Free The Fixer: New Wave Newsroom by Jenny Holiday

crowd protesting outside it, except the crowd was made up of famous artists that regular people were likely to recognize: da Vinci, Andy Warhol, and so on. It wasn’t the most imaginative thing, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.
    She looked up, and…shit. To say the smile that blossomed lit up her face would be an understatement. It might as well have been powered by the same neon that made her dress blaze that fierce blue. But at the same time, her eyes had grown suspiciously dewy. She was full of contradictions, this one.
    I expected a torrent of words. I knew her ways now, and after she got over her shock that her campaign had finally succeeded, she would start talking and stop maybe sometime tomorrow or the next day.
    I did not expect her to kiss me.
    My single room was so small that there were only a couple feet between the bed and the desk. Since she’d moved to the edge of the bed, all she had to do was lean forward. She pressed her lips to my cheek and murmured, just before they hit, “This is wonderful.”
    I froze. I hadn’t shaved in a couple days, so I had more than a five-o’clock shadow going. Her lips were too soft for me. She was too soft for me.
    But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t push her away. I just sat there, letting her put her mouth against me like a brand.
    It was a chaste kiss, on the surface of things. It was just her lips against my cheek, and her hands rested in her lap, for fuck’s sake. But, just like the other night, at the construction site, it was like she was filling me with lava. It ran down my throat, swirled around my chest, and then settled in my dick, where it burned hot and fierce.
    She pulled away, but only slightly. “Thank you for this,” she whispered. See? This was what nice girls did. They said thank you. Then they gave you a kiss on your rough cheek.
    Though she’d moved back enough to speak, she hadn’t returned to sitting upright on the bed. She stayed leaning forward, listing toward me, bracing her hands on her thighs.
    I let my gaze slide over a bare neck that would make Degas weep. Across pale, unblemished shoulders. The bodice of her dress went straight across, a horizontal ruffle making a dramatic line between white skin and brilliant blue dress. Earlier, it hadn’t been showing much in the way of cleavage, but now that she was leaning forward, a gap had appeared between the ruffle and her breasts.
    I couldn’t stop looking at that gap. Why didn’t she just move back? She had her cartoon. She’d deposited her perfunctory kiss. We were done here.
    Weren’t we?
    â€œI don’t want to graduate a virgin,” she whispered.
    A jolt shot through my body. I could feel each rib painfully expanding as I sucked in a breath and brought my eyes up to look into hers. In contrast to the tentative tone of her last sentence, her eyes were fierce, glittering, determined. Those were the eyes of the investigative journalist she would become.
    â€œI have a sponge in my bag,” she added, her voice catching a little.
    â€œOh, Rainbow Brite,” I said, though it came out sounding more like a groan. I let my head fall to my chest. I couldn’t look at her anymore. The room should have been silent then, but I swear, the blood in my ears was like thunder.
    She might have spoken and I hadn’t heard her, because the next thing that happened was she moved her hands from her thighs to mine. She just laid them there, but it was nearly enough to make me black out.
    I flinched. I was startled, turned on, wary…everything. Everything all at once.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said, snatching her hands away.
    No. The protest probably started with my dick, to be honest, but it rose up through my chest and down through my legs simultaneously, spreading until it swirled throughout my whole body, propelling me toward her.
    I wasn’t going to be the reason Jenny Fields was