Oh, oh I'm on Fire

by lollipop-mania

"Are you sleeping together?" Jane looks at Sam, the dark hair on his arm, the sleeves of his sweater rolled up to his elbows. She imagines a gold wedding ring on his finger. "No," she says, "of course not. We just work together." Sam/Jane, pre and post-canon.

a/n: I know the ggr fandom is non-existent and, if it ever had something, is long-dead, but the way they looked at each other just got to me (and i watched the show twice during lockdown), so...

this has no focus except "Jane" - it's both a story on jane's growth into feminism and a story of her relationship with sam, but does neither particularly well, so... enjoy?

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Oh, oh I'm on Fire

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PART 1

i. sam

November 1969

She bites her tongue, heart pounding, waiting (impatiently) as people walk past her.

It's not a holiday, she thinks, trying to remember the exact date. It's a Friday — she always knows how soon they are from going to print — and it's the second week of November. But it's not a long weekend, as far she knows.

No. It's not. If it were, she'd have plans with her boyfriend.

Why are there so many people out, then? It's a little after ten. Aren't people working? No one comes this far east — really, no one comes off fifth at all — except when going to and from offices. So why is it suddenly so crowded?

A deep breath.

Where is he?

"Oh!" Someone bumps her shoulder from behind.

"Apologies, ma'am."

She smiles as the person descends into the station. "It's no problem."

Hm.

Jane's fingers are practically shaking. She feels like she is bouncing in her heels.

Where is the train?

Someone smiles and tips his hat to her. Jane smiles back.

Where is he?

Whoa, she takes another long, slow breath, trying to steady herself. What is happening? Why is she doing this? Why is she standing outside in almost freezing weather, not doing anything useful just so she can relay some information a few minutes earlier than she otherwise would? It's not going to make a difference to the story!

And why is she so excited? This is her job. She is usually much calmer, much more collected.

Tidy.

Ha — well… it is a good story. It's a good line. A good source. A gold find.

She's been spending too much time around these newsmen. It's so easy (it always was) to get sucked up into it.

She's not even wearing gloves!

Why is he taking the train? A taxi would've been so much faster, especially mid-morning.

Though maybe not, judging by the people still pushing past her.

No. He should've taken a car. She would've paid.

Jane concentrates on her breaths, pacing them out, letting her shoulders fall.

A train comes from uptown. She hears it from the entrance, from the grate a few feet away, and then it stops. Good. Local. It should be his. If he's on the next one, she'll be furious.

She licks her lips to warm them up. She has her pad in hand, pen hooked onto the ring-binding.

It takes a moment. Not many people get off on the fifty-first street exit.

Sam's the fourth one out. She sees the top of his head first as he comes up the stairs. And then his coat, mustard and checkered and tight around his shoulders — distinctive — next.

"Sam," she begins before he is all the way up, speaking to him despite the two people still between them. "You know my cousin, the one in D.C.?"

The people ahead of him on the stairwell disperse around her form and Sam finds her without even looking, stepping before her so fast, all she has to do is blink and he's there, in her space, eyes lit, knowing it'll be good if she's come to find him.

He knows better than to ask why she is four blocks from the office, why she is waiting for him outside the subway stop, why she is standing in an unbuttoned coat in the middle of November.

It's because she has something.

"Yeah?"

She turns around and starts walking, letting him fall-in close. "His college roommate's girlfriend runs papers for Herb Klein."

"You're kidding!"

Jane is grinning, looking half at Sam and half at the pavement as they meander around people.

She was right to come out here, right to wait for him, right to tell him as soon as she could even though nothing in the product itself would be lost by the delay. It's because there is no feeling like it — like this.

"She said Klein 's been calling Agnew an idiot all week." Sam grabs her elbow as they walk, bringing her closer, urging her to lower her voice so it's only between them. "She says he even asked the president to disavow the remarks!"

"Damn, Hollander." He stops, pulling her to a halt. "You got her to tell you this? On record?"

She feels it in her knees again, in her heels, in the pounding of her heart.

She purses her lips, pausing for a moment. He raises his brows.

"Not on record until ten minutes ago."

Sam scoffs. "You didn't tell me anything!"

She smiles, slow. "I didn't have it confirmed yet."

No. There really is nothing like it — the flush of the story, of the success, of the praise. There's never any question that she'll wait outside, that she'll watch her reporter's face as she gives the story, that her heart will be racing until the moment she sees the magazine on the stand first thing Monday morning.

"We've got the cover." He breathes, face pale but cheeks flushed in the cold, eyes bright and mouth wide. Their fourth cover in as many weeks. No one has done that in three years. And never a specific team. Not like they have. Never once in the history of News of the Week (she knows, she's done the research). "I'm buying you whatever you want to tonight."

He squeezes her elbow and then drops it as they continue, side by side, down the street.

It's an empty promise. They end up sleeping at the office that night.

But they have the whiskey from his bottom drawer, which is close enough to what they'd have ordered if they'd gone out anyway.

---

Summer 1968

They met her first day, isn't that something?

May 20. 1968. Two years to the day she'd graduated college.

Before that, Jane'd been working at a law firm. It'd been a nice setup. She'd started on the phones, but was coming near clerking when she left. It was good work. She liked the energy, the sleeplessness, the competition of young men newly out of school, shining their shoes on their ironed ties and florally-fragranced fiancees. She liked knowing things before them, taking notes in meetings only to find the steps to the argument before they did. She liked how they valued her ability to parse things out. She liked when they chose her to help.

"They're good," the partner told her father one weekend at the club, speaking of the young men. "But from what I've heard, Jane keeps a strong hand on them. Has a mind for case law."

"Good hire, isn't she?" Her father replied. "Top of her class, you know. And editor of the paper."

"I remember." The partner raised his glass at Jane. "Easy on the eyes too. No wonder she's so popular at the office. Bunch of ivy boys who crap their pants in a courtroom. Women like Jane stop 'em in their tracks. The Huntington son is a lucky man."

"Well, to hear her tell it, you've some smart kids."

"Wet behind the ears." The partner responded before moving on, as though that explained something.

Jane had thought she'd stay for a while, find a husband, and then leave. And once she started with Chad, things lined up. So, a few years while Chad finished school. Then a year for him to get a handle at work, another, maybe, to make his given name as influential as his surname, and then she'd leave, her brief foray into law a good intellectual exercise and post-collegiate venture. She didn't work too late into the night. She had a nice apartment and got out of the city on weekends. She became a junior member of two charity boards and she still read the paper (a few papers) every morning.

But then one day, two years into it, Jane was out with an old friend from her college paper who still worked in the news and had heard there were openings at News of the Week.

It didn't sound like much. At first, Jane didn't think anything of it.

She went to work the next day without further consideration of the proposal.

When she mentioned it to her parents, she did so only in passing, and only because they asked on her old classmate.

"Time is a better magazine," her mother offered. "Stronger reporting. And they're right on the issues…. Though I don't know why you'd leave your job anyway. You're happy, aren't you?"

"Bea would love to hear you're interested," her father circumvented.

"It's a good idea," Chad contributed later over the phone. "You never seemed to like working with those stuffy lawyers anyway."

Jane wasn't interested though. It was weeks later that she changed her mind.

Something happened, then. Even now, she isn't sure what. She didn't see a copy of News of the Week. She didn't have any setbacks or problems at the firm. There was no impetus she could pinpoint. She was checking a citation and suddenly, like someone turning on a light, like a flash of memory, an overwhelming and poignant feeling of wrongness, she knew she was going to leave. She was going to go work for News of the Week.

Oh, she thought, without thinking of anything else, yes.

Ha! Jane didn't even subscribe to News of the Week!

But still, she knew. And she sat there after the realization, one hand still holding her pen, the other in her lap, and she was shaking. Without even realizing it, her hands were shaking enough to scratch a sharp line of ink against the pacific reporter she was reading.

With a breath, Jane straightened and smoothed a hand over her hair. And then, with no hesitation, without more than a cursory look around to see who was near, she reached for the phonebook near her desk and found the number.

"Cute voice," the guy who answered said. It was quiet in the background. "No one in the office Monday morning," he told her. "College?"

From where? Experience? We could use another girl in foreign or the back of the book. Oh, too bad, the court is already covered. Oh? Good. Can you come by right now?

She realized, later, her father must have called Bea Burkhart. After all, the road to researcher usually started as a clipper or in the mailroom. But Jane had been editor of her college newspaper, so she had experience. She had a good education and a good resume. And researcher is the top position for a girl at News of the Week. You're part of the news! You work with the writers, stay up all night reading the AP and UPI telexes for breaking stories. You feel the pulse of the world.

Still, she'll figure, much later, as she meets the other girls with equally impressive resumes, that calls had been made to get her where she was.

Her father always knew her better than she knew herself.

"I'll need to put in my notice," she said, legs crossed at the heel, knees pressed together tightly.

"No notice," Phinneaus "Finn" Woodhouse had said, leaning tall against his desk. He was the youngest editor of a major publication in the city. She'd read all about him before and he was just as young and good-looking and charismatic as the papers said. Sharp, she could tell, even as his shirtsleeves were rolled up and his collar undone like someone ten years younger (and less successful) than him. "Tell them you're leaving. Today."

Jane didn't hesitate.

"I want you back by three," he straightened off his desk and gestured her to stand. "We have our embed missing somewhere in Kham Duc. Can't get ahold of him."

She shook his extended hand. "I'll find him."

No notice was no problem.

This — this — is what she was missing: the speed. The click of typewriters. The movement of shoes on tile and scuffs on carpet. The smell of mimeograph. Energy. The race.

The law moved slow — anyone who knew it would tell you. She liked court — she always knew she would — but Jane only worked for the associates, so she never came close to being present for than the occasional procedural hearing. She'd been hoping to stay until she got to work on trials.

But trials as a legal clerk — a paralegal at best — and researching for a weekly national publication… well, they were two different things. One was alive, at full throttle, all the time. The other wasn't.

She only had a few years before she married — might as well spend them.

By the time she left Finn's office, the rest of the newsroom had started to fill in.

People were scratching pens to paper and calling out names. She could hear the consistent hum of the telexes and the constant ringing of telephones coming from everywhere.

And then there he was, walking in right as she was walking out, pencil behind his ear, long legs taking him in long strides as he called out a quote to someone that she didn't catch.

There was nothing superlative about Sam on the outset. Tall, but not imposing. Confident, clearly. Handsome, vaguely. Jewish, obviously. She didn't do any sort of double-take or even think about him at all. She met so many young men that day. So many young women. But when she came back that afternoon, a box of her things from the firm and her lipstick freshly applied, he was the one she remembered. He had hardly looked at her when they passed — they'd done nothing more than nod politely — but she had remembered.

She worked under Stephen that day, though more directly under Rox, the Head Researcher at the time. She didn't talk to Sam for almost a week.

She liked the way he walked though, with his long legs and tight pants.

He'd only been there a few months, not much longer than her at all, but he moved as though he'd never been anywhere else.

Wet behind the ears, she thought, watching him take the steps up to Wick's office.

Jane was assigned to foreign first. She spoke German well and French well enough.

It wasn't long before she went with Sam though, once or twice, on Nation. And then more. More, until Sam looked to her first.

He had an energy the others lacked and a jocular cynicism that made him popular; but he was eager beneath that.

Yes, she would think, watching him endeavor through a copy. Eager. Wet.

The words would ring in her ears, like she was hearing them again, like they were being repeated next to her.

Times passed quickly.

And it's been months since then.

She knows the work. She knows the reader. She knows her reporter.

When they get their first cover (his first cover too, which she likes to think has something to do with her, although she knows better) at the end of the summer of '68, more than five thousand words, she buys a copy, for no reason, on her walk to the deli.

She has drafts just upstairs in her apartment. She can pick up dozens of copies in print floating around the office. In a way, she is only spending money to pay herself.

But she buys one and takes it home and looks at it on her coffee table.

She tilts her head to see it one way and then the other. She thinks about the photo Sam, Harry (the photo editor), and, in the end, only Finn had picked out. She thinks about the words inside. She thinks about how it will read By Samuel Rosenberg just as she'd typed.

And she doesn't think about anything else. She watches it for a few moments, just sitting there idly on her coffee table, and then she grabs her bag and heads for the door. She has to meet her parents at the club.

The cover is strikingly similar to one she'd seen before that she'd otherwise mostly forgotten about.

Months before her friend had first told her of the position, when she'd casually mentioned it to her parents, when she'd sat in Finn's office and given her best smile and nimble sentences, when she'd confidently traced her finger down the phonebook to find the office number, she'd never mentioned that, long before, years before, she'd picked up a copy of News of the Week while still an undergraduate and thought maybe.

---

August 1968

"You never come out," he says, leaning slightly closer. He's already standing too close.

Jane rolls her eyes. It's her parents anniversary tomorrow. They're going to the Cape.

Yes, he's right — she never comes out. The girls in the pit don't care for her much and her friends wouldn't care for them. So she keeps her distance.

"We've got to celebrate."

It'll be their second cover. Two covers in less than two months.

Well — only if they finish the story.

"You mean if I finish the story." He adds when she reminds him. He sits on his desk.

Jane shakes her head, though she's as upset about it as he is. "I told you I was taking this time weeks ago. And you have three other researchers on this story."

"I don't know that I can finish anything without you, Hollander."

"You managed to keep your job before I came."

"Skin of my teeth. Begging Finn and Wick every goddamn day for another shot."

"I'd imagine." She can't help her amusement. "If you're so worried, I can stay for a bit now and work on it."

"I think we need to drink."

"I don't see how that'll help your cause."

"Clearly the story benefits when the reporter and researcher celebrate their achievements together."

"Sam. You have four researchers."

No need to celebrate anything. She'll be gone all weekend. She won't even see it come to completion. She'll see the final cover from the pharmacy's newsstand out in Massachusetts.

"Anyway," she walks past him to the front of his desk. She hits a key on his typewriter and he makes a noise in protest. "It's your story, celebrate on your own."

Sam twists. "No. You too." He smiles, despite the drop in his tone. "You said you have some time. I want to go out with you."

They've never had a drink, just the two of them. Never outside the office.

What would they even talk about? Work?

They could stay here, talk about the story, talk about something else, drink some of the plethora of alcohol that's hidden around the bullpen.

Somehow that seems safer. Though she isn't even sure what she thinks might be dangerous.

Why does something feel dangerous?

"How much later will you be here?" He asks after a moment, and it is instantly lighter. "Will one drink make that much of a difference?"

He's laughing now and Jane inhales. She parts her lips. She isn't sure what kind of face she was making before. She wasn't sure what she was thinking about, only a second ago.

"Fine. But quickly."

"Okay, maybe two drinks." He's grinning, straightening off the desk and walking around it, reaching for his wallet without looking. Then he continues on, expecting her to follow him.

Jane glances once more down at the paper sticking out of the writer, the G she'd put in the type. It's almost all finalized, he was just working through some paragraphs.

Then she looks up, watching his back as he moves further away.

Fine. Maybe two.

She doesn't know why she's so hesitant anyway.

Plus, in the end, it's no matter.

He said just the two of them, but he takes her to Cole's, so half the office is there.

She sits next to Sam and leans in to speak with him. She watches the way his eyes avoid her — they're sitting too close for him to look at her directly — and she laughs at the conversation.

It's always exciting, this. This: having the story. Having the cover.

She was right, before — she won't finish the story or finalize it. She'll be on the beach with her family.

But Sam, her reporter, will have his story on the cover. Everyone she knows, everyone she has ever met, regardless of whether they read the story or not, will not pass the following week without seeing the headline she drafted. The photo she and Sam chose, staring out across the world.

Exciting is selling it short.

It's not just exciting. It's the best.

---

July 1968

She was in the pit in July, two months after she started working there, two weeks before Sam's first cover, when she first heard it.

"Rosenberg!"

Jane perked, glancing up, getting ready for whatever was going to be asked — if Sam asked her, that is. He was still working on a rotation. She hadn't been assigned to him. She was not his researcher. But she's ready, in case. Ready because she knew, really, that he would ask her. He had been, for weeks.

Wick was at the top of the stairs.

"Come up here. And bring your girl."

Her breath caught.

Sam, standing in the bullpen, looked back at her, looking right to her desk.

He knew it too.

Sam shrugged and she stood.

Okay.

After that, there never was a question about who worked with him. Never a question about where she went.

.

.

.

After that, it was always just Sam and Jane. Soon, nobody even called her in. If Sam was going up to discuss a story, he took her.

They say you learn your reporter, and she had.

---

September 1968

It's not a clear development. Any of it:

Sam. Their partnership. The work. Chad. Jane, too.

She liked him in the beginning. That first day. Those long legs. His face when he smiled. The pencil he kept behind his ear even though he preferred writing in pen.

And she still likes him now. She likes the way she can measure his gaze. The way he shook her hand when they officially met. The way he can write a copy faster than anyone else. The way he'd ask her to find information, names, numbers, that she thought were so far removed from what she imagined the conclusion to be; but then it always is what made the story interesting. She was in awe of his work, his talent.

They get on well. They work well. He writes covers. She rolls her eyes when he calls her cute.

It's not clear though, the development of it. They just work together and then, quickly, they're a team without her even noticing.

But there is one day where she is aware of her choice, though once it has happened, she realizes she's been making it for months.

She had come in early on a Wednesday in mid-September and stopped by Sam's desk to put down some papers for him when something catches her eye. There was an atlas of eastern Missouri open on his desk and a handful of scrap paper with dates and other notes scribbled on it. Jane had paused and, after a few minutes of leaning over, pulled out his chair and sat down, taking off her sweater and putting her bag by her feet. She was sorting through his things, trying to make sense of what he was finding so interesting it'd clearly meant hours of work the previous night.

It couldn't have been more than twenty minutes that she is there by the time she feels eyes on her. She turns to see Sam standing at the top of the stairs to the waiting area. She didn't hear the elevator ring, so she isn't sure how long he's been there. The office is otherwise completely empty. It's just the two of them, and he is standing there in silence.

He is looking at her like he's never looked at her before.

It is quiet, hands in his pockets, brow heavy. And it moves something in her.

After a while — too long by all social accordances — Sam spoke.

"What are you doing tonight?"

Chad was back in Philly for school, but Jane was going with his mother and sister to the theater.

She doesn't tell him this though. She thinks of it, and then says nothing.

"Friends are in town," she offers, instead.

Before, she'd never said anything about her boyfriend, but that had always felt like an inadvertent omitting. Accidental. Like, he had just never come up. But here she is, knowing the truth of her answer, and yet choosing to say something different. She'll marry Chad and she never once said anything to Sam. To anyone here.

Why?

Why was she keeping him separate?

Why was Sam looking at her like that?

Jane didn't remember much more about that morning. She thought, when she stood and apologized for being at his desk, in his chair, her voice was shaking, but Sam said nothing of it. He didn't ask further on her plans. She didn't tell Chad about her mendacity.

It was only then that Jane realized that she'd never said anything before. That she'd kept her lives — work, family — so separate that one practically didn't even know of the other.

She wasn't sure why that had happened. Why it had developed that way.

Any of it.

Things were good with Sam. She was always good at everything she did — but there was nothing like this.

There was no high — not grades or boys or even her father's approval — like finding exactly what her reporter was looking for, like finding exactly what the story needed to go to print, to make the cover. There's nothing like it. There was nothing like it before and, sometimes she worries, there'll be nothing like it after.

.

.

.

In late September of her first year, only a few weeks after that, they're out celebrating (again) and everyone is there.

He doesn't say "couldn't have done this without her," or "Jane saved me" as he sometimes does.

Instead he says, smiling at her across the table, "this article is Jane's. It's her angle. Wouldn't have even considered it without her."

She remembers that night for a long time. She smiles back; clinks glasses.

She sits with Cindy and discusses Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and sips at her old fashioned.

She'll remember how her cheeks hurt from smiling too widely; how her bra-strap was cutting painfully into her shoulder all day, but how the alcohol numbed it; and yet her face ached when she went into the bathroom to reapply her lipstick.

She remembers how, for the first time, Cindy asked: are you sleeping together?

In the moment, Jane is surprised. Shocked, even. Sex—

Well, she's not that type of girl. Not that type! She's just… not like that, of course.

Some girls are. Jane knows well what happens in the office. So many young men and women. She's not obtuse.

But she's not like that! Don't they know?

She's never even considered it. And Sam… well, he's Sam! He's…. No. They're not.

Don't need to, she wants to say, he respects me as a researcher.

She knows women do that. It's stupid, she thinks. She's better than that.

(better, right? isn't that the division? yes. and no. she knows better, she knows it's not that — except it is. except, in college, as so many of her friends did exactly that, she never did. and then when she started seeing Chad, they never did. he didn't want that. he wanted a good girl. traditional, is all. right? yes. right.)

Jane, at the bar now, looks over at Sam. Sometimes he says things… things about sex. Sometimes he looks at her longer than he ought to (though she looks at him too, and she doesn't mean anything by it; they're partners, so), but she never thinks much on it. And, she believes, if she had a line she didn't want crossed, he'd stay back. If there were a line. If she knew where a line would be.

She downs her drink.

Sometimes, it's like if she pays too much attention, she knows she won't like what she sees.

She's so smart, so quick, so well-educated. She's so pretty. Prettier than Sam. Prettier than most girls here. She's been told her whole life — you're so pretty.

Pretty. And smart. Caring. Tidy. Dedicated. She'll be able to hold conversation with the men and still be a loving mother to her children.

If she thinks on this though, if she thinks too much, she… well. She doesn't do it. She doesn't think on it. She doesn't look at Chad and think of anything other than the family christmas card they'll have. She doesn't look at Sam and think of how his arm feels beneath her palm, of how, when he smiles at her, she can't help but smile back. She doesn't think of his hands.

And when she does find herself looking at him and noticing how small his waist is and how long his fingers are, the wrinkles in his brow as he writes and the rhythm of the keys as he presses into them, she knows enough to shake herself out of it.

It's a virtue of spending so much time together. Nothing more. A good researcher knows what her reporter wants. And Jane is a good researcher.

So she doesn't think on it. She doesn't think on anything. In a few years, she'll be gone. She'll be married and pregnant and happy.

It's not ignorance.

Jane is not ignorant.

She just doesn't think about it.

Are you sleeping together?

Jane looks at Sam, the dark hair on his arm, the sleeves of his sweater rolled up to his elbows. She imagines a gold wedding ring on his finger.

"No," she says, "of course not. We just work together."

.

.

.

There are two glasses in the bottom of his desk and a bottle of whiskey. He often gives out more whiskey than the two glasses, offering to whoever is in the vicinity. Other people will easily produce their own cups, so he owns only two. Two for the two of them, she thinks.

Mostly because it's never just him and someone else. It's so rare that he is there and she isn't. It's happened, but in the five months they've been together, she can count on one hand the times it has.

Usually, if he's there, so is she.

They're not specific glasses — he'll grab them without looking. She'll wash them and put them back in any form, in any position. Sometimes he puts them back, so he might have some placement worked-out so that they're not sharing the same glass interchangeably between them, but she doesn't have any similar arrangement. She's never made one glass his and one hers. And, knowing Sam, he'd laugh at the idea of keeping separate glasses he owns between himself and his researcher as some sort of propriety.

They likely drink from the same. She doesn't think about it anymore than simply noting it. It doesn't mean anything to her. It's just something to acknowledge: that there are always two in his bottom drawer which he keeps for the two of them, for when the night gets too late and the story gets too hard.

.

.

.

"You went to a sock hop!?"

He laughs. He looks like he might blush, if he ever did anything like that. "I was fourteen. And Alan Freed was in his prime."

