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Macy nodded. “Dating, yes. It’ll be a hell of a tightrope to steer clear of controversy.”
“Popular though?” said Jackson.
Macy grinned. “Why do you think I’m considering it?”
Luca spitballed. “I could use abstract concepts? Desire. Lust. Throw in some Greek philosophy and Freud. Give it an intellectual edge?”
Jackson looked impressed. “Yes, that could work. Though it’s hardly a topic for a weekly column?”
Luca was flying now. He’d caught their attention and there was no way he was letting go. “Why not put it as one big essay in the ‘Sunday Supplement’?”
Macy stared at him again, her face unreadable. The “Sunday Supplement” was the pinnacle of the Gazette—where most of the Pulitzers had been won. Big articles on big topics. “You’d turn down a weekly column for a single freelance piece? And give up sex for the whole summer—no kisses, no gropes, no drunken screws behind the dumpster at Queenies. Nothing?”
“Yes. As an opportunity to show what I can do within your rules.”
Until I learn how to break them . . .
Jackson shuffled in his chair. “We don’t pay in advance for freelance pieces. The renumeration is highly competitive—even more so if our affiliates pick it up. New York and London and Sydney. But we’d only make the decision once the piece was finished.”
The HR man sneered. “And you’d need to sign a guarantee that you’d been truthful to your pledge.”
“Come on, Chester,” said Jackson. “Surely we don’t need?—”
“No, Mr. Bennet. All it would take is one dalliance to come forward and the whole Gazette would be tarred. The conservatives have been watching us for months, just waiting for a mistake. Imagine what they’d do if this story was exposed as a lie.”
“Agreed,” said Macy, before Jackson could respond. “We’d be toast. Besides, the power’s in the honesty. You hear me, kid? Zero sex. Zero anything. I don’t want you dating. I don’t want you lining up options for when the summer’s done. I don’t want you kissing a friend on the damn cheek at brunch. Nothing is to happen. Can you handle that?”
Luca paused, the weight of the question pressing down on him.
It had all happened so suddenly. One minute he was readying to march out, the next he was being offered a piece in the “Sunday Supplement”—something most journalists spent decades working toward.
It was an incredible stroke of luck. An incredible opportunity!
But could he actually do it?
A whole summer without sex sounded awful. But after a year of professional rejection, at least this was something.
All he had to do was be clever, write this one article, show them what he could do. And then, job done, he could start pushing their boundaries. Fraying their edges. Working toward the articles he actually wanted to write. Articles that would start conversations and bring people out of the shadows and tell stories that no one else would.
The horizon was faint but there was a sunrise there. A goal. A plan. And this was where that journey started. The first step he had to take, blue balls be damned.
“Of course,” he said, as calm as he could.
Chester glared with his mainstream little eyes. “Good. Because if you do lie, Mr. Torres, you’ll soon learn the difference between making the news, and making the news.”
Luca sipped the steaming cup of hot chocolate—his mother’s thick, mouth-watering recipe, with freshly ground cinnamon and a pinch of chili, giving the whole brew a luxurious quality.
There were no marshmallows bobbing on the surface. They’d never been part of his family’s pantry, and Luca wasn’t sorry for that. He couldn’t understand the fetishization of the candy. They were like gooey packing foam, nowhere near as satisfying as a heaped spoonful of dulce de leche.
A flurry of mouse clicks filled the cramped room—a single-bedded time capsule to a chunky teenager who’d always forged his own path.
There was the Polaroid of him at the high school newspaper, wearing that terrible green fedora he thought made him look like a dashing reporter. There was the leaflet he’d distributed around high school—the one with sex education advice for queer kids that his school had refused to teach.
He’d been suspended for that. And had his parents dragged into the principal’s office for a dressing down.
The school had expected them to be ashamed. To punish him. To agree that his actions were improper for a good Catholic boy.
Instead, they’d told the school to get bent. And framed the leaflet for him, too.
