The One I Love to Hate

by Amanda Weaver

  Before he left, he stayed hidden in the shadow of the staircase, watching Jess, just as he’d been doing for years. As she turned her face toward Lina and laughed at something she said, her hair slid back over her shoulder. How many times had he stared at that hair, wondering how it would feel between his fingers? Now he knew, the sense memory tingling along his fingertips. Now he knew what it felt like to wake up with her body next to his. Now he knew what it felt like to look into her eyes and see them light up with love instead of hate.

  But how long would that love in her eyes last if, day after day, his life ground off all the parts of him she liked best? The animosity she’d thrown his way for so many years would pale in comparison to seeing her look at him with disappointment. Regret.

  Last night, he’d been angry at Jess. But what had she said that wasn’t true? How long did he think he could juggle all the disparate parts of his life before he dropped one? Jess’s Peabody versus his father’s Alex Drake. In the end, only one would win, and Drake Media was a behemoth, devouring everything it touched. When he inevitably slipped up in his life’s balancing act and dropped Jess, how badly would she suffer at his hands?

  Slowly, he made his way over to them. Jess spun around when she sensed his approach, her eyes lit up with gratitude and love. For just a moment, he let it sink into him, fill him up, warm him from the inside out.

  “Mariel gave Jess her job back!” Lina said before either of them could speak.

  “That’s great. I knew she would.”

  “Alex—” Jess said, reaching a hand out to touch him. It would be so easy to take her hand, kiss her, pretend last night had never happened. But he’d only be delaying the inevitable.

  “If you see my dad, will you tell him I left?”

  Jess blinked and drew her hand back as if he’d slapped it.

  Lina licked her lips, her eyes flicking between him and Jess. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay? We’re celebrating.”

  The smile he produced felt foreign on his face, but he’d better get used to it. He’d be faking his smiles for a long time to come. “No thanks, I’d better go. There’s a lot to do tomorrow at work to fix Chase’s mess. Good night.”

  Turning away from the bewildered hurt in Jess’s eyes, he made his way out of the bar and into the cold night.

  * * *

  Jess watched Alex’s retreating form, the painful constriction in her throat making it hard to breathe.

  “Lina...”

  “Go after him,” Lina said, nudging her side. “Go.”

  Jess went, half walking, half running through the bar, which had grown crowded while their drama had played out upstairs.

  “Alex!”

  He didn’t hear her, walking out the glass front door and off down the sidewalk. She tumbled out the door after him. “Alex! Wait!”

  He stopped, turned, and waited, that impossible-to-read blank expression on his face. It was his Drake Media face. His eyes were dead.

  It had started to snow again, the flakes stinging against her flushed cheeks as she closed the distance to him.

  “Can we talk about last night?”

  “We don’t have to do that,” he said, so infuriatingly calm and polite. She wanted to grab him by those broad, strong shoulders and shake him hard, until he came back to life under her hands.

  “Yes, we do. I didn’t say it right.” Helplessly, she trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head in frustration.

  “You said it perfectly, Jess. And you were right.”

  “No, I wasn’t. Just—”

  His eyes fixed on the snow-covered pavement between them. “You were right. I’ve been trying to have it both ways and it’s not going to work. Not in the long run.”

  Suddenly it was hard to breathe. She wanted to take it all back, every single stupid thing she’d said about being true to himself and sticking to his principles. Because not once as she spouted all that crap at him did she think he’d choose Drake Media instead of himself. That he’d choose to leave her behind. “No, Alex, we can figure this out. Please—”

  He looked up at her, a slight, sad smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. His hair fell in a tangled sweep across his forehead, flecked with snowflakes. They caught in the tips of his eyelashes, and one landed briefly on his bottom lip before it melted away in the heat of his skin. “I’ve always known what my life would be, Jess. I’m sorry if I made you think I could change that.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s okay. We can work it out. I’ll be fine, I promise.”

  With a weary shake of his head, he stuffed his hands into his coat pockets, hunching his shoulders against the cold. “You wouldn’t be. Not forever. And you shouldn’t be. From the very beginning, you’ve known who you are and what you wanted. And it wasn’t this. I don’t want you to compromise yourself for me.”

  “I wouldn’t be.” She was losing him. He was going to turn around and walk away and there was nothing she could say to stop him. Taking a step closer, she reached out to touch him but he took a sudden step back, and she stumbled to a stop. “Alex—”

  With a deep inhale, he straightened and flashed her a smile, this one devoid of all life and warmth. It was a hollow shell of the smile she loved. “I’m really glad you got your job back, Jess. That place is your dream come true.”

  Then he did turn, walking away from her up the sidewalk. His feet left a line of dark prints in the snow, growing smaller as he moved farther and farther away.

  “No, it wasn’t. You were,” she whispered into the cold, but he was too far gone to hear it.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  When Alex arrived at the ClickNews offices the next morning, the place was in chaos. Word of Chase’s betrayal had spread, along with the inevitable viral internet videos of Alex confronting him in the bar. The excited chatter paused momentarily when he stepped off the elevator, and a second later, the staff burst into enthusiastic applause and whistles.

