Moments after the mayor’s gavel-stroke marked the adjournment of a blessedly brief City Council meeting, my competitor and I were locked in a City Hall janitor’s closet, fumbling with each other’s clothes.
His teeth studied my neck as I unbuttoned his corduroy trousers, the heat rising from his groin. I dove in with my hands, then backed up against a sturdy shelf and propped myself against it before pulling him inside me. There was no floor space to speak of, and his reporter’s arms were too damaged by years of high-speed typing to lift my sturdy frame. Besides, we were both on deadline and there wasn’t much time.
We weren’t always like this. I faintly hated him the first time I saw him. He was there, in the back row of a gossip-filled neighbourhood meeting I thought only I knew about, whispering with residents and taking pages of notes. He never looked at me, never saw the barbs in my eyes.
My scorn only grew as he managed to dig up just as many exclusive stories for his newspaper as I did for mine. His name and by-line were the reason I swore under my breath each morning and worked late each night, trying to beat him in the next day’s edition.
We were thrust together – literally – during a standing-room-only press conference at the international airport. Dozens of reporters crowded around the talking heads as they brought hurricane victims’ pets in by plane and took them to local animal shelters. He was standing just behind me – towering over me, more precisely, since he is nearly a foot taller than I am.
I’d never been so close to him; one tends to keep a safe distance from one’s imagined nemesis. We were both scribbling frantically in our notebooks when the network-news cameraman in front of me stepped back, bumping me directly into the man I’d worked so hard to avoid. I started to mumble an apology, but when I felt his erection pressing against me I lost all powers of language.
I looked up at him, studying his liquid mahogany eyes, three-day stubble and tangle of dark, curly hair. With a quick tilt of his head and a tug of my hand, he beckoned me to follow him. He led me silently down a hall and into a small office whose floor space was nearly filled by a desk and two armchairs. There, with the late-afternoon gloom shining in through the venetian blinds and the planes roaring on the tarmac outside, he sat down in one of the chairs and unbuttoned his khakis, letting his cock spring free. He quickly sheathed it with a condom, and then raised my skirt, slid my underpants down, and lowered me onto his lap.
I squeezed his legs together between my thighs and rode him as he clutched my breasts from behind. His gasping breath jetted hot streams of air across my shoulders. With one hand on my clitoris, my orgasm came quickly, subsiding just in time for me to feel him spasming inside of me.
We both settled backwards into the chair for a few breaths. I twisted around to kiss him, keeping his organ buried deep. As I pulled away he started to speak, so I put my musk-scented fingers against his mouth. Any conversation might lead us to spill our sources, reveal our leads, ruin our competitive edge, or even make friends. It was better to say nothing.
I kissed him once more, tugged my panties back on, and found my way back to my car. Then I raced back to the newsroom and composed the best orphaned-pets story I’d ever written. The whole time, I imagined the stream of profanity that would emerge from my lover’s lips the next morning when he saw it on the front page of my newspaper.
A handful of reporters from local papers regularly reported news in the city I covered, but my competitor and I were the only ones consistently assigned to the same City Council meetings, ribbon-cuttings, and press conferences. On evenings when he didn’t show up, I made sure I wrote a story that would make him sorry he missed it.
When he did show up, he always found a way to tryst with me in some abandoned room, closet or secluded garden. We were never together more than 10 minutes – we were on deadline, after all. How he knew every hidden spot in every location in the city, I could only imagine. Perhaps he had his way with every female reporter, sooner or later. Perhaps at home he kept a master map, marking down new spots as he discovered them. That would explain why he always had a condom or two in his back pocket.
After a gruelling meeting in which a 35-member committee bickered for two hours about the benefits and drawbacks of artificial turf, he showed me into a darkened office with a planner’s name on the door. There, he bent me over the desk and entered me from behind, his soft hands knotted into my hair, while I eyed a photograph of the office’s owner posed with a wife and two young children. They beamed blandly back at me. After my lover left, I swiped one of the planner’s business cards – I needed to interview him for an investigative piece I was pursuing.
We met as often as chance brought us together. At a garden-party for a new wing of the local college, he pulled me behind a tall hedge and laid on his back in the grass. As I straddled him, my long skirt shrouding our nakedness, we covered each other’s mouths with our hands to muffle our moans. Watching him at the banquet table that morning, I learned he subsisted (as many poorly paid reporters do) on nothing but coffee and catered food. Meanwhile, he learned that I had the Dean in my back pocket.
To pass the dull prologue of a school-board meeting, we found an unlocked classroom and fed each other bites of a teacher’s apple as he hoisted my legs over his shoulders and plunged into me. Since then, I haven’t been able to eat an apple – or interview that teacher – without remembering the ferocity in his eyes that night, as though he were exacting some revenge on every dull classroom he’d endured.
