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  Good grief, where did that come from? If I didn’t know myself better, I’d swear I’m turning into a corny undergrad poet after knowing Avery for five minutes.

  It’s good that human beings haven’t evolved to the point of mind reading, because if the other sports writers could hear what I’m thinking right now, they would not recognize me.

  But then, maybe they would not even bother to react. The people in this room are so beat down by this job, they all barely looked up when I introduced Avery to the room, which should have been Reese’s task—seeing as he’s her actual boss, as he likes to point out—but the little man has never been known for his manners.

  The rest of the tired staff’s reaction to Avery was more of a collection of half-hearted, preoccupied “heys” before all eyes went back to their screens.

  It made me feel a little bit bad for her. As much of a self-assured presence as she might be, I hope she doesn’t feel unwelcome. I don’t think I want to be here on the day when she realizes what a soul-sucking place this can be. Sure, she could tone down the excited puppy energy a bit, but I have no doubt she’s a hard worker.

  I finish showing her everything I need for the spreadsheets, then hand her a sheet with the list of coach contacts.

  “Here are the coaches you need to call and get quotes from tonight.”

  She takes the sheet and eyeballs it, nodding, chewing on her lip.

  “All the scores from all the games are already in the spreadsheet. You just need stats and quotes. Use those to write the story.”

  “What story?”

  I look at her. Has she had a brain episode? “We cover ten school districts and we each write a story about two of the games. For tonight, I’m letting you just handle one of the games.”

  She tilts her head and seems honestly befuddled. “But…what’s the story in that?”

  “The game,” I say, my stomach flipping a somersault and getting the feeling like Perry made a mistake. “The game is the story. You’ve seen sports highlights on ESPN, right? Every game has a story, you get the facts and you tell it.”

  Avery’s eyes widen and she nods. “OK.”

  Shit. She is scared shitless.

  But she doesn’t admit it.

  Still, I can’t help but admire her bravery if she is, in fact, as lost as I think she is.

  Avery walks away in her thigh-high boots and finds her desk. Whipping off her large scarf and tidy trench coat, I watch her out of the corner of my eye while she looks around for a coat rack. Seeing none, and noticing that everyone has simply hung their coats over the backs of their chairs like savages, she places her long coat over the edge of the partition separating her work space from mine.

  For a brief second I get a glimpse of her fitted sweater, diamond plaid skirt, and patterned tights that disappear inside the tops of her boots. That outfit has me thinking of Mary Tyler Moore.

  Is it hot in here or is it me? Did Reese actually grow some balls and adjust the thermostat?

  Geez, look at her. She’s too cute for this place. She stands out like the lone house with colored Christmas lights on a street where all the other homeowners have silently agreed to use only white icicles. Avery is a welcome sight in this office with oatmeal-colored walls, gray carpeting, and outdated computers.

  A part of me looks forward to reading what she comes up with. And taking a good long look at it with her seated next to me. Or better, while she’s hovering over me. Because I just like having her near me.

  Chapter Four

  Avery

  It’s now 10:30 p.m.; the coaches and assistant coaches I’m trying to reach on the phone are either in bed, on their way to bed, or stuck in traffic because of the weather.

  I’m lucky to get any quotes from the coaches whose teams have won, let alone the ones who have lost. Half of them are not even answering their phones. The ones who do don’t want to spend thirty seconds talking to me, and there’s no way I’m getting any statistics out of them.

  Undaunted, I cobble together an article from what they gave me and shoot it into the shared editing folder.

  And then I get up to leave.

  “Where are you going?” I hear Reese say while I’m buttoning my coat.

  “Home. Well, to the hotel in the next town over, where I’m staying until I can find a place to rent. You know, it’s really tough finding a place this time of year and there’s not much to choose from in this town. I was wondering if—”

  Reese cuts me off. “You have to stay here until your story has been proofed and sent to print, in case of questions.”

