by Ava Ashley
“I’m, I’m gonna go now, Lennox. M-m-maybe some other time,” she stutters, grabbing for her purse.
“Aw, come on, babe! Don’t go. It’s all good. Right, Dante? Just an accident.” I grab her arm.
“How ‘bout I ‘accidentally’ bust that pretty mug of yours?” Dante growls.
“It’s really okay, Lennox. I’ll see you later. Call me.” Miss Double-D hightails it.
Call her? Shit. How’d she expect me to do that? I didn’t even get her name. I turn back to my teammate.
“Look, Dante. Sorry, man. But, come on. It’s just a suit.” I stumble forward, just a little, and make a little production out of smoothing the lapels. Dante throws my hands off and shoves me backward. It’s not a love tap.
“This is a Kiton cashmere, motherfucker! Ten fucking thousand dollars. Not your goddamned shot glass!”
The cocoa-skinned beauty – Jasmine, I think – with Dante tries to hold the massive lineman back. But, it’s kinda like trying to stop a Cat 5 hurricane. She gets in front of him and places two, tiny manicured hands on his chest.
“Come on, bae. He’s drunk. Let him be,” she offers calmly. He considers it, and grabs a couple napkins to wipe the lime pulp and spit from his neck and suit.
But, I can feel that angry, red fire pumping. On top of that, Dante just blew my sure-thing. That breaks the man-code. I stumble to my full six-foot five height.
“Yeah, Dante. Listen to your woman! I said I was sorry, so take the goddamned apology and move the fuck on, will ya?”
“Take this, asshole,” Dante grabs a drink off a nearby table and douses my shirt. I look down at the splotch of red, flecked through with bits of tomato pulp.
Sonovabitch! How many shirts can one guy go through in a night?!
A pickled green bean falls off my head and lands at my feet.
A crowd has started to gather. At least the party’s invitation-only. It would be icing on the goddamned cake if the flash-happy press had wormed their way...
The night strobes in a single white-blue burst.
Goddamned, motherfucking press. One of those assholes managed to sneak their way in. This time, I’m not seeing blue...just an insane, boiling red.
Well, fine. You want to document every second of my damned life, you dick? Document this.
I give Dante a two-handed shove.
Jasmine’s feet skid uselessly along the slate as Dante surges forward. He stiff-arms her to the side. Then, Dante hits me with a half a ton of hurt. The crushing force against my chest suddenly reminds me why he plays the position he plays.
I stumble backward, crashing into a glass and bottle filled table. Shards splinter everywhere, including into my right hand. My throwing hand.
The red in my brain is now streaming down my upheld arm.
Sonovabitch!
I leap to my feet, broken glass crunching under my shoes. I lower my head and bulldoze into Dante’s ten-thousand dollar gut. He may have me on pounds, but I’m not small. I knock the monster back a few feet. His arms flail out to the sides with the impact, and he accidentally busts his girl in the nose with a beefy fist. She screams. Blood spurts everywhere. The injury draws Dante’s attention away for a split second, long enough for my fist to connect with his jaw.
The crunch of his jaw echoes louder than the crunch of the glass underfoot.
The crowd goes wild.
Then, so do I.
Five of my teammates - I’m so rage-blind I can’t even tell who - are on me in seconds, trying to pull me off the dazed Dante. Forrester, that stupid shit, gets up in my face, yelling at me to calm the hell down.
“Get outta my way! He fucked up my hand! And he fucked up my date!”
Forrester pushes me back with all his strength. “Yeah? Well, maybe the golden boy doesn’t always have the Midas fucking touch, huh?”
The little reminder of my own fucking defects is like the flag in front of the bull. Like Pop all over again. With my uninjured hand, I grab one of the nearby broken beer bottles and swing wide, slicing raggedly through the lapel of Forrester’s jacket.
Then, suddenly, my entire body stiffens like a board. I lose all control of my motor skills as fifty thousand volts surges through me from the nightclub security. It’s only ten seconds, but it feels like an eternity. I hit the slate. Hard.
But, not as hard as it was going to be to explain to Coach why I was in central lockup on felony assault charges against my own damn teammates.
