35. Patrick

Demmit let me do four front-page features about the fireman who stole drugs from his station and sold them to cover his family's sinking finances.

It's a funny thing in a newsroom. Once there's blood in the water, even the guppies grow sharp, pointy teeth and begin to thrash. The moment my story hit, every serious reporter not burdened with a specific assignment began digging into the life of Alex Bennet. The boss was determined to find out what sort of debt would drive a man to steal from his fire station. He was convinced it was gambling or drugs, maybe something more nefarious that would make an even better story. When he told me to dig into things, he got this look in his eyes. I imagined it was the same look the editors at the National Enquirer or other sensational rags got when they smelled an actual tidbit rather than the usual alien space-laser tripe they liked to print.

Demmit promised Emily that this was my story. He didn't care if anyone else dug up the dirt, it would be my name on the byline. He even let it be known across the floor, warning all others away from the hunt in a good-faith effort to protect "the rookie" from seasoned vultures.

It didn't work. The vultures, being what they were, continued to stalk and circle and do creepy vulture shit. I found myself locking my metal desk drawers every time I got up to pee or leave the floor. I'd never done that before. A few times, I returned from lunch to find papers on the surface had been moved or my keyboard slightly askew.

I couldn't blame them. I was the new guy working on serious stuff and I had Demmit's favor, fleeting as it was.

For two weeks, I worked twelve- or fourteen-hour days, searching records, interviewing friends of my target, hunting for anything that might sound a little unusual or hint at hidden truths.

I tried not to think about Dane, to just focus on my work. His inky hair and dreamy eyes haunted me. His husky voice rasped in my ears each morning as I stretched and rolled out of bed. One morning, as I waited for the Keurig to do its life-saving thing, I leaned against the fridge. I wasn't doing it on purpose; I was barely awake. The feel of the stainless steel, all cold and hard against my back and neck, had my dick twitching and me reaching behind to grip its sides.

I could feel his firm body pressed against me, his rough hands gripping my wrists and pulling them above my head, slamming them a little too hard against the metal. My neck twinged at the memory of his teeth biting, almost forceful enough to break the skin. His breath was hot and wet.

And then he looked at me. His cold blue eyes, so hot with passion, stabbed into mine, and I melted.

My butthole clenched, and a shiver thrilled through me. I wanted him inside me, to feel him, to let him fill me and live deep within.

Was I losing my mind? Had I been turned on by an appliance? Wasn't I supposed to be moving past Dane? Forgetting about him?

The fridge-sex-dream-incident thing only happened once. I kept well away from the silvery siren each morning after that. I couldn't risk a repeat or I'd end up testing just how "stainless" that steel really was.

I did dream about him a couple of times. My sheets weren't stainless.

When I got to the bottom of my investigation, satisfied there were no more rocks to flip or whatever other trite expression meant I'd been really thorough, the result was sickening. Literally, my stomach rebelled and I had to run off the floor. I didn't make it to the restroom, puking all over the linoleum of the back hallway. Right there, in a dimly lit corridor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's offices, I slumped beside my stinking vomit and let tears fall.

Actually, that's too generous of a description. I ugly cried—the kind one might see on TV in those Housewives shows when one woman was especially cruel to another. Their made-up faces scrunched beyond beauty and turned all primal, like someone might've taken a baseball bat to their BMW and made them watch. I always thought those shows were a little like professional wrestling, but with overly surgeoned women who lived in the suburbs. There's no way their petty squabbles were real. Their tears definitely weren't.

But mine were.

Alex didn't have a gambling problem. He didn't abuse drugs or alcohol. His wife wasn't extravagant or wasteful or anything. They lived a quiet life, raising their two kids, desperately trying to carry the weight of medical bills they'd accrued during their second pregnancy. Susan, his wife, had nearly died. His boy, also named Alex, had nearly died. The whole thing almost killed Alex. If he hadn't had a little girl to care for, it might have. Or he might have …

I didn't want to think about that.

I hadn't felt guilty about writing my first article. It was a break, a rare opportunity to step into the big leagues and walk out of the darkness of cub reporting. It was also a story that would be told by someone, somewhere, so it might as well have been me. I didn't cause Alex's arrest; I simply wrote about it. Why would I feel guilty for that?

But the subsequent stories, where I detailed speculation about what motives might have driven Alex, where I let wild guesses and baseless claims seep into my consciousness and my writing. I knew better. I was finally a real reporter, a pro who based his writing on verified facts and eschewed silly rumors. I was above all that.

But I wasn't. By the time my final piece ran, detailing the utterly unsensational reasons behind Alex's family's financial woes, the damage had been done. I had smeared their name and painted them with the brush of doubt—very publicly.

