Dirty Laundry

“You can’t be in love with her, you know.”

He snapped his gaze to me, looking like a lost child. He hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious and now that I’d busted him, he was bordering on terrified. I was the wrong person to look to for guidance, so I tried to avoid having that conversation by lighting up a cigarette, dreading having to reapply my lipstick before my next appointment.

“You shouldn’t smoke, you know,” he mocked.

I smirked, knowing the more aggressive side of Liam only came out when he was interacting with me. Sloane told me once that it’s because I bring out the worst in people. I was okay with that.

“Seriously, Liam,” I continued, “don’t go down that road.”

Almost unwillingly, as if he was trying to convince himself not to, he went back to watching her. “Why not?”

I rolled my eyes, trying to remember what it was like to be young and naive. “Because what we do for a living doesn’t leave any room for falling in love.”

Liam turned back to me, eyes blazing. “That’s rubbish and you know it.”

“Nah,” I replied, blowing a stream of smoke from my lips and waving it away. “Maybe you don’t want to believe it, kid, but you know I’m right. You’ll only end up breaking your own heart if you don’t let it go.”

Finally, as we both watched Mia hang up the phone and come around the side of her desk—the upside of having glass walls, I suppose—Liam turned his attention back to me. Pity welled in the pit of my stomach, though I knew Liam didn’t deserve it. He was young and smart and someone would make him incredibly happy one day…someone that wasn’t Mia.

“What if she doesn’t want to do this anymore? What if she wants to do something different?”

I smiled. “How much do I pay you, Liam?”

“I don’t know. A good amount, I suppose.”

Nodding, I took another drag before I spoke. “And do you know why I can afford to pay you so well?” He shrugged, either because he was playing dumb or because I’d suddenly veered down a path he didn’t want to travel. “Because Mia and I make a lot of money doing what we do.”

Liam scoffed. “Don’t you mean who you do?”

I dropped the remnants of my cigarette onto the floor and stepped on it, much to Liam’s horror. Slowly and deliberately I made my way over to his desk, leaning down just enough to give him a decent showing of cleavage, before leaning over him and tossing the extinguished butt into his trashcan.

“I’m smarter than you give me credit for,” I said quietly as I straightened my back. “I’ve been responsible for breaking a million hearts all over this city; don’t you think I know how unrequited love destroys a man?

“I hired you to do the finances and the finances only,” I reminded him. “Remember your place.”

Just as Mia emerged from her office and shot me a look, I was en route back to my own. I had an appointment in fifteen minutes and my lipstick was a mess, not to mention my minor altercation with Liam had caused all the blood to rush to my face. I looked like a botched Botox experiment.

After my complexion returned to its normal color and I was sporting a fresh coat of lipstick, I began thumbing through the file Sloane had dropped on my desk earlier in the afternoon. They usually went untouched by me (the application was nearly ten pages long and I had neither the attention span nor the interest to read every response), as it was Sloane’s job to sift through the applications and try to determine who genuinely needed my services, who could actually afford them, and who seemed like they’d follow through with the appointment, but I hadn’t had a consultation in three days and I was getting antsy.

An alert chimed from my computer and an instant message from Sloane instantly appeared, informing me my prospect had arrived and she’d be bringing her in shortly. I sighed, temporarily powering off my monitor to use as a makeshift mirror.

I could hear the click-clack of Sloane’s heels as she approached my office. She didn’t bother knocking, she never did, and simply stood in the doorway with a clipboard in her hands. “Your three-o’clock is here, Elle.”

“Send her in.”

Sloane moved out of the frame and a nervous-looking woman took her place. Bullseye, I thought. The fidgety ones were almost always a guarantee. The most insecure, they were also the most willing to put out a hit on their husband’s bank account.

“You must be Miss De Luca,” I said, faking a smile as I extended my hand. She visibly relaxed and stepped further into my office. I gestured to the single plush chair across from my desk, “Please, take a seat.”

Once she got settled, I busied myself with preparing a round of drinks. Her application had stated she was more of a wine drinker, so I popped the cork on a bottle of Mazis-Chambertin.

