Tormented

Her mouth went dry. Maybe she shouldn’t have been honest.

The streetlight had turned red, allowing him to stop the car and pin her with a stare. “There anything else you want to tell me, pet?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

She looked so damn pretty, Ben almost didn’t know what to do with himself. He wanted to think that she had added the makeup for him, a sign that maybe she didn’t hate his guts after what he had done to her.

The light turned green, so he turned his attention to shifting gears. He wasn’t going to push it with Kimani, not until he had a better handle on how she felt about what had happened.

“Nice move,” she commented when he changed lanes, slipping around two slow-moving cars.

“I used to want to be a race car driver,” he said.

“To piss your dad off?”

“Partly, but I like driving. Don’t get to do much of it anymore.” With a rare expanse of open road, he kicked the car into higher gear. “What did you want to be?”

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a police officer. There aren’t many female cops, let alone cops of color. Then I got into basketball and wanted to play in the WNBA.”

“You said you did a journalism internship after graduating Stanford. You still interested in that field of work?”

“Yes and no. The work is interesting.”

“What about it appeals to you?”

“Knowledge is power, and journalism is about giving people the power through knowledge and the dissemination of information. Making the world a smaller place so that people can connect and relate with what is happening, whether it’s next door or halfway around the globe.”

“That sounds very worthwhile. So why not pursue a career in journalism?”

“Oh, um, there’s not a lot of jobs anymore, especially in print media. I like to write. You can fit more information into one minute of reading than you can one minute of talking in front of a camera.”

“So your dream job would be working for a newspaper?”

“...Yes.”

“Any paper in particular?”

She smiled, and her eyes brightened. It was devastating.

“Washington Post. New York Times.”

“So if the jobs are few and far between, how does someone like you land a job?”

“Try to get an internship that turns into something. It didn’t for me.

“Anything else you can do?”

“Work for free. Freelance.”

“You doing any of that?”

“This is talk that people on a date would have,” she deflected.

“You got a problem with that?”

“Yes. I don’t want it to feel like a date.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Why not?”