by T. A. Foster
“A trade? But you aren’t going to tell me what it is?”
My hand squeezed her knee. “Remember the mother and daughter from the Cove?”
“Shawna and Lindy? Of course.” She lowered her eyes. “They remind me of—”
“Your sister. I know. I thought the same thing when I met her.”
“You met Shawna? When?”
“I didn’t have much choice after that article you wrote. You basically crucified me in that story.”
“They are going to be homeless, Mason. It wasn’t as if I could put a happy spin on it.”
I took a second to pour another glass of wine for myself. Sydney was still working on hers. The bottle was almost empty.
“No. You’re right. There’s no way to make people losing their homes a happy ending, but I have good news.”
She stared at me, the expectation circling her eyes. “What is it?”
“I am the proud owner of a new campground on the sound side of the island. Shawna and Lindy will be moving in two weeks.” I grinned.
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. The wine was dry and crisp. “It was a good business move. I can relocate ten residents. The mother doesn’t get kicked out on the street. I built in a cushion for the demolition budget, so I’ll use that to make the abandoned lot livable. In a few years when all of this blows over I’ll sell it.”
“But then what will Shawna do?”
“Hopefully by then she’s not still living in a camping trailer.”
“So you did this for the press? To kill the story I wrote?” Her brow was starting to furrow and the lips I loved to kiss so much weren’t smiling.
“Darlin’, I’m building that resort. Things are going to come up along the way. This was one of those things, and I took care of it. I’m happy the mom and little girl have a place to go. But I didn’t promise her anything other than I would get her moved. I don’t owe her a damn thing.”
“How can you say that? She grew up on this beach. She used to vacation here with her family. Lindy’s father has never paid her a cent. That trailer park is all they have. Don’t you get that?”
“What I get is that you made the right decision.”
“What are you talking about?” Her eyes glared.
“There’s no way we can do this.” I grabbed her around the waist, despite the way she struggled in my arms. “And you not cause problems for me. You’d write another story just as damaging if you got the chance.”
“Me cause problems for you?” Her tone was irritated.
“You disagree?” I studied her eyes. She was breathing heavy and her skin was still warm from the sun. I couldn’t believe I had spent two days on the beach. We had significantly increased my total number of lazy minutes.
“Ugh. I hate it when you’re right.” She threw her arms next to her side. “If I wrote the story now you’d probably have to buy the rest of South Padre to recover from it.”
“I know I would.” I chuckled. “Now that we have that settled, do you know what you’re going to say to your editor tomorrow?”
She considered my question. It took her awhile to answer. “You want me to trade story choice for this planted piece of public relations?”
“If you don’t report it, someone else will. I’m giving you something to wield before you head into that meeting.” I leaned back on my elbows. The wind fluttered through her hair.
“True. It’s bound to be picked up tomorrow.” She chewed on the side of her lip. “And you think my boss will go for it?”
“It’s worth a try.”
Her face softened. I smiled as she lowered herself on my chest, resting her head over my heart. I tangled my fingers through her hair.
“I’ll try it. But I can’t promise anyone will paint you in as positive light as I will,” she teased.
“I’m hoping one that’s much better.”
“Hey!” She assaulted my sides with her fingers.
I looked at my watch over her head. “It looks like we only have three hours of this weekend left. What do you say we take this party inside?”
“What’s in there?” she teased.
“Ok, never mind. Let’s keep it going right here.” I pulled her on top of me, bringing her lips crushing down on mine.
I was worried I might get used to this, but the instant I heard her moan my name, I knew this was a weekend I wouldn’t forget. I’d rather crack open another bottle of wine and spend the night loving Sydney into oblivion if it would make time stand still.
I straightened the pleats on my skirt. I rehearsed what Mason and I had gone over. This was the right thing to do. I had to remove myself from the situation. I had flashbacks to my ethics class. It heavily focused on slander and defamation, but I hadn’t forgotten the discussion on sources. The last thing I wanted to be as a new reporter was labeled as unethical and biased. I held my breath and counted to eight. Somehow that always seemed to help, but right now all I felt were sweaty palms and a nervous stomach.
“Paige, come on in.” Alice called across the newsroom. Her door was cracked.
I closed it behind me and turned to take a seat.
“Did you have a good weekend?” I asked.
I knew nothing about Alice’s personal life, other than she was married. She wore a simple gold band on her left hand. There wasn’t a picture in the office. Not even a shot of a dog, or a landscape.
“It was a weekend.” Her lips were so thin they almost formed a straight line when she wasn’t smiling. “I got your email. Let’s talk.”
There was too much silence. Too much space in between our words. “Well, thank you for seeing me so quickly this morning. I need to talk to you about something.” I could feel the plan unraveling. Alice stared at me, and my resolve to be a hard-ass negotiator seemed ridiculous.
“It’s Monday. My schedule is filling up. What do you have for me?” She chewed on the bottom of a pen.
I didn’t know how Mason did this every day. How he faced people and walked away with exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t just good at it. He was amazing.
