Dr. Stud

by Jess Bentley

  I stand the rest of the way up, leaning my knuckles on the edge of her desk.

  “That was the deal, remember?”

  “It's just that…” she starts, holding her hands palm out in a let's be reasonable gesture. “I mean, I don’t know if it will really be up to me? You know what I mean? With Google coming in and everything… I don't know what my role will actually turn out to be, so…”

  “You promised,” I say, keeping my voice somewhere above a snarl.

  “And I will totally try!” she nods vigorously.

  I have to stop for a moment because suddenly I feel very dizzy. Maybe it's the residual rocking motion of the boat, or the whiskey, but I feel like the desk is going to slide out from beneath my hands. Everything is very bright. Something smells like it's burning.

  “Hannah, I just put my whole life and my career on hold for the last three weeks to help you out. We had a deal. We had a negotiation. Please don't tell me that you're trying to wriggle out of this now.”

  “And you are such a good team player!” she shrugs helplessly. “But, I mean, this is business, Bella! In a team, everybody just has a small portion of the authority. Everybody has to work as a team! So if it's possible for you to go off and start writing your little life stories again or whatever… I'm sure they'll tell you. Sure of it!”

  “My little life stories —” I repeat vaguely, suddenly understanding what she really thinks of me.

  “Not as good as your makeup reviews, if I'm being honest,” she wrinkles her nose and tips her head to the side before taking another sloppy sip of her drink.

  “We’ll just have to see about that,” I snap, smiling.

  “Yeah, we could totally could see about that. Totally. So…”

  I feel like she's pushing me off, but suddenly I want her to know.

  “I mean, I think it's a really good story. A really good story. An amazing story.”

  She fondles the stack of papers with her fingertips, swirling in a slow circle, then stops. Her perfect brow wrinkles and the center as she squints up at me.

  “What are we talking about?” she asks me slowly.

  “The story…” I answer automatically. “This story. My story.”

  She smiles again, but not a real smile. A competitive, dangerous smile.

  “Your story just got cut, like five minutes ago. By me. Remember?”

  I just shrug.

  “Bella? Did you write an article about this?”

  I shouldn't tell her, I know it. That's really not a good idea. But the look on her face is really getting on my nerves.

  “Of course I wrote about it. That's my job. My life.”

  She clears her throat. “And what did you… write? An article?”

  “About a hundred thousand words, Hannah,” I inform her triumphantly. “I didn't have an ending, but now I do! So thanks!”

  She steeples her fingers and leans back in her chair, regarding me shrewdly. All the mirth and bubbly excitement seems to have gone out her, replaced by this sharp shard of woman.

  “I look forward to reading it. That’s a lot more than I was asking for. Maybe we can talk about… installments or something. A serial column?”

  “No,” I blurt out defiantly. “I don’t want it chopped up into pieces or given to one of the copy guys. I don’t want to have to run it past an editor. And I don’t want to reshape it or cut it for space or any of the other things we do to serials. I think it's a book. That's how I see it. On shelves, in bookstores.”

  “A book,” she repeats coldly. “I'm not really sure that we want to publish a book? I think that your column on TurnPost is probably the right place… the only place for that sort of work. If I decide to go with it.”

  I just shrug, trying to be as breezy as possible. She stares me down but I hold my ground, keeping Emmet and Dillon in the back of my mind, pretending they are backing me up, standing behind me, thick arms crossed.

  “No, I don't think so,” I finally say. “I think I am going to do it my way.”

  “You can't.”

  I stare at her, noting the squared position of her shoulders, the icy chill of her gaze.

  “Excuse me?"

  “Any work that you've done while under my employ is work product. It belongs to me. If I say it's not a novel, it is not a novel.”

  “I wrote it!” I huff, incredulous. “It's mine.”

  “So, I will put it out in hundred word increments… maybe at the top of the home page… maybe at the bottom of the page. Or I might do do nothing with it. That's my option.”

