So around midday, he texted Brynn to see when she was free for dinner.
You’re not going to ask me out on Twitter?
I’m too afraid you’ll say no.
After some hemming and hawing, she agreed to meet him for a late dinner tomorrow night at a seafood place between their apartments.
After no movement or developments during the next day or evening, he headed out. It was the coldest so far of the fall, and Drew’s throat was starting to ache when Brynn jumped out of a cab in front of the restaurant.
“Sorry. I got stuck in a meeting.” She was flushed and not quite able to meet his gaze. Because he’d caught the tail end of it, he also knew she’d been on Evening News Hour, but he wasn’t going to mention it if she didn’t.
Her hair was candle-bright under the streetlight. Her eyes were haggard around the edges, but he was fascinated by the strong lines of her face and the determination of her expression. She wasn’t certain about this, about him, but she was going to do it anyway.
Which made two of them.
He held the door open. “After you.”
5
The interior of the restaurant Drew had suggested was all navy and dark wood, brass touches and paintings of water scenes, much as Brynn suspected an underwater bordello might be.
“I’ve walked by this place a hundred times, but I’ve never been it in. It looks like the inside of the Nautilus or something.” She wasn’t quite certain how he’d take a marine whorehouse reference.
Drew slid around the U-shaped booth until he was sitting right next to her—wow, he was really acting like this was a date—then he gestured to the chef behind the raw bar. “Which makes that guy Captain Nemo?”
“He looks more like a young Kirk Douglas, who could totally get it, by the way.”
He made a dismissive noise, and she poked him in the ribs before picking up her menu. Under his dress shirt his body was slim and tight. She couldn’t get the feel of it off her fingertips, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
As she perused, she asked casually, “What are you working on?”
“Um.” He fumbled with the wine list. “Some stuff related to the special prosecutor’s investigation and the omnibus. No big breaks the past two days. Everyone’s waiting for the next huge story.”
“It feels like it’s coming, right? Everyone’s just staring at each other expectantly. But it’s been radio silence for me too.”
“Would you tell me if it wasn’t?”
“Nope.” Of course she wouldn’t: she barely knew him. The $64,00 question was what would she do if this were real, if they were together. How much would she conceal then?
Could you be close to someone and also hide so much of your life at the same time? The last guy she’d dated was a lawyer. The one before that had worked at a non-profit. Her friends were in the media, but they didn’t cover national politics.
If she and Drew were going to hide so much of their work lives—which was who they both were—maybe having a meal, flirting in public, and whatever else they were doing were terrible ideas. But she’d always known that, and here she was anyway. She was going to stop being stupid soon.
As if he could read her mind, he asked, “Have you ever dated a reporter?”
“Are we dating? And no.”
Dinner wasn’t dating; eating was biology. This didn’t have to mean anything. But she wanted it to.
He hedged. “I think we might be.”
She watched his face, waiting for the moment when she would know if he was sincere. But the server arrived before his tell did. Brynn had questions about the soup and where the fish was from, and when the server left, he still hadn’t given anything away.
It wasn’t as if they were enemies, though. “We’re on the same side,” she told him.
“But we’re fighting a war.”
“One that was declared on us, anyway.” After a lifetime around reporters, she expected to hear people complain about the media—and some lionize it when it didn’t always deserve it—but she’d never felt like much of the public wasn’t on board with what she did until the last election cycle. That was when everything had changed.
Drew rearranged himself in the booth, so his arm now rested behind her. Almost around her. He radiated warmth like one of those big Russian ovens. She wished she were more confident he wasn’t going to burn her up.
“Why did you go into journalism?” he asked.
“The family business?”
“Your dad too?”
Oh hell, he hadn’t known. “He’s a TV news producer, but my parents split when I was a kid. I don’t see him much.” She trailed off. She certainly didn’t want to talk about her family with him. It wasn’t good first-date conversation. “You don’t want to hear this story.”
“Yes, I do. I told you mine.”
That he had. She probably owed him, then. “Um, let’s see…my mom had this party when I was about eight. I was supposed to be in bed, but I snuck down to watch. Mostly I wanted to see the glitz—the dresses, the men in nice suits, the jewelry, the flower arrangements. Anyhow, the impeachment stuff was raging. She’d been trying to keep it from me, but I’d picked up on the details.”
Why was she telling him the long version? My mom’s work seemed important, and so I became interested was what she normally said, and it was perfectly true. But Drew’s questions, or maybe his attention on her, were truth serum. No wonder he’d become a reporter.
She sipped her water and regarded him over the rim of her glass. As usual, his expression was sphinxlike. “Don’t laugh, but I went to this chic-chic private school with senator’s kids—”
The dimple winked at her. “Of course you did.”
“—and every one of us could have told you about the blue dress, we all had opinions on single-party consent for taping phone calls, the whole deal.”
“I sincerely doubt ‘every’ kid was following it closely.”
