" With Rosaline, my ghostly father? no;
I have forgot that name, and that name's woe."
The morning after the election, Nina Howard wakes at six in the morning, her phone vibrating right off the dresser where she'd dropped it last night. Blinking sleepily, she sits up and stumbles across the carpet, narrowly missing her discarded shoes from the evening before, her head pounding.
She picks up the phone and unlocks it, scrolling through the notifications. She has thirty new Google alerts: ACN, News Night, Will McAvoy.
It's that last she picks as she scrolls through the news stories. The headlines scream "NEWS NIGHT UNDER FIRE AS FORMER STAFFER SUES", "UNREPENTANT MCAVOY REFUSES TO BACK DOWN","NEWS NIGHT? MORE LIKE NEWS FRIGHT."
Nina allows herself a smirk at that last one.
But it's the tenth entry on the page that makes her eyes widen and she sits down heavily on the bed, her head suddenly aching more than ever.
It's a Page Six blind item. The first line reads, "McAvoy proposes to former flame and Exec. Producer."
"You were spectacular tonight."
Nina can picture the rest from there.
"Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief."
Nina Howard was the girl who always got what she wanted.
"What did you want to be when you grew up?"
That was the story she'd told her friends in New York anyway. No one wanted to hear the story of the girl who grew up in a ramshackle little town fifty miles outside of Boise, picking potatoes and running to school every morning, dirt still under her nails. She would dream of the day she could escape, run away to the big city, where she'd be saved by the lights and the glamour and she'd never have to see a gravel road again.
She'd kept a map of the places she wanted to go. Big cities, exotic names, strange places.
That was when she found the news. And Nina was fascinated. How marvelous it must be, she thought, thirteen years old and sitting by herself in the library on her lunch break, flipping through glossy magazines and stark newspapers, the ink spreading on her hands and smudging on her face when she pushed her hair behind her ears. How wonderful, to travel, to report, to share what it is like to be there, to be anywhere.
"A journalist, why?"
She'd gotten off the farm, but still had nightmares about the dirt. She thought she and Will were a lot alike that way.
She went to journalism school at Columbia, busted her ass as an intern at the Times. She'd wanted to make something of herself, damn it. She was going to report the news.
"Yeah, me too."
She worked her way up the ladder, but ever so slowly. She noticed the other women in the office got more attention than she did; and when they got attention, they got promoted. Nina Howard, with her dark hair and her shabby wardrobe, tended to blend into the furniture more than anything.
She'd dyed her hair blonde. That was simple.
It was the wardrobe that got her in trouble. After enduring catty remarks day after day and watching everyone she'd come into the intern program with be promoted far above her, she'd finally snapped. And found herself in two thousand dollars worth of credit card debt, with no leg to stand on.
"No little girl dreams of being a gossip columnist."
She submitted her first piece to E! news, as a last, desperate stand against losing her apartment.
They offered her a column. An office. A job.
Nina never looked back.
"Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."
Nina knew that Will McAvoy was trouble. That much was clear when he told her he was on a "mission to civilize" with that smug look of self-righteous indignation on his face.
"Do you think you'd like to go out sometime with me? To dinner, or a movie?"
Sure, it was cute and he was handsome, in that overgrown farm boy sort of way. Comforting, until he opened his big mouth and told you that your job was meaningless and that you were the source of all evil in America.
Perhaps not in so many words, but Nina got the drift.
"But you're in love with Mackenzie."
His abortive attempt at a bribe really was something else. She'd been surprised to even receive his call, so high on his moral horse as he was, so she hadn't really been shocked when he ripped up the check, lecturing her once more on civility and valuable investment choices, smirking as he'd left.
God damn his smile.
What peaked her curiosity was why he'd called her in the first place. Mackenzie McHale, his executive producer and former lover, if the email was to be read correctly.
"I'm not just saying this because I'm high, but I've never stopped loving you."
But she'd cheated on him, then left him. Why was he defending her?
That should have immediately thrown up red flags, but Nina was a sucker for punishment.
"You were spectacular tonight."
What kind of woman goes out with a man who just left that message for another woman?
Nina poured herself another drink, six thirty in the morning be damned.
"You thought she'd moved on? You're an idiot."
Who was the idiot now?
"These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume"
Will was everything she'd ever wanted in a man and more. Loyal to her, chivalrous to a fault, a fantastic lay.
And for once, just for once, Nina thought she could have it all.
"Hi Nina, it's your old friend, Mackenzie McHale."
Because really, so what if Mackenzie McHale was a "real journalist", so what if she had the life and career and shoes that Nina Howard had so desperately coveted as a girl and as a woman.
Mackenzie had the nerve to tell her it was her own fault that she was a gossip columnist, acting as if the choices Nina had made in her life were simple or easy or even entirely fair.
As if we had all been born with a pedigree dating back centuries and had grown up in a manor home. Or where ever the hell oh-so-posh-sounding Mackenzie got the nerve to talk down her nose at Nina.
None of that mattered now. Nina went home with Will at night and woke up in his bed the next morning.
Nina had won, where she'd lost so many times before.
Old friend indeed. Nina had almost snorted in derision, but considering she was probably using Mackenzie's old hairbrush at that very moment, she'd managed to keep her tone civil. (Oh god, how had she not seen this coming)
"Do you happen to remember the rest of Will's message?"
Nina had Will. They went on dates, to shows and plays, to restaurants and movie premieres. Every time they appeared on Page Six, Nina smirked, hoping that Mackenzie would see it, hoping that she'd die a little more inside, being denied the one thing that she'd always wanted, that had been so close to her grasp, then snatched away.
"Yeah, no. He said he thought you did an amazing job, with the coverage. The Bin Laden coverage."
She had smirked and taken Will to bed.
"The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea."
He'd broken up with her on a Wednesday. She knew it was coming, the moment she'd seen the chill in his eyes and the hard, dark sound of his voice.
She didn't need to hear the words to know that Mackenzie had fed them to him.
"I have to do two things. I have to write a huge check to Sloan Kettering, then I absolutely have to break up with you."
The Nina Howards of the world never did, after all, win the handsome prince at the end of the movie. Why should they, when the virtuous princess has been the one who really deserved him all along?
"They're both important, you get why the first one has to come first, but the second one has to come right after, no delay."
Mackenzie McHale had ripped Will's heart out of his chest, crushed it under her heel and walked away, leaving a bloody trail that led into a fucking warzone.
And Will still chose her.
"Why didn't you say that I shouldn't worry about the fucking number?"
Why did you tell me you weren't in love with her? She almost screams back, too stunned at the sudden demise of their relationship to even form words.
He'd lied to her. Made a fool of her to anyone with eyes, who could see what she'd clearly been so blind to.
Will McAvoy and Mackenzie McHale were made for each other, in a sick, twisted, gut lurching, mutually assured destruction sort of way that Nina couldn't even begin to grasp. It was what she imagined bleeding out felt like, like all the color in the world was slowly draining out of her, before a long fall into black.
He left and she sat on the couch for a long time in stupefied silence, before she'd gathered what remained of her dignity and taken the rest of the day off.
"For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."
Nina took another drink and looked at the time. Seven in the morning.
She wondered how long it would take before they destroyed each other. Smart odds said inside a year. Maybe she could find a betting pool.
It was like watching a car crash in ever so slow motion.
Nina couldn't look away.