Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other, page 3
What wasn’t obvious, at least to me, was how much of what I said had made it to air. The only thing more frightening than what people were saying about me was what I had actually said. For about half a second I had comforted myself with the possibility that only the tail end had been broadcast before Colton cut the feed, but then I remembered that the tail end was the part where I essentially called our viewers gullible dimwits for believing I was a good person. There was no bright side here.
I cleared my throat. “Colton . . . how much of what I said—”
“From Elena and Hayley’s thirty-second cue on.”
I was pretty sure I was already sitting down, so why did it feel like I was falling?
“So when I said that stuff about twelve brain cells and forty bucks . . .”
“It was forty-two bucks, but yeah. Clear as a bell.”
In an instant, my legs catapulted me up from the couch just as my throat seized and the air I was attempting to breathe got caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs. I released a very undignified honking sound from my mouth—maybe from my nose . . . who could say?—and my eyes flew open in terror and panic. Maybe because I couldn’t breathe. Maybe because I’d just perfected the mating call of the Canada goose. Or maybe, just maybe, because I’d known it was bad. Now I knew how nice just “bad” would have been.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Colton jumped up and flew over to me. He wrapped one arm around my shoulders and squeezed my arm. “Breathe. Come on. Nice and slow. In and out.” He began demonstrating, and I was grateful. Turns out I’d forgotten how that was supposed to work. “In and out. That’s good. Keep going. In . . .” Deep breath in. “And out . . .” Deep breath out.
He repeated the process several more times for me, and I tried to focus on a framed photo of his family on the table in front of us as he patted my back gently. They were at Disney World. Colton’s wife and their three daughters, who looked to be preteens at the time, laughing at Colton, who was wearing one of those Goofy hats with the ears hanging low and two buckteeth protruding from the cap. The Epcot ball glistened behind them, but nothing else was happening in the picture.
Those laughs. That ridiculous smile on my boss’s face. It was all fueled by the five of them being together.
“I bet you’re a really good dad.” My voice was raspy and my breath ragged, but I felt like I was in control once again. Of breathing, anyway.
He followed my eyes and then smiled as he patted me on the back one final time and pulled away. He guided me back to my spot on the couch and said, “I hope so.”
“How old are your daughters now?”
He sighed. “Skye is twenty-four, Roma is twenty-two, and Lizzie’s nineteen. She’s finishing up her first year at University of Southern California.”
I looked at him in surprise. Maybe because I hadn’t known—I’d certainly never bothered to ask—where his daughter was going to school. Maybe because I never would have suspected that a simple thing like the name of my alma mater would stabilize me and give me something to grab on to. “I went to USC.” My voice sounded deceptively normal once again.
“I know.” He chuckled. “And believe me, Lizzie certainly knows.”
My eyebrow quirked. “Why’s that?”
“She wants to be you. The only thing that has made me cool to her over the course of the past couple years is the fact that I work with you.”
“Are you saying she’s going to USC because I went there?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say it gave her one more in a compelling list of reasons to move to the complete other side of the country rather than go to NYU or Columbia, as her mother and I would have preferred.” He grinned, and I was surprised to discover I didn’t detect any sadness in it. “She wants to be in television news, God help her. Paige and I couldn’t argue with the quality of the broadcast journalism program there, even if we wanted to.”
He crossed to the small refrigerator behind his desk and walked back with two bottles of water. He leaned forward and pushed one toward me on the table as he sat back down. I grabbed the bottle and began greedily gulping as I stared at the photo of Colton’s family. Lizzie Passik, whom I’d never met in my life, wanted to emulate my career path. Or at least she had, as of when her dad left for work that morning. Hoda Kotb had gone to Virginia Tech. Maybe they were still accepting enrollments there.
“What do I do now, Colton?”
He sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m not exactly sure. I think I’ve got Bob convinced, at least for now, that we can’t fire you.”
My eyes widened. “Bob wanted to fire me?”
