At Cosmo Reads, we’ve been having a lot of fun getting to work with our favorite authors and creatives to bring their stories to life. But it’s also been an incredible opportunity to also get to meet some new names who are just getting started in their writing career. And we’re so excited to introduce you all to the one and only…Anna Natasha. When her book, The Sex Detective, landed on our desks, we immediately felt like it would be perfect for us. Obviously, we had to read it first and we found ourselves unable to put down this book that is filled with so much laughter, heart, and spirit.
The Sex Detective, which will be released January 19, 2027, follows Xochitl Ruth Bader Bernstein Buenaventura, a public health caseworker who absolutely loves her job even though others may not understand why. Things quickly turn upside down when she has to inform her former crush that he has been exposed to an STI. But a good sex detective tries to figure out the whole truth and suddenly their reunion swings open more than just their reconnection.
Here’s your official first look at The Sex Detective, including a cover reveal and exclusive excerpt.
Xochitl Ruth Bader Bernstein Buenaventura works in the public health department to ensure that all the citizens of Los Angeles County can have all the safe, shame-free sex their hearts desire. But her own sex life is nonexistent now that she’s living at home with her Ashkenazi Jewish family after a miserable breakup. She’s always felt like an outlier ever since her Mexican mother died. But at least she has her work. Until the patient in her latest case turns out to be her former high school crush.
Cristian Martinez has been kicked out of the art residency program that was supposed to lead to his dream career. Then he really hits rock bottom when a Department of Public Health caseworker informs him that he's been exposed to an STI. An extremely flustered, strangely familiar caseworker, who, for some reason, he can’t stop thinking about.
When his ex-girlfriend denies everything, Cris and Xochi team up and uncover a shocking underground adultery ring that busts Xochi’s caseload wide open. As secrets come to light, their growing attraction threatens to ruin everything Xochi has worked for. Because the most important rule of being a good Sex Detective is never to fall for your client.
Ready to meet your favorite new detective duo? Cover artist and designer Monique Aimee brought Cris and Xochi to life with a fun cover that we absolutely cannot get enough of! Maybe you can find some special clues in here, too!
Ready to solve the case? Check out an exclusive excerpt of the prologue and chapter 1 below!
PROLOGUE: XOCHITL
Xochitl Ruth Bader Bernstein Buenaventura was gonorrhea’s worst nightmare.
At least, that’s how she would describe herself after one too many margaritas. To LinkedIn snoopers she was a disease intervention specialist for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and to friends of friends she met in noisy bars, she was a contact tracer (No, not Covid, STIs— like syphilis, yeah— no, sorry I can’t really diagnose that rash). But to the people she really wanted to impress, she was a sex detective. And she was the best. Not through inflated ego or mere numbers alone, no—you only got to be gonorrhea’s worst nightmare by understanding the enemy, where it lived and how it thrived. Meaning that Xochitl understood shadows and secrets.
In fact, if she were a superhero, her name would be ShadowSmasher (not “The Syphilitic Woman” as her cousin Jessie had once suggested). ShadowSmasher chased down wily little bugs—through apps, word of mouth, and round and round groups of swingers—and dragged them out into the light, banishing them forever with a couple shots of penicillin. She had the power to beat back death, infertility, and gnarly genital discharge! On her good days, she felt nearly unstoppable.
Today, however, she was feeling decidedly un-superhero-like. Not even sidekick material. Today she felt more like…well, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman crawling around the floor of her childhood bedroom on hands and knees, searching for an appropriate hiding place for her vibrator that grandmother wouldn’t immediately dis-cover. She prodded at the loose panel in the back of her bottom dresser drawer, where she used to hide single cigarettes, mustache bleach, and other illicit materials, and now found the space stuffed full of personalized keepsake yarmulkes from various bar and bat mitzvahs and a brochure from USC medical school, meaning Safta had definitely been there. Xochitl sighed and leaned back against the dresser, tossing the vibrator into one of the giant blue Ikea bags that now held all of her earthly belongings. How was it possible, she wondered, that her entire life could fit into just five overflowing bags? And also—why hadn’t her father taken down a single one of her Special Agent Fox Mulder posters when she’d moved out ten years ago? And additionally, most importantly, why hadn’t she seen this coming?