*****
“You look like shit.” The familiar voice cuts through the near-overpowering stench of puke, piss and B.O. At first, I’m not one hundred percent sure its talking to me. Surely, it’s gotta be to one of the stained, shapeless forms huddling in any one of the corners of the large holding cell. Not me. Drunks and druggies belonged in here.
I roll to my left on the urine-stained floor and squint through the bars.
Sonovabitch. Goddamned Logan. Perfect suit. Perfect hair. Perfect smile. Me, but with class.
“Aw come on, Logan. It’s been a shitty night.”
“I mean, if you’re going to fuck up, at least have the decency not to look like somebody swept the barroom floor with you. Some of us have a reputation to uphold.”
The wino next to me casts a crooked look at me, bruised, bloodied, stained shirt, and then twists his head toward Logan in his perfectly tailored three-piece, leaning casually against the far wall on the opposite side of the bars, not a hair out of place. The drunk looks back at me and shakes his head. He blinks his bloodshot eyes. Hard. He leans in toward my face, so close I could smell the sour leftovers of his Thunderbird.
“Hey, buddy! Buddy! How’d, how’d you get out there?” He jabs a chipped, yellowed thumb in Logan’s direction.
My own buzz had worn off ages ago, but I almost get contact drunk off the fumes. I start to stumble to my feet and away from my new “friend.”
I rest my forehead on the bars. “C’mon, Logan. You’re a lawyer. You never show your real face, pal.”
Logan smirks and levers himself off the wall. He takes a step toward. “Yeah? Well, you called this lawyer to come get your ass out of some seriously hot water. Anyway, you’ve got it all wrong, brother. I’m all about truth, justice, and the American way now. It’s what folks expect from their Congressional candidates.”
I bust out in a loud belly laugh, but crap does it make my head hurt! But, not nearly as much as it twists my gut in a knot.
“Jesus Christ, Logan! We’ve talked about this. You don’t owe the bastard anything. Neither of us do. Except maybe a big fat kiss off, but that opportunity’s sailed. Why are you still trying to live up to a dream? Especially when the reality was a goddamned nightmare! Why in the fuck would you do that?”
“Why would you go Bruce Banner on your own fucking teammates? You’re just a lucky shit it ended when it did. And speaking of ends, it’s time get you out of here,” Logan says.
I agree. On all counts. I’m glad it ended when it did, too. Whatever happened at the club – that wasn’t me. I don’t know what I would have done if that bottle had connected with more than Forrester’s jacket. I know I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself.
Wasn’t sure if I could now.
“Thanks for coming, Logan. I mean it.”
He turns his head and calls down the hall. “Officer! Look, we can talk about it more after we get you cleaned up. You smell like a barroom bathroom – Eau de Puke and Piss.”
The irony of the situation isn’t lost on me. I’ve lost count of how many times over the years Logan’s mouth had written checks his body couldn’t deliver. I’d pulled his ass from the fire way too many times after he’d mouthed his way into some unfuckingbelievable situations. “Heh. Guess this time, it’s you bailing my ass out of trouble. That’s a switch, huh?”
“Never asked you to,” Logan admits. “But, don’t get too excited. I’m not bailing you out. Forrester and Scott aren’t pressing charges.”
Now, it’s my turn to blink.
Hard.
“What the hell? I mean, great, but I’m pretty sure I broke Dante’s jaw,” I muttered.
Logan shook his head. “No, but he might be favoring soft food for a little while. You knocked out a molar and a bicuspid.”
“Crap.”
Logan shrugs. “Nothing a little hydrocodone won’t fix”
“And what about Forrester? I went after him with a broken bottle, Logan. You don’t cut your teammate and it just goes away, man.”
Logan laughs. “Tell that to Michael Irvin.”
Logan slid in the reference to “Scissorgate”, the infamous incident where the wide receiver had taken a pair of hair cutting shears to the throat of a fellow player over an imagined slight, opened a two-inch gash in the man’s neck, and never faced charges. Papers clamored with clever headlines as the incident got swept under the rug.
