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“Haley.”
“On a deadline, Potter.” He spun back to his screen.
“Got a responsibility to the paper, Haley.”
“To my part of the paper, the part that...” He faltered. Once upon a time he could’ve said the part that sells papers; now that wasn’t so clear. Readers seemed to want Jesus toast and goat-eating pythons and fifteen sexy wash-and-go hairstyles for summer more than ever before.
“You were saying?”
“It’s not Honeywell’s fault.” He didn’t want his resistance to be construed as her failure. He turned his chair to face Potter again.
“I should’ve realized you two wouldn’t click. She’s not your type. She’s too, I don’t know, guileless. Great girl, solid writer, enthusiastic, does excellent work, but you know, not from here.”
He was being played. He could smell it over the liniment he was liberally coated with. “Go away, Potter.”
“We need the first story by the end of next week.”
He turned back to his keyboard.
“What if you’d died last night? Huh, Haley, what would you most regret not having told someone?”
That was one of those fucking questions from the study. “No regrets.” Only nervous intensity, buried in rampant workaholism and a deep-seated feeling of misplaced shame. The entire reason he went to the Church of the Cocked Fist.
“Haley.”
“Fuck off.”
Well, maybe one regret, but not even with his tongue still in his head would he preach it.
Chapter Seven
Jackson Haley showed up for work with two strips of white tape over his brow. Did he walk into a door, or get into a fight on the way back to the office last night? Maybe it was an e
xtreme paper cut from his alien existence envelope. He had a bruise on his jaw and a scrape on his neck and a five o’clock shadow at one fifteen, and Derelie had no business noticing all these things as she watched him argue with Shona all the way across the room in the gap between cubicles.
She had no business telling Shona about Phil either. It just slipped out between “Haley won’t do the love experiment” and “I’ve axed two paragraphs from the how not to play safe using emojis in the office” story.
She badly needed to work on her honesty, rein that sucker back to a more acceptable three wise monkeys in the urban jungle level. That was the hardest part about the city, having to transform herself into someone new; someone slimmer, with straighter teeth, who had a good wardrobe full of nice corporate clothing and knew how to stand all day in heels, ate green things, drank without getting drunk, got enough sleep, and knew how to play office politics.
There’d been no office politics at the Orderly Daily Mail. There’d barely been an office to speak of—it was more of an abandoned shop-front full of old desks. Nor were there many colleagues to have politics with. There was Dan, who wrote sports, and Albert, who wrote general news, and the lead reporter was Maisy Brownlow, who wrote “The Downlow with Brownlow” and had done so for thirty-five years. There was nothing hip about Maisy’s reports on what the mayor was up to.
Derelie badly wanted to know what happened to Jack’s brow. Didn’t she have a responsibility to find out? What if he was jumped on the way back to the office and lay comatose on the street for hours while she was bubble bathing in an attempt to stop her brain from exploding?
Getting jumped was the kind of thing that happened in the city. That’s what yoga, with its lift your heart’s energy, marry your pulse to the movement, open your armpit chest and find your Drishti focal point in ocean breathing, was supposed to help with; the sense that the city was a foreign place with different rules, that the world was moving too fast and she didn’t have a firm foothold on it.
Breathe the negative forces of the day out through your pores, suck the energy of the cosmos in through the soles of your feet. Leave the earth and enter the limbic system. That’s what she was supposed to do. She wasn’t entirely sure if entering her limbic system was a good thing. It was the news desk for emotions like fear, pleasure, anger, as well as drives for hunger, sex, dominance, care of offspring, which might account for her obsession with Yogaboy and how the sight of him in child pose made her offspring-making bits squirmy.
Mostly she staggered through the class, trying to find length, soften her knees, breathe through her armpit chest and not dump her weight on the earth until the part where you got to lie like a dead thing on the floor to feel as light as a filament of air. She always kept her face turned toward Yogaboy. He always closed his eyes. He was just like Chicago, mysterious, complex, and confident. She was sure he never worried about getting on the wrong train and ending up in the wrong neighborhood where unspeakably awful things might happen to you. There was no wrong neighborhood for him. He fit.
She didn’t need to know what happened to Jackson Haley. Who cared what bounced off his thick head? He was a bastard despite the meal and the cab home, if only because he’d already written her off as out of her depth and not worthy of his notice. Screw him and the good neighborhood he no doubt lived in and the hackneyed expense account he rode in on.
Shona came back to her cubicle with a scowl. Derelie made herself not ask, and got on with her current story headlined “Six Common Laundry Mistakes.” Jack’s story today was headlined “Secret Pact Explodes Cartel.” No wonder he thought she was a waste of his time—she was common as laundry detergent while he got to blow things up.
An hour later, he almost exploded her 3:00 p.m. energy crash, only-two-calories soup packet pick-me-up. His email said, Thursday night, 7:00 p.m. Elaine’s. Meet you there.
She googled Elaine’s. A swanky reservation-only restaurant. He must mean this for someone else. How to respond? She could stoop to his level and be just as clipped and weird or channel her inner harmony. She popped her aligner off and sipped the tomato soup, then typed, I think you meant this for someone else. Also, what happened to your head?
It took a while, but then she got, Can you do it or not? No mention of his head injury. Was this his ungracious way of agreeing to the experiment after all? Shona had intended to force his hand and Elaine’s looked amazing—it would be a legitimate expense account meal. Crazy not to go, even if it meant missing yoga. May absence make Yogaboy’s heart reach to the sky, while his shoulders traveled to the earth points of his very squeezable ass.
