The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom (6 page)

“No. It's okay. Come take a look.” He pressed his lips together and beckoned me over. “It's just that it's always kind of weird to show your stuff to someone, and I've never actually done a portrait like this before.”

“You've never done a portrait?” It was hard to believe.

“Well, sure, we've had models in class and stuff. But this is the first time I've drawn someone I actually…”

“Know?” I supplied.

“Like,” he corrected, just as I stepped around to the front of the easel and caught my first glimpse.

My jaw dropped. It literally dropped.

He had drawn me not once, but twice. In each likeness, I was depicted from the waist up. On the left, I was crying a little—my eyes were all watery, and there was one tear on my cheek. I was staring into space wistfully, like I was thinking about something far away. Someone, rather, because I recognized the moment, even though I had experienced it from the inside and had not been able to observe myself in it as he had. It had been when he'd plucked out the truth about my fears about my father and my guilt over leaving him.

The second image, even though it was me, in the same dress, was the polar opposite of the first. I was looking right at the “camera” and cracking up. My huge grin exposed my teeth, and my eyes looked…happy. It seemed an anemic word to describe what I was seeing, but it was the best I could come up with. I tried to think when this moment had been, but unlike with the other image, I couldn't pinpoint this one. I realized that there had been several times something he'd said had made me laugh.

And…whoa. Hang on a second.

Matthew
liked
me?

“You hungry?” he asked as he stood at a sink at the far end of the room, washing his hands. I had to struggle to make sense of what he was saying, because my brain was still busy exploding. “Because I'm starving. What do you say we hit the A-Hole?” he said, using the Allenhurst Tap Room's more common nickname. “I can use my vast insider knowledge to steer you toward the least awful items on the menu.”

“I should swing by my room and change first,” I said, amazed that my voice came out sounding calm.

“Nah.” He wiped his hands on a towel and looked me up and down. It was hard not to squirm. “You look great.”

T
en minutes
later we were ensconced at a table at the infamously grungy Allenhurst Tap Room, sipping pints of beer and eating mozzarella sticks. I had gotten some weird looks from the other patrons, what with my formal dress, but I'd taken my cue from Matthew, who seemed totally oblivious, and acted like everything was normal. “These are shockingly good,” I said, laughing as a gooey mozzarella string extended from my mouth to the uneaten half of the stick I'd bitten into.

“Yeah, it's hard to mess up fried cheese,” he said.

It being a Saturday afternoon toward the end of the term, the pub was crowded, so we had to lean close to make ourselves heard. He smelled like turpentine, which wasn't a surprise given that he was an artist. But the fact that I found it so irresistible kind of was.

“You do what you can back there,” he said, nodding at the kitchen. “But given the quality of the ingredients, that's only so much. But cheese, even cheap cheese, is pretty reliable.”

“You're quite the connoisseur,” I said. The Hefeweizen he'd steered me toward, suggesting its lightness as a good foil for the rich cheese, was a perfect match for the mozzarella. “Have you worked here your whole time at Allenhurst?”

“Yup. And I am not going to miss it at all.”

“What are you going to do after you graduate?” I almost didn't ask the question I'd been wondering about for so long. Things had become so easy between us, and it seemed like the type of question that might scare him off.

“What are
you
going to do?” he countered.

“Move to New York and get a job in journalism,” I said. “Then after a year or two, I'm going to apply to Columbia for a master's in journalism.” It had always been the plan. It was the one thing in life I could count on.

When he didn't say anything in response, I decided to push him further. (I'm a masochist, apparently.) “You ever think about New York? Isn't that the center of the art world?”

He was shredding a napkin. “Yeah. But I'm not sure you get to just
be
an artist.”

“Well, you already are one.”

He looked up, surprise written across his face.

“You are,” I protested. “That might be quite apart from your ability to make money from it, but I have no doubt that you are an artist of the finest ilk.” It was the truth, and there was something about Matthew that kept making me want to tell him the truth.

“It's the money part that's the problem. If I'm just going to end up flipping burgers, why do it in New York, where everything is so expensive? I'm going to Boston. It's cheaper, and there will be no moving expenses—just me and my shit on the bus.”