Jane can't quite believe it. "Well let's see some moves."

"Only if you do it with me."

"You're too much."

"Yeah, yeah. Anna Parisi was a better dancer anyway."

She swats at his arm. She imagines him in some gymnasium in his socks and rolled up blue-jeans.

"You've never seen me dance."

"No," Sam says, raising one eyebrow as if in challenge. "I haven't."

.

.

.

He uses too much hair gel, and he uses it against the grain. Like he's stuck in the past. Like he's trying a bit too hard.

He wears a lot of yellows, tans… colors other men his age, in his stature, wear — but it doesn't look as good on him. Doesn't he know he'd look better in black? He'd look more serious, more suave.

She wants to tell him, but she also really, really doesn't want to.

.

.

.

They always drink a bit too much. Touch a bit too much. And then they come back to the office and work much too much.

---

December 1968

"I never want another researcher." It's a Monday morning in December and they're the only two in the office.

He's reading the paper, open in front of his face so that she can't see anything above his feet on the desk and his fingers holding the sheets.

"I'll never work with anyone again," he continues.

Jane rolls her eyes. She's reading an article in the Time's Magazine about Warren's decision to continue with his retirement.

She's been trying to tell Sam how much will change with the advent of Burger, but he doesn't care nearly as much as she thinks he ought to. He's not even paying half his attention to her when she reads sections aloud to him.

"You'll have to," she says absently, flipping the page, not even thinking through what she is saying. Sam, often, jokes about things. Jane, often, ignores his jokes. "Once I get married, I won't be able to work anymore."

Sam folds the paper sharply, as though surprised by what she has said, head popped over the top. "That can't happen, Jane. I told you, I won't work with anyone else."

"You'll have to," she can see him out of the corner of her eye, but refuses to look up and engage in whatever humor he is on. "If you want to keep being a reporter."

"I won't, I swear."

Jane sighs and, holding a finger to the paragraph she's on, looks up. "I'll have children to raise, Sam."

"Well then, you and I must get married." It's earnest. He isn't smiling, but there is lightness in his voice, a mocking in his gaze that she knows a bit too well. "It'll work out perfectly. You will research while the children are at school and then, after dinner, I'll put them to sleep."

She tilts her head, as though contemplating it.

"What?" He offers in her silence. He smirks and then raises the paper back up. "We won't work any more than we do now."

.

.

.

He asks her out on occasion. It's always a joke — when will you go out with me? we can't get married if you never allow me to court you — but she does, sometimes, think about what it would be like to actually be wanted by him.

She wonders why his innuendo (is it even innuendo, when he asks her to make out with him or says their relationship would benefit from being intimate?) doesn't bother her.

It does when other men have said it. It does when she overhears men say it to other women.

But now, with him, it makes her want to push back, just a little harder.

Maybe, if he were a little more serious, she'd feel differently.

But he's not. And that makes it a challenge.

---

March 1969

Sam has sex, she knows.

She's heard him joke about it. She's watched him fully engage in conversations about the findings of Masters and the opinions of Gurley Brown, but she's never met nor even heard of the previous girlfriends he's had. She knows of no current prospects.

He jokes that she can come over and play Twister anytime and she rolls her eyes and she pushes back without saying no, and then he actually goes to parties with Ned, the new photo editor, where people do play those kind of games.

Of course, when Sam says these things, she doesn't mention Chad (she means to, she really does, when she remembers it; but now it feels as though so much time has gone by… she needs to find an opportune way to insert it, but she always forgets to look for one, and by the time she does think of it, the opportunity has long passed). Church and state, she says to herself. But she should tell him. She should. It's a weak excuse.

So maybe he has a girl back home? Maybe he has many girls. Maybe he has gone through one — more than one — since they met.

He's 28. He's not engaged (she'd know that, right?).

He sure does joke about sex a lot though. He smiles about it, in the same way he smiles when he gets excited about a story.

She doesn't think about it much, except to wonder where he is finding the time. She knows so much of him, she spends so much of her time beside him, and so she does wonder about the parts she doesn't know.

Perhaps he is like her. Perhaps he has someone else. Perhaps, he, too, has lied.

— has she lied? Is that what she's been doing?

No. No. It's simply an omission. She doesn't know about Sam. And he doesn't know about her. That's all there really is to it, nothing to be concerned by.

.

.

.

"You talk about him too often. Don't go getting the wrong idea. I know you don't mean to hurt Chad's feelings, but it does."

Jane sips water. Her stomach is tight. It's a misunderstanding. Her mother is misunderstanding her. Accusing her of something — it's a misunderstanding.

"You shouldn't be so preoccupied with work."

Jane didn't realize she'd bit her tongue. She opens her mouth and exhales.

"It's my job, Mommy. It's all I do every day. What else am I going to talk about?"

She doesn't, actually, talk much about work with Chad. They usually talk about their friends. Or his school. Or their families. Not work. She doesn't have much to discuss at work that is absent of Sam. And she doesn't discuss him with Chad.

No reason to it. She only speaks with him on the phone so briefly, she doesn't waste time discussing her job. And when he's back in the city, when they're together, well, she hardly thinks of News of the Week at all.

"You should talk about whatever Chad wants to talk about," her mother answers, piercing her fork into a tomato, "which I highly doubt is your work. Especially when it is so temporary."

They've had this discussion before.

"I like the dynamic of the bullpen," she says shortly. "Of the newsroom and the people on a deadline. That's all."

"I remember," her mother is reluctant. "It was the same way when you were editor of The College News."

Yes, Jane knows. It's the same. A bigger audience than the girls and faculty of Bryn Mawr, but the same thing.

Things were different in her mother's time. She married before she graduated. After college, she didn't work. During the war, she didn't work.

Things were different now. Jane had a few more years. Her mother just didn't understand the times.

.

.

.

Honestly, Jane doesn't ever think about saying yes to Sam or to sex or to any of the propositions he thinks he is being so very funny in making. It's so far out of the realm of possibility — she already has Chad — and even then, even then… even if she was told to choose something else, Sam was no candidate!

He wasn't actually interested in her.

And, regardless, he would never be with someone like her. He was a Jew. He was from the Bronx. Columbia J School didn't cover for Queens College or aunts in tenement buildings. His namesake, despite the prevalence of it, despite his own leanings, was still dirty on the tongue of all those she grew up with who mantra'd Better Dead Than Red….

She never considered Sam because it was so far from possible as to be in the fantastical.

Though, it's a lie to say that she hasn't wished, during the night of dinners and family events, that she went with Sam instead. She didn't kid herself — her parents would hate him. He was too ribald, too outspoken, too liberal for their tastes. But she wished, sometimes, that he were there. He's fun. She enjoys him.

Really, her enjoyment in her work isn't solely because of him. Not at all — it's not Sam. It's the story (there's nothing like it) and Sam just comes along for the ride. But sometimes, when she is leaving, when they part ways on the street and she goes alone to meet her parents, she wishes he'd accompany her.

That's all. Just something she thinks about. Has thought about. Once. Or twice.

---

April 1969

He comes over too late, knocking loudly on her door as he is speaking. He's never been to her place before.

She's half-asleep and, recognizing his voice, opens the door without thinking it through, her hair still pinned in curlers, makeup long removed, dressing gown and all. He's already mid-rant about Finn's ugly, public veto to a story he'd optioned that afternoon when they come face-to-face.

Sam, too, hasn't thought it through. He's drunk. She can tell in how is he is standing.

Oh, how embarrassing! She's about to shut the door, except he's just standing there, looking at her, looking her once over, looking at her like —

looking at her, coat under his arm, hands in his pockets, hips tiled forward languidly — like she hangs the moon.

And then he suddenly straightens and continues right on with whatever he was saying about Finn's lack of trust in him even though they've had a dozen covers in less than a year.

"Sam!" She interrupts, shooing him away with her hand. "I was asleep!"

Though she knows, if this were different — if her hair were up, her lipstick on and face powdered, wearing anything other than nightclothes — she'd invite him in. She'd sit him down. She'd share the wine she has in the icebox with him and keep him away from whatever cliff he was looking off. Just like she always did. Just like she always had.

Sam understands, but she finds herself wishing he didn't.

"Don't be so upset, Janey," he says, knowing she hates when he calls her that. It's not quite slurred, but it is poorly enunciated. As slotted as one can be without sacrificing civility or coherency. "If we get married, I'll see you in pajamas all the time."

"You won't. I was taught," she says quickly, "to always look beautiful for your husband."

Sam frowns. "Jane." He pauses. Blinks. "You are beautiful."

It's so sincere, so far removed from how he usually speaks to her — even when he is sober, when he is serious — that it takes her breath away.

So she closes the door on him, hitting him as he is shoved back by the force of it.

"Goodnight, Sam," she condescends through the wood.

There is a thump against it in parting. His palm maybe. Or his shoulder. As he walks away, steps silent on her carpeted hall, she imagines it was his knuckles.

.

.

.

She doesn't think about it. It's hard to articulate the reasoning. Except, as she said, she doesn't think about it.

She knows, looking too hard will only show her the cracks.

(she is scared, so scared, that she won't like what she sees)

Sometimes, when he gets too close, it is because he has good news. Or he has a real compliment. Too close for the public they're in.

She always looks at his mouth when he says nice things, when he shares the news — she traces the lines of his smile.

---

ii. chad

May 1969

When Chad graduates Wharton, he gives her a pearl necklace. It's his celebration — she should give him something (she does, though nothing as noteworthy), but he presents her with a velvet box anyway.

She wears the necklace to dinner with his family, and later, to a party with his peers. She lets her hair down and drinks so much she gets sick, something that hasn't happened since her freshman year. She's embarrassed Chad has to carry her out the door, but he won't stop laughing about it the next morning.

Jane fingers the pearls he gave her. It's a beautiful necklace, even though she was expecting a ring.

.

.

.

On the anniversary of her first day, Sam buys her a book. "A bit cliche," he says as she opens it at Cole's that night.

An advanced copy of Making of the President 1968. She'd never read the original, though knows he adores it.

"I'm not so sure if it's a gift," she quips, "or an assignment."

He's brought up White's impact on political journalism more than once.

"Give you better editing on my work," he shrugs, smirking.

Jane scoffs. She brushes the spine. "I have perfect pencil. Can barely go ten words of yours without red-lining something."

"That's why you're my girl."

Jane ignores him. She flips through some pages.

"Come on," he says after a moment, reaching for the printed paper ripped open on the bar. He gestures to the tender to toss it. "Let's go somewhere better. I'll buy you a real dinner."

She runs her fingers over the embossed title.

"Thank you, Sam." She reaches for his arm. He stops, lets her touch him. "This means a lot."

One year down. Two? Three more to go?

"For you, anything. So…" he straightens his collar. "I'm thinking Italian?"

---

July 1969

Jane takes two weeks to stay with Chad and his family in Southhampton. She sits on the beach and works on her tan and enjoys the salt on her skin (though not what the breeze does with her hair).

"We expect Chad to ask you before the decade ends," Mrs. Huntington says coyly as the women drink on the deck. "A Spring wedding would be lovely."

"No, summer!" Chad's sister adds.

Jane laughs. She knows the timeline. They've been together two years last month. This time next year, they'll be married.

"I'm thinking May," She sighs. "If it doesn't get too cold this year. Last year those rains! They lasted well into June!"

"When were your parents married?"

"August."

"Could be nice?"

She sips her drink and glances down at her finger. A few more months.

.

.

.

"Miss some good stories?" Chad jokes in his car outside her building, words muffled with his lips against hers.

Jane makes a noise, reaching further to wrap one arm around his shoulders. "Nothing more important than you."

She'd read every article in both issues she'd missed.

Sam hadn't published either week. He was out for the first issue and working on dissecting records from some secret source he hadn't told her about during the second. But she read everything else, early before everyone had woken up and before she'd be missed.

The Huntington's didn't subscribe to News of the Week, so she'd had to go into town. The man at the store had made her buy the first copy, but on the second, let her sit outside and read it for free.

Some good pieces. She'd wondered, reading it through, what story they'd have been assigned if they were in.

She wonders — later, earlier. Not now. Now she's kissing her boyfriend. Necking, she laughs, in his car late Tuesday evening.

"Would you like to come up?" She asks as he kisses down her throat.

"Can't. Early day tomorrow."

Jane playfully fixes his collar. "Such a gentleman."

"Oh," Chad nips at her ear lobe. She feels it in her stomach, between her legs. "Is this gentlemanly?"

It doesn't have to be, she almost says. But she doesn't really mean it. She isn't sure what she meant by asking him in the first place anyway.

---

September 1969

Jane has read Cosmo before. She understands what people say about single girls in the city. About sex and relationships. She works with dozens of women in her office, most of them young and unmarried.

She knows.

She's not single though. She's about to be married. That's a different sort of status. Post-dating, pre-engagement. She doesn't fall into Cosmo's Single Girl and the Modern Woman propaganda. It's different for her. She has every opportunity before her. She's already "liberated."

She enjoys making out. She enjoys when Chad's hands touch her legs, her butt. She will surely enjoy intercourse when she has it (of course she will! She loves Chad, so she'll love pleasing him).

Jane isn't oppressed. She has every opportunity.

She went to college. Her mother went to college. She had to wear skirts to class and sign men in at her dorm, but her brother's dorm had a no-girl policy and a curfew too. Some of her professors were women (though none of them were married, which Patti points to as problematic). She's read the Feminine Mystique and she thinks, mostly, if some women are unhappy being wives and mothers, they should not be wives and mothers.

If you have children, the best thing is to be home. To be home for them. To show them a good family. A good upbringing. And if they then choose differently, that is to them. You have done everything you can.

That is how she sees it. What more liberation is there to want? Women can have any job a man can. There are female politicians. Female police officers. Female reporters.

Honestly — a woman can do anything! Frances Perkins was a cabinet secretary forty years ago!

She sometimes sees some of the women from the office in those marches on the weekends. She knows a few of them don't wear bras and, more than that, many don't wear pantyhose. She lives in New York City for christ's sake! She knows all these things! Go down ten blocks, there are nightclubs her mother would absolutely die to see her enter!

That's all fine. Homosexuals, loose women, all of that — it's good. Good for them.

Debauchery, her mother would say. She'd say the word like someone else might say sinful. They're not religious though. The sin is only the societal morale.

Jane doesn't have a problem with these causes, with these lifestyles. Women can protest (though she isn't too sure what for) and men may love other men and blonde girls from Connecticut can date Jewish boys, but she can't. Jane can't. She won't.

Not for people like us, her mother would say. And Jane would agree. Not for people like her.

But she is a modern woman, mostly. She has read Cosmo and she has a job and she has a degree and she's in love with a modern man who goes to dive bars and music shows down in the village.

She's liberated, as they say. She is.

---

November 1969

His first night back from the Calley Article 32 hearing, Sam gets drunker than she has ever seen him. He usually holds his liquor well. Jane knows men who drink too much. She's spent enough time around the office to see the rowdiness. She's spent enough time around the club to know the arrogance it entails. And she's known women to do it too; but when women drink, it's not happy. When her mother drinks, it's quiet. It's sad. It's not social.

Sam is drunk like that now. She's never seen him like this. They've covered death before. They've covered the war before. She's seen the alleged pictures of Mai Lai— the ones dispatch could get their hands on — and they're no worse than the other ones coming out of Vietnam every day. There are always photos of bodies; always, unfortunate though it is, photos of dead women and children.

Jane hadn't seen anything different here.

But Sam comes back from Virginia quiet. And then, as they drink and she tries to catch his eye, he doesn't look at her.

He lets her pay for the taxicab home. He'll take the train, always, unless he's been drinking enough that she can convince him splitting a car is easier. She always pays, either way, if she can get away with it.

Drinking enough to convince him to take a taxi is a low bar —and it's usually nothing like this. Tonight, he doesn't protest as she extends her arm in the street, doesn't protest when she gives the driver his address and not hers, and says nothing as she walks him to his door.

It's fine. She'll find another taxi home. It's late and cold and the clouds are heavy with the weight of snow about to fall upon the city, but she's fine. She is always fine. She is always good.

When he's inside his apartment, sitting on his couch, he reaches for her wrist.

Jane looks down from where she stands facing the door, ready to leave. His gloves are cool on her exposed skin.

Sam isn't looking at her. His head is hung low. She's read most of his copy. It was a horrific event, yes. A young boy, Sam argues in it, taking on the sins of his country's expectations. He did a bad thing: he followed orders.

A hard cover. But there are worse things they've written about. This is News of the Week. Sam is a reporter.

Toughen up, a part of her wants to say, but more, enough to stop her, she's worried. She's never seen him take a story so hard.

Then he sighs, and she watches all the weight of some invisible world fall from his shoulders, the back of his neck long from the edge of his coat.

He drops her wrist, not saying anything.

Jane isn't sure what he saw there in Virginia. But it was something.

"I'm so lucky to have you," he says, low, head still hung to the floor.

"I know."

She's lucky, she's so lucky, to have him. Jane doesn't say this though.

She is slow to leave, but Sam never asks her to stay.

---

PART 2

i. girlfriend

December 1969

Jane likes when she gets to wake him up.

He's always groggy, first thing. And then, when he knows it's her, he gets urgent, knowing it must be real important. Then, before it ends, he will sometimes say something annoying, like: you're cute when you call first thing, and she hangs up on him.

It's not even that early today. A little before five.

"Sam," she says the phone lifts. "I spoke with Patti."

"Okay," Sam says, slow, and she can hear him moving around, likely looking for a notepad. "Okay." He repeats, clearer. He's quicker now. He'd been short all day after Wick shot down his record-less story and he knows she's calling because she's going to save it. "I'm ready."

Jane has already been in the office for hours.

"She gave me a few names. I'm still tracking one of them. But Sam. Well." She hesitates. They'll need Sam's support if this is Patti's lead source. "The girl Patti has. She'll go on record."

"That's great. Saying what?" Relief. Neither of them wanted to run the B version.

"I can't tell you for sure. She's flying back now. But my guess is it's like she said: police presence. Biker gang as security for three hundred thousand people."

"They started the fight?"

"I'd run on that assumption."

"Are you in right now?"

She's the only one here apart from the girl watching the wires. "Yes." She leans forward on her desk, lowering her voice. It's too quiet. She hopes the telexes are loud enough for the girl in the wire room to not hear her every word. "Sam, look. I have to warn you—"

"Warn me?"

"—the girl. Patti's source. I've been doing some background. Her name is Juicy Lucy."

"By choice?" He interrupts.

"She works as an artist. Specifically," Jane hesitates, "a penis caster."

"A what?"

"She casts men's… penises. In plaster. Men she had engaged with."

Sam laughs. "As a trophy or…"

"As art, I think. From what I can find."

He laughs again, louder. "That's a new one. I knew people did it" —Jane didn't— "but I never thought I'd be relying on one."

Jane exhales. "It's your byline."

She can imagine his smirk. "If it's a good scoop, I'll run anything." The phone shifts. "You trust Patti on this?"

"Yes." She's never liked Patti, but. "I'd trust her. She's the reason we're getting it."

"Okay." He's writing something down. "Find the other one you're still tracking and give me some background sentences. I'll head in now."

"You'll have to convince —"

"Yeah, Jane, I know." He laughs under his breath. "Oh, and thanks for calling. Hey Jane," it's flippant, like he almost forgot, "what are you wearing?"

Jane smiles, hanging up the phone. They're going to have this. They're going to get the investigative beat (and they'll need it if they're going to kill Wick's cover… if they're going to get off Nation). Sam'll have lunch with Finn after this next issue and it'll be a done deal.

He's been trying to get off Nation since she got there. This is the one. They're on a roll. It'll be five covers in five weeks. No one has ever done that.

Kicking everybody else's ass in the city, he'd said.

Jane finds herself grinning, alone in the pit before dawn.

Aren't they?

.

.

.

Nora is hired in one week and quits before the next issue. Nora is a fine researcher, but she wants to write. And women do not write for News of the Week.

It's as simple as that.

Jane isn't bothered, really. Women don't write here. It's always been that way. It's not anything to do with talent — Jane is not a better writer than Sam, but Jane doesn't think she's much worse either. Surely better than some in the bullpen.

She thinks, if she wanted to write, if she was to be some sort of career girl, she could. Things will change, eventually. Women write in other places. Nora went about it all wrong. And Jane doesn't mind, because in 1969 women do not write for this magazine and that's just how it is. Jane doesn't mind because Jane doesn't want to write.

She's no fool though. She knows that here, Sam will grow. And she will not. She's almost Head Researcher (no one has been promoted since Rox left). But that is all? To go past that… she can move to someone higher, maybe? If Finn ever takes one girl, it'd be a promotion of sorts. But she's with Sam. So, when he gets promoted, she'll share that.

The investigative beat is a promotion. A promotion for the two of them. It's them. He hadn't had one cover until Jane was there (though he'd only been hired six months before; his first cover had nothing to do with her).

Which is fine. It's fine. She doesn't need to write! Grow?! She doesn't need that! This is a brief time. A temporary job. She won't even be here in a year or two.

Good for Nora. Good for Nora leaving and going somewhere where she can write. Women do, obviously. There are female reporters everywhere. And if she wanted to, Jane (or Nora or Patti or anyone) could work in the back of the book where women had more opportunity to write about leisure activities and female pastimes. Nora wouldn't have liked it at News of the Week, doing breaking news, where women didn't write.

Jane is happy though. She doesn't mind Sam's byline atop her writing. She knows her place is to support him. She will not leave Sam high and dry. She's his researcher.

And she's a goddamn good one at that.

She thinks about Nora though. She doesn't sleep the night Nora quits. She asks around to see if Nora got another job. She pays more attention to which sentences of hers make it into the final copy under Sam's name (many, many do). And she tracks other women at other publications to monitor what they publish and when they publish.

Just to see; just to know.

Jane isn't missing anything by working here, but she understands that some girls, girls who want other things, might be.

.

.

.

"How is it at work?" Her mother asks, the contempt subtle to those nearby. "Quite a lot of articles he writes. You've worked on all that?"

Jane smiles softly, trying to rein it in as she cuts a piece of her chicken. She knows her enthusiasm, always, and especially about something like this, will be too much.

She wants to say: yes! She has!

Instead she only nods. "We usually have an article per week, but sometimes, especially now that Sam is on the investigative beat, they'll be longer. And take longer."

Her mother wrinkles her nose at something on her plate. She reaches for her water and takes a sip, as if cleansing her palate.

"Have you been seeing Chad?"

"All the time." Twice a week, usually, and then on weekends. It's quite a lot, Jane thinks, considering he was in school the first two years of their relationship; but if she gives her mother the exact amount of dates, her mother'll inevitably wonder where she is every other night and who, if not Chad, she is with. At the office is not an acceptable answer.

Chad is okay with it. He works late most nights too. He is happy with their schedule.

"What about Sue Anne? You hardly talk about her anymore."

"Sue Anne is in Dallas with her sister."

"You're still friends?"

Jane laughs shortly. "Of course. I'll be with her as soon as she gets back."

"You have friends over, right?"

"Mommy," Jane says, "where is this interrogation coming from? Yes, I have friends over. Most girls I know live in the city." She doesn't say anything about how those are only the unmarried ones.

Anyway. The real answer to that question is No, Jane doesn't have friends over. Truthfully, she hasn't had anyone over in months. Actually the last person to come into her apartment was Sam a few weeks ago. He and Ned were on their way into the city from some early-morning story on Long Island and they'd picked her up in their checkered cab on their way to the office.

