excited for me.
The problem is that it's bad enough that I wrote this article. It would be very unprofessional for me to write this article about someone that I had slept with who I didn't even get to go on the record.
I debate how much of this I should tell her. Then I take a deep breath and take a chance.
“Okay, if I tell you this, can you promise that you won't say anything?”
“What do you mean?” she asks, raising one eyebrow.
“You have to promise me. As a reporter. I'm your source. You have to keep this a secret, just between us.”
Despite all of her interest in juicy gossip and other things like that, I know that Shelby takes her job as a journalist seriously and that she would never break her oath.
I used to think that I was the same way, unfortunately that's not the case.
“Everything in the article is true,” I admit. “Although, he didn't exactly go on the record with me about what we talked about.”
“He didn't?”
“I wasn't going to make it a story at all. It was just an accident that I happened to find him. I went there to get over my stupid relationship drama and to clear my head. Then when I found out that he was actually a friend of Alex's –"
“Wait, what?” Her eyes become two big saucers as she stares at me.
“He was at the party, but he had to leave early.”
I haven't had time to catch up with her about what's been going on, but she knows the gist of how I got D. B. Carter's address from the article.
“I didn’t put this in the story because I didn’t want to mention my party, but Liam was Alex's friend from back in the day. That's why when I came to the house, he invited me in. What he also said was that everything that we were going to talk about was going to be off the record.”
“Holy shit,” Shelby says, putting her hand over her mouth.
It's not until I see her reaction that I realize exactly the depth of the trouble that I'm in.
“You can't do that, Emma. Journalists aren't allowed to do that.”
“I know,” I say, looking down at the floor.
I twirl my thumbs, one over the other, but it just makes my nervousness worse.
“I know that it seems like journalists don't have many rules anymore given that basically people just write articles about what they read on Twitter, but you're going to have a hard time finding a good job if someone finds out about this. There are certain things that are sacred. If he said that what he was going to say to you was off the record, then…”
Her voice trails off. She doesn't need to finish her thought. I know exactly what she's going to say.
“Why did you write this?”
“I went into Corrin’s office and I was just going to tell her that I couldn’t find out who he was. I know that she wanted me to write the story, but I was going to say that I wasn't able to locate him. Then Mr. Matthews was there and they mentioned that the magazine was in real trouble and they really needed a breakthrough story. She kept talking me up and I just… I got in over my head.”
“This is really intense,” Shelby says, sitting down in my chair behind my desk.
I grab a chair from a nearby empty desk and pull it up in front of her.
“It was only supposed to be 2,000 words initially. So, I started writing it from my perspective thinking that I could just end it right before I met him. Mr. Matthews told me they wanted a draft that day. I didn't want to not turn anything in and yet I thought that I would just tell them that everything after this was off the record.”
“I guess it didn't work out that way,” Shelby says and props her head up with one hand taking a long gulp of her wine.
“No, as soon as they read that part, they expanded the word count,” I continue. “And the thing is that Liam did talk to me about writing and all these other things and I had all the content for the perfect article. With depth. It was so much more than I ever did before and it wasn’t just a story about what some celebrity posted on Instagram. This was a real scoop. No one else had the story. I guess a