“He’s so into you that I was kind of surprised you could walk straight when you came in. You must be in great shape. What kind of stuff do you do at the gym that lets you get all scorching hot with Jake and still walk around like it’s just another Tuesday? Maybe I should try some of your routines...”
Karli was too scandalized at Trevor’s frank comments to respond and sat tensely, torn between a shriek of indignation and flat-out silence.
She had spent enough time in Trevor’s chair by now to know that he was probably about to start in on a story about how he had styled some porn star’s hair and then tried the Official Porn Star workout and how it had left him a breathless puddle of sweat.
She steered toward less scandalous matters. “Tell me again why it is that people voluntarily live here in Iowa,” she demanded. “Not that I’m thinking of staying. They had me out freezing my ass off yesterday, and the whole story was that it was cold. When the cold is the story, it’s too cold.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad—”
“Oh it SO was that bad,” Karli cut in. “The high temperature yesterday was negative one—the high!”
“But it doesn’t last that long, really,” Trevor began again.
“Trevor, the winds were gusting to almost 40 miles an hour. And it only got almost but not quite up to zero for an hour or so. It got all the way down to negative 12. That’s below zero. Below zero fahrenheit. Without wind chill. That’s crazy stupid cold.”
“It’s only a few weeks, Karli,” Trevor started another time. “At most. Just enough to make spring and summer feel really special. And look at that fur hanging over there,” he said, indicating a full-length mink coat draped as though on display, at the salon’s office-door coat rack. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”
Karli hadn’t ever thought much about fur coats—weren’t they for middle-aged women, for whom material things had taken the place of actual excitement?—yet the lustrous fur looked both beautiful and, most importantly at the moment, very very warm. But in this weather, Karli thought, Jake is what I’d really prefer to be keeping me warm. That might be universal. Maybe that’s why so many babies are born in September.
“David came in this morning wearing that because he was showing off for his new boyfriend,” Trevor was saying. “He was showing off way too much, though. Everyone in the shop is pissed at what a bitch he’s been about everything today.”
Karli hadn’t seen the normally cheerful Trevor actually upset before. She fixed an inquiring glance on him. “This place is a regular soap opera, isn’t it?” she asked. He caught her look and immediately snapped his face back to its usual cheerfully naughty expression.
“Don’t you talk to me about soap operas,” he said with a smirk. “You’re the one who is getting non-stop wild with the gorgeous Jake. That’s way more exciting than David and his new little queen. And I want details.”
“Trevor!” Karli nearly shrieked. “There aren’t any details. He’s just . . . really a wonderful guy.” Perfect, she thought. And that’s what’s really frightening.
“No details? There can’t not be any details!” Trevor paused to search Karli’s blushing face. “Okay, so we’re agreed that he’s completely obsessed with you. So just tell me how—”
“Wait, Trevor,” Karli interrupted. “You already got details from him, didn’t you?” Her face began to darken at the thought of Jake reciting their bedroom activities to Trevor and anyone else.
Trevor’s voice and face echoed his remorse at misleading Karli. “Of course not, Karli,” he said quickly. “He wouldn’t give up anything.” And here he paused to lean in and whisper in Karli’s ear, “Why do you think I’m asking you? If he’d already told me what a hot, tangled knot of passion you two are in bed, I wouldn’t be curious. Besides,” and here he delicately cleared his throat, “I’m not nearly as curious about what he has to say about you as I am about what you have to say about him.”
Karli quirked an eyebrow at his face in the mirror. “Well,” he responded with a naughty twinkle, “All he gave me was some nonsense about gentlemen not kissing and telling. Which is total BS. And even if it isn’t,” he added, his voice again dripping with tones of conspiracy, “you aren’t a gentleman and neither am I. So start with the details already. Is he a good kisser?”
“Oh, man,” Karli breathed quietly, her eyes half-lidded. Then she caught a glimpse of Trevor’s leering face in the mirror and felt the shock of realizing he had nearly gotten her to tell details. “You jerk!” she said, and then noticed it had been loud enough that other people in the salon looked up to see what was going on.
Trevor slumped a bit, then snapped his eyes back up to the mirror to meet Karli’s. “Okay, I’ll quit,” he pouted. “But there’s nothing wrong with this question.”
Here he paused to make sure Karli could see his serious, non-leering expression. “Is he The One?”
Feeling a bit guilty for calling him a jerk and calling attention to him, Karli considered how to give a fair answer. “He’s unique, for real,” she began. “He is creative in so many ways—the photography, the interior design, the still photography...he’s got real stuff when it comes to visuals.”
“And he’s hot, of course,” Trevor added with an over-the-top exaggerated wink.
“And he’s perceptive,” Karli replied in quelling tones. “Trevor, he sees things in me that I don’t even realize are there until he points them out. Like, he’s the one who told me that I prefer reporting stories that get inside the subjects’ heads to stories that simply describe events. I always kind of knew that—interviewing people in depth has always been the best part of the job—but he was the first person ever to say it out loud. Spot news can be fun, too, but how many crashes and derailments and fires can you cover before they all start to run together?”