He'd stopped at her place for the second time — maybe the first, because he'd never actually stepped foot inside last time — and this time she was dressed and expecting him, even if he was fifteen minutes early.

"What are you listening to?" He asked while she went into the other room to grab her bag.

When she came back, he was standing before her record player, tall beside it, weighing the sleeve of the current record in his hand.

"Ravel."

"Hm," he put the record back and lifted the needle off while Jane reached for her coat. "Your side of the Debussy debate?"

Jane smiled. She didn't expect Sam to know anything about that.

"That fight doesn't exist. People are making a false dichotomy between them." She buttoned her coat and began toward the door.

Sam raised his hands, as if to back off. "Whatever you say, Hollander."

He'd been the last person over. And, if she remembers correctly, since almost nine months ago, there'd only been two people between his first and second appearances.

Maybe Sam is her friend? Maybe that's what it is?

No. They're not friends. That's not right.

They're coworkers.

But what are friends when there is more to write?

"Well," her mother continues, "don't let them think you push too hard." Jane isn't sure who the 'them' is, exactly. "You're not a career girl, Jane. You're a Hollander."

She's right, of course.

But there is nothing like the flush of the story, of the success, of the praise.

There is simply nothing like it.

.

.

.

Career girl.

Working girl.

Is that how people think of her?

Do they think of her as a fiancée? She's not even technically engaged yet — and her coworkers don't know about Chad, so they wouldn't think of her like that. But surely they know her employment is temporary until marriage?

Is it embarrassing?

At work, no. All those girls are married or dating or (seemingly) content in their single-dom. Many of them sleep with their reporters. Many more are sleeping with other men around town.

Jane doesn't do that.

And, deep down, don't they wish they were like her? When they get married, won't their husbands wish they'd been more like her? When she does get married, they'll envy her, won't they? For her perfect husband; her true white wedding. She's been everything she is supposed to be (everything she wants to be; she wants to be this).

When Patti and Cindy talk about blowjobs and vulvas, they do so only to rile her. She knows that. They don't mean it. She isn't missing out. She's not the type of girl who —

She's not going to be a career girl. She isn't one now.

Girls like Nora, girls who want to write, those are career girls. Jane isn't. Jane doesn't want more. She's just waiting for that ring on her finger.

(It's a little late now, she supposes. She expected it'd happen on her birthday, but that had come and gone. Chad's family assumed sometime in early Fall, which had long since passed. Six months is no time to plan a wedding. If the proposal comes in early spring, she'll have to adjust her plans for a late summer wedding. Or even a winter one. Maybe, if it comes down to it. waiting another year.

Either way.) She's not a career girl. It's not something for people like her.

.

.

.

Jane has one picture of him — of them. And even then — not of them, simply a picture with them.

She keeps some work at home, but it's sparse. Mostly notes and drafts of whatever they're working on. And then, once the story has gone to print, she'll take what she has to the office and file it in the morgue. She really only keeps a stray copy or two of the old issues (their first cover, her favorite story she's worked on, her first story upon arrival - some things like that). And she keeps the photograph with the two of them.

It was taken during a meeting. She remembers Harry, back before Ned, was upstairs, photographing Finn for some feature being done on him in the New Yorker. In the photograph, Sam is leaning against the wall of Finn's office with one shoulder. Jane is standing next to him, half a foot away, pad in her hand. They're both facing the same thing, likely Finn.

It was rejected — Finn isn't even in the photograph. It surely didn't even make it into the pile of anything but stray, unnecessary shots. It's just Sam and Jane, shot while Harry was snapping photographs all day.

Harry'd offered it to them. He'd taken of shots of everyone around the office and had been giving them away. There were plenty with her in the background or with others, but that had been the only one with just the two of them. She isn't sure if Sam has a copy. She isn't even sure if he'd want one.

But she'd kept it. She doesn't know why (it's not a good photograph). She doesn't know why she continues to keep it. It's not framed or on display in any way. She keeps it inside the magazine, behind their first cover, tucked into the pages he (they) wrote. There is a month separating the story and the photograph, and no connection between the story and whatever they were discussing in Finn's office that day, but she keeps them together anyway.

Sometimes she'll look at it. She can see Sam's shirtsleeve coming out of his jacket, the band of his watch, the hair on his forearm. She knows all the colors in the photograph despite the gray-saturation of the print.

It's the only picture of him she has. The only picture of the two of them — the only real proof of her time at News of the Week at all. After all, except for paystubs, end-of-the-year cards, and some internal documents, Jane's name isn't on anything. Here she is though, beside her reporter, in photograph. It's enough. So she keeps it.

.

.

.

She can't stop staring at his jaw.

You're goddamn beautiful up close.

Is that just how he talks to girls? Has he always talked to girls this way?

He's joking. He always is.

She's staring at his jaw though. And she's not joking. She's serious. Very serious.

They're pressed so close in this phone booth, the door closed behind her. Closer than they've ever been.

Her heart is pounding. She can hear the blood in her ears. They're high off their success, so high — can you believe the Fed Chair said that?! — Sam 's almost tripping over the words as he repeats them to Finn.

It's so hot. He's hot, isn't he? Is this his heat that she's feeling? She's sweating at her temples. Her lungs are heaving. She's so close, her chest is almost against his.

She watches his throat. His jaw. The slightest beginning of a beard, only noticeable inches away from his face. Does he shave every day? She doesn't know. His hair is so thick, so dark, he must. His cheek is rough. She can tell. Chad's is so smooth.

They're so close. Closer to him than ever, sure, but maybe closer than she's ever been with a boy she isn't kissing.

She watches his lips.

"Jane," he breathes, holding a hand over the receiver. "We did it!" She can feel his exhale on her cheek, pulse in her throat.

She laughs, half-relieved, half-delirious. "You got it, you did it."

It's instantly cooler the moment they step out of the booth; cooler the moment they step out into the winter evening.

"The guys on the markets will never believe this," Sam continues as they walk to the train. Weeks of nothing but preparation, background, even a few mocks between them and some of the guys on business. "Shit — my sources… they'll… Whoa."

The success. Nothing like it.

They're going quickly down the pavement, side by side, grinning like idiots.

"You saved me there," he says, moving from thought to thought, not holding down one stream long enough for her to do more than reply. She understands. She feels the same way. "How'd you even get up? I had to show two forms of ID!"

"Oh," Jane laughs. She swallows. She smirks. "Well. I may have implied I had to return something the Chair'd left at my house."

"What —"

"Before his wife came home, I mean."

"Jane Hollander! I knew it!" Sam's too loud, too happy. "This good-girl image is just a facade, isn't is?" He moves closer, nudges her shoulder with his, and then straightens back to walk parallel with her. "News of the Week's own little Virginia Hall."

She reaches into her bag for a token as they come to the Broadway entrance. "Men never suspect a woman to be capable."

Sam follows behind her on the stairs into the station. "Being a pretty girl must open so many doors."

Jane feeds her token into the stile and waits for him to come through. "Not all of them." She says. Or maybe not all the right ones, she wants to say, to end her sentence with, but she doesn't. She doesn't think it quite makes sense. She wonders why, later, that coda came to her.

.

.

.

That night, well into her third martini, Jane sits at the bar with Cindy and Dottie and watches Sam talk to Naomi.

The high from earlier (the absolute thrill of a perfectly executed scoop) has disappeared with the alcohol and the hours. Disappeared, with the the draft of their story done. Two more rewrites, source confirmations over the next few days, some final factchecking, and they'll be on this week's cover once again.

Sam is leaning back in his seat, listening to Naomi talk about her son.

Are they flirting?

Maybe. It looks like it, but Naomi is married, and Jane is a little too far away to hear what they're discussing.

"No thank you," she waves a hand as Cindy orders another round. She hasn't been paying attention to the girls beside her. She had no idea they'd asked for another round until the bartender is standing before her.

She looks at Cindy. Cindy is married. Her husband is at the library, apparently, studying for his last exam of the semester. Cindy is married and she works.

Next year, Jane will be just like Cindy. In a year (right?) she'll be married (right?), and, like Cindy's husband, Chad will let her work for another year or two, and so Jane may occasionally come to Cole's with her coworkers before going home to her husband (right?). In a year, this will be her.

Right?

Jane holds the toothpick and drags it aginst the rim of the glass, watching the olives fall into what remains of her drink.

She looks back at Sam and Naomi. Their legs, beneath the table, are quite close.

Did Sam want girls like Naomi? Girls like Patti?

Were there women in this city giving him blowjobs?

Jane takes another sip, holding her gaze on Sam's knees, visible under the table, on the tops of his thighs.

A part of her is disgusted at the thought. How degrading.

(not for girls like her)

But, in another sense, she's interested. Not to do it, of course. But, well… it is interesting. She knows how those things work, obviously. She's read books on sex. Books with lots of sex. In school, she'd learned the basics of reproduction. She'd seen countless films with it. She was certainly exposed to it. She knew people having it. She's not frigid! She went to college, after all. A college where they read Henry Miller in class. Yes, an all girls school, but there were always men around. Haverford was there. And men always coming in on weekends and sneaking up fire-escapes at night.

She'd read Philip Roth. Once. A few months ago. So she had an idea what some boys were like. What Portnoy was like. What those boys were like.

Jane looks at her glass to pierce an olive with the toothpick once more and pull it between her lips. Her mouth is numb. It's time she went home.

Naomi laughs and it draws her back over.

If she were with Sam, he wouldn't respect her choices like Chad did.

Sam talked about sex all the time. Chad was never overly crass. Chad was a gentleman. At most, he kept his hands on top of her clothes.

Of course, she's not with Sam. Sam is her reporter, is all. As the only man she spends such time with, it's natural to think of him in juxtaposition to her boyfriend. It's a product of their shared work. She's not actually thinking about Sam as anything other than an everyman when she wonders if there are women who have… put their mouth on him.

She looks at his feet, up his shins, his knees. She thinks of her hand on his knee just hours before, her fingers against his thigh to relax him. She thinks of how he exhaled the moment she touched him.

She's not — she's just. She's just. Thinking.

.

.

.

"Cute tree."

Sam's gaze gestures toward the pit. Oh, the small one on her desk.

"Thank you," Jane responds curtly, raising the list of names up to get his attention back on task. "Now—"

"Where'd you get it?"

Sam didn't even celebrate Christmas. She inhales, tapping her finger toward the sheet. "It was a gift."

That sparks his interest and he smirks. "Should I be jealous?"

She tsks. She thinks of the opened envelopes with a woman's handwriting she'd seen on his table the one time she'd been inside his apartment. I don't know, she wants to say, should I be? But that's too far. So she just doesn't answer.

.

.

.

It's like a time-bomb, if she's honest. She knew, eventually, it would blow.

It's just so easy to not think about. To not think too much on. She's honestly never considered anything else after she left college. After she began seeing Chad. After she began at News of the Week.

She always knew she'd marry him. From their first date — the way he made her laugh! It has always been such a forgone conclusion, an end already long in sight, that she'd never really (not really) understood any other possibility.

Yes, there were women who never married. Lots of spinsters in the world. Seemingly more every day. And Jane knew better than to think those women were spinsters because of their looks or personalities or general attractability. She had an aunt who, though beautiful and gleeful (a bonafide world-traveler) never married. She understood the time had simply passed her aunt by. Her aunt had never loved a man who wanted marriage. Her aunt, maybe, had never wanted marriage. Still. Still. Jane saw how people looked at her. How, growing up, the other women at the party all spoke carefully around her aunt, either omitting talk of their husbands and children or, in some sort of anger Jane recognized but didn't yet understand, spoke profusely about the benefits of married life in an effort to cause heartache to her aunt.

And still, it never occurred to Jane, despite this lifelong example before her, that she too would become a spinster.

Even before Chad. Back with her college boyfriend. Her high school boyfriend. Her first kiss on the beach at thirteen. She'd assumed marriage which each of them. And they had assumed it too. Chad assumed it too.

Yet, here he was, months past the time she expected he'd kneel. Years, maybe, if she's honest. Why didn't they get married last summer?

Why not get married when he finished his MBA?

Why not, after David and Sue Ann?

Why had they even waited this long?

She doesn't think about it though. She expects it for so long, she doesn't think to think about it.

Except, she knew, eventually, the timer would go off.

When she's thought of leaving post-marriage, it's been with a touch of loss, a sadness for what she will miss (not a regret, simply an air of lament). It's why, maybe, she's accepted the lack of proposal for so long, why she hasn't let it sink in… because it gives her more time here. It allows her more time here.

(She wants to be at home, though, doesn't she? She will, when she's married. She will, when she has children).

There is no other option for girls like her.

Even in Sam's joking hypothetical last year, she wasn't a full-time researcher. In his jestful proposition, she wasn't doing what she was doing now. She was still at home. Which, of course, is what she wants.

It's because of Bea Burkhart's visit. The owner of the paper, who Jane has known her for years, asks her point-blank why she is not married.

It's because Bea Burkhart looks at Fran — Fran, who has worked in the pit forty years last month — and expresses her pity.

It's because all those girls — those single girls with a rolodex of men — look at Fran with pity.

It's a time-bomb. She had to know, at some point, it would explode.

.

.

.

It's stupid, in a way. Stupid, she knows. Stupid, she knew then, to never sit down and actually think about it.

But she never had. She never did.

She's always known she'd leave, like a small itch in the back of her mind, a slight nudge on her shoulder, like a fly walking over her skin, or like a mosquito piercing her arm and drawing her blood: only noticeable if she is paying attention.

If she does think about why she is here, why she gives so much to something so ephemeral, so momentary, she knows she'll recognize it for the waste it is.

There is no need for her to be staying up all night. No need to not sleep and let her hair fall flat by the end of the day. There is no need for her to be so stressed about the research, so appalled at the horrors of the world she sees, that some nights, when she does sleep, she has nightmares. No need to cancel dates and lose friendships because she's always working too late, too long. She's always working so hard. But her future isn't here. It's not.

It shouldn't be.

But she's also known, for a long time, in all those same, small ways, that Chad has been waiting too long. That there is something to be worried about.

And now she looks at Chad. And she looks at Fran. And she worries.

Fran has been here her whole life. She's never married. She has no family. She works for the men and then goes home to an empty, cold house.

Jane will marry. She's getting married, isn't she?

Isn't she?

.

.

.

So she proposes it like this: tell me you want to be with me or I will make other plans.

What she means is: propose to me in three months, or I leave you.

It takes everything she has to keep her smile light, to keep the edge out of her tone lest she scare him away.

So she's light and easy and puts on perfume right before she sees him. She wears his favorite lipstick even though it doesn't match her outfit. She urges his hands higher on her thighs. She brings her palm to touch him through his pants, even just for a moment, to demonstrate that it's not calculated: it's an afterthought; that she wants him in every way. She proposes it flippantly, as though she hasn't thought about it all day.

Still though. In the end, her eyes well. Her voice wavers. The vulnerability humiliates her, but she manages to smile through it.

"Okay," Chad says, kind. Three months. Three more months.

It's hardly any time at all. And it's a good expiration, because he'll have time to buy a good ring and plan something, but it's not so long that he'll forget and she'll fret.

It's good, because he is always so busy, he's probably never had the motivation. He knows they're in love, he knows they're to be married, and he's so busy at work too, he probably doesn't even remember there is more to do in his relationship. For him, like her, it's a conclusion so long drawn, he probably has just forgotten. He's probably just kept putting it off. Now, with a deadline, he'll remember to take the actual steps.

Maybe he's always just assumed she'd say Yes, he hadn't even realized that he hasn't actually asked her. That's all it is. The three months isn't an ultimatum as much as a friendly reminder. That's all.

That's all.

Three months, and she'll be engaged.

Jane holds the base of her ring finger. It's not until the taxi comes before the News of the Week building that she even notices she'd been holding her breath too for who knows how long.

.

.

.

She's right. She's glad. Three months and it'll all be better.

Things moved so naturally with Chad. They'd grown up together and then met again as adults. She remembers the party, the Sunday morning, the way he smiled at her across the room. Their first date was a picnic in Mamaroneck. He kissed her right there on the blanket, knocking over the champagne. She remembers what she wore. She remembers spending the whole drive back looking at his red lips and wanting to kiss them again. All the nights spent thinking about him, the butterflies when he called, the pride she felt when her father whispered in her ear that one's a keeper when she first brought him over.

She's spent so much time being in love with Chad, so much time knowing she'd always love him, she's never really thought about what it means to actually love him.

So much has happened to her these past two and a half years, it's hard to remember her life beforehand. Once Chad was around, her future was such a clear picture, that she never really thought on the relationship itself.

It's good though. It's usually so good.

Oh, he'll say Yes, won't he? That's what it meant, when he said 'okay', smiled, and then kissed her?

He'll say Yes. And in three months, everything will be different. He'll get down on one knee and pull out a velvet box and she'll forget she ever worried about anything in the first place.

.

.

.

Sam walks quickly away from Bea Burkhart, but he's moving too fast while simultaneously trying too hard to walk at a normal pace (or at least, that's her diagnosis) and he ends up stumbling as he comes to her. She catches him with a hand on his chest.

Jane is still watching Bea and Wick, so she misses it as Sam's head falls close to her, almost cheek to cheek. Quickly, before she can even move him away, he straightens.

"Whoa," she says, straightening him up more with her hand flat on his sternum. His eyes struggle to focus. "Quite the lunch you had." She can smell it on his mouth. She's not surprised. He's one of the last back from the reporter lunch, but the others have been stumbling in for the past half-hour.

Sam blinks and steps away from her, finally focusing his gaze on Jane's. "She scares the shit out of me."

Jane chuckles, but she's not thinking about Bea Burkhart.

He frowns. "You okay?"

She smiles and tries hard to make it reach her eyes, but still Sam's brow grows heavier.

"Of course. Always!" She holds his arm and nudges him toward his desk. "Take a seat, you."

She pats Sam's shoulder once he's sitting

"Stay there," she says, "I'll go get you some coffee."

.

.

.

Jane can't stop thinking about it.

She needs to do something more. She needs something more.

She feels like she put herself on a ledge and is still dangling there. She either needs to come back inside or she needs to jump.

She taps her pencil on her paper.

She looks over at Fran, the woman squinting at something just typed, the paper still in the writer.

Jane is not a career girl.

She looks to her left and up, but from where she sits, she can't see Sam. She's been here for a year and a half and she never has been able to see him when she's sitting down. She isn't sure why she ever looks up, still, like she might; why she keeps trying to find him when she knows already that she can't do it.

He's not available, in her line of sight.

.

.

.

Jane isn't frigid. She has a boyfriend.

She's ready.

Isn't she?

What's the difference now than in another few months?

It's not like those other girls. It's not flippant. She's not going out and meeting someone at a bar or at a hippie party.

Maybe there is some merit to it. To sex. To what other girls do. To what other girls say.

He's agreed, hasn't he? The three months are for an official ring, the promise has otherwise basically been is no reason to wait. It's her future husband. There's nothing fraudulent about that. A white wedding must count if it's only him?

Jane leaves just enough time to get ready so that she can't second-guess — though it's no matter: Once Jane puts her mind to something, she won't back down.

So she picks out her sexiest underthings. She matches her bra and underwear and girdle and shoes. She puts perfume between her breasts. She powders the back of her knees and her underarms.

She keeps on the pearl necklace he gave her. She's worn it all day, picked out by chance this morning.

Kismet, isn't it?

It'll be good. She wants this too.

It's Chad. She loves Chad. She wants it. She wants him.

She's ready. She's been ready. She thinks, right before the phone rings, that maybe, she's been ready for a long time.

Her neighbor has been playing the same song on repeat for half an hour. It's horrifically annoying. She's so relieved to hear Chad's voice in her ear when she picks up the phone, it takes her a few seconds to even understand what he is trying to say.

.

.

.

Jane raps at the door of 15C. She waits a moment. There are so many fucking people in this apartment, how is it possible there isn't someone right by the front door? She knocks again.

It opens. There's a young man. Shaggy. Doesn't look like he can afford to live in this building.

Good-looking though.

She dislikes him.

"Hello," he's surprised, maybe amused, as he looks her over. Behind him, the music continues. "I don't know you, but come on in." He opens the door wider.

She glares. "My name is Jane, 15B."

The man, seeing she's not going to come in, faces her. "Cool," he nods. He's holding a bottle of beer. "I'm Max. You like to party, Jane, 15B?"

She huffs. Takes him in. Demonstrates her annoyance.

Faux-vagabond. The worst kind. Probably living off daddy's money while professing he's a child of peace and love.

"I have to be up at six to be back at work at seven." He blinks. "And I don't know what it is you do that gives you the luxury of partying and singing the same song six times in a row so late on a Thursday night, but I hope you will do me the respect of turning down the music and shutting your window until you officially wrap up."

And with that, before he can respond, she leaves, turning sharply and striding down the hall.

"Uh, just one question there, Jane, 15B?" She stops, still facing away (her stopping already gives enough attention). The flirtation in his tone is clear. "How were we?"

Without responding, Jane waits another moment, and then continues on to her door.

She's smiling when she opens it up.

Chad really did just get busy. Jane still attracted men. She is beautiful (goddamn beautiful up close), even to shaggy neighbors like Max in 15C.

And, to her surprise, she feels it in her stomach too — the way he watched her as she lectured him.

Hm. Serves him right. She had a job. He, clearly, did not. He should learn to respect his neighbors. This was Park and 73rd! He was in the wrong building for those kind of antics.

She's still smiling when she finally unzips her dress.

.

.

.

Jane turns the small, circular compact in her palm. She clicks open the lid, stares at the rows of tiny pills, and then closes it again.

Then opens it.

They're so small. So tiny to be doing so much.

She takes a taxi into work, shoving the compact in her purse. How many women there have one? Have the same little package of Enovid that she does?

Jane has taken her first pill already.

The doctor told her to wait a few weeks before having sex. The doctor — a friend of a friend of a friend — tells her to keep it quiet. After all, she's not married. It is, technically, illegal for her.

But the women she went to school with used it. And some friends took them. And she is sure, sure, those other girls at News of the Week must as well. Right?

"I don't know if I'll be using them," Jane had told the doctor, "but just in case."

The doctor had smiled, like he knew she was lying. "Of course, Ms. Hollander. Just in case."

She walks into work slowly. She hasn't even told Chad — she'll tell him on New Years. It'll be special. A gift from her to him. A gift — the greatest gift a woman can give — because he has been so loving, so caring, so incredibly wonderful….

Jane walks into work with her bag heavy on her shoulder like she has a secret.

.

.

.

She's looking over something with Mark when she sees Sam move purposefully over to his desk. He's walking over like he is doing something, like he has something.

She's been running facts for a story he'd already completed days ago. They have two days before the magazine goes to print, so she is taking her time. They have ample time. Sam, actually, has nothing to do right now. His sole assignment, last she heard, was to find another assignment.

"Hardest part of the investigative beat," Finn had said after shooting down all of Sam's propositions. "Finding something to write about."

Or should be. But she sees Sam searching through his desk, and she knows something is up.

"You have something," Jane says, low, so they won't be overheard unless someone is trying to listen. She stands close beside his chair. "What is it?"

Sam looks up at her. "Do you know anyone in Vietnam?"

"Um. I could find the list of active servicemen?" It's easy. They have seventy different versions of it. Reporters look at it so often, it's probably not even up in the morgue, but floating around the bullpen.

"No, no. Personally, do you know any vets?"

"All the boys I grew up with went to college to avoid the war." She's confused. "Did Finn sign off on a story?"

She shouldn't've left work early last night. She shouldn't have left Sam to work on his own. Sam stayed late and she went out with Chad. But she should've been here. Maybe she could've helped.