Xochitl prided herself on her ability to pick up on subtle clues and see patterns where others saw disarray. The fact that Michael had caught her off guard with his I think this is over, had been the most devastating part.
Well, and the fact that he’d done it on New Year’s Eve. That was pretty bad, too. She’d lain awake on the couch until dawn, listening to firecrackers pop on the street below and the faint rustle of Michael tossing around in the bed that used to be theirs, wondering what she had missed.
What did it say about her, the best sex detective in LA County, that she hadn’t seen this breakup coming and even now didn’t have a clue what had gone wrong?
She stood with a groan and began pulling clothes out of Ikea bags and tucking them into her old sticker-coated dresser. She’d read an article once about how physical activity improved cognitive function, so maybe moving around would help her see things more clearly.
In the closet, she pushed aside an old prom dress and her bat mitzvah skirt-suit to make room for her business casual work clothes, thinking…
The way she saw it, there were only two possible explanations to the Michael Conundrum, and she didn’t know which was worse:
1. She was a bad detective.
2. She was a bad girlfriend.
She dismissed the first possibility on the basis of all the evidence to the contrary, which left…her. There was something wrong with her. Michael seemed to think so. Her family seemed to think so— certainly more so now that she’d shown up at the back door at six a.m. on New Year’s Day in her stained pajamas with five Ikea bags. In fact, the world had been telling Xochitl there was something wrong with her for as long as she could remember. That same message, over and over; she was always, simultaneously, too much and not enough.
She grabbed another item of clothing from the bag, and when she shook it out, she saw it was a pair of paisley boxers. She remembered a long-ago night. A lot of wine at a hip new restaurant in the Arts District to celebrate a promotion at Michael’s work. Then afterward, both of them flashing crimson- stained smiles and rolling on wine- drunk laughter. Michael tripping over his boxers to get to her, get his hands on her…
She studied the undergarment now, searching for clues. Every problem had a solution, she was sure, and if she just looked hard enough, she could find it. But there was nothing—nothing but these stupid, ugly boxers and a hollow feeling inside, like someone had drained an ocean out of her belly.
She took a deep shuddering breath and let it out quietly. Her fingers came to rest on the little gold Virgin of Guadalupe pendant she wore, the same one her mother had always worn around her own neck, much to the chagrin of Xochitl’s Jewish grandmother. She didn’t know what her mother would tell her in this moment. She had never known adult Xochitl, or even adolescent Xochitl. But still, her mother had named her after two warriors for a reason, and though Xochitl couldn’t ask her now, she supposed it was to remind herself who she was, in times like these.
A superhero.
A force to be reckoned with.
Or at least, she would be. Tomorrow.
For now, she settled for wrenching the window frame open and flinging the paisley boxers out onto the shrubbery below.
CHAPTER 1: XOCHITL
TWO WEEKS LATER
“My first question,” Xochitl said into her headset, “is how many people have you had sex with in the last sixty days?”
“One,” the woman said, too quickly. No one answered that quickly unless they had a prefabricated answer ready to go.
“Sorry, I missed that. Did you say three?”
“I said one,” the woman repeated.
Ah well, Xochitl had given her a chance. She rattled off some information on the importance of contact tracing before asking the woman for her “one” partner’s name and information. She was in the process of noting it down in her case file when the woman asked, “What is this for?”
“As I mentioned previously, we need to notify all your partners of possible exposure so they can be promptly tested and treated, to slow the spread of infection. Now if you can just provide me with your partner’s phone number, in addition to the address you already gave—”
“You can’t contact him!” the woman cried, as if she’d been suddenly woken from a stupor.
“All contact tracing is done anonymously, so your name will never be mentioned. Now all I need is a phone number for your one partner, and we’ll be set!” Silence met Xochitl’s ears. “Ms. Solano?”
The woman had hung up. Xochitl checked the call log on her phone: three minutes and twenty seconds, which she considered a success. Most of her coworkers’ cold calls ended after the first fifteen seconds, but Xochitl Bernstein was not most people. Even though she’d only been doing this work for five years, she was better than most of her colleagues who’d spent decades at it, and soon she’d be able to prove it. Her boss Ushma had been hinting at a promotion for weeks, and Xochitl was sure that if she solved one more case—neatly and succinctly, with all involved parties tested and treated—she would finally be promoted to junior supervisor. In superhero terms, it would be like getting promoted within the Avengers from Invisible Woman to Captain America. The position didn’t come with a vibranium shield, unfortunately, but she would get an office with a door and, most importantly, a raise.
