Just a Girl - Becky Monson Page 0,73
she says, and then she sashays away, her heels making clicking sounds on the sidewalk as she goes.
I go and sit inside the air-conditioned station van while we wait for dinner to be done and Henry and Brenda to be ready for their interviews. Otherwise I’d just be standing there outside the window like some sad puppy dog saying Pick me! Pick me! with my eyes.
I spend the time scrolling through my phone, text with Thomas, run my hands over the wrinkles on my jacket to try to get them out, anything to get my mind off what’s going on just twenty feet away from me.
After what seems like an eternity, Henry and Brenda exit the restaurant, and we start the interviews.
Moriarty once again claims Henry without a fight from me. I’d have thought that this might be a red flag to her—the fact that I acquiesce so quickly—but she’s so caught up in her own self, she doesn’t notice.
Because I don’t feel like having someone gush about the man I wish I were with, I have one of the interns wait with Brenda in the restaurant, and I stand to the side as Moriarty interviews Henry.
“Date number two, this time with Brenda Morris from Orlando. So, tell us Henry, how did it go?” Moriarty says, her delivery flawless as ever.
“She’s quite lovely,” Henry says, a twinkle in his eyes. Or maybe that’s just one of the streetlamps reflecting off them. Here’s hoping.
In hindsight, this may have been a mistake on my part. I probably should have stayed with Brenda. Having to hear Henry and watch his face as he talks about her is far worse. How I wish he were saying this about me, that it were me on the date. That we could be a thing. I wonder if it were Brenda that was working for Henry, if he’d not be able to control himself and they’d have a relationship despite his past issues. Maybe she’s hot enough to set all that aside.
“Do you think you hit it off?” Moriarty asks Henry, her perfectly red lips pulling up into a broad smile.
“Most definitely. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Brenda.”
Knife . . . to the gut. Maybe I should go back in the van?
“So maybe she’s the one?” Moriarty asks.
Henry’s smile is a shy one; he looks down at the ground and then back to Moriarty. “You never know,” he says, and my heart does a little painful spasm thing in my chest.
I know this is just for show—for ratings. But what if it’s not? What if Henry really does hit it off with one of these women? What if they get my two-story craftsman-style home with the pram and I’m stuck living in my tiny apartment and in Moriarty’s shadow for the rest of my life?
“There you have it, Central Florida,” Moriarty says after David offers some words from the news desk that none of us can hear. “Next we’ll hear from Brenda and see what she thinks of our Henry.”
Henry and Moriarty go in the restaurant, and Brenda comes out for her interview, and crap-on-a-stick if she isn’t the sweetest thing. Gah. Maybe she is the one for Henry. I know I’d pick her over Kristin with an i. Of course, we still have next week. One more time to suffer through this, and then Henry will pick the person he wants to go on a second date with and this will all be done.
Afterward, when all the interviews are finished and Henry is giving Brenda an extra-long hug goodbye that I didn’t stare at and hate every second of or anything, one of the interns gets a nasty headache, so I ride back to the station in the van and help the rest of the crew unpack things. Because I’m a team player, and also because I have nothing else to do tonight.
I’m tasked with dropping off some cords in the audio booth, and I walk into the quiet, empty space with the padded walls and the soundboard that’s lit up like a Christmas tree. There’s no one here, though I’m assuming there will be soon when the nightly news gets going. I put the cords in the cabinet. I haven’t spent much time with the nightly news team—I hardly know any of them. It’s weird to think that they have this whole life, this whole existence in the same place I do, but we know nothing about each other.
I look around the space and