“That’s a three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine.”

I smiled again. “What can I do for you, Miss De Luca?”

She shifted in her chair and started picking at her fingernails. Manicured, I noticed. She thanked me quietly as I handed her a glass of the Pinot Noir and I took a seat on the edge of my desk. “I, uh, had a few questions a-about what you…”

“What I do?” I finished, and she nodded. I stole another glance at the file. “What can I answer for you, Genevieve?”

“Do you really…”

Another smile. “Sleep with them?” Another nod. “Sometimes, yes.”

I smirked as I watched Genevieve’s face fall. Most of our clients did their homework before coming to us, already steeled with the knowledge of what exactly it was that we did, but the rest thought we were something much simpler, something much more respectable.

“Why?”

I sighed. “Let’s say you don’t know me. I’m just a random stranger on the street and one day I come up to you and tell you your boyfriend or fiancé or husband is cheating on you. You’ve never met me before, I don’t have any legitimate proof, and you have absolutely no reason to believe me. What would you do?”

“I guess I’d think you were lying,” Genevieve replied.

“Men are all bark and no bite. They want their friends to think they’ve landed every piece of ass in Manhattan but deep down they’re scared little boys.” No reply. “They see a woman in a bar and the first thing they say to their buddies is how they’d fuck her so good she wouldn’t be able to walk for a week. They say that, and once they’re given the opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, they get scared. They don’t do it. That’s why I sleep with them.”

Gen shook her head. “I still don’t get it.”

“I’m that woman in the bar, Miss De Luca. You hire me to be that woman. Now, put yourself in my clients’ shoes: you’ve just paid me an astronomical amount of money to find out if your guy’s…not very respectable, let’s say. Would you rather me come back to you empty-handed and simply tell you that he is or would you rather me give you proof?”

“Proof?”

“Well, what kind of proof depends on how much you’re willing to spend, of course. Most are satisfied with copies of text messages or e-mails but the more extreme clients tend to opt for the sex tapes or the oops, I accidentally called you while I’m fucking your husband option.”

Genevieve was stunned. “Women actually do this? They pay you to sleep with their men?”

I sighed, almost at my wit’s end. “They pay me to find out the truth. Sometimes it’s with sex, sometimes it’s not.”

“If I did this, and I’m not saying I am—”

“If you’re not going to do this then why are you here?” I asked, finally reaching my breaking point. I had better things to do than explain to a stranger the way I made money. Plenty of women had come through Neris’s doors and agreed to our terms; as long as there were cheating men wandering the streets of Manhattan there would be plenty more. One less wasn’t going to hurt.

“Can’t you do this without sleeping with him?”

I shrugged. “I do what I have to do to get you what you want. Do you want to know if he’s a cheater or do you want to know if he’s going to send me suggestive texts?”

“I-I don’t know.”

I stood from the edge of the desk, towering over the woman sitting in the plush leather chair in front of me. “Think about it and get back to me.”

Genevieve nodded, doing everything she could to avoid eye contact. It took her five long minutes to gather her purse and put on her coat, and by the time I finally got her out of my office I was ready for a stronger drink.

There were always the few prospective clients that simply couldn’t wrap their minds around what we did. I could respect that; it went against everything women were taught growing up. Everything they were told not to be, Mia and I were. Some women were intimidated, some were turned off. It took a while but I was finally able to brush it off. Neris provided a service no one else in New York could, granting us the rare ability to monopolize on it—we could charge whatever we wanted. It just didn’t pay to worry what other women thought of what we did when every suspicious housewife funneled us $5,000.

Still, in all the time I’d been doing this, I’d acquired a sixth sense. I could point out every cheater in a crowded room in seconds, just like I could tell when a woman was at her breaking point. Genevieve De Luca would cave. Maybe it wouldn’t be today or even this month, but she would eventually. She had champagne taste on a beer budget, just like all the rest. They pretended to have integrity to save face, but what was a little cheating when her man was raking in six or seven figures?

I wandered back into the lobby where Liam was making eyes at Mia who was giggling over something Sloane was showing her on her phone. The trio looked up when I entered.

