Channel 20 Something Page 3

  Aric danced for another song then left the floor, in spite of loud protests from the girls. He came to our table and sat across from me with the other guys, ordered a beer, and made small talk with them.

  “So, you don’t look Italian,” Tony said.

  Aric laughed. “No—I get that all the time. My dad’s Italian, but my mom’s Swedish.”

  “And you’re from California?” Brad asked.

  “Well, I’m from all over the place, really. We moved a lot when I was a kid, about every year or two. But when I was in high school we moved to Kingsburg, California, where my grandparents live—I graduated there, so I sort of claim it as home.”

  “Wow. Every year or two—that would suck,” Brad said.

  “It was all right.” Aric put on a big grin. “I have a short attention span.”

  “I’ll bet,” I muttered under my breath and turned away from the guys as they laughed.

  Brad and Tony tried to draw me into the conversation a couple of times. I gave one or two word answers and kept my focus on my crazy friends, who were now doing the electric slide. Some middle-aged guys had eagerly slipped into Aric’s spot, and in their happy-tipsy states, my friends didn’t seem to mind. It even looked like Mara had located a potential new himbo.

  As much as I told myself I wasn’t interested, I couldn’t keep from eavesdropping on the conversation behind me. Aric asked the guys if there was a dog park nearby.

  “You drove a thousand miles with a dog, man?” Brad asked.

  “Yep. Took me twice as long to get here as it should have because I had to keep stopping. Thor is apparently prone to violent car-sickness.” He laughed, with the guys groaning in sympathy.

  My eyes flicked back in his direction then quickly away. I folded my arms across my chest. So what? Even a serial killer can buy a dog. It doesn’t make you a good person.

  When the song ended, I glanced over to find Aric looking at me.

  “Get tired of dancing?” he asked in a soft voice.

  “Yes. Tired.” I looked away again, silently willing my friends to run out of party steam so we could leave.

  When they finally wore out and Kenley had declared it an “epic” good-bye party, our group shuffled toward the exit door.

  “When are you actually starting work, Aric?” Mara asked, sidling up to him.

  “Tomorrow. I’m going in early afternoon for training.”

  “So is Heidi,” Kenley told him.

  Aric gave me an interested glance.

  “Um, yeah. I’ve been at the station almost a year, and I’ve filled in on the anchor desk during the week a few times, but I’ve never produced and anchored a show myself. Allison’s teaching me the producing part tomorrow, and the studio crew’s going to re-set the lighting for me.”

  “Yes, because you’re just a wittle pocket-anchor.” Kenley used a baby-talk voice and gave me an off-balance side-hug. She actually was quite a bit taller than me.

  “How tall are you?” Aric looked me up and down. “Five feet?”

  “Five two and a half.” I lifted my chin, straightening my back and shoulders.

  “How big are you?” Mara asked him, the gleam in her eye spelling out her real meaning.

  Aric chuckled. Her not-so-subtle connotation wasn’t lost on him. “Six-four.”

  “Wow. Did you play sports in school?” Kenley asked.

  He shrugged. “Nothing people around here would care about—volleyball, swimming.”

  My mind instantly filled with images of Aric on a beach, in the water, his wide chest bare, his arms and legs long, strong, and tan.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing him in a Speedo,” Mara whispered to me, clearly thinking along the same lustful lines.

  “But I like all sports,” Aric continued his thought as we emerged from the building into the warm night air. He grinned. “I guess that’s obvious.”

  “Well, I’ll be seeing both of you at work tomorrow because Janet’s dragging me in for weekend photog duty. Colleen apparently had a very important soiree to attend in Jackson.” Mara’s tone revealed her disdain for anything concerning Colleen.

  “I think it’s a family thing—parents’ anniversary party or something,” I said.

  “Whatever. It’s always something. That girl’s social life puts Princess Kate’s to shame.”

  Our group broke up in the parking lot. As Kenley, Mara, and I reached my car, Aric called out to us and ran over to catch up.

