Chapter Seven
Jason
Work at the station never stopped. Whether we were on the air or not, something was always happening. People were working on stories, or audio, or graphics, something was happening with the weather: there was always something. I was just about to go on for the evening broadcast. I had gotten into work a few hours ago and was in makeup. I was thumbing through my script last minute. I had just come out of a meeting with Clark, and he had just talked my ear off for twenty minutes about nothing in particular.
It was good that he took his job seriously, but I had never met anyone as nerdy and socially awkward in my life. Interacting with him hurt. He had to be on the spectrum or something; nothing wrong with that, but I couldn't imagine how he had gotten this far in his life. He was boring as a bag of rocks. Did he have a girlfriend or any kind of friend for that matter? Talking to him was like talking to a cat or something. I knew he could hear me when I talked to him, and he responded when I did, but I couldn't really be sure of what was going on upstairs, if anything.
After working with Shelby for a year, who at least had a fucking personality, I didn't know what to make of the guy. Saying he bored me to death was kind. It had been about a year with him too; he had officially unseated Shelby as my longest running writer. As far as work went, he could hold his own, but I wasn't sure half the time whether I was talking to a man or a robot.
Shelby. It had been harder lately not to think about her. It had been around this time last year that everything with her had blown up. I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgiven her either. Clark worked, I couldn't complain about him or what he brought to the table, but if she had never left, then nothing would have had to change.
"You guys still keep in touch?"
"Here and there. It can get hard with the time difference."
"Yeah, I can imagine." Rachael, she reported the news, had walked up with another woman, Trisha, who worked behind the scenes. Rachael sat in a chair close to me in front of a mirror and pulled something out of her purse and started touching up her makeup. Both politely acknowledged I was there before getting back into their conversation.
"There's that, but since the baby was born—"
"The what?" Rachael asked, turning to Trisha. Trisha looked up from the phone she was holding.
"You heard me," she said, smirking.
"Holy shit. Shelby had a baby? That's amazing; I didn't even know she was seeing anyone."
"Mm-hmm. It's a little boy, about fourteen weeks old, I think she said. She sent me pictures." Rachael gasped and asked Trisha to let her see. I listened to them gushing over how cute the baby was. I barely heard Lila when she said I was ready. I got up and slowly walked away, trying to hear as much of Trisha and Rachael's conversation as I could.
What a fucking time to hear that Shelby had apparently had a kid over in L.A. That was it, huh? She had really moved on, unless...
The last time we had seen each other had been a year ago. She hadn't been pregnant when we had hooked up. A year was long enough to get pregnant and have a young baby. She might have met someone in L.A., that was a possibility, but why would she have a baby with them so fast?
Then, of course, there was the night that we had been together. I hadn't used protection because she had said she was on birth control. My heart was pounding, trying to make sense of what I had just heard Trisha and Rachael talking about. They hadn't said that she was actually seeing anyone. Whether she was or wasn't, the kid would have had to have been conceived at least a year ago. How old had Trisha said the kid was? Fourteen weeks? That was about three months. Women stayed pregnant for nine months; that brought the grand total to a year—the amount of time since Shelby and I had hooked up.
"Bowman? You're up," I heard someone say. My fists were clenched, and my mind was racing. I cleared my throat and tried to compose myself before the broadcast. I had to calm down. The last time I had flubbed a line on air had been like six years ago. If my theory checked out, it meant that Shelby's baby was mine. When we had hooked up, I hadn't known whether she had been seeing anyone. Maybe she had been. She had been on birth control, but nothing was one hundred percent.
Fuck. I needed to talk to her. Trisha might have been able to tell me what she was up to since they still talked, but I needed it straight from her. If I had a kid out there, a little boy, then I needed to know. Before anything happened, I had to get through work. It felt like ages before I could finally leave the studio. I thought about her all day. Getting to her should have had a straightforward solution, but it didn't. It was clear that she didn't want anything to do with me; reaching out to her directly probably wouldn't get me a reply. She could dodge me that way anyway and if there was something she wanted to hide, then contacting her directly was just the way to make sure I never found out.
Back at the penthouse, I sat down and did something I hadn't done in months. Shelby was a little younger than I was, just by a couple years, but her presence online was depressingly low, considering it was the only access I had to her. She didn't really use social media, just had a professional site and a LinkedIn page that didn't tell me anything about her that I was interested in knowing.
The story about her going to work at KJLA popped up, but it was a year old. I would never forget what it was like when she told me that that was what she was going to do. A couple pages into the search, I saw a result on what looked like one of the shadier gossip blogs. Her name was in the title, but so was another one: Davis Jacks. Newsman and Producer in Clandestine Romance, the title read suggestively. I clicked it, feeling my heart pound. There were some pictures of the two of them, one of them exiting their station's building together, one promo style picture of the two of them at work, and one where they were photographed on location somewhere. They didn't look any closer than any two people who worked together but usually, where there was smoke, there was fire. Rumors didn't just come out of nowhere.
I leaned back in my seat, trying to figure it out. I was still in my work clothes, sitting in my home office. I had a lamp on, but the rest of the house was still completely dark. I hadn't checked my email, my phone, anything since I'd walked in and right then, I didn't even care. I had just gotten a lot of information, and none of it had been good.
Last year a lot of us had no idea who Shelby Aster even was. For weeks now, the curvy brunette has been linked with heartthrob anchor Davis Jacks. The two started working together in January, and allegedly, the sparks started flying as soon as she moved into her new desk, the article read. The twenty-eight-year-old is a writer and producer whose job means she gets to work very closely with Davis. Who hasn't made friends with a coworker, right? Only these two reportedly are much more than just friends. Friends don't take each other on dates to expensive Hollywood restaurants, do they?
There was more, but I stopped reading and closed the browser.
Davis motherfucking Jacks. Was she serious? Was she that desperate? That had to be it. How the fuck did she go for him after we had been together? Jacks was an okay guy if what you wanted was second best. That milquetoast, straight-laced mama's boy? It had only been a year. Clearly shit had to be going south for Shelby in L.A. if she was hooking up with Jacks.
And then all that stuff Trisha had said about the baby... could it be Davis'? If that shady article was telling the truth, then the two of them were involved. Davis didn't seem like the kind to keep his girlfriend or child secret. No. If he and Shelby were parents, the baby would be in those pictures with them. That was his whole thing: the good guy who you could bring home to meet your dad. Apparently, Shelby's type. It made me sick thinking about the two of them together. All that baby stuff too made it worse. I had to figure this out. I needed the truth, and I wasn't going to get it from sketchy gossip sites.
I had to go to L.A. and make her tell me to my face. Everything, including whatever her deal was with Davis. I finally looked up from my computer. It had been a year, and Shelby had always been on my mind in one way or another. I had wondered why I hadn't thought about looking her up before, and this was why. I felt like I was going to explode. As long as I had been able to think about her the way I remembered her, then I didn't have to deal with what could have been really happening, like her moving on with Davis Jacks or having a fucking baby. That way I could have tried to forget her. Now I wasn't going to be able to.