He tilted his head and released a humorless chuckle. “Did you seriously not realize that would have to be an option on the table?”
Droplets clung to my lashes as I lowered my gaze and focused my eyes on my clenched hands, squeezing my knees. “I guess I hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
Fired. I’d never been fired in my life. In fact, I’d never left a single job I’d ever had for any reason other than to move onward and upward to a better opportunity. But there wasn’t a better opportunity in the entire industry for someone who got fired for cause from Sunup.
I sniffed. “Thanks for talking him out of it.”
“Trust me, it would be easier if we did fire you.” He released a heavy sigh. “But we’ve got too much invested.”
He didn’t have to explain what he meant by that. The last two months had been an endless barrage of photo shoots, interviews, appearances, and hype. Hype, hype, hype. The stars of every show on the network had recorded promos welcoming me to Sunup. Fashion designers from all over the world sent original creations in my size, vying to get me to wear their clothes on-air. And Ben & Jerry’s had launched Sunup Sundae just the day before. My face was on a gazillion pints of ice cream. Yeah . . . a lot had been invested.
I implored him again. “Tell me what to do.”
“Bob recommended I get Hayley to fill in for you for a while. Until we sort it all out.”
I liked Hayley Oswell. She had certainly always been nicer to me than Elena had been. Hayley was smart and personable and terrifically charismatic on-screen, and from what I had seen, she’d never used the fact that her daddy was the network president to get her out of the hard work. I had no doubt her day on the main couch would come. I’d imagined she’d sit there with me someday, once I replaced Mark in the top seat, and she and I would make up the first all-female seven o’clock couch in Sunup history. But it wasn’t her turn yet. And I couldn’t take a chance of getting lost in the fray during a particularly intense game of morning television leapfrog.
I cleared my throat and sat up straight. I didn’t even take time to wipe away any stray tears on my face. There was no more time to be wasted on any of that stuff.
“I’ll make it right, Colton. I’ll apologize. We’ll explain that the prompter was malfunctioning. That we were short-staffed and the wrong cue got piped into 2-A.” I nodded and took a final swig of my water before setting it on the table and standing up. Energy was suddenly coursing through my veins. Hope-fueled energy. “I mean, I know it was bad, but that was a lot to go wrong all at once. People will understand. Don’t you think?”
I nodded again, answering my own question as I lifted my thumb to my mouth and began chewing on my fingernail for the first time in twenty years or so. “Yeah. They’ll understand. I’m only human, after all. Who hasn’t said something they shouldn’t? Sure, I did it on a much grander scale, but—”
“They won’t trust you. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. Now, whatever you say, they’ll just think it’s an act.”
I shook my head. “No, they won’t.”
“They will, Brynn. Because you just told them it was.”
Tears sprang to my eyes again, but I refused to let them fall this time. I blinked rapidly and turned away from him so I could fan my face with my hands. He was right, of course. He was absolutely right. No matter how insincere viewers now believed me to be, it was going to be nearly impossible to convince them that I had been anything less than completely truthful in that accidental moment. That moment when I told them I didn’t have the natural personality, warmth, and glow of a thousand suns (and that they were all stupid for ever believing that I did).
“Okay, then . . .” I turned back to face him. “There’s a way to make lemonade out of this situation. We can talk about the pressures placed on successful women of my generation. On all women. Of any generation. Maybe I go away for a little while. Get some rest . . . do some work on myself . . .”
“What are you suggesting? That we send you to rehab?”
“Sure! I’m good with rehab!”
Colton chuckled again, and this time there did actually seem to be a bit of humor behind it. Yeah. This was all hilarious.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and quickly clicked around before reading aloud. “‘Does anyone else feel like they woke up this morning to discover what big teeth their granny has? At least the wolf was already in Granny’s house when Little Red Riding Hood got there. I guess we viewers are pathetic, like she said. We invited the wolf in. #firebrynncornell. There are thousands upon thousands of posts just like that. Or worse.” He sighed. “Brynn, if there’s a quick and easy fix here, I’m not seeing it. And I’m sure you understand that I can’t let you sit on that couch until this dies down. If this dies down.”