  “Hey, it was fun tonight. Great meeting you all,” he said, then lowered his voice and looked directly at me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Um, okay.” I walked a few steps away with him while my friends waited.

  Aric put a hand on my arm, turning me a little to the side for privacy. He lowered his face to mine. My heart started thumping so hard I worried he could hear it.

  “Listen, did I do something wrong in there?” He hooked a thumb toward the club.

  “No.” I shook my head and forced a smile. “No, everything’s fine.”

  “Well, you just kinda… changed all the sudden. It seemed like we were having a good time, and then, I don’t know, I thought I made you mad or something.”

  “You didn’t do anything—it’s—I have a boyfriend.”

  “Oh.” He nodded as if it made perfect sense. “Where is he tonight?”

  That threw me. I’d expected to toss the half-truth out there and get away with it clean. Now I had to come up with another lie.

  “He’s… busy.” Lame, but functional.

  “Okay. Well, see you at work tomorrow.”

  “Yeah—see you at work.”

  I walked back to my friends, who stared at me with nearly identical bug-eyed glances. I shrugged and got into the car.

  “What the hell was that?” Mara demanded, climbing into the passenger side. “Six-feet-four-inches-of-missing-Hemsworth-brother-Viking-hotness chases you across a parking lot, and you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

  “I do have a boyfriend.”

  “You guys are on a break,” she argued. “Which has now lasted nearly a month, so it’s looking more like a break up, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, if he’d been chasing me down, I wouldn’t be in this car with you two right now—sorry girls,” Mara said.

  “No apology necessary.” Kenley laughed from the back seat. “I’m a hundred percent in love with Mark, and I’d have to think about it myself. But Heidi’s not interested in someone new. She and Hale are just doing the obligatory pre-engagement breakup.”

  “That’s not really it,” I said.

  “Well, what then? Aric’s not your type?” Mara asked. “Cause I saw the way you were looking at him while you two were dancing.”

  Ugh. Had I been that transparent? “He’s exactly my type,” I confessed. The type I was usually so careful to avoid. I threw the car into reverse and checked my mirrors before backing out.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Love-is-grand-Kenley frowned in the rear view mirror, totally confused.

  “Ohhh, I get it,” Mara said. “Does he look like that guy from Brown, or something?”

  I shook my head, considering it. “He doesn’t look anything like Josh, but he is like him.” As the words left my mouth, the rightness of them sank in even further and hardened like cement.

  “How do you know?” Kenley asked. “You just met Aric.”

  “I just know, okay? He’s so… smooth, so sure of his universal appeal to women. That’s why I’ll always go for a guy like Hale. He’s so much more—what am I trying to say?”

  “Safe? Boring?” Mara suggested in a kill-me-now tone.

  “Real. That’s what he is. Hale is real in a way a guy like Aric could never be.” I nodded, certain of the truth of it. So why did my reaction to Aric feel so much more real to me after one night than my feelings for Hale did after almost four years?

  Chapter Four

  Start Saying Yes

  I pulled
my Mini Cooper into the station parking lot a few minutes before one the next afternoon, the nerves in my stomach swimming like a bowl of busy goldfish. I’d eaten only lightly today, anticipating my usual anxiety-produced reaction to being on live. The newscast was nine hours away, and I was already nauseous. Better to keep the belly as empty as possible.

  The crunch and pop of gravel alerted me to another vehicle driving into the lot, a huge Chevy Tahoe, which pulled up and parked right beside me. I glanced over to check out the other driver and saw the back of Aric’s blond head as he gathered items from his passenger seat. Not helping the nerves. I grabbed my own bags and got out, determined to be friendly but unaffected by him.

  “Good morning,” he said when he spotted me. He gave me a wide smile that put the hot Southern sunshine to shame. A sunny smile. I’d always thought that was such a ridiculous description, but I could see it now, as if he carried a bit of the bright California sun with him from his home state. No doubt he’d thawed many a female heart in Minnesota where he’d last worked. Not here, Buddy. This was one girl who was going to stay chill.

