“Well, it’s better than Señor Dipshit.” Adam shrugged. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say he actually liked you.”
“Maybe you don’t know better,” I said.
“Maybe he likes being worshipped by pretty young things,” he replied.
I threw a jalapeño slice at him. Pretty young thing, huh?
We were still laughing when a tall blond girl approached the table. She easily had four inches on me, and that was before you counted her designer heels. Diamond studs the size of blueberries shone from her earlobes, and her outfit was one I remembered being featured on a recent segment about the newest trends from Milan.
“Adam!” she cried, her voice musical.
He looked up. “Oh, hey.” He stood and hugged her. They looked like a Ralph Lauren ad. Two perfect specimens of preppy northeastern elite.
“You never called me!” The girl affected a pout.
“Sorry.” Adam cast me a sidelong glance. “I’ve been, um … working a lot.…”
Working a lot? Oh, I see. This was work. Even Perfect Girl here didn’t seem to view the situation as datelike. She made no move to introduce herself to me. Neither did Adam. She started talking about some of the doings in Greenwich. I swirled the dregs of my beer around the bottom of my glass. This was taking considerably longer than Adam’s all-important phone call with his source.
Guess Perfect Girl ranked higher on his list of priorities.
“So, I’m in the middle of—”
“Right,” said Perfect Girl. “Maybe I’ll see you at Barton’s regatta party on Saturday?”
Regatta?
Regatta?
Jesus, what was I doing here? The closest I’d ever gotten to a regatta was a story I’d once done at
Good Morning, New Jersey
about a rash of car thefts at the Barnegat Bay Yacht Club.
“Yeah,” said Adam. “Great.”
“Okay, great,” said Perfect Girl. She turned to me. “Nice to meet you.”
She hadn’t. I almost said this aloud.
“Sorry,” she went on, her tone blithe, “I was just so glad to see Adam again—”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Fine, fine, fine.”
Oh, God, Becky, shut up. You sound inane
. But my heart was racing, and my palms were damp. What in the world was I doing here next to this Amazonian goddess?
As soon as she was gone, Adam sat down again. “Sorry about that.”
“So that’s why I came by tonight,” I blurted. “Because I don’t know that many people who know Mike and I really needed your. … professional feedback.”
“My … feedback?” Adam asked.
“Yeah.” I searched around desperately for my scattered vocabulary. “Well, I’m new in town, and I don’t have that many … work contacts.”
I knew I should also try to find the pieces of my shredded dignity. I needed to get
out
of there. Quickly.
“Great,” Adam said slowly. “So we’ll be … work contacts.”
“Exactly.”
“Can’t have enough of those,” he said, his tone flat.
He probably couldn’t have enough girlfriends, either. I was at a complete loss as to what to do. This whole evening had just imploded around me. I was going to kill Lenny. I never even would have been thinking in terms of dates if it hadn’t been for him and his stupid model wife. He’d made me actually think, for a moment, that it made some kind of strange sense for someone like me to go out with someone like Adam. But of course not. Stupid. Stupid.
The need to bolt became overwhelming.
“Well.” I stuck out my hand. “I’ll be seeing you around, then. Definitely.”
He looked down at my hand, brow furrowed, then shook it. “Okay.”
I grabbed my jacket and ran, unable to catch my breath until I hit the street. I stood there for a moment in the fading light, asking myself and God how in the world it was that I could track down gun-toting maniac reporters in the wilds of New Jersey, but couldn’t manage to make small talk with a cute guy in a trendy Manhattan bar. Was it some kind of weird brain damage? Had I been dropped on my romance lobe as a child? Did I need behavioral therapy? Most important, could we build a segment around this kind of pathological boy-girl ineptitude? Gah.
I sneaked a peek inside the window of the pub. Adam was still sitting at our booth, staring down into his beer. He looked as baffled as I felt. And then I saw him reach across the table and pick something up from my side of the table.
My IBS badge. Oh no. Should I go in there and get it? Did I dare show my face in front of him again?
He ran his thumb lightly over my picture on the plastic, and I shivered as if the caress had touched my face. He looked at it one moment more, gave a slight shake of his head, then stuck it in his shirt pocket.