“Last week you mentioned that you thought there was a possibility I could change over to straight features.” I twisted my hands in my lap. I was using weak words. I knew it. “And anyway, I thought we could make that transition start a little sooner.”
Alice looked puzzled. “Sooner? How so?”
“Yes. See I need to remove myself from any stories pertaining to Mason Lachlan. And it seems like maybe the timing is right to go ahead over to features.”
“And why do you have to come off the Lachlan stories?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I just do, but I have a story I thought I could give the reporter you assign to the resort.” My words sounded ridiculous. I couldn’t string together one impressive sentence.
“You haven’t answered my question. And if you have a story, why isn’t it already written?”
“Ok. That’s a good question.” We didn’t analyze enough of Alice’s reactions. Mason was used to overcoming negotiation obstacles. I didn’t even know how to barter in a flea market.
“Look, Paige, we all get assignments we don’t particularly like. That’s the news business. This happens to be a business journal. We serve the southern half of Texas. So, we don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing what we report. We have a readership that depends on us. We have an obligation to those readers.”
“I’m sleeping with him.” I blurted it out before she could finish.
I had worked there three months, and in those three months I had seen Alice angry, happy, pleased with a well-written story. This morning I saw what she looked like when she was surprised.
“With-with?”
I could barely look at her. “With Mason Lachlan.”
The tiny office erupted with her laughter. “You can’t be serious.”
I nodded. “I am. We started dating after the interview.” I blurred the timeline a bit.
“You realize he�
��s a complete womanizer. He’s nothing short of the business equivalent to George Clooney.”
“But he got married last year to that amazing attorney.”
She rolled her eyes. “You understand what I’m saying. He’s Clooney-esque. You’re willing to sacrifice your career for a man like that?”
I shook my head. “No. Not sacrifice. That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to cause any problems for the Record. I can’t report on him any longer. I’m telling you it would be unethical. I’m here to be open and transparent about it.”
Alice sighed. “But you were hired as the business beat reporter for South Padre and Port Isabel. I don’t have anywhere else to put you, Sydney.”
Oh, God. It wasn’t a good sign she used my first name. “But you said I could do features.”
“You have to prove yourself first and on top of that I would have to move Cecelia somewhere. She’s on features now. There’s nowhere else for her to go.”
I shook my head. This could not be happening. “But you made it sound like it would be soon. Like there was a position now for me to slide into.”
Alice folded her hands together and laid them on the desk. “I’m sorry if that was how you interpreted it. I didn’t promise you a different job.”
“No, you didn’t,” I admitted.
“I guess this puts us both in a pickle.”
I wondered if there was some way I could untangle myself from the information I had deposited on her desk. If only I hadn’t thought being ethical was so damn important.
“I can report on anything else, Alice. Anything. I’ll switch to advertising or sales. Or maybe I could help out with editing. I used to edit at the Daily for the other reporters.”
Her cheeks filled with air, and then she expelled it into the room. “I’m going to have to think about this.”
“So, I’m not fired?” I asked timidly.
“I’m going to have to consider all of the options and consult with HR. I was going to send you to the Rodriguez meeting this morning, but I clearly can’t do that. Shit.” Her pen rolled on the floor.
“Alice, really I’ll cover whatever the Record needs.”
“I hear you. But the Record needed you on the resort. I needed you to write another piece like the one on the mom and daughter. I needed someone who could write about the politics of the resort, but that person is no longer you.” Her eyes softened with disappointment. It was worse than any look my mother had given me. “Now head home for the day. If something non-Lachlan related comes up, we’ll call you in, but that man is all over the island.”
I rose to leave, worried I would trip over the tight space before getting out the door.
“Hey, what was the story you had for me?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. It was an idea on the environmentalists. Not a very good idea anyway.”
I closed the door behind me. It might have been the one thing that stuck from my conversation with Mason. The only thing. He told me not to show all my cards too quickly. I still had one card and only a few hours to figure out how to use it.
I stared at my laptop. The screen displayed the words “no search results found”, and I thought I might be sick. There were no reporter positions posted within a sixty-mile radius. I paced around the studio, bouncing from the bed to the bathroom and back again.
I thought of ten things to do, and five minutes later couldn’t think of a single thing to do. Alice was meeting with HR to determine whether I could keep my job. Mason told me he had conference calls all day and wouldn’t be able to see me until late tonight. I couldn’t call him. I wondered if he would be disappointed in how I handled the entire meeting.
If I lost my job I didn’t know what I’d do. I had a bit of savings stashed away, but it wasn’t enough to stay in South Padre indefinitely. With summer winding down, most of the seasonal jobs were drying up. I wouldn’t even be able to get a position waiting tables.
I threw myself back on the bed. I couldn’t leave. I had just found him. I had just discovered how much fun the island could be. I had my first friend here. I groaned.