“Do you know who that was?” I asked Sloane, the two of us watching Genevieve show herself out.

“Pretty sure that’s Harry Styles’s fiancée. They got engaged back in September, I think.”

Mia’s eyes went wide. “Harry Styles, as in the CEO of Franklin & Roberts?” Sloane nodded, earning a low whistle from my co-founder. “Wow. She doesn’t seem like his type.”

“What’s his type seem like, then?” Liam asked. Sloane and I exchanged glances; you could hear the jealousy in his voice from a mile away.

Mia was oblivious as she answered. “I don’t know. She just seems—”

“Shut up, Liam,” I barked. Mia looked at me with a dropped jaw. “What? He’s clearly the banker in our little Monopoly game we’ve got going, and everyone hates the banker. Just sit over there, count the money, and shut the fuck up. I don’t pay you for your input.”

Sloane snorted. “If he’s the banker, what’re the rest of us?”

“Mia and I are obviously Park Place and the Boardwalk. You’re, like, Connecticut Avenue or something. I don’t know.”

“Those aren’t even real places,” Liam replied, undeterred by my abrasive nature.

I rolled my eyes. “You’re in America now, kid. It’d be a good look to start acting like it.” I turned my attention back to Mia. “How’d your twelve-thirty go?”

“Do you know Zayn Malik?” she asked Sloane, who immediately started gushing.

“He’s so hot.”

Cue the eye roll from Liam, which Mia was also oblivious to. “His fiancée came in. Apparently he spends all his time in clubs so she thinks he’s cheating.”

Sloane looked somewhat surprised. “She thinks he’s cheating just because he spends a lot of money?”

“You should’ve been here for the woman who thought her husband was cheating because he hadn’t been home for two weeks. Turns out she forgot he’d gone on a business trip to Dubai.” I shook my head. “Women are insane, Sloane. Luckily we’re there to profit from that stupidity.”

“Speaking of which…”

I followed her line of sight. A cheshire grin formed as I walked to meet Genevieve at the entrance. Her eyes were red and puffy; she’d been crying. Hopefully over the heartbreaking decision to hire me, I thought.

“Miss De Luca,” I greeted. “How can I help you?”

A pair of defeated blue eyes locked on my own. “I…I’m gonna hire you.”

I pretended to frown, as if I couldn’t believe her relationship had come to this point. I spoke unintelligible consolations as I ushered her into my office and shut the door behind us, digging a contract from a filing cabinet and going over the fine print with her. She was still in the chair, almost zombie-like, and didn’t say a word.

When I reached the bottom of the negotiation, I looked up at her. “How far do you want me to take this, Gen?”

Without emitting an ounce of emotion, she said, “Do whatever you have to.”

I nodded, checking the box next to NO RESTRICTIONS. I signed where I was supposed to and slid it in front of her. “Before I hand you this pen, I want you to know that sometimes these things get ugly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how far your fiancé is going to take this. I need you to be prepared if you wake up in the middle of the night and we’re fucking in the guest room.”

She swallowed as she nodded. “We don’t know each other,” I continued. “That goes without saying. If we ever see each other, we’re strangers. I’ll play my part so no one gets suspicious, but part of this contracts requires you to do the same.”

“I know.”

I eyed her. “I’m serious, Genevieve. If you see something you don’t like, you can’t just cry wolf and out the entire operation.”

She grabbed the glass of wine she hadn’t touched earlier and began drinking. “How many women come in here and hire you?”

“Five or six a month.”

“And of those five or six men, how many are usually cheaters?”

“Most of them.”

“And you still have faith in love after all this? You’re still positive your Prince Charming is out there waiting for you?”

I couldn’t help myself as I laughed boisterously. “I have no faith in love. I’ve never had faith in love. Do you honestly think I’d be able to do what I do if I believed in Prince Charming and happily-ever-afters?”

Maybe she was hoping I’d talk her out of it, that I’d tell her to trust the man she fell in love with and go home, but when I didn’t, she grabbed the pen from out of my hand and signed on the dotted line. Without so much as a look in my direction, she collected her belongings and left my office for the second time that afternoon.