The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

Chapter One

Derelie Honeywell heard the word cutback and felt her organs flip inside out and shrivel.

What exactly was a cutback? Back home it was what people did with out-of-control weeds. Was it worse coffee in the breakroom? Could that be a thing? Longer hours for less pay? Was that even possible? Freaking hell. Getting this job had been hard enough, and now it was going to be that much harder to keep it.

It didn’t help that the word cutback came from the mouth of the paper’s biggest bastard. Phil Madden was one of the reasons life in the big city of Chicago was more scary than windy. His once upon a time offensive tackle massiveness was one factor. But it was the reality that as editor-in-chief of the Courier, and Derelie’s ultimate boss, he muscled over anything that opposed his vision for the paper that made him truly formidable.

Phil got what Phil wanted or you got a different job somewhere else. He was a bastard amongst bastards in an industry that proudly measured that kind of thing.

Less than a year into her new job, Derelie was quietly terrified of him.

She must’ve made a sound because her cube mate Eunice elbowed her and she scored a glance from her section editor. “Don’t look so scared,” Shona whispered. “Every year around now we get the cutback talk.”

“You’re not a real reporter till you’ve survived a cutback,” Eunice muttered.

Apart from Yogaboy with his man-bun and his perfect lotus position and his effortless vinyasa, there wasn’t anything a whole lot more that interested Derelie than surviving a cutback and keeping her job. Said job allowed her to pay the rent on the shoebox she lived in, eat something green regularly, make long calls home, get her teeth straightened and update her wardrobe. But she appreciated Shona’s attempt at reassurance.

If there was such a thing as tenure at a newspaper, Shona had it. She was rumored to be doing it with Phil. And since Shona had Tinker Bell proportions to go with her pixie cut, that took some thinking about.

Best not to.

“What does cutback mean exactly?” she whispered back.

Shona used a cupped hand to cover her response, as Phil kept talking. “Hard to tell what it means now. We once had potted plants and a dry-cleaning service, and we used to report on foreign and national news. Now we only cover the state. I remember when we used to have a book reviewer, and a film critic. There were always free books and tickets to shows being handed out. We used to have more editors and photographers too.” Shona sighed. “All of that went in cutbacks.”

That was not reassuring. Derelie covered lifestyle for the web edition of the paper, which was where any story that didn’t belong anywhere else went. Her last story was on the rise of athletic wear as everyday fashion. The one before that was on the benefits of standing desks. Not exactly breaking news.

“Remember, you were hired for the online edition and we all know that’s the future of the newsroom,” said Shona.

At twenty-eight, with only a slightly shop-soiled degree, another six months of wearing her invisible braces, enough student and credit card debt to qualify for a personal World Bank assistance loan, and the unrequited love of Yogaboy, being considered the future of the newsroom was more of a threat than a reassurance.

This job was her career break, a way to cement her skills base and make a name for herself. She’d do whatever she needed to grip on to it with all ten fingers, all ten toes, and her near perfect bite, because she wasn’t going back to small town butt-fuck nowhere until she’d made something more impressive of herself in the city than a decent sun salute and straight teeth.

From the front of the room across the tops of the rabbit warren of cubicles, Phil said, “There’ll be a tightening of costs, an increase in the number of syndicated stories and a reduction in the number of pages going to print.”

Management speak for “things aren’t getting any easier.”

“Much thinner and the paper will disappear up our asses,” said Dante Spinoza, another beefy bastard who wrote for the sports pages.

“More complaints and I’ll have you disappeared up your own ass,” Phil fired back.

Derelie’s shriveled insides tightened further at that. It was management speak for “if you know what’s good for you, shut the hell up.”

The only person that didn’t apply to was Jackson Haley. Another of the scary bastards. Haley, who was billed as the Heartbeat of the City and the Defender of the People, was a multi-award winning investigative reporter who had his own daily column. His dinkus—which was a thumbnail of his smarmy handsome face—was always part of the masthead on the first page of the paper where he broke the latest big scandal.

He was courted by cops and CEOs, who wanted to be on his good side, and hated by the people and organizations he exposed for unsavory practices. He was well connected and unafraid, despite the fact he’d had death threats, and gossip had it someone once totaled his car with a baseball bat. He was a newsroom legend. He sold papers. He was the only man in the room who cou

ld out-bastard Phil without raising a sweat.