Remaining wordless turned out to be wise. Our news reporting became smarter than ever, fuelled by the silent chemistry between us. Each of us found juicier angles, sweeter sources, and sharper tongues the more we trysted. As we grew more incisive our editors sent us out into the field more and more.
Eventually, he invaded my dreams. One month after that afternoon at the airport, I dreamed that another reporter had stumbled upon us in a City Hall broom closet, then jotted notes briskly in her notebook while we continued fucking. The next morning, her headline proclaimed that our papers were secretly in bed together. Page designers can never resist a bad pun.
A few weeks later, I dreamed that my lover had written an article in which the capital letters of each sentence spelled out a secret message to me, although when I woke I could not remember what the message was.
I never once felt guilty for my moments with him. Now and then I craved the feel of his hands, his mouth, his breath on me as I went through my workday. Sometimes it was all I could think about.
If my bureau chief thought my competitor would be somewhere, she’d send me to make sure we had the story, too. Meanwhile, he and I got to know each other in the way our field has the most trouble conveying. Journalism is good with facts and ideas – less so with intangibles. Like the spark you get when you climax with your nemesis and then return to the newsroom sated, clear-headed, and ready to wipe the floor clean with him.
One afternoon, a stormy wind blew down a concrete wall at a demolition site. According to the dispatcher whose voice crackled on the police radio, the 10-foot-tall structure had collapsed onto the car of a woman who pulled over to look at a map, and had taken down an electricity pole in the act. I jumped in my car and sped to the address.
The scene was a confusion of fire engines, urban-search-and-rescue trucks, firemen in yellow jackets and hardhats, and curious neighbours gathering beyond the line of yellow police tape. My lover was already there, taking a statement from the police department’s spokeswoman. She was dressed against the frigid gusts in a long black trench coat. When I stepped up to ask her what she knew, I caught the haunted look in my competitor’s eyes.
‘No, we don’t know who she was,’ the spokeswoman said, her voice already hollow with repetition. ‘No, we’re not sure how many neighbours are without power. Yes, we think one of the other walls might be in danger of collapsing. We’ve evacuated the house next door, just in case.’
I jotted notes, but my mind was on my lover. Out of the corner of my eye I watched as he walked toward the demolition site, his figure receding into the shadows of a nearby alley.
As soon as I could, I followed him. My cell phone rang; it was my editor. I silenced the call, then approached the gruesome place where a half-block of concrete lay in a peculiar hump over the shape of a crushed automobile. Rescue crews were using a jaw-toothed crane to pull pieces of rubble aside. The coroner’s white van waited patiently nearby, its back doors ready to receive the dead woman’s body. Grief stuck in my throat. I shook it from my head and walked on.
The alley was dark and smelled like dust and ozone. Before my eyes adjusted I felt his hands clutch the heavy fabric of my coat and pull me into the shadows. I kissed him and tasted the tears that wetted his face and throat. It was all I could do not to cry, too – for that lost woman, for all the pleasures she would no longer know. Suddenly it felt important to make it up to her. I could tell my lover felt the same.
His crushing embrace made it difficult to breathe, and he kissed me so sharply that his teeth bruised my lips. His icy hands sought their way under my long woollen skirt, roughly pushed aside my panties. I gasped as he penetrated me with three fingers of one hand and unzipped the fly of his corduroys with the other, pulling his red, stiffened cock free.
We switched places. I leaned against the masonry; he bent his knees and slammed into me, wrapped one of my legs around his waist. Hard kisses muted our sorrow-laced moans. Our orgasms rushed over us like the frozen wind, hurrying with need. A moment later, he re-bundled himself against the cold and rushed off to get more quotes. I went to my knees and brushed the gritty sidewalk with my hands, unready to return to the world just yet. Few understand what these scenes are like, and I was thankful beyond words for his knowing company.
Our articles were nearly identical in the next day’s editions. That was okay; I would keep closer tabs on the police department’s follow-up investigation than I knew he had time to do.
Tonight, among the mops and buckets, as he climaxed inside me, he laid his rough-shaven face against my breast and I held him like a child. I wondered what thoughts rattled around in his mind when he recalled or longed for these trysts. I wondered what exclusive story he had in store for tomorrow’s edition.
He zipped his corduroys, kissed my vulva and then my mouth, and stole away quickly. The door had clicked shut behind him before I opened my eyes.
Sometimes, when I return to the newsroom after seeing him, my editor notes my enthusiasm for late-night meetings and compliments the speed and incisiveness with which I write about them. When she asks what keeps me interested while our other reporters are passing out at their desks, I tell her only this: our work is made up of the words that people say, but it’s what happens between the words that makes the story come alive.