“Isn’t that the exciting stuff, though?” Trevor asked. “Like when you did that drug bust? That was cool and scary,” he concluded with a shiver.
“Oh, that wasn’t really spot news, though,” Karli responded. “We knew that was going to happen, so it was different from the kind of story where you just go to where all the firetrucks are going and then report on whatever’s happening there.” Karli paused, recalling with remembered anger how the drug series had been taken from her. Sophia had done a minimum of work developing Karli’s research, too, and had mostly worked on making sure she had a maximum amount of time on camera.
“All those firetrucks are headed to Jake’s because the sex is so hot, right?” The scandalous comment snapped Karli out of her reverie. She narrowed her eyes at Trevor and caught up the threads of the conversation.
“So he tells me stuff like that, which is just about annoying because he says it like it’s obvious even though nobody else ever noticed. Then he tells me how it’s part of what makes me so awesome in his eyes, and that makes me all warm and melty inside.
“It’s not like every other guy who thinks he’s saying something special by telling me I’m beautiful. I’m sick of hearing that. Everyone says it and it’s never sincere and it is always manipulation. Jake tells me stuff that he understands. And to him it’s not a compliment at all, it’s just. . . descriptive, I guess. There’s nothing manipulative about it.”
“The other guys could just be telling it like it is, too, you know,” Trevor said. “You are beautiful, you know.”
“Oh, God, Trevor,” Karli sighed. “Not you. You aren’t even trying to get laid. And I’m not beautiful. I’m short. There’s a difference.” As Trevor tugged a little bit too hard on her hair and took a breath to continue the debate, Karli jumped in ahead of him. “—and if you think you’re going to get a tip yanking on my hair like that, you’re crazy. Stop it.”
“Fine,” Trevor relented, “you’re a pipsqueak. Whatever. That’s who gorgeous Jake wants to shag until she can hardly walk into the salon. Right.”
Karli glared at Trevor’s reflection in the mirror for two silent seconds. “I’m not a pipsqueak, Trevor,” she sai
d. “Since you mention kids, though,” she said, though Trevor had said nothing of the sort and furrowed his brow at her for making him responsible for the change of subject, “he is good with them. He’s going to be an outstanding father—you should’ve seen him shaking hands with this kid at the fair. It was effortless how he helped the boy discover part of what becoming a man is, and the boy really thought Jake was cool. Not many kids think any grown-ups are cool.”
She paused here and gazed into the distance. Then in a quieter voice she said, “And he practically was a father to that poor kid who got killed.”
“And why, Karli, would that matter to you if he isn’t The One?” Trevor asked, rather than joining her in a maudlin moment.
Getting no response apart from what had become a more or less fixed glare, Trevor tried to lighten the tone, muttering so she could only just hear it over the salon’s energetic dance music, “So do you call him daddy when you’re doing it? Because that sounds like it could get really kinky.” He raised his eyebrows in two suggestively quick pulses. “He’d really be The One if you called him daddy and he gave you corsets and special padded handcuffs and stuff, wouldn’t he?”
Shocked at Trevor’s taste for the kinky, Karli flailed in the chair, trying to hit Trevor, but he had the chair up so she couldn’t extend her foot all the way to the floor to swivel, and she was far enough away from the counter that she couldn’t reach that with her hand. By the time she stuck her leg up to push against the counter, Trevor had a firm grip on the back of the chair, and they were both laughing.
“You’re pretty easy to bind up, anyway,” he said, continuing to laugh. As Karli tried again to turn so she could reach to hit him, he quickly reached for his blow dryer and wrapped the cord around her shoulders. She gave up, and they both glanced around the salon to see how much attention they’d attracted. As they both saw that it was too much, Trevor quickly replaced the blow dryer, cleared his throat, and fiddled with his fancy scissor-case while they both tried to quit giggling.
“So he’s a great kisser—though you won’t even come out and say so—he’s great with kids, he says wonderful things to and about you, and he’s got mad skills with the handcuffs and feathery whip.” Karli again glared at Trevor in frustration at his never-ending dirty talk. “But,” Trevor continued, “is he The One?”
“Maybe. Yes. I don’t know,” Karli stammered. “I so don’t want him to be The One. I have a career. I’m leaving, and he’s staying.
“But he gives these odd gifts. Girls always think they want jewelry and flowers and stuff—and that stuff is great in its way and I really like it all—but he gives stuff that comes from his passions, like wine from New Zealand, or a black-and-white portrait he shot, or a dumb pork chop on a stick.”
Trevor continued listening and expertly snipping away at Karli’s hair.
“He’s always doing stuff for me, too, more than what a photog or just a guy normally would. He fixes stuff I didn’t even know was broken, he carries my stuff, he even cleans up messes whether or not he made them.”
Trevor ran his hands through her thick hair with a keen appraising look in the mirror, tugging it slightly here and there to confirm that both sides were precisely the same length.
“I don’t know, Trevor. He might be The One, but he’s totally not what I expected. And he’s not going to fit with my life. I’m not staying here in this stupid deep freeze of a television market.
There are bigger things ahead for me.”
His hands slicked with product, Trevor again ran his fingers through Karli’s hair, shaping it to his own exacting standard.
