“This is a luxurious libation, don’t you think?” he said, changing the subject with a wink.
An ambrosial aphrodisiac, I thought to myself as I lifted the straw to my mouth once again. And that, basically, is how, a couple of hours later, I wound up in the hotel suite of a People magazine certified eligible bachelor.
And that’s where he leaned forward across the plush velvet couch and gave me a soft, gentle kiss on my mouth. He had soft, full lips, warm and, oh…this is hard for me to write, even now. One doesn’t get many kisses like that behind bars.
“I should go,” I said, not really wanting to, but proud of myself for saying so.
“It’s okay,” he said, “we can just talk if you want.”
I wanted to kiss him. “It’s just, well, I don’t want to do anything stupid, and you are one of the most coveted guys in the country and I really don’t want to be another conquest and…” I went on like this for a bit too long, embarrassing myself more and more with each word. I grabbed a water bottle from the coffee table and finished it off, because if I was drinking I couldn’t talk.
Mark laughed. His eyes closed when he laughed. It was incredibly sweet.
“You know the stupid thing?” he said, sitting back into the cushions, away from me. “Because of that People article, sure I can get laid, but no woman will trust me enough to take me seriously.”
I shot him an impish grin. “Poor you.”
“No. Seriously. I really like you, Annie. And I know it sounds like a line, but I would really like to get to know you. See what happens.” He crossed his arms, giving himself an uneasy little hug. “Is that okay?”
“Okay,” I said, wanting to believe him. I told him that if we really wanted to get to know each other, he had to trust that I understood that everything he said was off the record, and that made him smile, as if there was a lot he wanted to tell me, which, of course (I later found out) there was.
We didn’t kiss again that night. We just talked and talked until the sun started to rise, and then we both fell asleep on the bed, fully dressed.
When I woke up, there were two pink peonies on my pillow. Mark was in his hotel-issued, white terry-cloth bathrobe, watching me.
“I stole them from the breakfast spread,” he said, pointing his chin at the flowers.
There was a cart with coffee and pastries at the foot of the bed. He poured me a cup and sat down next to me. I sat up to take it.
“Peonies are my favorite,” I said. “And lilacs.”
He smiled.
I smiled.
It was a little awkward again. And there was no alcohol in this brew.
“You have beautiful hair.” He gently touched my brown tangled nest.
I worried about my morning breath.
“What time is it?” I said, looking for the television remote. Found it. I turned on my show. “I have a piece on at 7:44.”
“Cool.” Mark looked at his watch. “We have thirty seconds.” He put his arm around my shoulder, giving me a quick squeeze, causing me to spill a bit of the coffee on the sheet.
It is an odd thing to watch someone watching your work, especially when it’s someone you have a crush on. And, if I could have chosen it, this certainly wasn’t the first piece I wanted Mark to see.
“Wow,” he said when the story was over and Natasha was showing Faith and Ken some of our purchases. “That was totally disgusting.”
“You don’t like snakes?”
“Remember, I work in Washington.”
I laughed. “It was pretty gross. The place smelled like a subway toilet.”
“I think I might have fainted if I got anywhere near one of those pits.”
“I did faint,” I said, quickly regretting admitting that.
“You did? From the smell?”
“No, I…I don’t really know why.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well, I had gotten a disturbing call, and it kind of made me unbalanced. And maybe that, with the smell, I don’t know…”
Mark looked at me as if I was nuts. But in a sweet way. And I don’t know why, but I guess I needed to talk about it with someone, so I told him the story. About the piece, about the calls.
“Wow,” he said again. “I saw that story. I was there the day it aired, remember? It was a really nice piece, but what’s the big deal?”
“I know. But Natasha said that the second caller specifically mentioned it when calling me all sorts of horrible things.”
“Like what?”
It was too embarrassing for me to spell out how he had phrased in hideously derogatory terms that I was a weak journalist, a lazy hack, that reporting like mine was part of the problem, and that I might as well be producing Nazi propaganda and working for Leni Riefenstahl at the rate I was going. It had really hit a nerve.
“He just said stuff about the story being totally wrong and misleading, and basically blamed me for the downfall of society,” I said. “There were some threats about needing to get it right, or else.” It sounded funny when I summed it up like that. Now I wasn’t even so sure why I had gotten so upset.
“Or else?”
“Or else. I’m not really sure what.”
“Well, who do you think it could be?”
“Honestly? My best guess is that it was some whack-job viewer. We do have a few, and they do make strange phone calls from time to time. But the weird thing is that I don’t know how they would have my cell number. Unless some idiot intern forwarded the call. I suppose that could happen. But it was still upsetting.”
“And they haven’t called again?”
“No.”
“Will you let me know if they do?”
“Okay,” I said, relieved that I could talk about this with someone, that he didn’t seem to think I had overreacted.
And then we got up because I had to rush home to shower and change, and Mark, well, he had a country to help run.
Dear Faith and Ken,
I have been watching your show for over five years, but after your interview with the family of the runaway, I am turning the dial. It was completely distasteful to harass the parents in such a way. At least on Sunrise America they just spoke to the siblings.
Disdainfully,
A Disappointed Viewer
CHAPTER FIVE
EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 10:00 A.M. WE HAD our weekly staff meeting. It was usually a fairly staid affair in which we would pile into the conference room (walls decorated with the ever-present mosaic of monitors and posters from our network’s sitcoms and reality shows). We crowded around the ferry boat–sized conference table, coffee in hand, sometimes a bagel, stragglers standing in the back. Tom would read off the previous week’s ratings, usually getting overly enthusiastic if he had anything positive to say about ours, which was becoming rare. The staff would give tentative feedback (the grumbling happened out of Tom’s earshot), and then we went on to tear apart the competition:
“June and Jack looked like they were about to hit each other yesterday, did anyone notice that?”
“I know! It’s so obvious they hate each other!”
or
“How