When I asked about the show, he pushed at his glasses nervously. He said he needed something new to freshen the Evelyn Carney story.
“Ben’s story is in the can, ready to go,” I said. “I oversaw the edits.”
“Mellay wants the story live.”
“Can’t have it,” I said. “Ben has worked since early morning. I won’t make him work a minute longer. Tell Mellay to take Ben’s edited spot and deal with it.”
“Mellay assigned the story to Heather.”
“What?”
Isaiah didn’t say anything.
My palms went flat across the desktop. “Assigned her to my story? It’s the goddamn lead. Has she been on-air? Ever? In any market?”
“Some on-air stuff at her university, I think.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “She’s not bad, just inexperienced. Mellay wants to give her some experience, that’s all.”
Nelson cackled. “I bet he does.”
“Look at this.” Isaiah handed me her script. “Pretty good, actually.”
I only had to glance at the script with her name in the byline. “Sure it’s great,” I said, my voice rising. “Because I wrote it.”
He hesitated. “I told her to go through the rundown and study how the good writers write.”
“Oh, she went through it all right. She stole the script I wrote for Ben. Every word is the same.” I caught the last graph. “Except, no, wait, there are seven—no, eight words that are different. Hey, Nelson, you want to hear the words?”
Nelson was punching buttons on the remote, toggling to find the channel for Heather’s live shot. “Hit me with ’em.”
“ ‘Her and her husband met at the restaurant.’ That’s the change she made.” I turned to Isaiah. “Well, me and my photographer are appalled. I can’t believe you let her steal my work.”
“It’s no different than you writing for Ben.”
“Hell it isn’t. Ben puts my name in the byline. You ought to explain plagiarism to your girl.”
“Too late anyhow.” Nelson had found the channel for Heather’s live shot and turned up the volume. He rubbed his hands together with excitement. “She’s getting ready to go on.”
“This should be good,” I said. “I’ve never seen a train wreck as it happens.”
We crowded around the monitor. At first glance, Heather looked as if she belonged. The studio lights warmed her already flawless skin. She sucked in her cheeks and lifted her chin. The camera matured her, made her more elegant and beautiful—I had to admit it—a terrible beauty. She opened her mouth wide, stretching it, like a snake about to swallow its prey, and then she must’ve heard the countdown in her earpiece. She got an arrested look before she adjusted her mouth, slightly pursed with the smallest hint of a smile, the serious journalist look.
“Man, would I like to shoot her,” Nelson said.
And then she was on.
She read my script as if it were her own. It was a perfect delivery, as if she was born for reading news, as if she’d been reading for years and our anchor desk had been waiting only for her. After she tagged out, she murmured her thanks for what could’ve only been congratulations from the control room. She pulled out her earpiece and slipped off her microphone and got up from the set.
I stared in disbelief at the empty desk on the monitor.
Nelson let out a low whistle. “Well, Jay-sus. You ever see anything like that?”
“Not since Ben,” Isaiah said. “All she needs is someone to put together the story for her.”
I ushered them out of my office, leaving the door ajar, and strolled past the bank of monitors. My fingertips swept across dusty buttons, turning each off. The hush of no television. Emptier than silence. Like floating in the river.
I sat on the windowsill with my hot forehead against cool glass and peered down at the empty driveway below. Michael was nearly an hour late. He’d always been late, except when he hadn’t shown at all, and it’d be a waste of time to wait for him. I wasn’t going to waste anything anymore. Not the night, not my beautiful dress, not the whiskey buzzing through me. The hell with Michael. I turned from the window.
Ben was in the doorway.
He had one arm raised, white-knuckling the doorframe above in an attitude of climbing or falling, I wasn’t sure. He wore a tux tailored beautifully, tight in the waist and across the shoulders, making him long and sleek and dark. I had the hazy feeling of standing on the edge of a dream with a strange man in a beautiful tux.
“Come in.”
He shut the door and leaned against the back of it, his hands clasped before him. “You all right?” he said.