"Sort of." He's annoyed. At Finn? "On his way out last night, he came over, tapped on my desk, and said 'when our boys come home.' And then he walked out the door." Sam moves again, pushing back his chair and standing up. Without waiting for her, or even gesturing her to follow, he walks away.

Despite that, of course, Jane does follow; trailing close over his shoulder to the water dispenser. "'When our boys comes home,'" she repeats, "how is that an investigative piece?"

Sam grabs a cup. "I have no idea." And then, without hesitating between clauses, hardly pausing for the period in his sentence, he stands tall and stares her right in the eye as he says: "When were you going to tell me you had a boyfriend?"

He might as well have slapped her across her cheek, for all the shock the words bring.

"What?" Jane breathes.

He looks at her coldly. Looks at her like he knows her. Like he sees right through her.

It's impatient. He's always so impatient with everyone else — but not with her, never her.

But this. It's impatient. It's — angry. He's angry.

"Townley Investments. Chad, is it?"

He begins to fill his cup, still looking at her. Still angry.

"Who told you?"

Her heart is going a mile a minute. She can't get enough air in. It's all happening so fast. Even her words, when she speaks, sound out of breath.

Sam doesn't blink.

"Not you."

And then he walks away. Again. And Jane is once more following him, protesting all the way into the wire room.

"Sam, I. You know I've always—"

He's holding one of the cables coming through, fingers not bothering to avoid the wet ink.

"You have research to do, don't you?"

She steps closer. He's not looking at her. "That's not fair!" She moves into his space until he has no choice but to look at her. "Please, let me explain."

Sam inhales, closing his eyes and tilting his head to the ceiling. And then he turns and faces her. When he's head-on like that, when she's not just looking at his profile, he's much too close, and it forces her to step back.

"Fine." He says. "Take a shot."

She licks her lips, huffing. This! She wants to say. This! This is why she never said anything… (except, she knows, had always known, that none of this would ever have happened if she'd... They would have been fine if she had simply said something).

"It never came up," she tries. She hates how breathless she sounds. She hates how she can't think of anything except the way he's looking at her.

Plus, that's not true.

That's so far from true, it's laughable.

Except he's not laughing. No one is.

"And," she fishes, "we don't talk about our personal lives." Not true. Not true at all. "Church and state, Sam," she says, like she told Patti, like she'd told herself, once. "It just never came up."

"Then why did you—" he stops; zips his lips like he already knows the answer. But she doesn't. She wishes she did, but she doesn't. She doesn't even know what he was going to say.

Does she?

He doesn't follow up. He doesn't ask anything more. He leaves his cup on the counter, ignores the ink she saw on his fingers, and walks away once more, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Her heart is still pounding. Her hands are shaking. She feels hot.

"Sam," she tries, grabbing for his sleeve, but he steps out of reach and walks over to Doug and Patti.

She follows, because that's what she does: she follows him. And even though it's clear he wants to, he doesn't stop her.

.

.

.

First, she is mad at Patti.

She's only told Patti. Patti is the only one who knows. Almost two years here and she has only told one person: Patti.

Well. Bea Burkhart knew. And was in the office two days ago. But Bea Burkhart is not talking to Sam. So… Patti? Patti would bring it up, she could see, assuming that Sam had long-known. But what exactly had she told Patti? Not those details. Not —

Jane stops. It doesn't matter. It's no one else's fault.

It's hers.

.

.

.

Nevermind. Fuck him. Fuck Sam.

He's a child: assigning her grunt-work (captions!) as some sort of juvenile and petty punishment for keeping her personal life personal.

Instead of her, he's working with Naomi because, what, her husband is deployed?

Jane can find someone in Vietnam. She can find anyone. She is his researcher.

Though apparently Sam didn't think so. Apparently all those comments about how they're a team, about how they come together, about how she is his girl….

It was all contingent on her supposed availability?

What a piece of shit. She owes him nothing but her work — and her work is exemplary. Always has been.

They're not friends. They're not a couple.

Why is he treating her like she is in the wrong?

— Then. Why does she feel like she is? Why does her stomach hurt and her eyes ache? Why is she so desperate to make him forget he'd ever heard anything?

They're a team, aren't they?

.

.

.

She was right.

He had been flirting with Naomi at Cole's. He is flirting with her now. Openly. At work! Right in front of Jane.

Jane watches his legs, so long, so skinny, as he sits on Naomi's desk and leans over, recounting some story she's never heard before.

Hypocritical, she knows, even as she's upset about it.

She's jealous.

Yes. She is. She knows what this feeling is.

She's jealous of him with her.

Naomi, honestly, is much more like him. That's it, isn't it? He and Jane are so different.

Outside of this building, even off this floor, they have nothing in common.

Naomi is much more like him than Jane will ever be.

And she remembers how he'd lean over her desk like that — he had, just yesterday! — and smile at her (he's not flirting with Jane of course, not seriously, not, seemingly, like he is with Naomi). Well, nevermind, that was wrong too. He never leans over her desk like that. He leans over her, but always at his desk when she is in his chair. Actually, he rarely really comes to her desk. Almost never. In fact, although she can picture him here, she doesn't actually remember the last time Sam was in the pit. Even for the break room. When he needs coffee, Jane is the one who will get it. She is his researcher, it's what she's supposed to do. And when he needs her, he calls her. Sam never comes to the pit.

Sam and Naomi laugh, loudly.

Don't they have work to be doing? Doesn't he have some war-lead to be hunting down? Doesn't she have her own reporter?

Doesn't she have a husband?

It makes Jane feel ill, watching it; hearing it.

She taps her pencil. She ignores how, at the desk right over from her, if she raises her eyes just an inch, before her line of sight will be Sam's shoes.

.

.

.

There are other teams who don't get along.

It's no surprise. Some pairs just don't work out. Vivian is always complaining about J.P. taking her work and taking advantage of her edit. Susan's reporter quit without telling her. Diane was promised by her's that he'd take her to Moscow when he became bureau chief and then he left in the middle of the night.

She's heard all these stories. She's given tissues to girls in the pit, hidden in the bathroom or hallways or infirmary, crying about work.

Sam has never been like that. He's never treated her poorly. He thinks he's lucky to have her (or, he thought that, once). And she's so happy with him — so lucky to have him! He's never written a bad piece. He's the star-reporter of this magazine!

When she comes to him with good work, his eyes light up. Like he's privy to some secret. Like he's struck gold. Always a hint of humor. A hint of awe. A hint of arousal.

Hm. Why that word? She can't think on it, but she knows the emphasis of it. She knows, even if she won't concentrate further, what she means by it.

Arousal, isn't it?

.

.

.

Is it?

.

.

.

Jane takes a long sip of her drink, the ice cubes cool on her teeth.

She's speaking too quickly. She's speaking too much of him.

She knows her mother will hate it. But she can't help it. She's so angry. She's so furious. She gets angrier the more she says.

"He's frustrated." She repeats. He's frustrated, he's frustrated. "That's all." She's cutting into her food intently, hearing the knife scrape against the ceramic. "Finn rejected all of his proposals for the investigative piece and then gave him a nothing assignment. I mean, 'When Our Boys Come Home?' That's an idea, it's not a story."

What could Finn even mean by that? Write about an end-date to the war? Wishful thinking. The schematics of coming home? Like, the trajectory? The plans? The VA? Redeployment?

"We don't know any Vietnam veterans, do we?"

She can see her mother is disappointed. She knows the comment is coming even before it's made.

"I wish your father had gotten you a job at a less Jewish magazine."

He hadn't gotten her any job — Bea Burkhart may have recommended her, but wouldn't Jane's qualifications have landed her there on her own?

She rolls her eyes. They've had this conversation too many times to count.

"I know," her mother relents, also knowing the continuation. "You find the newsroom dynamic."

"Mommy," Jane pleads, sounding like a teenager all over again. "None of the editors at News of the Week are Jewish, and only a few of the reporters are."

"Yours is."

Jane exhales. She doesn't speak as she cuts a piece of steak and then takes a bite.

Rosenberg Rosenberg Rosenberg. She thinks about it sometimes, over and over like that. And over again. She remembers how sometimes, when they'd be on the train together, she'd just look down at his feet (too close to look up at his face when they're not speaking) and think, over and over, Rosenberg. She'd remembers the Rosenbergs she knew — one or two families, both in the city. She'd think on the Rosenbergs everyone knew and how a faded poster of their faces had hung in the apartment of a source she and Sam went to see once and, afterward, she said, did you see the poster? And he said Yes, and he didn't say anything more about it. She remembers the face her mother made the first time Jane showed her his byline.

It's so small, yet so big. Meaningless, yet means everything.

It is the first thing her mother sees when she opens the magazine.

Jane swallows her food.

Her mother always wanted her to work at Time. They'd had connections there too, but Jane had never applied.

She knew why her mother wanted her there. And it wasn't just the politics.

WASPy, Sam had said once, a year or so back, one night in Cole's, only a few blocks from where she is now. She'd been drinking. He asked about her mother. All Jane'd said was "traditional, would've preferred I worked for Time."

"Hm," He'd sipped his scotch. "WASPy."

So Sam knew too. He jokingly wanted advice from her father on how to date her, but he knew. He knew that much.

Jane takes another bite.

"Anyway," her mother shakes her head. She reaches into her bag. "I stopped by the pharmacy and Dr. Simpson gave me an extra prescription of Obetrol." She presents the pills to Jane. "He says it is better than your Aminorex. Stronger. You take a pill a half an hour before meals and it'll curb your appetite."

Jane nods.

It's her fault. She should have ordered a salad. She shouldn't have cut her steak so hard. She shouldn't have eaten when upset, something her mother always warned about.

She shouldn't have talked about Sam. She shouldn't have mentioned Naomi. She shouldn't have discussed work at all.

"You know, I'm really sorry." Jane says, putting down her silverware. "I have to run. It's deadline day and I should get back to the office." She takes the pill bottle. "Thank you for lunch, Mommy." Jane slides out of the booth and goes to kiss her mother on the cheek. "Give Daddy my best."

On her way out, without thinking too much about it (except knowing she wants to stop thinking), Jane opens the bottle and pours as many pills into her hand as she can. She takes them dry and all at once.

.

.

.

She's antsy when she gets back.

Her Aminorex, when she takes it, makes her the same way.

Is there really a difference between them?

Either way, she'd hardly had lunch, hadn't eaten breakfast, and she's not hungry. Actually, she's quite jittery. She's quite thirsty. She's thinking so quickly.

It's just anxiety. Sam is at his desk, Naomi is absent, Jane's hands are shaking.

She goes to the bathroom. It's so dry. She drinks from the faucet. It's not enough. Is she shaking?

She goes to the water dispenser and gets a cup. The water isn't as cool as the faucet. She fills one cup. Then two. When she goes for her third, she sees Allan looking at her, a little disturbed. Jane smiles, exhales, holds her cup and drinks it slowly.

She looks at Sam, a few yards away. He's going over her captions.

She's no help. She knows no Vietnam vets. Boys she knew always got deferments.

Sam too. He'd been called a few years back, but he was in school. And by the time he got out, he was too old for the draft. He was like most of her friends who stayed in programs, who had high numbers, who, if all else failed, had friends in high places.

Wow — she really didn't know one person who went over. Not one. Well, lots, but none from her childhood, none personally. Chad wouldn't either.

Sam though. Sam though.

Sam didn't go to private school.

Jane takes her fourth cup of water with her. She's still breathing quickly. She ignores Allan's look.

In personnel, she finds Sam's resume. She's never looked at it before. It's not filled with anything new. She knows all his experience, his menial labor in high school, his student jobs in college, his first foray into newsprint.

Then she goes into the morgue and pulls his yearbook. The year before he graduated, his year, and the year after. She'll start with his year, but if necessary, she can look at the classes surrounding his. He might remember boys from there.

She finds the list of active servicemen on Clem's desk and takes it back to her own.

Jane sits there after getting another cup of water and deftly goes through the first book. She opens it and scans down the list of names to find his. Rosenberg. Rosenberg.

Rosenberg: she thinks on it all the time.

Sam's face ten years ago is smiling back. She brushes a finger over it.

How silly. Not even a jewish high school. An immigrant neighborhood, Belmont, but not predominately yid. All of it is so silly. So meaningless. Her mother has no idea what she's talking about.

She looks at his class. A mix of races. Nothing — nothing — like hers. Few tow-headed kids, but even they too were represented in the 1959 class of Morris High.

With a long breath, Jane pulls away from his yearbook photo.

She starts in alphabetical order. She finds the first boy, compares it to the list of servicemen, and goes from there.

.

.

.

It's just a further testament to their differences.

All their clubs, all their pictures, all their clothes.

Everything about them is so different.

But when she comes to the photo of Sam and the boy — Noah Benowitz — running, she laughs out loud. She ran too. And she'd swam. He probably didn't know that about her. She was actually pretty damn fast.

The photograph slows her down. She's gone through everything so quickly, but it's been six hours since lunch and she can feel herself steadying out.

She stays on the photo for much longer than she should. She looks at the black and white print of him running, his arms; his shoulders. His knees in shorts.

He's smaller, slighter, than he is now (and he's so skinny as it is!). She touches the photograph, tracing her finger over the lines of his form.

Jane huffs. Then she reaches for a piece of paper and bookmarks out the page.

Next, she takes the phonebook and finds the Benowitz household which, after a few more calls, leads her to Noah himself.

"Rosenberg?" He laughs, voice gruff on the line. "Sure, I do. Grew up right next to the punk."

He says he lives in the deuce; knows a good bar in the area where they can talk. She sets the meeting for eight thirty.

.

.

.

On the train, they're side by side against the doors. Too close to look up when they're not talking, so she looks at his feet.

She's never understood why he prefers taking the train, but she's well used to it by now. If they're together, it's what he does, so it's what she'll do.

They're side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

Man, Jane thinks, eyeing his shoes, the cuffs of his pants. What a fucking line she'd given him — As long as I'm here, I'm here for you — what sentimental game is she playing?

Wow. She really shouldn't have said that.

She's not desperate.

She doesn't need Sam's attention. She doesn't need his forgiveness.

She's been fine before Sam and she'll be fine after him. In a few months, another year, it'll be after-Sam, and she'll be fine. She is always fine.

Sure, the words were true. It's always been true. She's upset she even has to say anything, because he should know it already; upset she ever put herself in the position where he might doubt it.

It's true, but it's too vulnerable. And, more than anything, Jane hates being vulnerable.

So why is she?

It's her job to follow him. And he wasn't letting her. That's all. There is nothing else to it.

The train lurches to a stop.

They move aside as the doors open to let people get off and on around them.

That's all. If she works for News of the Week, she works for him. That's all it is. That's all it has ever been.

.

.

.

"Sam," she says as they exit the bar. He turns to stand against the brick wall of the building, leaning his head back. He's debating where he had gone wrong in the interview. He's thinking of Noah. He's considering lighting up his cigar.

Jane stands before him, thinking about how to articulate it.

"God, Jane. He's so different." Sam rubs his eyes and then blinks, as though refocusing on the white of her coat. Except he's hardly seeing her. "I don't know how to explain it. He's the same guy I know. Same voice, same eyes. But he's — it's different. That long hair. The way he trails off all the time." Sam half-sighs, half-laughs. "Handsome though, isn't he? Came out pretty unscathed."

Jane huffs, "he's not," she says, but Sam isn't listening.

He's talking about finding work for Noah, about who he'll call, about what exactly he'll write about with When Our Boys Come Home.

"Sam," she tries. He keeps talking. She says his name again, tugging at his lapel.

And that stops him.

She thinks, maybe, suddenly, she isn't supposed to do this now. Now, that she has a boyfriend (though what as that ever mattered? (how was it okay before, touching him? she always had had a boyfriend)). Jane releases the fabric of his coat.

"He's not okay," she continues, looking at Sam until he meets her gaze. "Didn't you see? The way—" she watched how Noah held onto it until the fire burned his fingers, how the flame reached his skin and he didn't even flinch, how the fire went out naturally after he lit his cigar, gone because it ran out of stick, not because it was against the tips of his fingers. "That match, Sam."

But Sam is only looking at her confused. He doesn't understand.

She steps back, knowing she doesn't have the words to fully express what she saw, what she understand. She understands.

Noah doesn't feel anything. The fire, the flame licking his skin… he hadn't even noticed it.

Jane understands that. She can't explain it. She doesn't know why it makes sense (that numbness) but she saw it and she thought yes.

---

ii. fiancee

In a way, having Sam know is a good thing. It's like a weight has been taken off her back.

He's more professional now, maybe. He doesn't propose they go make out anymore (and he hasn't called her cute in weeks). She doesn't feel more respected (she never felt disrespected by him), but she does feel like the dynamic has changed for the better.

It's a weight off to not have to keep things separate.

When she gets married, she will ask Sam to the wedding. He should come.

He's her reporter.

It's a weight off her, to not have to fib anymore.

If he asks where she is going after work, she no longer will ever have to lie (though he doesn't ask, not once since). When she takes long lunches or makes excuses for not staying late, she doesn't have to bend the truth. It's good. It's a relief. Things are easier, she says to herself. They're easier. It's better this way. She never should've been lying to him in the first place.

.

.

.

Jane washes her hands, looking in the mirror the entire time.

"It's a new decade, so I wouldn't be afraid of trying at least one new thing tonight," Patti had said.

She'd said it as a taunt. She'd said it to goad Jane, to mock her for her chastity, her alleged frigidity; her adherence to what Patti ostentatiously considered an outdated and sexist practice.

Jane is none of those things. Jane had just made a choice, before. And then things changed — she changed — and now she is making a different one.

New decade for trying new things. Exactly.

She's already planned it.

She stands, dries her hand on her green skirt, and blinks at her reflection, mouth held in a hard line.

Patti is right — it's 1970 tomorrow.

She'll be a new woman tomorrow. A new woman for a new decade.

.

.

.

Jane is shopping during her lunch break when she decides, off the cuff, to walk into the lingerie shop.

The attendant takes her back and asks if she needs anything. And then, with the door closed, takes a measuring tape and wraps it around Jane's bust (36), waist (24), and hips (34).

Jane exhales. "Almost." She says as the woman finishes giving her measurements.

She hasn't measured herself in a long time, but nothing has changed.

The woman looks concerned. "That's what my mother says about my ratio," Jane explains with a smile. "'Almost.'"

"No," the attendant urges in her heavy accent. "Hip is perfect."

"Oh no, no. I'm not complaining." Jane wrings her hands, deflecting. It was only a comment. She truly meant nothing by it. She hadn't meant to be self-deprecating. "It's just what she always says, is all."

"I do this long time," the woman says. And Jane exhales.

When the attendant leaves, Jane looks in the mirror, observing her body from the side. She puts on hand on her stomach, measuring her line in the reflection.

Almost. She means nothing by it. It's simply what her mother has always said. Almost.

The woman comes back with two boxes stacked on top of each other. "Sweet or salty?"

"Excuse me?"

The woman puts down the boxes and from the top one pulls a black, lacy garter.

"Oh," Jane laughs, uncomfortable. She can feel her cheeks getting hot. "Um. I think my fiancé would probably prefer sweet."

She doesn't even know she's said it until much later.

Fiancé.

It's easily explainable though. She justifies it to herself later as just a Freudian slip, an accidental leap for something she'll need to be saying anyway. Like, when you're so aware of your impending birthday, you accidentally call yourself that age a few weeks early. That's all. It's such a conclusion, she simply momentarily forgot.

"It's going to be our first time."

She says that under her breath, as though it's a secret. As though there is anyone else in the shop. As though she isn't in a lingerie store buying clothes for lovemaking without wearing a wedding ring.

"Oh," the woman says, understanding. "We need the most beautiful."

"Thank you." The woman pulls the clothing from the second box. "Oof," Jane breathes, embarrassed, light in her heels. "I don't why I'm so nervous."

Put up for her inspection is a pale blue nightie, thin, tight, half-silk, half-lace.

"You lose your virginity only once."

Jane knows how she'll look in it.

"Oh," she reaches for it, holding the bottom and taking in the loveliness of the garment. "Chad'll love it. He says blue brings out my eyes."

"Everything change after tonight." The attendant gives her a supportive look. "I will be right outside." Jane nods. "If you need anything, tell me. Okay?"

Jane holds the lingerie up to herself when the woman leaves, looking at it in the mirror. She can't stop staring at herself. She smooths out the fabric against her stomach. She imagines what Chad will see when she takes off her dress.

She doesn't want to spoil it. She'll see it for herself later tonight.

Everything change after tonight.

Jane doesn't try it on before buying.

.

.

.

"Heya Rosenberg," Charlie asks. "You going to that thing at the Chelsea?"

Jane has a chair pulled up to Sam's desk.

"Nah," Sam says, not looking up from the map she's explaining to him, "not my scene."

"So what are you doing?"

"Or who?" Alex adds.

Sam sits up and smirks over at the other men. "Seeing some old friends."

Jane swallows. She wonders if he means Noah Benowitz; if he is still seeing Noah after that night in the bar two weeks before. If she'd helped them, in some way, reconnect. She thinks that'd be a good thing, if it were happening.

Or maybe he means he's seeing a girl, as Charlie and Alex are hoping. Maybe he is "doing" someone. She doesn't know. Sam doesn't tell her. He never has, really, has he? And he certainly never tells her anything anymore.

They're a team though, right?

"You okay?" He asks, turning back to look over the paper.

He's looking at her hand. She's been holding the base of her ring finger, scratching at herself. She hadn't even noticed.

Jane swallows.

She wants to ask, to say, to tell him and see him react: if you moved to Moscow, would you take me?

They're nothing like Peter and Diane though. Peter was sleeping with Diane. Diane was in love with Peter. He promised her Moscow with him and then left on his own.

Nothing like Sam and Jane. They're not sleeping together. They're not in love. He'd never promise her a foreign posting by his side. She would never, could never, go with him.

Still, despite that, she wants to ask: if they moved you, would you take me? You always say we come together….

But she can't ask that.

She shouldn't ever ask anything like that.

It's an impossibility.

Still, she is scared of what he would say. If she did happen to give the hypothetical, to give it possibility… she doesn't think she can hear his answer. She doesn't want to.

No. Stop.

Jane swallows. She flexes her hands.

"Fine," she says, easy, perky. She goes back to explaining her research.

She shouldn't even think things like that. Especially after tonight. After the ring is actually on her finger. After everything changes. Naomi thinks it's a real gas to make suggestive, explicit noises to annoy Jane's supposed fragility, but after tonight, Jane won't be made fun of anymore. After tonight, she'll have the promise that she'll never be like Fran: up all night in the office over New Years, alone, year after year.

Everything will change. Everything will be fine. She'll never be like Fran. And she'll never be like Diane.

So it doesn't matter if Sam would be like Peter. It doesn't matter. She doesn't ask.

.

.

.

Jane gets dressed in the bathroom stall.

It's a tight fit, but she didn't have time between work and meeting Chad to go back home.

She has already fixed her hair (adjusting the fall it had taken since she left the salon this morning) and done everything else but her lipstick.

She puts on the lingerie. It fits just as she expects.

She takes off her pantyhose.

It'll go as how she expects. It'll be magical. It'll be everything.

She's ready. She so, so ready.

.

.

.

This is how happens: she offers him everything, and he takes even more.

She's only had one drink, just so her voice doesn't shake.

And they're dancing. Her gloved hand rests on his shoulder. She likes the broadness of his chest. She likes his height. She likes the structure of his jaw. She likes the compliment of him beside her.

And she decides it's time.

