6
SADIE
The gray early morning sun woke me even though I’d barely gotten five hours of sleep. Once I was awake, there was no going back to sleep. My body didn’t function that way.
I lay in the giant four-poster bed for a few minutes staring at the ceiling before willing myself to get up and pack my duffel bag. In the light of day, my room looked like it could have been in a bed-and-breakfast.
The house was quiet as I slipped down the stairs. The first floor was more Bates Motel than B&B. I couldn’t reconcile this house full of antique furniture drowning in plastic slipcovers with the man who dragged me out of his backyard last night. He didn’t look a day over thirty and gave off a sort of angsty alpha impression, but his house looked like it belonged to a seventy-year-old cat lady.
There had to be a story there.
But that wasn’t why I was here. My boss, Eirin Jennings, heard a rumor Axel and Veronica Everett had a vacation home in the area and I was here scoping it out under the guise of writing about the upcoming Bay Days Festival. Axel spent part of his childhood in a town not far from here, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities. He and Veronica were the celebrity power couple at the moment, and they fiercely guarded their privacy. If it turned out they did have a little hideaway here, an article about it would generate major traffic for us.
I wasn’t a paparazzi. I wouldn’t be hiding out in the bushes by their front gate or staking out a spot on a hill behind their house with a telephoto lens. But sweet-talking locals into giving me the dirt on whether or not famous people graced their town on occasion? That was my bread and butter.
Next to the front door, my tent sat all neatly packed back up in its carrying bag. Chalk another one up in the courteous column for the mystery homeowner. Or maybe he just wanted me out of his hair as soon as possible. An awkward morning scene was too much for me to deal with anyway.
But man, I wouldn’t hate seeing those blue eyes of his one more time, even if they were giving me a frosty look. When I ran into him in the hall last night, I wasn’t sure if he wanted to strangle me, devour me, or get the hell away from me. He’d opted for door number three, but I could’ve sworn something else brewed in his expression.
Again, not why you’re here, I reminded myself. It had been too long since I’d gotten laid, and I was imagining attention where it didn’t exist. I left him a thank-you note and hightailed it out of there before I could make a fool out of myself trying to hold a normal conversation with him.
Back behind the wheel of Ward’s car, I turned my phone off airplane mode then proceeded to leave Lauren a rather colorful voicemail telling her she needed to find me a new place to stay. Of course she didn’t answer her phone. Hopefully she’d have it worked out soon.
Next, I shot off a message to Ward to let him know I’d survived the night and asked him to nudge things along with Lauren since he was in our office this week working on marketing tasks before Eirin sent him out on another celeb hunt.
Ward: Oh, girl. You haven’t heard from Eirin yet, have you?
Sadie: No. Why?
Ward: She is on a warpath.
Ward: (head on stake gif)
Sadie: What? Why?
My phone rang and Ward’s voice filled my ear before I could say hello.
“TMZ posted pictures of Clayton Rivers and Alison Calderon in Savannah.”
The air blew out of me like someone deflating a leftover party balloon.
“How bad is it there?” I asked.
Eirin had sent me to Savannah six months ago because she got a tip Clayton and Alison had a love shack in the area. The relationship between the pop princess and the bad boy of baseball had seemed speculative at best at the time, since she’d just come off an ugly breakup with famous soccer player Luka Sparks.
I couldn’t find a single local to corroborate the story. There was nothing there. I’d told Eirin as much and she told me to hint at them having property there anyway, but I dug my heels in and refused. In exchange, I offered her a juicy vacation fling article.
God, why did I choose that hill to die on? It had been a weird trip and I’d had some kind of existential crisis about the fact that my job revolved around making shit up about celebrities. It wasn’t like this was hard-hitting journalism or I was worried about my integrity.
If I’d just given her something even halfway close to what she wanted, she would have rewritten most of it, left my name on it, and called it a day. Eirin had no formal journalism training and had no problem changing eighty percent of what we sent her and calling it “editing.” As long as she could plausibly put someone else down as the author she was happy, because even though she had no problem owning HypeKey, she somehow felt being named as one of the writers was beneath her.
Hell, the article I’d convinced her to post instead was an entirely fictitious account of a relationship I daydreamed up while I stared at a hot guy sitting across from me in a bistro the day I decided I wasn’t writing about Alison and Clayton. I’d used a stock photo and Eirin didn’t bat an eye.
“She spent twenty minutes yelling about the number of clicks we could be getting today if we’d published that story six months ago. A confirmed sighting of the two of them together is breaking the internet.”
I banged my head on the steering wheel. “Fuck my life right now.”
The call waiting beeped at me and I held the phone away from my face to check who was calling. Josh’s mom. Ignoring the gnawing sensation in my gut, I sent her to voicemail. I loved the woman, but she was an emotional black hole and I couldn’t afford to get sucked in at the moment.