Kenny watched as Chanté walked Tracy to the door and they kissed goodbye. “Nice to meet you Kenny. I hope it gets uncomplicated with your girl,” Tracy called one more time before Chanté closed the door.
When Chanté turned around her brown cheeks were flushed and she wouldn’t meet Kenny’s eyes.
“Okay, first of all, you need to marry her. Second of all, WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” Kenny yelled.
Chanté, who never got shy, like ever – Kenny wasn’t even sure if she understood the concept – began to fiddle with the hem of the long shirt she wore and mumbled her answer. “Just someone I met at the club.”
“Is she another dancer?”
“No. She works security sometimes for extra money.”
“Well, I like her already,” Kenny laughed.
Chanté raised her eyes and smiled at Kenny. He exhaled sadly. He could already see the questions building there and they had a silent conversation made possible by over a decade of friendship.
Did he like Tracy better than Asif?
Fuck yes.
Was Asif really so bad?
Worse.
Why can’t I move on from him?
No idea. But he’s not worth it.
It was a heavy moment between them. Too heavy for three in the morning. So Kenny changed the subject, he hated fighting with Chanté about Asif.
“We didn’t have sex,” he said.
Chanté’s face lit up immediately. “I told you to wear the outfit I picked out.”
“I wore the cologne, chill. And it was my decision not to have sex yet.”
“What is wrong with you?” Chanté spat in disgust.
“I asked her out on a date,” Kenny said, yawning. “And then we had pizza and watched a bad romantic comedy.”
Chanté smiled and jumped up in excitement. “Fucking adorable. They literally don’t make men like you anymore, Ken Doll.”
He shook his head at her compliment. “I’m tired. I need to sleep,” he said as he walked away from her toward his bedroom. She followed him on her short legs, probably prepared to annoy him some more. But he turned to her, his hand on the doorknob. “There’s no one else like you,” he said sincerely. “You should be with someone who appreciates that.”
Her smile faltered and she frowned for a second before she forced herself to nod and smile at him. He smiled back, walked into his bedroom and closed his door softly.
***
Maya woke up with a crick in her neck, a vague throbbing in her sex and Kierra’s frowning face staring at her.
“So you flubbed it?” Kierra said with a disappointed shake of her head.
Maya turned on her back and stretched slowly like a cat. “Flubbed what?” She said around a loud yawn.
“Kenny obviously. And not in the good way.”
Maya pushed herself up to sit and stare at her friend. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you having the entire apartment to yourself and not fucking the guy you’ve been pining after for months. Not even after that broadcast. Oh, Lane told me to tell you that he nominated you for ChatBot’s broadcast of the month.”
Maya smiled. “Oh my god! Tell him I said thank you.”
Kierra brushed her reply away. “Explain yourself.”
Maya rolled her eyes. “Okay, so I wanted to.”
“Duh, I have eyes and ears and an internet connection,” Kierra said.
“But he wanted to wait until…”
“Until what? Until we catch this Albanian mobster? Life is too short.”
“No. He wanted to wait until after our first date,” Maya mumbled, her eyes focused on her fingers as she played with a frayed seam on her sweatpants.
Kierra moved from her perch on the coffee table and fell onto the couch next to Maya. “Holy shit, he’s a unicorn.”
Maya nodded. “I know.”
“If his dick is as good as his head, you’ll have to marry him.”
Maya grabbed the pillow next to her and slapped Kierra in the face with it. They laughed. “My mama told me to never marry a man for good sex.”
“Preach that,” Kierra said.
“If I get married it’ll be to a man who makes me laugh and is kind and blushes at the drop of a hat and treats me like a queen and remembers how I like my pizza,” she whispered.
Next to her, Kierra whipped out her phone and began to type.
“What are you doing?” Maya whined.
“That got oddly specific at the end, so I’m assuming you were talking about Kenny. I’m gonna start looking for bridesmaid’s dresses. I don’t want you putting me in some ugly ass mermaid cut monstrosity when the time comes.”
