Guilt nibbled at my gut as Dad exclaimed how happy he was for me. For us.
Of course, I’d sugarcoated the situation to the point that it looked like a churro.
Instead of telling him I was now blissfully single and screwing my heartless boss, I painted a picture in soft pinks and vivid baby blues, in which Célian and I had fallen desperately in love with and decided to be together. He swallowed the entire thing and asked for seconds—came clean about the experimental treatment and said he loved Célian like a son. Like. A. Son.
Dad begged me to invite Célian for dinner in the capacity of a normal couple, and I caved, mostly because I knew Célian would not turn us down. Since he’d opted for not getting back with Lily, any united front we were going to offer would surely help our case. Plus, who the hell knew what we were?
Sometimes it felt like a relationship.
Oftentimes like a dirty secret.
Sometimes he ran cold.
Many times he burned hot.
On Monday morning, everyone walked into the first rundown meeting looking grim and overworked. I placed Kipling on the desk and slid into my usual seat, popping open a big white box of donuts.
“Habit’s gonna get you broke, girl.” Kate picked a chocolate-glazed one, greeting me by bumping her thigh against my shoulder.
“That’s like threatening a nun with a crucifix. I already am.” I licked the powdered sugar off a pastry as Jessica handed Kate and me some coffee.
“How was your weekend?” they both asked in unison, but Kate peppered the question with a knowing grin.
She and Célian were close, but he was still a vault, so I opted for vagueness.
“Relaxing?” Oh, sweet. I put a question mark there. That wasn’t suspicious.
“That’s one thing I don’t believe.”
The entire room raised a collective eyebrow as Célian breezed through the door. He looked both pissed and perfect in a pale gray suit, his frown was so deep I could barely make out his eyes. Brianna shadowed his steps, sliding his Starbucks and iPad in front of his seat.
“I would ask how everyone’s weekend was, but that would imply that I give a fuck. And I don’t, because we have bigger fish to fry. I’m talking whale-sized ocean creatures. This is the first and last time I will address this subject, so feel free to never ask me again.”
He dumped his phone and some documents on the desk, shooing his PA away. “LBC just signed a clusterfuck of an ad deal with a marketing firm that specializes in alcohol, condoms, and gambling. You will hear about it in the media and in your local high-end bars and on goddamn Twitter. Do not engage. As far as we’re concerned, we’re making unbiased news. Period. Understood?”
Everyone nodded solemnly. Elijah raised his hand to ask something. Célian fell into his chair with a sigh. “Is it about the deal?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t wanna hear it. Let’s get to business.”
James Townley looked up from a newspaper he was holding. “Anything else you’d like to address?”
Célian shot him a look. “Are you referring to your fake tan problem? Because I can hold an intervention, but probably not until next week. Busy schedule and all.”
“I’m talking about the elephant in the room.” James frowned, concern etching his face. He slapped the newspaper with the back of his hand before boomeranging it toward his director. Célian picked it up, frowned at the little article circled with a yellow highlighter, and slid it my way silently. I picked it up, my heart pounding in my ears. There was no picture. Just text.
WHO’S THAT GIRL: New York media tycoon Célian Laurent is DUMPED by his fiancée, Miss Lily Davis, after the latter caught him in the act, cheating on her with an employee. The sordid affair is said to be at least a few weeks old. Both parties were unavailable for comment.
Célian sat back, lacing his fingers together. “Well.”
Elijah’s eyebrows jumped to his forehead. “You’ll need to elaborate.”
“It’s true.”
No, it’s not! I wanted to jump up and yell, as gasps erupted all across the room. He hadn’t cheated on Lily, and she hadn’t caught us in the act. I stared at him, bewildered, feeling my pulse jackhammering against my eyelids. He tilted his chin up, his expression reeking defiance, ignoring me completely.
“Most of it, anyway. I am in a relationship with Judith Humphry. However, it is not sordid, hardly a secret, and we were never caught in any act. Judith didn’t know about my relationship with Lily when we started dating, and is therefore not at fault. However, her position here has nothing to do with our relationship, which developed after she was appointed as a reporter.” He was calm, cold, and smooth. Everybody’s eyes ping-ponged between us, and my skin was on fire. I felt humiliated and helpless. And most of all, I felt furious at his random confession. When we’d agreed to tell the world, I thought it would be after discussing a strategy. Together.
“I think we can all agree that Miss Humphry has earned her place in this newsroom and did not need to sleep her way up the corporate ladder.” Célian smoothed a hand along his crisp shirt.