Shit
. I’d totally screwed up back there.
10
M
y IBS badge was waiting for me at the security desk when I arrived the next morning.
“You should really keep more careful track of these,” the guard said as I signed the necessary paperwork to retrieve it.
“Yeah,” I said, though I wanted to curl up and die. Of course Adam wouldn’t have called me to tell me he had it, or even where he was going to put it. I’d just run out the door on him. He probably never wanted to speak to me again. Leaving it here was the low-impact way to return it. It was either that or interoffice mail.
God, how humiliating.
I headed down to the
Daybreak
studios to face the gauntlet of our final rehearsal before Mike’s first broadcast. Lenny met me at the office.
“So how was it?” he asked.
“Nuclear disaster,” I said, breezing by him to the coffee machine. “I am never listening to you again.”
“Really?” Lenny raised his eyebrows. “I’d always heard Adam was a mensch.”
“Adam is fine,” I said. “I’m Chernobyl.”
“I see.”
We headed off to rehearsal. I saw the problems coming as soon as I got Mike and Colleen situated behind the anchor desks. Mike started playing with the levers on his chair, adjusting it so he sat a wee bit higher than Colleen.
She glared at him and adjusted her own seat.
I started worrying that the camera was going to show only their feet and told them both to cut it out.
“Okay,” I said, bringing their focus back to the actual script. “So the plan is to alternate voice-over intros of the headlines, and then you two ad-lib. So say we have a story about … I don’t know … the midterm elections—”
“We won’t, though,” Mike pointed out. “Because we don’t actually cover the news.”
“Pompous,” grumbled Colleen. “Gee, that’s a different color for you.”
I ignored them both. “So you guys should just banter back and forth a little.”
“ ‘Banter’?” Mike said. “From the Latin for ‘to gibber like an idiot’?”
I grit my teeth. “Just … talk about the headlines. You know what I mean.” Come on, Mike, they banter on the nightly news! Was he going to fight me every single step of the way?
“Fine.” He stood up and straightened his tie. “I’ll do it … when we get on the air. I’m not going to sit here and rehearse like I’m in summer stock. I’ve been on television for forty years—I think I know how to ad-lib.”
He hopped down from the set. I turned to Colleen. “Okay,” I said. “Then maybe you and I can rehearse.”
Colleen rolled her eyes and slipped out of her chair as well.
“Great,” I said to no one in particular. “I’m glad we could have this time to … I really feel like we’re meshing right now.…”
I wondered if it was too late to get in on that “When Is Becky Fuller Going to Crack?” pool Adam had mentioned.
When I got back to my office, I heard the special inner-IBS ring tone. My heart leapt. Maybe it was Adam, hoping to give it another try. I checked the readout. Or … Jerry.
“Hi, Jerry,” I said in my peppiest voice.
“How’s it going down there?” he asked.
“Oh, Mike’s ready. We’ve been rehearsing all week.” Little white lies.
I carried the phone out to the door of my office. Mike was back at the anchor desk, spinning side to side in the chair and throwing Raisinets at a cameraman who was adjusting the lighting. The cameraman spun around and Mike raised his eyes to the ceiling, whistling innocently.
“He’s in … great spirits,” I finished, miserable.
“That’s not what I heard,” said Jerry. “I heard you’re spending all your time trying to wrangle him. That you barely have time to retool the show.”
True and true. And who was Jerry’s little spy down here? “Look, all I need to do is get him on the air, okay? The public loves him. Will the show still need fine-tuning? Yes.” I took a deep breath, hoping to convince myself as much as my boss: “But trust me, Jerry—Mike Pomeroy is the key to taking this show where it needs to go.”
He’d better be, or I’d break his neck like he was one of those pheasants.
Jerry didn’t sound convinced. “Hope you know what you’re doing, staking everything on him.”
“I’m not worried,” I said, braving a smile that I knew he couldn’t see. We said our goodbyes, then I walked casually out of my office, down the hall, and into the ladies’ room, where I promptly started hyperventilating.
Oh, God, I hoped I knew what I was doing, staking my entire career on him.
