Unfinished Ex (Calloway Brothers, #2)(4)
My eyes meet the table. Tag’s right. Calista has been very patient. And I’ve been a jackass— stringing her along on the premise that I wasn’t divorced yet. And although I’ve never entirely led her to believe we’d be more than what we are, it may have been implied.
“Heads up,” Cooper says, nodding across the room.
Calista is walking over, her eyes as bright as I’ve ever seen them. “Jaxon! I just heard the news.”
“I guess good news travels fast.” I almost choke on the words, but they please her. And if I’m anything, I’m a people pleaser. It’s one of my best qualities. Or perhaps my greatest downfall.
“Well, congratulations.” She leans down and kisses my cheek. “I’m here with friends, but maybe we can get together after.”
“Sure. I’ll text you.”
“Great. See you later then. Bye, guys.”
Cooper stares me down. “You aren’t going to text her later, are you?”
Lissa puts another round of drinks on the table. I toss one back. “Is it that obvious?”
Tag huffs. “Bro, you have a gorgeous woman who basically just told you she’s up for a game of hide the sausage, and you’re just going to go home and sulk over your failed marriage to the girl who cheated on you?”
Cooper pushes his shot in front of me. “You need this more than I do.”
I drink it, knowing I’ll need a lot more to numb whatever the hell feeling this is inside me.
Chapter Two
Nicky
Yesterday…
“Five minutes,” my producer, Marty, says, popping his head into my small dressing room at 5:15
a.m.
“Got it.”
I check my face in the mirror. After almost eight months on air, I feel I’ve gotten the makeup down pat, albeit far from a professional makeup job. At least I have a dressing room, even if it’s not much bigger than the broom closet next to it. For all I know, this was a closet before WRKT hired me as their morning meteorologist. But it’s a country mile from what I had before they offered me this position—which was a corner of the supply room. Let’s face it, while this is basically my dream job (or at least a stepping stone toward it), WRKT is like working at a coffee cart instead of Starbucks.
When I first came to Oklahoma, I worked as a forecaster. I chased storms, researched data, and helped come up with interesting weather-related stories the ‘real’ meteorologists would cover. Then I caught the eye of one of the producers, who thought I might work well on camera, so he put me in an on-camera apprentice program. It was basically an unpaid internship, and I was living in an apartment over some guy’s garage surviving on tips I made waitressing at the local honky-tonk.
But I was doing what I loved. Being on camera reporting the weather was never even on my radar. Yes, I took a few TV studio classes in college taught by a former television reporter who said I should try my hand at weather broadcasting. But that’s like a professor telling an acting student they should try to be in a television series. It’s something a lot of meteorology students dream of but that very few will ever achieve. In reality, most meteorologists don’t even work for TV or radio. They work for private companies: insurance, trucking, shipping, even the government.
I wanted to gather data, dissect the atmosphere, and make the appropriate predictions. After Marty Maxwell took an interest in me and got me the apprentice gig, I started doing small ninety-second environmental pieces about controlled burns, pollution, and deforestation. When I tested well on those segments, they moved me to weekends when Marisol Hennesee left to go to a larger station in Seattle. I was in that position for less than a month when a more prestigious position opened up right here at the station after Kyle Morrison left to go to KBLJ, a much larger New Jersey station akin to Dunkin’, if we’re still talking in coffee shop metaphors. It’s no secret that small stations like mine are merely a pit stop until something better comes along. Turnover is common if not expected. So there I was being offered the coveted morning meteorologist slot at this small Oklahoma City affiliate of XTN, the national cable news network second only to ‘the big three.’
I immediately quit moonlighting at the place where serving handsy men paid my rent and literally went from being an unknown weekend weather girl to a respected TV forecaster overnight.
Weather girl. That term grates on me like fingernails on a blackboard. It’s left over from a time when they put pretty girls on TV to recite information fed to them by meteorologists. But today, almost everyone doing the weather on television has a science degree.
I look down at my chest, running a hand across my breasts, making sure my stiff nipples aren’t showing. Studios are cold. It’s better for the equipment, but certainly not for nipples—unless you’re a horny man watching the weather who gets off on that sort of thing. Over the past year, I’ve gone from wearing sexy bralettes to padded, more traditional bras that cover my pointy peaks.
“On in two,” Marty says as I make my way to the set.
I take my position in front of the green screen, put in my earpiece, and wait for my cue. Marty talks to me in my ear, doing a quick sound check. I nod. Marty is always in my ear. He feeds me any new and breaking information while I’m on camera. He corrects me if I say anything wrong so that I can rephrase it, and he offers encouragement when needed. He’s become like a father to me. And if Marty is my father, Josh, the cameraman who always shoots me when we go out on location, is like a brother.