Alpha Feud BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance Series - Books 1 to 5

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

“Yes,” Eliza responded instantly, as if a supernatural force had taken her body hostage for that instant. She was shocked at her own words but knew that it was too late to take it back.

“Great,” Hayden responded, audibly surprised but excited. “I’ll call you tomorrow then. Have fun with your friends.”

“Ok, you have a good day, too,” Eliza replied robotically. She hung up the phone and passed it to Melissa.

Melissa was staring at her quizzically. “And?” she inquired.

“Nothing really,” Eliza replied, shrugging her shoulders nonchalantly.

“What did he want to speak to you about?”

“Not really sure. I mean he asked me if this was a good time to talk, and I said I was with friends, so he said he’d call me back.”

“Right.” Melissa wasn’t looking convinced. “Well, let me know what he tells you later. If it’s something to do with Theo, you absolutely have to tell me.”

Eliza smiled, relieved that Melissa was too preoccupied with Theo to entertain the notion of Hayden’s insistent flirtations with Eliza.

>>

The following day was an office day for Eliza. This meant that the reporters, crew and network managers were going to be stuck in a tedious stream of meetings, during which they would also be viewing the footage from the previous week and deciding how to compile the pre-recorded shots to insert into the live news broadcasts.

If there was anything that Eliza enjoyed less than doing broadcasts about three-day fairs that revolved around growing the biggest, fattest farm animals, it was watching herself doing broadcasts about three-day fairs that revolved around growing the biggest, fattest farm animals. She knew that she would look ridiculous in her stupid windbreaker, which hadn’t even done such a great job of protecting her from the incessant dribble of rain. Jim, of course, would love the bad weather aspect. However, Eliza didn’t understand how he could’ve stooped as low as allowing three whole days for that garbage. If there was one consolation, it would be seeing Jim showing signs of disapproval. This will show him what a bad idea it all was, and maybe it’ll force him into acting like himself again. If all goes well, he’ll say ‘this is crap, let’s do something awesome’, and I’ll finally get a good story.

Contrary to her expectations, Jim breezed through the meetings in a suspiciously good mood. He was even acting a little manic, and his craziness reminded Eliza of a man in love. She hadn’t seen Jim behave that way ever, probably due to the fact that he was gay and married to a woman. Nevertheless, Eliza suspected that he’d had affairs outside of his marriage, and even considered that he and Feline had some sort of special arrangement. After all, they seemed like great friends, and perhaps she became his beard for her own secret reasons. Maybe Feline was gay, too? Nobody really knew the truth, and since Jim was a perfect orchestrator of illusion, he had managed to keep his life incredibly discreet.

Jim approved the livestock fair footage and, to Eliza’s dismay, decided that they should do ‘more features like this’ to ‘please their Midwestern target audience’. And the more Jim kept insisting that the boring broadcasts were somehow a good thing, the more Eliza grew suspicious. She decided that she would have a little talk with her boss and confront him once and for all. Eliza had been with Jim from the beginning, and she had supported him through thick and thin. When she first came to work for him, she had just given up her Boston job offer, and it seemed like an odd move for her to start working for a minor news network. After two years of shooting guerilla-style broadcasts with Jim and his very limited crew, the ratings had finally shot up enough for Jim to receive real sponsorship. The only loose end he needed to tie up was the matter of his private life, and after his wedding to Feline, this was all settled. Three years later, their network ratings were in the stratosphere. They now had offices all throughout Indiana, and their stories were no longer purely Birkbridge-based. However, after all these years of hard work, it seemed as if Jim was returning to the small-scale stuff, under a guise of ‘appealing to their target audience’, aka farmers and suburban housewives.

Eliza, more than anyone, knew how much Jim hated being confronted. Having come from a big family, Jim’s life had largely consisted of prying and confrontations. Ever since he was a child, he had been different from his male cousins and siblings. His father didn’t seem to mind too much, but his mother and aunts seemed to have conspired to make Jim’s life one large obstacle. ‘Why don’t you leave your sisters to play with their dolls and go outside, kick a ball around?’ ‘Don’t you want to be like your older brothers?’ ‘Your father would be very proud of you if you joined the football team. You know that your father was one of the best players in his high school team?’

To make matters worse, Jim was the youngest child and therefore naturally a magnet for overbearing attention. The youngest child curse was unfortunately for life, and even when Jim had grown past his teen years, there was still a flurry of expectations for him to ‘be like his brothers’. The comparisons never tired, and Jim had grown accustomed to zoning out the sound of nagging family members.