By the end of the day, I’d worked myself into a full-fledged panic attack. I vacillated between two trains of thought: My plan was brilliant and I would become a legend in the world of morning news; my plan was poised to become the industry laughingstock. The problem was that there was nothing I could do to influence the outcome at this point. Either Mike would hold it together and be the newscaster I knew he had in him, or he would embarrass us all by treating the show like a cosmic joke.
I had to talk to him. I’d beg if I had to.
I gathered up the material I was taking home to review and marched over to his dressing room.
“Enter!” came floating through the door at my knock.
I opened the door. Mike was in his chair, drinking a scotch and watching the feed monitors.
“Hi,” I said, keeping my tone casual. “Just wanted to say good luck tomorrow.”
He faced me, then tilted his head to read the label on the DVD in my hand. “Ah, Colleen’s pap smear. A classic.”
Enough was enough. He wasn’t the single arbiter of what belonged on TV. “You know, she may have saved some lives by encouraging women to—”
“My God, this place is absurd.” Mike gestured broadly with the hand that held his scotch. “Say what you want about Dan Rather, at least I never had to see his cervix.”
I studied him. “Are you drunk?”
“Insufficiently.”
He pointed to the feed monitor, which was currently showing the rehearsal for
Nightly News
. The new anchor, Patrick Jameson, was barely forty. He had a St. Barts tan and the smile of a matinee idol. Also, according to rumor, he had the brain of an unusually intelligent shih tzu; but audiences didn’t seem to care, since he managed to sound plenty intelligent reading off the prompters.
“The spill began when the tanker was damaged in heavy seas outside of Galveston,” Patrick was saying.
Mike sneered.
Patrick was no doubt matching the script point for point. Another reason the network execs loved him—they never had to worry about him going off book and angering the sponsors. “Officials say up to two hundred thousand gallons of crude oil could be deposited in rough seas in the next forty-eight hours. Current weather conditions are complicating efforts to contain the damage amid fears that the oil could be ignited by the ship’s engine.”
“That’s my chair,” Mike slurred. “That’s where I should be. And they took it away from me, those motherfu—” He slumped.
“Mike, you should go home.” I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Get some rest.”
He pointed to the bottle of scotch sitting open on his desk. “You see that? Bruichladdich. Forty-year-old Islay single malt. I only drink it when I’m feeling particularly suicidal.”
If he committed suicide before the broadcast, I was going to kill him for sure. And that went double if he did it in my studio. “Time to go home,” I said firmly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Bright and early!”
“Aye, aye, captain.” He gave me a drunken salute.
I shook my head in disgust and departed.
The
Daybreak
offices were empty. Everyone had already gone home for the night, getting as much rest as they could before tomorrow’s big premiere. My bags were waiting in my office, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to follow the example set by my staff and head home. I straightened up my already-tidy office and made sure every pen on the desk made a neat parallel line. I looked at my bags. Tapped my foot.
Oh, enough already.
Thirty seconds later, I was in the elevator. Thirty seconds after that, I was deposited on the floor that housed the news division—the “real news” division, as Mike would probably say. Halfway across the floor was a glass door marked “7 Days.” I took a deep breath, told myself that I was making up for having acted like an idiot last night, and pushed through.
Adam’s office was the third door on the right. I knocked, hoping that he, too, had not gone home for the night. Or back to the bar to meet with Perfect Blond Regatta Girl.
“Come in,” he called.
Adam’s office was not decorated with golf trophies, or basketball trophies, or even Yale crew team trophies. Instead, his walls were covered with pictures from his latest story—something to do with the Philippines, judging by the thumbtacked map behind his desk.
“Hi,” I said, standing on the threshold and fighting for a lighthearted tone.
Adam’s hair was tousled. His face was unreadable. “Hi.”
“I just came by to … um …” I clasped my hands in front of me to keep them still, and my pinkies touched my badge. “Thank you for, uh, returning my ID.”
“Figured you couldn’t get in without it,” he said. He hadn’t moved from behind his desk, and his usual easy smile was absent this evening.
I drifted farther into the room. “So, what are you working on?” I pointed at the maps.
“Oh, we’re doing a piece on Communist rebels in the Philippines and—”
“Yeah, good, that sounds good.” I reached the desk. “So … last night? I went to the bar to see
you
.”
