Don't Go L.J. Breedlove (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

newsroom and went upstairs. Second day in a row, he was the first person in. This time he flipped on all the lights. He wandered up onto the sound stage, the set where they did the nightly newscast. He’d never been interested in being in front of the camera although it had been suggested. More than once. He rolled his eyes. It was the reporting that interested him, not the telling as much. He wrote the stories so they’d let him go out and ask more questions. He wanted to understand people. What made them tick. Why they did what they did.

Maybe the vault had leaked out into his motivations, he thought ruefully. He walked over to the sports desk. They had new posters up. Both male and female bodies — athletes in their prime. He thought about his party a week ago, and Joanne, who was a happy, lusty drinker. He grinned. She hadn’t gone home until the next morning. She’d been a busy lady that night.

He ran his hand along the polished wood of the windowsills and was surprised there was no dirt. The university didn’t charge them for janitor work, and it was easy to forget that custodians came in and did their work — when Ryan wasn’t sure. But he was grateful they did, or they would be buried in pizza boxes, Pepsi cans and reams of paper needing to be recycled. He stopped at the workstation between the windows and the couches, the one he’d worked at as a reporter when he was first starting out in the newsroom. The editor at the time had seen something in him and rode him hard to be a better reporter, and to contain his partying to not interfere with the reporting. Since the editor was no slouch at drinking himself, Ryan had taken the lessons in stride. He partied Friday afternoon until Monday morning. Was a reporter from Monday ‘til Friday at noon.

He had met and become fast friends with Cage and then Emily. And then there was Teresa.

He’d fallen hard for her almost immediately. She was gorgeous, although in a much more understated way than the women he’d partied with since he was 18 — 16 if he was honest, but it seemed unfair to say that to people, because the people he partied with hadn’t known he was underage. Well, really, even 18 was underage for the bars he went to, the drinking he did. He shrugged.

Teresa was smart. He’d never met a woman — anyone really — who was smarter than he was. And he wasn’t being vain. Emily was plenty smart, and there were any number of women in the newsroom who were equally intelligent. But it was different.

His first editor had done a study once for a psych class about the psychodynamics of the newsroom. One finding? Most everyone here had been in school gifted programs when they were young. Then something derailed them in their late teens. When they got their life back together, they came here. Too old to want to go to schools like University of Oregon or Oregon State. Too old to want to do Greek Rush or Homecoming Weekend. If not the years, the miles, the editor said. Ryan had suspected the editor had some of those miles.

He knew he did.

But he liked academics. He liked taking a history seminar even at 8:30 a.m. and it had nothing to do with his major. Just to know. Teresa had been like that too. They’d taken classes together and arguing over coffee had been as important to him as making love.

But Teresa had come straight from high school, from a protected Mexican American family. He was actually surprised they’d let her come here. Yakima was close to Central Washington University where she could have lived at home and gone to school. Instead, she’d made her way here. Lived in the residence halls her first year, found roommates the second. Joanna, now that he thought about it. She’d been one of Teresa’s roommates.

He was uncomfortably aware he’d been Teresa’s first lover. Probably, after reading her journal, her only lover.

She hadn’t even been his only lover during the months they were together.

He shook his head. He wished his memories of that time weren’t so fractured, that he didn’t see them as some kind of kaleidoscope of images. But he remembered some of their moments together with clarity. Teresa laying on the sheets of his bed, looking up at him, loving him. Her rearing above him, riding him, as he urged her on.

But more, he remembered her arguing with him after an honor seminar they’d taken together on the matriarchal figures in pre-Columbian cultures. She thought the instructor was sexist and colonialist. He tried to remember if the professor had been Professor Black. If so, she’d been absolutely right.

But he couldn’t give up the night scene that drew him downtown, often after leaving Teresa’s bed. The drugs. The alcohol. The women. And the men, he admitted. It was his secret life. He didn’t think Teresa had known of it, but he could be wrong. Cage knew. Some of it, anyway. Cage had been the person he’d called when he realized someone had slipped him something. Something that was probably supposed to make him compliant — as if that had required chemical means — and it hadn’t taken full effect until he got home. Actually, someone had sent him home in taxi, he remembered. The drug had interacted with all the other stuff in his system, and he knew he was dying.

That’s when he’d called Cage. And Cage had taken one look at him, lifted him in a fireman’s carry, hauled his ass out to his car, and up to the all-night psych clinic at OHSU. Saved his life. And never mentioned it. But that was later. After Teresa was gone.

What he worried about was that he had done something bad to her. And that it was locked up in his memories. And