Jennie
"From drugs to scars: The inside story on heiress Jennie Kim"
"Game-changing new scar treatment in the works at Flawless"
"Bookie lays odds on billionaire's rehab prospects"
"Listen, ladies. If we stay focused and don't let any of these people derail us, we can get out of there in forty minutes flat," Nayeon said with uncharacteristic optimism.
We were on her terrace, preparing for the Bluewater quarterly neighborhood town hall. One would think that an enclave of wealthy neighbors would be too busy to attend a boring community meeting. But no. Not in Bluewater. We'd accidentally built a community of eccentric, lovely weirdos who were as invested in the community as its founders.
It was charming, sweet even.
But tonight, I just wanted to crawl into my bed, binge watch something mindless, and pretend that I was a normal human being.
I was so. Very. Tired.
It had been two weeks of Lisa running me from public appearance to interview to photo op. Two weeks of me squeezing in late hours of work at home. Two weeks of me trying not to think about the kiss… and the erection.
Things felt more out of control than they had the day after my near arrest. There was some good press but not nearly enough to turn the SS Sinking Jennie around.
I felt beaten down in a way that was entirely new to me.
I needed sleep. And comfort food. And a vacation.
"We'll talk like the Micro Machines guy." Chu's suggestion pulled me from my internal pity party.
"Pregame?" I suggested, digging deep for some semblance of energy. I'd often wondered how royalty did it, performing at their public appearances when they were uncomfortably pregnant or teetering on the verge of exhaustion. Be a duchess, dammit, I told myself.
"Pregame," Nayeon agreed. She produced a bottle of organic French vodka. "For the snooty vegan palates."
"Oooh! Organic," Chaeyoung said, whipping out her phone to capture the pouring of the shots.
We'd done town halls without alcohol in our systems. And they were much more painful sober.
"To the shortest town hall in Bluewater history," Chu toasted.
"Cheers!"
We clinked gold-rimmed shot glasses and downed the vodka.
"One more?" Chu rasped.
I nodded.
"One more and Jennie can tell us all about being shadowed by the sexiest human alive," Nayeon suggested with a mercenary grin.
After brushing off their thinly veiled interrogations for two weeks straight, I'd seen this coming. I was not about to confess that I'd kissed the girl mere hours after meeting her. Nor would I mention our fight in the ring that ended with me nearly orgasming from a handful of dry humped thrusts.
There were some dark, dirty fantasies that should remain private.
"I would prefer to forget she and her purpose in my life exist for one night," I said, nudging my glass back at Nayeon.
"Is she kind?" Chaeyoung asked. She was sprawled on her belly on a daybed, kicking her bare feet up behind her. The pool was shaped like a scrotum. It was a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that we'd designed and developed Bluewater in the shape of the female reproductive system.
It had mostly been an accident until one day, while we were pouring over drone footage, Chaeyoung said, "Does this look like a…"
"Reproductive system?" Chu had supplied. "Yup."
So we'd added the fallopian tubes. One served as the community's marina. The other was where we built our four homes… including Nayeon's cock and balls swimming pool.
"Kind?" Nayeon scoffed. "How is that the first question you ask about someone who looks like that?"
Chaeyoung tossed her hair over her shoulder. "That's what really matters, isn't it? She can be as beautiful as David Beckham, but if She's an asshole, that knocks the points off her."
"But assholes can be so much fun in bed," Nayeon insisted.
Chu and I snorted into our shot glasses as the urinating man statue steadily returned water to the pool behind us from her marble urethra.
"Wait. That came out wrong," Nayeon snickered. "My point is, you shouldn't be close-minded against the assholes of the world."
Nayeon liked to try to argue morals with Chaeyoung, but Chaeyoung's Zen-like acceptance of literally the entire world made it impossible.
"I'd like to point out that Jennie still hasn't responded to our inquiry," Chu said, pointing an accusatory finger in my direction.
I downed the second shot, a smooth fire coating my throat and temporarily reviving me.
"She is remarkably unflappable," I said.
My friends looked at me expectantly.
"That's it?" Chu said. "No 'She's a skeezy dirtbag'? No 'She's Prince Charming in a business suit'? No 'She's a divine god in bed'? Just 'She's good at her job'?"
"No detailed description of what I can only guess is an incredible cock?" Nayeon teased, ignoring the chairs and flopping down on the terrace tile.
I immediately fought off the vision of Lisa's incredible cock that surfaced from where it was emblazoned in my memory banks.
"In this case, what matters is how good she is at her job," I insisted. "How was she to work with over your shoplifting thing?"
Nayeon's new assistant at the time had gotten jealous when her boyfriend said Nayeon was "totally fuckable." In a revenge plot that made sense to no one, the assistant had snuck a $40,000 Cartier bracelet into Nayeon's bag.
"That was fucked up," Chu sighed.
"So fucked up," Nayeon agreed with an elegant shrug of her shoulder. "Lisa was brutally beautiful. Ruthlessly efficient. But I wasn't paying for the babysitting service. At the time, my scandal was a little less big-dealy than yours."
I wondered if she'd ever found her naked in her house.
"You two ever… you know?" Chu, reading my mind, made a hip thrusting motion from her chair. The gesture was incongruous with her impeccably tailored suit.
