Page 28 of Is It Casual Now?

twenty-eight

Jamie’s stomach churned and everything seemed harder and sharper as she stepped into the elevator at work. After the call with Siena, she knew it was the last straw for her. She couldn’t keep living this way. Jessie had been right. Not that she would admit that to her sister. But once she looked around at her clean apartment and admitted at least to herself how bad she had let it get, she couldn’t keep fooling herself.

And then to top it all off, she had opened her phone only to find photos of the fake engagement splattered across the internet. With a hollow pit in her stomach, she had brought up her workplace’s paper. And the rock of truth plummeted into the cavernous pit of who she had become.

Her phone rang, and she watched as Siena’s name flashed across the screen before her voicemail finally picked up. Because like hell was Jamie going to answer that call. That wasn’t a personal call. That was a call where she was going to be screamed and yelled at, and that was a call that was going to be dangerously painful.

Tentatively she had listened to the message and knew that no matter what she said, Siena was going to play it the way Jamie had feared. She was the bad guy. But Siena had been the one person who had seen beyond the hate and dislike and assumptions about who Jamie was. At least, Jamie thought she had. But now the writing was on the wall.

After she’d called back, on Siena’s work line, Jamie had been done.

Done with everything. But she wouldn’t just scurry off into the darkness like Siena obviously hoped she would.

The elevator stopped, and the rush and bustle of the workday at the paper whooshed into the quiet elevator, trying to drown out the intrusive thoughts and spirals that had been going on in her head all morning. Usually it worked. It was one of the perks of working in a loud and busy office. It was why she hadn’t opted for a place with a true graveyard shift. She needed the bustle at the start of her shift to get through the quiet of the rest of it.

“Hey.” Scott looked up and smiled.

Jamie returned the smile but feared opening her mouth right then would result in her vomiting. She continued past her desk and pretended not to notice Scott’s furrowed brow and the concerned pout on his lips.

She knocked on the boss’s door as soon as she reached it, not allowing herself to hesitate or second-guess this move. It would mean everything she worked for would be gone, but she couldn’t live with herself anymore. Not like this.

“What?” The grunt from within was all she needed to open the door, step in, and close it behind her before he could argue.

“Kettlehouse, what the hell?” Bossman scowled, but he leaned back in his chair and looked her up and down.

Jamie’s skin crawled. It had always crawled, but like so many other things she had pushed it aside for her career goals.

Or you accepted it because you think you deserve to feel bad, her mind added unhelpfully in her sister’s voice.

Jamie pushed it back. She could spiral later. And she knew she would. But right now, she had to stick to her plan. And hope for the best. Except what hope she may have had in the past flitted away as she opened her mouth.

“I didn’t get the interview with Bunny and Piper.” She had thought about how to approach it—with an excuse or a justification. But none of that mattered.

“What?” His face grew instantly red as he leaned forward in his chair, using the momentum to push him to his feet. His hands, tobacco-stained and wrinkled, pressed hard enough into the top of his desk to turn their backs white.

“And the scoop I was preparing to present to you has already been leaked and published on our website.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He sat back down, picking up a pen from his desk only to throw it back a moment later.

“No.”

“Well, that’s it.” He looked up and narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re done. Grab your shit and get out. You’ve had too many chances as it is.”

“Yep.” Jamie nodded. She had anticipated this, but the reality still stung.

“That’s it?” Bossman scoffed.

“You’re right.”

“What?” He scowled as he looked her up and down again. His gaze might as well have been a grater. It tore away the very essence of who she was and turned her into nothing more than an object to glare at. “You’ve lost your grit, Kettlehouse. I suspected so, but gave ya a chance. Now I see it’s really gone. You’re no good to anyone without that spitfire attitude.”

Jamie didn’t say anything, because she had nothing to say.

When he scoffed again, he wheeled his chair back into his desk properly and started working on his computer. She turned and left his office. Dismissed. Terminated. Sacked.

Without a word, she went to her desk.

She’d expected this. She really had. She knew she was walking in to end her career here, and when she’d stepped into that elevator, it had felt okay. But now? Now the devastation and reality were crashing down around her, and she wasn’t going to be able to hold her head high any longer.

Where was Siena’s fucking confidence when she needed it?

Jamie sneered at herself for that thought. She really shouldn’t be thinking about Siena at a time like this. That would just drag her down into the pits of hell and the spirals that she was avoiding.

“Everything okay?” Scott asked, looking up at Jamie as she remained standing at her desk, ignoring her chair.

“Take it easy, hey, Scott?” Jamie turned a smile to the kid. It wasn’t real or happy, and she knew it, but it was the least she could do. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he’d always been kind to her when they’d worked together. She couldn’t take her frustrations out on him.

Her trip home was a blur of the spiraling thoughts she had been pushing back to try and force herself to be the better person she wasn’t sure she could ever truly be.

As soon as she got inside her apartment, she collapsed into a heap of tears and snot and misery. The pressure of her closed front door against the small of her back the only thing stopping her from flying away altogether.

