Bought (His For A Week)

“I bet Master has a mansion in Marin County,” Claire prattled. “Or maybe he’s meeting us at some fancy restaurant like The French Laundry.”

Kimani would have loved the destination to be the famed Michelin-starred restaurant in Napa Valley, but she suspected that wasn’t the case. She reached into her hobo handbag for her cell to text Sam what was happening.

“Hey! Where’s my phone?”

She rifled through her purse, pulling out her glasses, ChapStick, notepad, and pens that had built-in audio recorders. Her canister of mace was missing, too.

Her heartbeat shot up. She turned to Claire, “Do you have your phone?”

Claire looked into her sparkling clutch. “Mine’s missing, too. Oh, well, I don’t really need it. I told my friends I was going away to a spa for some ‘me’ time.”

Kimani tried not to panic. She tapped on the window separating her and the driver.

“Where is it we’re going?” she asked as nonchalantly as possible to the driver.

“No hablo ingles,” he replied.

Shit. Kimani willed herself to relax. Panicking wouldn’t help her out. Sam knew where she was and what she was doing. If he didn’t hear from her in some time, he’d get worried and do something.

Focus on getting the story.

“We are soooooo lucky,” Claire cooed. “We got the hottest bidder. At first, I was really scared that the fat old guy in the front row was going to win me. I mean, I was not going to lose my virginity to that guy. I’d rather forfeit the two thousand dollars I put up, and getting that money wasn’t easy. I’m still trying to pay off these girls.”

Claire squeezed her boobs.

“Finally decided to take a cash advance on my credit card.”

Kimani winced. The interest on that couldn’t be pretty, but with over thirty thousand dollars coming her way, Claire shouldn’t have trouble paying back the cash advance and the boob job.

“So what made you decide to do the Scarlet Auction?” Kimani asked as she settled in the leather upholstery across from Claire. She thought about clicking on one of her audio-recording pens, but she only had three of them with her and wanted to adhere to journalist ethics. She couldn’t record without the source’s permission unless lives were at stake, the information could not be obtained in any other way, or the story would suffer irrevocably without the information.

“Who wouldn’t?” Claire responded. “How else can you make forty thousand in just one week? I mean, it’s tons more than Julia Roberts made in Pretty Woman!”

“I don’t know that—” Kimani stopped herself from suggesting that movies didn’t necessarily make good examples for real life. “I bet lots of entrepreneurs can make that kind of money.”

“I mean regular people, silly. It would take my older sister a whole year—maybe more—to make what I just did in one week!”

In a good mood, Claire chattered on about how being a barista like her sister or taking some other equally boring job was “soooooo not my thing.” She talked about where she went to high school, how none of the classes at the local community colleges interested her, and that she had decided to go into modeling instead. But that career path was going slower than she would have liked as she worked more trade shows than she did photo shoots. She complained about the number of European women who came to the US to try their hand at modeling, and because foreigners were taking jobs away from Americans, she’d voted for Trump. She wanted to become a model and marry a billionaire like Melania.

“But maybe I’ll get to marry a billionaire first,” Claire said with a smile.

Kimani stared. Did Claire really think something was going to come out of a relationship—if it could even be called that—with a guy who paid for sex?

“I’m actually a little nervous,” Kimani said as she noticed that they were long past Marin County and driving through Sonoma County. “We don’t know anything about this guy. What if he’s not that nice?”

“Did you see how good-looking he was?”

Kimani did a double-take, not understanding the response.

“He had the sweetest-looking baby-blue eyes,” Claire sighed. “And we know he’s not racist ’cause, you know, he bid on you. That’s a good sign, right?”

Kimani tapped on the window to the driver again. She wanted to get to a phone to call Sam with an update. “Can we make a bathroom stop?”

“Lo siento, no hablo ingles,” the driver replied.

Wishing she had paid more attention in her Spanish class, Kimani combed her memory and finally remembered. “Baño, por favor.”

“Una hora.”