by Laura Hankin
There was a long pause. Then Miles threw his head back and laughed. “Okay,” he said.
A team of us headed over to the bar after that. We gossiped and played darts, and as our first drinks disappeared and our second came to replace them, Miles and I gravitated toward each other. “It’s good to have you back, Beckley,” he said. “The office had gotten too . . . pleasant without you.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, and smiled at him.
We jumped from topic to topic, cracking jokes, trying to one-up each other. Occasionally, other writers joined in for a few minutes, but Miles and I kept turning back to the electric energy of our own conversation. The bone-deep weariness I’d been living with lifted. My belly hurt from laughing. Everyone else trickled out, but we only noticed when the last two said their good-byes, leaving us alone. “It got late. I should probably go too,” Miles said, looking at his watch.
“Come on, Emmy’s out of town, right?” I put on some jokey puppy-dog eyes. “So you could go home and rewatch The Wire by yourself, or you could have one more drink with your grieving friend in her time of need.”
“I thought you didn’t want people treating you any differently,” he said.
“I don’t. I’m just worried about you. Abandoning a grieving friend makes you a terrible person, and I don’t want you to go to hell.”
He laughed. “When you put it that way . . .” Then he leaned over the bar and ordered us each a gin and tonic.
When we’d finally closed out, as we were putting on our coats and lurching onto the sidewalk, the night chilly around us, I said, “Thanks for this. I just . . . Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said.
“I’m glad to be back at work for real now,” I said, the words escaping my throat in a rush. “I’m going to write so much good stuff. Make you proud.”
He stopped walking. “I have to tell you—I got another job offer. I’m giving my two weeks’ notice on Monday.”
A roaring started up in my ears. I did not care for this particular change, not at all. “No, what? You can’t leave. You’re the best part about Quill!”
“I’ve got to take it,” he said, and a satisfied smile momentarily lit up his solemn expression. “It’s the New York Standard.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s amazing. Of course they poached you. You’re amazing.”
“Thanks,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s what I’ve wanted, forever.” He cleared his throat. “I will be sad to leave you, though.”
My eyes filled suddenly with tears, tears for him leaving and about other things too. Endings all over the place. The unfairness of how the bottom can be pulled out, when you thought things were so solid. “Oh God. Sorry,” I said as I dragged my hand across my face and blinked the tears away.
“Jillian Beckley crying? I never thought I’d see the day,” he said.
“I’m not. Shut up.”
He pulled me into a hug to comfort me. We’d never hugged before. He was stronger than I’d expected.
“Whoa, man, you work out?” I said.
“Oh yeah, total gym rat.” One hand of his reached up and stroked my hair, and then, with my nose against his neck, I made a mistake: I breathed in. He smelled like coffee, but more than that. Like security. Yes, I know that sounds dumb.
I watched myself put my arms around him too as if from outside myself, watched somebody who looked exactly like me doing something that I would never do. This bad decision-maker that had my face pressed herself against him, not just head against chest, but hips against hips and then, as he pressed back, I was no longer watching from outside myself. I rocketed back into my buzzing body, and oh, my body wanted him bad. “I wish you would stay,” I said.
“You guys will get some great new editor and forget all about me soon enough,” he said, his voice low, a hitch in his breath.
I drew back and punched his chest lightly. “Right, maybe we’ll get someone who actually appreciates good pop culture.”
He gave me a gentle push. “Let’s hope they can put up with your typos.”
I pushed him back, and then as he stepped forward again, I knew what I was going to do before I did it, and I hated myself. I put my hand on his cheek and kissed him. He drew away for a moment. And then he kissed me back.
It was like neither one of us could catch our breath. He held on to me so tight it bruised my arms. I hadn’t been kissed in almost two years, since my mom had gotten her diagnosis, and my boyfriend at the time had asked if I really had to miss his work party to take her to chemo, and he was promptly not my boyfriend anymore. After I moved home, my mom worried that I wasn’t dating, that I was focusing too much on her, so I’d sometimes tell her that I was going out with someone I’d met online. Then, I’d sit in a café and read a book for a few hours before coming home and spinning her tales of imaginary men—how this one had been rude to the waitress and that one had smelled like fish left out in the sun.
So I’d forgotten how kissing someone felt, the beautiful messiness of it. I was throbbing, a pulsing, exposed, EXTREMELY HORNY heart. But also, I’d never been with someone who kissed me as hungrily as Miles did, who kissed me like he’d also been denied something beautiful and messy for years, and had to make up for it all right now.
Then, abruptly, he pulled away. The flush on his face was so deep it showed even in the weak light from the cars whooshing by us. “I can’t.”
“Right, we shouldn’t,” I said, and we stared at each other for a moment before he turned aside and stuck his arm out for a taxi.
“We need to forget this happened,” he said. “Please.” I nodded dumbly, and then a cab pulled up. “Look, you take this home and go to bed.” He opened the door for me, and I scooted inside. Before he shut the door, he leaned against it for a moment. “We just stayed out too late and got too drunk, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He closed the door. I gave the driver my address and we pulled away. I watched out the window as we sped down the street, Miles growing small, then indistinguishable behind us.