Two weeks ago, after her sudden eviction from Michael’s apartment, she had optimistically thought it might be nice living with her dad and grandmother for a bit. But after too many days of Safta wincing every time Xochitl mentioned something about her job and endlessly dropping pointed comments about her friend’s grandchildren who had gone to MEDICAL SCHOOL, Xochitl was about ready to move out. A few months of that raise, and she would have enough to get her own apartment, or at least a room in an apartment where she wouldn’t be woken at 5:30 a.m. by someone shrieking because they found a So You Have Syphilis—What Now? brochure on the kitchen counter.
She sighed and tossed her headset onto the desk, just as a fat dollop of melted cheddar landed on top of her case file. Xochitl glared at it for a moment. “Brandon,” she said without looking up, “how many times have I asked you not to eat directly over my shoulder?”
She had to wait a full twenty seconds for him to swallow his mouthful of egg and cheese sandwich before he responded, “Maybe eight, why?”
If Xochitl were an STI Batman, Brandon would be her faithful Robin. She wasn’t sure who Invisible Woman’s sidekick was—an invisible dog? Anyway, Brandon may have had terrible table manners, but he generally supported her ideas, always told her when she had poppyseeds in her teeth, and was blatantly gay enough not to threaten her boyfriend. Ex- boyfriend. Whatever.
Xochitl looked up from her computer screen just in time to dodge another drip of melted cheese. “Brandon, this is the health department for God’s sake!”
“It’s organic,” he garbled, before perching on the corner of Xochitl’s desk, where she was at least in less danger of getting cheesed. “How are you doing?” he asked, after swallowing. “How was your weekend? Did you take my advice?”
“About changing my conditioner brand?”
“You know, I don’t actually think you need to change your conditioner brand; that was me giving you a subtle hint to wash your hair. Which I see you did, so, good job.” He applauded, one hand slapping against his breakfast sandwich.
“I was in mourning,” Xochitl said. “You know that.”
She hadn’t wanted to tell Brandon about getting dumped, but he’d taken one look at her last Monday and hustled her into the breakroom for coffee and interrogation.
“Mourning, right,” he said. “Which is why I asked if you took my advice.”
She stared at him blankly, slurping at her lukewarm coffee.
“Ass, Xochitl! Did you get some ass?”
“Oh, God no!” She put the lid back on her drink and shoved it into the corner of her desk. “Let me remind you, I live with my grandmother now, where all forms of ass are strictly forbidden. Besides, I’ve only been single for fifteen and a half days.”
“You said that number real fast.”
“I know numbers,” she shrugged. “That’s what I do. Numbers. Not…ass acquisition.”
Brandon barked a laugh that drew a “Shhh!” from the next cubicle over.
“You’re such a nerd,” he said more quietly. “You’re never going to get over Michael if you call hooking up ‘ass acquisition.’”
“I will get over him when I want to get over him,” Xochitl insisted, pushing her gold- rimmed glasses up. “And when I do, it will be with someone with a large vocabulary.”
“Large vocabulary,” Brandon snorted. “Honestly, same.”
She ignored him and turned back to her computer screen.
“Speaking of large vocabularies,” Brandon said, undeterred, “any luck with that resistant gonococcal case from Highland Park?”
Xochitl clicked into a file on her screen. “I just talked to the client. She insisted she only had the one partner listed on the CMR then hung up before I could get their phone number. But I did get an address.”
“Heyo!” Brandon held out his non-cheesed hand for a high-five, and well, she couldn’t resist. “You gonna head over there now?”
“I don’t know.” She usually tried to do some online reconnaissance first—Facebook, LinkedIn, standard internet stalking—before she moved to house calls, but the woman had said her partner’s name was Chris Martinez, and there were probably three million and twelve Chris Martinezes in LA County. Meaning the internet wouldn’t be much help.
