Chapter 56 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I wanna tell you, but I don’t know how / I’m only honest when it rains / An open book with a torn out page / And my ink’s run out / I wanna love you, but I don’t know how”
— “Sleeping At Last” by Neptune
“It’s not what you think,” I try.
He shakes his head. “I told you not to do that.”
“Okay, fine. It’s exactly what you think,” I hurry to say. “But it’s also—it’s so fucking complicated, Doug.”
“Uncomplicate it for me.” He takes the lid off his coffee, blows on it, and takes a sip. “How long?”
I blink at him stupidly. It’s not that I don’t know what he’s asking; it’s just that my brain has been scrambled by sex and surprise and little girls letting red balloons fly off into the air. “How long what?”
His nose wrinkles up and I know immediately that I said the wrong thing. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Jillian. How long have you been sleeping with the CEO of the company you’re supposed to be investigating?”
Sleeping with. That’s such a bizarrely banal word for what’s been happening. So chaste and cute. It belongs in a PG-13 rom-com, not the dark, depraved, fucked-up mess I’ve been mired in.
“A few weeks,” I say helplessly. “Give or take.”
“I see.” He sets his coffee down, lips pursed. “And during these few weeks, ‘give or take,’ were you also actively building a story about his family?”
“I… Er… Well, yes.”
“And you don’t see the problem here?”
I lean across the table, feeling the desperate lies using my mouth like a puppet but completely unable to stop it. “Doug, he’s a source. This is access! Direct, unprecedented access to the inner workings of—”
“Again, I beg you to stop.” The flat of his hand raised up to me stings every bit as bad as if he’d slapped me right across the face with it. “Is that what you’re telling yourself? Jillian… do you really think you have the upper hand here?”
“I know what I’m doing,” I whimper.
“Do you?” Doug looks skeptical, to say the least. “From where I’m sitting, it looks like a thirty-year-old billionaire with a legal team the size of a small country has gotten his hooks into my best reporter, and she’s sitting here in his T-shirt telling me it’s just about access.”
My face goes hot. I glance down at the shirt. It was such a nice thing to put it on this morning and feel swaddled in him. Now, I wish I’d burned it and flung the ashes into the East River instead.
“Men like Kir Lazarev have tools, Jillian. Not just money and muscle. I’m talking stuff that’s way, way more intrusive than that macho man shit.
” Doug’s voice is sad, not angry, and there isn’t a thesaurus or dictionary alive that contains enough words to explain how low that makes me feel.
“Charm. Exclusivity. The illusion of intimacy. I bet he made you feel like you’re the only person who really gets him, yeah?
” He doesn’t need me to nod, but I do anyway.
“It’s a playbook, Pierce. Old as me. As dirt.
I always thought you were too smart to fall for something like that. ”
He pauses.
“Now, though, I gotta ask… Was I wrong?”
I don’t answer him. I can’t.
Because he isn’t wrong at all.
The seconds expand into an endless pit of centuries as I trace the whole ugly timeline backward.
A few weeks ago, I was a reporter with a story, a source, and a deadline.
What have I become since then? It’s like I blinked and suddenly, I’m now a woman who let a man climb through her window and put a gun to her spine and then ended up on her kitchen floor underneath him.
The rules I made got broken as fast as I could make them.
Hidden cameras and sweaty confessional booths, alleys, photo darkrooms—the list of sins goes on and on.
Maybe that would’ve been okay, if there’d been at least one line in the sand that I refused to cross. But as of this morning, even that is gone.
Because when Kir asked me to kill the story, I folded right away. Okay. Consider it done. It’s as buried as your mother was. I didn’t even have the guts to feel guilty for longer than a few seconds, because I wanted to be happy so badly that I let it all go.
Every rule I’ve ever lived by, every single one: Gone.
I look up to see Doug watching me over the rims of his glasses. He might as well have a stethoscope pressed to my forehead that can read every last one of my thoughts down to the comma. It’s all there, obvious, undeniable, shameful, true.
“You know what I remember?” he says as he sighs and stands.
“Two years ago, a redhead kid walks into my office with a cold-case pitch about a contractor burying asbestos in a school gymnasium. She was green as hell, but damn was she eager. Didn’t have a source or a single shred of proof.
Hell, she didn’t have nothing more than a silly little hunch.
But she looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Give me three weeks and I’ll give you a front page,’ and fucking hell, my cold, dead, black, shriveled little husk of a heart actually believed her.
And then I’ll be damned—she did it. In two weeks, not three.
” He picks up his coffee and his to-go bag.
“That kid had a fire in her chest that I haven’t seen in thirty years of doing this.
I hired her on the spot because I knew she was going to be something. And she was. She is.”
I want so badly to tell him that I’m still that person. Nothing has changed; I can still do what I do. But the words won’t come because we both know they’d be bullshit.
Doug reaches into his back pocket, pulls out his wallet, and drops a twenty on the table next to my half-eaten croissant. “That fire in your chest, Jillian?” He tucks the wallet away. “He didn’t light it; you did. But he sure as hell didn’t say no when he came along to snuff it out.”
Then he turns and walks away down Bleecker Street. Not once does he stop to look back.
Kir rounds the corner thirty seconds later, saying something I don’t catch as he drops into his seat.
“… Jillian?”
I look up at him. The sun is painfully bright in my eyes now. I wish it would go away. “Huh? I mean, sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked if you missed me.” He smiles, beautiful and terrible all at once.
“Y-yeah,” I say, picking up my menu and holding it in front of my face while I pretend to read. “Tons.”
Kir’s finger snakes over the top of the menu and pulls it down. “Everything okay?” he asks. He’s frowning now.
“Peachy,” I assure him with the fakest smile I’ve ever mustered. “Just hungry all the sudden.”
He scrutinizes me for a second longer before he shrugs and leans back in his seat, unconcerned.
And all I can think is that, in my pocket, my phone holds a draft email to Doug with a finished article attached. It sits there.
Unsent.
Waiting.