The Company We Keep. Mary Monroe

and you can hang up on me. I don’t mind. Just keep signing my paychecks and giving me my bonuses on time,” she said, now glaring at the telephone she had just hung up.

      And she didn’t mind. Nicole loved her job and she loved Teri, which was why she had canceled a date so she could accompany Teri to another party that Teri didn’t want to go to on her own.

      Nicole made a mental note to cancel her part in a scheme with another secretary to set Teri up with a paid male escort. She knew for a fact that that dude was a firecracker in the bedroom. Her cousin Lola had tricked her into going out with him during a dating slump she’d slid into last year. She laughed and shook her head. If the other secretary still wanted to pay somebody to fuck Teri, he’d do it without her assistance. She had decided that her relationship with Teri was too important to risk.

      A loud, sour belch rose in Nicole’s throat, then popped out of her mouth, almost making her gag. She was still feeling the effects of the champagne she had consumed. The cup of coffee she’d picked up from Starbucks on the way home, hoping it would help reduce her buzz, hadn’t helped. She was as dizzy now as she’d been before she left work. But that didn’t matter one way or the other. It was party time and she was going to party her big ass off tonight.

      The panties she’d just slid into seemed even tighter now as she patted her stomach. The elastic in the waistband was stretched so tight she was afraid it might snap in two. It was a consolation to know that the bloating around her middle was mostly premenstrual water retention that would last only a few hours.

      Standing in the middle of her bedroom floor with her hands on her hips, she looked around her cluttered bedroom. She didn’t have much, but she was thankful for what she did have. Aside from her family and a few close friends, at the top of her list was a job she loved. It was demanding and it didn’t pay as much as she would have liked, but it was a job, and she worked with people she admired and respected.

      Living in L.A. and working in the music industry, she was surrounded by wealth and a fast-paced lifestyle that she admired from the sidelines and secretly envied. Who wouldn’t? She dealt with people who paid more for one pair of shoes than she paid for rent. She’d met and socialized with some of the biggest recording stars in the business. Last year, she’d been treated to lunch at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills with a Grammy-award-winning rapper. And even though it had been part of her reward for taking the rapper’s dog to the vet, she had enjoyed it.

      Despite the fact that the rapper in question was a first-class fool, she’d been attracted to him and they’d spent the night together in his Hollywood Hills mansion. He had admired her good looks and spunk. He had made a bunch of promises—ones she knew he wouldn’t keep—while he was on top of her, his dick slapping the side of her thigh as if it were his favorite sport.

      A week later, when he was supposed to call her again and didn’t, she saw him on an entertainment TV show grinning into the camera as he exited a church with the supermodel he’d just married. The last time she saw him was six months after his wedding. He was strutting his newly divorced ass down a street in West Hollywood. He’d flirted with her again, not even realizing he’d already sampled her fruit. The last thing she wanted to be was the same fool twice. Karrine Steffans, the ultimate black groupie, had already cornered that market and then told the world about it in her two tell-all best-selling books.

      Like all the other women connected to the music industry on some level, Nicole wanted to lead a more glamorous life on a regular basis. But for the time being, all she could afford was a one-bedroom apartment, which was always cluttered with items she was still paying for.

      Nicole was just a few months younger than Teri Stewart, a boss that she not only admired but envied. But her envy did not include malice. She adored Teri, and the feeling was mutual. But Nicole didn’t have to drop to her knees and kiss a bunch of funky butts to make people like her. She was “all that” anyway—sensitive, thoughtful, and charming. She had to do very little to win admirers. Especially with the men she came in contact with.

      Despite the fact that she was not a beautiful woman by Hollywood’s standards or if she went by what the black music videos depicted, a lot of men found her casual eroticism and icy aloofness appealing. She had a nice body but a face that she felt was too round. She also felt that her eyes were too big for her face and that her nose was slightly crooked. However, nobody but Nicole noticed her “flaws.” She knew how to work with what she had and turned heads everywhere she went.

      Nicole looked toward the bedroom door, then glanced at her watch and moaned like a woman in labor. The one person she knew who had her at the top of his shit list was on his way. And her trifling ex-husband was the last person she wanted to see tonight, or any other night for that matter. This man had broken not only her heart but her spirit as well.

      “Mama, I can’t find my Transformer.” The small voice coming from the doorway leading to the living room belonged to Nicole’s five-year-old son, Chris. The small living room, with cute little pieces of furniture and knickknacks that Nicole had picked up at places like Ikea and other discount stores, contained a pullout sofa where the boy slept. He was the only reason she still had a relationship with that sperm donor she’d once been married to.

      Nicole whirled around, blinking hard. “Uh,” she started with a sniff. “Honey, your daddy should be here soon to pick you up. Get all your stuff ready. You know how he doesn’t like to wait.”

      Chris gave her a puzzled look, as if he were hearing this for the first time. The fact that he looked so much like his no-good daddy made his reaction that much more irritating to Nicole. “But what about my Transformer?” He pouted with his bottom lip sticking out.

      “Can’t you go just one night without that thing?” Nicole snapped.

      “No way,” Chris snapped back, shaking his head so hard his ears wiggled.

      “Well, tell your daddy to buy you another one,” Nicole suggested, rubbing her chest.

      Nicole had chest pains almost every time she thought about that man. Seeing him in the flesh was enough to make her sick. Chris opened his mouth to speak again, but a loud knock on the living room door made him hold his breath. Nicole braced herself and held her breath, too.

      CHAPTER 3

      “Ask who it is before you open that door,” she ordered, knowing damn well who it was. She slid into the tiny bathroom next to her bedroom and threw on a long, loose terry cloth robe. It was one of several she owned that had seen better days. The belt was missing and the one pocket below the waist had a hole large enough for her foot.

      “It’s Daddy,” Chris announced from the living room, which smelled of fried food coming from the kitchen and floral scents coming from the bathroom.

      Gregory Mason, dressed in dark brown corduroy from head to toe, reluctantly entered the living room with the grim look of a pallbearer on his handsome, dimple-cheeked face. He shook his head in disgust and smoothed back his thinning, wavy black hair. He and Nicole were the same age, but Greg looked at least five years older. That was because he had frowned so much the last few years that the frown lines on his forehead and the sides of his mouth had become permanent. Looking around the room, shaking his head, he rubbed the beaked nose that he had inherited from his Jewish grandfather on his mother’s side. Then he sniffed and coughed as if he’d just stumbled into a room full of cow dung.

      “Hey, Dad,” Chris offered, more interested in his misplaced toy than his father’s presence. Chris was used to seeing his daddy look and act like the giant booger he was. Greg had started exhibiting this rude behavior before he moved out.

      But Chris loved his daddy as much as he loved his mama and wanted to spend time with him whenever he could. Unfortunately, they were not together that often because Greg had his own agenda and it did not include babysitting his own son when there were a lot more important things he could be doing.

      Gregory Mason was an angry black man and had been for years. He blamed the source of his rage on the black woman. She had contributed to his downfall and had been an ongoing thorn in his side for years. An ass-kissing, female Uncle