“Is it a real address?” Brandon asked, scratching his chin. He had been trying to grow a beard but was too baby- faced to pull it off. She didn’t have the heart to tell him.
Xochitl copied the address into her maps app and a pin appeared in East LA. “Looks like Lincoln Heights.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Brandon jumped to his feet and ripped Xochitl’s blazer off the corner of her cubicle. “Field trip!”
“Brandon, it’s a Tuesday morning. I doubt anyone’s home.”
He guided her up and out of the chair, placing the jacket on her shoulders. “Xochitl, hon, no one leaves the house anymore. Besides, it’s a beautiful day. And we can get Tostilocos from Los Reyes on the way back!”
Brandon preferred field work locales that overlapped with yummy snacks. He was constantly suggesting they visit a certain street corner in Skid Row that was home to both a group of friendly sex worker informants and a surprisingly good bacon- wrapped street dog. Xochitl looked at the map. The address was pretty close to a birria joint her mom had loved. Or that Safta had once mentioned that her mom had loved. Xochitl’s appetite had been hit-or-miss since Michael had ended things, but she was trying to do things this week that made her feel good. And birria made her feel good. Plus, she really did need to make progress on this case. This morning she had discovered that her grandmother had rearranged her underwear drawer according to her own sense of propriety, with the Spanx up front and the lacy thongs hidden in the back. A promotion was looking more and more necessary.
Brandon was still staring at her. “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”
***
Brandon insisted on driving his newly leased Jeep, causing Xochitl to once again suspect he must have a trust fund, because the Department of Public Health did not pay enough for leather seats. As they rattled along the freeway, Xochitl took the opportunity to look over the CMR one more time. There was almost nothing on it. The client’s full name, Yajaira Solano, had been filled in by clinic staff, followed by her birthday, the date she had tested positive for a particularly resistant strain of gonorrhea, and the day she had received treatment at a Planned Parenthood in Pasadena. In the space for number of partners in the last sixty days: one. Number of partners in the last six months: one.
“So who do you think’s cheating?” Brandon asked, swerving around a glittering Sparkletts van. “The guy or the girl?”
“So heteronormative of you, Brandon,” she murmured, as she continued to study the form.
“Says the straight girl,” he snorted. “You can’t accuse me of heteronormativity then use me to chat up all the syphilis-spreaders on Grindr.”
“Queer people can be heteronormative,” she fired back, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose in a practiced debate- club move of aggression. “Maybe not homophobic, although one could argue that every closeted queer person is suffering from society’s inherent homophobia.”
“Oh, I’m homophobic too!” Brandon said cheerily. “Especially against that guy at my gym who never wipes down the leg machine. But anyway, you said the partner’s name is Chris. Sounds like a dude.”
“Could be short for Christina.”
“Oh my God, I didn’t actually want to debate you on this.” He took a hairpin exit off the 110 freeway too fast, causing Xochitl’s papers to skitter across her lap. “All we know in this case so far is: Yajaira, Chris, gonorrhea. So, who’s cheating?”
Xochitl scraped the forms back together and let her eyes run over them again. She was good at this; she’d had years of experience.
“Well, if we’re assuming that Yajaira is a woman and Chris is a man and that they’re in a monogamous two-person relationship and that one of them was infected with gonorrhea during the active duration of said monogamous relationship, then…we don’t have much to go on.” She flipped through the thin stack of papers. “She’s twenty- six years old, fairly young, which means she’d be more likely to have multiple partners, but we don’t have information on country of birth, demographic data, or anything else that might indicate whether she’s a settled mother of four or a freewheeling party girl who spends all her nights at the club.”
“Did you just say freewheeling?”
“And honestly, we can’t even use address to determine socioeconomic status anymore,” Xochitl continued. “Gentrification throws everything out of whack. There was a three- bedroom house by my old apartment that I saw listed for two million. Two million in Highland Park.” Xochitl shuddered then tapped her papers into a neat pile. “So, in conclusion, I don’t know. Need more data.”
“I think they’re both cheating,” Brandon proclaimed.
“You always say that.”
“Am I ever wrong?”
“Occasionally, yes.”
Xochitl glanced again at the form, only slightly crumpled now.