Nayeon laughed and slapped the pool tile with her ringed hand. "I would have but she was very clear on the 'no personal relationships with clients' thing. She missed out on all this." She gestured at her breasts.
Against my will, I perked up. So she didn't turn on the charm and pheromones with every client? Was I special?
For the love of strong women everywhere, pull yourself together, I told myself.
"So what's with her showing up naked in my house?"
Nayeon pursed her raspberry pink lips. "She's an unorthodox kind of guy. My guess is she was trying to get your attention in a way that wouldn't allow you to just cold-shoulder her."
"I don't cold-shoulder people."
My friends, comedians that they were, mimed shivering.
"Hilarious, jerks."
Chu checked her watch. "We have to go, jerks."
"I don't want to," I groaned. Whining was very un-Kim-like, but I felt like indulging just this once.
"Last time we were late, they got all hopped up on the smoothies, and now Bluewater has an eight-foot carved parrot next to the disco since the residents decided the rooster statue was lonely. Also, we had to rename the nightclub the disco," Chaeyoung pointed out.
"Who's driving?" I asked.
"We'll take my cart," Chu offered. "I made some modifications to it that I think you'll like."
You could take the woman out of the aerospace engineering office, but you couldn't take the aerospace engineer out of her golf cart design.
Chu's modifications on her four-person vehicle included aerodynamic spoilers, ventilated seats to combat Miami swamp ass, and a fringe of neon-lighted tassels that danced in the breeze where they hung from the roof.
"It's like being on a flying carpet," Chaeyoung sighed happily as Chu tooled off in the direction of the clubhouse. We cruised over the bridge and down the palm-lined street, past luxury homes into the little downtown area.
I felt the same driving through Bluewater as I did walking the halls of Flawless. Pride.
Both places were a reminder that I was doing something in the world. I was leaving a mark. Or, in Flawless's case, I was removing them.
Chu punched the horn, and it played a jaunty verse from Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." I made a mental note to see about upping my golf cart game by installing a margarita blender in mine.
We weren't early enough. The vegan strawberry shakes at the bar were gone. The only evidence of their existence was pink solidifying stains left behind on the white linens. The catered desserts, displayed on a beach-themed tablescape, had probably been magnificent. There were no survivors there either. Only sad, lonely crumbs.
Nayeon, our resident real estate mogul and developer of Bluewater, had decorated the clubhouse in upscale South Florida style. Lots of rattan and wooden shutters, white coral stone, stucco. The personality came from generous pops of color, unexpected artwork, and our eclectic neighbors themselves.
It was a full house tonight.
We had bohemian artists with their southern exposure studios. The owners of a national organic grocery chain that had bought the $2 million lot next to their nine-bedroom farmhouse just to plant a garden. We had the secretive Mr. Joneses, both exceedingly vague about everything. I was positive that wasn't their real name, and none of us were buying their "retired business executives" cover story.
Then there was the former crown prince of Eswatini. His highness had politely declined his royal birthright after meeting a feisty fashion magazine editor. They spent the winters here in Bluewater, summers in Paris and Milan, and spring and fall in Eswatini.
The WWs, or Wealthy Widows, had commandeered an entire wing of Bluewater's luxury condo building and kept everyone on their toes organizing enclave-wide events including progressive dinners, pole dancing workshops, and, of course, the April Fool's Day two years ago when they'd secretly hired a troop of mimes and unleashed them on the enclave.
Next came our techy geniuses. Some retired, some still working seventy-hour weeks to bring the world the next advancements in technology. Those in attendance were clustered together around the patio doors on the far side of the room discussing something that had them geeking out.
I wished I could join them. But in a Bluewater Town Hall, it was essential to stay on task.
"Okay, ladies," Chaeyoung said. "Let's do this. Forty minutes in and out."
In a fit of lunacy, the four of us had made ourselves property managers of Bluewater. We could have hired an outside company. We should have hired an outside company. But that would be giving up control.
We'll have a say over everything, we thought.
It'll be great, we thought.
Turns out, we were stupid.
Sure, we were able to screen property buyers to make sure each neighbor was a good fit for Bluewater. We had no party animal socialites. No reality TV stars petitioning to film in the community. No gossip mongers selling pics of our more famous residents to the tabloids.
But it was a lot of work. So. Much. Work. Running a company and a community was the equivalent of three full-time jobs. And that was without adding a scandal into the mix.
I took my seat behind the long table at the front of the room. Chu, Nayeon, and Chaeyoung lined up next to me. I shot a look at the smaller empty table in the corner and suppressed a shudder. The Negotiation Table. I hoped we wouldn't need it tonight.
With a few hundred entrepreneurs, sports executives, and extremely well-paid attorneys as residents, there were no yeses or nos in Bluewater. Only deals.
Nayeon pointed a manicured finger at the bongo player in the corner of the room—a previous negotiation when residents decided they didn't like Nayeon's gavel. She riffed out an attention-getting beat, and the residents took their seats. There were no tacky folding chairs here. No, town hall attendees settled into swiveling cushioned clamshell-style chairs in a range of teals and turquoises. We'd discovered people were less likely to jump to their feet and argue when they were comfortably seated.
"Okay, Bluewaters, first up on the agenda is feeding Steve. The Joneses are heading to Greece for a week and need someone to cover for them," Nayeon began.