“Agreed.” Kate reached out, squeezing my hand. I was too stunned to react.
“I concur.” Elijah raised his palms in surrender.
“She’s the best.” Jessica regarded me with a frown, probably for keeping mum about getting freaky with the boss.
I got why a lot of people felt cheated.
“Junior.” James tossed me a toothy smile. “You’re the real deal. We all know it.”
But did they? There were at least eight more people in the room, and their silence spoke a thousand words. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that no one saw me in the same light anymore. To what degree was the real question.
“Thank you…” I managed, refusing to look back at Célian, who stared at me intently now, trying to read between the lines of my deep frown.
I didn’t give him anything.
“With this out of the way…” Célian ran a hand over his square jaw. “Give me something good.”
“Evidently, Jude already has…” someone coughed from my general direction, but I couldn’t snap my head fast enough to see who it was.
I don’t think Célian heard it. He wasn’t one to miss an opportunity to berate a cheeky employee.
Kate began talking about the anti-drugs campaign failure, and Elijah butted in with a debt ceiling lead. Célian looked bored out of his mind, leaning back in his chair and staring into the air, his legs crossed over the desk.
“Humphry?”
At least he still called me that, like I was a genderless employee, like nothing had changed. Because nothing had. I was still a career woman. I was just a career woman who slept with her boss because we were both the same type of screwed up.
I flipped Kipling’s pages, my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth.
“I was talking to this guy last night…” I started.
“Does Célian know? He always seemed like the possessive type to me,” Elijah joked, tossing his head back and gulping down a bottle of water with a chuckle.
“Out of my newsroom, Elijah,” Célian barked, looking back to me. “Continue, Judith.”
I looked between them noiselessly. Elijah furrowed his brows, picked up his things, and shook his head.
“It was a joke,” he whispered.
“Comedy Central is down the block. We make news here.” Célian was still looking at me, but with a jaded expectation, not an ounce of sympathy or affection in his icy blues.
An unbearable tension squeezed the room from the moment Elijah realized he’d messed up to the second the door closed behind him.
“Anyway…” My face heated, and I kept my eyes on Kipling. “He’s a Syrian journalist living in Germany. His name is Saiid. I found his Twitter account late last night.”
“Or Tinder…” Bryce, one of the producers in the room, whispered under her breath.
Sitting at the head of the desk, Célian couldn’t hear it. But I could. And I wanted to die. I deserved it. Even I could see why it would make my peers bitter. While they were chasing leads, I’d been chasing orgasms with the future president of the network. The engaged future president of the network.
I took a deep breath, borrowing Kate’s iPad silently and entering a web address. “He uploaded this video, documenting Syrian refugees trying to smuggle their way back to Syria…”
“Back to Syria?” Jessica raised an eyebrow.
I nodded. “They find it difficult to integrate, and they miss their families. Hundreds of refugees come back into Syria every week, mostly through Greece. They enter their own country illegally, on foot, tracing back over the route they used to run away.”
I clicked on the video and turned it around so everyone could see. Most of all, I was relieved to find people no longer looking at me like I was the root of all evil. Now they saw toddlers crying in their mothers’ hands, their lives at great risk.
“Coverage?” Célian looked up at me after the video ended.
Shaking my head, I pointed at the screen. “This video has only been watched five hundred times or so, but I’m guessing more people will find it as time ticks by. This could be a great lead for the special we’re airing next week.”
“Good job.”
Maybe his words would’ve been more believable if they hadn’t felt like hail hitting my skin. I was growing tired of him being so callous. It’s like his heart was wrapped in a thick layer of dead skin—the kind you have on the sole of your foot. A needle could pierce it, and you wouldn’t feel a thing.
I bowed my head, not daring to look at the reaction his compliment had created.
People began to file out of the room, and so did Célian. He probably knew I was about ready to strangle him and didn’t want a shouting match. I stayed inside, watching Kate pretend to collect her things at a snail’s pace.
She looked down as she spoke to me. “Célian did the only thing he could to make sure both your asses were covered. He did it in his own fuck-you-very-much way, but he meant well. You’re about to get a lot of heat for it, but remember—better to address it here than let The Daily Gossip give people their version of your story.”
I looked up, through the glass wall, and watched the news spread like wildfire—people hunching down and whispering into their colleagues’ ears, secretaries marching out with their cigarette packs so they could gossip downstairs, reporters passing the newspaper James had brought between them.
“I think he just killed my career.” My head collapsed into my arms on the table.