“I’ve had several predinner cocktails, but unfortunately, I’m not drunk.”
“You’re not?”
“No, I’m very clear tonight.”
And I was. Clearly from across the room I could see the long muscles of his throat where I could press my mouth and feel his words pulse against my lips. His shoulder twitched in that way particular to him, and I reminded myself, this was Ben. There was a rule about Ben. What was the rule?
Oh yes. One does not use one’s friends.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.
“You already know.”
His expression remained calm, eyes steady, but the doorknob rattled as he fumbled with the lock. I squared my shoulders and pushed off the sill, my shoes carrying me in a slow, perilous saunter, the spiked heels feeling thinner and higher with each step.
“I’m going to wait until you get out of this mood,” he said, nodding to himself or to me, I didn’t know.
“You should.”
“I can’t figure you out.”
“Me, either.”
He wore no cologne, only the faint smell of soap overcome by his heat and his heft. My thumb pressed into the hollow at the base of his neck. It throbbed like I knew it would.
“I can’t wait,” he said.
He lifted me onto the desk and laid me across its top. With that first shock of his weight, I felt a surge of excitement, the zing of fear. And then his hand was in my hair, as he whispered what he wanted, how long he had waited. The newspapers crinkled beneath us.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I’LL GET YOU off this floor,” he murmured, his fingers playing along the knots of my spine. “Give me a minute to catch my breath.”
I lay all tangled up in him, loose boned and hulled out, slowly gathering myself—smarting knee against the rough carpet, left shoe lost, dress askew and beyond all redemption. No sense of time, except his heart punching in sync with mine. No sense of sadness, either, the kind that was sure to come, that had always come, even in the blue hours with Michael. Instead, a feeling so unexpected I feared its pronouncement.
I lifted myself on elbows, pondering the enigma of his face at rest. It was all dips and planes never seen from this angle. His mouth was soft and relaxed. I asked if he knew about the frog that survives arctic winters.
He smiled. “Tell me.”
“When winter sets in, the frog makes her heart stop and she doesn’t breathe. Her eyes go white from cold. It must look terrible, I think, this frog encasing herself in ice. But the false death protects her. Then spring comes, as I guess it always does, and the ice melts. The frog’s heart starts beating again. Those first heartbeats, though, they must be painful. They worry the frog. Now she’s at her most vulnerable.”
“I know all about that frog,” he said.
“You do?”
“I’ve been learning that frog for years. I can promise you. That frog’s got nothing to worry about, except this drafty floor.”
He groaned and said, “up you go,” and guided me hobbling one-shoed to the leather sofa where we both dropped, me onto his lap. “I have only a dim recollection of falling off your desk.” He laughed. “Who the hell knows where we’ll find your shoe?”
His tux jacket had come off. His black tie was undone and loose from his collar. I spread open his shirt, discovering his shoulder tha
t bore the mark of my teeth. My finger circled the mark slowly, wonderingly, and trailed lower. His waist had a thickness that surprised me, hidden always by his tailoring. It showed love for food and drink by a man who enjoyed life.
The bar-shaped metal cuff link was trickier, but I got it off and rolled up his sleeve and caressed the inside of his wrist, so much thicker and darker than mine. My fingertip trailed the tough skin of his bulky forearm, the kind a man acquires not from a gym but from physical work in the elements, work that now seemed a great secret.
“Tell me about your farm.” My voice was halting, not mine at all.
“I’ve told you, it’s a ranch,” he said. “And I’m having a hard time recalling anything right now.”
“How’d you get this?” It was a long T-shaped scar on the underside of his forearm.
He lifted his head and glanced where I pointed and let his head fall back again. “Barbed wire, beer, and Bandit. My horse when I was a boy.”
“Sounds like an animal with behavioral issues.”
