Bella

As I ride the elevator up to Hannah's office, I draw my shawl closer around my shoulders and try to stifle an involuntary shiver. The air-conditioning is blasting, but I don't think that's it. I haven't talked to Hannah in days, and I don't really feel like starting right now.

But, hell, I'm a goddamn professional. If I've learned anything about myself in the last few weeks, it's that I'm apparently as ambitious as all get out. I don't need Hannah's dragon lady stare trying to wither my straight-backed resolve. She's not going to get on my nerves today. She's just not.

But when I walk into her office, tentatively brushing my knuckles against her open door, I'm surprised at the look on her face. She is standing next to her desk with a glass of some brown alcohol in her hand, grinning from ear to ear.

“There's my star! There is my brilliant sidekick!”

She raises her glass in the air to toast me, then drops it back on her desk and refills it, plus the glass next to it. I try to stifle my reaction to the word sidekick and walk carefully across the floor to accept the glass.

“Did you already see the… event?” I ask her carefully.

“Who hasn't?” she giggles, rolling her eyes for dramatic effect. Her cheeks are pink and I can see she’s already heavily invested in celebration whiskey.

“Well… did you think it went off okay?” I ask her, squinting over the rim of the glass. The liquid is hot and pungent, nearly burning the tip of my tongue.

“Okay?” she repeats incredulously. “The whole thing was just live streamed from a dozen different people. You had celebrities on the bridge, did you know that? Somewhere out there, Amal Clooney was live streaming you! Amal fucking Clooney!”

“Well, she's no Gwyneth Paltrow, but…”

“Tell me about it!” Hannah exclaims, wobbling around the side of her desk and plopping extravagantly into her leather executive chair. It tips back dramatically and she kicks off her stiletto heels so she can cross her ankles on the corner of her desk.

It would probably be wrong of me to take a picture of her right now. Probably wrong. Tempting, but wrong.

“Okay, so I guess it was definitely good. The windows in the building were a nice touch, I thought.”

“Brilliant!” she yells at the ceiling, toasting the air once again. “That was Dillon, right? He's always had a thing for fireworks and stuff like that. Tell me that was Dillon’s idea!”

I sip at the whiskey again, feeling its hot tendrils soaking through my blood from my chest outward. The taste doesn't bother me as much anymore.

“Oh, that was totally Dillon. He's really creative, insightful too. I couldn’t believe it when I saw how many people gathered around to watch all that. I mean, he arranged it so that everything would fall into place that way.”

Hannah nods to herself, humming quietly through her nose. I don't think she really heard what I just said though. But it's true. Dillon’s real personality was reflected in the whole event, his intuition for what people want, how to make a splash.

And thinking about it, I realize that was a real gift for Emmet too. He wanted both of us to be delighted. I could see how much Dillon loved his brother in the way that Emmet's expression lit up over and over again. It was like we were both walking through the fairytale wonderland that Dillon had crafted for both of us.

The warmth in my chest spreads even further, and I'm not sure it's just the whiskey.

“So… okay,” I stammer, beginning to edge back toward the door. “Everything's okay, then? I am just going to go back and —”

“It's over!” she whispers suddenly.

Her eyes are wide, her smile so broad I think she just gave herself a new dimple.

“What's over?” I ask, confused. “I mean… that was the last thing we had planned, right? We all knew that, didn’t we? I just assumed that —”

“No, you don't understand,” she continues, her voice speeding up. “It's over. They signed. Look. Right here.”

She taps a stack of manila folders in the middle of her desk with her magenta lacquered fingernail. Then she taps it a few more times, even harder.

“It's over! The merger… it's done!”

It all starts to sink in and I take a deep, shuddering breath. “They signed!?”

“All right here in black and white and blood oaths!” she nods, toasting me so hard that the whiskey sloshes out of her glass. She takes a second to refill it, and gestures with her fingers for my glass too.

“Oh my God… already?”

I let her refill the glass and force myself to take a deep drink. I don't usually like to drink too much whiskey since it works on me so fast, but this is a special occasion. Relief washes through me, a cooling, prickling sensation.

“It worked. We did it!” she hoots.

“Well, yeah… I mean of course that’s awesome. But how?”

“You know what, I'm not entirely sure,” she shrugs, her blouse slipping over one shoulder. “I thought we still had a couple of days left, and was really waiting for Perez's story to get out. I thought we might even have to wait for yours to go live on TurnPost for a day or two. But they must have already had the docs ready to go by messenger! When I talked to Rick — you remember Rick at Google — he said it just felt right.”

“That's amazing!” I smile, feeling all the tension drifting away from me.

“No, you're amazing!” she grins. She leans forward, pushing her elbows on her desk and holding her hands out as though gesturing to me like I am something amazing on a game show. “It's you! Our plan… you did it. We did it. You guys just kept pounding the media until everyone believed. To be honest, I didn't even think you had it in you!”

“Well, you know,” I pout, shifting uncomfortably, “I am familiar with men. They are just people.”

“Ha!” she barks, rather cruelly, I think. “You know they exist, but you don't know anything about men. You never have. You’re stuck between reality and fantasy and always get all… twisted around. Like you just got thrown from a horse!”

She laughs for a really long time, obviously amused by herself. I feel myself straighten in my chair and slide the glass back onto the end of her desk.

“Well I’m just glad it worked out,” I mumble.

“Turned out what you really needed was two men!”

“So, I'm really glad this all went so well,” I finish as a way of saying goodbye. I want to stay polite, and moreover, I really don't need to hear her critique of my love history. I think I should leave while I still have any love left for her.

“Me too,” she sighs, smiling obliviously. “So what's next for you?”

I stand halfway up, then stop. I wasn’t going to say anything, but that was a stupid question, wasn't it?

“Well, you know what's next for me, right?”