It's the Mayor's Young Society Ball. They've been every New Year's Eve since they started dating, she's gone almost every year since debuting. It's one of the most popular societal events. This is the time. She's planned all of it. And she tells him so. She tells him: "I've been thinking about it, and I have a surprise for you later."

Chad smiles. Dazzlingly handsome, isn't he?

Everything about him is always so suave. So, so suave.

She knows she's made the right decision the moment she says it.

"I'm ready."

And then he swallows. His smile, so bright, falters.

He spins her.

"Ready for what?"

Doesn't he understand? Jane blinks, mouth dry. "I'm ready to make love."

He's not smiling anymore.

"Ah, Jane." He begins. Everything slows. She knows what he is going to say before he says it. "You don't have to do that."

She shakes her head. What is he doing? "Well I know I don't have to." She knows. She knows what he is saying. She knows what he is doing. "I want to. I know it's something you've wanted."

Chad inhales. "I care about you, Jane."

Stop. Stop, she wants to say, but she can't seem to form the words.

"We grew up together," he continues, hesitant. "You gave me that ultimatum and I've been thinking… if I have to decide…." He swallows. "I mean, we've been together for so long. And I know what this is."

She can't breathe. He'd asked her out, he'd pursued her, he'd told her he loved her — in the car, an hour ago, he reached for her hand.

'"You're not breaking up with me?"

"Yeah."

No. Stop.

"If you knew you were gonna break up with me, then why did you bring me here?" It's shrill. It's ugly.

"I wanted you to have a good New Year's." He explains, as though that's an explanation. As though that makes up for it. As though that makes sense.

They're still moving. Her hand is still in his.

Her hand is still in his.

Janes holds her breath. She blinks back tears. She looks around at the faces of who's-who in the tristate.

"I'm sorry," he says. Low. Defeated. "Let's go sit down."

Jane stops. He drops her hand. She stares at him. He won't take this from her.

He won't take this.

There are people looking.

"Don't. You. Dare."

Chad exhales. Looks down. And then he smiles at the people around them and takes her hand back up. They keep dancing.

They keep dancing until the song ends.

That is how it happened.

.

.

.

Jane walks all twenty-two blocks and two avenues until she is home. She doesn't take the train. She doesn't find a taxicab. She walks in the frozen air. She numbs her legs, her arms. She doesn't feel the blisters on her feet. She walks without thinking. She walks and walks and walks, her gown whipping back in the wind, her heels loud on empty streets and drowned out from noise on avenues.

It's hard to see through the tears.

"You'll be okay, darling," a man calls out to her as she passes. "If you were with me, I'd take better care of you."

She doesn't smile at the compliment. She keeps walking.

.

.

.

And that's how the rest happens:

She's stopped crying, momentarily, when she gets inside. And then she sees Max, her neighbor in 15C.

She's not crying when she sees Max. She can't breathe when she sees Max.

Max, whom she has spoken with once. But she can't breathe.

And there he is, wishing her happy new year in the hallway as she fumbles with her keys. And his hair is so stupidly long. Long, like those young men these days. Long, like Noah Benowitz's. Long like no one back there at the Waldorf. Long, like Chad's will never be.

And he wishes her a good night and so she asks him in and tells him she just broke up with her boyfriend and he has his hands in his pockets and he offers to get her a drink and she asks him to kiss her (she's never asked anyone before) and he says, "you're really something you know, Jane" (no 15B tonight). And then he kisses her. And he says, "you're beautiful, Jane."

And she doesn't cry anymore.

Even as it hurts. Even as she kisses the skin of a man she'd hardly ever met. Even as she does it all, even as she gives him — a stranger — herself, she doesn't cry anymore.

---

January 1970

She calls her father first, the next morning.

He will tell her mother.

She calls Sue Ann, but Sue Ann already knows (Jane can tell). She calls her college roommate. She smiles, on the phone, hoping they'll imagine it, even though they can't see her. She cries too, and hopes they don't imagine that.

That's all.

.

.

.

Jane goes back to the office the next day. Technically, they have it off, so almost no one is there.

But she has nothing else to do.

So she runs every name Noah had mentioned that she hasn't already done. She does what more she can and tries to think of different things to look into and questions to ask. She cleans out her desk. Then she cleans out Sam's. She cleans out some of the others that need tidying up. She checks on the orders for more supplies.

Some people wander in throughout the day — those with impending deadlines or developing stories.

Jane sits on the toilet and cries in the empty bathroom.

And she takes so many diet pills.

And then she stops crying, again.

And time passes. In a routine, mostly. But days do go on. Time does pass.

.

.

.

Some days are harder than others.

Some are okay, eventually, too.

She is able to stop herself, usually, from getting too in her own head; sometimes she can stop herself from looking at Fran and thinking now.

She keeps her distance from Finn and Sam and the rest of the girls in the pit.

She smiles when she should and she works as hard as ever. And then she goes home, alone.

She ignores Patti's weird, secretive conversations with the other girls that Jane is pointedly excluded from. She ignores Sam's worried glances that he passes her way, but he never asks on her, so she never has to lie. Or tell the truth.

(She isn't sure which is worse).

And then she goes home and eats a bit of dinner and drinks her wine and stands in front of the mirror and stares at herself.

Almost.

Perhaps that's why?

.

.

.

Sam frowns, sometimes, when he looks at her. When she catches him staring at her, he's always frowning.

She should smile more. She knows. It unsettles men to see a woman sad.

.

.

.

"Why don't you give Chad a call?" Her mother says when she comes into the city. "He's broken up about it too."

Jane's mouth falls into a hard line.

"Call him, resolve it. Apologize."

Ha. Ridiculous.

She won't be humiliated like that. Not again.

Chad's done enough.

---

February 1970

One night on her way home, instead of taking a car uptown, instead of going to Cole's with the other girls in the pit, she walks downtown. She walks until she isn't familiar with the neighborhood, until she knows she won't see anyone she recognizes.

She goes into a bar on her own.

She orders an old-fashioned, up. And she drinks it. And she talks to a man. She smiles, a lot, like she is supposed to.

And then he puts his hand on her knee and she stops smiling. She leaves.

But it feels good, walking out. And she smiles then. On her own. For the first time in a long time, she smiles without thinking to.

.

.

.

Chad left her because he is shit. Because he always like Dave more than he liked her. Because she kissed him first. Because he asked her out knowing who her father was. Chad left her because he is an asshole.

.

.

.

At the end of February, she stops sleeping again.

Rejection. Rejection.

Her parents called too much at first, but now they hardly do.

She doesn't see Sue Anne anymore (Sue Anne is with Dave — Dave is with Chad).

Jane stays up and stares at the ceiling and thinks about how little she has.

What identity, even, does she have here? Here, in New York. In the city. At this job.

She will start going back to the country club on weekends. She'll turn in her work early and leave the last-minute research to others, to career girls, who can afford to spend all weekend with reporters they'll never marry. She'll go to the club and she'll meet someone there. There is no one suitable in the office. Maybe she'll move to Time, like her mother always wanted.

"You're twenty-five now, Jane," her mother tells her, over and over. And the threat of it is daunting, looming. It keeps her up at night, staring at the ceiling.

There is nothing for her at News of the Week.

.

.

.

She doesn't quit though. Not yet. It's not a specific time she is giving it. She's just busy. Busy, always, and so she forgets to leave. That's it.

She'll do it when she remembers to.

---

March 1970

Jane has an eye on the elevators, waiting for Sam to come through. He's late, which is normally fine as he has no story in this issue, but today it's an emergency, and he was requested hours ago.

She was called in at three. When she got here, Gabe told her he'd tried for Sam, to no avail. So Jane did. Over and over, every twenty minutes, but nothing went through. At seven, she ends up calling one of Sam's neighbors (something she has only done once before) and requests the woman give Sam the message as soon as she hears him.

It's ten when he walks out of the elevator. He comes in quickly, almost running to where she waits by his desk.

"Where were you?" She asks under her breath, holding out his notepad and pen. She's never been unable to reach him. He's always home, eventually. She really has no other numbers for him, friends or a girlfriend or anyone else to call.

Sam takes off his coat fast, straightening his sweater and reaching for her offerings. "Visiting my parents. Didn't know anything till I came back this morning."

In the years she's worked with him, she's never known him to spend the night in Belmont. She wants to ask, but he's in a rush.

"They're meeting now," she says instead, taking his coat. "Postal strike is going national."

"They're moving the Namath cover?"

"I don't know," she waves him away. He strides up the stairs, two at a time, to Finn's office.

.

.

.

Jane has been seeing Patti and Cindy talk a lot. Mostly in the bathroom, but sometimes in the hall or break room or even openly in the pit, with lowered heads and quiet voices.

Normally Jane would wave it off, but it has been happening more and more. What could they possibly be plotting? And what is it that they're so pointedly leaving Jane out of?

Could it have anything to do with Sam? With the investigative beat? Sam's been on the back-burner for weeks… does it have something to do with Patti?

No. Patti is hungry for stories. She's a bloodhound — more of a threat to Sam's position than Doug will ever be — but she's not bloodthirsty. Finn has been favoring Doug as of late, but she doesn't think that could be attributed to Patti. Patti cared about getting the story, not stealing the story. She cared about the news, not the win.

These conversations though — they must be geared toward something. If not Jane, then something they don't want Jane involved in?

.

.

.

She's not meaning to. She doesn't even realize she's doing it — slipping her ring finger through the ring of her binder and looking at the silver line where an engagement ring would be. She's really not even thinking about Chad. She's just… looking.

"Hollander," Sam calls, pulling her out of it. He's been in that meeting for over an hour. "Get your coat." He's putting on his own as he walks down into the pit in his long strides.

Jane turns in her chair. "Uh, well, I gotta finish reaching—"

"Nope." He stops before her desk. "Whatever you're doing can wait. We are going to beautiful Jersey City, New Jersey to see about some mail."

"What kind of mail?"

"Undelivered mail." He holds up a photograph. "Piles and piles of it."

She shakes her head, turning more fully to face him. "Uh, but what's the story?" She has other things to be doing (things that aren't mindlessly putting her finger through binder rings).

"Oh there's no damn story here. Finn just likes the picture." He's annoyed. "We're writing the world's longest caption."

Jane swallows, reaching for her bag. "Why am I coming?"

"Why? Are you worried?" He asks, as though he often takes her for stories. "Is your boyfriend gonna be jealous?"

"No, no, no. I just—"

"Good." He cuts her off again. "Lobby in two."

How are they even getting to Jersey City? If he makes her take the train….

She shouldn't be going with Sam to Jersey to write a caption. She could write the caption from her desk. Sam should not be writing a caption! What a joke of an assignment — a nothing assignment.

No wonder he's annoyed. No wonder he's frustrated.

By the time she gets to the lobby, he's standing outside, leaning on a car pulled up right before the entrance.

"My parents," he explains.

She's never seen him drive.

Sam's eyes narrow as she walks up.

"It's cold out."

Jane looks down at her legs. "I've been wearing this coat all season, Sam."

"I know," he says as he walks around the car and opens the driver's side door. He leans his elbows on the roof, looking at her. "But it's below zero in Jersey. And we'll be outside with the picketers."

"Oh. Should I change?"

He huffs, but it's not as quick as it once was. He'll say, absolutely not, Hollander. But then he doesn't. He says something else about how it's up to her.

He never flirts anymore.

Sam gets into the car without saying anything else.

.

.

.

On the drive he complains about Doug, mostly. Which are, really, complaints about Finn. He complains about Wick and Gregory too.

She's hardly interacted with Gregory, but Sam says he is too crass.

She's surprised. She thought Gregory Sansone was a great replacement for Wick. He'd been at Princeton with Finn and then they'd both started together at the Boston Globe. They had a similar worldview, a similar interpretation for the future of the magazine.

"Up with the times," she says, but Sam only shrugs.

Better than Wick, she thinks. Wick was scarier. He was meaner. He was so old school — out of touch with the magazine in a way Gregory wasn't.

"Wick called all the girls honey, like he didn't know their names." She looks out the window. "And every time we were in his office talking about a story, he'd ignore everything I said. I'd give him my research and then he'd ask you about it even though I was right next to you. Remember? And when we left, he'd always ask me to get him a cup of coffee."

Not mean to her, maybe. But not nice either. Wick wasn't nice. Gregory seems nice.

Sam doesn't say anything for a moment, looking at the road the whole time. But then he nods. "Yes. I remember."

.

.

.

Jane folds the map as they pull up.

There is a crowd marching in a long circle from one end of the block to the other. They're holding signs. Some are yelling.

She watches Sam take off his sunglasses that he still wears even in the middle of winter.

He exhales, looking at the crowd, bracing himself, maybe, for the cold. Or for the meaningless work.

"You really don't need me for this," she finds herself saying again.

"I do." He insists, turning to her. "You were a huge help when we met with Noah. People like talking to you."

Jane looks down at the console. Then at his knees. She thinks of their meeting with the Fed Chair. "Well, I am a good listener." And then looks at Sam and is suddenly, vividly, reminded of how they used to sit as his desk on Wednesday mornings and talk about everything except work.

It's been months since they've done that.

"That's what happens when you grow up with a lisp," she says. And Sam, who hasn't been paying too much attention, snaps his head toward her.

"You did not."

Ha.

"Mmhmm. Well, I took elocution lessons three times a week for months. And I rather excelled at it," she over-enunciates the end.

"I don't want to hear that. I want to hear the lisp. Let's dust that thing off and take it for a spin."

"Oh no, no don't make fun."

He's smiling that goofy smile of his. "No, I'm not. I—" he huffs. "Hell, I wore the shoes with the bar in between them."

"Oh no! I know that bar! My little cousin had that bar."

"It's a fuckin' torture device. I fell on my face, knocked my two front teeth out. Then I had a lithp."

Jane bursts out laughing.

She can imagine him, slight, small, missing two teeth from his smile, waddling with a bar between his legs and being completely misunderstood every time he tried to speak.

"That's nice to hear," Sam says. He's smiling down at the wheel.

"Oh? What's that?"

"Your laugh," he turns to look at her. "It seems like you've been a bit, uh." He pauses, blinks, and when he looks at her, it's more serious. "Down lately."

Jane swallows. She clicks her tongue. "Well, you're sweet to worry, but everything is great." She nods as she says it, as if that will give it more credence. For Sam? For herself?

He turns back to the wheel, inhales and regains his humor.

"Well, let's go see some mail."

"Mhm."

They get out into the icy air and she watches as Sam pulls on the dumbest had she has ever seen. It's floppy and checkered and she laughs loudly at the sight of it. "Nice hat."

He lifts his hands in defiance. "They're postal workers. They're not gonna judge a man who knows how to keep his ears warm."

"Oh is that what you're doing? They may not, but I will."

He rolls his eyes and touches her back when they cross the street.

.

.

.

"It's so sad, isn't it? All these words, lost." She thinks about what is on these undelivered letters. Love letters? Confessions? Proposals?

Sam lifts one up. "This isn't far." He looks at her like he's got an idea. "What do you say we deliver some mail to the good people of New Jersey?"

"That's illegal, isn't it?"

"It's illegal to open it or forge it or blackmail people with it…."

Partners in crime, she'd once said. Bonnie and Clyde, she'd told him, pressed up against each other in a phone booth months ago.

"We're just gonna deliver it," he continues. "Talk to some folks. Maybe get a story."

"Okay." She points a finger at his chest. "But if we get caught, you're taking the rap."

Bonnie and Clyde died together, side by side.

"Well you'll still visit me in the slammer, right?" By the end of the sentence he's smiling. Jane watches his mouth.

"If you're lucky."

He said he hadn't heard her laugh in a while.

She understands. She has missed his smile being pointed at her. She missed how he always gave her rise to push back. She missed this.

Jane grins. And then follows his retreating back.

.

.

.

Nixon is speaking when the enter the diner that afternoon.

"Shit," he says upon walking in, knowing the cover of the magazine will be changed to address the protest even though they go to print tomorrow. "There goes Namath." He taps Jane's arm as they take a seat on either end of one corner of the bar. "Order for us." And then he asks the girl behind the counter to turn up the volume on the television. Jane picks key lime pie — a favorite of Sam's, and although he says nothing, he is happy she did. Happy, she can tell, that she remembers. It's good, isn't it: how well she knows him? It's her job, after all.

They eat in silence so they can hear the latter half of the president's address.

"They aren't gonna run it," he says eventually, once Nixon starts talking about the obligations of civil servants. He waves his hand. He's matter-of-fact about it, but disappointed.

"How do you know?"

"'Cause I know. They don't want my five-hundred word ode to the cultural significance of mail delivery." Jane shakes her head at his conclusion. "Not sexy enough."

"Well I thought it was beautiful." She's always loved Sam's writing. Sam is the best reporter there. He'll be the favorite again. His writing moves people. His lens, his turn of phrase… it has always moved her. "Can I ask you something?"

He looks at her, meeting her gaze. "Always."

"Why didn't you want to interview the woman with the letter from Vietnam?"

An undelivered letter from a son who died before its delivery. She'd be a perfect subject for his story. Tragedy. War. Institutional Failure. It's what his story is about. There the woman was — a prime interview candidate — and he'd just closed the door.

Sam nods, pauses, licks his lips, and thinks about what he wants to say. When he speaks it is slow and deliberate.

"I grew up around sad people. Most of my family didn't make it out of Europe."

"I'm so sorry." She had no idea. If she ever thought of what his race meant to him (and not just what it meant to her), she might have considered it before.

"I— I didn't know any of them. I mean, it still screwed me up, but that's not the point." His brow is so heavy; his eyes so clear. He's looking at her, trying to get something across without being forceful. "The one thing you learn when you grow up around that kind of pain is…" he licks his lips again. "Is that, it has to be respected. You know, with people in pain, you, uh, can't fix it. Can't make them forget it. You can't take it away from them. All you really can do is treat it with respect." Sam looks down at his cup. His hands, momentarily, flutter against his mug. "As a reporter, sometimes that's not possible. But," he inhales, "we didn't need that story. Not today."

She doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know why. But she could feel it coming, as he spoke. She can feel the edge of it now, in her throat; in the way she can't control her lips from turning down.

"I forget how pleasant it is to get out of the office sometimes," she says lightly, willing it away. She wipes a tear from her eye. She won't cry. She doesn't cry, anymore.

And what is her plight in comparison to that?

"Goodness, look at me. I'm so sorry." She reaches for a napkin from the tin dispenser. She's fully crying now. She can't stop it. He's just watching her and it makes her cry more.

It's been so long.

Her lips are still shaking. "I have been a little down lately." She struggles to take a breath. "I'm so sorry," sniffling around the words, embarrassed.

"Why?" He asks gently.

"I broke up with Chad. Things weren't, um, moving forward as I had expected them to, so…." She can hardly get the words out. "Oh dammit."

Less than three months ago, she wouldn't leave in the middle of a dance after her boyfriend had broken up with her — she kept his hand in hers and her head held high — and now she's sitting in the middle of a diner in New Jersey practically sobbing in front of her coworker.

Jane blots at her eyes with a napkin. When she looks back up, he's still waiting. He's still just looking at her patiently, saying nothing.

She inhales — hard, as her nose is now stuffed.

"You know, the truth is, um. The truth is: he dumped me." She laughs, almost, in her exhale. Absurd, isn't she? "On New Year's Eve no less."

Sam's voice, when he speaks is low. "Well then, he isn't worthy of you."

She takes another shaky breath. She's stopped crying.

She glances up at him again.

"Thank you," she whispers.

And he says nothing more about it.

.

.

.

"You look cold."

He parks the car near work.

"It's just my coat, Sam. The only one I brought." She rolls her eyes. "Are you driving it back to the Bronx tonight?"

"No, but I'll drive you home later."

They've been together for over twelve hours now. It's not the first time — not be a long stretch! — but it's the first of the decade.

He reaches over the dash and takes his stupid hat and then, without hesitating, he tries to pull it over her head.

"Stop!" She protests, swatting at his hands. "Do you know how long it takes to do my hair?"

"There's nothing," he says, laughing, "that this hat could possibly hurt. You'll thank me, I promise."

Jane sighs, but relents, pulling it down over her ears.

"You'll be cold," she tries, though they're only going two blocks to Cole's. She smiles, looking down at his knees. So skinny. She wants to touch them.

There's a pause.

"I had a good time today, Jane." He's more serious. "It's been a long time since I've had fun. At the news," he adds as an afterthought, as if to clarify.

"It's always fun working with you."

Sam smiles, and she wonders, if he stops joking around…. She wonders, if he asked again…. She wonders if she would say Yes.

They get out of the car. It is cold. The hat helps.

"Jane," he says, before they move anywhere. He's standing in front of the driver's door, leaning on the roof of the car. It's a little too dark to see him clearly. "I should apologize."

He says it like it's something he's been meaning to say, something he was waiting to tell her.

"For before." Sam continues. "For going too far, sometimes. If I'd known, well." He sighs. He's not looking at her. "You grew up differently. I understand that. I knew that. But it didn't. You know, it just didn't occur to me that you still, well, would be…. To make those kind of jokes." He pauses again.

Oh. Sex. He's talking about sex.

Are you sleeping together, Cindy had asked all that time ago.

"I feel like such an idiot, Jane. If I'd known, I never would've said all those things."

Who told him? Naomi? She bristles. Then relaxes. She doesn't care.

"Oh. Well. I'm not anymore."

Sam nods. Then, belatedly, goes "oh." He swallows. Then he nods again, easing into a smile to break the tension. "It's a good hat, Hollander, but I'm afraid any longer out here and you might freeze to death."

She walks over to him and reaches for his arm. They go across the street together.

A part of her wants to say I wanted it just to say it. Just to quell the image he probably has — used and discarded, crying in a diner.

She doesn't say anything though.

She doesn't want to keep being vulnerable before him. And anyway, she's said too much as it is. Said too much already.

She really never should have said anything in the first place.

.

.

.

It's not a long weekend.

Sam ends up being right and the magazine doesn't run his Jersey piece.

But they do meet up at the office on Sunday.

He's doing it, she thinks, because he knows she's lonely. Doing it so she has somewhere to be.

Or maybe not. Neither says anything about it.

They laugh and make charts and organize strong paragraphs of narrative he's already done.

She looks at the pencil behind his ear and the way his smile transforms his whole face. He's handsome, isn't he?

A part of her, suddenly, without Chad, thinks finally.

---

iii. career girl

"May I?" She's already reaching for the paper though.

"Later," her father's voice is hard. Jane, wary, puts down the newspaper, smoothing out its front.

"So," she asks. She spreads her napkin across her lap. "What did you want to take to me about?"

"Are you getting eight hours?"

Jane smiles lightly. She doesn't look tired, does she? She thought she'd done her makeup better. "We just closed an issue. Sam and I had a few late sessions, but I'll make up for them."

Her father blinks. "Now that you and Chad are broken up, what do you think about a job somewhere else?"

Oh. So that's why she's here.

He's never been one to beat around the bush.

"I've got a lead on a great position at a white shoe law firm."

She nods, knowing what he means. "With more suitable men."

It's not a question.

"News of the Week has changed, Janey. I mean, they're putting black murderers on the cover for christ's sake. It's not what we signed up for."

We? Who is this we?

"That was one cover."

Her father doesn't look away. "Mudge Rose Guthrie will put your talents to good use. They've got a rigorous research department."

"Mudge Rose?!" She is exasperated. She can hear it in her voice. She needs to calm down. Her father hears it too. He's always told her: in a business discussion, emotions are weakness.

And this meeting is business, isn't it?

He sips his coffee coolly.

"You already set this up?"

