“Come in,” I call.
Alan, the main producer, pushes open my door. “Hey, Sadie.”
“Hey, Alan. What’s up?”
“Good job today,” he says.
I smile. “Thanks.” Internally I’m screaming, because if Bill told him to come in here and critique my wardrobe and he’s actually doing it, I might actually lose my shit.
“I’ve got a last-minute story for you,” he says. “Just came in.”
“That’s great,” I say, both relieved and suddenly filled with energy. “What is it?”
“Local athlete,” he says. “Kind of burst onto the scene and is becoming both a local and national sensation. He agreed to do a profile, which is good for us because up until now he’s been kind of shy on doing media.”
I’m still smiling, but my heart falls a little bit. “I’m not a sports reporter.”
“We know,” Alan laughs a little. “But the guy says he’ll only do the profile if you’re the one doing it.”
I frown. “What’s his name?”
“Jon Lawson.”
Quickly, I type his name into google. The pictures populate, and I freeze. Oh shit. It’s him. The guy from the club. The guy that’s been plaguing my dreams since I left him sitting naked in that VIP room in Atlanta.
Alan must see my face fall because he sighs. “Is this going to be a problem, Sadie? Because you really need to find a way to not be a problem, if you take my meaning.”
My stomach plummets. Alan must have told him what I said. “I know him,” I say. “Or rather, I’ve met him before. I didn’t know his name, though. I don’t want it to look like I’m using a personal connection to get a story.”
“Honestly, I don’t care,” he says. “This guy is the hottest thing in sports right now, and everyone is talking about him. The fact that his first real interview is going to be with us is a big deal. He wants to do it with you, and if you’ve met before, maybe that’s why. If he feels more comfortable that way it’s fine with me, but we need you to do it. This is a big deal for us, and I don’t give a shit how we got this scoop.”
I nod. “Okay.”
“Thanks.” Alan turns to leave. “Oh, and he’ll be here at four o’clock to shoot it. He didn’t want to wait and neither did we.”
Plastering a brilliant and confident smile on my face, I look at him. “Not a problem.” But as soon as the door shuts behind him I let out a string of curses.
What the actual fuck. How is it him? Why is it him? How did he find me and why am I the only one he wants to do the interview with?
Of course I already know. Alan said that he is local. So when he was in that club in Atlanta, he was just passing through. And now that he is here and I am here, and my face in on TV every day, he must have seen me.
I almost have to laugh. It’s the exact situation that I’d tried to avoid by having that one-night stand in Atlanta. I hadn’t wanted any lingering attachments. And yet…
That night has haunted me in unexpected ways. I keep reliving the way he made my body sing with pleasure and the way he fell into that slow, deep place with me. The way his eyes flashed and he made me feel like I was the only person in his world.
The roughness in his voice when he asked me what my name was. I’ve woken up more than once since that night, panting with longing and having to resort to other far less satisfying methods just to ease the arousal that thinking and dreaming about him brought me.
And now he is here, and I am going to see him in less than three hours. Last minute is right. Usually working stories and profiles like this would take at least a week for research and preparation. Maybe more than that. I’m going to have to come up with an entire battery of interview questions in a few hours, and I don’t even have a modicum of knowledge about sports. And if I can’t pull this off, then my career is in jeopardy because the last-minute nature of this interview won’t be the problem, I’ll be the problem.
I shake my head. Hopefully doing this and doing it well will solve some of the issues that I’m having here at the station, but even so, I don’t feel good about it. Journalism should always be impartial. And so the fact that I am going to interview a man whose cock has been in my mouth and who fucked me with his tongue and everything else, it doesn’t sit well with me.
But it seems like I don’t have a choice. So I need to get to work.
Taking a deep breath, I swallow all my panic and my anxiety. I can do this. Profiles aren’t my specialty, but I’ve done them before. I know what his public relations people are looking for, and I can give it to them along with reporting that makes me stand out as a top-notch journalist. Start with his history and go from there. I’ll see where that leads me.
Start early. Jon Lawson.
I find a birth certificate from here in Nashville. It seems he truly is a local. And shortly after I find his birth certificate, I find death certificates for both of his parents in the vital records database. Fuck.
There’s an entire life painted in these documents, and I’ve done this before, but it feels entirely different doing it for someone I’ve met. This is exactly why I shouldn’t be doing this. I can’t look through this man’s life story with any sort of emotional detachment, no matter how brief our encounter was.
There are records from the foster care system, and juvenile detention records, too. The only file from juvenile detention that isn’t sealed is an incident involving a stolen car, though it doesn’t seem like he was the one who did the stealing.
Now he is a fighter. That makes perfect sense to me. I knew when I saw his body that it was toned to perfection, and MMA is a place that you can’t afford not to be on the absolute top of your game.
It is easy to find out why he was in Atlanta. A professional fight. It happened about a week after we met at the club. There are news stories praising his victory and his fighting style. Smooth and efficient, they call him. One story has a clip from the fight, and I press play.
Seeing him in action takes my breath away. He’s far, far more than smooth and efficient. No movement is wasted. Precise grace. He moves like water, and it looks like he can predict his opponent’s every move. But I know just enough about fighting to know that the MMA isn’t wrestling. These fights aren’t choreographed for show. Jon is winning in his own right, and undefeated since he started fighting in the league a year ago.
Pulling my eyes away from the mesmerizing way his body is moving and the completely distracting sight of him shirtless and shining with sweat and effort, I start to make notes. About his history and career, laying him out on a page so I can stand back and get a good angle.
How would Jon feel if he knew that I was analyzing him like this? I imagine a deep smirk and him asking if I liked what I saw.
That is the problem. I do like what I see. Far, far too much.
After I finish those notes, I double check what Alan said, and it is true. There is shockingly little coverage of him that is just him. No splashy profiles. No gossip items to be found in the tabloids. Most of what I find is second hand at best, and speculation at worst. The only pieces I find of him quoted are a couple of brief pre-fight press conferences, and his Instagram.
That could be interesting.