Difference was, I felt like crap about what I’d done. I tossed a quick mental thank you to whatever poor guardian angel got saddled with my ass that I wasn’t facing manslaughter charges.
“I really don’t understand what the hell happened, L.”
“You’d better hope your sponsors understand it or you’re gonna be kissing some of those choice endorsements goodbye.”
And there’s that.
But, what did sponsors mean if I couldn’t get hold of this fucking, inexplicable anger? Before I did something irreversible?
Before I lived up to Pop’s label?
“Guess I’d better figure out a way to work my way back into management’s good graces, huh? Show them I’m a solid, upstanding citizen and not some crazy-ass loose cannon before I get booted off the team,” I suggested.
Logan shrugged. “Do or don’t. Either way it’s our mug on the front page. And you know what they say. Any press is good press.”
Media.
Sloane.
As a uniformed officer clicks his corframs down the hall and the cell door slides open, my focus swings around to the gorgeous reporter and her “relationship” with my twin brother. “Speaking of conspiracies, bro, you still pulling that same old crap where we pretend to be each other with the honeys?”
Logan stops in his tracks as we walk down the narrow hall and turns to me.
“Why do you ask?” he questions suspiciously.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just tonight, I had the weirdest meeting with this hot reporter chick.”
“You?” Logan scoffed as we collected my personal effects. He tapped the ledger at the wire-cased window for me to sign.
“Would you mind signing this, too?” the clerk behind the counter asks, shoving a piece of blank paper in front of me. I grin lamely. Fans.
Logan shoots him a pissed-off look before turning back to me. “You don’t hang out with press.”
I scratch my signature on the paper and give him a narrowed look. “Exactly. So, you can probably figure how blown my mind was when she told me I was gonna be a daddy.”
Dead silence.
It’s a night of fucking miracles. First, I find out I’ve gotten a woman pregnant that I’ve never been with. Then, amazingly, I nearly kill my teammates in an unexplained rage of aggression, and get away with it, scot free. But, the most astonishing miracle of all? My shyster brother, the forever man with a plan, is struck incredibly, and completely, dumb.
Chapter 5
Sloane
My stomach is a knotted, sourdough twist. Like those salted figure eights you can pick up at the Philly airport. I can’t pinpoint the exact cause. First trimester heave-ho’s; the pink foreclosure notice jammed in my purse; or the uncomfortably intimate relationship I’ve developed with the receptionist at Tippet, Fontenot & Burkhardt, APLC over the last two weeks.
I stare down at the useless cell in my hand. I haven’t gotten so much as a “thanks for the ride” response from Logan even though I’ve left over a dozen messages. Correction, I think as I sit in the sleek chrome and charcoal glass lobby of Thirty magazine. Thirteen.
Fine. I’d done my due diligence. He quite obviously wanted nothing to do with me or the baby.
Baby.
Wow.
The knot twists a little tighter. I take a deep breath.
Come on, Sloane. You’re a big girl. You’re used to handling things on your own. A baby’s not going to be anything different.
I toss the phone into my purse where it crunches into the foreclosure notice.
On your own. With no house. And no job. Piece of cake.
Wish I had a piece of cake right about now. I’d smash it right into Kirk Dennington’s face.
*****
After Emma’s frantic phone call, I had dropped everything and rushed to the Sac-Bee building and marched straight into Kirk’s office.
“What do you mean, ‘I’m fired’!” I had burst.
“Not my choice,” he’d shrugged as he leaned back in his leather executive chair, hands linked behind his head. “Word came down from the home office. Paper’s being bought out by some conglomerate. They want us to streamline our profile. You know, down-size the filler pieces.”
Kirk leaned toward me, suggestively. I self-consciously buttoned one more button on my blouse.
“Of course, I tried to tell them the filler pieces are sometimes the, uh, most interesting,” he offered.
Could you wither someone’s manhood with a look?
Judging from how quickly Kirk had moved back, I suppose the answer was yes.
“Anyway,” he backpedaled. “They’re opting for more ‘hard-nosed’ reporting. Articles with bite. Exclusives. Gritty investigative pieces.”