Even though she knew Jim wouldn’t enjoy being scolded by her, Eliza knew that it was her duty to do it. Who else would ever confront him without the fear of being fired? Luckily, she was immune to this possibility, since as one of the core employees of the company, firing her would cost Jim a fortune. In fact, Eliza mused, being fired wouldn’t be such a bad thing, considering how much money she would receive. I could finally go on that culinary trip to Italy... But this was all just fantasy; Eliza knew that she would never be able to give up journalism, unless it was for a life-changing cause. Her father had kept his job, in spite of the obvious dangers, until the very day that his wife announced her pregnancy.

Furthermore, Jim was Eliza’s friend, and she knew that there was a chance that that stubborn man might actually listen to her. She grabbed her emergency bottle of wine from her desk drawer and headed to his office. Although it was strange to keep wine in a desk drawer, Eliza knew that this was the only drink that Jim actually liked, so she kept it around to deal with his relatively frequent outbursts. Speaking of which, his recent lack of outbursts was also a worrying factor. Maybe he really was losing his marbles?

“Eliza!” Jim exclaimed, a little too much enthusiasm lingering in his voice. “What are we celebrating?”

“Jim, you should know by now that this is crisis wine, it’s not celebration wine.”

“Ok... so does this mean that you’re having a crisis?”

“No, you are,” Eliza blurted out. The words had sounded a lot better in her head.

To her surprise, Jim wasn’t bothered by her attitude. In fact, his expression was frustratingly calm. He smiled a little, feigning complete ignorance. “El, I’m not having a crisis.”

“Well, something’s definitely up with you. And if you can’t be bothered to tell me, I’ll figure it out myself.”

“You would never guess,” Jim said, his voice turning soft and dreamlike.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eliza’s eyes narrowed as she studied Jim’s face. “You met someone, didn’t you?”

“What on earth are you talking about, Eliza? I have a beautiful, loving wife,” Jim said, his voice neutral enough to hide the deep-seated sarcasm.

“Ok, cut the s**t,” Eliza said, surprising herself once more with how forward she was being.

Jim’s poker face dissipated and the corners of his mouth curled up into a smile. He began laughing.

Eliza just looked at him for a few moments, at which point she also caught the laughing bug. Before she knew it, they were both giggling and laughing.

Three quarters of crisis wine later, Jim began spilling the beans. He didn’t want to go into specifics, but he met a devastatingly handsome man during the weekend. Jim said that the man was from out of town, and that they ran into one another at the supermarket, of all places. The man, Dylan, had been looking for a ready meal, and had asked Jim’s opinion about what to get.

“I’m not sure which one will taste less like garbage, have you got any suggestions?” he’d inquired, flashing Jim a sexy smile. The sexy smile part was featured in Jim’s recollection of this event, but Eliza couldn’t be sure if this had been added onto the story later in order to spice it up.

“I’m afraid to say that they all taste like garbage,” Jim had told him.

Apparently Dylan loved the joke, but had suddenly stopped laughing and looked at Jim quizzically. “Hey, do I know you from somewhere? I swear I’ve met you before.”

“I don’t think so, I would’ve definitely remembered meeting you,” Jim said.

After scratching his head for a moment, Dylan had given up trying to figure out where he knew him from. Thereafter, Jim suggested that he may have seen him on TV, but that probably would’ve been a long time ago. He proceeded to tell him that he used to be a news anchor in Los Angeles during the 1990s. This made Dylan perk up considerably, and he excitedly proclaimed that he had watched Jim’s broadcasts in LA, where he had lived with his family during his childhood and part of his adolescence.

“Let me guess,” Eliza intervened, “he was what... five at the time?”

Jim didn’t believe that her snarky comment warranted a response, so he just continued talking. Long story short, after chatting to Dylan for at least twenty minutes in the supermarket, Jim ended up offering to help cook dinner. “You can’t be buying that microwavable garbage. It’s much better to make a real meal.”

For obvious reasons, they chose to go to Dylan’s place rather than Jim’s. Eliza was still too modest to ask Jim whether he and his wife had some sort of polygamous ‘arrangement’, but figured that she would ask him someday, if her curiosity got the better of her. Dylan lived in an apartment on the north side of town, near the coal mines. He told Jim that he was recruited to work in the mines during a recent staff deficit, and had only recently moved into Birkbridge and his new apartment.

Eliza realized that Hayden and Theo must also have responded to the same call to arms. It seemed that, as male unemployment soared in the country, there was still always work in the mines. Of course, due to obvious health risks and the stress of relocation, mine work was not suited for everybody. Generally, only young, single men would come to work in the mines, and even they would usually quit after a year or two. Eliza wondered how Theo and Hayden were able to stay healthy despite continuously working in dirty, dusty conditions. Gold mines, coal mines... perhaps their family had developed some kind of genetic immunity through the magic of Darwinian evolution. After all, they had said that the nomadic, gold-mining lifestyle had been in their bloodline for at least two centuries.

