#
A few days ago, Jason had thought he’d had a close escape. Seeing how immaturely Linley behaved when she wasn’t the center of attention in DC had made him wary of getting intimate with her. A hookup wasn’t intimate, of course. In her fit of anger, she’d changed her mind. To tell the truth, so had he. Hooking up again would be unprofessional.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Should he avoid Linley completely because she had revealed she had a bad temper and would take it out on the nearest person? Probably. Her temperamental freak-out was too close to the psycho girlfriend profile.
But there was something about her. Something kept him interested in her. He still sensed she was interested in him and not only for the sex.
She had been fantastic on the show lately, coming up great added-value contributions. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been trying in the past, but now she was firing on all cylinders, making her time on his show count by enhancing the show’s punch. He had to admire that. If she was attempting to make up for being such a bitch, she’d found the perfect way to do it. Leaving out what she could do for him sexually, that is.
Sex didn’t matter. He could get that from other women, and not have to worry about professional complications, or set himself up for some kind of off-the-wall sexual harassment charge. That was the problem. Linley had revealed that she might be crazy, although perhaps it had just been a one-off, a never-to-be-repeated freak-out. He’d have to think about that. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Or maybe she was his kind of crazy. She had the same fiery ambition he had.
#
Linley watched as Jason aggressively questioned the expert guest who was on the president’s team. He didn’t usually go for the throat like that. Of course the expert was giving the usual party line. She guessed Jason didn’t like hearing that. It took up too much space on the show and didn’t add any facts. Their program was all about facts—and speculations about the facts to come.
Her campaign wasn’t working. Jason acknowledged her hard work on the show, but he hadn’t made a single new effort to personalize their relationship. No asking her out. No suggesting they have a casual lunch. No dropping by her cubicle to say a kind word. She’d have to find a way to bring him back, panting for her.
Although, maybe she should let it alone.
No. There was something still unexplored between them. She’d behaved like a prima donna in DC, so he was being cautious. Fine. She would lure him closer.
A college friend of hers had become an actress and had offered her tickets to an exclusive awards show. She would not do the obvious and invite Jason to go with her. She would offer the second ticket to Ernie, who was a film buff. Jason would learn about her connection to a rising star when Ernie started raving about all the famous people he met that night, thanks to her. Ernie was very predictable. Jason was ambitious, like her. Linley’s connections to famous people would mean something to him.
Right now, she needed to call her Today Show buddy and set up a thank you lunch for getting her and her mother on the program. Then she should work all the other new contacts her mother’s job misfortune had created.
The mess with Jason was just a hiccup. Life was good.
#
“What an amazing night. I actually talked to Brad Pitt,” Ernie said, a couple of days later as they were all sitting in the planning meeting before the show. He turned to Jason, next to him, explaining their evening out. “I couldn’t believe it. Hugh Jackman was a row away, and…”
Jason gave Linley a sharp, questioning look, then quickly muffled it and bent his attention to Ernie’s ravings about the star-studded night.
She could tell Jason was wondering if she was starting a thing with Ernie, or if they had hooked up, or what. Good. Most men didn’t like competition. Knowing they had it made them more eager.
#
Jason got home from the job around eight p.m., out of sorts, knowing he wanted something. He made a booty call. He knew it was a risk, but so what.
When Linley answered, he said, “You want to hook up tonight?”
He could hear her shocked intake of breath. A beat later, she said, “That is not a smart idea, Jason. Goodbye.”
She clicked off.
A minute later, she called him back.
“Want to go get some pizza?”
Pizza instead of sex? Guess he’d take what was being offered.
“Sure.” He ripped off his tie and dress shirt, tossed his undershirt in the hamper after them, and threw on his khaki carpenter pants and a fresh black tee shirt. He gave the apartment a visual once over before leaving. In case he got lucky with Linley after all.
Half an hour later, they were wolfing down slices of Sicilian pizza in a hole-in-corner joint in Chelsea.
“Know what I like about Sicilian?” she asked, talking as she licked sauce off her fingers. He’d like the opportunity to lick her. He shook his head. He’d better pay attention to what she was saying.
“No, what?”
“You can’t order a whole pie.”
“Sure you can.”
“Can’t. No one eats a whole Sicilian. No one.”
“Three lonely college boys do,” he said, remembering one night when he and his friends had indulged in entirely too much of everything.
Linley was insistent. “Look at that one on the counter. There are twelve slices. No one who comes in here ever orders the whole thing. They order one or two slices.”
“I never realized you were an expert on pizza.”
“I’m a statistician by trade. Of course I count everything around me.”
“Here I thought you were just a pretty face.” He meant it to be funny, but she obviously didn’t take it that way.
“Did you?” Her expression was displeased. “That’s the problem with television. If you’re a girl, you have to be pretty. If you are pretty, you have to fight to make people believe you’re qualified, intelligent, educated, the rest of it.”
Girls always complained. He couldn’t help a semi-exasperated rejoinder. “Oh, lighten up. You know what I meant. You know what the game is all about.”