  With a half-hearted smile and wave, Alex made his way through the workroom to his desk.

  “I never liked that asshole,” one writer told him.

  “I always knew he was a shady son of a bitch,” another said.

  “So.” Samaira Sangar materialized in front of his desk before he’d even sat down, arms crossed over her chest and foot tapping. “What happens to our department now?”

  Chase’s reporting staff had been spotty at best, but Samaira was definitely one of the better ones.

  “I’m going to run it for now.”

  A wide smile broke across her face. “Excellent.”

  “It’s just temporary. Until we can find someone else.”

  “Well, we’d better get to work. Chase was out most of last week, so we’re already behind.”

  And any stories the staff was already working on would have to be scrapped, since there was no telling where Chase had gotten them. That meant they were starting from square one.

  “Um...” Alex dragged a hand through his hair. “Sure. Let’s go. Call everybody into the conference room. Let’s get started.”

  He could do this. Brainstorm a few ideas, assign the stories, get the staff to work. Then he could turn his attention to the problem of finding Chase’s replacement.

  Ten minutes later, he was staring down Chase’s ragtag crew around the conference table.

  “It goes without saying that anything you were already working on needs to be scrapped. Which means we’re going to need to generate some new content quickly. Who’s got something they want to pitch?”

  They looked uneasily at him. “We don’t usually pitch stuff,” one guy—Dean?—ventured. “Chase just assigned the stuff he’d already outlined and we’d write it up.”

  “Well, all of that stuff was stolen, so now it’s on us to get it done.”

  After another awkward silence, Samaira tentativel
y raised her hand.

  “Samaira? What do you have?”

  “The mayor is holding a press conference today about his bid for the 2024 Olympics. I could cover that?”

  “Good. Excellent.” He was about to move on, but something made him pause and think for a moment. “And, Samaira, don’t just reprint his press release. There are sure to be some protesters there, people who don’t want the Olympics here. Get some statements for the anti side, to balance the pro side.”

  “Got it.” Samaira was smiling excitedly. For the first time in days—no, weeks...no, months—Alex had a frisson of excitement of his own.

  Another guy—Yanni?—spoke up. Yanni’s writing was good. It hinted at some formal training in journalism. “I saw something on the wire about that federal judge’s corruption scandal. I was poking around online this morning and there are rumors that they had his office tapped and the tapes are about to drop.”

  “Yes! That’s good.” Adrenaline shot through Alex’s body as his mind came alive with possibilities. “But we’re not using the wire service’s story. Get down to the FBI offices in Manhattan and see if you can talk to someone. I want something original on this. What was the probable cause behind the wiretap? Somebody knows something. Find it out.”

  Yanni looked startled at having such an ambitious story thrust into his face, but he sat up at attention and nodded as he scribbled some notes. “You got it, boss.”

  “In fact,” Alex continued as the story came together in his mind, “Samaira, forget the Olympic bid story. You’re on the judge, too. This is his district. His offices are downtown. Get down there and start digging. Talk to his paralegals, his secretaries, the security guys, the cleaning lady, anybody... Find us something nobody else knows yet. The offshore account, the secret mistress, the corporate collusion...whatever it is.”

  Samaira’s eyes glinted with hungry glee. “I am on it!” She was definitely the star reporter of this bunch and he’d just let her off the leash. Who knew what she’d drag back, but it was exciting as hell to imagine it.

  “Rob.” He pointed at one of the duller staffers. This guy would definitely need to be replaced, but he’d do for now. “You take the Olympic bid. But I’m serious. You get me a pros and cons write-up, understand?”

  Rob nodded nervously. “Pros and cons. Got it.”

  “In fact, talk to someone from the Parks Department. Has anybody done an impact study yet? And the budget office. What’s it going to cost us? And the tourism department. What kind of money will it bring into the city?” He ticked off departments on his fingers. “The MTA, Con Ed, the hotel industry, the TLC... Talk to everybody and get their take. Can New York reasonably host an event as complex as the Olympics? Talk to someone in LA or Atlanta and find out what it ended up costing their city in the end. Was there ever a cost/benefits analysis done? This could be a multi-part exploration of the impact of hosting the Olympic games on major cities where the infrastructure is already stressed—”

  * * *

  His first editorial meeting with the ClickNews staff lasted well over an hour. At the end of it, when every reporter had been tasked with a story to run down, he finally collapsed into a chair, still running high on adrenaline. The staff was filing past him, reviewing their notes or already on their cell phones. Samaira paused by his chair.

  “You were amazing. I’ve got a whole file of story ideas I can’t wait to pitch to you. This is going to be so great!”

  She was gone before he could remind her that this was just temporary. She was going to have to take all her fiery ambition and undoubtedly brilliant ideas and pitch them to his replacement. They’d find someone else for this position soon enough, because he was going to Brazil, on to the next phase of Drake Media’s never-ending expansion.

