My Love Or Job

I ran a hand through my shock of kinky roots, letting out a deep exhale. Annoying couldn’t quite describe the situation I’d found myself in. I had subconsciously bit my lip till they became a bright red. My reflection off the mirror I had taken from my drawer stared back at me with thorn-sharp eyes that were two pools of black lava threatening to boil over. I took note of the bags that were forming under my eyes and I frowned. This was what you got when you had Seth Mahoney as your assignment editor. In the past three days, I’d barely had ten hours of sleep.

I couldn’t say I didn’t know why Mahoney hated my guts, but it got to me every time he made no effort to disguise it. He'd had the hots for me since the first day I walked through the frosted glass door to his office with a folder full of stories I was confident were Hunch Spotter-worthy. He had liked the insider information I claimed I had on Ryder Fleming’s abusive marriage and was ready to give my hunch a shot. He gave me two weeks to work on the story I had. He explained that Hunch Spotter was not just a speculative tabloid that published celebrity gossip week after week only to have the public figures deny such speculations.

“Well, our focus is celebrity news,” he had said, lolling on his cushion seat behind his large desk, his copper eyes anywhere but at eye-level. He had this smirk on his thick, pale lips that irked me. Mahoney could be anything between late thirties to early fifties. He had a U-shaped balding and was running too fast.

“But we make reports based on documentaries. Photos, videos, and audio notes are all what we work with to publish a story,” he had added, shooting me a grin I pinned to slap off his face.

I could tell when a man reasoned with his third leg. I could call lust out even if it showed in the most obscure of leers, but Mahoney wasn’t trying to be obscure with his interest. He tried to let me know in the way his hand lingered when he shook my hands, in the way he tried to keep the conversation going when he sent direct messages to me under the guise of assigning me to a new story, that he was truly gunning for me. And when I played dumb to all that, he finally told me there was a steakhouse he could meet me at.

It wasn’t so much about what he asked, but the confidence with which he asked, regardless of his two-year-old marriage I had only recently learned of, that came off to me as off-putting. So I relished poking holes in that ballooned confidence of his when I turned him down. Since then, Mahoney had gone full jerk on me, assigning me to the toughest stories with the shortest deadlines. However this last one was the worst! Of all the stories he could assign me to, he chose the Other Colors of Snow. And I got the brunt of all things unethical journalism for this assignment.

This was the story that made Celeb Xtra go out of business. It all began four years ago with a headline on Raiden Snow, the wealthiest man in Silicon Valley and chairman of Mays Games. I had only recently moved to California with an inbox full of rejection mails from the Idaho Post and a growing interest in tabloids. Frank Dudley, the editor at Celeb Xtra, ran the story of how Snow was running a sex cult under the guise of summer interns for software development undergrads. Dudley’s hunch had come from Snow’s offer of a paid internship to five students from UC Berkeley. The only thing was, the interns were all females.

Snow replied with a suit and by the time Dudley was done being the defendant, Celeb Xtra was neck-deep in debt. This Snow, described in the Valleys Gazette as ‘the most ruthless exec you’d ever meet’, was the man Seth wanted me to run a story on. For the next one month, I’d be playing Hunches’ insider at the Snow's estate in Los Altos Hills, with five other female students interning at the billionaire’s company. The assignment was to get photos and videos that would make the loudest noise Silicon Valley had ever heard. I was to do my assignment without getting caught.