It should never have happened. I let the reporters' version of battle rage guide my hand, ignoring rational explanations and empirical data. Some pro I turned out to be.

Demmit didn't care. I'd delivered everything he'd asked for. I'd given him a juicy series of stories that led the news, not only in our paper but also on the local TV stations. They covered everything we printed, teasing their viewers with "highly anticipated" additional information between editions. One local station even ran a feature just to interview me and discuss my investigative journalism process.

My name was everywhere. Overnight, I'd gone from an unknown newsie to a pseudo-celebrity.

Demmit moved me to the City Desk, where I was asked what I would like to do next. The desk editor actually asked me what I wanted. No one had ever done that before—not once in the years I'd been with the AJC. Every story I'd ever written had been assigned to me, handed down from Mount Demmitrius to his lowly follower.

Now that I was a known commodity and I'd produced work for which the paper could be proud, my voice mattered. I can't begin to describe how good that felt—and describing things was my jam.

My first thought was to cover the City Council because Atlanta's ruling body was always a mess of drama waiting to be unraveled. Some of their votes were incomprehensible, and their private lives, however not-so-private they might've been, were even more so. Reporting on that esteemed body was a sure recipe for regular page-one appearances.

Unfortunately, the reporter currently assigned to the council watch had been with the paper for decades. There would be no dislodging him, and he had made it clear long ago that he worked alone and never wanted a partner. He was a surly, often bitter, tough piece of dried and weathered old leather, and I had no desire to land on his bad side.

My new editor tossed out a few ideas, including more coverage of the Fire Department. I passed on that one quickly, saying, "I think they might shoot me with one of their water cannons if I tried to step onto their lot." That got a knowing chuckle.

We settled on a series about life at Grady Memorial. The POV was up to me, but the gist of the series would be to show the challenges of working in the city's hospital system from multiple angles. I even thought about befriending a janitor or orderly and getting their perspective. They could probably spill some serious tea on the docs and nurses. I was sure they saw everything.

We agreed I would produce one article per week.

One a week. I'd been pumping out two mini-articles per day before the whole fire station thing happened. My brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept of having time to dig into a story and write from a comprehensive knowledge of a subject.

It got me excited, like a first-year journalism student assigned their first few words in the university rag.

"It feels good to, I don't know, feel good again," I told Katie as we sat on her couch eating barbecue potato chips with sour cream and onion dip she'd bought at a gas station around the corner. She drank Mr. Pibb and I sipped on Diet Shasta, the orange one that tasted like citrus bar soap. The combo probably wasn't on the menu in any of Atlanta's fancy restaurants—or any restaurant anywhere, really—but it was our thing and we loved it. It's what we got when we were celebrating something.

"Aw, Patty Poo, I'm so happy for you." She smiled and shoved another fully loaded chip into her mouth. Her cheeks pooched out like a horny chipmunk. I nearly spat Shasta on her off-white sofa.

"I got a new author this week. He writes steamy romance." Katie was an editor, mostly working with indie authors. Some of the stuff she worked on was really good, worthy of being published by one of the big shops, but she saw as many bad books as she did good ones. She chided me for calling any book bad, insisting that it took great courage to write a book, to put one's creative heart on their sleeve and share their brain children with the world. She argued that any author willing to press pen to paper deserved respect, not ridicule, and certainly not one-star reviews.

"Romance?" I shoved a chip in my mouth to hide the way my lips twisted. I missed and smeared dip all over the tip of my nose and upper lip.

"That's what you get." She giggled. "You, of all people, know how hard writing can be, and you get to write real-life stuff. These authors are making everything up, sometimes even the world they throw their characters into. They're artists, in every sense of the word."

"Some of your artists couldn't paint a barn," slipped out between crunches.

Her eyes flew wide almost as fast as her hand slapped my arm. I dropped a chip into the dip bowl. "You be nice, or I'll smear that dip all over you, Patrick Pierce."

"Don't threaten me with a good time."

She slapped me again, this time giggling as she did.

"So, what's the book about?" I asked, fairly certain that I needed to show interest or she'd make me pay even more than she already had. "What's a steamy romance?"

Sitting cross-legged with her back against the armrest and the chip bag in front of her, she scooted forward so our knees banged together. Her face was sunlight and falling stars, the very definition of excitement. "Some people call it spicy romance. Don't you just love that?"

"Should we start putting sriracha in our dip?"

She tossed a chip into my chest. "It's romance, but with explicit sex. I've worked on a ton of wholesome romance books but never a spicy one. I can't wait to hear how they describe …" Her face colored in the cutest way.