“Can't you do something related to art to make money? Like work at a museum, or—oh! Oh!” I had the perfect idea. I didn't know why I'd never thought of it before. “What about editorial cartooning?” He started to protest, so I just plowed on. “Seriously. Your graffiti is all about politics.”

“Shh,” he cautioned sharply, looking around. I felt bad—I'd been getting excited, and my voice had risen. “That's not art, though.”

“Are you kidding me?” I wasn't much of an art person, but I searched my mind for an example of a politically minded artist. “Diego Rivera!” I cried triumphantly. “Are you telling me his stuff wasn't art?”

Matthew rolled his eyes. “You did not just compare me to Diego Rivera.”

“All I'm saying is, you clearly have something to say. So why not editorial cartooning as a way to make money?”

“So I should just knock on the door of the
New York Times
and tell them I'm ready to go?”

There was a hint of his old snarling tone. I didn't like it. So I shot him a withering glance as I said, “No. I would think the first step would be to build a portfolio.” When he didn't answer, I softened a bit and added, “It's too bad you don't have any ins with newspaper editors.”

Apparently I'd drunk the rainbow-flavored Kool-Aid, because half an hour later, watching Jenny trot back to the table from a trip to the restroom, I was preparing to capitulate to her demand that I submit a cartoon for next week's
Allenhurst Examiner
. I'd resisted as long as I could, but, as she had so vehemently pointed out, I owed her for sitting for that portrait. As she walked, bouncing along in her bright white Keds, the skirt of her electric-blue formal puffing up a little, I could feel the last shred of my willpower evaporating. I was pretty sure Curry was going to love my portraits of her. And though I would never admit it out loud, she kind of had a point about cartooning. It had never occurred to me as a possible job path, but what could it hurt to have a bit of practical art experience on my résumé? Even if I had to get some shit job to pay the bills, wasn't it a good idea to actively be adding to my portfolio at the same time?

Just as she arrived back at our table, a girl I didn't recognize did too.

“Nessa!” said Jenny, smiling. Ah, so this was the roommate. Warily, I looked around, only half paying attention to Jenny's introduction. If the roommate was here, it was possible that Royce wasn't far behind.

I'd been looking out into the bar proper, but he approached from the hallway behind us, where the restrooms were. And he wasn't alone. There were two other preppy types with him, complete with letter jackets and frosted blond hair.

“Art Boy.”

I shot him a look. It wasn't like he was going to do anything in public, but I knew his type. I had punched him. Jenny had refused him. He would never let these slights go. Plus he was slurring a bit.

“Cat got your tongue, fag?”

“Don't use that language around me, Royce,” Jenny said with a coolness I suspected was manufactured.

“What? ‘Fag'? Would you prefer ‘cocksucker'?”

The Neanderthals laughed, and Jenny's roommate gasped. “Royce!” she whisper-admonished, taking his arm.

He shrugged her off like she was an insect and let his gaze settle on Jenny. Silently, he took in the dress, which was, of course, wildly out of place in the casual pub, where acid-washed denim ruled the day. I wasn't looking to start anything, but I knew without a doubt that if he insulted the dress that Jenny so loved, I was going to punch him again. And I wouldn't stop at one this time.

“I'm just calling it like I see it,” Royce said to Jenny's roommate. “If you couldn't tell from his pansy-assed long hair and artistic ways, we know it's true because this frigid chick”—he turned back to Jenny, leering—“wouldn't let a real man anywhere near her. Ergo, Art Boy is a fag.”

“Ergo,” I drawled. “Wow. Big word for you, Royce.” This couldn't possibly end well. I didn't know how to defuse the situation, but I wasn't about to cower before Royce fucking Waldorf. “Bigots don't usually come equipped with such impressive vocabulary skills.”

He took a step closer, a vein on his temple bulging.

“Is there a problem here?”

Never had I been more grateful to hear that voice. It was the pub's night manager, Brian. Though Brian was usually riding me about bussing tables faster or not letting the kegs sit empty, he was basically a stand-up guy.

“I hope not,” I said. “My friend and I are just trying to enjoy a drink.”

Brian turned to Royce, eyebrows raised. “Can I help you find a table?”

The intervention worked. After a few beats of tension-laden silence, Royce snarled and stalked away. Jenny's roommate, the last to follow, stood staring at Jenny for a few seconds. She looked like she wanted to say something, but Jenny wasn't cutting her any slack. She just stared back, her eyes hard. Good for her. If this Nessa chick was going to choose Royce over Jenny, the correct response, if you asked me, was
good riddance
.

