“Is everything ok?” I asked her, unsure of exactly what I should be saying to a virtual stranger who had basically just come in and had her way with me. I’d had plenty of casual sex in my life, but this felt somehow both more and less casual than it ought to.
“Of course,” Zoey replied with a bright, convincing smile, “I just don’t want to miss the launch.”
Launch? What launch?
Oh shit!
The snap back to reality felt like someone just slapped me upside the head. I looked at my watch and was shocked to see that only fifteen minutes remained until the final countdown began. I needed to get down to the viewing platform ten minutes ago. As much as I liked Zoey and didn’t want to rush her, she couldn’t be allowed to stay here without supervision.
“Um, Zoey?” I ventured, and she popped the compact shut and stood.
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling another fake reassuring smile, “I’m going. God knows what I’ll have to tell Angelica to explain where I’ve been.”
“I’ll walk you back,” I offered, relieved, “And you can tell her that I took you on a… private tour.”
I wiggled my eyebrows at her and she giggled. I mean, I had taken her on a tour of my privates. I liked the sound of her laughter.
“A private tour? Yeah, she might buy that,” Zoey replied, smiling, “got any tips for working with Ms. Hunt? You know her, right?”
I grimaced, taking her hand and placing it in the crook of my arm as we walked the short distance down from my office to the viewing platform outside.
“Yes. I’ve known Angelica since we were kids. She’s a very unique person,” I replied carefully, “is this conversation off the record?”
Briefly, a look flashed over her face that seemed like a mixture of hurt and offense, but it vanished before I could be sure. A confident smile took its place almost instantly.
“Of course, it’s off the record,” she replied soothingly, “I won’t tell anybody your thoughts on Angelica. Or that you’d never seen a bodysuit before.”
“Is that what your leotard with the snappy thingies is called? I liked that,” I replied, momentarily distracted, “and it seems very convenient.”
Zoey rolled her eyes and nodded indulgently. I’d learned something new today. I liked bodysuits. Especially the see-through lace kind.
“Nathan?” She prompted.
“Oh right,” I followed up, refocusing, “Angelica. Well, she’s unique. Very unique. And just, um, she’s also awful. She’s a genuinely bad, selfish person who’s obsessed with herself.”
“Wow,” Zoey replied, “tell me how you really feel. I mean, she’s obviously very image conscious and pampered, but isn’t that sort of narcissism just par for the course for people like her?”
“People like her? Gold diggers?”
“I meant rich and beautiful people.”
“I’m rich and beautiful but I’m not a narcissist,” I countered, and then instantly wished I could rewind time and punch myself before I could say something so conceited.
Zoey just laughed, however, and there was a quality to it that put me at ease. She had a way of doing that, I was discovering. She possessed a high degree of skill at instantly defusing tension. It made sense. A reporter would need to be good at relaxing her subjects, so they would say stupid shit. Like I just had.
I frowned. She was a little bit too good at manipulating me. As much as I liked to think that I knew she was using me and that I would simply use her back, it was tough to tell who was playing whom. Journalists are inherently untrustworthy, I reminded myself.
“That’s true,” Zoey replied after her laughter died down, “you’re rich and beautiful. And I still like you. You seem pretty down to earth for someone so hell bent on escaping it.”
I hoped that was true. Part of me really wanted to believe Zoey. I wanted to believe that her words and reactions to me were genuine, and that her passion back in my office was real. It all seemed real.
“Angelica is easy to manage if you keep one thing in mind,” I continued, trying to answer her question despite the possibility it would come back to bite me in the ass somehow, “she fundamentally does not recognize the personhood of anyone else but her. As long as you approach her with the knowledge that she views you the same way she views a table lamp, you’ll be ok. Oh, and she’s smarter than she seems.”
“She is?” Zoey asked in surprise, “because she really doesn’t seem all that bright if I’m being honest.”
“Half of her dumb blonde persona is an act to put people off her trail, definitely. The other half is a carefully curated piece of performance art that she has to maintain to seem halfway normal. Angelica is only motivated by two things that are really just one thing: money and power. She’s like a tiger or a shark. You wouldn’t criticize them for killing other animals, right? She’s the same way. She just does what she does.”
“You make her seem like some kind of evil genius,” Zoey said incredulously, “I thought she was just a spoiled Kardashian wannabe.”
“Well, she’s that, too,” I said, grinning but very much not envying Zoey her job, “but you have to watch your back around Angelica. She’s petty, but she’s also ruthless.”
“Great,” Zoey whispered sarcastically as we approached the viewing platform, “do you still have time to strap me to the rocket? I’m not sure I want to live on the same planet as Angelica Hunt.”
“Zoey!” Angelica cried as we approached closer, her obvious ire at Zoey causing her small entourage to scatter around her in the VIP section like a flock of frightened birds, “where the hell have you been?”
At the same time my head of security, Cecilia, appeared at my elbow, “where the hell have you been?” she hissed in my ear, “We’ve got a very serious problem.”