"Cocks?" I offered.

Her eyes widened with her grin.

"Balls? Dicks? Pussies?"

"Patrick!"

"Slits? Cunts?"

"Patrick Pierce, don't use that word!" Her amusement morphed into something I'd seen in one of the Alien movies—on the alien.

"What? Cocks?"

She slapped my arm with one hand, then tossed her chip down and slapped the other arm.

"What?" I laughed. "One slap wasn't enough?"

"Not for the C word. That's a terrible, awful, nasty word."

"Not in Europe. It may as well be a flavor of ice cream over there."

She yanked herself back, nearly slamming into the armrest. "We're not in Europe!"

I grinned. Teasing Katie was the best. She was the best. "Alright, fine. Not feeling feminist today, I see."

Horror quirked into confusion. "What? Because I hate—"

"If you were feeling empowered, you'd want to claim the word, take it over, like gays do with the word ‘fag' or something."

She shuddered dramatically. "I hate that word too. And when you boys call each other that … I just hate it."

God, Katie was such a good person. Down to her toes, she was a cool breeze on an autumn morning.

"Okay, no more teasing," I yielded.

"Good." She squinted, clearly doubting the truce I'd offered. "Anyway, the stories are all about two men falling in love in one way or another."

"Two men? You didn't say it was boy romance."

"Well, it is. They call it MM."

"How descriptive." I rolled my eyes, earning yet another slap.

"Ow!" I grabbed my arm like she'd hit me with the dip bowl. She giggled again.

"Are you listening to me?" She scrunched her face, like the woman on Bewitched trying to cast a spell that wasn't working. "This book is about a fireman falling in love with a reporter. The description sounds so cute. I can't wait—"

She stopped talking, as my eyes fixed on the bottom of the chip bag. I hadn't meant to bring us down or get sad all of a sudden or anything. I really was interested in her smoky book or whatever it was called. But that storyline … shit.

"I'm sorry, P." Her hand stroked where it had slapped moments ago. "You still think about him?"

I hesitated, wanting to deny it. I wanted to scream that Dane was nothing, that we were only a hookup and it was all about sex. I really wanted to be strong and not fucking cry.

A lot of people want a lot of things. Tears trickled down my cheeks.

"Oh, P." Her arms were around me in a flash.

"It's been four weeks, five? I can't remember. Why am I still thinking about him? It's not like we fell in love or went to Paris or had babies."

"I think you tried that last one."

I laughed despite it all, snot smearing her padded blouse shoulder thingy. She would be pissed later.

"Have you tried calling or texting him?"

"No." I pulled back and tried to meet her gaze. "He doesn't want to talk to me. He made that painfully clear. Besides, he's probably moved on to, I don't know, one of his softball guys or somebody at his gym. I was never really his type."

I stared down at my bony forearm. Stupid, scrawny thing was only good for writing.

She lifted my chin with the tips of two fingers. "You listen to me, Patrick. You are one of the best guys I know. You're my best friend, and I love you more than … well … more than these chips."

I grinned despite myself.

"Not the dip though. That stuff's heaven, and you're only a boy."

I snorted. "Stop making me laugh. I deserve to be sad."

She curled her fingers and punched my arm.

"Ouch!" That one actually stung.

She speared her index finger, almost hitting my nose. "That's what you get for talking bad about my best friend. Do it again, and I'll do a lot worse."

"Sorry," I muttered, dipping my head like a scolded child.

"Don't be sorry. Do better. You deserve all the happiness in the world." She sat back and crossed her arms. "Dane saw that, at least for a while. You know he did. And if he could fall for you, then other hunky men who like to slam guys against things will too."

"I guess," I admitted, not really believing it.

"He was into you, even though you are all skin and bones."

"Hey!"

She grinned. "Maybe he had something in his teeth and needed a toothpick, and bam, there you were."

I blinked a few times, wounded.

She laughed. "Or maybe your ass is so tight his cock couldn't stand to be without it. I bet there's still a print on his fridge; you know, where he didn't clean it. There's a little butt impression of my Patty." She shrieked and covered her mouth with both hands.

"What?" I was so shocked by her sudden use of graphic language—about my body parts—that I froze.

"Patty's patty … or would that be patties? You left Patty's patties on his fridge! Oh my god, that's priceless!" She gripped her stomach and doubled over, knocking the bag off the couch and spilling chips all over the carpet.

I threw my head back and blew out the longest sigh in the history of sighs. That just spun her up more.

In another moment, I gave in and we were both hunched over, crying hysterically, gasping for breath through bouts of uncontrolled laughter.