Electric II

"So tell me about the story," I said, once we were in the truck.

"What about it?" Sarah asked.

"Well," I said. "Who are we talking to? What are we doing for b-roll? Do you know what angle you want to take?"

"We'll see when we get there."

That pretty much set the tone for the whole night. Sarah was really pissed off at me, presumably because... Well, I really don't know why she was mad at me. She screwed me over Tuesday, and then refused to talk to me all night Wednesday. I did the best I could with the story considering I had no idea what was going through her head. She did leave me 45 minutes to edit (after writing for 90 minutes herself), so after the last couple of weeks I felt like I had an eternity.

After the show I ran into Lizzie in the newsroom. I was surprised to see her, since she had worked dayside that day.

"Escape tapes," she said, when I asked why she was there. She was referring to resume tapes, the demo tapes reporters and photographers send to show their work to news directors when they apply for job openings. While reporters generally don't want to broadcast to management that they're looking for new jobs, very few of them actually have their own systems to edit and dub their tapes at home. They have to rely on the equipment at their stations, and they have to be somewhat discreet about it. Most reporters probably would have waited until the middle of the night to do their tapes, when no one else would be around, but I think Lizzie wants the ND to know she's looking elsewhere, without actually shoving it in his face.

"I'm almost done," she said. "You out yet?"

"Yeah, I'm off right now," I said.

"Wanna go somewhere? I'm off tomorrow, and I don't feel like going home."

"Sure, I'll go."

I waited another fifteen minutes, just surfing the net in the newsroom. Then Lizzie and Lynn popped in together.

"Let's go," Lizzie said.

Hell yes, I thought.

We went over to Lynn's place to hang out. Lynn lives by herself in a comfortable one bedroom apartment carved out of an old house. There are four apartments in the house, and she has the first floor.

The first thing that struck me upon entering the place is that Lynn has really cool taste. To cover the cracked plaster walls, she has old, red, velvet-like cloth hung from the ceiling like tapestries. All her furniture is old, but she has picked stuff with character. She has an old Philco television cabinet, complete with doors on the front, with a newer television stuck inside it to replace the old tube and guts. She sectioned off one part of the room by making a wall of old windows she got from a construction salvage yard and put her desk and computer behind it. Her couch and chairs are all covered with quilts, and at one end of the couch is an old end table with a brass pipe holder built into it. There are plenty of little strange decorative items around, but too many to list here.

Lynn offered us drinks, and for more than an hour the three of us sat in the living room engaged in a discussion of our jobs, which consisted in large part of listening to Lizzie bitch about hers. She told us about some of the places she was planning to send tapes. She explained her theory on the ND's hiring practices, which apparently involves letting his penis choose his reporters. That would explain the discrepancy in the ratio of females to males in the newsroom.

Lynn and I kept catching each other's eyes throughout. The spark was definitely still there. Finally she let out a big sigh.

"Every time I make a new friend, they leave," she said.

"Nature of the business," said Lizzie. "Can't stay here forever."

"What about you?" Lynn smirked, turning her eyes my way and looking at me around the corner of her glasses. "You planning to leave me here too?"

"No," I said, feeling pretty bold. "I'll take you with me."

"Oh really," she said. "What if I can't go?"

"You could go if you wanted."

"I dunno," she said. "I like it here. I might wanna stay."

"I could convince you," I said. Crap, was that ME that said that? Where is this coming from?

"Big words," she said, with her smirk growing a little more like a smile.

After a short pause, Lizzie reminded us of her presence by suddenly saying, "I have to go to the restroom."

"You know where it is," Lynn said.

Now Lynn and I were alone together, and suddenly it seemed awkward again. Why does that happen? One minute you're swimming along, the master of the current; the next minute you're drowning.

"Let me give you the tour," Lynn said, getting up. She led me through a door into a short hallway that connected to the kitchen. There were some framed black and white photographs on the wall there. "Don't look at those," she said. So I didn't, even though I distinctly got the impression she wanted me to.