But of course Jenny didn't ask me; she just looked up at me once her friend was gone, those huge brown eyes filling with moisture. “How could she just stand there and listen to him talk to me like that? To both of us?”

I shook my head, not sure what to say. For someone with a dead mom and a messed-up dad, she was amazingly innocent in some ways. How did you tell someone like Jenny that it's better to expect the world to fuck you over because that way you're not disappointed when it does?

“How am I going to face her back at the room tonight?” Her voice was small, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. Small didn't suit her.

“Will she stay with Royce?” I asked. Not that I wanted to subject anyone—even the thoughtless, self-absorbed Nessa—to Royce. But for Jenny's sake, it would be better if her roommate just didn't come home tonight.

She shook her head. “I don't think so. When he's that drunk, she usually comes back to our room.”

Well, then. There was only one correct course of action to take. I stood up. “Let's get out of here.”

“
I
can't just hide
out in your room indefinitely,” Jenny said, even as she lowered herself to perch on the edge of my bed, which, since the desk chair was covered with a painting I'd draped there to dry last night, was the only place in the small room to sit. My room was a disaster, actually, strewn with clothes and art supplies. In her fancy dress, she looked like a princess in a hovel.

Normally, I would have agreed with her. I didn't like having people here. Hell, I didn't like people generally, which was why I avoided the other guys on the floor. And since I didn't have a dining package, I didn't have to deal with them in the cafeteria, either. People came with shit—emotions, demands, needs—that would only distract me from doing what needed to be done. But, somehow, more than I didn't want people in my room, I didn't want Jenny to risk another run-in with Royce or Nessa. Obviously, she was going to have to see her roommate at some point, but just…not yet. But I couldn't say that without sounding like an idiot. “You don't have to stay. Just give me five minutes. I want to show you something.” I cleared the desk chair, sat down, and rummaged around in the desk for a fresh sheet of paper and a fountain pen. “But I was thinking…” I twisted to look at her over my shoulder. “If you stay until it gets really late, she might be asleep when you get back to your room.” I shrugged. “Whatever you want. But you're welcome to stay as long as you like.”

She shot me a grin. “Thanks.” Then she used each big toe to slip off the opposite foot's shoe and swung her legs up so she was half sitting, half lying back against my pillows.

I should have stopped staring at that point. She clearly wasn't going anywhere, at least not immediately. It's just that the sight was so incongruous. Rainbow Brite, all sandy brown and electric blue, glossy and tough, innocent and bold, sprawled out on my bed as if she belonged there. And her dress had hiked up a bit as she'd laid back, exposing a pair of smooth pale thighs.

I had managed to sublimate pretty much every biological urge I'd had since coming to college. I ate just enough to keep me going, trying to spend as little money as possible on what I forced myself to regard as mere fuel. I drank water. It was free, and there was no danger of too much water impairing your judgment.

I hadn't had sex since high school. The girls I'd slept with back then had been enjoyable diversions, and they'd come on to me. It sounds awful to state it so clinically, but they were there for the taking, so I took. That didn't happen at Allenhurst. Besides, I hadn't really even looked up long enough in my time here to make lasting eye contact with anyone. I had no time for relationships—this phase of life was about getting good grades, learning actual technique in my art, and working enough to survive. It was about getting what I needed to set me up for the next phase, when my real life would begin. So if I was horny, I'd close my eyes and beat off to an imaginary girl.

And she never looked anything like the real one currently draped across my bed.

“What?”

The imaginary girl of my masturbatory fantasies also didn't talk.

“You're looking at me like something is wrong,” she said.

I turned back to the desk and shifted in my seat, trying to ease the pressure that had built in my groin. Something was wrong, that was true. But that wasn't why we were here. I was used to self-denial, so better to just get on with it. I picked up the pen, and she seemed to accept that I wasn't going to say anything, because for the next few minutes the only sounds in the room were the scratch of my pen and her soft breathing.

When I was done, I turned my desk chair around to present her with the fruits of my labor.

“What's that?” she asked, sitting up and scooching to the edge of the bed to peer at the paper I held.