Adam’s mouth remained a thin line. “Yeah, I could tell by the way you ran in the other direction, arms pinwheeling.”
I nodded, once. “Yes. Fair. True. I did do that. It’s just …” I hesitated. “You seem sort of … comically great.”
“Like I could be a great comedian?”
“Oh, God, I’m doing this wrong.” I hung my head. I was doing it wrong
again
. Seriously, I needed to look into my benefits package and see if my health plan covered this. Maybe I could get behavioral therapy. Like an anger management class, but dating management. Maybe.
“It seemed
promising
,” I said helplessly, “and so of course I bungled the whole thing. I do that, you know. I bungle and I ramble, and look, I’m doing it right now as I’m trying to talk about it.”
What a mess. But then I looked up. He was smiling. Surprised. And flattered.
And … interested?
“You caught me off guard, is what I’m saying.” I took a step back, a little intimidated by the directness of his gaze and the undeniable look in his eye. “I mean, why would you like me? With your …” Words failed me, and I trailed off.
“My what?” Adam asked.
“You know.” I gestured to his hair, his smile, his Yale diploma.
He seemed confused.
I pretended to be rowing.
“Weird swimming?” Adam asked.
I rowed harder.
“Old-timey railroad car?”
“Crew championship!” I shouted, exasperated.
He looked at me like I was nuts. “Wow, I never would have gotten that, seriously. How do you even know about that?”
“There’s gossip about
you
around this network too, you know.”
“And the juiciest thing they can come up with is my collegiate athletic career? I don’t know whether to be relieved or depressed.”
“So anyway,” I said. “I just didn’t think that you
liked
me.”
“But I do,” Adam said, standing. “Oddly, a lot. You’re different. And a deeply terrible mime.”
I laughed despite myself.
“I asked you out.”
“Kinda.”
“I did,” he insisted. “And then when I saw you in the bar I practically tackled you to the ground. What part of that was confusing to you?”
It shouldn’t have been. It hadn’t been, at first. And then … “My radar for that kind of thing is off.”
“Guess so.”
Maybe I should wear a bracelet
, I thought,
like diabetics
. It would warn any potential dates that I was astoundingly slow when it came to these things. “I can’t really tell if a man is interested in me unless he’s naked.”
Adam gaped at me.
“No, you don’t have to get naked,” I said quickly. Well, unless he
wanted
to. “You know what I mean. It’s like the pants come off and I think,
Oh, all right, guess he doesn’t actually want to check out my CD collection
.”
He laughed. “Wow, you’re nuts, huh?”
I sighed. Finally, he
gets
it. “Yes.” But then I smiled. “That going to be a problem?”
“Okay, look. Let’s start over. Maybe I’m to blame with that whole ‘meet some friends at a bar’ thing.”
“Yes, great idea,” I said. “We’ll put some blame on you.”
“So this time we’ll go out to dinner like regular people. Take it slow, see where it leads. Sound good?”
I beamed. “Sounds perfect.”
So we had dinner together, which was lovely—some cozy little Italian place Adam knew—and then he took me back to his apartment to, um, check out his CD collection.
Which was also lovely.
I can’t tell you who made the first move. It all happened so quickly. But next thing I knew, we were making out like crazy on the couch. And not like I’d report this to Sasha and Tracy tomorrow, but Adam Bennett, on top of being a journalistic scion and a Yale grad and a crew champion and a certified hottie, is also a damned good kisser.
Damned. Good
.
Eventually, as the second half of the TV on the Radio album revved up, my shirt came off, and so did his.
“You know,” I said. “It’s a perfectly nice CD collection.”
“Mmmm …” Adam nibbled his way along my collarbone. His hands slipped down my torso to fumble with the clasp of my skirt.
“But I should probably start heading home. It’s
eight o’clock
already.” Damn morning show schedules. How would I ever have a normal social life?
“Yes,” he said, as he got the button undone. “You should go. You should go.” And then the zip.
“It’s Mike’s first day tomorrow,” I protested between kisses.
“Then definitely,” he said, kissing my neck, my shoulders. “Definitely go. Go.”
I moaned a little and ran my fingers down his spine. Yeah, I should go home. I should. I should.