But none of the breakdown had anything to do with losing the job. At least, not really. It had become little more than a crutch she’d been using to keep herself from doing exactly what she wanted and taking the risks she’d have to in order to achieve her dreams. And she’d used it for far too long as an excuse or justification to avoid being a better person. It had allowed her a plausible excuse not to chase dreams she was too scared to fail at.

The tears and subsequent misery were all around Siena.

And betrayal.

She had never been so wrong about someone in her life. The one person she had let her guard down with, the one person she might have actually been able to believe and trust. Maybe not love. Never love. That was well beyond Jamie’s capacity. But that one person had ended up being the one she should have avoided and been the most wary of. She was the one who had fucked her over in the end.

For what?

Revenge?

Or was it more than that?

Had this been her entire plan from the start? A way to get the notorious Portland gossip writer out of her hair once and for all?

And what better way to do that than to break her? And Jamie was broken, both professionally and personally.

Jamie sobbed harder, a fresh wave of tears racking her body.

Scrubbing at her face with her hands, she sniffed and scanned her coffee table.

She always left a box of tissues on it somewhere among the clutter.

“Goddamn it, Jessie.” She had forgotten about Jessie’s rampage of cleaning while Jamie came back from the edge of migraine hell.

The table was pristine, with not a tissue box in sight.

Jamie sniffed and resigned herself to getting up. She pulled herself to her feet, using the closed door she had been leaning against. After finally finding the tissues on the windowsill of the kitchen, she grabbed the box and returned to her living room.

Everything weighed her down—mentally, emotionally, and physically.

With a sigh, she flopped down on the couch and heard a strange crinkling noise. It took a bit of wrangling and doing couch squats to find out exactly where the crinkling had come from but when she did, her mind momentarily failed her .

In her hand, she held the photos from the proposal and the notes she had so far written up for the article for her lesser-known blog. She held the now crinkled papers and blinked, unsure what the hell the pile of paper was doing under her couch. It wasn’t like she ever hid any of her story information. Who exactly would she hide it from? She told Jessie more than she ever should, but Jessie would never jeopardize anything for Jamie.

And no one else ever came to her place.

Well, not ever.

Memories of Siena’s visit tormented her as she remained standing in front of her couch gripping the photos. But they hadn’t even existed at the time of that visit.

She pulled her phone from her back pocket and dialed without needing to check the number or truly looking at the phone. Her mind was missing something, but she wasn’t going to jump to any conclusions. There might actually be a reasonable explanation.

Even if for the life of her now she couldn’t figure it out.

“Jamie, what’s wrong?” Jessie’s worried voice came down the line. Only then did Jamie think about what day it was, and the time.

“Oh shit, Jessie I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the time. I just have a really weird question for you.”

“Okay, ask away.” Jessie’s voice was slow and filled with caution.

“When you cleaned up my place the other day, did you put any of my notes or photos under the cushion on the couch?”

“What? No. You were passed out on it. I wasn’t touching you.” Jessie’s reply was filled with the chuckling Jamie had expected. But hearing it made her chest tighten and an anger flare within her. “Why would I?”

“Right, of course. Sorry to bother you.”

“James, what’s wrong? ”

“I’m not sure, well I’m not completely sure. Not yet. But I’ll tell you when I can. Right now, I’ve got to chase down a lead.”

“All right.” Jessie’s smile came down through the line, and before she realized it, Jamie was smiling in reply. “It’s nice to hear you distracted with a story.”

“Yeah, it kind of is,” Jamie agreed. She wasn’t about to explain her day so far to Jessie. That would take way more time than Jessie had right now. After saying their goodbyes, Jamie paced her apartment, the well-worn track a comfort beneath her feet.

It had been nice to be focused on a story and a mystery. Because really what else did a story do but answer a question she had to find the answer to?

At first, as the idea bloomed in her mind, she dismissed it immediately. Swatting it away like a mosquito looking for her blood. But the more she paced, the more her mind got back into the game she had always been so good at playing, that idea grew.

It was going to be tricky. And she would only have so much control over it actually happening. Giving anyone else power over her stories had never come easily. It had been the reason she had started the blogs in the first place. She hated being censored.

The shit she wrote for that paper really did border on the trashy side of things. At the beginning she had written them with everything she had. She would find the angle to make the most mundane thing interesting and ensure her writing captivated the reader’s attention. But it hadn’t taken her long to write the pieces moments before she flicked them over to the boss’s inbox.

She hadn’t cared, and until she had met Siena, she hadn’t quite realized just how much her passion had died, suffocating beneath the vile side of the industry and refusing to fight back due to her own inferiority complex .

But still, this was going to be hard.

She sat down on the couch, letting her notes and photos flutter to the floor.

It was a risk, a huge risk.

And she had no idea if she had the strength to put herself on that line again. No, further out on the line.

Her palms grew sweaty at the very thought of it. And what if she was wrong? With a sigh, Jamie went to her bedroom and grabbed her laptop. Before she did anything else, she had to do her due diligence with her research.

She powered up her computer, ignoring the papers that still lay on the carpet. With her legs crossed and her computer in her lap, she started down the rabbit hole in search of the truth.

She didn’t realize just how much truth she would end up finding.