  The room sloshes back and forth again, threatening to tip me out the window and down forty storeys into the river.

  “You can't have it!”

  She opens her palms again as though revealing a chess move. Her voice is slow and calculating.

  “Are you seriously saying that?”

  “Well... yes,” I stammer. I’m not entirely sure what I'm agreeing to, but I’m certainly not just going to give it to her.

  “Then you’re fired.”

  My mouth drops open.

  “Theft of company property, by my reckoning,” she continues coldly. “Pity. You won’t even qualify for unemployment. That will be so weird. It’s a tough life. Unemployed writers are just about everywhere, aren't they?”

  “Jesus, Hannah. Do you have to be such a bitch?”

  She grins, her smile cruel and dry as she slowly stands up and picks the phone up from her desk.

  “Security? Please accompany Ms. Cage out of the building. Retrieve her ID as well. Her employment here is terminated. Thank you.” She returns the phone to its cradle and regards me.

  My head is spinning.

  “I just… I can't…”

  I try to think of something to say, but there's nothing left. She looks so different than the picture that's on my cell phone, the one with the freckles and big smile, but now I see this is really her. I don’t mean anything to her. And it dawns on me that I probably never have. Somehow I made up this whole fantasy world we were such good friends, that all seems totally fabricated now.

  I'm a writer. That's what we do.

  You’re just not supposed to live in them.

  Chapter 40

  Dillon

  Emmet knocks on the door, but there’s no answer. He looks at me, shrugging.

  “Well, she's got lights on in there. She's got to be home.”

  “Yeah, but she's not answering her phone. She doesn’t want to answer the door either,” Emmet scowls. “Maybe we should just leave her alone?”

  We stare at each other for a few seconds, pondering the idea.

  “Well, we were going to uh, get together and fuck, though, right?” I venture. “That was the deal, right? After the boat and everything?”

  I mean, I don't want to be petty or force anyone into anything, but she clearly agreed to that. That was the plan.

  “Yeah, subtle,” Emmet mumbles, shaking his head. After another moment's hesitation, he raises his hand and knocks on the door again, just slightly louder than before. Not like FBI loud or drug dealer loud, but loud. I reach out and press the buzzer with my thumb again.

  “Okay, if she doesn't answer now, then she really doesn't want to see us,” I say reasonably. “Like for real, real.”

  Emmet scowls, leaning toward me conspiratorially.

  “Well, our deal is done, right? I mean, maybe she's just… done? Like that's it? Finished with us?”

  “Yeah, maybe…”

  We look out in opposite directions, mulling it over. Could that really be it? Could she just turn it all off, just like that?

  Man. Cold.

  Finally I see a shadow in the hallway, growing larger. When she opens the door, she looks up at us with tears in her eyes, her makeup smudged into thumbprints on her cheeks, her nose red and shiny.

  “Oh my God,” Emmet blurts out. “What happened? Are you okay?”

  She waves her hand in the air, turning on her heel and shuffling back toward the livi
ng room. We follow her tentatively, careful not to make too much noise.

  “I'm sorry we were knocking so loud,” Emmet mumbles. “We thought maybe you couldn't hear us or something… or like…”

  She flops on the sofa and sighs. “I don't care about how loud you were knocking.”

  Emmet stares at me helplessly. He takes a seat in the chair, leaving the sofa for me. I sit down gingerly, about four inches away from her knee. I don't want to get too far into her space. I’ve been around the block a few times and I’ve learned one thing: crying women can be a little dangerous.

  “You want to tell us what happened? I thought everything was going so well. Did Hannah say something about the… um, the merger?”

  Emmet shoots me a dangerous look and flinches like he's going to drag out his phone. Then he pauses, trying not to be impolite. We pass little bit of a look between us, promising to check for merger updates just as soon as we deal with this Bella situation, whatever this is.

  “There will be other mergers,” Emmet says consolingly, and I'm almost convinced he means it.

  “The merger’s done,” she sighs, sniffling loudly.

  “Wait, what? How do you know that?”

