The Ex Talk
And yet there was Dominic, purveyor of Truth in Journalism, basking in the attention and letting Kent buy him another beer.
“Going down?”
He shows up in front of the elevator just as I’m waiting for it. Oddly, this hasn’t happened since the show began. I’ve always needed to rush home to walk Steve, while Dominic seems content to stay late.
“Actually, I’ve been meaning to pay the AI golf club startup on the sixth floor a visit,” I tell him. “They seem like good people.”
“Never pegged you as the golfing type.”
“I’m a complex and layered human being.”
That earns me a smirk. “You know, I’m hating this much less than I thought I would.”
“You’re not hating your nearly ten thousand followers?”
“Don’t be bitter because you’re only at nine thousand.”
“Nine thousand five hundred.”
And I’m sure we’ll both be flooded with sponsorship opportunities soon. Still, I’ve had to limit looking at my mentions, since some people don’t exactly respect the boundaries between our private and professional lives. Sure, the show blurs the two, and the images of famous movie breakup scenes one listener posted with my and Dominic’s faces photoshopped onto the actors’ bodies were entertaining. Yes, I retweeted it.
But some comments have strayed a little past PG-13. I was flattered by it at first—strangers finding me attractive is certainly an ego boost—but it stopped feeling innocent when someone tweeted at me asking if Dominic’s circumcised. Then someone asked Dominic to rate my performance in bed. And those were some of the tamer ones.
I have enough unsavory thoughts on my own without the internet making it worse.
The elevator arrives, and when we both go to hit P, his hand gets there first. God, he looks even taller in here.
My brain does bad things in enclosed spaces with Dominic, but I want to take advantage of our alone time, ask him the questions I can’t in the newsroom.
“It’s weird, isn’t it, that some people want us to get back together?”
“Apparently, both of us are in the right and in the wrong, and we deserve both better and worse.”
“We should really stop reading the tweets.” I settle into a much less impressive lean against the o
pposite side of the elevator, toying with the strap of my bag. “You don’t feel . . . I don’t know, dishonest?”
He pauses, and then: “You made it pretty clear when you begged me to do the show with you. We’re telling a story.”
“Right.” I thought maybe he was wearing a facade for Kent—not that he’d abandoned his journalistic morals. Maybe they weren’t that strong to begin with. It changes my opinion of him, just a little. I guess I liked that he had something he was so passionate about. So steadfast.
“How’s your family handling all of this?” I ask. “Do they listen to the show?”
His mouth curves into that frustrating side smile. “They wonder what I did to drive you away.”
“And you told them it was your insistence on falling asleep to the lullaby of a judicial-system podcast?”
“Naturally. I was going to tell one of my buddies from college. Undergrad,” he adds. “But we’re all spread out, and we don’t talk as much as we used to. Sometimes I wish I’d stayed here for college,” he says, and there’s a hint of . . . nostalgia? in his voice. “But then I wouldn’t have the master’s degree.”
“That’s five dollars.”
“We’re off the clock,” he says, feigning a look of innocence. “You’re not going to let me off easy?”
I hold out my hand, and he groans and slides his wallet from his pocket.
This ease between us, it’s very new. I don’t entirely hate it, even if it makes me more aware of all the angles of him: the slant of his shoulders, the curve of his cheekbones. It’s cruel that I can’t go back to simply being annoyed by him.
A ding indicates we’ve reached the parking garage.