#echoingloneliness

@echoingloneliness

There were few reporters in the world that Terry believed were honest, and Karen was one of the few. Shared experience had brought them together. (An attempt at sobriety had brought them together.) But it was Karen’s character that caused Terry to trust her. Which was why after she got the tip about Central Park, she went to Karen first. The only honest journalist she knew. (And a friend that she had wanted to check up on for some time now, but now she had an excuse.) 

She knocked on the doorframe of Karen’s office at the Bugle and offered Karen a bright smile. “It’s been a while,” she said. That was her own fault for letting the distance between Karen and herself get so large. And those four words had a thousand hidden questions, but none that Terry would vocalize. (She should have said something. Should have asked. But Terry knew from experience how sensitive a topic like sobriety was.) “I would say that I’m about to make your career, but you’ve done that all on your own,” Terry offered before stepping inside the office and sitting down in the seat across Karen’s desk. “I’ve got something big --- really big --- you have time?” 

⚠️ a text meant for someone else. || @echoingloneliness

An interview. It wasn’t something Riri would have agreed to a few years ago --- in all honesty, she wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to it now. She wasn’t a people person, wasn’t someone who understood the right thing to do or say in order to be liked. That had always been Natalie’s strong suit, not Riri’s. She’d watched her best friend sweet talk every person they met, watched her smile and bat her lashes into free food from food trucks and better seats at the movies and the occasional ticket to whatever event she was going to drag Riri to that week. For a long time, Riri wondered if she ought to be jealous of Natalie’s charm, but she never had been. She’d figured as long as she had Natalie with her, she didn’t need charm of her own.

But Natalie wasn’t with her now, and Riri never had developed any kind of people skills. The interview was a bad idea. She knew that. She also knew that Natalie would have told her to do it. And she’d never been good at saying no to the voice in her head that sounded like her best friend, so here she was, sitting in a chair with Karen Page across from her and her hands clutched in her lap. “So, um... How does this work? I mean, I --- I know how an interview works in the broad sense. You ask questions, I answer them. I get that much. But how --- Are we starting? Is this the start?”

@echoingloneliness

@echoingloneliness