“Maybe not. Selection bias. But Mom had been writing these columns about how the Democratic Party was more interested in chasing the Reagan Democrats, mostly these working-class white men, than representing women’s interests and critiquing all the sexism in the coverage of the impeachment. At this party I was spying on, I remember these men, these old-school reporter types, circling to criticize. Their heads were cut off by the doorway, but I could see their torsos. She was wearing this red dress, and there was this ring of black jackets around her. This is a long answer to your question. It might not be an answer at all, actually.” She was babbling, but it was his fault. He shook her off-kilter.
“You’ve never told me a story that was less than fascinating.”
For a moment, she weighed his words. He seemed to mean them. He seemed to mean all of this.
So she told him the unvarnished truth: “Those storied reporters and editors, those men, told her she was wrong. They told her she was biased. They told her she was jealous. She shrugged them off, but she went to get something in the kitchen, and she caught me on the stairs. She put me back to bed, and I asked why they didn’t like what she was writing. She said, ‘They’ve gotten to tell all the stories for a long time.’ I wrote my first piece of journalism that week about the people who worked in the school cafeteria and how they were paid and treated. I never stopped wanting to tell the truth as I saw it.”
Wow, she felt damn exposed. It might have been easier to be naked in front of the man.
She could feel her cheeks color, but she held his gaze. He set his free hand on top of hers and ran his thumb over her skin. His brow softened, and his entire face suffused with warmth. That look had to be real. Had to be.
Lightly, but in a tone that seemed to recognize her self-consciousness and try to make her feel more comfortable, he asked, “No objectivity for you?”
“Objectivity is a dodge people use to justify the current state of things, to shut down points of view they don’t want to listen to. Can’t journalism be forceful, rigorous, and reflect the people who
write it?”
“When has it ever done anything other than that?” His tone was slightly patronizing.
“If you mean newsrooms are still mostly white, male, and overwhelmingly well off—”
“Exactly. Those aren’t new perspectives.”
“You’re right. You’re totally right.”
For an instant she thought she might have surprised him, but then he deadpanned, “I'm glad we agree.”
“No, what I mean is I don’t know how to erase myself from my work. It always matters that I write the story and not someone else. That’s why news is important and why we need lots of different kinds of people writing it. But what should matter is our parallel searches for truth.”
He was still caressing her hand, and she couldn’t tell if he was aware he was doing it or not. “I know that. I didn’t feel like there were a lot of people like me in newsrooms. It drove me to stay there even when it felt hard.”
“And your work is important,” she told him.
A slight smile. “But it doesn’t feel like a shared mission, not when there are bad actors in the system and page views drive everything.”
Needing him not to touch her if she was going to keep her mind, she gently slipped her hand from under his and pulled her hair tie out. “The corporate stuff is never going away. News is always going to have to make money, or at least break even. But I have no idea how to push back against news orgs that are basically propaganda, especially not when it’s popular.” She rubbed a spot on her neck that was throbbing and gave him a sidelong look. “I like the stuff you’ve been writing about what the budget cuts mean to people outside of the District.”
“You’re the only one. My editor wishes I chased bombshells like you.”
She didn’t chase them; people threw them into her path and she sometimes wished they didn’t. “My stories are loud, but they don’t impact people’s lives like eliminating funding for Legal Aid.”
“No fucking shit, right?”
Yeah, something like that.
She’d read his piece on the Legal Aid cuts. She’d liked it. He wanted to pump his fist in the air and then kiss her until they couldn’t breathe.
In the past, he’d avoided relationships. He could understand in a distant, theoretical way why someone would want emotional intimacy even if he hadn’t had much of it. But she was being far more straight up with him than he’d been with her, and it was disarming. Her origin story explained how she could be in the establishment but outside it, why she was defensive, and how he’d gotten under her skin…it made him wish things were different.
When their salads came, Brynn yawned and then apologized. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. It’s been the longest two years or so. Let me say this, though, I haven’t made a lot of friends or dated at all, really, since things got crazy.”
“Since you became famous?”
“Sure. Why not.” She moved her salad around her plate with her fork, her mouth set like she wasn’t happy. “But while the thing I told you isn’t like, revealing, or personal, or whatever…can you keep it to yourself?”
She was asking him to keep her secrets. She was asking if she could trust him.
And he had no idea if she could.
“No worries. I’ll tell everyone you were bitten by a radioactive spider.”
She huffed out a laugh, but her gaze was open, believing. “Good.”
His stomach clenched at her trust, but he shoved the discomfort away.
The conversation moved around work if it wasn’t about it. Brynn was witty, thoughtful. Since she’d grown up in the District, and well, had had a lot of money, she knew the city differently than he did. Neither had seen a movie or much TV lately, but they had similar tastes, even similar friend groups.
“I’m surprised we didn’t meet before,” he said after several rounds of ‘do you know so-and-so’ had turned up enough mutual acquaintances to field a softball team.
“You’d be seen with an aristocrat like me?” Her tease faded into a broad yawn, however, and Drew checked his phone.