  I blink at him. “That’s what cell phones are for, I do believe.” I amp up the Southern twang but he is not charmed at all.

  “This is how we do things here.”

  I consider my words carefully. It would really suck to lose this job, especially considering the plans I have in mind. Plans known only to me, for now. But I also know Perry isn’t going to let Reese fire me for shooting my mouth off. I decide to be a good girl. At first.

  “Oh, I see. Well, I guess I haven’t had the time to acclimate myself to this place. As a human interest reporter, I mostly worked day shifts and I was always on call during editing. I’ve never been told to cool my heels in the newsroom while lots of other stories are out there just waiting to be found.”

  I try to make it sound like I’m the busiest of bees, but really, I’m tired. The drive from the small rural airport to my hotel to this paper took longer than I’d planned. I had to drive slowly because I’m not used to driving in snow. And if the chatter on the police scanner is any indication, I need to leave soon before the road between here and my hotel in the next town over gets shut down due to blizzard conditions. I just want to go to the hotel, put my feet up, maybe order a pizza and find something good to watch on the hotel TV.

  Reese presses his palms together and taps his nose, eyes closed in thought. For a second I think he might be praying. But no, he opens his eyes and his face looks puckered, like he’s been force fed a lemon. “Here at this paper, we win awards for a reason. Everyone has their beat, but everyone pitches in when we have bigger things going on. And everyone stays until they’re given permission to go home.”

  I glance around at the other reporters, who aren’t even pretending not to eavesdrop on this tense conversation I’m having with their boss. It’s the first time I’ve seen any sort of animated expression on any of their exhausted faces tonight.

  What I want to do is go all Julia Sugarbaker on his scrawny ass. What I want to say is, Yes, I agreed to help you with football because Perry said that your sports editor needed an extra set of hands. I’ve been doing newspaper work since I was fourteen years old, where I started out serving coffee and writing up the police blotter. And I’ve written award-winning pieces for papers in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and all over Florida. So when I say you can trust me, you can, because Gramps didn’t raise a half-asser. And I can answer questions over the phone or email because this is the 21st Century, Reese.

  I open my mouth to say some polite version of this when the police scanner crackles and a faint, officious voice declares that yet another highway out of town is completely shut down due to the storm.

  Reese’s shoulders are practically inside his ear holes right now, he’s so tense. He starts again. “We have a very strict policy…”

  “Story’s fine. You can go, Avery. But you’ll have to find a place to stay in town.”

  I whirl around, and Beast is standing there watching us, looking twice as mad as Reese is right now. I don’t know whether to feel relief or fear; he looks like he wants to pound Reese into the earth with a cartoon sledgehammer.

  I won’t be long for this job, no matter how much Perry likes me. Reese dislikes me. Most Reeses of the world—tightass, frustrated little rule-followers, grasping to be noticed by the bigwigs—usually don’t like me. Reese is what the rough and tumble unionized press crew back in Florida would call a punk-ass bitch. Still, as much
as he chaps my hide, even in the limited interaction we’ve had so far, I feel a little sorry for him.

  And yet, a tiny thrill tickles my insides at the sight of Beast’s murderous posture. We only met about an hour ago, and yet, it looks like Beast is trying to protect me or stick up for me. He’s being openly kind to me, and I like the way this feels. Certainly, I don’t need a hero for this moment with this puny man. I come from a long line of men and women who crap bigger than Reese. However, I can appreciate how nice it is having a Beast on my side.

  “It’s all right, let’s do this and get it over with.” I march over to Beast’s work station and pull up a tattered office chair next to his. He grunts and takes a seat. As he drops into his chair, I notice he smells like cedar and peppermints, and it reminds me of the large, chalky peppermint discs my Gramps used to keep in his desk. The ones with the portrait of the Dutch queen stamped on them. The memory of stealing them out of his desk makes me smile.

  “OK?” Beast says it like a question, and I snap out of my walk down memory lane.

