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Chapter One
Tatum
“Tatum? Thoughts?”
Tatum Ripley glanced up from the stick figure she’d been doodling for the last three minutes and blinked her eyes twice at Chauncy Covington, her managing editor at theSycamore Statesman, their small-town campus newspaper.
“Thoughts? On … trash cans?”
A predictable snicker rippled through the other editors assembled at the weekly brainstorming session for that Friday’s edition. Chauncy, as ever, was unfazed by the verbal mutiny. “Not justanytrash cans, Tatum. The new ones, for the quad?”
Tatum met Chauncy’s inquisitive glance from where he stood at the front of the room, dry erase marker hovering over a list of proposed topics on the whiteboard by his side. Tatum pretended to glance down at her doodle figure, realizing that, with the curly hair and thick glasses, it looked remarkably like Chauncy himself! Stifling a self-conscious grin, she made her best,I’m honestly being serious right now, face. “I’m all for them, obviously, but are we talking a full profile here or…”
Chauncy looked disappointed. “I for one think doing our part to reduce the amount of on-campus litter by at least 3.7 percent this semester alone is worth a full profile, don’t you?”
His disgusted voice made it sound like Tatum secretly went about at night, tossing candy bar wrappers and biodegradable coffee cups around the campus quad willy-nilly. She glanced around the semicircle of editors pointedly, noting how they were already staring nervously at their notes, as if to avoid being assigned the weighty topic of new trash receptacles themselves. “Clearly, but for theArts and Entertainmentpage?”
More snickers from the cheap seats. More shooting eye daggers from Chauncy. She was nervously adding another strand of curly clown hair to Chauncy’s stick figure in her spiral notebook when the editor’s office door opened and Moira Spiers poked her head out. “Tatum? A word?”
Tatum stood abruptly, mouthing “sorry” at Chauncy even as she sped toward the editor’s office in record time. “Jesus,” she gasped, leaning dramatically with her back against the door she’d just closed behind her. “How long can you talk about new trash cans?”
Moira shot her an understanding, if aloof, grin. Tatum kept forgetting that Moira and Chauncy had dated at some point, however briefly. “Can’t blame a guy for loving the environment, can you, Tatum?”
Tatum rolled her eyes but remained on the fence. If this was some kind of lover’s spat, she wanted nothing to do with it. “I suppose not. So, what did you call me in here for, anyway?”
Moira waved a chewed-up pencil at the chair across from her cluttered desk. “You’re new this semester but every fall we do a feature called ‘Rookie Roundup’ where we profile one of the incoming high school stars as they transition to their first year of college athletics.”
Tatum nodded, still waiting for an answer to her question. She jerked a thumb out the small window toward the typically rowdy newsroom beyond, the rest of the editors still assembled in a semicircle around Chauncy. “Shouldn’t one of the sports editors do that?”
Moira glanced up, pinching the bridge of her long, angular nose as if she was addressing a squirming class of kindergartners. “They do, obviously, but there are so many sports to go around that everybody pitches in with this feature.”
“No pun intended, right?”
Moira blinked her soft brown eyes, ebony skin warm and vibrant beneath the flattering desk lamp at her side. Then she got the joke and smiled, warmly. Tatum unclenched just a bit. She wasn’t nervous, exactly. She just didn’t know much about sports, and despite her limited dating experience, had never had much luck with jocks, in particular.
“Funny you should use that particular pun,” Moira said, sliding an 8 x 10 print across her cluttered desk. “Because, ding-ding, you get to profile Shane Dixon, our incoming baseball star.”
“Baseball?” Tatum groaned, sliding the glasses up her nose anxiously. “I don’t know much about sports but I know even less about baseball.”
Moira chuckled. “We’re not looking for statistics here, Tatum. It’s a profile. I’ve prepared a questionnaire for you to use, printed out a few of last year’s features so you’ll know what we’re looking for.”
“And … what are you looking for?”
Moira sat back in her desk chair, reaching for a cup of coffee in one of the cheery littleCampus Caféto-go cups Tatum saw so often around school. Finding it empty, Moira wriggled it hopefully before tossing it into the trash next to her desk. “Honestly, Tatum? To forgive another pun, this is a softball assignment. You take a few pictures of Shane in action, take him to the batting cage, sit with him in the bleachers, ask him a few easy questions about life in the athletic dorms, the transition from high school to college, his hopes for the future, that kind of thing.”
Tatum visibly relaxed. “I can do that.”
Moira chuckled. “Tatum, a junior high yearbook editor could do it. It’s not the assignment that’s difficult, it’s … resisting temptation.”
Tatum chuffed, struggling to ignore the sexy, baby-faced jock in the 8 x 10 glossy Moira had foisted upon her side of the desk. “That … won’t be a problem, Moira.”
Moira chuckled openly, a rich, belly-deep guffaw Tatum didn’t think she’d ever heard from her typically stoic editor in chief before. “Oh, that’s what they all say, Missy. Then I spend the rest of the semester consoling my fragile little editors as they nurse their broken hearts after getting a little too close to their, uh … subjects.”
“For one,” Tatum offered in her own defense. “I’m a junior so this actual child and I will have nothing in common. For another, I’ve never been a fan of jocks, and frankly, they’ve never been a fan of me. We have absolutely nothing in common and I have even less interest in derailing my journalism career over some, some…”
“Some corn-fed country hottie,” Moira finished for her, tapping the same picture Tatum couldn’t stop herself from admiring.
“Please, Moira. Give me a little more credit than that?”