“I’m not complaining.” She pointed at him with her piece of pizza for emphasis. “I’m stating a fact. Because I have a pretty face, you don’t look at me and think ‘expert analyst.’”
“No, I think ‘babe,’” he smirked. She rolled her eyes, but he could tell she was pleased. For all her talk of professionalism, she was a woman, and women liked men to compliment their looks.
He wondered what the hell he was doing.
He’d called her on an impulse. He should stay away from her. He hadn’t called so they could have a date. Yet Linley had turned the evening into a typical boy-girl dinner out.
An hour later, back at his apartment, alone, he was still wondering. They’d shared some laughs and parted casually. Without any mention of his booty call. Or any mention of hooking up. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her. He had wanted to. He’d been wanting to for weeks. He must be losing his touch.
Women had never been mysterious to him because of his two older sisters. He’d watched them and listened to them and even spied on them as a kid. He’d scoped out boy-girl relationships early as a result. Most important, he'd learned how to talk to girls. He’d been lucky because girls had liked his looks. From then on, he’d cruised. Now, after two decades of pursuing girls and women, he thought he understood them. He didn’t understand Linley. At work, she acted like a girl scout. Outside of work, she was a hottie who liked to enjoy herself to the fullest. Tonight, she’d been the kind of girl he’d hung with in college, a gal pal. He’d hooked up with his gal pals, at least occasionally. Did that mean she’d be amenable to a hookup at some later date?
Bottom line, he thought he knew the rules, but Linley was not playing by them. She was an asset on the show, and that should be enough. Anything she did to help the show helped him. She was ambitious and was developing her contacts as fiercely as he was working on his.
If her goal had been the same as his, he’d see her as competition. Linley wasn’t bucking for a late night talk show as he was. She wasn’t trying to be a comedian slash entertainer slash political commentator as he was. She might want his current job. Not a problem unless she wanted to take it before he was ready to give it up. He’d never sensed any aggression of that sort from her, and he would have. That guy who’d been on the show the first couple of weeks had been bucking for a bigger spot at the table. A talk with Marty had gotten him paid off. It was Jason’s show. He was the moderator and he didn’t want anyone else trying to run the table. He didn’t care who management brought in to replace him when he had to take a day off because he was augmenting his rise by appearing on other television shows. Appearing on The View had been a coup. He wanted to hit Rachel Maddow and all the rest.
#
Linley was happy to go home alone. That had been a close one. When Jason had made his booty call, she’d been horribly tempted. No need to talk, no need to care. The opportunity to touch him all over and get some, too. Very tempting. No. Been there, done that. She wasn’t so hard up that she needed to accept all invitations, even though it had been a long time since she had bothered to hook up with anyone. She used to have a casual arrangement with an old pal from grad school, but since that night with Jason, she hadn’t been interested. Something about their one time together had ruined her for sex-only screwing. At least temporarily, she hoped. She shouldn’t let herself dry up like an old virgin.
She hadn’t been able to resist at least trying to get a relationship going tonight. Her ploy had worked. A casual pizza meal and some talk. That was a lot more than they’d had for a while. Maybe they could build on it. It had been exciting being with him. Difficult, too, because she’d been distracted by her desire to sex him up. She wanted to straddle his waist with her legs, hold tight, and feed him pizza with her mouth. Then more.
Sex between them wasn’t in her game plan. Finally, she’d been paying attention to her own best interests and following her plan. Tonight she’d behaved like a pure little convent girl. No touchy.
What else could she do to encourage Jason to pursue her, to want to date her, to show her his emotions? She wanted all that from him. She could admit it to herself even if she was too savvy to even hint at it to him at this stage. Guys were dense. They loved being the chasers. She would let him be the big macho man, let him think he was in charge of creating this relationship, when in reality, she was calling the shots.
How different their little dance was from the relationship her parents had. Her dad ran the family, and her mother kowtowed to his every whim. She built her life around him. She rushed to the door when he came home from work. She pampered and spoiled him. Linley had loved her dad, but her mother’s subservience had been sickening once Linley had noticed her friends’ mothers did not behave that way.
Although, come to think of it, her mother had not been sly. She hadn’t kept secrets from her father, or spent money behind his back and hidden purchases until she could coax him into a good mood, making herself a child to his daddy figure. Guess her mother wasn’t a total throwback to the bad old days Grandma had described. Grandma hadn’t suffered them, either. According to everyone, Grandma had ruled her home and the family life entirely, with never a peep of protest from her husband. Linley never met her grandfather because he died before she was born. Everybody said he had been a workaholic, a man’s man who smoked and drank because that was how men behaved back then. He had his sphere at his office, and his wife ran the house. Linley had no interest in being a housewife, but she liked to think she had inherited Grandma’s groundbreaking self-confidence. She did not intend to be bound to a man in some limiting relationship. She wanted to grab for success and achieve it. Eventually, she’d like to be with a man who respected and admired her for her success and her drive. Who wouldn’t feel threatened by her. Who would have drive himself.