In the box for partners was just one name: Chris Martinez. She had known a Chris Martinez back in high school, but he had been a Cristian Martinez. Maybe known was too strong a word. She had lusted after a Cristian Martinez in that all-consuming multiverse kind of way that only teenagers can properly achieve, wherein he was the first thing she thought of in the morning and the last thing she imagined at night, and he had no idea she existed. He had been a junior during her freshman year, so they didn’t cross paths much in their sprawling high school, but she would often force her cousin Jessie to venture to the upperclassmen hallway with her, just to get a glimpse of him pulling books from his locker.
Even if they had been in the same year, she wouldn’t have stood a chance, as a short thick frizzy-headed, bespectacled Jewtino. In high school, she was always too “ethnic” for the white kids, but not Mexican enough to hang with the Latinos. Too square for the artsy types, but not smart enough for the honor society nerds. Too religious for the social justice warriors, but way too Semitic for the youth group kids. It was always the same problem; she was eternally too much and not enough.
But still, despite the odds against them, Xochitl had filled up journals with poems about Cristian Martinez, haikus, and limericks, or whatever else they were studying in English class at the time. Odes to his brilliant smile and his eyes like honey or brown sugar or toasted almonds or literally any other oatmeal topping (apparently, she was hungry a lot in high school). And his hair, oh God, there had been pages devoted to his chestnut brown curls, which he had worn up in a ponytail at the time. A wild, messy ponytail in the days of hair gel and frosted tips—of course she had lost her goddamned mind. Lost it enough to do the one sort of illegal thing she had ever done in her life, to get into an upper-level art class her sophomore year. It was a big class, but still, it allowed her to sit in a room with Cristian Martinez twice a week, hidden behind an easel, and watch him bite his lip in concentration and hold the paintbrush in a way that was both so intense and so delicate at the same time, and maybe, maybe, he’d brush back a strand of hair, and then there would be a little smudge of purple paint left on one of those curls and—
“Here it is!” Brandon cried, slamming on the brakes and snapping Xochitl out of her reverie with a dose of whiplash.
She shook her head to clear out any lingering teenage fantasies. It wasn’t professional to have those kinds of thoughts when she was on a house call. It was just a little breakup-induced crazy. It was understandable.
“You ready?” Brandon asked, hopping out of the Jeep and tucking his button-down shirt into his pants. “You look a little dazed.”
“Just your terrible driving skills,” she muttered, adjusting her blazer. She liked to look as professional as possible during these visits, hoping a well-ironed blazer could offset her small stature and the fact she was still sometimes mistaken for a thirteen-year-old at the movie theater. A very busty thirteen-year-old, but still.
As they walked up to the front door of a squat yellow house, she noted there were two cars in the open garage. A good sign that someone was home after all. She rang the doorbell.
“Voy!” a woman shouted from inside, followed by the snap of several locks pulling back. The door opened a crack, but the metal gate remained shut. She could see a middle-aged woman on the other side wearing an apple-printed apron-smock and a wary glare.
“Good morning, señora, cómo está?” Xochitl usually started out this way, not only to be polite but to gauge what language the other person preferred. But rather than responding with a bien or an okay, the woman spat out, “I’m not interested.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know who you are and I’m not interested.” She moved to shut the door and Xochitl leaned forward.
“Sorry, wait! My name is Xochitl Bernstein, and this is my partner Brandon Fischer, and we’re looking for Chris Martinez. We received information that he lives at this address?”
The woman remained silent behind the metal gate, but the door hadn’t closed completely. “What did he get involved in now?” she finally asked.
“Oh, he’s not in any trouble,” Xochitl said quickly. “We’re—”
“I know who you are,” she repeated, cutting Xochitl off.
“You…do?”
“You’re those Jehovah’s Witnesses. With the”— she gestured at Xochitl’s white blouse and black blazer— “and the”— she gestured at the thick black leather case file in Xochitl’s arms. “Don’t tell me he got in some mess with you too?”
“No, no, ma’am. This is just my business casual, it’s not, I’m not—we are definitely not Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Xochitl said emphatically, trying to communicate with an elaborate eye roll that the pair of them were way too Jewish-slash-gay to be out proselytizing for any organized church. “We work for the county health department,” she clarified. “No one is in trouble, and we’re not trying to convert anybody. But we would like to speak with Chris Martinez about an important matter, if he’s available?”