8
Zoey
“Angelica,” I exclaimed, setting my charm on maximum overdrive and the world’s biggest, brightest, fakest smile on my face, “you have such wonderful, fascinating friends! I ran into Nathan on my way to the powder room and he gave me a personal tour. How incredible must it be to be surrounded by so many important and influential people and exciting events all the time? How do you even keep up? I never could.”
Her irritation melted away at my flattery like a hot knife through butter. Nathan’s advice notwithstanding, Angelica seemed surprisingly easy to manage. She seemed totally harmless. Vapid, obnoxious, and spoiled, but not evil. I fawned slavishly over her for about fifteen solid minutes and we were best friends again. By the time I had a chance to look around for Nathan, however, he’d vanished.
“Zoey,” Angelica’s assistant Tara whispered urgently to me as we were all gathered during the final countdown, “have you seen Marcus?”
I craned my neck to look back at Tara. The members of Angelica’s entourage were all seated in the first two rows of the VIP section on the viewing platform. Tara, of course, was relegated to the back row.
Marcus? I had to rack my brain to even remember who that was. My mind was thoroughly addled by my impulsive decision to jump Nathan’s bones and the mind-numbing conversation I’d just had with Angelica.
Oh right, I reminded myself, Marcus was Angelica’s man du jour. He was tall, dark, handsome, and as far as I could tell, completely mute. I imagined that was how Angelica liked her men. All the better to listen to her mindless prattle.
I shook my head at Tara, who bit her lip.
“Angelica hasn’t noticed he’s missing yet,” Tara continued quietly, “but she will. He disappeared a long time ago.”
I shrugged. Keeping Angelica’s man candy from wandering into traffic wasn’t my job. It technically wasn’t Tara’s, either, but she looked extremely distressed.
“He probably just went to the bathroom,” I told her soothingly, “don’t worry.”
She nodded, still biting her lip. The poor girl clearly lived in absolute fear of Angelica. I wished I had something with which to placate her, but I neither knew nor really cared where Mar
cus was.
Tara and I were the same age (twenty-four), we both hailed from Florida, and I suspected we were both daughters of the ever-shrinking middle of the middle class. But we were completely different beyond those few salient details. She’d not yet discovered the key to dealing with Angelica, but she was still working for her despite the near-constant stream of personal abuse.
I wondered if Tara had been working for Angelica before Mr. Hunt died, and if that had changed things with Angelica, and made a mental note to ask later. Right then there were more pressing considerations. The final countdown had started.
“Do you think it will blow up?” One of Angelica’s ‘friends’ asked her. The woman was tall, blonde, and famous on Instagram, but not famous enough that I knew who she was.
“Maybe,” Angelica answered, sounding unconcerned, or perhaps, slightly hopeful.
“We should get another selfie just in case,” the friend replied, and the two turned and made a pouty face with the rocket in the background.
I wanted to vomit.
What the hell was I doing with my life? Nathan, who was only a decade older than me, was building rockets. Angelica, only five years my senior, had married a billionaire, outlived him, and now lived in the lap of luxury. Of all the people sitting in the VIP section that day, I was the least accomplished, other than Tara. They were all at least Instagram-famous. Even Marcus was supposedly some fabulously amazing tennis player.
Meanwhile, I’m apparently just fucking hot, rich, astronauts now. Although I don’t judge people for having casual hookups, it wasn’t something I’d done before. Ever. All my other sexual experiences had occurred in committed, if ill-fated, long-term relationships. I was half surprised that my seduction had worked, and I was even more surprised by how much I’d enjoyed it.
Still, shame and regret flooded me now that the fun was over, and it took every ounce of self-control that I possessed not to dissolve into self-pity and cry right there on the launch platform. Nathan, of course, had disappeared back to his important job of running a billion-dollar Astronautics firm. He’d probably already forgotten my name. He probably had three girls like me a week. I’d read the recent gossip on him last night online. The man was spotted on numerous first dates with sexy, female companions, but very few second dates. He was hardly ever spotted with the same model or socialite more than twice.
It was true that I had come into his office looking for a story, and I’d left with one. From the moment I started tailgating employees with badges through the locked doors, to the second I’d climaxed, the whole experience had been exciting and fun. I’d initially planned on poking around in Nathan’s office for a real story. I had assumed he wouldn’t be there and when he was, I settled for the next best thing that I was secretly hoping for: sex. But now all I could think about was just how pathetically disposable I was to people like Nathan and Angelica. Nathan Breyer was a genius, and he fucked like a rock star. It really was too bad that I wouldn’t even be a footnote in his story.
At least when I was a real, working journalist, I’d had pride in my work. I firmly believe that journalism is the fourth estate in government. Good reporters are required in any society that believes in free speech and democracy. At their best, journalists speak truth to power and keep governments, corporations, and public figures honest.
But good reporters don’t write gossip for nasty rags like JuicyNews. They don’t spend three days of their life writing fluff profiles on bimbos like Angelica Hunt, whose greatest claims to fame are being the daughter of a sitting US senator and fucking her way into an oil fortune. I wanted to feel pride in my work.
No matter what, I promised myself as I watched the enormous countdown clock edging closer to the moment the rocket would launch, this would be my last assignment for JuicyNews. It didn’t matter what I had to do, I didn’t want to end up like Tara: beaten down, perpetually nervous, and settling for less than she was worth.