Shit. He was normally passed out by now, and he was certain Brynn was too. “It’s almost ten o’clock, and you’re practically falling asleep. This was a terrible idea.”
“No, it was a great idea, but I slept awfully last night even by 2017 standards.”
He flagged the server and asked for the check. “But can you add a to-go box with a piece of the flourless chocolate cake, please?”
“What are you doing?” Brynn asked.
“I’m going to put you in a cab and send you home. But you should take some cake for breakfast.”
“You’re amazing.”
His heart stumbled then squeezed hard on its next beat. Affection. This was what affection felt like.
He’d seen all kinds of things at dinner: Brynn took fast, tiny bites, like someone who hadn’t had time to eat in forever and was afraid of being interrupted at any moment, and she sometimes laughed with her entire body. She’d run out of adrenaline months ago—as had he—and she’d kept going. Out of commitment or stupidity or habit, neither of them could stop and they’d both experienced something few if any people would ever understand.
But getting all gooey about her and wondering if she was ticklish or how she’d taste didn’t help him do what he needed to do. It wasn’t fair to either of them, so as much as he didn’t want to, he had to walk away from her.
After he’d paid the bill, they went outside to wait for the car she’d called. She was standing closer than strangers, even friends, normally would. She rolled her head from side to side. It was at least the fifth time she’d done that. He’d bet she was aching in the exact place he hurt when he spent the day staring at his monitor.
With this, only with this, he could help.
He moved her hair over her shoulder. It fell almost to her elbows, was fine and soft, and smelled like herbs. Rosemary, probably from her shampoo. He breathed deeply again committing it to memory, and then set his hands on her neck.
“Is this okay?” His voice came out deep, quiet.
After one tense second, her response wasn’t muted. She dropped her chin to her chest and gave an enthusiastic, “Uh-huh.”
He pressed his thumbs into the base of her neck and traced little circles. Shivers seemed to go through her as he hit the places where she was tender. He rubbed up and down her neck and along the stretch between her shoulders and spine. When he went back to one, she made a rough noise—an intimate, secret noise—that had him wanting to bite the triangle of skin at her nape.
Why couldn’t she be anyone else, or this any other time?
She wasn’t and it wasn’t, but he kept kneading anyway. Now that he had his hands on her, he didn’t want to take them off.
“So good at this,” she whispered after a minute.
“You need a real massage.”
“I’ll schedule it between yoga and brunch tomorrow.”
He was still chuckling when her Lyft arrived. With a regretful groan, she pulled away from him.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to my place for a nightcap or something? Whatever it is they say in old movies?”
His pulse kicked up another notch. Of course he wanted to. He’d love to blot out the news cycle for an hour, to ease more of the tension out of Brynn’s body, and to make them both feel very, very good. The problem was in the morning, reality would sweep in.
He set his hand against her cheek. Her skin was differently soft than her hair. “If I get in that car, you won’t get any sleep.” If he got in that car, all bets and limits would be off.
“Sleep is overrated.” When he didn’t move, she turned her head and pressed her mouth to his palm. With her lips still on his skin, she looked at him. Her pupils had dilated. She hadn’t expected this, this pull between them.
She took an unsteady step backward, and he dropped his hand, but he could still feel the place where her mouth had touched him. Whatever else was true, their attraction was real and
strong. Jesus.
“Night,” she said.
“Night,” he echoed.
He watched until the car’s taillights were too far away to make out any longer. Not going home with her had been the cautious thing to do, the safe thing, but it sucked hairy balls.
Watching his breath turn to fog and trying to convince himself he’d made the right decision, he walked to his apartment. But before he could fall asleep, a notification sounded on his phone.
It was a document from Hadley Darlington.
6
Brynn was having, if she did say so herself, a pretty awesome day. She and Matt had had a piece out about palace intrigue at the White House with dozens of sources. If it recapitulated some of what people already knew, well, so be it. It was still good reporting and writing, which counted for something.
She’d also had several texts from Drew, though she hadn’t seen or talked to him since their dinner three days prior, but he’d been funny and sweet and they were both extremely busy. Plus, she’d basically swooned when she’d eaten the cake for breakfast. Men who understood the importance of chocolate were not to be under-appreciated, especially not if they had knee-weakening eyes, were obsessed with politics, and shared her ambition.
She shouldn’t be optimistic. If the last year had taught her anything, it was that hope was dangerous. But she couldn’t help it: a little late-night office chair dancing it was. Carly Rae Jepsen spoke to her soul in a language both carbonated and giddy.
An alert popped up on her desktop informing her Drew had a new article out. He hadn’t mentioned he was working on something, but of course he was. This was the job. Humming, she began to read. By the end of the second paragraph, she’d gone quiet. By the halfway point, she felt vaguely ill.
Someone had given Drew a memo from the White House Counsel’s Office on whether executive privilege could extend to matters relating to the campaign and quotes about how the Justice Department was managing the special prosecutor’s investigation. Basically, a source had given him one of the biggest stories of the year.
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