She continued to glare at them through the gate, lips pressed in a hard line.
“We mean no harm, I swear,” Xochitl said, holding out the lapel of her jacket so the woman could better see her little collection of pins: the black and gold BLM fist, the pink flowering uterus, the colorful rainbow flag, and the little red circle with ICE slashed out. It wasn’t strictly professional, but honestly, what country did people think they were living in? If you wanted to ask someone prying questions about their most personal topics, you had to give them a little reason to feel safe first.
The woman peered at her pins, then turned away. Just as Xochitl was beginning to think this was a dead end, she heard the woman shout into the house, “Cristian! Some church folks are here, they said you’re in trouble o no se que, quieren algo contigo!”
“Not in trouble, señora, we specifically said he’s not in trouble!” Brandon cried as Xochitl felt her heart shudder to a stop.
Had she just said Cristian?
It didn’t mean anything. Lots of people were named Cristian Martinez; the streets of East LA were probably teeming with Cristian Martinezes, bursting at the seams with them; it was—
“What the fuck, Ma?” came a cry from inside the house.
“Oye, language, mijo!”
That voice.
But no, it had been years; there was no way—
Someone skidded around the corner in a blur, and the metal gate was thrown open. In the doorway stood a man wearing only a pair of low-slung Adidas shorts. He had light brown skin and hair styled into an undercut, chestnut brown curls falling over breakfast-food-colored eyes, which were currently the size of saucers.
Oh no. Oh God.
“What happened? What did I do?” he cried, chest heaving. Xochitl vaguely noticed that her jaw was hanging open and that she was incapable of closing it. Brandon shot her a get-yourself-together look then took over.
“You’re not in trouble.”
“Are you sure?” Cristian Martinez asked, still gripping the gate. In her dazed state, Xochitl stared at his hands, noting flecks of white paint under his nails.
So he still painted. Her gaze drifted up from his wrists. In his panicked state, every muscle was tensed, his forearms, his biceps, his shoulders. His body was still lanky but strong, like a soccer player’s. Her eyes drifted back down past his collarbone, the smattering of hair on his chest, then lurched to a stop at a fleck of white paint on his upper abdomen, what was known in medical terms as the epigastric area and in Xochitl-speak as dear God the most freaking sensual square inch of skin known to humankind.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Brandon was saying. “Let me also stress that we are not representing any organized religion today. We told your mom that many times.”
“Oh, thank God, I thought…” Cristian Martinez loosened his grip on the gate and dropped his shoulders, the tension fading out of him. Then he paused, confused. “Wait, where are you from then?”
Brandon elbowed Xochitl, and she finally rattled her jawbone free. “We’re um, we’re from—wait, you are Cris Martinez, correct?”
As if she didn’t know.
He nodded.
Obviously.
Obviously, the universe would plant this Cris Martinez in front of her now, when her self-esteem was mangled, her curls hadn’t been properly treated in a month, and her apparently missionary-appropriate blazer was covered in an artful array of coffee and glazed donut stains she’d been too depressed to rinse out.
She took a deep breath. “My name is Xochitl Ruth Bader Bernstein Buenaventura.” In her nervousness, she rattled off her full name and waved her badge at him with shaking hands. There was no sense of recognition in his eyes, just a wary sheen of fear. “We’re from the LA County Department of Public Health. You’re not in any trouble. We’d just like to have a conversation with you, if there’s somewhere private we can talk?”
Luckily, she had made that introduction enough times that her mouth was able to follow the script while her brain was still lost somewhere among Cris Martinez’s tumble of curls. You know, sometimes an undercut made a guy look like a white nationalist, but on Cris it looked decidedly good. Sexy, even.
Oh no, was someone talking?
“…nowhere private in this house,” Cris was saying. “We can go in the garage but, um, can I actually get a shirt first?”
No, she nearly shrieked.
“Yes,” Brandon said. “Of course.”
“Okay, give me a sec.”
The gate closed, and Brandon turned to hiss at Xochitl. “What is wrong with you? Why are you acting like you’ve been punched in the face?”
“Nothing! I’m not… It’s just…hot?”
“It’s January! Get yourself together.”