  “Yes. You’re perfect. I mean. I’m perfectly fine to have you edit my story. So, tell me what I need to work on, Coach.”

  He looks at me like he suspects something. Oh no. He doesn’t like it.

  “Well,” he says, pushing up his glasses and peering at the screen. “Somehow you managed to get a decent, thought-provoking quote out of a coach who just missed his last chance at the playoffs during the year he retires from coaching. It’s a little overwritten and unorthodox, but you turned it into a think piece about the meaning of life. How the hell did you do that in that short time?”

  I give him my dorky finger guns and click my tongue against my teeth. It’s silly, but it’s what my Gramps used to do at his staffers, and at me all the time. It’s my goofy little way of keeping his memory alive.

  “Well, like I said, I’ve been writing human interest pieces since I was seventeen. I’ve done crime, health, arts, and just about everything else besides sports. So I just wrote the way I know how to write.”

  Beast stammers like it’s hard to pay a compliment but he’s trying. “Seventeen, you say? That’s interesting. Well, this is good. It’s unusual but I think our readers will like it.”

  I nod my head. I don’t want this conversation to end. I like him. Beast has the potential to end up being a good friend. I’d love to learn about sports writing from him. Hell, I’d love to learn about sports, period. It’s about the only thing I don’t know a lot about, apart from the college football I absorbed watching Florida teams with Gramps.

  “How long have you been writing sports?”

  “Uh…you can go if you want,” he says abruptly. “You don’t have to stay and make small talk.”

  I smile and raise an eyebrow. “You say that like nobody ever goes to the trouble to get to know you.”

  “They…don’t.”

  I glance around. The other reporters are all still clacking away and dialing up numbers and entering stats, cussing under their breath. Reese is doing the same but occasionally shoots a glance over to where Beast and I are sitting.

  Yikes. My new boss does not like me at all. I don’t blame him. I was brought in without his input. Still, he could try to be friendlier and not act like such a whiny little ball sack. That’s when I remember something Gramps used to say: If you don’t like your boss, become the boss.

  “So, are you going to answer the question?” I ask.

  I fear that Beast is going to heave another exasperated sigh at me but instead he seems to perk up. His shoulders drop a little and he relaxes. “I played offensive tackle in high school but needed something to round out my college applications. I was a decent writer so the newspaper nerds put me in charge of sports. No offense.”

  “None taken. We are our own sort of nerds.”

  “Right. So then I went on to play for the Hawkeyes.”

  “Are you serious? Wow!”

  “Don’t get too excited. I got injured my second year and lost my scholarship, so I had to work to put myself through the rest of school. I found part-time work at the local paper while I finished my communications degree. End of story.”

  Oh, I want to say, but don’t you see? This is just the beginning! I need to warm up my cold coffee now but I don’t want to get up. I like listening to him talk.

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “About seven years.”

  “Holy shit,” I say. “What’s keeping you here?”

  The sound of his deep laughter makes it clear he’s someone with a dark sense of humor. I like it. You can tell when a laugh comes all the way up from the diaphragm; it’s real. “Careful,” he says.

  “Why, because Reese is watching? Shit, you know it’s unusual that you’re still here, right? With your talent you shouldn’t be staying at any one paper for longer than two years. You do your thing, make your mark, learn everything you can and move on, right?”

  “How do you know about my writing?”

  “I do my homework before I take ov—before I take on a new job. You’re bound for great things. The world needs to know who you are. Not just your little corner of the world here.”

  Beast and I spend the next few seconds exchanging a look—it’s a restrained smile as we each try to read what the other is thinking.

  We both look over and Reese is fully glaring at us from his cubicle.

  “I’m sure Reese is used to it, right? You can’t hang out in a newsroom without a thick skin and a realistic outlook.”

  Beast mutters so only I can hear. “He’s been here twelve years. As far as he’s concerned, he’s a lifer.”

  I mutter back under my breath, “Seems like a guy who needs to broaden his horizons.”