I looked down at my toes and muttered under my breath as the sting of tears and the pressure of keeping them from falling began to shoot bursts of pain through my head.
Colton leaned forward. “I’m sorry, what?”
I cleared my throat and tried to ignore the single tear that had just landed on my canary-yellow Saint Laurent pumps. “I never said the viewers were pathetic.”
Just my hometown.
And there it was. The problem. The solution. All wrapped up in 0.925 square miles of beautiful middle-of-nowhere. Adelaide Springs, Colorado—0.925 square miles I hadn’t stepped foot into for nearly twenty years; 0.925 square miles I’d sworn to never return to.
Resolve and refusal fought against each other as they each pulsated through my body, warming me and making me queasy, all at the same time. Warmth and queasiness. Yep. That was the dichotomy of home everyone hoped for.
“Do you mind if I . . . ?” Colton asked, a rectangular box in his hands and fatherly concern in his eyes, if I wasn’t mistaken. It was similar to the depth that had been evident in his eyes as he talked about his daughters. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in the eyes of adults in the home I grew up in. And in that moment, when my thoughts were stuck in memories void of parental love and kindness, it confused me.
“If you what? What’s that?”
“They’re called tissues, Brynn. Kleenex.” He pulled one from the top and held it out in front of him as he threw the box on the couch. “They’re really good for wiping tears. Blowing noses. Squashing the occasional spider. That sort of thing.” The left corner of his mouth rose as he dabbed the tissue on my cheek. “It’s just that right now you resemble a really creepy goth clown.” He pulled back the tissue to show me, and sure enough it had turned black—Tom Ford Ultra Raven, to be exact.
At least I was a creepy clown with impeccable taste in cosmetics. And I was a creepy clown with a plan that I knew would work.
“Send me to my hometown, Colton.”
He was halfway to the trash bin with the mascara-smeared tissue when he stopped in his tracks. He looked back over his shoulder at me. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re right. No one’s going to trust me. Those people—the ones saying I should be fired and that they never should have let me into their living rooms every morning—nothing I say will change their minds. But if they see that the people I insulted the most have forgiven me . . .”
He dropped the tissue into the trash and walked back to me. “But will they forgive you? The people in your hometown. Surely they won’t be super happy to see you after all this. Do you even know anyone there anymore? How long’s it been since you’ve been home?”
How many people could name every single person in their high school graduating class? Their middle names. The names of their parents. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Their favorite song. Their best subjects in school. Whether or not they’d had braces. What they liked on their pizza.
I could.
My senior class was made up of Addie Atwater, Laila Olivet, Wes Hobbes, Cole Kimball, and me. That was it. For the first seventeen years of my life, I’d known everything about each one of them. Laila and Cole had been best friends since birth, Addie and Wes had been in love nearly as long, and I was the fifth wheel. Except I wasn’t. We were a well-tuned five-wheeled machine, each wheel dependent on the others. They were my family. The only family I’d ever had, really.
And I hadn’t told a single one of them that I was leaving Adelaide Springs and never coming back. I hadn’t spoken to a single one of them since.
Now, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know if they still lived there, if they were married, if they had kids of their own. And statistics would lead us to believe at least one of them had to be gluten-free or lactose intolerant, right? Did they even eat pizza anymore?
“It’s been a lifetime since I’ve been there. A literal lifetime. I don’t know who’s there now.”
They’d all had plans to get out and go on to bigger and better things, but that town had a way of sinking its teeth into you if you let it. It was like there was a window of opportunity, and if you didn’t leave when the window was open, you’d die there. The majority of people—the older generations—seemed perfectly fine with that. Why would they ever want to live or die anywhere else? The five of us had always wondered if the older people were different from us or if they’d just missed their window and somewhere along the line forgotten they’d ever had different dreams. Was that what would become of us if we stuck around?