"I bumped into Randolph Guthrie. We have a conversation."

"Daddy…."

"All I ask if that you meet us for dinner tonight. It's just a meal. Nothing formal." He gives her a look, as though it's casual. "If you don't like what Randolph has to say, that's the end of it."

"Okay."

"He'll love you. How could he not?"

Jane drinks her water.

There are lots of ways he could not.

So, this is her chance to woo him, not the other way around. She understands her role. She's always understood.

.

.

.

She should've seen it coming. She knew it was going to sooner or later.

Her parents wanted her to leave News of the Week on her own. And she hadn't. So now they were doing it for her.

She's twenty-five. It's time to move on, isn't it? Some girls aren't married yet, but not girls like Jane.

Career girls.

It's not for people like them.

.

.

.

"I'm seeing Noah tonight," Sam leans back in his chair. "I'll get his take. And, uh, maybe we'll go to Patti's after if he's up for it." He looks down, settles something on his typewriter, and asks: "you going?"

It's the first time in months he's asked her about her plans outside the office.

He's clearly uncomfortable doing so. He's not even looking at her.

She doesn't smile, but she has to fight not to.

"I have a family dinner." She gives. And she's lying again. What else can she say though?

Sam nods, still looking down.

.

.

.

"Come tonight," Patti tries again on her way out, "after your thing. It'll be fun."

And then, once more, as always, Jane is alone in the bathroom.

Why do the other girls dislike her so much? Naomi clearly does, but that's mutual (and, even if Jane won't say as much, she knows it has to do with Sam). The others though. They hate her too, don't they?

Patti, sometimes, seems to. And other times, doesn't.

She hadn't invited Jane to her birthday breakfast over half the pit attended, but she did invite Jane over for a dinner party that night, so….

Jane doesn't understand these girls; this world. She looks in the mirror.

It's no matter, right?

She opens her purse. It's been a few weeks since she's taken her Obetrol, but if she's going to Mudge Rose… if she's finding a husband….

It's like. It's like, for a moment — it's like she almost forgot what she is supposed to do, who she is supposed to be.

She takes the pill dry. It's better, sometimes, to feel it, to taste it, going down your throat.

.

.

.

"I, uh, knocked on your door last night." Jane sits down next to him.

She settles. Pauses. Apart from the two of them on the bench, the lobby is empty.

She has an hour before her dinner. She has time. It's time.

Okay.

"I've been avoiding you."

Max exhales. "Whoa. Honesty. I like that." He laughs shortly. The smoke from his cigarette smells up the lobby of their building. She remembers, too, how it smelled up her bedroom. "Damn. I guess that means that, uh, New Years wasn't as good for you as it was for me."

"Oh, Max, I want to thank you so much for being such a gentleman that night."

He lifts his hand, donning an Atlantic, old-timey accent, "Well you are welcome, Jane," he jokes around his cigarette, "if you could write me a nice thank-you note on fancy stationary, I would be much obliged."

"Oh, you." She smacks his arm. Then she sobers. Her smiles falls. She tilts her head back and looks at the ceiling. She remembers that night.

Max puts out his cigarette.

"How are you doing?"

Jane lets her head, still against the wall, fall to the side.

"I feel like I'm in a strange land."

All those girls who don't like her (why? she's never been cruel, has she?), Patti who is trying, her parents who want her somewhere else, her whole life, that right now seems to point in too many different directions….

She hesitates.

"I was saving myself for marriage."

"Eh, but you changed your mind."

"I did."

"Well, I was honored." Max speaks slowly. He takes a deep breath. "And, uh, things don't have to be funky. You don't have to," he waves his hand vaguely, "avoid me."

"Okay."

"Good."

She smiles at him. Maybe they could be friends? Maybe they should be?

"And I the next time I, um, you know…"

"Mhmm."

"I think I want to be in love."

She also thinks she shouldn't have sex again until she is able to even say the word aloud.

"Yeah, it's." Max sighs. "It's nice that way too."

They're interrupted by a knock on the front window.

Max stands, gathering his coat. "Now, you sure you don't want to go check out the Allman Brothers?"

"Oh, not for me."

He walks away. Jane waits a moment, happy, warm in her stomach, and then gets up.

"Uh, Jane." He calls back when she's before the elevator.

"Mhm?"

Max smirks, watching her. "You're a cool woman."

It starts slow, and by the time the elevator comes, she's light in her heels again, hot in her chest, grinning like an idiot as she gets on and waits for the doors to close.

.

.

.

Jane walks inside and starts reaching for her dress as though she hasn't made her decision yet, as though it's still up in the air.

Better hear Randolph Guthrie out, she thinks. Better for me, she thinks, as she pulls her hair back, as she finds the pearl necklace her ex-boyfriend gave her.

But the whole time, over and over, all she can really hear is You're a cool woman.

And she picks up the phone as though it's a last-minute choice, as though the decision hadn't already long been made, as though she'd put on one appropriate dress and then had to change, and leaves a message at the restaurant.

.

.

.

Patti's is overwhelming.

She stopped on the way and bought oysters, but that's clearly the wrong kind of gift.

It's not a dinner party at all — except on the technicality of it being a party where people are, at night, and some happen to consume foods.

It's the same people Jane sees all day. She spends long nights with these same people at Cole's.

So why does it feel like, upon arrival, Jane is alone?

She needs a drink.

And so, when Naomi offers her marijuana — just to make fun of her when she turns it down — Jane accepts.

And soon, she forgets she felt alone at all.

.

.

.

"Sam!" He came! "Sam!" She pulls on his elbow. "Sam — he said I was a 'cool woman'!"

Sam has two beers in his hands and he's trying not to spill them as she tugs on him. She stops her motion, but keeps her hold on him.

"Max. My neighbor. The guy — the guy!"

Sam shakes his head, not paying too much attention (or not enough attention, she thinks) as he moves to avoid tripping on people. They're near the edge of the dancing crowd.

"You are cool, Jane," he's laughing as people surround them. "Are you high, Hollander?"

She reaches higher, folds her hand around his bicep, his shoulder. She loves touching him. She's always loved how he feels. She loves him next to her. He's always so sturdy even though he is so skinny. Chicken legs. Wet behind the ears. She reaches up and touches the rim of his ear. Is it wet? What's that mean?

"Can you tell?" She bites her lip.

Sam ducks from her hand, frowning, but smiling.

She grins."I miss your laugh too!"

"I always laugh."

"Not enough."

"Wow," he steps away and she lets him go. He gives enough distance to look her up and down dramatically. "Janey. All grown up."

"Don't call me that."

"You won't remember it tomorrow."

She laughs, again.

"I'm going to Noah. Come say hello."

Jane raises a hand in parting, watching him disappear.

Noah! She likes Noah! Noah is her friend! Sam is with Noah. She wants to go. She'll go. She loves Noah!

She has a vague sense of conversation, but that's all. No real coherency from line to line.

In a minute, she'll get a drink.

And then she wanders back into the bedroom where some girls — different girls, now — are still lying on all the coats across Patti's bed toking. And so she does that.

.

.

.

They dance and they play and she can't stop smiling and the room is spinning and she loves how warm Sam's arm is underneath her hand while the music goes.

She's so happy!

If this is the strange land, maybe she can get used to it. Maybe she's found a map.

She loves News of the Week! She loves it! She loves it!

She loves the covers they choose! She loves the stances the take!

Finn Woodhouse is at the forefront of everything! He's the modern man! So radical! So brilliant! So freethinking! Her father has no idea what he is talking about!

There is no "We"! There is just Jane. It's just Jane. Just Jane.

She belongs to herself. It's only her from now on, forever.

Not for people like us? She's not like them!

She's just — Jane!

.

.

.

"What is all this?" Jane asks, hours later, tilting her head to take in the four locks across Patti's front door.

There is the deadbolt one, and then the chain lock; and below that, an entire bar across the width of the doorway, and finally the lock to the knob itself.

Jane can't stop looking at it.

Sam shrugs. "This isn't exactly the safest neighborhood." He looks down at her mockingly. "Not all of us can afford an apartment on the Upper East Side."

She shakes her head, frowning. "It's because she's a woman. She took this place because of this bar, don't you think? You think all the men in this building have this?"

He shrugs again, but then pulls on her to bring her back to the party, and soon she forgets about the whole thing.

.

.

.

"Let me get you a drink," Susan yells over the music, almost in her ear. They're too close to the hi-fi speaker. They should move into the kitchen. "I'm so glad you're here!"

"Oh." Jane cranes her neck to yell back in Susan's ear. "Thank you!"

"You never come anywhere on your own. You only come with Sam."

No, that's not true, is it?

"But Sam is here. He's right over there."

"Yeah," Susan lowers her voice as the song changes over. "But so are you!"

Jane doesn't understand it, but she laughs anyway, and takes the drink Susan has made her.

.

.

.

It's hours later. It's Tuesday, probably. Tuesday morning, right? Long past midnight now.

Jane sits on the escape outside Patti's living room with a blanket wrapped tightly around her, though she doesn't feel cold.

It's probably the marijuana…. Fuck, her father is going to be so angry with her! But she's happy.

She's happy.

Why has she kept so distant from this? From these people?

Jane and Patti started at News of the Week within months of each other. But they've never been friends. Jane is the best researcher. She is on the strongest writing team in the history of News of the Week. But Patti isn't bad. Patti, actually, is pretty fucking great. She's a great researcher. And a good writer.

Patti smoked and did drugs and had sex and lived with fifty locks on her door and wore pants! She wore pants to work!

Why had Jane ever felt superlative before?!

She knew so little then. Or maybe she just knew all the wrong things.

She was a cool woman though.

She'd said she loved Chad. She told Max she'd wait for love. But what did that mean? What does she know of love? Does she, really, know anything? Had she, with Chad? With all those boys before? With her parents?

Does she even know anything at all?

She tries to make sense of it — to get some coherency in her categorization of what she understands, give the gift of articulation, the necessity of it, to her wider schema, but she can't. She's too high, maybe. Or too stupid.

Her thoughts, even as she tries to connect them, don't stay in one line long enough to make sense.

.

.

.

Earlier in the night, when they finished dancing, sweaty and tired, and he started smiling at her as they discussed music with Noah, Jane thought she would go home with Sam. And now, hours past that, sober now (almost, maybe, vaguely), right at the point she'd usually remember that moment with embarrassment in the light of solemnity — thinking she'd gone crazy, thinking she'd imagined the whole thing —, she's actually thinking, yes. She would've gone home with Sam, if the night had gone a little differently. If Cindy had drank less and her husband been more in-control. If Sam had known enough of Noah not to provoke him, to keep his anger from him, Jane would've gone home with Sam. Home with him! They were going to home together.

That's probably what would've happened.

Or maybe not.

She doesn't actually know. She has never gone home with someone before. She really has no experience.

With Max, it had felt like she had nothing to lose (apart from the obvious, which it had never really been about anyway).

But no. Here, she… she.

He'd wanted to, hadn't he?

He'd looked at her, spent the whole night looking at her like— like he knew it too.

Oh, wow. She's dizzy. She needs more water. Maybe another hit. Nevermind. Nope. Not sober, not even vaguely. She has no idea what she's saying — saying! To who?! No. Thinking.

Should she restart the pill?

No, no. Jane close her eyes and lets the winter breeze blow against her eyelids.

What is she thinking? What is she trying to say? What does she mean?

She forgets about that by morning.

.

.

.

It seems like maybe Jane has it figured out, almost… like, maybe, she understands something. She may be far down the line, but at least she knows which direction she's standing in. She's at Patti's party and she has the map.

And then everything changes again. Any map she has points to something different. Or, better yet, has been ripped from her hands.

She's still on the balcony. She's still wrapped in one of the blankets from Patti's couch. She's still flying.

And then Patti climbs through the open window to meet Jane on the fire escape.

Most people are gone. Gabe is in the bathtub, Nora is cooking (something good) and there are two clippers talking right next to the window.

"I had so much fun tonight," Jane exhales, content, as Patti sits on the window.

Patti 's tired. "I'm so glad you stood up your date!"

A laugh. "Ah, my dad is gonna be livid."

"You stood up your dad?"

Jane exhales in a short, relieved huff. Then she nods, like she's conspiring, and laughs, easier. "It was a job interview." Another laugh, a little sadder. "Since I'm not marrying Chad, Daddy thinks I need to work somewhere with more appropriate men." She inhales shortly, ready to say more, then stops.

That says enough, doesn't it? Says it all.

Patti leans forward, taking Jane's hand. "What do you think?"

Patti's hand is tiny. Patti, herself, is so small.

Her parents would be shocked at Patti. In her long dress and no bra and unruly hair.

Jane thinks she is wild. Jane thinks she is beautiful. Jane thinks she is free.

Jane blinks. "I love my job."

Patti inhales and squeezes Jane's hand. "Jane?" She begins excitedly. Jane tilts her head forward, waiting. "Are you becoming a career girl?"

She wants to laugh, but it doesn't come to her.

"Maybe I always was."

And then Patti lets go of her and stands up, gripping onto the railing, yelling into the night. "Hey, everybody! Jane Hollander is a career girl!"

"Patti!"

"Jane!" It's said in protest, loud and petulant and full of humor.

Patti moves, urging Jane to join her, yelling off the escape. Jane stands, pauses, and then without further hesitation, yells into the empty alley: "I'm a career girl!"

"Whoo!" Patti screams. "News of the Week is the best magazine!"

"I love my job!"

"It's my birthday!"

"And I'm not having a white wedding!"

Patti is about to yell something else, but stops and pulls back, facing Jane. "Whoa! What?!"

Jane swallows. She could almost cry out of nothing more than a feeling of pure relief. "I lost my virginity to my neighbor." It's the first time she's ever said it aloud. Patti is the first person she's told.

Patti's mouth is agape. Then, under her breath, she responds with: "I had sex with my dad's best friend when I was in college."

And then they're both laughing, together.

"I lost my mother's bracelet. And I blamed it on my grandmother!"

The muscles in Jane's stomach hurt.

"Oh," Patti exhales around her laugh, "I've wanted to tell you about something for the longest time."

She's so earnest, so honest, it lays Jane low.

"Some of the other girls and I are filing an Equal Employment claim," Patti continues. "It's illegal for the them not to let us write. And we want the policy changed."

"What?!"

She moves with the force of it, the surprise of it; completely taken. It's like a cold bucket of water has just been dropped on her head.

Patti is anxious now, smiling, waiting; nodding — as though that will assuage something.

It doesn't.

"You're suing News of the Week?"

"No, no. Not suing. We're complaining. Officially. And I'm gonna write an article about it!"

"Is this why've been so secretive at the office?"

Patti nods.

"You and Cindy and all the other girls?"

"Yeah."

"Oh." Jane lets out her breath slowly. She can't think.

"Come on," Patti urges, and Jane wishes it were two minutes ago when Patti was holding her hand and Jane's next steps were beginning to make sense. "Be a part of it with us."

As she's saying it though, she's seeing the answer on Jane's face. By the end of the sentence, Patti's smile has faded.

Jane can hardly breathe.

"You deserve it." Patti gives.

Jane licks her lips, frozen.

"I know I've had a really lovely time tonight, but…" she shakes her head. Patti looks upset. "I'm way too high to think about whatever it is you're saying."

And then, without waiting for Patti's next attempt, Jane turns and crawls back through the window.

She can't think about this. She can't understand it. Nothing makes sense.

She finds her coat in Patti's bedroom and manages a smile to everyone still left in the apartment before leaving, though half don't even seem conscious. By the time Jane is walking out the door, only a minute or so later, Patti hasn't come back inside.

.

.

.

Her heart is going miles a minute, but her limbs feel like they're sinking down into the mattress. She's so heavy, but she can't close her eyes. The room is spinning and she's falling.

Jane thought marijuana was supposed to calm you down?

So she lays there, for what feels like forever, not thinking about the consequences of Patti's news or plotting out the future trajectory of what Patti is doing. She's just thinking about it — about the EEOC, about suing News of the Week (a threat of a suit might as well be a lawsuit) — over and over and over and over. She's up so long, she doesn't even realize she's fallen asleep until her alarm goes off the next morning.

.

.

.

Jane is hungover. She's sore. Her head aches. She slept less than an hour. Too much happened too quickly and she feels like she can't quite catch her breath.

She goes into work first thing. And, despite knowing she doesn't feel well, she's also energized. She's invigorated. She picks a yellow dress she'd bought last summer for a party in the village that she'd never actually worn (it was too forward), but she wears it now, she lets her hair down like she's seen the other girls her age do (the other career girls, not those Jane grew up with). She's ready for the day, for the new dawn, for the new decade. Ready to prove Patti wrong.

Patti is being short-sighed. She's suing over a non-problem. There are women reporters everywhere! Nora was there all night — Nora writes! Betsy Wade has been in the copy room at the Times for over a decade! Women all over the world write.

All Patti needs to do is ask.

Jane loves her job. She loves her job. And what if she lose her job because of this? Will she bear the brunt of punishment for such a silly and insolent act?

Patti's wrong. She is.

Jane is a career girl. And Patti is wrong.

It's rude. Hurtful, maybe. Cruel, even, to those who have given her a career. Jane is the top researcher because of Sam and now Patti's asking her to turn around and demand Sam give her his job? He's the star reporter, not her. What does he owe her?

The magazine doesn't owe them anything more than they've given.

If Patti wants to write, there are other places to go.

.

.

.

"You look chipper," Patti says when she finally corners Jane in the wire room.

"I am." She holds the paper, scanning the lines of news coming in over the telex. The other people in the room walk out. "You know, I don't get the big deal with marijuana. I didn't feel anything."

Patti shakes her head, confused.

"Where is Sam?"

"In Albany with Gabe."

"What are you doing with Gregory?"

Jane blinks. "He's writing a story on an artist who paints well on LSD and I'm helping him."

"Oh, I have an idea," Patti says, stepping closer, clearly only waiting for any opportunity to say it, "why don't you dose and join our lawsuit?"

She's in Jane's face. There's nothing sweet about Patti now.

"No, thank you."

"Why not, Jane?"

She inhales. Then closes her mouth and leans closer, not ducking away from Patti's glare. "Because I think your filing, or whatever it is, is rude, not to mention unnecessary."

Patti doesn't back down. "Last night you said you were a career girl!"

"I am!" She can hear herself getting louder as she goes on, but she's so angry, so infuriated, she doesn't stop herself. "One who works hard, plays by the rules, and advances on merit."

Suddenly, right before her last word, the telex cut off and Jane has fully yelled at Patti in the now-otherwise silent room.

It stops her short. It stops both of them.

Jane steels herself in her shoes and takes a deep breath.

Patti is looking at her as though she is an idiot, as though Jane is missing something... as though she pities Jane.

"You cannot advance here," Patti responds, slow and purposeful, enunciating each word to try to make her point. "You can't write."

"Are you sure? Because I think I can." With that, Jane walks past Patti, papers pressed against her chest. She turns back before hitting the door, holding her chin high. "And I don't bite the hand that feeds me, Patti."

.

.

.

"Look," Cindy says when it's her turn at bat, "when I first started at News of the Week, I was intimidated by you." Jane smiles kindly. "You know, you are so smart and competent and confident. And your posture is amazing."

"That's very kind of you." Jane appreciates the effort, vaguely, but it's pointless.

"I— I thought you could do anything." Cindy, for a moment, looks so sad, her eyes wide like a puppy, so much so that Jane is actually moved by it. "But now I know that you can't. You can't grow. You can't write. At least, not at News of the Week. And— and that seems like such a shame." She shakes her head. "Especially for someone like you."

Jane is moved. She understands their desires. She just thinks they're wrong.

"I agree with what you and the other girls want to do, just not how you want to do it."

Cindy is drinking a gin martini. Jane thinks back to Patti's party and Cindy's outburst. Cindy obviously has other things she needs to be concerned with, not this.

"Have you asked to write?" Jane continues. "Have you pitched an idea to anyone?!"

"Well, I sort of talked to Wick about it."

That's exactly it.

"Wick doesn't work here anymore," Jane explains. "Do you know why that is?" Cindy smiles, but it's confused. "Because he's old school. So Finn brought in Gregory, who's from a different world."

Cindy sips her martini. "So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to work hard. I'm going to prove my value to Gregory." And she already has. She's scheduled a private viewing of Dan Kucera's newest show in just a few hours. And Gregory knows her value too — he's bringing her for the "different angle" she supposedly always has (he'd called it the "Jangle"). She is proving her value. "And then I'm going to ask for an opportunity to advance."

She'll do it. And Gregory, a man of the future, a man of a whole different generation, a different world than Wick, will say Yes.

Jane, smartly, sips her water, holding her straw between her fingers.

"When?"

Jane shrugs. "When the time is right."

"I think the problem is bigger than that."

Jane has always taken her for straightforward — easier — than some of the other girls. Cindy's married, for one, and never seemed competitive the way the others did. Honestly, Jane had never even noticed Cindy much at all until she'd started hanging around with Patti.

"Women are marching in the streets," Cindy continues. "Asking to be acknowledged. To get paid for their work, to— to be noticed. Making demands—"

"But you're not making demands, you're sneaking around. You are. You're plotting against our bosses, out friends." Jane shakes her head. "Men aren't the enemy, Cindy. You can talk to them, maybe even your husband."

Cindy swallows. She halts.

See, this is what Jane means.

Have they really thought this through?

Patti is with Doug. She's his researcher and she's sleeping with him… why not just talk to him? Right now, Doug is Finn's golden boy... didn't Patti ever try to ask Doug? Or is she just going to go behind Doug's back?

"I guess if anyone can break the mold," Cindy gives after a moment, reluctant, "you can, Jane."

.

.

.

Jane sees the opportunity unfolding like clockwork.

See? It was easy.

"You know," she tells Gregory later that afternoon, all alone in the private viewing, "there's a big women's liberation march planned for August. I heard some of the girls talking about it in the pit."

They've been having fun all afternoon. Talking revolution, Joan Didion, hallucinogens, critical art-theory — it's a minded conversation between intellectual equals, or, at the very least, contemporaries. This is the moment she's been waiting for.

"You know what I dig about the women's movement?" Gregory asks. "The Pill and bras on fire."

Jane laughs, but she's too nervous to think about anything other than her next steps.

She looks from Gregory back to the art before them. "I'm wondering if maybe there's a story there."

"Yeah? What's the story?"

Jane turns and walks away, trying to act casual, as though she's simply musing as she takes in the art.

"Well, the women's movement seems to be growing, but… will it endure?" She turns back, stomach fluttering.

"Or it is just a gimmick?" Gregory looks at her, hands on his hips. "That's a good idea. I like it."

Here. Here it is. Here she goes.

"If none of the guys want to write it, I could take a stab. I— I mean, I'd have better access to some of the events than the guys."

Gregory steps closer. "And you'd bring the Jangle."

She chuckles. Yes yes yes! She would.

He stops less than a foot from her. "You want me to talk to Finn?"

Jane nods. "Please."

"You got it."

And there you go! She's done it! See? See?

Once they finish here, she'll tell Patti.

No need to involve lawyers, the EEOC. Just ask. God, this couldn't have worked out better. She'd been telling Gregory that she wants to go out more, to hit the pavement, as he'd called it, on stories. But it's fate she's here today while Sam went off to do reporting without her. It's a perfect case of providence that she can be here, that she was available, left to keep house, seemingly, without her reporter, so she could work with Gregory.

She has a story. She has an opportunity.

And she's so proud of herself!

So proud. So caught up in the pounding of her heart that she turns the corner of the curation, of the display, following Gregory's beckoning call with no hesitancy, no expectation of what she may find except another piece of art.

