Her picture was next to the byline. It was the same one they’d just shown on ESPN. I clicked on the image to enlarge it to full screen. I felt a little twinge go through my body when I gazed into her blue eyes.
She was looking directly into the camera with a modest smile. Her red hair was loose on her shoulders. Her lips were turned up at the corners. I could see freckles across the bridge of her perfect nose.
My eyes followed the gentle slope of her neck down to her collar bone. I remembered trailing my tongue down her neck. I remembered how her breasts felt in my hands. I remembered her sighing into my mouth as I squeezed her long nipples.
“She’s smoking hot,” Leon said, bumping me with his elbow, interrupting my memories of her. “I’d tap that ass.”
“I know,” I said quietly.
“You should tap ass that again.”
“Will you shut up and let me read?”
His cellphone buzzed on the coffee table. He picked it up and winced when he saw the call was from Monique, his soon-to-be bride.
“Fuck. I gotta go home, man,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, giving him a distracted wave. “Have fun.”
“Three words for you, man,” he said, backing out of the room. “Tap that ass!”
“Okay, thank you,” I said. After the door closed, I forced my eyes away from the photo of Katie – Kate – and read the story of my life.
Kate
I’d never seen Walter this giddy. When he came into my office with a big grin on his face and his hands in the air, I thought that he had lost his mind. When he pulled me out of the chair and put me into a bear hug, I was convinced that he had gone completely over the edge.
?
?What’s going on?” I asked, trying to wiggle from his grasp.
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
He held me at arm’s length with his clammy hands on my shoulders. He gave me a shake. “Young lady, come with me!”
“What the…”
He grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the office, down the hall, and into the large conference room, where every other staffer had already gathered, including Dru, who was standing near the door with a big smile on her face.
“What’s going on?” I asked again, this time directing the question to Dru, who just made a silly face and let her thin eyebrows go up and down.
“Okay, people, listen up,” Walter said, rubbing his hands together like two blocks of sandpaper. “Two big announcements today.”
He took out his reading glasses and set them on the tip of his nose, then tugged a piece of paper from his back pocket and took his time unfolding it.
He cleared his throat and read from the paper. “According to our server administrator – that’s the guy in charge of keeping the website up and running—our website crashed twice yesterday.”
He looked at the group from over the top of his glasses, as if he was waiting for them to groan at the news.
“Ordinarily, that would not be good news, but the reason the server crashed this time was the amount of traffic going to Kate’s article about Sean Donovan!”
Everyone clapped and cheered. Dru came forward to give me a big hug. I blinked at them.
“Wait, I don’t understand,” I said.
“You melted down the fucking server, Katie Holmes,” Dru said, pounding her fists in the air as if she were at a Springsteen concert. “Tell her, Walter. Tell her how many hits the story got.”