Here we went. Silently, I handed her the drawing.

There was no noise in the room while she absorbed it. I was struck suddenly with the urge to minimize my efforts. “You sat for the portraits,” I said, feeling my face grow warm. “So I figured the least I could do was give you a cartoon in return.” It was about the goddamned art building. I'd drawn a little picture of a crowd protesting outside it, except the crowd was made up of famous artists that regular people were likely to recognize: da Vinci, Andy Warhol, and so on. It wasn't the most imaginative thing, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.

She looked up, and…shit. To say the smile that blossomed lit up her face would be an understatement. It might as well have been powered by the same neon that made her dress blaze that fierce blue. But at the same time, her eyes had grown suspiciously dewy. She was full of contradictions, this one.

I expected a torrent of words. I knew her ways now, and after she got over her shock that her campaign had finally succeeded, she would start talking and stop maybe sometime tomorrow or the next day.

I did not expect her to kiss me.

My single room was so small that there were only a couple feet between the bed and the desk. Since she'd moved to the edge of the bed, all she had to do was lean forward. She pressed her lips to my cheek and murmured, just before they hit, “This is wonderful.”

I froze. I hadn't shaved in a couple days, so I had more than a five-o'clock shadow going. Her lips were too soft for me.
She
was too soft for me.

But I couldn't move. I couldn't push her away. I just sat there, letting her put her mouth against me like a brand.

It was a chaste kiss, on the surface of things. It was just her lips against my cheek, and her hands rested in her lap, for fuck's sake. But, just like the other night, at the construction site, it was like she was filling me with lava. It ran down my throat, swirled around my chest, and then settled in my dick, where it burned hot and fierce.

She pulled away, but only slightly. “Thank you for this,” she whispered. See? This was what nice girls did. They said thank you. Then they gave you a kiss on your rough cheek.

Though she'd moved back enough to speak, she hadn't returned to sitting upright on the bed. She stayed leaning forward, listing toward me, bracing her hands on her thighs.

I let my gaze slide over a bare neck that would make Degas weep. Across pale, unblemished shoulders. The bodice of her dress went straight across, a horizontal ruffle making a dramatic line between white skin and brilliant blue dress. Earlier, it hadn't been showing much in the way of cleavage, but now that she was leaning forward, a gap had appeared between the ruffle and her breasts.

I couldn't stop looking at that gap. Why didn't she just move back? She had her cartoon. She'd deposited her perfunctory kiss. We were done here.

Weren't we?

“I don't want to graduate a virgin,” she whispered.

A jolt shot through my body. I could feel each rib painfully expanding as I sucked in a breath and brought my eyes up to look into hers. In contrast to the tentative tone of her last sentence, her eyes were fierce, glittering, determined. Those were the eyes of the investigative journalist she would become.

“I have a sponge in my bag,” she added, her voice catching a little.

“Oh, Rainbow Brite,” I said, though it came out sounding more like a groan. I let my head fall to my chest. I couldn't look at her anymore. The room should have been silent then, but I swear, the blood in my ears was like thunder.

She might have spoken and I hadn't heard her, because the next thing that happened was she moved her hands from her thighs to mine. She just laid them there, but it was nearly enough to make me black out.

I flinched. I was startled, turned on, wary…everything. Everything all at once.

“I'm sorry,” she said, snatching her hands away.

No.
The protest probably started with my dick, to be honest, but it rose up through my chest and down through my legs simultaneously, spreading until it swirled throughout my whole body, propelling me toward her.

I wasn't going to be the reason Jenny Fields was sorry.

I was also done being a goddamned monk.

So I grabbed her and fell back onto the bed, hauling her on top of me. She shriek-laughed in delight, and it did something to me. The ribs that had twinged before were opening like doors now, but it wasn't smooth. It wasn't pretty. It felt like my chest was cracking open, jagged bits of bone piercing pathetic, inadequate lungs I couldn't get enough air into. So I did the only thing I could do, which was to kiss her. She melted into me immediately, straddling me with her legs and letting her whole weight settle on me as she sighed and opened her mouth.

When I pushed open the door to Matthew's room, I sent a silent prayer to the sky.
Please don't let him have changed his mind
. (Also:
Please let me have inserted that sponge correctly
.) If I had been on the pill, this awkward interruption of the action wouldn't have been necessary. We could have gone right from rolling around on his bed kissing to…the rest. God, I could feel myself blush just thinking the words.

