood I need to hear when I’m working.”
Kierra sighed. “Sorry, I’ll keep it down.”
Maya scrunched her face, “God, don’t sound so sad when you say it. Now I feel bad.”
Kierra stood up and pulled the large yellow rubber gloves from her hands and threw them into the sink. “Don’t feel bad. I’m just… I just need some time,” she finished lamely.
“This is about your bosses, right?”
Kierra nodded.
“Do you want to tell me what happened on your trip?”
Kierra shook her head.
Maya opened her mouth to speak and then the alarm in her room started going off. “Shit, I have to go,” she said, gesturing toward her bedroom. “I have a broadcast starting in a few. I don’t want to keep my viewers waiting.”
“The glamorous life of a cam model,” Kierra said, a small smile on her face.
“Don’t knock it. It pays my half of the bills and keeps Sallie Mae off my back.”
Kierra put up her hands in surrender. “No judgement. If you like it, I love it.”
Maya looked at her for a second, the alarm still blaring from her bedroom. “Actually,” she said, “You really might be into it.”
Kierra laughed and shook her head. It was her first real laugh in what felt like years. “Oh no, that’s your thing. Don’t try and pull me in.”
Maya shrugged and walked out of the kitchen. Just before she disappeared down their short hallway, she turned to Kierra and said in the voice that must drive some of her clients wild, “If you ever change your mind, you know where to find me.”
And then she winked. Kierra burst out laughing.
Her best friend
was the absolute best.
◆◆◆
Kierra started to feel normal again after a month. Well as normal as she could feel while unemployed and trying to process a kinda sorta breakup. She started leaving the house on a regular basis although she mostly just sat in coffee shops, trying to write but scribbling Monica and Lane’s names over and over again – sometimes putting her own in between them – instead. It was very high school dramatics, but Kierra had decided to lean into it.
She had just wasted a few hours at a new coffee shop in her neighborhood and was walking slowly home, feeling highly caffeinated and very sorry for herself. It was a nice fall day in Jersey, crisp, cool air, orangey-red leaves falling from trees; very Lifetime movie set. Kierra was daydreaming about the leaves being the almost exact same bright red color as the lipstick Monica had been wearing the last time they had all been together in bed. She could feel her body heat as she remembered what the color had looked like smeared over Lane’s mouth.
She reached up to unwind the light scarf tangled around her neck. A loud car crash at the intersection behind her startled her. Her pulse was racing. She turned around to see the collision. In the center of the intersection, two almost indistinguishable gray sedans were crumpled together in a sickening heap of rent metal. Kierra watched as a man from one of the cars jumped onto the street and moved to the other car. He leaned into the window briefly and then turned to scream at the slowly growing crowd of useless onlookers, “Someone call an ambulance.”
Kierra pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and started to dial 911 when someone bumped into her left side from behind. The girl who brushed past her was wearing a simple pair of jeans and a thin gray t-shirt. A very basic outfit for a girl who, when she turned around, a smile on her face and murmured an apology on her lips, was absolutely stunning. It was such an ordinary moment but the hair on Kierra’s arms was standing up as if there was electricity in the air. Something wasn’t right.
Kierra put her phone back into her pocket, turned and walked home as quickly as she could without running so as not to draw any unnecessary attention to herself. She stole glances over her shoulder to make sure that she wasn’t being followed the entire way. When she was finally back at her apartment she slipped her key into the lock, looked both ways down her hallway, and then turned the handle to let herself inside, swiftly closing the door behind her. She locked all three of the locks, including the chain, and then turned to lean her back onto the door. She was out of breath.
The sound of Maya’s laugh caught her by surprise but also calmed her.
“Oh my god, you’re a freaky one,” Maya whispered to herself, her cell phone clutched in her hands as she walked into the living room. She looked up and absently waved at Kierra. “When’d you get back?”
Kierra swallowed and tried to force a lightness in her voice that she didn’t feel. “Just now.”
“Cool,” Maya replied, still focused on her phone.
“Who are you talking to?” Kierra asked, pushing away from the door and following Maya into their small kitchen, needing to be close to someone she trusted after the eerie feeling that had chased her home.
“New client negotiations. He seems fun,” Maya replied, looking up at Kierra with a dirty smile on her face and a wink.
Kierra rolled her eyes. The girl could seduce an inanimate object.
“Oh you got a letter earlier,” Maya said. “It’s on the coffee table.”
Kierra walked back into the living room on suddenly shaky legs. When she reached the coffee table, she let out a sigh of relief. She picked up the large envelope, tore it open and pulled out her welcome packet from the Enniskerry Writers Retreat.
“What is it?” Maya asked, walked back toward her bedroom, a cup of water in one hand, her phone in the other typing quickly with her thumb; a small smile on her face.
“It’s from the writing retreat I’m going to.”
“Ooh, I forgot you were leaving me again.”
“Not for another couple of months,” Kierra said, sifting through the packet of information, letting the excitement pull her fully out of the mire of her own irrational paranoia and persistent sadness.