"This is the kitchen," she said. It certainly was. Just like the living room, it reflected her style. Against one wall was a 50s style red formica table with chrome trim, with matching red vinyl chairs. This was no reproduction, but showed the genuine wear of several decades in the dullness of the chrome and the splits in the vinyl. Her cookware was hanging from a rack suspended from the ceiling, galley-style. The counters and sink were trimmed with black and white tile. I noticed a French press on the counter (girl knows about coffee, obviously), as well as--what's that?

"A waffle iron?" I asked.

"Heart shaped," she said, stepping over and opening the old chrome waffle iron to reveal a heart pattern inside. "It still works, too," she said.

"I didn't picture you as the type," I said.

"Yeah, sometimes I feel like being a girl," she said.

Lizzie was STILL in the bathroom after all this time, so the tour continued. (Thanks, Lizzie.)

Next up was the bedroom. The room was small and was mostly filled with her bed, a queen sized four post frame with a canopy. Off to the side, leaning against the wall on top of a little bookshelf, was a stack of large black and white prints mounted in cardboard frames.

"Don't look at those," she said. This time I wasn't as obedient. I headed straight for them and started flipping through.

"Did you do these?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "I used to use the darkroom in school. At some point I'm gonna set up my own. Now everything's digital, though. I oughta just use the computer."

Some of the photos weren't that interesting, but some were really good. I stopped on a picture of a little kid eating what appeared to be chocolate cake. He had this huge smile on his face. What she captured in that instant was simple, extreme happiness. You couldn't look at it without smiling in sympathy.

"These are really good," I said.

"Stop it," she said. "That's enough." Then she started trying to shove between me and the stack.

"No," I said, "I want to see the rest."

"That's enough for one night," she said. But instead of pulling them away from me, as she had been trying to do, she turned toward me and pushed me away from the stack. I instinctively put my hands up, and she grabbed both of my wrists. Remember, I said this was a small room, mostly filled with queen-sized bed. The only place for me to go was--you guessed it--onto the bed. As I backed against it I lost my balance and sat down on the edge. She moved directly between me and the stack of pictures, still holding my hands.

"I'm not letting you up," she said, moving closer to me. She ended up standing with her knees between mine, but still pushing on my wrists so that our upper bodies weren't as close. I turned my hands to try to catch hers in mine. She responded by loosening her grip a little to allow it. We ended up with our fingers interlocked.

Holy crap was my heart pounding. She was breathing hard also, but we had hardly exerted ourselves at all. Her glasses had slid down her nose a little, but she wouldn't let go to adjust them. Instead she just tilted her head back to look down at me through the lenses. She wasn't smirking.

I pulled my hands apart to take away her leverage, pulling her closer to me in the process. She resisted, but she didn't pull away completely. Then she did something unexpected. She let go of my left hand and ran her fingers through my hair with her right. I closed my eyes and shuddered, not even realizing at the time that my free hand instinctively had gone to her waist.

"Huh-um!" we heard come from the living room. "It's about time I got home!" Lizzie said. We hadn't even heard her leave the bathroom.

"Okay," Lynn said, still not letting go of me. "See you tomorrow!"

"Uh, Max is my ride home," Lizzie yelled back. This is how murders happen.

"Your girlfriend's calling," Lynn said to me. Her smirk was back. She let go of me and straightened her clothes a little, even though I didn't really mess them up. I was hoping to at least get a kiss before parting, but she just turned her back on me and went back to the living room. I followed shortly behind to find Lizzie grinning idiotically and throwing glances back and forth between us. She already had her coat on and turned for the door.

As she went out, I stopped at the doorway and quietly said to Lynn, "Maybe we could pick up where we left off sometime." I almost immediately felt like a lecherous idiot when I said it, but perhaps it wasn't the wrong thing to say.

"Maybe," she said, smirking sideways at me with her head tilted down a little to give me the full effect of those steel blue eyes.

Damn. Electric.