She shakes her head, shrugging. “Oh…. right. You wrote an article about this, right?” she asks, waving her hand in the air in front of her like she’s waving away a bad smell. “Yeah, we don’t need that anymore. You can just skip it.”

“Um, okay,” I reply slowly. I didn’t write an article, but I’m still a little miffed that she would just trash something I had been tasked to write, anyway.

“So what’s next?” she asks again.

I shake my head, sort of amazed she’s asking me this. Did the last three weeks just happen or what?

“My writing assignment?” I explain, feeling like I’m giving her Cliff Notes. “I get to go back to my personal journalism, like we talked about?”

“Oh, sure…” she says vaguely. “Well maybe not right away. But yeah. Sure.”

I stand the rest of the way up, leaning my knuckles on the edge of her desk.

“That was the deal, remember?”

“It's just that…” she starts, holding her hands palm out in a let's be reasonable gesture. “I mean, I don’t know if it will really be up to me? You know what I mean? With Google coming in and everything… I don't know what my role will actually turn out to be, so…”

“You promised,” I say, keeping my voice somewhere above a snarl.

“And I will totally try!” she nods vigorously.

I have to stop for a moment because suddenly I feel very dizzy. Maybe it's the residual rocking motion of the boat, or the whiskey, but I feel like the desk is going to slide out from beneath my hands. Everything is very bright. Something smells like it's burning.

“Hannah, I just put my whole life and my career on hold for the last three weeks to help you out. We had a deal. We had a negotiation. Please don't tell me that you're trying to wriggle out of this now.”

“And you are such a good team player!” she shrugs helplessly. “But, I mean, this is business, Bella! In a team, everybody just has a small portion of the authority. Everybody has to work as a team! So if it's possible for you to go off and start writing your little life stories again or whatever… I'm sure they'll tell you. Sure of it!”

“My little life stories —” I repeat vaguely, suddenly understanding what she really thinks of me.

“Not as good as your makeup reviews, if I'm being honest,” she wrinkles her nose and tips her head to the side before taking another sloppy sip of her drink.

“We’ll just have to see about that,” I snap, smiling.

“Yeah, we could totally could see about that. Totally. So…”

I feel like she's pushing me off, but suddenly I want her to know.

“I mean, I think it's a really good story. A really good story. An amazing story.”

She fondles the stack of papers with her fingertips, swirling in a slow circle, then stops. Her perfect brow wrinkles and the center as she squints up at me.

“What are we talking about?” she asks me slowly.

“The story…” I answer automatically. “This story. My story.”

She smiles again, but not a real smile. A competitive, dangerous smile.

“Your story just got cut, like five minutes ago. By me. Remember?”

I just shrug.

“Bella? Did you write an article about this?”

I shouldn't tell her, I know it. That's really not a good idea. But the look on her face is really getting on my nerves.

“Of course I wrote about it. That's my job. My life.”

She clears her throat. “And what did you… write? An article?”

“About a hundred thousand words, Hannah,” I inform her triumphantly. “I didn't have an ending, but now I do! So thanks!”

She steeples her fingers and leans back in her chair, regarding me shrewdly. All the mirth and bubbly excitement seems to have gone out her, replaced by this sharp shard of woman.

“I look forward to reading it. That’s a lot more than I was asking for. Maybe we can talk about… installments or something. A serial column?”

“No,” I blurt out defiantly. “I don’t want it chopped up into pieces or given to one of the copy guys. I don’t want to have to run it past an editor. And I don’t want to reshape it or cut it for space or any of the other things we do to serials. I think it's a book. That's how I see it. On shelves, in bookstores.”

“A book,” she repeats coldly. “I'm not really sure that we want to publish a book? I think that your column on TurnPost is probably the right place… the only place for that sort of work. If I decide to go with it.”

I just shrug, trying to be as breezy as possible. She stares me down but I hold my ground, keeping Emmet and Dillon in the back of my mind, pretending they are backing me up, standing behind me, thick arms crossed.

“No, I don't think so,” I finally say. “I think I am going to do it my way.”

“You can't.”

I stare at her, noting the squared position of her shoulders, the icy chill of her gaze.

“Excuse me?"

“Any work that you've done while under my employ is work product. It belongs to me. If I say it's not a novel, it is not a novel.”

“I wrote it!” I huff, incredulous. “It's mine.”

“So, I will put it out in hundred word increments… maybe at the top of the home page… maybe at the bottom of the page. Or I might do do nothing with it. That's my option.”

The room sloshes back and forth again, threatening to tip me out the window and down forty storeys into the river.

“You can't have it!”

She opens her palms again as though revealing a chess move. Her voice is slow and calculating.

“Are you seriously saying that?”

“Well... yes,” I stammer. I’m not entirely sure what I'm agreeing to, but I’m certainly not just going to give it to her.

“Then you’re fired.”

My mouth drops open.

“Theft of company property, by my reckoning,” she continues coldly. “Pity. You won’t even qualify for unemployment. That will be so weird. It’s a tough life. Unemployed writers are just about everywhere, aren't they?”

“Jesus, Hannah. Do you have to be such a bitch?”

She grins, her smile cruel and dry as she slowly stands up and picks the phone up from her desk.

“Security? Please accompany Ms. Cage out of the building. Retrieve her ID as well. Her employment here is terminated. Thank you.” She returns the phone to its cradle and regards me.

My head is spinning.

“I just… I can't…”

I try to think of something to say, but there's nothing left. She looks so different than the picture that's on my cell phone, the one with the freckles and big smile, but now I see this is really her. I don’t mean anything to her. And it dawns on me that I probably never have. Somehow I made up this whole fantasy world we were such good friends, that all seems totally fabricated now.

I'm a writer. That's what we do.

You’re just not supposed to live in them.