Politics. Escorts. Blackmail. by Pynk Page A

traveled for vacation sex. Usually white women. They’d come to town looking for a good time with African men, even though prostitution was illegal. He knew for a fact that one in five single women who visited from rich countries were looking to hook up. The sex tourism industry there was booming, much like it was for men who looked for vacation sex in Brazil.
    His Kenyan mother couldn’t quite put her finger on what her tall, dark, and mature-looking son was doing with his time. But one thing was for sure, whatever it was, he wasn’t stopping. She threatened to lock him out of their one-bedroom apartment, where he slept on the living room sofa, if he didn’t come home at a decent hour. One night she found the stash of cash he’d hidden under one of the cushions, but she couldn’t get an answer out of him as to where it came from. But by the next night when he arrived back home, his mother was gone. And inside of a brown paper bag was all of his money, along with a gold and white Bible. He was devastated. Christian or not, she left her son and moved on with her life. He wasn’t just a child abandoned by his Egyptian father, whom he’d only met once when he was twelve, but he was also abandoned by his mother when he was nineteen—abandoned because she couldn’t deal with her suspicions of him being a prostitute.
    Beryl Thomas was one of the white women he serviced. Twenty years his senior, she was trying to get her groove back in Kenya. She changed everything for him and made him her studly, six-foot-six, dread-wearing sex king. Then she made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: one summer, five years after his mother left, she brought him back to New York City with her.
    Months later, Money spotted him at the Mark Hotel on the East Side and added him as her one and only male employee, after so many requests had come in to Lip Service from females looking for straight men. And of course Money had to taste-test Kemba for herself. She approved big time and put him on the payroll immediately, naming him Harlem.
    He quickly became a paid call guy, actually living in Harlem, the heart of Manhattan, in a grand condo. It was a penthouse suite for which his sugar momma, Beryl, paid five thousand per month out of her advertising agency executive money, in a nineteen-unit luxury building called the Lenox Grand, complete with hardwood floors, a chef’s kitchen, and vanilla marble tile throughout. Her style was all white with silver accents. The only spot of color was a huge, orange shag rug in the sunken living room.
    They were in an open relationship, and all he had to do was service her and be available when she needed him. She accepted the fact that he was an escort. Though they did manage to do what needed to be done to please each other, and say what needed to be said to each other, they made sure to get along, knowing it was hard enough to deal with the straight-laced societal standards of fidelity. Their standards were anything but straight-laced.
    The rules they had were mainly hers and he obliged.
    Both benefitted greatly.
    She got her boy-toy stud who was hung like a horse.
    And he got to live like a king and not even have to spend his own money.
    It was ten in the morning when Beryl greeted him as he stepped into the kitchen area from their master bedroom. Their sprawling condo smelled like maple bacon and coffee.
    “Hi, there,” she said to him.
    “Hey.” His voice was deep.
    “What do you have going on today?” Sitting at the bar on a white leather stool, Beryl split her focus between her iPhone and Kemba as he adjusted the strap on his gym bag, standing tall before her, looking like the hunk that he was.
    “Not much. A client at midnight.” Kemba’s words were drizzled with a hint of Swahili.
    “Why so late?” She took a crisp strip of bacon from the white saucer before her and bit it.
    “Somebody’s sneaking out, I guess. A married woman, ya know.”
    She chewed, swallowed, and smirked. “Oh, really?