  He chuckles. “What about you? How’d you end up here, other than being a Perry conquest at the national awards banquet?”

  “You make it sound like I’m some kind of trophy.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  I could be offended, but I know he doesn’t mean it in a sexual way.

  “I did win a few awards last year. Perry and my Gra— er, my publisher—knew each other from the board of directors for the national organization. The boss man liked to complain about Perry all the time, saying your paper belongs in another division altogether. Said you guys always win because you deflate your circulation numbers to get into a division with rinky-dink papers with less money backing them up to make them look slick.”

  Beast’s mouth falls open and he looks like he’s seen the ghost of Rupert Murdoch. Wait, is Murdoch dead? Gramps did sort of murder him in a game of Texas hold ’em that one time. “What?”

  “That’s one way to look at it, sure.” The comment comes from behind me, but it’s not from Reese. I recognize the voice right away as that of Perry Grant.

  Gulp. What is a publisher doing hanging around his paper at 11 p.m. on a Friday? I play it off with some lighthearted jibes. And why shouldn’t I? After all, Perry had cornered me at the national awards banquet, where I was trapped, listening to him tell newspaper war stories for two hours as he got more and more drunk on Manhattans. “Shouldn’t you be in your oversized hunting cabin in the woods, waiting out the blizzard?”

  Reese shoots daggers at me with his eyes. Behind me I hear Beast suck in a breath.

  But Perry, the tall, barrel-chested older man with a bow tie, suspenders, and a combover, only laughs and takes the stance of a man who loves to hold court. “Young lady, did you inherit your late publisher’s sense of humor somehow? You all know old Jake Weatherington and I go way back. We both came up at the same time as Edward R. Murrow, when reporters were respected. We were tough, and Jake was the toughest of all of them.”

  Why are all publishers old white men with bow ties, suspenders and combovers?

  Too bad Jake Weatherington—my Gramps on my mother’s side, though Perry never asked and doesn’t need to know—would never say the same to you, I think. I know the truth, that Gramps thought Perry and his whol
e family were shady as fuck. He probably would not have encouraged me to take this job. But something just drew me here. It wasn’t Perry. Sure, he’d offered me the job on the spot after our long, one-sided conversation at Nationals. But after researching his company a bit, it was the writing that caught my attention. They let people write long articles, and they fill the paper—even on the inside—with lots of full-color photography. That is why they decimate their category every year.

  “I just wanted to stop in and greet Ms. Jacobs in person, and introduce her to everyone,” Perry says, sounding like he’s gearing up to give an inspirational speech or something. I think everyone will thank me for stopping him before he starts.

  “Thank you, I’ve met everyone. So nice to see you again, but you’d better get home, sir. It’s miserable out there and getting worse.

  The police scanner squawks again. “A minivan full of nuns is stranded on the bypass coming home from the soup kitchen. Can anyone respond?”

  I cut my eyes to the scanner. “I really feel like we should be covering this blizzard,” I say.

  Reese pipes up. “You think so? If you were actually from here, you would know we have at least three weather events like this per year.”

  “That doesn’t explain why we’re not writing about it,” I say before I can catch myself.

  Again the police scanner chirps and a female dispatcher’s voice describes someone coming to the aid of the stranded nuns. “A tow truck is getting them out, assess for injuries.”

  I cock my head at Reese, who looks utterly seriously about not being interested in my suggestion, even though there’s a minivan full of nuns stuck in a snow drift just up the road.

  Perry rubs his Santa-sized belly and laughs. “She’s a firecracker, just like I told you, Reese. And a go-getter. Better watch out, she might be gunning for your job.”

  I look from Perry to Reese and he appears to be only half joking.

  Both Beast and Reese look deeply uncomfortable after that comment. Thank god for the voices on the scanner breaking the silence. And thank goodness, they’ve stopped using official police code language and just begun bantering. “Ooh. It’s tow truck guy. Remember the cute one from last Christmas? He’s doing it again.”