“And besides, he’s weird. What guy with a huge heap of money keeps working as a journalist because he has a sense of duty to the community? What guy who is a real adult actually has a karate studio? What guy has the time to do all that and still take long detours with me so we can see one of the actual bridges in Madison County or just talk through stuff?”
Trevor had been taking in all this extended monologue without comment or even much in the way of facial expression. As she finished, though, his exasperation was revealed in a massive eye-roll. “So he’s The One,” he sighed, “but you can’t be bothered to deal with that because you have a job that you want to worry about. Am I getting this right?”
“You’re so reductive,” Karli said, anger ringing in her voice. “I’m not talking about just a job—this is a profession that I’ve worked my whole adult life to succeed in, and I’m just a great series or so away from landing a major-market job. So I’m not worried about a job, I’m staying focused on a goal I’ve had for years.”
“Call it what you want,” Trevor shrugged, continuing to tug and adjust a few hairs to make them just so. “I just know that honest-to-goodness true love doesn’t come around very often. If you want it, you have to grab it before it slips away. And if you keep your hands full of career-goal nonsense, you won’t have anything to grab it with.”
“You’re such a pig,” Karli replied.
“You expect the woman to put her dreams aside so she can catch a man, but you’d never ask a man to do that.”
“Um, I don’t know if you’ve figured this out yet, but the relationships I usually think about don’t involve subservient women—or any women at all.” Trevor turned on the dryer and played it through a diffuser over her head. He paused and looked Karli’s reflection right in the eye. “We all have to adjust a little when we have a chance at The One.”
Karli blushed a little at Trevor’s rebuke. Of course he hadn’t been analyzing the relationship as a sexist. “It’s not a very convenient time in my life to be worrying about true love. If I execute my plan well, I should be able to get to a major market in the next two years. Then I’ll be in a different place.”
“Yeah,” he said, replacing his tools and tidying up the counter in front of his chair. “The place where your career eats every minute of your life, and you don’t even know the names of the people who work with you, much less appreciate the pork chop-on-a-stick that they give you once in a while.”
“Why do you keep harping on me?” Karli asked in tones of genuine frustration. “I’ve had a goal since my freshman year, okay? Is that such an awful thing?”
“All done!” Trevor announced as he unsnapped the cape and swirled it and the little snips of hair it bore cleanly off Karli. He returned the iPhone she’d set aside when she sat down, and she was immediately caught up by the text that showed up when she woke the screen: “There’s a news anchor opening here in Charleston, kiddo. I met with the station manager yesterday, and he says they’re very interested in you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Three NewsFirst Viewing Area
Winter
Never had all aspects of his life felt so in synch. He and Karli had begun the background work on a first-ever Three NewsFirst documentary series on renewable energy in Iowa. The plan was for six half-hour episodes to run in mid-summer—all produced with only existing personnel and resources. The station’s only additional costs would be minimal overtime (because Jake and Karli would have to donate most of their time to the project) and travel expenses for shoots outside the usual viewing area.
Jake’s passion for renewable energy—viz, the Tesla—combined perfectly with Karli’s relentless digging to look for political maneuvering that sought to block it. They had spent considerable off-the-clock time laying the groundwork for in-depth coverage of the issue and how it affected the people in his home state.
And the Karate Center had grown in recent months. Not only had the enrollment gone up, one of Jake’s high school friends who had joined the military and been stationed on Okinawa where he had survived several years of intensive martial arts study had just returned home. He had very humbly asked Jake if he could continue his training at the Karate Center; Jake had immediately invited him to take on instructing duties and to work with him to revamp the curriculum.
The new energy and focus he’d found all began and ended with Karli.
She was exhilarating; he was euphoric. He treasured home and family; she was both. She showed him passion like he had never known before; he mirrored it and more.
They were both too busy to spend all their time together, yet it seemed the days were complete only when they found time to touch base, to talk about their projects, to share notes or video clips or helpful quotes, to touch one another, to share a glass of wine together, to eat together, to spend ecstatic nights together.
For her part, Karli felt a growing sense of confidence in her future. The documentary she and Jake were planning was the perfect kind of launch vehicle to propel her to the ranks of broadcast journalism’s elite: an issue of national importance that she could explore through personal, local stories. She’d already found Amish farmers who were generating electricity with solar and wind installations, and she was very close to getting strong interviews with power company representatives and State-level politicians about the money pouring into anti-renewable campaigns from regional and national groups with interests in fossil fuel electricity generation. She had complete confidence that Jake’s sound and images would combine with her reporting to make an Emmy-contending product.
Her father had tried to drag her home yet again, asking what it was about the major markets that attracted her more than a front-line anchor job in Charleston. He hadn’t really listened to her answer, though Karli had tried to explain that major market reporters could cover bigger and more important stories and have a greater effect on the world. He just couldn’t get it.
And she enjoyed her time with Jake. The conversations were engaging, the work was exciting, and the sex was electrifying.
She had even gone to watch a class at his dojo once, but that hadn’t been anything she could get her head around.
Once had been enough, even though Jake had proudly given her her own set of karate pajamas. She suspected that gift had been as much to recall their first night together as to have anything to do with karate.
Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series Page 23