“So, what happened when you got to his apartment?” Eliza asked while pouring out the remainder of the wine bottle into Jim’s glass. He smiled at her sleepily and Eliza was shocked that he was still spitting out information about his private life; this was so unlike Jim. I should get him drunk more often.

“Well, at first I cooked for him. It was a nightmare though because everything in that apartment was stiff and rusty, but you know me, I can always make do with what I’ve got.”

Eliza nodded in agreement, thinking back on their crappy news studio days from five years ago. We managed to make pretty great stuff.

“So I managed to make a pretty good pasta dish,” Jim continued, “and then time just slowed down, and it was almost like a movie. It just happened so naturally. I wasn’t even sure if the man was gay or not; I can usually tell, but he was so damn mysterious, I really didn’t know. I thought that I was going to have to make the move, but there I was, stirring the pasta sauce, when I felt his hands on my back, slowly moving down toward my...”

As the story heated up, Eliza put her glass of wine down with more oomph than she had realized, and the sound made Jim come back to his senses. “Oh, sorry, did I digress?”

“Just a little,” Eliza admitted.

“Ok, well, to wrap up my story, it was the most amazing night I’ve ever had. Ever. Including my twenties at the LA broadcasting network. This just blew it all out of the water. Maybe because he was a complete stranger, or maybe because he was the hottest man in a 100-mile radius from this dump, but whatever the reason was, I still can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Are you seeing him again?”

“You can bet your bonus money on that, missy.”

>>

When Eliza sobered up and drove home, she realized that she hadn’t even had a proper talk with Jim about the important work stuff that she’d really needed to confront him about. I guess that ship has sailed... I’ll just be reporting on donkey s**t for the rest of my life. She was very happy for Jim that he’d met a guy who turned his world upside down, but she couldn’t help but reflect his happiness onto her own self-pity. Everyone seemed to be happy with this sudden gold-rush of hot coal-miners that had flooded their boring little town.

The sexy story that Jim had told her also began to resonate with a darker, repressed side of her inner psyche. Eliza had never questioned her s****l attraction for Andrew, since he had always been an objective ‘hottie’. She had thought he was handsome, albeit slightly cocky, from the moment she met him. All her friends thought he was good looking and charming, and so did the girls who knew him in college. But when she tried to apply the chemistry and passion that were central to Jim’s story to her s****l relationship with Andrew, Eliza began to see that something was missing. Ever since she’d started dating Andrew, she hadn’t felt this numb. For the first time since high school, she was starting to feel a personality crisis coming on.

Her drive home was an emotional rollercoaster, and to make matters even more complicated, Eliza received a phone call. The number was anonymous, but she had a feeling that she knew who it was. Should I pick up?

Without giving herself time to think anymore, Eliza pressed the ‘accept call’ button on her car loudspeaker. “Hello, this is Eliza speaking,” she said formally.

“Hi, Eliza, it’s Hayden.”

“Hayden, hi. What did you want to speak to me about the other day?”

“It was nothing in particular actually, but I just wanted a chance to talk to you alone. Listen, I know that you have a boyfriend and I respect that you were upfront about it, but I’d really like a chance to spend time with you, just as friends. I’ve hung out with my brother much too often since we got here, plus now he also has Melissa. I need a friend, and believe it or not, I wasn’t only interested in talking with you because you’re beautiful. I thought you were interesting, and I think that you’re an upfront and honest person.”

Eliza’s concerns from earlier, her worries about Jim and Andrew evaporated for a moment. She hadn’t realized that Hayden was lonely and looking for a friend, but his outpouring made her suddenly want to trust him. She realized that she needed a friend as well, since all her other friends were too intertwined in her life to trust with her doubts and worries.

“Ok,” Eliza said firmly, “tell you what, I have a free afternoon tomorrow, so maybe we can meet to talk over coffee?”

“Sounds good to me,” Hayden replied, his voice enunciating each syllable in a deliciously smooth way.

“Good, I’ll text you the directions.”

Eliza hung up the phone before he could respond, since she didn’t want to get sucked into a deeper conversation at the moment. Her mind was still conflicted about her recent revelation regarding her s*x life, and she was determined to try and right this wrong. As soon as she got home, she would seduce her boyfriend, they would have amazing s*x, and she would hereby prove to herself that they had chemistry.

By the time that Eliza got up to the bedroom, Andrew was already in the shower. She lay down on the bed and waited for him to come out.

