72
GEORGINA
Wednesday 11:34 am
“Welcome back, CeeCee!” After hugging her enthusiastically, I take the chair across from her at her large glass desk. “Thank you so much for agreeing to see me privately, before our meeting with Zasu.”
“Margot said it was an ‘urgent’ personal matter. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. How was Bali?”
“It was wonderful. But let’s talk about this personal matter.” She looks anxious. “Do you have a problem with Zasu?”
“Oh, gosh, no. Zasu is a goddess. I worship her. No, it’s... I don’t really know how to say this, so I’m just going to spit it out.” I take a deep breath. “It’s about Reed Rivers.”
“Oh?”
“We had a bit of a fling, CeeCee. A highly mutual, consensual, amazing, fun fling for a week at his house. And then he was an asshole. And now it’s over.”
CeeCee furrows her brow. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, it’s fine. It couldn’t have ended any other way. Butmy fling with Reed isn’t what prompted me to ask for this meeting, specifically. That’s merely context so you understand what I’m about to ask you.”
Anticipatory dread overtakes CeeCee’s elegant face. “Okay...”
I take a deep breath and proceed to unload the entire, embarrassing, enthralling, heartbreaking story. All of it. Including my discovery that Reed donated the money for my grant. “Honestly, knowing Reed funded the grant is making me question if I got this job on the merits of my writing. Forgive me if this is an insulting question, but did you and Reed broker a deal where you both got the special issue, Reed got access to some tits and ass he wanted, and you got that coveted interview of Reed you’ve been wanting for two years?”
CeeCee looks ashen. “Oh my gosh, Georgina.No! I’m heartbroken you’ve even had to wonder these things! I promise you, the way the grant happened wasn’t like that at all—though I totally understand how it looks that way to you. Darling, I would have hired you, regardless. You’re a star. I knew it the minute I met you. And then I read your writing samples, and I knew I had to have you, no matter what.”
My shoulders soften. My spirit expands. “Oh, I’m so relieved to hear you say that.”
CeeCee explains everything to me, all of which is right in line with what Reed told me in his texts.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what Reed told me in some texts,” I admit. “I just wanted to hear it from you before I let myself believe it.”
“Do you mind letting me read what Reed texted you about all this?”
“Sure. It’s everything you just said.”
I pull out my phone and she reads all of Reed’s lengthy messages about the grant.
When she’s done reading, CeeCee hands my phone back to me. “I agree with almost everything Reed wrote. But, in the interest of transparency, I should tell you there are a couple places where my narrative differs from his.” She threads her manicured fingers together onto her glass desk. “First of all, Reed doesn’t know this, but I was kind of messing with him during our initial discussion about you. I was going to hire you, no matter what, Georgina.Withpay, by the way, one way or another. I’d already decided that when Reed called and started asking me about you. I acted like I was on the fence when Reed brought you up, simply because he seemed so damned interested in talking aboutwhether I was going to hire you, and then he was so adamant I should pay you. It was so out of character for him, I wanted to test the waters and see what the hell was motivating him. But the truth is, I wasn’t going to let you slip through my fingers, whether Reed had called me or not.”
“Thank you so much. That means the world to me.”
“It’s the truth. But then Reed offered to pay your salary! Ha! And I knew my hunch was right. He’d seen you at the panel discussion and had been flirting with you the whole time, just like I’d thought.”
I gasp. “You saw us flirting?”
“Darling, Reed wasn’t subtle. And neither were you.” She chuckles. “But, still, I never would have assigned you to work on the special issue—effectively serving you up on a silver platter to that horny heathen of a man—were it not for a few things. First off, when I told you about the special issue, you let it slip you’d already looked up Reed on Wikipedia. Well, that’s when I knew I’d seen things correctly at the panel. You’d been flirting with Reed, every bit as much as he’d been flirting with you. Why else would you already have looked him up at that point? And then, you expresslyaskedif you could sleep with an interview subject. Ha!” She snorts. “I loved that you did that, by the way. But, again, I knew at that point I wasn’t sending Little Red Riding Hood straight to the Big Bad Wolf.”
I blush.
“But there was something else that sealed the deal for me. Something that made me feel especially confident about assigning you to River Records.” She leans forward and places her forearms onto her desk. “Your father’s expensive medicine, darling. Paying for that was Reed’s idea, not mine. And that told me you’d caught the attention of more than Reed’s libido. I knew, somehow, you’d caught the attention of his generous heart.”
My heartbeat is thrumming in my ears. I can barely breathe.
“Plus, your father wasn’t the only person Reed helped that day. That generous man donated a quarter million dollars to my favorite cancer charity, even though only a fraction of that sum was needed to cover your salary and your father’s medication.”