  His gaze swept over me from my jersey knit wrap top to my black pencil skirt and pumps, seeming to take inventory of every detail. When his eyes met mine again, the clear green of them was so striking, I almost forgot to respond to his greeting. Chill. Right.

  “Hi,” I finally managed. “It’s afternoon, you know.”

  He huffed a slight laugh. “I guess it is. I’m still kinda wiped out from the drive and moving in and stuff. I didn’t get up till about an hour ago.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I noticed his hair was still damp from the shower, darkening its color slightly. He carried a garment bag that must have contained his suit because he was wearing a golf-type shirt and flip flops with a pair of long shorts. In the daylight, my assumptions from last night about his volleyball muscles proved true. Long, lean, and muscular, he would look right at home among the athletes he’d be reporting on. He moved like an athlete, too, fluid and confident.

  Butterflies began hatching and testing their wings inside me. I didn’t understand myself—I’d seen hot guys before. The MSU campus had been full of them. Hale was handsome. So what was it about this guy? He fell into step beside me, and I worked to keep my high heels from wobbling in the gravel lot and to keep my voice from betraying my absurd awareness of him.

  “Well, I hope you’re rested up because I think we’re going to be putting in some serious work this weekend. Mr. Aubrey doesn’t exactly keep a full crew on hand. See this?” I motioned between the two of us as we walked across the parking lot to the building. “This is pretty much it.”

  “Yeah, I figured. It was the same in Mankato.”

  Normally there was a skeleton staff on weekends—a meteorologist, one news anchor who also served as reporter and producer of the ten p.m. newscast, the sports anchor, who’d spend the day driving from town to town gathering highlights from the major sporting events across the area, and one poor photographer who scrambled all day long picking up video and sound bites to help flesh out the thirty minute show. Today there would be some extras on hand—Dennis, to teach Aric the ropes, and Allison, to help me learn producing and get me through my first show as weekend anchor.

  Honestly, I was less concerned about the producing part than the anchoring part. Sure, I was used to being on camera—as a reporter, I’d gotten pretty good at it over the past year. But that was mostly recorded. Anchoring the newscast was live TV. And that was a different story.

  At least with anchoring there was a bathroom nearby, which was a plus. Out in the field, I’d had to use a trashcan or go behind a bush to throw up before going on air for every live shot. Every. Single. Time. That was another little thing I’d have to get a handle on before I could move on to a bigger market.

  Once we got inside, the day felt like I’d stepped onto a NASCAR track. I went out and one-man-banded two stories then came back in and worked with Allison on producing the show. Producing the weekends involved writing everything in the show that wasn’t written by a reporter, ordering the stories for the newscast, and making sure all the content timed out to fit into the twenty minute news block. The rest of the time would be filled by weather and sports.

  Mara, bless her heart, was in and out all day shooting stories. “You owe me, sister.” She pointed at me. “If Hairspray Queen Colleen was here, you’d get one package and maybe two minutes of video out of her,” she’d said in a surly tone.

  “Anything,” I promised, well aware she was saving my bacon by filling so much time in tonight’s show. “You are a news goddess, and I will gladly worship you with offerings of Chardonnay and chocolate. Whatever you desire.”

  “How about double-dating with me and Mike? He’s got a cute friend.” This, delivered with raised brows, a mischievous grin, and an aren’t you tempted tone.

  I was not. “Maybe I could come over and scrub your toilet instead?”

  She laughed and headed out the door again. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Oh yes I did. Mara had an absolute knack for dating men with zero boyfriend potential. Himbos. Beautiful and brainless. For instance, Mike, whom I had met once and instantly diagnosed—dumb as a stump.

  “The best part is,” Mara had laughed, “he thinks he’s brilliant. He actually carries his transcript around with him and whips it out at any opportune moment.”

  “Well, his GPA might have been high, but in Common Sense 101, he gets a big fat F. In red marker,” I said. It could’ve been worse, though, and it had been. “Still, compared to some of your past ‘special friends,’ he is sort of brilliant.”