  In the space of an instant, his high was gone, leaving him feeling hollow and cold. Nothing he’d done in his life had felt as good—as right—as running this news division for the past hour. For a brief, glimmering moment, it was like that dream he’d described to Jess had actually come true. He was turning this ragtag afterthought into a force to be reckoned with. But it wouldn’t last, not for him, anyway. His fate lay down another road.

  In the echoing silence of the conference room, he thought about walking away from this, turning it over to the qualified candidate they eventually hired, and his heart began to pound like it was about to burst right out of his chest. A cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck.

  Chase was a backstabbing son of a bitch, but he’d laid out a harsh truth that was now staring Alex unrelentingly in the face. He was a coward. He hated his life yet he was frozen, unable to make a move to change it. Maybe it was done for the best reasons, because he loved and respected his father, and felt obliged to take over what his father had so diligently built for him. But did that make it right?

  Running that TV station in Brazil was the last thing he wanted to do. This—what he’d done here today—this was what he was meant to do. He could feel the rightness of it in his bones. Anything else would be a grievous compromise of his very soul. It had already cost him Jess. In time, it would cost him himself.

  If Chase didn’t have what it took to step in as his father’s heir, why was he so sure he did? Why did his fortunate birth automatically instill him with what it took to run this company? What if it didn’t? What if he was missing that essential attribute—the drive, the passion—to succeed at this? What if he was sacrificing everything so that he wouldn’t let his father down, and then he ended up failing him, anyway?

  “Hey, Champ.”

  His father’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. Dan was standing in the doorway of the conference room, smiling down at him. “I came by to see if I needed to smooth some things over after yesterday’s excitement, but it seems like you’ve already got it under control.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, to the reporter’s pool. “Chase’s department is on fire this morning. You must have really whipped them up.”

  Licking his lips and inhaling deeply, Alex sat forward in his chair. “Yeah, I did. Dad, close the door and sit down.” He motioned to the chair at his right. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  Dan’s smile faded. He stepped into the room and shut the door before taking a seat at the conference table. “Is this about Chase’s replacement? We can have HR pull together a list of candidates by the end of the week—”

  “I don’t want to replace Chase, Dad. I want to take over his job.”

  “Well, you’ll have to for a couple of weeks, but—”

  “No. Dad. I want it full time. I want to run the journalism division of ClickNews. For good.”

  Dan blinked once, and then leaned back in his chair, hand curled under his chin as he examined Alex. Alex knew that look. His father had just sensed a critical shift in the wind and was carefully assessing his next step, reading the room and his opponent. If this were an acquisition meeting, this is when the other team would start falling apart, panicking under Daniel Drake’s shark-eyed gaze. Alex couldn’t afford to do that.

  “And Brazil?”

  The time had come for him to lay his cards fully on the table. He’d gone along with this for so long because he loved his father. What was important to Dan was important to Alex. But now Alex needed Dan’s support. He could only pray that Dan’s love for him would push him to make that same sacrifice in return.

  “Dad,” he began, folding his hands in front of him on the table. “I don’t want to run Drake Media. I never have.”

  Dan absorbed that with no outward reaction. Alex forced himself to stay silent. The rookie mistake was to babble, to fill the silence, and in doing so, expose yourself. But Alex had learned a few things watching his father negotiate over the years. He would make his father respond first.

  “It’s your company, son,” Dan said. His delivery was matter-of-fact, like he’d pointed out that the sun would rise tom
orrow in the east, even though Alex had just stated it would rise in the west.

  “What you choose to do with Drake Media in the future is entirely up to you. This has nothing to do with that decision. But we’re talking about here and now. And I cannot run Drake Media.”

  “You’re my only child, Alex. If you don’t run it, who will?” Dan sat straighter in his chair, his response this time less calculated. He was officially off-script, which was just how Alex needed him. He wanted to appeal to his father, not engage in protracted negotiations with the head of Drake Media.

  Alex shrugged and attempted a smile. “You’ll have to hire a CEO, Dad. A professional, not your son.”

  Dan shook his head slowly. “I built this whole thing for you.”

  Of all the things his father could have said, this was the hardest to resist. Dan only knew one way to care, and that was to take this amazing thing he’d built and hand it over in full. Telling him that he didn’t want it felt like shoving a shiv right between his father’s ribs.

  “I know you did,” he said quietly. “It’s why, for all these years, I never said anything. I knew how important it was to you, and how much it meant. It was important to me for that reason, too.”

  “But not enough to work for it.”

  Alex dropped his head forward. “Dad... I don’t love it like you do. Believe me, I’ve tried. But I don’t.” Looking up again, he leaned in, trying to get through to his father. “And here’s what I’ve finally figured out. The passion is important. It might be more important than brains or experience or hard work. Chase might have been a bastard, but he said something out loud to me that I’ve never been able to bring myself to acknowledge. My heart is not in this. It never has been.”

  Dan scoffed. “You can’t let anything that little asswipe said get to you—”

  “Believe me, he only said what I already knew. Let me finish, though. He did what he did because he was trying to impress you. He figured sooner or later I’d crack, and he’d be right there, ready to step into my place.”