Maya pushed off from the couch. “Oh my god. You’re like a relationship evangelist ever since you started banging your bosses.”
Kierra laughed wickedly and didn’t bother to reply. But she hopped up from the couch and followed Maya down the hall.
“Leave me alone. I have work to do,” Maya yelled, yawning again.
“Sure Jan,” Kierra called. “Anyway, do you think you want a spring or summer wedding?” She asked.
Maya squinted her eyes and glared. “I hate you,” she said and then slammed her bedroom door.
Kierra’s loud cackle filtered through their thin walls.
***
A couple of hours Maya sat down at their dining room table with her laptop in front of her. She pulled up her monthly earnings spreadsheet and was ready to input last week’s figures. She was preemptively frustrated that the spikes from Kenny’s appearances on her weekly broadcasts were going to ruin the bar graph for this month. But she took some solace in the fact that their missed Thursday private session would even things out.
She logged into the ChatBot site and pulled the information she needed. As expected, her income jump from last week and the week before was the highest week-to-week increase she’d ever seen. She frowned at her computer, saved the file and closed it. Maya didn’t want fluke success. She wanted to grow her channel and online presence sustainably so that cam modeling would be there for her for as long as she wanted to do it. When it was time to move on, Maya wanted to make that transition because she was ready, not because she had to. Yet another unintended long-term consequence of this rash decision. But there was nothing that she could do about that now.
She clicked around the ChatBot site for other work admin. She responded to a few private messages; just a little bit of dirty talk in her email. Her analysis had shown that for every ten horny men in her inbox wanting some free chat, three of those men would ask for a private video session and at least one of them would become a regular client.
As she was sifting through her emails she gasped and clicked on the email from the site administrators.
To: ThickaThanASnicka
Subject: Daily Rankings
Congratulations ThickaThanASnicka!
We are pleased to inform you that last night you placed sixth in the Top 10 BBW cam rooms. As you know, placing in the Top 10 in your category-
Maya was too overcome to read anymore. She jumped up from her chair and started screaming, “Oh my god. Oh my god,” at the top of her lungs.
“What’s wrong?” Kierra asked, rushing out of her room.
And then there was loud knocking on their front door.
“What?” Kierra asked as Maya continued screaming. The knocking on the door became louder, harder and Kierra rushed to open it. When she did, Kenny burst into their apartment, a gun in his left hand and Chanté at his heels.
“What’s wrong?” Kenny said, his eyes efficiently scanning the room.
Kierra raised her arms in bewilderment.
Finally, Maya blurted out, “I made it to the Top 10 list in my genre!”
“Oh my god,” Kierra and Chanté exclaimed and rushed toward her. They all jumped around in happiness until Kenny’s voice cut them off.
He was reaching to put his gun into the waistband of his jeans, hard eyes on Maya. It was a different intensity th
an when he was turned on, but not unwelcome.
“One, congratulations,” he said, holding up his index finger. “Two, please refrain from yelling that loud unless it’s a real emergency. Three, I’m sorry about the gun.” He walked toward her then, Kierra and Chanté moving out of his way. He grabbed Maya’s face and pulled her into a kiss. His tongue licked just at the edges of her mouth. She thrust her tongue forward, wanting to taste him, but his own tongue blocked her invasion even as he moved his lips against hers roughly. It was a maddeningly intense tease of a kiss and it drove Maya crazy.
“You earned it,” he whispered against her lips.
A soft chime emanated from her computer. It took Maya a few seconds to realize that it was another ChatBot email and a few more seconds to tear her eyes away from Kenny’s to look at it. What she saw there made her pulse quicken, but not in a good way.
“Fuck,” she said.
Kenny moved to her side and read the email she’d just opened.
“What’s wrong?” Chanté whispered.
“It’s Mehmeti,” Kenny said as they scanned the email quickly. “He’s requesting a private session with us.” He turned back to Maya and dropped one arm to her waist to squeeze her close to him. “Looks like your plan worked.”