  “And I'm fired,” she continues, her lips drawing downward in a sudden, twitching frown. Oh my God. She's going to cry right in front of me.

  “Fired, what? And the merger… start at the beginning, Bella!”

  She takes a deep, calming breath and pulls her heels up to sit pretzel style on the sofa. She hides her face in her hands. A few more seconds elapse while my heart races wildly. Too much is happening here. She pulls her hands away from her eyes all of a sudden and breathes in sharply.

  “Well you know Hannah called me to her office… right after the, um, event.”

  “Yes… go on…”

  “She wanted to tell me the merger is done. We did it. She got the papers and everything.”

  “That's great!” Emmet declares, probably a little bit too loudly for the room. I shoot him a look and he shrugs apologetically, his lips stretching over gritted teeth.

  “Yeah, it is great,” Bella sighs. “Everything we did worked out. We stayed at the top of the news cycle for the last three weeks, almost, and somehow you guys are magically transformed. Especially you, Emmet. You're like Prince Charming now. Google couldn't wait to scoop up your brand.”

  I nod, unsure what to say. I hear the little bit of sourness in her voice.

  “We did it,” I repeat quietly.

  Her eyes flicker up to meet mine, wide and wet. In this state, there's almost nothing between us. No defenses, no invisible curtain, nothing. Here she is, wounded. I fight the urge to pull her into my arms and hold her tight.

  “And then…” I prompt her gently.

  “And then…” she closes her eyes, taking a deep breath that takes a long, long time. Her fingertips pluck at the fabric of her yoga pants over and over again. “But I guess our agreement was just… well at least you guys got what you wanted.”

  “Wait, hold on,” Emmet objects. “We didn't… I mean, yes, we did get what we wanted. I'll have to look over the papers and everything, but if the merger is complete then that's true. But you have something too, right? Your agreement with Hannah? With us?”

  She shakes her head, pressing her lips into a line.

  “Yeah, didn't you have it ready to go? Your novel? Your change to more personal journalism?” I continue. “It's a natural thing, Bella.”

  “I thought so too,” she whispers. “But apparently I'm just… I'm just a writer. She says it's up to Google. She doesn't have authority to say yes.”

  “That's bullshit,” Emmet declares.

  “You don’t need her authority to say yes,” I shake my head. “You already did it. You already wrote the book, right? Is it finished? Is it ready to go?”

  Her mouth opens like she's going to speak, but then she stops. She balls her hands into fists and I reach out automatically, taking them in mine. I can feel her trembling through her core, a bone deep shudder that seems to erupt from somewhere deep inside her.

  “She says she owns it.”

  “Owns what?” Emmet asks, annoyingly clueless.

  “My book. What I've been writing… she says that it's work product. Since I worked for her while I wrote it, she owns it.”

  “Well that's —”

  “And then when I refused to give it to her to be chopped into hundred-word sections and hidden on the bottom of the page, she fired me.”

  She stares at me, helpless, silently pleading with her eyes.

  “Do you understand?” she asks in a shuddering whisper. “I had a book, now I don't. I had a job, now I don't. I had a plan, and now…”

  “Okay, that's bullshit,” Emmet declares.

  She starts to glance at him, but I reach up and take her cheek in my hand, drawing her attention back to me.

  “Don't look at him, he's being an insensitive ass,” I command her, drawing out at least a little bit of a smile. “She doesn't own your book, okay? Let’s say that first. And maybe she did you a favor.”

  “She says she does own the book,” Bella counters. “And I have no plan.”

  “Planning is my middle name,” I boast. (It's not, really. My middle name is actually Drew.)

  “Yeah, good idea,” Emmet says, suddenly becoming serious. I hear his voice change and realize he's fired up the old thinking machine. “First of all, is that what you still want? A book?”

  “Of course it's what I still want!”

  Emmet raises his hands defensively. “Okay, okay… just asking. I’m on your side, here, Bella, okay?” he asks her.