“He liked to steal feed, a habit I secretly admired, me being the middle of five growing boys.” He was watching me now from beneath lowered lids. “This particular scar came from checking fences. I’d been sneaking beer with my brothers. I was maybe sixteen, can’t remember. Bandit got spooked or I’d had too many, or both, but it felt like he bucked a little on my dismount. I put a hand out for balance and got snagged on a barb. Damn stupid thing to do. Hurt like hell from the inside out.”
The phone on my desk rang. He wrapped his arms around me and tightened. The ringing stopped, but after a moment, started up again. It had the effect of an alarm clock going off. “I have to fix my medusa hair,” I said.
“I like it like that. Besides, I’ll just mess it up again.” He lifted my chin as if to kiss me, but he didn’t. He was merely perusing a face of pure wreckage, my makeup long gone. I jerked my chin from his hand.
“Don’t get shy on me.” He blinked lazily. “I remember how everybody said the camera softened you when you were on air, made you so pretty. But I prefer you like this. Your skin rubbed pink. All your sharp edges.”
“You’re making no sense.”
“I know it.” He laughed again. “You’ve blown my mind.”
When I got up and pulled at the hem of my dress, he helped me, tugging and straightening and smoothing in a way that made me consider wrecking it again. I walked in a silly one-shoe-on stroll to the phone on my desk and checked the caller ID.
Oh no. Not now. Not him.
I looked up from the display. Ben had eased back onto the sofa. His eyes were closed and his head thrown back, the long curve of his neck exposed.
“That dinner tonight,” I started. “I don’t want to go.”
“Let’s skip it. I can’t get back in that tux. It’d suffocate me.”
“I can’t go with you anyway.”
He stretched his legs, settling noisily on the leather, and he smiled, his eyes still closed. “Sure you can. Nobody will be surprised.”
“I already have an escort.”
He lifted his head and locked eyes with me. From behind the closed door, distant newsroom noises hummed.
“It was prearranged,” I said. “I take Michael to the dinner and he gives me information. That’s the deal, which is no big deal at all. I can meet up with you at the after parties, if you like.”
“You’re taking him?”
“I need him for Evelyn,” I said.
“I can still feel you on me and already you’re talking about him.”
“Don’t be nasty. I’m talking about the story and you know it.”
“Tell that to someone who doesn’t know the game.” He slid to the edge of the sofa, his powerful shoulders bunched on the arc of his arms. “You don’t see me snuggling up to sources and taking them out on dinner dates. You don’t see my sources demanding personal favors in return for information.”
“That’s not fair.”
“What kind of person does that? Who won’t give any damn thing away without expecting tenfold in return? Who holds friendships for ransom and trifles with women? That’s your beloved Michael.”
But this was about Evelyn, not Michael. Forgetting about Evelyn felt like the ultimate betrayal, another kind of death, and I wouldn’t do it. Not even for Ben.
“Tell me how to make you happy without endangering the story,” I said.
“Michael Ledger wants to hobnob with celebrities at the dinner? Fine, give him both tickets and come home with me.”
“It won’t work.”
He pushed up from the sofa, advancing toward me. “Because you don’t want it to work. You never do anything you don’t want to do.”
“No, I mean, that won’t be acceptable to Michael. What he wants is for me to take him to this dinner, that’s it. And it’s so easy to give.”
“I guarantee that guy wants more than a meal.”
There was a knock at the door. We both went still. Another knock, louder this time. I wedged open the door. Isaiah said I had a visitor in the lobby.
“Please tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said.
Ben sauntered up behind me, his TV Ben mask on good and tight, the rest of him looking like the cover of GQ except for his half-buttoned shirt and tie undone. He reached over my shoulder and flung the door wide. “Who’s in the lobby?” he said.
Isaiah looked from me to Ben and back to me again.
“I’ll make your excuses?” Isaiah asked.
My teeth grit so hard they hurt. “Tell Commander Ledger I’m finishing business.”
“Don’t tell him anything.” He shut the door on Isaiah and leaned against the back of it, blocking it. His cheeks were red, as if someone had struck him, and maybe I had without meaning to.
“I don’t know how this got so crazy, but I’m sorry. You’re important to me.”