“I hope it lifts your mood,” Maya replied. Kierra turned and gave her best friend her most convincing smile. “And I also hope you get laid.”
Kierra laughed and grabbed a cushion from the couch to throw. Maya dodged it easily.
“Hey, I have a few clients who’d be interested in a pillow fight. Let me know if you’re down.”
“Go away,” Kierra yelled around her own laughter.
“Don’t say I never tried to put you on,” Maya yelled back and then closed her bedroom door; her laughter carrying through the thin walls.
Kierra turned back to her mail and smiled softly to herself. And then, because her brain just refused to give her a moment of peace, she wondered where Monica and Lane were at this exact moment, because she missed them terribly.
ten
“Is 27 too young to be having a mid-life crisis?” Kierra posed the question to her phone’s voice recorder because the last time she’d asked her best friend that question, Maya had rolled her eyes so hard she’d almost dislodged a fake eyelash. So she found no help there. But the question still lingered. How could it not?
She was currently standing in the passenger pick-up section in Terminal 2 at Dublin airport waiting for the shuttle that would take her to a very expensive writing retreat in the Irish countryside. All through graduate school, this retreat had been her singular obsession because her graduate mentor, Gwendolyn Miles, had insisted that it had allowed her to draft most of a new collection of poems and short stories. The volume went on to win the prestigious Brooks-Giovanni Poetry Prize. Being able to afford this retreat had always seemed like a goalpost that Kierra thought would indicate her commitment to her art and put her on the path her mentor had laid out for her. She’d psyched herself into believing that she would not be a true poet until she bled – figuratively and financially – for her craft. And after five years of dreaming she was almost there.
She should have been happy that she was about to live out one of her dreams just as soon as the retreat shuttle arrived. But just three months after saying goodbye to her former bosses in a Serbian sex club immediately after they’d killed the former president and his personal bodyguard… life felt a little strange.
As the now former personal assistant to a pair of international spies, with actual money in her checking and savings accounts, her days were much less demanding. She slept in when she wanted. She didn’t have to have her apartment swept for listening and recording devices on a regular basis. She’d mostly stopped fearing that she was being tailed. And without her former bosses all-consuming presence in her life Monday-Friday, most weekends with the occasional international trip, she had stopped wearing the tightest clothes and highest heels in her closet. Because there was no one left to impress.
And Kierra was bored.
“So yea… really, is 27 too young for a mid-life crisis?” She asked her voice memo app again. It wouldn’t provide any answers and so was about as helpful as Maya, but maybe if she said it in different intonations, stressing various words, she’d stumble upon an answer. Or a poem.
Kierra let out an exasperated sigh, checked the watch on her left wrist. When she looked up, a very ugly shuttle bus was pulling into the passenger pick-up area. It was painted a pastel blue and was covered in dozens of children’s drawings on the side. Kierra raised an eyebrow when the bus stopped in front of her. She reared back in shock. The door opened and the driver descended the stairs with a wide smile on his face. Aimed directly at her.
“The hell you say,” Kierra said before she could stop herself.
“Are you Kierra?” He asked in a slightly high-pitched American accent that she knew would give her a headache inside of five minutes.
She scanned him from head to toe. He was Asian with a strong jaw and a smile that would have been pleasant if it
were slightly less wide. He was tall and looked muscular, she thought, although it was hard to tell what was beneath the ugliest outfit she’d ever seen in her life. He wore a fishing hat (for no apparent reason), utility vest (also for no apparent reason) over a t-shirt that was a shade of green that made his skin look gray and dull, and cargo pants (honestly, how many pockets does one person need!?). But the biggest fashion offense, as far as Kierra was concerned, were his ugly sandals, that looked to be made of hemp, on his socked feet.
She began to shake her head immediately.
His smile faltered for a second, but then it was back to its former unnatural width. “Kierra Ward? Am I saying that right?”
Kierra took a deep breath and then nodded, resigning herself to the sure reality that this retreat was maybe not going to be all that she’d hoped.
“Yes, sorry,” she said, forcing a smile. “I’m Kierra Ward. Are you from the Enniskerry Writer’s Retreat?”
“I am,” he replied with a very satisfied look on his face. “I’m the new social director, Kenny Wu.” He stuck his hand out and she tentatively reached out to shake it. But he grasped her small hand and shook so hard he nearly took her off her feet.
“Ow. Okay, we can stop now, Hulk,” she yelled.
He immediately released her and his cheeks reddened. “Sorry. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength. Well we should get going. It’s a thirty-minute drive to the countryside.” And with that he hefted her very heavy suitcase as if it weighed nothing and walked back onto the bus.
Kierra took another deep breath and looked around her in a move that had become a sad habit since Serbia.
It was an unfortunate byproduct, not of being Monica and Lane’s assistant, but from having very briefly been their lover. She knew what they were capable of. If they wanted, they could have located her anywhere in the world. If they wanted, they could have tracked her down and asked her to come back. But they hadn’t.
And Kierra was sad and angry about that more and more every day.
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