  She breathes calmly, deeply. “Okay,” she agrees.

  “Okay, glad we settled that,” he smiles. “So let’s piece this out. Does it exist?”

  “Yes,” she nods. “It’s about 80% completed.”

  “Okay. Did she see it?”

  Bella shakes her head.

  “But you were fired?” I ask her. She nods tightly. “And is there proof of that? A document?”

  “Well, no…” she shakes her head, apparently losing steam, then brightening again. “But she did have security escort me out. That was fun!”

  I cringe, imagining the sort of humiliation Hannah decided to throw out. What a jerk. “I'm sorry, she's kind of a bitch.”

  “I know!” Bella whines, her mouth open. “But we have been friends forever!”

  I pat her knee sympathetically, thinking that seemed like an appropriate thing to do. But with friends like that, who needs enemies?

  “So, you're in possession of an asset — the book. You were released from your legal responsibilities by Hannah, with a security guard as witness.”

  Bella nods. I look at Emmet, bouncing my ideas off him mentally until he nods as well.

  “So it just looks like you need to publish the book,” Emmet says in a low voice. “Do we have someone at Random House?”

  “Well there’s Xavier… I could give him a call,” I muse. “Oh! You know what, I think Patty at Universal Pictures would want to hear about this too. I want Ryan Gosling to play me!”

  “You are no Ryan Gosling,” Emmet rolls his eyes.

  “Fine,” I sulk, wounded. “Chris Pratt, then.”

  “As if! I’m a hundred times more Chris Pratt than you!”

  “Hold on, you guys!” Bella says, her eyes wide, her palms up. “This is ridiculous. I can't publish the book if I don't own the book. I can't do anything!”

  I shrug. “Let's just do it and find out.”

  “She'll sue me!” Bella barks, and she's probably right. “She will! I know her!”

  “Then she will be suing all of us. I highly doubt she wants to take us on.”

  I nod in agreement. “Highly doubt it.”

  She looks at both of us, one after another, her head swiveling back and forth as she pieces it together.

  “Wait a second… what are you talking about? Why would she sue you?”

  Emmet
shrugs. “We’re in this together. It's our story too. Not that I'm claiming ownership of it. I just feel responsible. Anything you need…”

  “Anything at all…” I echo. I squeeze her hand as she looks down, thinking.

  “You're serious? You mean it?”

  “Yeah it's one of the benefits of being stupidly rich,” I sigh. “There are very few people who want to get in the ring with us. Maybe they would pick on the little guy… but you're not the little guy anymore, Bella. We've got your back.”

  When she looks up at me, she smiles and it's like it has been a million years since I've seen it. Relief explodes in me, and I feel it trickling through every part of me. I'm happy. I'm happy that I made her happy.

  Emmet slides from his chair and comes over, taking her other hand in his and kissing her fingertips.

  “There, now, not so bad? Right?” he murmurs, looking up into her eyes. She nods uncertainly.

  “You guys don't have to do this,” she mumbles. “I could always just write another book. Something. I could work it out.”

  “Oh, I know you can!” I tell her. “This is not because you can't do it, this is because you shouldn't have to. No one is going to push my lady around when I'm able to stop it.”

  She pulls back, cautious and guarded all over again.

  “No, I’m not… what do you mean?”

  I look at Emmet, waiting for him to say something but I am not sure he will. We may have waited too long. We have to do it now.

  “You have to pick,” he finally says softly, carefully so she doesn’t just run out of the room.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says, but I think she does.

  I lean closer to her, trying to find that way in again. It really does seem like she’s keeping to the agreement — especially the part where it’s over.

  “I think you know exactly what we mean, Bella,” I tell her.

  “We’ve been through so much here,” Emmet continues.

  Finally, a crack in her armor. “We have,” she admits.

  I have to touch her. Feeling her retreat is too much. I stroke her arm, needing that reconnection.

  “There’s too much…” she starts, then falters. She seems careful, picking her words one by one. “Too much to say.”