BOSS BABY DADDY
By Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 Claire Adams
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Chapter One
Jason
"Shelby?"
It was minutes before I was supposed to go on air; where the hell was she? I was skimming my script while Lila dabbed something on my face. Last touches, she had insisted. I shooed her away impatiently. She was wasting her time; I didn't have a bad side.
"Shelby?" I called louder. "Where the fuck is Shelby!"
"Mr. Bowman?" I heard her reply, finally, hearing the click-clack of her heels. I shooed Lila away again who was trying to dab at my face some more as she walked up.
"About fucking time; am I talking to myself over here?" I asked her. She was holding her clipboard and looked like she wanted to be anywhere on the earth but there with me. Too bad. This was her job and if she had done it right the first time, then maybe I wouldn't have had to drag her away from whatever important fucking business she had.
"What is this?" I asked, waving the script at her.
"Looks like a script to me," she said. Fucking sass. She had that in spades; too bad I had to call for her a million times before she got off her ass.
"I thought I asked you to change it."
"You asked me to add more numbers. I didn't because it wouldn't work for the story. It would just slow your delivery down and be harder for the viewers to understand. Cutting away to a graphic would make more sense for the flow of the broadcast."
"Then maybe you should fucking read it," I snapped. “Since you’re the expert on delivery and timing.” She narrowed her eyes.
"Would you like me to change it?" she asked with sarcastic sweetness.
"It's too late for that," I said, impatiently, looking at the script again. News was real time, and it wasn't out of the ordinary to get updates during the broadcast. The reason we even needed writers was because stories needed to be reported in the simplest way possible. Shelby was good at her job, but when it came to working together, it was a different story.
"Then is that all?" she asked. I was going on in under a minute. She'd watch from the control room. No, that wasn't all, but I couldn't put production on pause because my writer was fucking up and pretending she didn’t know how to take simple instructions.
"Don't do this shit again," I said, thrusting the script at her and walking out to the news desk, where Helen, my co-anchor was already sitting. The lights were on, the prompter was ready, and the camera was trained on us. After getting my mic and sound check, we were ready to start rolling. I had been on the air for the last seven years. I could pretty much do this job in my sleep. That wasn't to say that it was necessarily easy, more that I was just good. Better than good, close to the best, and I wasn't the only person who thought so.
The thing was, we didn't just read the news. If that was all we did, then anyone would be able to do my job. As much as the news was supposed to be informative, the broadcasts at the very least had to grab and hold an audience. They had to be engaging. We weren't just reading the news; we were personalities. Aside from that, social media and online sharing had totally changed the industry. Our reach was further than just television.
My main story that evening covered a Christmas gift donation scandal involving a celebrity. I had come up through smaller regional stations, but WRTC broadcast nationwide. I always figured it was a specific personality type that went into broadcast journalism. There were the people who said it made them happy to inform people about what was going on in the world, but I wasn’t one of those people. Even though part of our job was to be as unbiased as possible, we still controlled the news. Controlling information, how people got it, when and from who gave me the biggest high. I fucking loved it. The actual time we spent on-air was the shortest in the day, but I never got tired of it. We wrapped the show in just about an hour.
Once we were off, I got up and started for the control room. Where was she? I wasn't done with her yet. I saw her coming out of the room as I walked towards it. She saw me, rolled her eyes, and kept walking. I called her, and she stopped, turning.
“Before you start with me, Jason, I think both of us just saw a perfectly good broadcast. If there was really something that wrong with the script, then it would have come up.”
“We’re not aiming for perfectly good, Shelby. We’re aiming for perfect, every time.”
“Then how about you get to work six hours earlier and work on these stories with the rest of the producers. Hm?” She turned and walked away again. She did that way more often than anybody else would let her. She wrote for me, which technically made me her boss. Who got away with shit like that in any other jobs? If she wasn’t so damn good at her job, maybe I wouldn’t let her do it. We had worked together what, eleven months now, and for me, that was a record. They usually didn’t crack three or four months. She might have been different, but she wasn’t special.
I followed her to the newsroom. She walked past her desk through to the break room. There were a couple people sitting at a table who stopped talking when we walked in. They got the idea and quietly walked out.
“I don’t want to see any of that shit again,” I said to her. She turned slowly to face me. There were times I felt like she came close, so close to smacking me across the face, but she never had. It was twisted, but I wanted to know whether I could get her to that point, see how far I could push her, how long she could really last.
“Great. Anything else,” she said, her voice strained.
“I’m expecting better for tonight’s broadcast. You don’t deserve it since I already warned you, but this is the last time I want to have this conversation. Get it right or get the fuck out.” I ran a hand through my hair and turned, leaving her in the break room. She had bite, sure, but as long as she worked for me, I was in control, and she needed to get with the program. The station would ditch her before they ditched me and if she wanted to stick around, I was the person she needed to keep happy.