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“Why did you really want to meet with me?”
Eden figured she should just get it out there. She told herself she was tired of small talk and had things she needed to get to. She did have work to do. Work she loved. She didn’t want to spend another second sitting there across from her ex-idol than she had to because that would just go against her hard-fought ideologies to actually want to engage in any kind of debate with a woman who had sold her soul for fame.
“I think you know why I’m here,” Jos challenged. She was smart. Sharp. Still. Even as a sell out. Eden had to give her that.
“I don’t, so maybe you should explain,” Eden said churlishly.
Jos lifted a brow. She slid her gaze down Eden’s body, though for what purpose, she wasn’t quite sure. That icy blue stare unnerved her, but she crossed her arms and raised a brow of her own as a challenge. If Jos wanted to do this the hard way, she was down to not let her take the easy road out.
If it was a battle of wills, Eden won, but she felt no thrill in the victory. Jos did give a small sigh, but it was more like she was bored than anything. It was obvious that she didn’t want to be there.
Was she thinking about her car? About how it might be missing two windows and keyed down the sides? She should have known better. If she wasn’t entirely tone deaf, she would have anticipated that driving a hundred-thousand-dollar cherry red import into a neighborhood where the majority of people were single moms and lived way below the poverty line and a large portion of the population called the street their home wasn’t a smart thing to do.
“Alright. If you want me to tell you why I’m here, I’ll give it to you the way you want it. Unvarnished and raw. I’m here because you have options. I’m the one they wanted to present them. I’m here to tell you to take them. To do the right thing. You can’t possibly want to be out there, day after day. It’s not safe.”
“Do the right thing?” Eden couldn’t believe she’d actually heard that correctly. Her mind was racing. She knew how her dad operated and she knew who Jos worked for and where she worked. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots, even if it was overwhelmingly strange.
Eden told herself that she had to be wrong. She forced herself to pick up the terrible coffee and take a sip. It was as bad as she thought, and she gave Jos silent props for not gagging when she’d tasted it. Eden let the silence drag out just because she hoped it would make the seemingly unflappable Jos uncomfortable.
Eden schooled her facial expressions as carefully as she did her emotion. She wasn’t normally someone who got mad. Regulated emotions were a quick way to keep things on a level path and get answers. She’d also found that she could steer conversations in the direction she wanted them to go and get answers when she was calm. Getting mad never helped anything or anyone. Hadn’t she learned that from Jos’ interview style? How would she like that thrown back at her? It seemed more likely that she wouldn’t even notice.
“How am I not doing the right thing?” Eden asked in a neutral tone. “Don’t answer that. I want an answer for this instead. How would you know what’s right for me considering you don’t even know me?”
Jos stared at her like she should know better. Like she was a spoiled, indulged child playing at helping the world because it made her feel better. Like she was having her moment of rebellion and then she could run home to her life of leisure and luxury, back to her parents and their money.
What she said was much more tactful, of course. “I can tell that out there, with unstable people who are often violent, or who are using substances so that they’re not themselves, it isn’t safe.”
“This is based on your own experience working in war torn nations, traveling the world to remote locations to get that story no one else can, and interviewing extremely volatile individuals?”
The only reaction that garnered was a slight wrinkling at the bridge of Jos’ elegant nose. Her blue eyes were so intense it was like staring into a set of extremely rare sapphires. It was impossible not to notice how elegant a picture Jos Frank cut. She was glorious, so utterly gorgeous that staring at her was like looking directly at the glowing sun. This woman was everything Eden had once admired. She was everything she wanted to be. How many times had she sat in front of her dresser mirror in her room, pretending to be Jos interviewing some high-profile businessman or politician?
Jos swallowed thickly, but still showed little emotion past a tug of her lips that Eden could tell was practiced. She didn’t blast off her made-for-TV smile that Eden had long ago come to realize was exactly that. Pasted on, manufactured, fake.
Eden knew she was pushing the bounds of something, testing the lines of something dangerous within herself. Too much emotion one way could quickly swing the other. It was better to stay neutral inside. Carefully cultivated dislike could turn into hero
worship or even attraction as easily as her one-time crush had turned into feelings of disgust.
“Actually, yes,” Jos said evenly. “It is. I did things earlier in my career that were unsafe and foolish. I risked my life for stories more times than I can count.”
Eden shifted on the hard seat, her watered down, old tasting coffee entirely forgotten. “But you did it because you thought people should know the truth, right?”
There was zero hesitation. “That’s right.”
“Because the truth used to be important to you.”
Chapter 3
Eden
The air went glacial. They were the only customers in the shop, and it was a good thing, because everyone else would have complained that their drinks went frigid simultaneously.
Eden knew she’d pushed way too hard. She’d been intentionally rude, but at the same time, she’d meant to call Jos out. She wasn’t one to shrink from the truth and she wanted Jos to know that.
In an odd way, Eden wanted to prove herself, which was worse, and she knew it. She didn’t want to admit that part to herself. She wasn’t trying to show off and she wasn’t trying to get into a pissing contest. She’d been the one to come into this meeting with an attitude she never took with anyone else, not even her parents when they were pushing her to do what they wanted her to do, shoving her into that tiny, neat little box of what they deemed an appropriate daughter looked like.
Eden had always felt like she’d been on the outside looking in. She knew for a fact that even though Jos Frank had kept her background on the DL and refused to talk about her past, that she’d come from next to nothing. She’d been a fighter once. Now, she was just the token story of that person who made it and forgot all about where they came from.
Eden knew she had no right to judge. She had even less of a right to inflict injury or wound this woman who had never done her wrong. Except by selling out. Maybe that was it. Eden was still deeply hurt by the death of her idol in her own mind.