Jackson Haley didn’t determine whether Derelie kept her job or not; they’d never even bumped elbows in the breakroom, but he was still terrifying in that “I’m utterly fascinated by you, but please don’t notice me” way.

Derelie noticed Jackson Haley, though. She couldn’t help it. He had lookability. A kind of Old Hollywood glamour with his sweep of dark hair and hard blue eyes that even bracketed behind tortoiseshell-framed glasses were instruments of interrogation. He showed up to work in good suits with starchy white shirts worn without a tie, when most of the other men wore chinos and short-sleeved, soft-collared polo shirts. He shined his shoes and they never had rubber soles. It was as if he was single-handedly trying to bring back the golden age of newspapers, before there was the internet and breaking news sometimes came in one hundred and forty character tweets.

That made him seem like some Clark Kent wannabe.

Clark Kent was a nice guy. Jackson Haley, who everyone called Haley, was a sharp-tongued steamroller, an avenging, all-seeing drone in human form. He’d stalk about the bullpen where the business writers sat with his coat off and his cuffs rolled back, a hands-free earpiece constantly connecting him to whatever secret source his stories came from.

He drank coffee by the gallon and smoked in the alleyway outside the office. She’d never seen him eat. She had seen him bruised, which proved he was no Superman. He never tried to hide the occasional black eye, reddened jaw, or hitch to his stride. Story had it, he boxed in one of those “guys who need to beat other up other guys to feel like real men” clubs.

Cut Jackson Haley and he bled the alphabet. He was journalism royalty. His grandfather was a famous war correspondent and a former editor of the paper.

Derelie knew these things about Jackson Haley because everyone knew them. Heck, the whole city knew them.

Over the top of the kind of rustling silence from a floor full of anxious reporters Jackson Haley said, “No cuts to the city pages,” and it wasn’t a question. He didn’t even look at Phil. His eyes were down on his cell.

Phil’s whole frontal lobe collapsed into a frown worthy of an earthquake warning. “We’ll continue to produce a quality news service the city can be proud of and I’ll do what’s necessary to ensure that happens.”

Haley laughed. The sound made Derelie flinch. It was the sound of ice cracking. “Are the PR people writing your lines, Phil? They could do with having more actual content, like the words yes or no.”

That caused a ripple of nervous humor and made Shona’s head whip around to look at Haley.

“I write my own lines, and I don’t need to go through you for permission to run this paper,” said Phil.

Now there was eye contact between the two men who stood some distance apart, which made for a lot of head turning. Derelie wished for popcorn, job security and fewer visits to the dentist, and she wasn’t getting any of those things anytime soon.

“That man has balls the size of Texas,” Shona muttered.

If Haley behaved like a man who knew what women were capable of outside of work, who used his good looks and glamour, his fame and professional power to do something as normal as fool around like other men did, Derelie might think Shona had firsthand, closely sourced, eyewitness knowledge of said Texas-sized balls.

But the collective powers of the paper’s editors, reporters, fact checkers, photographers and librarians had been unable to muster sufficient evidence that the human headline used his balls for anything as un-journalistic as sex, which had the makings of a tragedy as far as Derelie was concerned.

“Not for permission—for the stories that keep the presses and the dollars rolling in the first place,” said the man with the balls in question.

“This is not a debate,” said Phil with a savage tug on what little hair he had left.

“No, it’s our jobs, our livelihoods and the public good of the city,” said everyone’s sudden current favorite champion of the worker, using his rumored Texas-sized balls for the good of all.

“Christ, Haley, no one is losing their jobs.” Over the collective sigh of relief Phil said, “We’ll buy cheaper light bulbs and scratchier crapper paper, so when you’re all stumbling around blind with sore asses—” he pointed at Haley “—you can blame that asshole.”

Derelie knew working at the Courier would enlarge her worldview, but she’d had no idea today’s lesson was mostly going to center around sex and waste organs. She snuck a look at Haley. He was oblivious to the stir going on around him, leaning back on a wall with his eyes down on his cell phone screen, too cool for school.