She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. Brandon was right; what was she doing? She was a highly educated, fully grown woman, a public health superhero, a badass motherfucker as Jessie had texted her the night before. She was not the same nerdy fresh-man misfit who went all glassy- eyed and dribbly at the sight of a boy. She could have a perfectly professional conversation about this guy’s intimate sexual activities without acting like a creep.
The gate opened again, and Cris was now wearing a fitted white undershirt, which was only marginally less distracting than his bare chest.
“We can go in the garage,” he said, stepping around Xochitl and motioning for them to follow. About 95 percent of the space inside the structure was taken up by a Honda Accord and an old broken- down Buick, but Cris shuffled into the small space between the two vehicles. She and Brandon followed, maneuvering themselves around side mirrors and door handles. There was just enough room for them to stand in single file, Cris facing Xochitl with Brandon behind her.
“So what is this about?” Cris asked, arms crossed as he leaned back onto the Honda.
Because of the awkward positioning and the fact that she was totally boxing out Brandon, Xochitl realized she was going to have to handle this whole conversation by herself.
“As I mentioned, we’re from the Department of Public Health, specifically the Department of Communicable Diseases. We received your contact information in connection to a case and are here today to inform you that you have been exposed to a communicable disease.”
“Like Covid?”
“No, not Covid. A sexually transmitted infection. Specifically, gonorrhea.” He didn’t react, so Xochitl steamrolled ahead. “We’re notifying you so that you can get tested and treated. This is of utmost importance so that you don’t transmit the infection to others.”
Cris still hadn’t spoken. He seemed to be staring at something over her right shoulder.
“Gonorrhea is usually easy to treat, with a one-time dose of injectable antibiotic, although we are currently experiencing an uptick in multidrug-resistant strains and—”
“Wait…what did you say?” This was how it usually went; the news always took an inordinately long time to travel from lips to ears to a part of the brain that could actually process it.
“I’m informing you that you have been exposed to gonorrhea and— ”
“What does that mean, exposed? Are you saying I have gonorrhea?” His voice squeaked up a whole octave on the last word. “Can you, like, speak English?”
“Sorry.” She pushed up her glasses with sweaty fingers. “We don’t know if you have gonorrhea without testing you first, but it is likely since you were exposed through partner contact. As I said, there’s a possibility that this particular strain—”
“But where would I have gotten…that?” He was bracing himself against the cars now as if his legs might dissolve from under him.
“We’re not authorized to share that information, but it is a sexually transmitted infection, so the exposure occurred during sexual intercourse.”
“What? Wait, what?” He narrowed his eyes until they nearly shut and cocked his head to the side, momentarily distracting her with the jut of his jaw. Brown stubble grew there, darker than the hair on his head. He’d never had facial hair in high school; it looked much better than Brandon’s sad attempt. She bet it would feel rough and soft at the same time if she ran her thumb over it…
Brandon gave her a sharp kick in the calf.
“Sex!” she spluttered. “It’s—sex. You had sex with someone. Um, could be oral or anal or vaginal—I mean not your vaginal…area. Penis in vagina or penis in um, mouth, or…”
Oh no. Oh fuck. What was happening?
Was she really explaining the mechanics of sexual intercourse to him?
Cris was now squinting at her like, well, like she was a small woman in a business suit, squeezed between a Honda and a Buick screaming SEXSEXPENISVAGINASEX.
“Like I got it from my girlfriend?” he finally put together.
“Again, we are not able to confirm or deny that, but I do suggest you have a conversation with any sexual partners. Speaking of,” she struggled to pull her tablet out of her bag, but it was pinned against the Buick. She gave up. “Um, well. For reporting purposes, we do need to ask you how many partners you’ve had in the past sixty days.”
“Partners?” he asked, searching her face.
Oh God, was she going to have to spell it out for him?
“It’s sex—sexual partners. Men or women or nonbinary others that you have had any sexual activity with in the past sixty days. Involving the penis, vagina, anus or…other holes, I guess.” She ran a hand over her face as if it might make her magically disappear.
“Just one,” he said.
“Just one person or, um, hole?”
“Just one person, for fuck’s sake…”
“And the last six months?”