It was a compliment that didn’t suffuse her with warmth. Instead it made her shiver in his arms. Finally, Maya had found a compliment she didn’t enjoy.
Chanté’s voice interrupted the apprehension blossoming in Maya’s chest. “I know this is all about to get very serious in a second, but can I just say that you two are really adorable together.”
“I’ll second that,” Kierra chimed in.
Kenny didn’t roll his eyes, they stayed trained on Maya’s face. As a small ghost of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
ten
Maya was shocked at how quickly they went from celebrating her first time in the Daily Top 10 rankings to that kiss to emailing Joseph Mehmeti back to scheduling his private session to today. The Day. That’s what she was calling it in her head.
She wanted to slow down the passage of time, and rewind it back to that kiss, not just because it was sensual and teasing and it made her stomach clench, but also because in the last three days that was as close as Maya had gotten to Kenny. Ever since then, he’d been secluded in Command planning for what to do when Chanté got the information they needed from the private chat – and Maya guessed, what to do if they didn’t. These were conversations Maya didn’t have clearance to hear. And what little access Kierra did have, had kept her best friend away nearly night and day for the past three days as well. Which meant that Maya had spent most of that time alone. This normally wouldn’t have been a bad thing, except that she was bored. And it was Thursday.
Usually she wouldn’t have been able to schedule a private session today, because today was MasqerAsiaN’s weekly appointment. And Maya normally treated it like a holiday. She slept in late to make sure she looked rested. She lounged around the apartment with various masks and scrubs on every part of her body. She showered and shaved and contoured and curled and mascara’d herself into perfection. Then she artfully arranged herself into position and signed into her ChatBot account ready to have the best hour of the week as far as she was concerned; so good she would have paid for it herself.
Maybe that was what was stressing her out this morning. For the past five months every Thursday had been Their Day. It felt wrong to lose that and replace it with an appointment for someone she didn’t know and wasn’t worth all of the extra effort she used to put into preparing for Kenny. But Kenny would be there, with her. So maybe the real issue was that she felt alone.
Maya was in the kitchen staring into the refrigerator even though she didn’t really want anything and they didn’t have anything anyway. She sighed to herself just as the front door opened.
“Kitchen,” she called out, assuming it was Kierra, hoping it was Kenny.
“I brought ice cream,” Kierra yelled back.
Maya pursed her lips. Her best friend definitely knew how to soften the blow of her disappearing act. Maya raised her eyebrows as she walked out of the kitchen. “What kind?”
Kierra simply held the white bag up for Maya to see. She would know that bag anywhere.
“Bananas Foster?”
Kierra actually stopped walking and gasped. “Of course. What kind of friend do you think I am?”
Maya put her hands on her hips, “Hopefully the kind of friend who brought me a waffle cone on the side since she’s been MIA for days.”
Kierra rolled her eyes, reached into the bag and pulled out a waffle cone. “Like I said, what kind of friend do you think I am?”
Maya smiled and clapped her hands. “The best, obviously. I’ll get the spoons.”
They settled onto their couch, each with a pint of ice cream in hand, Maya’s bananas foster and Kierra’s berry crumble. They ate in silence, staring at the TV, which neither of them had the desire to actually turn on. Maya broke the silence only when they switched pints.
“So what’s the deal?” She asked and shoved a spoonful of the second-best ice cream ever into her mouth.
“I can’t tell you much.” She turned to Maya and rolled her eyes. “Clearance.”
Maya sighed. “Is that why you’ve been staying away, so that you don’t spill classified info?”
Kierra smiled, “Actually no, but that would have been a good plan.” And then her face dropped and she frowned. “Lane’s gone.”
Maya’s eyes went wide, “Oh my god, you three broke up?”
Kierra quirked up an eyebrow. “What? No. That would take much more than ice cream to fix?”