* * *
• • •
Now, a month later, as Miles stood up to go, I looked down at my notebook in a panic. We’d made a mistake, but he was my one contact. And we could keep things professional, if only I had something worth changing his mind. I flipped some pages—hadn’t I had a million ideas over the last few weeks?—and looked at my ramblings from the subway the other night, after Raf’s opening. Raf’s going to get eaten alive at Margot’s party, I’d written in a near illegible scrawl.
“Nevertheless!” I blurted.
Miles paused, in the midst of buttoning his peacoat. “What?”
I squared my shoulders. “I have an in at Nevertheless.”
He furrowed his brow and gave his head a little shake, as if to clear it. “How?”
“I met Margot Wilding at my friend’s restaurant opening. We bonded, because she lost a parent too. She basically begged me to come to this party she’s having this week, where all her Nevertheless cronies will be.” The words were coming faster now, a flood of bullshit that I almost believed myself. Miles slowly sat back down. “I could . . . infiltrate. Get invited to join, and then report from the inside.”
“You can’t just sign up like it’s a membership to Costco. They only invite the elite. No offense. So how exactly are you planning to infiltrate?”
“I can make up some influential aunt who was on the feminist frontlines, or some project I have in the works that’s going to make my name, and get my fancy restaurant friend to back me up on it.”
“And if they do any kind of Google search on you, they’ll know you work in media, and run in the other direction. They’d never invite a journalist. They probably think we’d sell out all their secrets. Which is fair.”
“I’m not in media anymore, buddy.” I crossed my
arms and sat back, cocking an eyebrow coolly. “After getting so unceremoniously let go, I’m disillusioned and using my talents in other fields from here on out.”
He laughed, almost against his will. “I’m not sure how convincing that will be.”
“Wouldn’t you love to know what that clubhouse looks like on the inside? Who’s a member? Wouldn’t the readers eat up ten thousand words about the way that these women put on a performance of concerned feminism while walling themselves off from any real risks because of their privilege? The hypocrisy of them all, saying that they need a safe space just for women while excluding all the women who need sisterhood the most?”
“Sure, that sounds interesting. But it also sounds high risk for potentially low reward, a little too ambitious—”
“What if I could prove that they’re the ones who brought down Nicole Woo-Martin?”
He got very still. “What do you mean?” It was difficult to talk about Nicole even now. The disappointment stung, like a cut that hadn’t scabbed over yet. She was supposed to be a hero, an icon, to do a term or two as mayor and then run for president. Instead, she’d fallen off the grid, walking in the woods somewhere, thinking about all that she’d lost.
Because shortly after Nicole started making moves to enact her most ambitious policy plan—a wealth tax on the city’s richest residents—a bombshell dropped: she’d been having an affair with one of her staffers, a twenty-five-year-old boy with the face of a Kennedy (John) and the common sense of a Kennedy (Ted). It was a terrible abuse of power, particularly from someone who was supposed to be so good.
Still, she might have been able to come back from that. Other politicians had. Maybe, just maybe, she’d exercised poor judgment, but the two of them had been truly in love.
The publication of their text messages put the nail in her coffin. The most explosive ones received endless coverage. Everyone read Nicole’s dirty talk. And everyone read Nicole’s threats. You should stay away from those women, Nicole had texted the staffer, or you’ll get yourself into trouble. She’d sent him a few variations on that theme: Seriously, are you going to see her again? I wouldn’t if I were you.
At first, Nicole claimed that she was making a reference to something they’d discussed in person, that she was trying to protect him from getting mixed up in some “bad crowd.” But the staffer solemnly denied it. She was threatening his job, he said, if he paid attention to other women. After that, she had no choice but to resign.
“Those text messages she sent, the threatening ones,” I said to Miles. “They just came out of nowhere and never felt quite right, did they?”
“Well, no,” he said.
The unabridged text messages made the rounds among journalists, and I’d read them all. Miles had too. Before the threats, everything was endearments, banter, and yes, the aforementioned dirty talk. And after the first threat, the staffer had written hah, okay, and then they’d gotten right back to banter. It was totally possible that he was just protecting himself, sure, but there was another piece of it that had never sat quite right with me.
“Do you remember her tweet? The one she deleted almost immediately?” I asked Miles.
As the scandal was unfolding, Nicole had tweeted, Forces are trying to stop our promise of change. Nevertheless. Despite unfounded rumors, I will keep fighting for you. A photo accompanied the text—Nicole beaming at that Women Who Lead gala Miles and I had gone to. In the background, Margot Wilding and Caroline Thompson, the Women Who Lead founder, watched Nicole, their faces partially in shadow.
I’d screenshot it at the time and sent it to Miles, mostly because we’d been there when the photo was taken. But that meant we were two of the only people to notice when she took down the tweet, only a minute after putting it up.
“Nicole never made typos, never used a period when she meant to use a comma,” I said to him.