“Why me?” he said, the moment I'd shut the door behind me.

“Look at you,” I said. He was propped up against his headboard with his shirt off—we'd gotten that far before I'd had to excuse myself for momentum-destroying sponge insertion. The twilight slanted in though the window, painting the planes of his lean, wiry frame with warm pink light and illuminating those insanely green eyes. His black hair fell in his face, and he swiped it away. Someone needed to paint
him
,
for heaven's sake.

He ducked his head and actually looked embarrassed. Could I ever have imagined, back when he was snarling at me and I was trying to bribe him with pizza, that
I
could make
him
blush? It made me feel bold. Powerful.

“I'm no prize, Jenny,” he said, meeting my eyes again.

“I'm not looking for a prize,” I countered, reaching around and undoing the zipper that ran up the back of my dress with a confidence I was faking. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, in truth, but I didn't really care to parse it now. I just wanted to get out of my head. That part at least wasn't going to be hard, because just looking at him zoomed my body back to where it had been before, when we were kissing. A pulse began to beat between my legs, and as I let the dress fall and pool at my feet, the cool air hit my breasts, making my nipples peak almost painfully. I might have been a virgin, but I knew this feeling. I just hadn't known I could get so close without touching myself.

“God,” he choked out, running his hands through his hair almost like he was having second thoughts.

I wasn't sure what to do with second thoughts. Had the onslaught of desire pressing down on me clouded my judgment? Had I made myself ridiculous? I pushed back at the questions. I didn't want them. They would only make me cautious, and that caution would hobble me right now. So I reached for the one word that made sense to me in that moment: “Matthew.”

He was off the bed in a flash, hands grabbing my hips as he crashed his mouth down on mine. Once he had steadied me, his hands came up to my breasts, sliding up under the strapless bra I wore and tracing their undersides, all the while making wicked, deep incursions into my mouth with his tongue. I was on fire everywhere he touched. I was on fire everywhere, period.

And then, with no warning, he fell to his knees.

I knew what he was doing. I mean, I knew with my mind. I was acquainted with the act in theory. But that didn't mean I was prepared for him to shove my panties down around my knees and bury his face between my legs.

It also didn't mean I was able to stop myself from asking, on a shaky exhale, “What are you
doing
?” As I spoke, he darted a tongue out and licked me like I was an ice cream cone, sending a jolt of pleasure so strong through me that my question was followed by a moan. And I was sorry I'd asked it, because now, tilting his head up to meet my eyes, he was going to stop and answer me.

“I'm eating you out.”

The matter-of-fact way he said it—oh, it did something to me. But part of me was still incredulous. “Why?”

“Because I want to.” His eyes narrowed, almost like he was angry. But I'd seen him angry, and this wasn't that. “And judging by how wet you are, you do too. So do you think you can shut the fuck up long enough for me to make you come?”

Oh, crap. His words alone almost did it. I had hoped I'd be able to shake off the heavy cloak of virginity I didn't want to wear anymore, but I had imagined it playing out more…traditionally. But now I wanted…this instead. So I nodded, not so much because I was obeying his command but because I no longer trusted my voice.

Matthew grabbed one of my buttocks with each hand to anchor himself, and apparently that initial lick had merely been an exploratory exercise, because, groaning, he sank his tongue into my folds. He set a rhythm of plunging in and out, licking me so intimately I should have been embarrassed, but I couldn't manage to do anything but gasp. With each stroke of his tongue, it was like a camera was gradually zooming in on the innermost part of me, making me heavy, saturated with sensation.

The fullness built and built until I thought I might not be able to stand it anymore. It was too much and, at the same time, not enough. Instinctively, I tried to buck my hips, but he tightened his grip on me, securing my butt with his forearms, all the while keeping up the wicked rhythm with his tongue. I was immobilized, pinned in place between his face and his arms, and I was so, so close. I let out a little sob of frustration.

He seemed to understand what it signified better than I did, because he lifted his face a little and swirled his tongue on my clit before pulling off long enough to rasp, “Is this what you want, Jenny?” Not waiting for an answer, he returned to my clit, taking it between his lips and sucking gently.