“That’s bullshit, Kirk! I’ve come to you dozens of times with material. Good, solid stuff! And you’ve turned it down every time!”
“Works both ways.”
I stiffened. “I know you didn’t just mean what I think you meant.”
“And that is why I’m sure you’re not going to have any trouble finding another job, Sloane. Your brilliant nose for the truth. You’re bound to land a great gig somewhere.”
*****
But, I hadn’t. I’d been pounding the pavement for two weeks. No one wanted to hire an untested reporter with only a few society bylines to her credit. Worse? My severance wasn’t enough to cover the back mortgage on the house. Mom’s house. I was going to lose the home she’s worked so hard to provide. I couldn’t let that happen.
Thirty was my last shot.
A slick, lifestyle magazine with a reputation for running controversial stories and photo layouts, Thirty was the self-proclaimed last and only stop readers had to reference for the who, what, when, where and why of society luminaries. Giselle Nast and her magazine were renowned for digging the dirt no other media outlet could and dressing it up in a typographically rich glossy to lend it a certain artistic credibility. Undressed, Thirty was just another gossip rag that exposed the seedy underbelly of the elite, giving anyone who forked up the ten-dollar-an-issue cover price a peek into a forbidden world.
Giselle was also one the most powerful women in publishing. A Dallas cowgirl at heart, the cattleman’s daughter had taken New York by storm. After a meteoric rise through the fashion mags, under the tutelage of such greats as Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Glamour’s Cindi Leive, she had struck out on her own and manned the helm of Thirty into five Ellie’s within the last seven years. And she showed no signs of slowing down. Maybe because of her own background, she also had a reputation for fostering young, female talent. Those who were willing to dig in their heels and grab her an issue-selling story.
Good thing I brought my spurs.
“Miss Armstrong? Ms. Nast will see you now.” The sharp-suited assistant holds a cuff-linked hand toward Thirty’s inner sanctum.
He shows me into an aquarium. At least, that’s how it feels as I enter the four glass walls that comprise Giselle Nast’s office. Even the windows seem to melt into the floor and ceiling. I half-expect some giant to press his face against the glass and tap an impatient finger. Suddenly, a force of natur
e hurricanes into the room. She slaps a swatch of fabric samples and a photo proof sheet down on the smoked grey surface of her desk. She jabs a finger at the proof sheet.
Speaking of impatient.
“Call Ivana. Schedule a wax for Chloe tomorrow. You can practically braid what’s coming out of that bikini. And fire that photographer. The one from the Kardashian shoot I mentioned from a few days ago. Oh, and I’ll have the Farro Fettucine with Gorgonzola Dolce from Biba’s for lunch. And find me Darius. I want next month’s layout. Yesterday.”
The slight, but severe, Giselle Nast slices across the marble floor toward her desk. Her assistant vanishes in a puff of Dolce & Gabbana for Men. Presumably to fulfill the definitive orders of his exacting boss.
Everything about Giselle Nast is sharp. The angles of her short, asymmetrical bob. The point of her four-inch stiletto Manolo Blahnik’s. Cheekbones that can cut. And a piercing, icy blue stare that bores into your soul.
She tents ten perfect red talons as she assesses me. “So, what do you have for me?”
“Well, I’m hoping for a job, Ms. Nast.”
“I know what I can offer you, Miss Armstrong. My question is, what can you offer me?” She gives a tired lean back into her chair. I’m getting the feeling this interview isn’t going very well. I sit forward on the very edge of my seat. Shoulders squared. Jaw set. I clear my throat and launch into my pitch which I must have practiced a zillion times in the elevator ride up.
“I completed my undergraduate degree in journalism at Columbia. Summa cum laude. While I was there, I had an opportunity to intern at The Times. Got my graduate degree here at Stanford and was a Reuters Fellow at Oxford. I’ve worked at the Sac-Bee...,” I begin.
Giselle’s sharp edge cuts me off. “I don’t want your résumé, Miss Armstrong. I want a story. I want the story. The one no one else can get.”
She stands. Her legs scissor to the front of her desk where she crosses her arms. She looks down her thin, straight nose at me. “Do you know exactly what it is we do here, Miss Armstrong?”