When my chance to get out came along, I hadn’t even turned back long enough to see if the window had closed behind me.
Colton took a deep breath and fell back onto the sofa. “I can’t deny it would make for good television, so I don’t think I’d have any trouble selling it to Bob. But it would be risky, Brynn. For you, I mean. If it didn’t work . . . If viewers didn’t buy it . . .”
I nodded. “I know. That would be it.”
My mother—the woman who raised me, if that’s what you could call it—had predicted I would never amount to anything. That’s what she’d said, right? Over and over she’d drilled that into me. She’d been dead for a decade now, but there could be little doubt that her impact and reminders of a life I’d worked hard to forget would still linger there. In that town. In those people.
But she didn’t get the last word. She didn’t get to whisper “I told you so” or “I knew it” from beyond the grave.
I looked up and met his eyes, already making a mental list of all I needed to do to prepare. At the very top was swinging by the Tom Ford store on Madison Avenue to see if Ultra Raven came in waterproof.
“Set it up, Colton. If I have to go back there in order to escape that town, once and for all, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Chapter 3
Sebastian
Friday, March 18
8:45 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time
Sebastian Sudworth rolled out on his mechanic’s dolly from underneath Andi’s Dodge pickup truck with flourish, pushing his heel off the cement at the last second to add in a 360-degree spin.
“You sure look like you know what you’re doing. That should count for something,” Andi teased.
“It really should,” Sebastian agreed. He stayed on his back and used his motor oil–covered hand as a visor as he squinted up at her, standing directly between him and the early-morning sun. “Having said that, I’d strongly recommend you have Roland swing by and double-check my handiwork.”
“Aww, Seb. Don’t worry.” She threw a towel at him as he stood. “I always do.”
He chuckled and wiped off his hands. Truth be told, he thought he was beginning to get the hang of the simple things—changing out fluids and filters, tightening gears, that sort of thing. Roland Cross was a good teacher. Andi Franklin was possibly an even better one, if only because she let her student get his hands dirty.
Adelaide Springs, Colorado, didn’t have any Uber or Lyft drivers, but it had Valet Forge, the car fleet Andi had taken over when her husband died of cancer a few years prior. Well, it was generous to call a 2013 Jeep Wrangler, a 2016 Chevy Silverado, and a hideous orange-and-white 1974 Ford Bronco a fleet. Most of their passengers were tourists passing through, staying there just for the night and afraid to drive on the icy mountain roads after dark. Valet Forge employed one full-time driver: Fenton Norris. No one seemed to know exactly how old Fenton was, but Sebastian had noticed he could be counted on for a “When I was your age . . .” story no matter who he was talking to—from seven-year-old regional spelling bee champ Olive Morissey to seventy-something-year-old mayor Doc Atwater.
Neil Pinkton, fresh out of high school, manned the dispatch. Neil was saving up money for college, or maybe just to move to Denver and give city life a try, but Andi would love having him there for as long as it lasted. Before he went the way of the other few Adelaide Springs residents of his generation.
Sebastian picked up shifts a couple times a week—sometimes because Fenton was scheduled to have the night off and sometimes because Fenton forgot he was scheduled to work until after he’d had a couple of beers. Sebastian usually jumped at the chance. He enjoyed chatting with tourists, and it was fun to drive that ugly old Bronco. It was a classic, of course, and getting it out on the mountain roads was Sebastian’s go-to trick for experiencing adrenaline and comfort, all at once.
The pickup truck was Andi’s personal vehicle, and that morning was the first time she’d allowed Sebastian to try out his developing mechanic skills on it. He felt good about it. He’d feel even better when Andi made it safely home that night—in other words, when she didn’t go careening into an elk herd because Sebastian had unknowingly cut her brake line or something.