Jason had drive. That’s why he was so tempting. It wasn’t just the sex. It was the entire package. Unfortunately, the package was not on offer. She supposed they were acting out clichés of being Generation Whatever. They didn’t have any urgency to marry or nest. Living together wasn’t even something her crowd bothered with unless for economic purposes, and then it was smarter just to have a roommate with some sex privileges. Career success and having a good time along the way was the plan. Oh, sure, she knew some girls who went the Bridezilla and Cute Young Couples route. They all took up the same habits in lockstep. What about knitting? Boring. Her mother crocheted. Linley had no intention of ever sewing anything. That’s what the person behind the sewing machine at the dry cleaners was for.
Linley let Jason stew for a while. She was busy showing off her statistician chops on the show and earning points with Marty by reading the books he had lent her. When she returned them, she asked questions about the old-time journalists he had known.
Of course Marty wasn’t fooled into thinking Linley merely had an historical interest in the field.
“You’re trying to find a way to put your name in these books, aren’t you?” he said, giving her his gimlet look.
Why lie? She nodded. “Of course. I want to succeed. I’ve been too focused on recent radio and television.”
“As I recall, you got your undergraduate degree in radio and television, not journalism,” he said. Marty remembered everything. Better keep that in mind.
“That’s right. My MA is in statistics. I have a lot more to learn about journalism.” She tried to say it with sincerity without being saccharine. Marty had shown a keen sensitivity to the phony. Maybe in the past she had coasted a little on her promise as a pretty young thing who also was bright. This wasn’t a prom queen contest she could win by being a smiling, attractive blonde. She must concentrate on improving herself, on becoming a valuable asset to the network. There were younger pretty faces from good schools arriving in the city every day, and she did not want to be easily replaced.
“Thanks again,” she said, and left Marty’s office quickly. As daring as she had been to engage her boss in discussions about journalism, she felt far safer out of his presence. She didn’t want to put a foot wrong accidentally. Her automatic youthful arrogance, which she had finally caught onto and was actively trying to tone down, irritated him. This wasn’t a game; this was her career. She couldn’t play with Marty, and she couldn’t manipulate him. He was far too savvy.
Jason was a different story. Not only was there the sexual undercurrent between them, but she had an advantage over Jason. He was a moderator, not an expert. She was a trained analyst who could offer both information and expertise to boost his program. From now on, that was what she would do, day in and day out.
#
Bruce was more than ready for his first real date with Pam. He hadn’t come to this beach town to start a romantic relationship, but there was no denying that spontaneously kissing a pretty woman and wanting to spend more time with her meant something. He’d moved on since the breakup with Carol, but he hadn’t been looking for a replacement for a wife in his world. Wife. Now there was a loaded word. No need to think about it now.
Or was there? He wanted to be with Pam, absorb the peaceful femininity of her personality. He should find out about her past, about the kind of woman she was in a relationship. Something told him it was important to know how she dealt with a man’s inevitable mistakes. Toward the end, Carol had enjoyed being a bitch to him.
Did people entering into late-in-life relationships have more tolerance for each other’s frailties? Did they have the same high expectations as when they’d been young? The same delusions about how perfect life together would be?
Why was he thinking about these things? Was he another of those men who knew at first sight? Who simply knew he’d found the woman? It hadn’t been that way with Carol, had it?
He looked at himself in the mirror next to the closet. Not something he’d have installed, but the house was rented fully furnished. He patted his stomach.
Still lean, thank god. Somehow he’d sidestepped the gut most men got. His hair was grey, no getting around it, although having hair at his age was a triumph. Women liked men who had still had hair on their heads. He’d heard they weren’t so crazy about the body hair men developed late in life, but his wasn’t terribly heavy. You wouldn’t mistake him for a chimpanzee if he took his shirt off. Not that he would. That had never been his thing. He’d never been the Italian Stallion type, although he’d grown up around plenty of them, and Irishmen in love with their own blarney. His brothers were like that, macho guys. He’d always been more the intellectual type. He liked baseball, not football, because it was a non-contact sport if played correctly. He’d been plenty shrimpy as a young boy, only gaining height and the muscle to go with it late in his teens. He had appreciated playing a sport that didn’t give the bigger boys many opportunities to run him over.
Youthful experiences shaped one. His dislike of physical bullies had sent him into a career in which quickness of wit and nimbleness with the written word were the hallmarks of success. He’d done well for himself, considering his fixation on the sciences. They’d only recently become more sexy—that was the word his literary agent used—to the ordinary reader. For a long time, he had labored in relative obscurity. In the past five years though, his books had become real sellers. Talking about the technical whys and wherefores of the world suddenly appealed to a public worried about global warming and about running out of oil and other natural resources.
His latest book had been a best seller and he’d been interviewed on television and radio to promote it. Book tours sponsored by a publisher were rare these days, so he was fully conscious of having arrived at a position of being, finally, a successful author. It felt good. He’d taken the few television moments with a grain of salt, letting himself relax and enjoy himself, not trying too hard to sell his books. He must have been doing something right. As a result of a few minutes on a popular morning show, sales had tripled.
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