“Killed? No.” Kate tossed her things into her bag and stood up. “But he just made it a lot harder for both of you. So you better get out there and start proving to people what I already know: that you were born to be a journalist.”
The next few days were a blur. Things somehow got both better and worse.
Better, because people had very little time to duck their heads down and whisper about us. Célian was running around the office, screaming his lungs out at them. We were severely short-staffed, and every calamity in the world had decided to land at our feet.
Worse, because ever since the new ads started rolling, Célian was in and out of meetings on the sixtieth floor, and every time he came back, he punched a wall to its untimely death. We were four holes in, with our ratings slipping each passing second and our competitors openly discussing our current situation as a network dying a slow, painful, and very public death.
Célian had not been kidding.
Mathias wanted to kill LBC before he left, and now that Célian was no longer engaged to Lily and in no position to overturn those decisions, he had to watch it crumble, eyes wide open, Clockwork Orange style.
Célian wasn’t the only one trying to plug LBC into a life-support machine.
James Townley got into a screaming match with Mathias in the middle of the newsroom the day after the commercials started running and threatened to quit.
“You’re ruining this business, and your son.” He’d thrown a batch of documents in Mathias’s face.
“If you’re unhappy, James, you know exactly where the door is.” Mathias had pointed at it for emphasis.
“Yes, Matt. You’ve showed it to me plenty. But I’ll never leave here, and we both know why.”
Célian had dragged his anchor to the conference room and had a heated conversation with him. They’d come out looking spent, just in time to see Mathias wink wickedly through the closing doors of the elevator.
If nothing else, Célian had found an ally in James, one person to cross off his Guinness records-worthy shit list.
The other downside of LBC’s looming demise was that Célian and I hadn’t had time to talk to each other since the news broke that we were together.
I was still mad at him, but it was difficult to confront him properly when he was running on coffee and energy shots, trying desperately to save his dying network. It was my educated guess that he hadn’t slept more than ten hours combined this week.
So when Friday evening rolled in, I was surprised to see him walk to my desk, in front of everyone, and lean his hip against my file cabinet, his signature hands-tucked-in-pockets and devil-may-care smirk on full display.
“Chucks.”
I looked up. He had dark circles around his eyes and a three-day stubble. I desperately wanted to give him a piece of my mind, but there was no point in kicking him while he was down.
“Jerk.”
He arched an eyebrow, and I shrugged. “I thought we nicknamed each other the things that represented us.”
He leaned down and placed a chaste kiss on my temple. Everybody stopped what they were doing and stared at us, and I felt myself turning crimson. The air stood still in the room. He was gasoline. I was a match.
“Dinner and an apology,” he said—not offered—in front of everyone, so cocky and sure that I would jump into his arms.
“You should probably start with the latter to get the former.” I sat back and looked at him blankly.
He hung his head and shook it, laughing. “I apologize for outing us in a less than diplomatic manner. But not for making sure everyone knows that you’re fucking mine.” He leaned down, his lips grazing my ear. “Hang on to this anger, Chucks. I’ll be happy to work your crazy ass up in bed and fuck every doubt and complaint out of your tight pussy.”
If I were an emoji, I would be drooling a little pool under my feet.
“I guess you could buy me dinner.” I kept my expression schooled, and he tugged at my jacket draped over the back of my seat, helping me into it.
“Guessing is a gambling game. I’m definitely buying you dinner tonight.”
“We’re going to have a long talk,” I said, feeling Jessica and Kate watching us with horror and fascination. I don’t think they’d ever seen anyone talk back to their boss.
“And even longer makeup sex.” He grinned.
Thirty minutes later, we were in a Chinese restaurant off Broadway. Célian was drinking bottled beer as I ordered every single thing on the menu.
“Sorry.” I handed our waiter the velvet red tariff. “I can’t eat when I’m stressed, and this is the first time we’ve spoken since Monday, so I’m making up for lost time.”
Célian unfolded his napkin, frowning at it like it had accused him of something, considering my words.
“We’re tanking,” I told him. “Your father is on a suicide mission, and he’s taken all of us as hostages. The only way to stop him is to overthrow his decision, which you can do by teaming up with the Davis family. Can you at least ask Lily’s father? Go directly to him?”
Every word felt like a sword slicing through my mouth. I was sending him off to the last place I wanted him to be. With his ex.
He fingered the rim of his bottle. “They have their own shit to sort through, and the last thing they need is the motherfucker who cheated on their daughter showing up asking for solids.”