I was still holding the story hostage, although I didn’t know why. My time had to be running out. The local paper would have someone scouting the City Hall records, and it was only a matter of time before a reporter discovered Mason had purchased the lot and was processing permits for trailer hookups.
I walked back and forth in front of the bed. Mason wanted me to be able to separate my emotions from work. I closed my eyes to see if it was even possible. The problem was with my eyes closed all I could see was him. Ugh. Bad start, Sydney.
If he were dealing with this crisis, what would he do? How would he negotiate his job back?
I flipped the screen open on my laptop and typed in the search engine.
“Mark, I want the three Austin properties sold by the end of the quarter.”
“Yes, sir. I have them listed with Barbara.”
“Good.” I looked at what else I had on my checklist. If I could make it through the next two calls, I might be able to call Sydney for dinner plans. “And I’ve decided to hold the commercial space in Houston. It’s not the best time to sell, and the rents there are high enough. Take it off the list.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll be in the office Thursday. I’ll drive up in the morning, or fly depending on what kind of time I have.”
It was an eight-hour drive. I usually got on the road at five in the morning to make it into the office by one.
I could hear the excitement in the voice. “We’ll be happy to have you around.”
“It’s been a while. All right. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I looked at my watch. I had five minutes before the call with the attorney. Make that four.
My phone beeped. They were calling in early.
“Harold, good to hear from you. Tell me what you have on the environmentalists.”
After speaking with the attorneys I knew the resort was in good hands. As much as the Guardians of the Dunes wanted to cause trouble, they didn’t have a legal case against the development. There were no endangered species present, and we would have to follow the same building codes that all island construction did. It appeared they weren’t the threat Commissioner Rodriguez had promised.
My biggest issue with the group was going to be the attention they were getting. I hated to start a new project with bad press, but hopefully by the end the residents would be so excited about the resort and the new jobs they wouldn’t give a damn about the months they had to put up with high-pollution dump trucks.
It was close to six. One more call, and I could end Monday. At least the working part.
I waited while the operator set up the conference call and the investors dialed in one at a time. There was always someone late to the table. This time it was Keith Higgins.
“Keith, ready to talk money?” I joked. The man didn’t have a funny bone in his body.
“That you Lachlan?” he asked.
“Sure is. What do you say we flip to page five of the preliminaries so we can come up with a number that will work for all of us?”
I directed the call, walking them through the projections my team had put together for us. I was venturing into a small oil and gas company. It was less risky if I partnered with a few others for the first time. Once I had a handle on the business I would either buy them out or move onto my next acquisition on my own.
Finally, I ended the call. The conferences were over. The analysis. The debates. The cajoling. My head swam with numbers. I walked to the fridge and reached inside for a beer. I tossed the cap on the counter.
The only thing that would make this beer better is if Sydney were here. I pulled my phone out to call her.
“Hey girl, hungry yet?” I should have asked her to come over straight from work. I wanted to get lost in her arms, lips, and laughter after the day I had.
“Hey. I don’t know if I can eat.”
“What’s going on?” The beer slid down my throat.
“Can I just come over?” she asked. There was more in her voice, but I couldn’t tell. I only knew she was upset.
“Yeah. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” I hung up the phone and waited for her to knock on the door.
Twenty minutes later I heard her tap on the door. I swung it open.
“Darlin’, what’s going on?” I could see it all over her face. I forgot about the shitty calls and the disappointing sales results. It all seemed secondary.
“It didn’t go so well today.” She dropped onto the couch.
I sat on the coffee table. Her eyes were red, her mascara smudged. “What happened?”
“I think they’re going to fire me.”
I shook my head. “No. Fire you? That sounds like a bad idea.”
“Yes. Alice said there’s nowhere to move me, and I’ve already outed myself as a biased reporter where you’re concerned.”
“What about the features gig?”
“It wasn’t as concrete as I thought it was. She was speaking in abstracts.” She looked at me. “I screwed up the whole thing.”
“Hey, come here.” I moved to the couch, so I could fold her in my arms. “That’s not the only job out there.”
She sniffed. “It is the only one. I looked all afternoon. There is nothing down here in nowhere Texas.”
“Why are you only looking here? What about the rest of the state? Or Florida? Or California? God, that place is loaded with reporters.”
I didn’t expect the hurt look on her face.
“You think I should move?”
I realized when the words came out of her mouth what she was thinking. “I don’t want you to move. No. But, I’m trying to think through the practical angles here. If there’s nothing here you’ve got to cast a wider net.”
She scooted back. “But you’re the reason all of this happened. You are the reason I’m going to lose my job. And you think it’s ok if my net takes me to California?”
“Syd, stop before we end up arguing. That’s not what I’m saying.”
Her eyes flared. I might have already lost.
“This is my first job. My first job. My only job. I don’t own twenty different companies. And my bank account isn’t overwhelmed with zeros.” Her voice rose. “I worked hard to get that job. I moved by myself. I live in a cramped studio apartment. And it’s over.” Her eyes turned on me. “Because I slept with you.”