“Like wine and sushi, a lot? Or are we talking tequila and tacos and maybe a public drunkenness charge?”
“Probably all of the above,” Kierra said. “He’s on remote assignment.” She shoved more ice cream into her mouth and sighed.
“Where?” Maya said and then, “Oops, sorry.”
“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have told you that. It’s soo boring. Anyway, Monica and I just miss him.”
“Damn girl, you’ve got it bad.”
Kierra’s sad face lit up momentarily, “Monica’s really strict when she’s sad.”
“When did you get this freaky?” Maya asked, truly astonished that this woman in front of her was ever that sad girl in the back of their college auditorium.
“When you meet the right people.” She let that sentence trail off and Maya had a hard time not letting her thoughts wander to Kenny. Who she hadn’t seen in days.
“So what’s up with you and Kenny? What have I missed?”
Maya exhaled a frustrated breath and leaned over to set her pint of ice cream down. “Not a goddamn thing. I haven’t seen him in days.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Kierra breathed.
“How?”
“He’s heavily involved in the US side of the arms deal. Lane’s gone to work with one of his former partners and he’s been trying to facilitate that from here. And he’s been working some contacts in Interpol too, I think. Dude is connected.”
Maya pursed her lips, “And what the fuck does any of that have to do with me?”
“He’s busy,” Kierra said around a laugh. “And you don’t care. I can definitely relate. It’s weird. I know that Lane and Monica have dangerous jobs, but I don’t really think about it. All that matters to me is that they come home. It was like that even when I was just their PA. I didn’t give a shit what dangerous thing they were out there doing, just as long as they showed up in the office every morning. When they didn’t, I was pissed.”
“And horny as hell?”
“To be fair, I was always horny then.”
“Then?” Maya turned to her. They both laughed.
“So this is normal, him being out of touch for a while?”
Kierra put her ice cream down and shrugged. “Can’t say. Every assignment is different, and every agent handles the absence differently, I guess.
That’s not any less true because they’re… you know….”
“James Bond?”
“Yeah, but much hotter.”
They both sat back. “So much hotter,” Maya breathed.
“You and Kenny need to talk,” Kierra said after a bit of silence.
“This isn’t the best time for a ‘where do you see this going’ kind of heart-to-heart.”
“True, but take it from me,” Kierra said as she stood, “the girl who only finally admitted that she wanted to fuck her bosses in a Serbian fetish club. There is no good timing.”
Maya’s mouth fell open and she only found the words to speak after Kierra had closed her bedroom door behind her. “A Serbian what?!”
***
Kenny was tired; the kind of mentally drained that always seemed worse because of how hard it made processing very simple things. He was lucky his drive from Command was short. He pulled his car into the parking garage under the apartment building and took the elevator instead of the stairs. He’d spent the last two days in the briefing room trying to work through the intel on the Pendleton Patriots, looking for any links to the Mehmeti family’s offshore bank accounts. He was also monitoring Lane and Lamont’s op in Ohio. All night, whenever there was any mental downtime, he spent it dreaming of getting back to his apartment, showering and crawling into bed. But his feet stopped in front of Maya’s front door instead of walking the few feet to his own. He realized why he hadn’t gone to his apartment; he didn’t want to be alone like he was on every other mission he’d run. He’d spent a lot of his childhood playing by himself, the perpetual new kid in town, or the only kid in the sleepy retirement village where his grandparents lived. It was the thing he hated most about his job actually, how much time he spent on solo surveillance missions or operations where he was alone in a room full of people who didn’t know his real name. As he stopped in front of Maya’s door, his body had understood before his exhausted brain that he didn’t have to be alone. Instead of logging into her private chat, he could see Maya in person. He knocked. If it were possible for a knock to sound weary, his did.
Kierra answered the door. He exhaled loudly.
“No need to be rude,” she said with a smirk. “Maya, your boyfriend’s here,” she called out, her eyes still on him.
Private Eye Page 17