“You haven’t cheated on Lily, though.” I rubbed my nose in frustration. “Why did you agree with that statement?”
If looks could slap you in the ass, I think his expression just did.
“I’m fond of her family,” he said curtly.
“And?”
“And I’d hate to break it to them that their daughter is a piece of work.”
“But…why?”
“They treated me like a son when I had no relatives to speak of but Camille.”
“So you’re content with being the bad guy?” I blinked, my mouth lax.
“Are we living on the same fucking planet? I am the bad guy.”
He had a point, and I understood where he was coming from, even if it made me uncomfortable that he’d protected Lily.
“What about LBC?”
He clutched his beer so tightly I thought it was going to crack, ignoring the steaming dishes the waiter slid on to our table. I wasn’t feeling so hungry myself anymore.
“I’m listening to offers from other networks.”
“What?” I whisper-yelled. “LBC is yours.”
“No. It’s my father’s, for the foreseeable future. Unlike ninety-nine percent of the general population, I’m both good at my job and I love it. I won’t jeopardize my reputation. I’d rather work somewhere else.”
“What about your staff!”
It was an accusation more than a question. No matter how much people feared Célian, they respected and were loyal to him, too. He couldn’t just get up and leave. Not in theory, anyway. In practice, I knew better than anyone how he could be taciturn and detached.
“If it comes to that, I’ll make a package deal to take Kate and Elijah with me.”
He stretched in his seat, and I watched the muscles of his arms looping around his bones like ivy, every curve incredibly male. Then I thought about the muscle inside his chest. The one that pounded, but didn’t get its recommended exercise.
His father was killing him slowly and enjoying doing so. His mother was mostly indifferent toward everything around her. Célian didn’t have a shot, other than the Davis family, and we both knew it.
“And what about us?” I asked quietly. His eyes were cold, but his mouth was red and hot, alive.
“What about us?” His icy tenor glided like an ice cube along my spine. He waved his empty beer bottle at the waiter, signaling for another.
“Are you going to explain that little stint in the newsroom when James showed us the item?”
“Probably not. We agreed it was the best thing to come clean. So I did.”
“Without consulting me.”
“False. I consulted you the night before. I have the text messages to prove it.”
“We agreed to it, but didn’t talk strategy.” I refused to back off.
“Strategy?” He scoffed. “We’re not running for office, Judith. Just fucking in one.”
He’d thrown our affair in everyone’s face, and now he was acting like an asshole, because he didn’t know how not to. But I was done—done eating it up every time he threw crumbs of attention my way.
I knew I had to stand up and leave before I cried.
We’d done everything backwards.
First the sex, then the feelings. We’d defied our workplace, and our colleagues, and our ethical codes. We’d ruined a perfectly dysfunctional engagement that had kept his company alive. But most of all, we’d also ruined ourselves.
My legs were up before I knew it, carrying me to the exit. No explanation. No apologies. I felt his grave steps thumping in my hollow chest as he followed me out. It was raining outside—the kind of dirty, humid rain to break the pulses of summer heat. It reminded me of the day we’d met, of the carnal desperation that ate at me back then, of the fact that I was still alone.
I felt his hand on my shoulder as he swiveled me around sharply. He jerked me into his arms.
I didn’t want him to let go.
I didn’t want him to keep me there, either.
“I wish I’d never met you.” My fists pounded his chest, and he took it. Maybe because he knew he deserved it. His mouth pressed against my cheek felt like a rusty, hot blade. The world felt like it was ending, even though I knew it couldn’t be.
The vane of his breath sliced through my ear. “I wish that, too.”
That night, the sex was different.
Slow, intense, and angry. Every thrust was a punishment, each rake of my fingernails against his skin a reminder that I, too, could hurt him. We didn’t talk about it. Not even when tears rolled down my cheeks and he kissed them, then licked them, then drank them thirstily, for they were his.
That night, we ended things differently, too.
He was sound asleep when I collected the few belongings I had and called a cab. It was going to cost a pretty penny, but I didn’t want to be there when he woke up. We were miles away from Florida, literally and figuratively. And that, too, reminded me of the rainy night we’d met.
Later that night, I had a strange, somber epiphany.
Milton was right. I was a mortal playing with a deity, and now I was getting hurt, while he remained intact. There was nothing wrong with my heart. It was not lonely, and it was definitely not a hunter. It had been hunted. There was only one problem with the fact that my heart was so dreadfully, unexpectedly normal.
Somewhere along the way, it had stopped being mine.