The crowd screamed the final countdown from ten with a rapturous frenzy. I’d been to the ball drop in Times Square before on New Year’s Eve, and it didn’t hold a candle to this countdown. When the fuel ignited and the roar of it reached our ears a moment later, it sounded like a thousand jet engines. The rocket lifted up off the platform like it weighed nothing, smoothly climbing up into the clear midafternoon sky. When it was obvious that the rocket wasn’t going to explode on the platform, a second deafening wave of cheering and applause broke out.
It rose quickly, much more quickly than I would have thought. Although I was only at this launch because Angelica was here, this was an experience I would not soon forget. Higher and higher, the rocket ascended, becoming smaller until it was just a tiny point of light against the blue sky, then nothing.
Durant Astronautics Launches Successful, Unmanned Rocket, Suffers Simultaneous Data Breach
By Phillip Paderewski, The Philadelphia Monitor
Durant Astronautics has done it again. The pioneering rocket firm just pulled off the unexpected and carried out what appears to be a seamless third launch of its new rocket called Starflier 1.
That makes Durant Astronautics, the game-changing company helmed by billionaire and disgraced astronaut Nathan Breyer, the owner of the world’s most powerful operational rocket.
Starflier 1 took flight Tuesday around 3:45 pm ET from the Durant Astronautics headquarters outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and touching down safely at the Durant landing platform in Lake Michigan. At the same time Durant Astronautics was preparing for the launch, the firm suffered a cyberattack from an unknown assailant.
“I’m still trying to absorb everything that happened because it’s all kind of surreal to me,” Breyer told reporters after the launch, “the launch was incredible. Obviously, we are also extremely concerned about the loss of our data. It’s a lot to process, to be honest.”
Thousands of onlookers in Pennsylvania could be heard cheering on the company’s livestream, which was viewed by about 3 million people.
In the run up to the launch, it wasn’t at all clear that the rocket would work or even if the launch would take place as planned. Staff could be seen rushing around the launch platform on the livestream while the data breach was ongoing, attempting to discern whether the launch itself had been sabotaged. It now appears that the rocket was not affected by the hacking.
Durant Astronautics Security Director Cecelia Salina told reporters the hackers accessed the data through a third-party, cloud-based service, utilizing a site that engineers use to store code and track products. There, the hackers found passwords which they then used to physically access data stored in a secure, onsite Durant Astronautics server. No personally identifiable information was involved in the breach.
Despite the data breach, Monday’s successful launch marked a huge step forward for a company that has already managed to shake up the rocket industry with its groundbreaking technology.
9
Nathan
“Team pie or team cake?” Zoey asked me as we sat on opposite sides of the diner booth that evening.
“Team pie,” I answered firmly, looking over the menu’s wide selection of desserts with enthusiasm, “what about you?”
“Same,” she replied with a smile that showed off her white, even teeth, “team pie all the way. Cake is for losers.”
I was feeling pretty good at that moment. My rocket hadn’t exploded, and the woman I had a crush on had agreed to meet me for dessert. The only drawback was that my head of security suspected her of being behind the cyber-attack.
“I’ll have the coconut cream pie, please,” Zoey requested of our waitress, choosing the one kind of pie I found totally disgusting, “and some black tea.”
“What about you, hon?” Carla—according to her nametag—asked me next.
“I’ll have the blueberry pie a la mode,” I said and watched Zoey’s face take on a skeptical expression at my selection, “with coffee as well.”
This diner was my favorite place to get dessert in
Philly, even if it was on the bad side of town. It would be completely ruined for me if it turned out that Zoey had hacked Durant Astronautics. I’d never be able to enjoy the blueberry pie again.
I couldn’t believe it was her though. She’d sounded so shocked and flattered when I’d asked her out tonight. Someone guilty should have sounded, well, guiltier. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her. In truth, I didn’t. I was forced to rely on the expert cyber-sleuthing skills of my assistant Paul. He’d found her number in about ten minutes, however, so it must not have been all that difficult.
“Congratulations on the successful launch,” Zoey said, “I would have thought you’d be at the big party.”
The employees of Durant Astronautics were indeed throwing down tonight. Usually I would have been game for such an event, but Zoey wouldn’t be there, and I didn’t think I could really enjoy myself with the entire IT and Facilities teams grousing petulantly over the hacking while getting sloppy drunk in the corners.
“I’d rather be here,” I replied honestly, “partying with my employees is fun, but sometimes it’s nice to do something more low-key.”
“Plus, this way you get to eat pie,” Zoey said.
“And I get to hang out with you,” I answered, and watched a shy smile and pink blush spread across her cheeks. This Zoey was very different from the wild, sexy creature that seduced me so easily in my office a few hours ago; she was more hesitant and measured. The part of me that thought she was innocent hoped she didn’t regret coming out with me, but I wouldn’t have called her even if I didn’t have an ulterior motive. However, now that she was in front of me, I was happy to see her and feeling more than a bit conflicted over what I was about to do.
“So, do you have any leads on your data breach?” Zoey asked after a moment, perhaps changing the subject to hide her embarrassment.
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