“Maybe, but I’m worried that will make me seem desperate.”
“That’s very,veryfifteen.”
It was. Or it might have been. Either way, rightnowAudrey was technically at work. And although Gavin wasn’t especially strict about conducting personal business on theEcho’s time, pretending he was let Audrey make a decision re: texting that she’d otherwise probably have prevaricated on for much longer. Instead,she put her phone away, started the car, and set off on the twenty-minute drive back to Telford.
Twenty minutes of light conversation with Eddie, it turned out, was not the best thing for Audrey’s focus or for her commitment to the importance of local journalism. Eddie had many fine qualities—a surprising level of sensitivity to relationship issues apparently amongst them—but there was no denying that he was also very slightly…inane? Possibly one of the leastanepeople Audrey had ever met.
Which meant the whole trip back to the office, present-day-Eddie, who was very much the same as every other version of Eddie, was happily scrolling through the Instagram feed of @bagleybrooktrolleys and retweeting pictures of discarded supermarket furniture, present-day-Audrey was asking five-years-ago-Audrey to explain why she’d ever thought that this was a good career move.
Sitting at present-day-Audrey’s desk cutting together the details of the rogue trolley article into something at least vaguely interesting, five-years-ago-Audrey tried to explain that working for a major outlet on stories that nine times out of ten were just glorified doomscrolling was an incredibly unhealthy place to be. And present-day-Audrey believed her. But she couldn’t quite shake the conviction that there should be at least some middle ground between “the world sucks and everything’s fucked” and “six trolleys in Bagley Brook.”
A middle ground, Natalie asked,between the nonsense you’re doing now and actual journalism?Gritting her teeth, Audrey got up, sauntered through to Gavin’s office, and said as casually as she could manage: “I think we should run theExpectationsstory.”
Gavin stared at her between his glasses and his eyebrows. “Thestory that the very angry, very litigious producer suggested you shouldn’t run because it didn’t fit with the way the show positions itself in the wider market?”
“The one with too much gay, yeah.”
Tapping distractedly on his desk, Gavin frowned. “As I recall, that wasn’t how she expressed it.”
“It’s never how people express these things, but it’s how they are.”
“However it is”—Gavin was never the kind to display strong emotions, but he was becoming cautiously agitated—“hasn’t she made her position perfectly clear?”
“I was hoping I could persuade her to un-perfectly clear it.”
Gavin’s glasses slid an eighth of an inch down his nose. “And how might you do that?”
Anything for the story, Aur, said Natalie.Although ideally the story wouldn’t be a trite human interest piece.
“Well the thing is,” Audrey began, less confidently than she’d have liked. “You see—we’re sort of—I think she likes me.”
“Likes in the sense of considers you a valuable journalistic contact with whom she would be well advised to maintain a positive working relationship?” asked Gavin in a tone that anticipated a negative answer.
“No,” answered Audrey, negatively.
“Likes in the sense of is sexually and/or romantically attracted to?” he followed up, in a tone which anticipated a response that may or may not be totally honest.
“Kind of,” Audrey admitted.
“Is that not…ethically questionable?”
She really, really wished he hadn’t gone there. “It’s a grey area?” she ask-asserted.
“Is it, in fact?”
Gavin, in Audrey’s experience, responded best if you took these kinds of concerns seriously. “I think so, actually?” She sounded less certain than she felt, and she didn’t feel especially certain. “I really don’t want to play the gender-reversal card, but if she was a man I think playing on the fact he fancied me would be pretty normal? Or at least pretty normalised.”
You have him there, said Natalie, in a tone Audrey found worryingly approving.
“Isn’t it also the kind of thing we’re meant tostopnormalising?”
Or does he have you? That’s the problem with being a quitter—it makes it so hard to stick to your principles.
It was probably a bad idea to double down when you were beginning to regret betting in the first place. “What,” Audrey suggested, “if I make it really clear that I intend to sleep with her whether she lets me do this or not?” It seemed like the wrong time to explain that she’d slept with heralready.
Gavin blinked. “I think that creates adifferentethical issue.”
“Right, but a much,muchless skeevy one. Like, imagine if she was my wife.”
