The Ex Talk

“Are you avoiding me?”

“No.”

“Something’s wrong,” he says, crossing the invisible line I drew down the center of the elevator. Instinctively, I press my back harder against the padded wall. He mercifully stops about a foot in front of me, leaning down to scrutinize my face with his deep, dark eyes. In my traitorous imagination, he pins me to the wall, smashes the emergency stop button. Bends to drop his mouth to my neck. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“If this is about Monday—” He breaks off, blushing, putting a little more space between us.

It’s the first time I’ve seen him blush, and it makes me want to cover my own face.

“No no no.” I tighten my grip on my bag. “It’s not. We were drunk. We were just—”

“Really drunk,” he finishes with a swift nod of his head. “I normally don’t—I mean, that wasn’t—”

“You don’t have to explain,” I say, though all I want is a detailed explanation with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation. I reach out to graze his wrist with a fingertip—a gesture of reassurance—realizing when I make contact that it was a terribly unwise decision. I am out of control and must be stopped. I should have known better, but the guy is a fucking magnet. That brush of skin against skin is enough to bring heat to my cheeks and to a couple other locations. Moth, meet flame. Give flame the middle finger.

“Good.” He visibly exhales, his shoulders dipping at least an inch. Now he can pursue the someone he mentioned on the air, guilt-free. “Then if it’s not that—”

“Dominic. I’m fine. I’m spectacular,” I say. “Nothing to investigate.”

“I’ve never heard you use the word ‘spectacular.’”

“Better take me to the hospital. It sounds serious.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “I’m going to figure it out,” he says.

A ding indicates we’ve reached the fifth floor. I’ve got to talk to maintenance about how slow the elevator’s been lately. There might be something wrong with it.

* * *

—

“I always feel like I’m in the principal’s office,” Dominic whispers as we wait for Kent to make his tea. It’s some complicated five-step process. He explained it to me once, and I promptly forgot it.

I refocus on the meeting itself. What’s at stake is far worse than the equivalent of detention.

Kent walks inside with his mug, smiling as always, but it’s a little tight. “Well. I’m sure you two know why you’re here.”

“We tried to get him off the air as quickly as we could,” Dominic says, and it’s strange he says we when I was mostly silent. “We were near the

end of the show, and I didn’t know how else to fill for time, so . . .” He trails off with a sheepish shrug. “Couldn’t we cut it from the podcast?”

“The fact remains that it’s out there,” Kent says. “If we cut it, it’s going to look like we’re hiding something. We have to take this seriously, do some hard-core damage control. People heard it, and now they’re going to be scrutinizing you more than ever before.”

Dominic runs a hand over his face. “Well . . . fuck,” he says, and I’d laugh at him uttering the word in front of our boss in such a serious meeting if I weren’t so worried about what’s going to happen.

“Fuck is right.” Kent blows over the top of his tea mug. “If more people latch onto this, if they call the show’s premise into question, then we are deeply, deeply fucked.” He sighs, and then: “I’ve heard murmurs. Nothing is a guarantee, but we could have some big things on the horizon.”

I scoot to the edge of my chair. “Big how?”

“Big like PodCon,” Kent says, and I have to fight to keep a straight face. “And there’s been interest from some exciting sponsors. Again, nothing certain yet, but do you realize how huge that could be for the station?”

I’m dying to know more about PodCon, about those potential sponsors, but the show’s integrity—or lack thereof—is the more pressing issue. “We could . . . stage some photos from the relationship?” I wince even as I suggest it. More lying. It reminds me that anything good I feel about the show is accompanied by this disappointed voice that sometimes sounds like Ameena and sometimes like my dad.

It’s a bit of a relief when Kent shakes his head. “It’s not a matter of creating evidence,” he says. “It’s in the way you two talk to each other. It’s almost too scripted. Too staged. I can hear it sometimes, too. And I know part of this is on me. I’m the one who encouraged this, and neither of you had solid on-air experience yet. But we looked through some listener feedback, and it turns out some of them also feel the show was a little too carefully choreographed, which makes me worry it seems as though you two don’t know each other well enough. Which, again, to be fair, you don’t. We didn’t give the two of you much time to get acquainted with each other, on top of creating both your relationship and your breakup.”

Dominic and I are quiet for a few seconds. Kent’s admonishing us, but not blaming us?