“Important,” he scoffed.
“And tonight was—it is—and I don’t want to upset you. If I made a mistake.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“If I’ve said something wrong . . . Give me a minute. I can’t think.”
I turned from him, striding hippy and off-kilter in my absurd shoes to the mirror where I made a big show of ignoring him. I smoothed my wrinkled dress. My shaking hands combed through moist curls clinging to my forehead.
From the corner of the mirror, he said: “You’re rejecting me for that—that cop.”
“This isn’t about you.”
“The hell it isn’t.” He snatched his jacket from the floor and threw it over his shoulder, stalking to the door in several long, angry strides. The knob was in his hand and then his grip loosened and he turned back to me, his face gray despite his perennial tan. “I’d love to hear how you spin it,” he said.
“There’s nothing to spin.”
His eyebrow shot up. “That newspaper ink all over the back of your dress tells the whole tale. Maybe your detective won’t detect it. But I wouldn’t count on it.”
He slammed the door behind him, rattling the awards on my wall.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AT THE ENTRANCE to the Hilton, a glamorous crowd in evening finery waited to walk the red carpet. Behind the rope line, photographers shot the dinner guests as they crossed. The mayor stopped to whisper a few words to Michael before slapping hands with a Sunday talk show host. Michael pointed out a movie director I’d never heard of. Some reality TV stars were chatting up a congressman. Everyone was mugging for the cameras, holding up the line, but I didn’t care. I’d gotten Michael to the party. If we made it no farther than this entrance, I’d have kept my word.
The cameras all swiveled for a freakishly tall woman whose face I’d seen on countless magazine covers. Michael was watching her in a sort of glazed-over, lustful way. When I laughed, he startled, and turning back, said automatically: “Have I said how lovely you are tonight?”
This was inaccurate. I was a wreck, my hair and makeup a mess, and my high-necked black
gown was a dowdy sack compared to the red dress now wadded at the bottom of my desk drawer, locked away with thoughts of Ben.
“Nice recovery,” I said. “You’re quicker than you used to be.”
“I learned it in that short-lived misery known as my former marriage.”
My sympathy surprised me. “Relationships must be hard when your work is so demanding. I was sorry to hear of your divorce, though. I hope your children are well?”
He smiled down at me appraisingly.
“What?” I said.
“We’re talking like friends.”
He was right. For a moment, I considered whether this was good or bad.
“It was only a matter of time,” he said, grinning now. “Face it, Knightly. My charm should be listed as a dangerous weapon, am I right?”
Before I could answer, he grabbed my arm. “Waiting bores me. Come on.” He steered me through the crowd, skirting the edge of the red carpet, and shouldered our way into the corridor, which pulsed with constant shout-outs and flashes of camera phones and the high, keening laughter of guests who’d already knocked a couple back.
Everyone was doing the Washington-party scan, eyes roving, never lighting on the person they were talking to, waiting for someone more important to come along. The other constant: media viciously bashing itself, the so-called mainstream media ribbing on the right-wing media and vice versa. Good times hating on each other. And the excited whispers: Is POTUS here yet? When does he arrive?
Because the big draw was saying you had dinner with the president of the United States. Of course, nobody really had dinner with him. He might be on the dais eating a meal at the same time you were seated across the ballroom eating yours, but that was as intimate as it got. Maybe that was why my colleagues called the correspondents dinner “the prom” and acted like they were too sophisticated to attend, when of course they always attended. I never mocked the dinner. It was always a heady experience, and as Michael and I entered the wide expanse of the ballroom, I found myself trying to take in everything at once: the Big Fish bunched in groups, the round tables set with gold-edged china that circled centerpieces of yellow roses and gold carnations, the women glittering in sequined gowns beneath great chandeliers, the men strutting about in their power tuxes. How many years had I been coming to the dinner? Always I had this same intense feeling as the first time I stepped through these doors a decade or so ago, the wonder of being a part of it all. How did I get here? Was this all some strange dream?
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