It's not art though.

It's not.

Despite what he says — pants unzipped and flaccid penis before her — it's not that.

It's not art.

And it's. It's like a freight train, hitting Jane, and all she can do (as she's been trained every single day of her life) is smile and laugh and shake her head as though she's in-on the joke, as though her boss did not just open his fly and flash her, as though she saw it coming, as though any of that is understandable.

She manages to keep smiling until he zips back up, laughing at his joke — is it a joke? is it funny? — and then turns around. It's only when he walks away that she can even inhale.

And so she forgets all about her story. She forgets all about Patti and Cindy and the EEOC and advancement. She takes deep breaths and doesn't close her eyes too hard lest she imagine everything she isn't seeing. She even lets him put his hand on her lower back as they cross the street to keep her safe (from what? She's not safe here, is she? Is he supposed to be safe?).

It's a joke, isn't it? Funny, right?

Her hand is shaking.

She spends the afternoon in a haze. She sits at her desk until the day is long over. Until people leave. Until Sam comes back from upstate and asks her to do some legislative research in the morning. And she wants to ask him, why didn't you take me with you? She wants to shake him, to hold him by the shoulders and shake him until he understands something she isn't even able to say aloud.

She stays there until most of the pit and almost all of the bullpen is gone; until the light is off in Finn's office and dimmed in Gregory's, and then, finally, she leaves.

.

.

.

When Jane gets home, a Kucera painting is already waiting for her.

She'd eaten on the way from the office, but it makes her sick.

She puts the painting up — it's expensive. Awfully generous, isn't he — and then, after a moment, turns it around so all she sees is the empty back of the canvas. And then she really is sick, and she throws up in the hallway bathroom.

.

.

.

Jane doesn't sleep, again. She keeps waking up. She gets up, wanders. She settles in her entryway and looks at the back of the painting Gregory had sent. She goes into her living room and picks up her phone, but who will she even call? Her mother? What friends, really? Patti?

What will she even say? What even is the matter?

She looks again at the back of the painting, staring for what feels like hours.

She'd really thought she was getting somewhere, really thought she was going somewhere. She could imagine the story, imagine her name in the byline. She knew how she'd write it. She could see the conclusion of it easily.

But then it didn't happen.

Nothing like that happened.

She feels sick, again.

She feels humiliated. Somehow, somewhere along the line, she felt humiliated by it — he's the one who was naked, nude before her, and yet she is the one who feels exposed? Who feels violated?

Jane doesn't sleep for the second night in a row.

.

.

.

Sam comes to her desk first thing Wednesday morning with a cup of coffee from the bodega. She opens the lid, watching the steam rise into the air.

"I got the call last night," he says, sitting against her desk, the sleeves of his sweater rolled to his elbows. "When Our Boys Come Home is going to print."

Jane smiles. Good. It'll be their first cover in a few months. And it'll be their longest story to date. "Congratulations."

"Hey," Sam leans a little closer, "you okay? You seemed tired yesterday. Pot can do that to you."

He's smiling as he says it, his legs long right beside her, crossed at the ankle.

She says nothing. It's a gross miscalculation on his part. It's been on two days since Patti's party, but so much has happened, she's almost completely forgotten about the drugs or Sam's arm beneath her hand.

Sam glances around, confirms the movement of others and that the desks around hers are empty, and then lowers his voice as he continues. He's not looking at her, but down at the floor, at his own legs.

"I can't stop thinking about Cindy and her husband." He confesses. It's slow, like it's weighing on him.

She knows Sam's not talking about the fight. He's not talking about Lenny's views on the war and Noah's reaction. He's not talking about Noah punching Lenny in the jaw.

He's talking about what Cindy said Lenny had done.

Jane had almost forgotten about it.

They were fighting about the war, about the purpose of it, about Lenny's beliefs that boys like Noah had been "sold a bunch of goods" or whether democracy was worth protecting at all. It was a conversation about the purpose of the war itself and it was always going to end poorly, she can see that now. Except then Cindy — drunk, angry — told the whole party how Lenny had given her one year after marriage to have a job before becoming a housewife. Jane knew about this. Cindy and her husband had agreed, she'd previously understood, to a year of work while Lenny finished law school, and then Cindy'd stop and they'd begin their family. That's not what happened though. Even if Cindy had wanted it (which Jane now knew she didn't), Lenny hadn't stuck to the plan. Instead, he had put a hole in her diaphragm. He put a hole in his wife's diaphragm and Cindy, drunkly, told the whole party.

Jane knew what it meant back then. She remembers the moment, she remembers Sam's long sigh behind her, Noah's fist, and Patti trying to pull Cindy away.

But now — right here, at her desk at nine thirty on Wednesday morning — she suddenly understands something else.

It's all of a sudden (like a lot seems to be these days - except this. This. It's more.).

She has to talk to Cindy.

The last time she really felt like this, years ago, was when suddenly, instantaneously, without any forethought or previous inclination, Jane knew she had to quit her current job and go work for News of the Week. This, like that, is a moment where suddenly everything seems to make a sort of sense sense; as though a type of connection has been bridged.

It's Cindy's body. Children are something to be discussed, decided upon together, but that wasn't the problem. It was that Cindy was using her body in a way she thought was safe, she controlled something, and then her husband took that away from her. Her husband made it unsafe. He made it unsafe and he didn't tell her.

It's just something she hadn't articulated to herself before. But she understands it now.

It's power. It's control. Lenny and Gregory — they're connected, aren't they? It's the same thing, isn't it?

All those locks on Patti's door.

It's all connected.

Jane doesn't feel unsure. Her heart is pounding.

There is something to what Cindy is saying, isn't there? This is what she should write about. This aspect of the women's liberation movement. It isn't simply about not cooking dinner for your husband anymore. It's about control. Autonomy. It's about being viewed as a person and not a possession.

"Sam," she says, reaching out, but then she pulls her hand back. He glances at her. "Why do you never come down here?"

"Hm?"

"You never come down to the pit."

He gestures over his body, perched against her desk. "I'm here right now?"

She shakes her head, exhales in a huff. Doesn't he see? Doesn't he get it?

"No," she breathes, "if you ever want me to do something, you call me to you."

Sam frowns. She knows his answer — he is the reporter. She is his researcher. Except he doesn't say that.

"Never thought about it like that," he says instead.

He pats her shoulder as he walk away, still thinking it over.

.

.

.

Jane asks Cindy about those meetings Cindy is going to.

The women sit around and drink and eat finger-food and discuss their parents. They don't talk about revolution or plans or marches. They don't talk about unequal treatment or withheld opportunities or men mistreating them. They just talk about their parents.

Jane doesn't know how this is connected to women's liberation, except in the obvious, though attenuated, definitions, but she does understand something in it.

Were her parents in love? Did they ever talk?

Yes. And No. They weren't really in love were they? As much as they were simply… married?

It's mortifying to hear about. To think about. Her parents were nothing like the ones discussed here. They loved their children. Jane and her brother were always paid attention to, always given everything. She's separate from the stories these women are telling about parents who hated each other, mothers who hated the fact that they had children.

Why though? How is she separate? Her parents aren't any different except that they're wealthy, that they have an image to maintain, a lifestyle they lead as her "parents" that mandates they act in certain ways. How, really, is Jane other? If he hadn't intervened, wouldn't she have married Chad and never, maybe for her whole life, realized she wasn't actually in love with him? Aren't these women the same? Isn't her mother?

When she was younger, too young, surely, she'd read the Feminine Mystique. She read it for the explicit discussions (she was just trying to understand), but now, she thinks of Betty Friedan's "the problem that has no name" (college-educated women who, once married, put their kids to bed, baked brownies for cub scouts, laid next to their husbands, and the whole time were wondering, but were too scared to ask: is this all?).

The problem. The Problem. The Problem That Has No Name.

The Feminine Mystique. 1963.

It's 1970 now. And still, just three months back, Jane would've married Chad Huntington, who worked at Townley Investments. Chad Huntington of Huntington's Metal. Chad Huntington who would've taken over her father's business when he retired. And she would've lived upstate or in Connecticut and she would've had three children and a housekeeper and a husband who worked in the city and she would've spent all day at the club or at home and she would've thought, without even knowing why: is this all?

That's what she would've done.

Jane listens to the women speak. She thinks about her life now. And she thinks about her parents.

It's a good story. There's a lot to it. She has good material here.

.

.

.

She hears nothing from Finn — nothing more from Gregory — for another week.

She goes to another talk with Cindy.

And she starts outlining what she would say, if they let her.

.

.

.

Jane asks Cindy (Patti is still angry with her) to give her a name.

Eleanor Norton Holmes of the ACLU.

Jane knows the law. She knows it well. She isn't sure it can succeed — the Civil Rights Act has never stood up for women.

Eleanor tells her to call the EEOC, to try it, so she does.

"I don't think these men know it's illegal," she says, from the comfort of her home during the lunch hour. "They're very liberal and have daughters and I think we should talk to them."

The man on the other end laughs, loudly; rudely.

"Don't be a naive little girl," he chastises. "People who have power don't like to give up that power. What's so wonderful about your case is that it couldn't be more clear-cut and that's going to change if you let on. You have to organize and keep it secret and file a complaint. If you ask them about it, they will hire two token women and that will be the end of it."

.

.

.

She sees more of it now. All the time.

Like, how you think of a red car and suddenly you only see red cars.

Men she thought were different weren't — they simply disguised it better.

Ned, who she always knew to be progressive, who has always supported the women in the pit (his office is in the pit), still talks of how pretty she is, her contribution to the magazine not her research, but getting Noah to smile for his photograph with Sam simply by being pretty. Finn's 'Atta girl. Gregory's you're just a big brain in a pretty little package, aren't you?

It's all of them. All of them. The men she though of as different — it's the same present, just with newer wrapping.

Well.

It's like the EEOC representative had said.

It's just like he said.

They had listened to her. Gregory has listened to her — he'd listened just enough to hire an outside writer for the "bra-burning" piece, as he called it. News of the Week's first story written by a woman — their first story with a woman's byline — and they contract Ruth Penney from Business Week.

Token female. Check. Work done.

Nothing more here.

The EEOC man was right. Cindy was right. Patti, this whole time, was right.

There is nothing more she can do.

.

.

.

Jane Hollander is going to sue News of the Week.

---

iv. revolutionary

She joins the cause right as the group of conspirators (revolters, she satisfies) is fracturing. Their attorney, Eleanor, is scheduling a press conference to be done when they file the complaint.

That's excessive, even for Jane, and it's over the line for the other girls. It's one thing to complain within the office, but another to do so on a national platform.

It's all she can think about. Sam spends their whole lunch agonizing about Noah — about how Noah can't find a job, about how Noah needs to do more (how can Sam recommend him if Noah can't even hold it together at a party?), about how Sam is stuck and feels like Noah is asking too much of him.

She's hardly paying attention though. Naomi is over at the bar alone. And Naomi, whom Jane otherwise doesn't like, is one of the girls that left the lawsuit.

"Well don't give up," she says to Sam, still looking at Naomi, "he's a friend."

Sam swallows. "He's a source."

Jane stops. She blinks. She looks at Sam sitting across the table.

Source?

They are friends, aren't they — Sam and Noah? They grew up together. Jane knows so much of it — where they lived in respect to each other, how Noah's mother used to yell at Sam for always tracking mud into her house. She knows Sam goes out with Noah for dinner and drinks and that he took Noah to Patti's party.

Just a source.

What does that leave her with?

She and Sam have had lunch at this exact table many times. And that one over there. And at that bar — everywhere in Cole's really, for years…. She and Sam are friends, right? They're partners, she'd thought.

But if Noah, who he's known his whole life, is no more than a source, then where does that leave her?

She's debated telling Sam about the lawsuit since day one. She thought, before, he'd probably support her. He would support her wanting to write, though she isn't sure if he'd condone suing the magazine. After all, the magazine gave him his start; it gave him a name. He'd be stupid to go against it. But he supports her, doesn't he?

But if Noah is only a source, what is Jane?

"Okay," Sam stands. "Let's get going." He grabs his coat. "See if that pouch from D.C. has arrived. Mike sent me some freeze dried ice cream from the Air and Space Museum." Sam leaves some bills on the table to cover them. "New flavor. Mint chocolate chip. Want to try some?"

"No, thanks." She smiles at him anyway; smiles like nothing is wrong. "I'll see you later?"

He frowns. "Sure." And then he watches, still frowning, as Jane gets up and walks over to where Naomi is sitting. By the time Jane is facing Naomi, Sam has left.

"Hi."

Naomi eyes her warily. "Hi." It's suspicious. They've never gotten on.

Jane takes a deep breath. If she can get Naomi back on board with the complaint - Naomi, who is, admittedly, popular - then maybe the others will rejoin.

"I was wondering if I could talk to you about your conversation about a certain… press conference?"

Naomi goes back to reading her book and she doesn't look up to respond. "So you're part of it now?"

"I was hoping to be, but I heard a lot of girls are dropping out. Like you. And I wanted to hear your side."

"Look," Naomi says, "I have bigger things going on."

What could be bigger than this?

"Like what?"

"Like, personal, life things."

Oh. "Like what? Is your son okay?" Naomi doesn't answer, but she looks up at Jane and doesn't look back down. Jane takes a seat on the next stool. "Is your husband okay?"

Naomi closes her book. "I'm about to lose our apartment and the bank won't let me refinance without Brian's signature."

"Well obviously they know he's overseas."

"Still, need an authorization form. And I keep sending it, but the truck carrying the mail to the base got blown up. Twice."

Jane inhales. "They can't keep you out of your home because you can't get a piece of paper signed."

Naomi looks at her like Patti had once before — like she's an idiot.

"They definitely can."

"Well, let's do something about it then."

"Why?"

Jane licks her lips. "Because that's not right."

They can find a way. They have embeds in Vietnam. They have sources. Surely they know someone wherever Naomi's husband is deployed, right?

Naomi should've come to her earlier. Naomi has a thing with Sam, she should've gone to him. They could've helped. They can.

.

.

.

"Look, here's the situation." Sam is practically yelling into the phone, finger plugging his other ear to better hear.

"We need you to type up a, um—" Financial letter of authorization, Jane mouths and Sam mimics it aloud into the phone "— and get it signed by one of our boys in the field. He's with, uh—" First infantry division, Naomi says quickly, and Sam, again, repeats it to their embed. "Brian Barclay." There's a pause. "What's that? The 'Big Red One'?"

"Yeah yeah," Naomi urges, breathless. "That's him."

"Yes. That's it." Sam yells back into the receiver. "Jane's here. She's gonna give you the details." He turns to her. "Hollander. Yes. You remember her?" His lips thin out and he looks annoyed at whatever he is hearing. "Yep." He looks at Jane. "Yes. She still is, yep."

She rolls her eyes.

"Sorry bud," Sam interjects. "We're on a deadline here."

Jane crosses behind the front counter where Sam is standing.

"I'm putting Jane on the phone right now," he says. She puts her hand on his back and he moves aside for her, handing her the receiver.

"Oh hi there, Joe." She mimics Sam's volume and holding her finger into her other ear. "Oh, you too." She smiles at Sam in thanks as he walks back.

She can count on him, for some things.

"Ah, that's so sweet."

Naomi blinks.

"Listen," Jane says, "I'm going to dictate to you. Are you ready?"

Naomi holds out the paper for Jane to read off of.

She's glad she spoke with Naomi, glad Sam will help her, glad she has the resources she has.

Glad she's here. Glad she bringing suit so that, next time, she can do more.

Next time, maybe, Naomi can sign for herself.

.

.

.

"You look around," their lawyer, says about their press conference, "and there's plenty of angry women. And nobody's listening. But people will listen to you," Eleanor says, with all the gusto of a seasoned and charismatic litigator. "You're the creme de la creme. When women like you get angry, that's when you know that something's really really wrong."

Cindy inhales sharply. "So we're your test case? You want people to see us."

"Yes. And hear you. And do right by you. Now, I'm sorry if you feel misled. But I didn't take this case just to change your lives for the better. I took this case to make some damn noise and change the world."

Jane understands. Jane knows.

"If we want to make noise," she says, ready, armed, aiming (Eleanor convinces with the strength of a lawyer; Jane plans with the confidence of a top researcher stuck behind her reporter, unable to write), "we should hold the press conference on March twenty-third."

"Why is that?"

Jane looks at Cindy, then back to Eleanor, shoulders straight.

"Because News of the Week will be publishing an article examining the Women's Movement, but written by a woman who is not a regular employee at News of the Week."

"Ha ha!" Eleanor grins. "Jane Hollander, where have you been all my life?"

Waiting, Jane almost says. I've been here, waiting.

.

.

.

"He had a girlfriend," She confides, two martinis in. Just a few weeks ago, she and Cindy were in Cole's, arguing about the lawsuit, and now they're here again and Jane is promising to rally all the women back and take her role as one of the leaders on the forefront of the movement. "For years."

She's too tipsy to be talking about this.

But they're discussing men and Love Story and contraceptives. And Jane's parents.

They're things she's never said to anyone before. And Jane isn't even close with Cindy!

Or maybe she is. Maybe they're good friends now.

"Madeleine." Jane continues. She'd seen the woman before. Not any older back then than Jane was now. "My brother and I knew about her. And my mother knew about her. And sometimes I would hear them arguing about her. But then my mom just… accepted it. And one day I asked her why, and she said 'What do I care? It makes my life easier.'"

She has been drinking too much. She's teared up without meaning to.

She hadn't thought of Madeleine in years. Not once, until — until Cindy took her to that meeting. Not until then.

"Well," Jane says after a moment. But she leaves it there. There really isn't more to say on that, is there. So she takes the darts on the counter instead and slides off her stool, aiming at the board.

There are other things happening beside the lawsuit. There is Naomi's husband and the piece of paper hopefully on its way back from Vietnam right now. There are Jane's parents. There is Sam, whatever that means. And Noah. Tomorrow or maybe later in the week, Cindy will accompany Angie, Finn's assistant, to a doctor Cindy saw once, right after her wedding night, to perform the operation that Jane (and all the girls in the pit) gave money for.

She's never thought much on these things before. About locks on door and parents who don't talk and women who don't have enough money or resources to go see a good doctor and not some medical student in a back alley.

Angie is lucky Cindy found out, lucky Cindy knows what to do and has done it before. Naomi is lucky she talked to Jane, Jane is lucky she has Sam. Jane is lucky she's never had to think of refinancing an apartment because even if she didn't have a husband, she always had her father; and if she got pregnant, she always had help.

Lucky.

"I can go too," Jane offers when she sits down. She's made all her throws. "With Angie, I mean. If you don't want to."

"I do." Cindy says after a moment. "I want to go. I want to help."

Jane nods.

"Have you ever gone?" Cindy looks over at Jane. "I mean, with a friend or something?"

"No." Jane smiles down at her drink. She wonders why. Statistically, she must have had friends in such a position. Friends who knew where to go. Maybe no one thought they could ever ask her? "And I have the pill."

"Oh," Cindy turns in her stool, surprised. "You and Sam finally?"

"No, no." Jane swallows and shakes her head. "Never."

Cindy sighs. "No? Well, that's probably for the best."

Yes. It is.

.

.

.

Actually, she's not taking the pill. She hasn't for months.

She never refilled her initial prescription after the first month ended. She has a few pills left though.

She's not thinking of anything particular, but she does she decide it may be time to restart it.

.

.

.

It's not purposeful, when Jane figures it out. She's simply getting ready the next morning, choosing a dress, doing her hair, using cold spoons to take down the swelling under her eyes — and then there is her answer.

It feels like maybe she's been preparing for this her whole life.

They need to do it this way though — don't they understand? They need to have a press conference, just as Eleanor had said. It'll never be successful if they don't do it in public — if they do it behind closed doors, there is no accountability. They write the news. If they don't put out their narrative, News of the Week will put out their own.

They have to understand.

A press conferences is necessary.

Jane has to convince them to stay.

And so she does. She picks up invitations on her way in and books the restaurant out with her father's credit card so there is some privacy and then she comes in early and leaves them on the desks of the girls in the pit who have left the lawsuit.

And then she sees Fran. And Fran smiles, and looks away, long used-to not being given invitations.

And Jane stares. And she feels sorry. And she wants more for the woman who deserved to have it all. So she invites Fran to go have a private conversation in the bathroom and when she tells Fran what they're doing, her eyes fill with tears before Fran's do.

.

.

.

"So ladies," she says, sitting at the head of the table. "I understand I'm a little late to the parry, but I wanted to tell you all why I don't just think we should file this complain, I think we have to file it."

Dottie and Vivian look at each other, unsure.

"I call it the Jangle."

The angle she brings to everything, Gregory had said, once. Well, look at what she's bringing.

The girls laugh.

"It takes me an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for work every morning. And sometimes, I think about how much earlier I have to start my day than the guys."

Diane nods in agreement.

"But what if one morning I get up and the power is out in my building and I can't curl my hair?" There is a murmur of agreement. "Or see," she continues, "to put on my makeup?"

Vivian laughs. "Oh, the horror."

"Why then," she soldiers on, "do I feel embarrassed to ask my reporter what he needs? Why do I feel like I've already failed at my job?"

No one is laughing now.

.

.

.

She stays late with Naomi for the letter to come.

And when it arrives, the envelope is dirty. Straight here from Vietnam. The air in that bag came from a different country. The envelope itself looks like it's been through war.

Naomi opens it so fast, Jane is worried she'll rip the letter (the letter, the letter giving an adult woman control over an apartment that her inheritance bought, not her husband's).

She's been mean to Naomi in the past, jealous in Naomi's flirtation with Sam, cruel in her comments about Naomi's husband. But Jane watches with empathy now as Naomi opens the paper and looks at her husband's signature.

"This is it. Look there, it's where he signed it." Naomi's voice wavers. A smudge of dirt covers the latter third of the paper, right near his signature. "His hand must've been dirty."

And then, lost in a world Jane can't understand, Naomi, cocky and confident Naomi, leans her face to the paper and smells the dirt. Jane watches her whole body as she inhales, inhales until she can't anymore, holds the breath in her lungs for so long, it must burn. And then Naomi straightens and folds the letter and thanks Jane one more time before leaving.

.

.

.

Jane walks home even though it's far.

She thinks on Naomi, smelling the dirt.

She thinks on Sam and what favors he will do for her, which he won't. She thinks on her decision not to tell him. She thinks of his arm, his chest, underneath her hand.

Is there something he won't do, if she asks? Maybe. He's never really said No to her, if she can remember. So why, then, does it feel like she's always the one trying to catch up to him?

Has he wronged her before? Are there reasons she knows she shouldn't say anything to him?

Maybe.

Is there a difference between getting coffee for Wick and getting asked out by Sam?

Maybe. But probably not.

She thinks of Finn and his pursuit of a younger, hipper magazine.

She thinks of Love Story. Of Cindy's fantasies of killing the men in her life. She thinks of her parents. Of her brother. Of Patti. She thinks of Naomi, smelling the dirt from her husband's hand.

She think of sadness. Of Noah. Sam is misunderstanding it, isn't he? There is a sadness to Noah that Jane understands (the match, the match, she told him). There always has been, since the day she met him almost half a year ago. There's a sadness to Sam too. Maybe there is a sadness to everyone. Maybe everyone is trapped by something. Maybe, and Jane just never realized it. It's all connected — love and obligation and sex and freedom. Trauma.

There is so much she has never understood. So much she is trying to understand now.

She walks home. And she thinks of Naomi, smelling the dirt.

.

.

.

She does want his advice.