“Just one,” he said again and the little break in his voice let Xochitl know he was telling the truth. Even though her mouth was on a runaway horse race, she did know what she was doing. She was good at this.
“Thank you for that information. Are you able to give us that person’s name, for reporting and tracing purposes?”
He dragged a hand up over his face and into his hair. “Yajaira Solano,” he muttered. “Do you need her phone number or something?”
“No, thank you, that will be enough.”
He nodded, eyes fixed to the garage floor. This was the worst part of the job, when the news finally sank in, through brain down to heart, and someone realized their most trusted partner had not been so faithful after all.
Xochitl wrangled a card from her bag and held it out as he swiped a hand over his eyes. “Here. My contact information is on one side, and the address and number for our clinic is on the back. It really is essential that you get treated.”
He dazedly took the card and stared at it. She hazarded a glance up to his eyes, that subject of so many teenage poems, and saw they were a little red from where he’d been rubbing at them. He looked so broken in that moment, she felt a sympathy ache in her own chest.
“It, um, it happens to the best of us, you know?” she said quietly and touched his arm. “You’re going to be okay, Cris. I promise.”
His head jerked up. This was off script. She could hear Brandon shifting behind her. Cris was still for a moment, his bottom lip held between his teeth. Then he seemed to see her for the first time, really see her, and there was a flash of something almost like recognition in his eyes. They looked at each other—it couldn’t have been for that long, but it felt like a skipping record, the same half moment happening over and over again. Xochitl’s breath caught in her throat, and she quickly drew her hand back, fingers feeling like they’d been dipped in permanent dye where they had touched his skin.
“I’ll follow up with you in a few days,” she said, her voice strangely mechanical.
He seemed to have lost the ability to talk altogether and just gave a quick nod.
“Please feel free to reach out. For—anything.”
Xochitl nudged Brandon and began the awkward process of squeezing herself out of the garage. Cris didn’t move. He had gone back to staring at her card in his hand.
“Take care,” she called once she was outside the garage, but he didn’t respond.
***
Once they were safely inside the Jeep, Brandon burst out laughing. “Good lord, Xochitl, who knew you’d lose your whole mind at the sight of one hot shirtless man?”
“What,” she said, “are you talking about?” She tried unsuccessfully to buckle her seat belt.
Why were her hands shaking?
“Just the sight of one nip, and you go totally unhinged. I mean, we’ve talked to entire naked people before, like ass cheeks and all, and you’ve kept your cool, but this guy just”—he mimicked flipping his hair like a model in a shampoo ad—“and you’re suddenly screaming about SEX HOLES? Did you want to ask him how large his ‘vocabulary’ was, too? Though, really, you were way past innuendo at that point…”
She should tell Brandon. Say, I know him. I went to high school with him. I spent my formative years infatuated with him.
Right. So he could mock her even more, laugh at the fact that she’d known everything about Cris—his schedule, his locker number, his laugh, every inch of his clothed teenaged body—and he had just looked through her as if they’d never met. So that Brandon could run to their boss Ushma and get Xochitl thrown off the case for conflict of interest, and she’d never see Cris again, never get to find out if he’d be okay, never be able to help him. She was good—so good—at this one thing, and she could do it for him. Even if he never recognized her or even knew to thank her, she would know that she had made a difference in his life. Plus she needed this case, that promotion. More than anything, she needed a reminder that she was not disposable or replaceable, that she was necessary.
She buckled her seat belt with a loud click and whipped around to smack Brandon with the case file. “Just drive the car! It’s nothing. I’m just…on my period.”
He pulled out into the street. “Oh, Xochitl, I have listened to enough of your monologues on the virtues of your IUD to know that you don’t get periods.”
“Shut up,” she muttered, cursing her big mouth. “And turn left when you get to Broadway. I need to get that birria.”
As they pulled away from the curb, she glanced back toward the house. She could see Cris Martinez still bent over in the garage, hair obscuring his face as he stared at his hands. He was still holding her card.
Excerpted from The Sex Detective by Anna Natasha. Copyright © 2027 by Anna Natasha. Used with permission of the publisher, Cosmo Reads, an imprint of Sourcebooks, LLC.
The Sex Detective, by Anna Natasha will be released on January 19, 2027 from Cosmo Reads. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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