Five minutes later, Andrew emerged with a towel around his waist. His body was still glistening with drops of water, which slid down his body and dripped off his strong, manly legs. “Hey you, where’ve you been all this time?”

“I had to have a talk with my boss, and then I had to wait to sober up before I drove home.”

“Oh no, Eliza, did he...”

“No, no, nothing like that!” Eliza assured him. “I was actually the one who called our little meeting.”

Andrew looked surprised but impressed. “My girlfriend, the power player who makes her boss go to meetings,” he teased.

“What did you talk about?”

“Ehm, well we ended up talking about some weird stuff, but initially I just wanted to confront him about all the boring broadcasts he’s had us doing.”

Andrew laughed dismissively. “Eliza, stop saying that those reports are so boring. You’re insulting the intelligence of our town. Everyone loves your reports, and viewership has never been better. I watched your report today, the one about the fair, and I really liked it.”

“It’s not that the people don’t like it. I’m just saying that we could do a lot better. Jim gained popularity by using the simple premise of looking beyond the ordinary. He knew that people needed a break from their daily routines, and he was willing to hunt for the stories that would provide them that. It’s not escapist per se, but it’s more about finding stories that are fresh and interesting. As a broadcasting company, it’s our job to help people learn new facts about life through showing them extraordinary real-life situations. And the livestock fair, for me, stands for everything that we’re against. It’s predictable; it’s annual; it’s planned; it’s boring... tedious.”

Eliza took a breath, surprised at her sudden anger toward this topic. “Also,” she continued, “I don’t think that I’m the one who’s insulting the intelligence of this town. It’s Jim who’s doing so, because he thinks that our ‘target audience’ will be so incredibly happy to accept repetitive, recycled stories as news!”

“Eliza... the thing about finding these phenomenal events, is that they’re usually tragic. Things that just happen are usually shootings, car accidents... at best s****l harassment lawsuits. I know that you respect your father, but what made his work fed off tragedy. And I think that, although reporting these things is part of your work, it’s also your job to report about the positive things that happen. People like to see their own reality reflected on a TV screen. Excitement can be found from within ordinary life, not just from outside of it.”

Eliza sighed. Even though Andrew made a valid point, she had still been hoping that he would at least understand her point of view. It seemed as if he was not just defending the Birkbridge mentality, but he was choosing it over her. Eliza felt alone and misunderstood. Jim, Andrew, even Brienne and Melissa; people who she considered close to her did not seem to understand her. Maybe she was the one who had changed... maybe she was the unsympathetic member of her community. Eliza felt as if she was turning into her father, and she couldn’t even control it.

Andrew and Eliza had one main rule in their household... never go to bed angry. The only other rule was ‘don’t leave your hair straightener on’, which was insisted on by Andrew, following an almost disastrous incident. Eliza no longer straightened her hair anyway, since she learned to tame her long brown locks with a round brush and anti-frizz spray.

That night was no exception to the main rule, and the couple made sure to talk out their differences before hitting the hay. However, the long talk had also ruined Eliza’s seduction plan from earlier. She almost wished that they’d gone to bed angry because this could’ve ignited some sparks of passion, which perhaps would’ve led to some amazing make-up-s*x.

Unfortunately, the moment had passed, since after an hour of talking and making peace, Eliza was emotionally and physically exhausted. As she fell asleep in Andrew’s arms, she couldn’t help but think that their ground rule might be in need of re-evaluation.

>>

On Tuesday, Eliza had yet another free morning. Ever since Jim had lost his media spark, the free mornings had become increasingly frequent. Most people would be happy to get some extra spare time, but Eliza wasn’t most people. She had been such a workaholic for the past five years, that she rarely had a minute to herself other than on the weekends. And even her weekends were tightly packed and scheduled with trips and plans to see friends or family.

The thing that scared Eliza about being alone was the thought that inevitably penetrated her mind. Her relationship with Andrew seemed happy to her, but they had also been so busy for the past few years that they hardly spent any time alone. This thought brought panic to Eliza’s mind; was her love with Andrew just a sham? Did they still have a spark? Had they ever had a spark?

As these worrying thoughts clouded her mind, Eliza realized that she had promised to meet Hayden for coffee in an hour. She quickly showered, dried her hair, and applied some eyeliner and mascara. Eliza was swift and precise when it came to makeup... a skill that she had perfected after being on-camera for five years. Eliza looked at herself in the mirror and couldn’t help but admire the results. For a forty-five-minute routine, she was looking astoundingly good.

She was about to leave when she remembered that she’d left her phone in the bathroom, so she went to fetch it. At that moment, the doorbell rang. Has Hayden showed up at my house?

Eliza ran over to the door and swung it open. It wasn’t Hayden... it was Freddie.