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “That’s probably why she deleted it, then.”
“Right, maybe she wanted to correct her mistake. But then why, when she put up the new tweet, did she leave out the word Nevertheless and change the picture?” I’d screenshot her revision too, thinking it was strange, and now I pulled up the screenshots on my phone, flipping between the two of them so that Miles could see. The later tweet simply said: Forces are trying to stop our promise of change. Despite unfounded rumors, I will keep fighting for you. The picture that accompanied it was one of Nicole alone, no Margot or Caroline in sight.
He rubbed his chin, momentarily stumped. Miles didn’t get stumped very often. I felt a thrill that I could go toe-to-toe with him like that.
“Why would they want to hurt her, though?” he asked. “The rumors were that they handpicked her for mayor.”
“The affair came out soon after she announced that the main focus of her administration was going to be closing the wealth gap, right?” I said. During the campaign, Nicole’s wealth tax had been just one part of her broad policy platform, easy enough to overlook. My mother had rejoiced at Nicole’s announcement, imagining that maybe their conversation at our door, when she’d told an empathetic Nicole about medical bills screwing us over, had played into the decision. I went on. “Maybe they realized that she was actually going to do something about taxing the rich, and they wanted to protect themselves.”
Miles leaned forward, speaking very quietly. “You really think you could find some evidence for that?”
“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “But this is my chance to try.”
“It’s very flimsy, Beckley,” he said. “Basically a conspiracy theory.”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “But every so often, conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Besides, what do you lose if I just try to get into the club and see what happens?” He hesitated. “There’s something going on there,” I continued. “Something bad. I can feel it.”
He chewed on his lip. He wanted to believe, just like I did, that Nicole was simply human, instead of a monster. “An undercover operation would be very difficult.”
“You think that, after the last two years, difficult things faze me in the slightest? I eat difficult for breakfast. Besides,” I said, and stared him right in his beautiful blue eyes, “I can be very persuasive when I want to be. People end up liking me, more than they’re supposed to.”
He stared back. Then he ran his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up in tufts. “Well, yeah,” he said. “If you could get us something on Nevertheless, of course I would want it.” He shook his head and laughed again in spite of himself. He had that expression on his face that he got whenever someone brought him something that really woke him up, a jazzed, unrestrained grin.
I floated on a wave of adrenaline as he told me to send him a written proposal as soon as I could and waved good-bye. I practically danced down the street as I headed to the subway, resisting the temptation to twirl around lampposts and throw my arms around strangers. This was the kind of story that could help me catch back up and make my name, that could catapult me to a life of credibility and regular assignments, a life where I could finally be happy.
It wasn’t until after I texted Raf that we needed to talk about Margot’s party that I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering how the hell I was going to pull it off.
FOUR
I went to Raf’s apartment in Bushwick the next morning, bearing donuts and coffee, shaky from three hours of sleep. Even under normal circumstances, sleep often eluded me—my mind ping-ponged around from my Greatest Hits of past social miscalculations to my anxieties about the future. And planning to break into an exclusive club wasn’t exactly “normal circumstances.”
“Wow,” Raf said when he opened the door, rubbing the sleepies from his eyes, with gravel in his voice. “Breakfast? What have I done to deserve this?”
“It’s what you’re going to do, I hope,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow, wary. “On the on
e hand, I need roughly twenty favors. But on the other hand, these donuts are very good.”
“I guess you should come in and sit down,” he said as he took a coffee and knocked back half of it in one swig.
I followed him into his combined kitchen/living room area. His apartment didn’t yet hint at the celebrity he was becoming. No fancy, expensive art on the walls, just photos of his family and a few vintage posters of musicians like David Bowie. (In high school, Raf taught himself guitar. He refused to perform in front of anyone, though, so I didn’t know if he was terrible or a virtuoso.) For a chef, he had a surprisingly small amount of counter space, but then Raf saved his fancy cooking for work and whipped up elaborate meals at home only if he was trying to impress a date. Otherwise, he made himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The couch we flopped onto was the same one he’d bought for his first apartment after college. I put the donuts on the same coffee table we’d been putting our feet up on for years. Someday, Raf would be forced to move to some gleaming loft in Williamsburg by whatever girl he ended up falling in love with—I pictured him wandering around it sadly, lost—but for now, his home still fit him like a turtle’s shell.
“So I got an assignment to write an article for the New York Standard,” I said, right as Raf bit into a glazed donut.
His eyes crinkled with joy, and he held up a finger and chewed as quickly as possible. “Jilly, yes!” he said as soon as he’d swallowed. Generally, I was a Jillian. As a child, I’d hated being called “Jill” so much that I’d spent a whole year telling people that, actually, my name was Gillian with a G (not coincidentally, this was the year I became obsessed with The X-Files and Gillian Anderson). When teachers expressed doubt, I doubled down, spinning out explanations of how there must have been a typo on the attendance form. Eventually, my mother had to ground me so I’d stop lying about it. Somehow with Raf, though, I never minded the affectionate shorthand.