  I couldn’t figure it out—I knew Mara had been in love once, a high school sweetheart she refused to talk about—apparently it hadn’t ended well. But I didn’t know how she could stand the bubble-headed beefcakes she seemed to seek out now.

  “What can I say?” she’d said. “When it comes to boys and brains, I think like a zombie—any more than a mouthful is a waste.”

  Aric was gone all afternoon shooting sports. He rushed back in around eight o’clock to start editing and writing his segment in the sports office. Well, Dennis jokingly called it the “sports office”—none of us actually had offices except for Janet. We were all together in one large newsroom with cubicles. The sports guys had claimed a corner near the printer closet, tacking team banners and sports schedule posters to the walls over their two desks.

  Aric and I were too busy to even look at each other until around nine-thirty when I walked by his desk on my way to the printer room to do my hair and makeup.

  Yep, pretty glamorous. The anchors all used a mirror on the wall of the tiny printer room to get ourselves camera-ready. The lighting was actually way less shadowy there than in the ladies’ room.

  A lot of people assumed news anchors had makeup artists or stylists to fix them up. Not quite. Only those on the network or in the very top markets like New York and Los Angeles had that luxury. The rest of us had to make it work with whatever techniques we’d picked up from beauty magazines, from Mom, or from trial and error. Even the guys wore some foundation.

  “Hey,” Aric mumbled, never looking away from his monitor as I walked into the door-less printer room across from his desk. He was on his own, sweating it out, trying to get done by his deadline. Dennis had left an hour ago, apparently reluctant to keep his hot date waiting any longer.

  “Hi. You gonna make it?” I asked.

  “I guess I have to, don’t I? So, the answer is yes, something will make it on the air tonight. I can’t promise it’ll make any sense, though.” He looked up and gave me a frazzled grin.

  I pulled my hair back in a clip and unzipped my bag, carefully applying approximately three times more makeup than I’d ever wear in “real life.” After ten minutes or so, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Aric had turned his desk chair around and seemed to be watching me. I darted my eyes over at him. He was watching me.

  “You all done
?” I asked.

  “Almost,” he said, his tone distracted. His legs were stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, his arms folded under his chest. He still had on the golf shirt, which was stretched tightly across some impressive biceps and shoulders.

  And now I was distracted, thank you very much. Wasn’t he trying to make deadline? Why didn’t he get back to work? Wait—did I already put on blush? Sugar.

  At ten till ten, I finished my makeup, and grabbing my scripts from the printer, headed for the studio. “See you in there,” I said to Aric, who’d finally (thank God) turned back around.

  “Good luck,” he called to my back.

  “Have a great show.” Mara gave me a cheerful thumbs-up as I passed her desk. “See you afterward. I’m going to hang around and work on my reel.”

  “Okay—thanks for all you did today,” I said, rushing toward the door. “Really. I’d kiss you, but the industrial-strength lipstick might be hard to explain to Mike tonight.”

  “Are you kidding? He’d love it.” She laughed.

  I walked down the corridor from the newsroom to the studio, nerves spiking. Large, framed promotional photos of the current and former news teams lined the wall. Their perfect anchor hair, power suits, and whitened teeth seemed to challenge me. Are you ready for this?

  “I’m ready,” I said aloud, meaning it. But as I put my hand on the studio door to push it open, I stopped. My stomach was rolling and bouncing like a basketball down a sloped driveway. “Dammit.” I spun around and ran, bumping into Aric in the hallway.

  His concerned call followed me as I burst through the ladies’ room door. “Heidi?”

  Five minutes later, I slid into my chair on the set, still shaking, but now that my gut was completely empty, feeling better. I neatened my stack of scripts in front of me. They were my lifeline should the teleprompter stall or fail.

  I said hello to Doug, the studio cameraman, and gave a silly, tongue-out nervous face to Allison, who’d come in to run prompter for me. The rest of the freezing, darkened studio was empty. Just me and the camera and studio lights so bright they threatened to erase my memory.