Bargain For Love

Ninety Days

Chapter 5

“Ninety days,” Austin said.

No water. No softening it into dinner. He put it down like steel and expected the floor to hold. He did not come around the desk. That was its own kind of pressure. A lesser man would have used closeness. He used the room.

“You get inside Joe Group. Your name on a series. A way onto staff that Atlantic Broadcast Group won’t be able to laugh off if the work stands. In return you show up with me at a short list of nights. Where people can see. Not in a back room. The Charles arrangement is alive again. I am not marrying it. A public other choice ends that talk without a fight I don’t have weeks to waste.”

Zera heard each piece as if it might change if she let it sit. *Not in a back room* should have been a relief. It sat in her like a warning instead. He was asking her to stand beside him. He was not asking her to bed. The restraint in that was louder than a hand would have been.

“You want me next to you so a marriage deal looks finished.”

“I want that deal dead. You want a job that isn’t Anna Charles saying you may breathe. That’s a trade.”

“That’s you using a reporter like a chair.”

“Chairs don’t ask about invoices.” His eyes didn’t leave hers. When they dropped, they dropped to her mouth, then her hands on the term-sheet edge of the table that was not a term sheet yet. “You’ll work. You’ll put on air what you can stand behind. I am not picking out a doll.”

A sound came out of her that wanted to be a laugh and didn’t make it. “Anna will bury me.”

“Anna will try whether you sign or not. She started the minute my office said your name.” He watched that hit and didn’t dress it up as care. “I looked at more than your pitch. Your family runs a small place. There’s a notice on a lease that doesn’t have many days left. I can make that paper go away by morning.”

The sugar canister. Her father David’s thumb on the desk. Her mother Mary’s apron. Mike asking if he could wave on television.

Zera’s face went hot, then cold enough that her fingers tingled.

“No.”

He waited. He was good at waiting when waiting was a kind of pressure.

“No,” she said again, cleaner, because once wasn’t enough for her own spine. “You don’t touch the eatery. You don’t touch my father. You don’t buy my mother’s stove and you don’t become a story my little brother has to live inside. If I do this, the only thing you hand me is the work. If I can’t hold a desk without your money under the table, I shouldn’t have the desk.”

Something in his face tightened. Not anger. Attention, sharp enough to cut. He looked at her like a man who had offered purchase and been handed a refusal he wanted more than the yes.

“You’re refusing.”

“I’m refusing the part where you buy the girl from the soup window.” She stepped closer to the table, not to him. Her heart was doing something stupid in her chest and she let it. Feeling it didn’t mean she had to obey it. “If I even look at the rest, I leave with language. I keep control of what I can source. There is an end date that doesn’t slide because you get bored. And you answer one thing before I walk out of this floor. On the record, if you can stand it. What am I when the ninety days are done?”

Austin looked at her for a long time. The river behind him kept moving like it had somewhere better to be.

“I don’t give clean answers I haven’t chosen yet,” he said. “The date will be on the paper. What you are after it will not be.”

The way he said *what you are* brushed her skin. She held the table so she would not hold anything else.

“Then I don’t sign today.”

“I didn’t ask you to sign today.” He glanced at Sam. “Print it.”

Sam left and came back with a thin packet still warm, the way rich offices made paper feel like it had already won. Austin didn’t hold it out. He set it at the edge of the table and let her take it, so the reaching would be hers and she would feel that later, in bed, when she tried to sleep and her hands remembered the distance he had kept on purpose.

Zera picked it up. Her name in type looked like it belonged to a person who had already agreed. That should have felt like a door opening. It felt like putting a foot on a stair and not knowing if the next one was there.

“This is a bargain,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like bargains with men who remember me when I don’t remember them.”

“Then catch up.” He stood. The height of him made the expensive quiet make sense. He still did not close the space. The not-closing was the thing she would think about on the elevator. “Or don’t. I remembered enough for both of us for fifteen years. I’m done standing outside that window waiting for you to look out.”

She went to the door because staying would have been a signature she hadn’t written. Sam walked her to the elevator. In the steel doors her phone lit. Anna. Then Anna again. Then a calendar alert she had not made.

The doors started to close.

Sam caught them with one hand and pressed the packet harder into her palm.

“Take the copy with the schedule,” he said, and there was something almost human in it. “He doesn’t send people downstairs holding half of what they just heard.”

The doors shut.

Zera looked down.

JOE GROUP

TERM SHEET: 90 DAYS

SMITH, ZERA

ATLANTIC BROADCAST GROUP

Under that, smaller than his voice had been:

Companion schedule attached.

She should have waited until the street. She didn’t. Her thumb slid the first page aside.

The companion list had three dates. The first one was not next week.

TONIGHT. 8:00 P.M.

HARBORLINE RECEPTION. PIER FOUR.

SMITH, Z. — ACCOMPANYING A. JOE

COPY: FORD JOE

Ford Joe.

She didn’t know the grandfather’s face yet. She knew what a copy line meant. Somebody above Austin already had her name on a night she had not agreed to walk into.

Her phone buzzed in her other hand.

Anna Charles: Lobby. Now. Do not get in any car that is not ours.

The elevator opened.

Anna was already there, cream jacket, phone up, not quite recording, close enough that it could become recording if Zera took one wrong step. Behind her, through the glass of Joe Group’s lobby, a black car sat at the curb with the back door open. A driver held a card that had her name on it in the same type as the term sheet.

Sam’s voice came from the speaker in the elevator she had just left, delayed, calm, final.

“Miss Smith. Mr. Joe said the first night starts now. If you go with Atlantic Broadcast Group, the access ends on the sidewalk. If you get in the car, you are already on the ninety days.”

Anna’s eyes flicked from the open car to the papers in Zera’s hand.

“Give me that,” Anna said, quiet enough that only Zera would hear it. “Before he makes you the reason Charles loses him.”

The driver waited.

The term sheet waited.

Zera stood in the lobby of Joe Group with her father’s hidden notice in her head, her mother’s voice in her mouth, and a choice that would not stay a choice past the next breath.

Tonight was already printed.

Ford Joe already had a copy.

And Austin Joe, upstairs, had started the clock without asking whether she knew how to run.