Vaguely. She knows the answer and she is sure in it. There is nothing anyone can say to change her mind. Honestly, she's never been as sure about anything before. How naive she was, just a year ago. How little she knew, back then.

But she wants to tell him. She wants to hear what he will say.

He makes twenty-thousand dollars a year, Patti had told her. That's almost three times what she makes. He's the reporter, he started before her, he's older, and he has a graduate degree. But he makes three times as much as her. And Jane works as hard as he does. Jane, sometimes, works harder than he does.

Jane watches him in the office. She levels her gaze until he looks up to meet her eyes.

He doesn't smile. She likes every expression he makes. She feels it all the way down to her toes.

Jane looks away first. She won't say anything to him.

.

.

.

The Saturday before, just two days before the press conference, everyone is called into Ned's office to pick what Finn calls a "historic cover" because a woman is writing for the magazine (ha!).

"It'll shock our readers come Monday, that's for sure," Alex says.

"Yeah, something will," Vivian whispers as Jane passes by, following Sam to the far side of the room.

Finn and Gregory are optioning covers with Ned, asking for photographs that both speak toward the feminist movement while also pulling-in readers. They're proposing known leaders of the movement. Radicals, Ned calls them. They're cringing at photos of the conventionally-unattractive, older women (the ones who are only feminists because they can't find a husband, the joke goes), as though they don't belong on the cover (as though News of the Week has ever kept Nixon off because his jowls).

Patti sends Jane a look and Jane crosses her arms over her chest.

Right.

All week she's been doing everything better: anywhere she could've been lacking, she's pushing harder now — better, better — everything she can do to prepare for the twenty-third.

And still, Gregory tells her to smile more. Men over the phone say she sounds cute. Your girl?, Finn says when he asks Sam to bring her up.

It's no surprise they're trying to put a babe in a bikini on the cover story meant to depict nuance in the feminist movement.

Sam walks out before they're done.

"You're leaving a staff meeting," Jane asks as she catches up with him.

Sam has always disliked Gregory. Good instincts, in the end.

"Whatever," Sam huffs as he falls into his chair. "Assholes."

Jane swallows and says nothing. She taps her fingers on his desk. Just wait, she thinks as she watches all the men slowly emerge from Ned's office down in the pit. Just wait.

.

.

.

Sunday morning there are coffee and donuts at the ACLU building where they all stand around for Eleanor to read through the final version that will be sent to the EEOC promptly at nine-forty five tomorrow morning, ten minutes before the cameras go live.

And then, one by one, they take the complaint. Jane looks at it, she touches it. She flips through page after page until she finds her name, middle name and all, and signs in the blue pen passing around.

She looks at her signature, nods, and then gives Patti the clipboard.

Everything happens tomorrow. Tomorrow, her whole life will change.

There is no going back now.

And then Eleanor points to her and tells Jane that she will be the one to speak, she will sit before the cameras, and tell her story.

"Alright," she says, not hesitating for more than a moment. "I'll do it."

Her story is a good one. An easier one, maybe, to stomach for the everyman than if someone else were speaking. Jane is not radical. Jane is not outspoken.

Jane is a good girl. And she's in revolt.

.

.

.

"Good Morning," she says to Sam as he comes up the stairs from the waiting area. It may be the last time this happens.

"Hollander," he's not stopping.

She falls in line behind him as he greets the people he passes. He doesn't even look over his shoulder to ensure she is behind him before he begins speaking to her.

"I got a note from Bea Burkhart," he holds the small envelope over his shoulder.

"Whoa! About When Our Boys Come Home?"

"Yep," all happy and smug.

Jane grins. "Congratulations."

Sam takes a seat at his desk and swivels his chair out to face Jane.

"The last time she sent a note was to Peter for his investigation into falsified medical reports."

"Then it was a straight shot to the Moscow bureau for him," Jane supplies.

"She mentioned you," he says, putting the card, still in its envelope, atop a pile of other papers on his desk. "As head researcher."

"She did?" When this story was written, she wasn't yet Head Researcher. "Thank you for telling me that."

She smiles.

Sam, abroad, running a bureau.

He can't take her now. He wouldn't of, of course. He never could. But he really can't, now.

She's proud of him though. Overwhelmingly so. She wants to hug him. To reach out. To touch him. To jump up and down. He's got it! He's always had it. Star-fucking-reporter. Abroad! Another bureau! Sam, in charge!

"Oh," she remembers as she's leaving, turning back after she is past his desk, "how's Noah been since the piece ran?"

"Same," Sam says. "He likes to drink beer."

A laugh. He'd given Sam (and her, but mostly Sam) shit for ordering old fashions once; bullied Sam into changing his regular order.

"I actually got a few job leads for him."

Good. Good.

"So he's more than a source?"

Sam swallows. "That fight at Patti's was a one-time thing. It's not like he walks around punching people."

No, he's more than a source. He's Sam's friend. And Jane, too, is more than Sam's researcher. She's a friend.

"I'm actually stopping by his place tonight," Sam offers. "You wanna come?"

Jane smiles, giving Sam a look, and he rolls his eyes in response, but there's humor in it.

"I have plans," she says, "but please tell him I said Hi."

She likes Noah. She likes him a lot. She likes what he does for Sam.

"Will do."

She'd like to be invited again, in the future. If Sam wants to ask her again. If he doesn't hate her after tomorrow. He won't, will he? Next week, or maybe the week after, they will go out again and they'll ask her to join and this time Jane will say Yes. This time, she won't have plans. They'll go have a beer in Time's Square and afterward they'll all walk to the train together.

And it'll be warmer. She won't have a coat. And she won't feel bad about tugging on Sam's lapel for his attention. She won't be worried about Noah's demeanor. Noah will have a job. Jane will have made a stance. And Sam will be proud of both of them.

Jane is still smiling by the time she makes it back to her desk.

.

.

.

It's not as though she's not scared. Double negative, but closer to the truth than she's not scared. Because she is. But not scared. Just — not not scared. She'll be speaking — on live television, on radio broadcasts, in interviews — to everyone, everyone she's ever known. They'll all see her. Everyone she knows, everyone she has ever met, regardless of whether they listen or not, will not pass the following week without seeing her face. Like how she used to think about everyone seeing Sam's cover. But this isn't a cover. It's not a story she wrote. Jane is the story.

It will change their opinion of her. Some for the better, some not.

Really, there were some days (many, many days... most days) where it wasn't so bad. She loves research. She has loved her time at News of the Week. Early mornings and lots of coffee and late nights and whiskey from Sam's bottom drawer and being in the pit with the typewriters and the sound of the telexes. She loved calling people and saying on the phone that she's calling from News of the Week! She loved getting covers, she loved standing beside her reporter during all the strides he has made.

She wants more, yes. She deserves more.

But she was happy too, for a long time.

That's all. Happy, before. But now — now, she wants more.

She wants it. She wants.

.

.

.

Jane is drunk when she answers the phone. Fully drunk. Won't-remember-half-of-it kind of drunk.

It's not so much the alcohol (though there is alcohol). It's her failure to eat after those donuts this morning. It's the buzz of the night, the dread of tomorrow. It's everything.

But she is drunk. And she misses it. She doesn't hear it. She won't even think of it, until much later. And then, she'll think of it all the time. For years, after, she will think of it.

A cleared throat on the line. "Jane, I—"

"What does the future say, Jane?!" Cindy yells loudly from Jane's bedroom.

"This is Jane. Hello."

There is a sound. A siren. Whoever is calling is on the street.

"It's me."

She inhales. She's been wanting to call.

"Sam?"

Patti is going to tell Doug tonight. Cindy will tell Lenny. Sam isn't her spouse, like they are, but—

"Ooh, Sam Rosenberg!" Patti says loudly, so loud, actually, that even Sam probably hears it.

"I'm here," he says, but it's quiet.

"He's adorable," Cindy adds, making swooning noises. "So dreamy!"

"Girls, please!" She yells back to them.

"Jane! Why don't you just ball him already?"

"Shut up!" She snaps, but she's laughing. She's too drunk. She wants to tell Sam. Why is he calling so late? Work? "Sam, I'm so sorry. I could barely hear you. Do you need something?"

A pause. Then: "No. I'm. Uh. I'll see you tomorrow."

She blinks.

"Bye."

And before she can say anything, she's hearing the dial tone.

"The future can wait, Jane," Cindy calls.

And Jane agrees. She can try Sam later. If it were important — if it were work — he would've said.

.

.

.

They all have dreams. Jane didn't realize it, but like her, they have plans.

Patti wants to go to Cairo and run their bureau. Cindy wants to travel and do features.

Jane dreams, too. She has plans, too.

She knows, too, that the hardest part is still coming. Tomorrow will be one step, but it won't be the end. It'll change everything (ha, she can't believe she used think sex would change things? What is that in comparison to this?!). Tomorrow is just the beginning.

.

.

.

Hours later, once Cindy and Patti are long gone, Jane takes a taxi to Connecticut. She has the cab take the FDR so she can stop by Sam's place, but when she gets to the neighborhood, Jane tells the driver to keep going. She tells him she just remembered, she doesn't need to stop, .

It's pretty quiet out. He's probably asleep. Or still out drinking with Noah. She won't try. She'll let it go.

He will hear about it tomorrow morning like everyone else.

.

.

.

She tells her father. She falters and stutters and hands him back her rent check and he has to tell her to slow down and use her words like she's a child (she can talk to the Fed Chair eloquently, but fails in coherency against her own father?!), but she needs him to know, she needs his support; she needs his love.

"Janey," he's speaking quickly when she tells him. "Janey where's this coming from? Are you using drugs?"

How does he not understand? He's spent her whole life telling her she'd accomplish everything. So why doesn't he want everything for her?

"I have the right to become a reporter," she's breathless. "That's only fair."

"Oh, okay," her father crosses his arms over his chest. "Um, well, for argument's sake then, I'll ask you the same question I'd ask your brother. Do you have a five year plan?"

Jane stays silent. She'll be thirty in five years.

"No?" He supplies.

Jane shakes her head. She looks down, then back up to meet his gaze. "I have a three year plan." She can feel the tears coming, filling in her eyes. "I'll become a reporter first. And then I'll apply to the Master's in Law program at Yale."

Her father blinks, upset.

"It's for journalists who want to cover the Supreme Court. I want to write about the highest court in the land. And I would be the first woman to do that. If we win. If they let me become a reporter." Her voice is shaking now, more. She is shaking now. "Because I need clips to apply to the law program."

"And— and how are you gonna pay for graduate school? Did you think about that?"

Does he really think there is anything she hasn't thought of at this point?

She used to be too scared to think about her life, too scared of what was there. She's not scared anymore though.

And she hasn't been, not for a long time.

"There are fellowships."

"I see." His mouth sets in a hard line. "Fine. So you don't need anything. Or anyone." And with that, he turns and walks through the entryway to the front door, opening it wide for her exit.

Jane doesn't move from her spot, voice quiet, but not weak.

"I need you, Daddy. And I want you to be proud of me."

Her father pauses. And, with another breath, he closes the door. When he looks back, Jane, softly, smiles.

.

.

.

Jane is looking over her speech, memorizing what she will say, when Patti pushes through the crowd.

"Jane," she says, " I have to go."

"What?!"

"I have to go tell Finn. He should hear—"

"No, Patti. We need you here!"

Patti's eyes are wide, desperate. "This will ruin his career, Jane."

What is this? She never thought she'd have to convince Patti. She's only here because of Patti!

"Other places let women write. He won't let us write. He could, but he doesn't."

"I have to," Patti exclaims, and then she takes off, leaving Jane flabbergasted.

Eleanor, tall, looks over the other girls, from the door Patti exited to Jane.

Jane closes her mouth and nods. Doesn't matter. She can do it. She will do it. Even if Patti is gone and Cindy is in D.C. telling Bea Burkhart. She'll do it, alone if she has to.

But she's not alone. She's surrounded by women who deserve the same thing. Coworkers who are asking for the same thing. Friends who want the same thing.

Jane is directed to sit beside Eleanor, with Vivian on Eleanor's other side and an empty seat at the end next to Jane. The other women, like a defensive wall, stand behind them, surrounding the table. Jane squares her shoulders. She keeps her head high. She doesn't look down. She stares at each camera as Eleanor begins to speak.

No weakness, because she's not weak. None of them are weak.

And then, Patti comes back. She walks in in long strides and takes the seat next to Jane.

One month ago, Jane sat on Patti's fire escape and Patti reached out her hand and told Jane of their future, of her rights; of what she deserves.

Patti takes her seat and, this time, Jane reaches out and takes hold of Patti's hand. With the other, she pulls the microphone towards herself, and then she tells the world of their future.

.

.

.

"We have been asked sweetly to prove ourselves at the office. We have asked permission to be treated equally to men we work next to. Enough. Today we demand that our employer comply with federal law. At News of the Week, women are not permitted to appear in the magazine under a byline, and yet, we know the magazine would not achieve the level of quality it is known for without our contributions. There is no mysterious god-given talent required to the reporter at News of the Week. It is a mixture of talent, hard-work, and opportunity. We deserve, and are entitled to, that opportunity."

She hears it broadcast twice just on her way to lunch and then back home. She'll hear it again, often, and then less so as time goes on, for the rest of her life.

---

PART 3

i. noah

They all decided not to go in Monday after the press conference unless they're called (they still have to do their jobs, after all).

They all stay afterward at the ACLU for lunch. There is champagne and tears and some girls sneak off to make calls to god knows who and others sneak off to somewhere else entirely. There's a lot of laughter too. And a lot of congratulations from those who work for the ACLU and journalists who stayed after the press conference.

They turn on the TV for a bit, but the breaking-news coverage of their story has ended. There will be longer reports tonight.

And then everyone who had stayed begins to leave, one by one.

Patti walks out with her. She's wary of going home — her mother will surely be calling. Or maybe she won't be calling at all. Jane isn't sure which is worse.

On the stoop outside the ACLU, Naomi and Dottie are talking about their reporters. Apparently J.P. called ACLU headquarter's already to demand he speak with Vivian. Confident, Jane will give him that. Stupid, too.

"I need someone screening my calls," Dottie jokes. "Where can I find my own researcher?"

They laugh, but it's sad too.

"Sorry about Sam," Naomi says when they hug goodbye.

Jane frowns, unsure what Naomi means. Sorry about the lawsuit, probably. Maybe Naomi knows Jane hadn't told him beforehand. Maybe, Naomi had warned him first (how would he feel, hearing it from Naomi and not Jane? Better than finding out when he saw her on television? Or worse? Is that what Naomi was apologizing for).

"Keep in touch," Patti calls as they part with the other girls. "And feel free to come over tonight if you want some good company and good tokes!"

.

.

.

There is no word from him when she gets home hours later. No messages left with her doorman.

It's not wholly unexpected..

He must be angry.

She's always thought (willed — naively; hoped) that he wouldn't be. She thought he'd support their stance. That if he were upset, it'd be about the suing of their employer, not the demand to be treated equally under the law.

She thought, when it came down to it, he'd back her.

She remembers when Nora left. When Nora and Wick got in a public fight in the middle of the bullpen because Wick wouldn't publish her work — work he said was great only a moment before when he thought Gabe had written it. And then Sam had said, after Nora walked out, "she should have the byline if she wrote it."

"Women can't be reporters," Jane had responded.

"They can," Sam had said, already looking away, already moving onto the story (what was it again? oh, the Hell's Angels one), "just not at News of the Week. Good for her to leave. There is no opportunity for her here."

.

.

.

She gives in and calls him that night.

He doesn't answer.

.

.

.

Cindy calls.

"Did Patti tell you? I told Bea Burkhart about the suit and she said 'So whose side am I supposed to be on?' Can you believe that?!"

Jane laughs. "Yes, I was with Patti this afternoon, remember?"

Cindy is laughing now too. She's been drinking. There is music and talking in the background. "I'm at Patti's now! Some of us are here hanging out! Do you want to come? Come by, Jane!"

Jane takes a deep breath. "No, thank you."

"Okay! Oh, oh, Jane, did you talk to Vivian? J.P. called her in."

No surprise. That must've been a show.

"There were telexes from other bureaus!" Cindy is saying, speaking quickly. "San Francisco sent over a whole case of champagne with the note: 'You go, sisters.' Jane, they're all men in San Fransisco!" Cindy bursts out laughing. "Imagine! A whole case to the office! Congratulating everyone and it's just the reporters there to receive it?! Ha! Jane, they were coming in all day from all the over the world! Writers, celebrities, sources! Everyone!"

"Who took them? Surely not all on Vivian?"

"Angie, I think. Vivian only heard about it. And Gabe called Denise to say they'd been getting messages all day."

And Sam?

She doesn't ask it though. Gabe had called, apparently. Sam hadn't.

"Have fun," Jane says into the receiver. Someone in the background whoops. Maybe she will go, later, if she can't sleep. "Goodnight."

.

.

.

She's in bed, but not yet asleep, when she receives a call from Finn.

"Since you're seemingly in charge here," he says, cutting right to the chase, "we're asking that you come in at ten tomorrow to discuss the suit."

Ten am on a Tuesday? They're usurping the weekly writer's meeting.

Jane agrees.

They'd expected as much, though she'd thought Patti'd get the call, not her.

Jane goes through her rolodex, starting with Eleanor — never, never talk to the men without her, Jane knows — and then gets a headcount at Patti's so she can call the remaining girls (mostly the married ones) to tell them.

Once she finishes, she hesitates on trying Sam one more time. He'll be home. It's Monday night.

But she doesn't. She does get to sleep, eventually.

.

.

.

Jane tries his apartment before going in the next morning.

She doesn't know what she will say (though she has written lots of drafts — she's never unprepared), but she knows it's better to handle now than in two hours in front of everyone at the office.

And if he doesn't want to see her, if he hates her, if he feels betrayed by her, well. Well. Then at least she can go in knowing what will happen.

He doesn't answer though.

He's not home.

Work then. Maybe he does have something — maybe he has a story good enough to keep him in the office all night and, as a consequence for her deception (if it can even be classified as such), he isn't using her to research it.

When she gets there though, Sam isn't in.

It's quiet. The bullpen is on tiptoes.

"There was a lot more yelling yesterday," Vivian says when they pass in the wire room.

.

.

.

"Why didn't you come to us?" Finn asks in his office while all three women stand before him.

"Excuse me, Mr. Woodhouse, we're not here to discuss what might have happened before the complaint was filed. We are here to discuss what happens now." Eleanor imposes. Thank god she's here.

Gregory is leaning on Finn's desk.

"I can understand you, Patti," he waves a hand. "But Jane," he looks her over, "you're such a nice girl."

Jane lifts her chin as Patti scoffs. She is, isn't she? Nice to him, wasn't she?

"We understand," Finn looks at Patti, "you're upset. And we're upset to hear that. And that you girls didn't feel as though you could come speak to us. But that was wrong. You could have. You should have."

Eleanor exhales, exasperated. "Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Sansone. The girls understand your position. Now, we're here to negotiate. If you're going to be discussing retaliation for the complaint, I'll have to request that your attorneys be present."

And so they agree, clearly on direction from their counsel, that there will be ten women included in negotiations. The senior editors and upper management will join. And representatives for both sides will be there too, meaning Eleanor will be by their side the entire time.

Negotiations will be held every Tuesday until May and, if the EEOC rep is not satisfied as to the progress by then, they will step in.

"How're your reporters?" Eleanor asks as they walk her out.

"Not happy," Vivian says.

"I changed mine," Patti agrees.

Jane doesn't say anything. She doesn't know.

"I'm not surprised." Eleanor nods, thinking it over with a hand held to her stomach. "But they'll get over it quickly. It's always middle-management that cares the most. They're the least likely to change anything. The executives don't care. And the writers don't care."

"The men care," Dottie insists.

"Not all of them," Eleanore answers.

But she doesn't know the men, does she? She's never heard them hanging around the break room, around desks in the bullpen. She's never heard them speak about women or liberation or ask for coffee or request rewrites. She doesn't know, really, does she?

Jane's stomach is tight when she walks back to her desk.

.

.

.

Ned had gone to marches before. Jane, now, thinks he's for the movement in the same overarching ways Finn is — it's superficial, simply for clout; in theory and not in practice.

Men have been asking Ned all day, yesterday more, probably, why he didn't warn them about the girls.

His office is in the pit, didn't he know? they all seem to accuse. You siding with the girls, Charlie demands, disgust in his voice.

And it makes Ned livid.

He doesn't give a shit about News of the Week. He's just upset to be unseated. He's just a young guy with loose morals and good photography skills. She knows Ned personally, some, through Sam. But she has no interest in him now. Not now, even though once she'd thought highly of him.

"Did you at least tell Rosenberg?" He asks when he gets Jane alone in the break room.

She snaps her head over to Ned, eyes wide.

He scoffs. "Thought so. Lost two people in one day. Well done, Jane."

.

.

.

That's how she finds out, from some jerk-around comment made in anger by a thin-skinned photographer.

It's in the paper. The first time in years that she hadn't looked at every article — and she'd missed it. Monday morning. She'd been thinking only of the conference. She hadn't thought of anything else or anyone else.

Suicide on forty-first and tenth Sunday night. Noah Benowitz. Marine. Two tours. One self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Jane doesn't stay at work.

She goes first to Sam's, again. But he's not there. Why would he be?

She's sick. She's dizzy. She can't breathe.

She makes it home in a daze. And then she sits on her floor, back pressed into her door, like she just couldn't wait to get in before she started crying.

She cries and cries and cries.

She knew. She knew. Since that first night, that night in the bar, that first time she called Noah and invited him to meet. She's known. She's always known. He needed help. He needed help and she did nothing. She helped herself. She heard it in his voice, saw it in his actions, knew it from the tremor of his hand and the hesitant way he regarded Sam. She knew it every time Sam said he changed, every time his mouth twitched when she needed him to smile.

She sits on her floor for hours and thinks about what she should've done to help and cries long into the night.

.

.

.

Their article, you know? It was to help people. To help people like Noah. It was about people like Noah.

And they couldn't even help him.

.

.

.

By the next day, word around the office is that Sam's out for the next week.

"Lucky he's on the investigative beat," she hears someone say. "How nice it'd be to afford a few days off."

She looks out the corner of her eye. It's J.P. and Clem. They know she's close enough to hear them; know that she's probably listening.

"Especially now," Clem responds, clearly in reference to her. "Icyyyyyy."

Jane bristles. Her shoulders hurt with the restraint of not turning.

She should say something. She wants to say something. If they weren't going forward with the complaint, she would. But Eleanor had told them to breathe, to act as though nothing were amiss at all. The men cannot retaliate for the suit, but if something else came up, they'd have free rein.

They could act, if Jane stepped out of place. If they could show the lawsuit had nothing to do with their firing, they'll fire her.

Jane would be the first to go.

She is the most disliked. The primary traitor, as far as they're concerned. The good girl. The nice girl.

So she says nothing. She exhales and goes back to the her work and pretends like she never heard a thing.

.

.

.

Three rings.

"Hello?"

"Hi," Jane keeps her voice level. "Mrs. Rosenberg?"

She had the number written down in her cards even though she's never called it. It was just in case he's there; for if, like last time, there is breaking news and she can't find him at home. She wrote the number into her rolodex just in case. In case.

In case he's there now.

"May I ask who's calling?"

"My name is Jane. I work with Sam at News of the Week."

"Oh." The woman says shortly. "Yes?"

"I — I was wondering if Sam is there?"

"He can't come to the phone."

There's no pause. Had the woman asked and he said No? Was he there, listening? Or was she simply keeping him away? If he wasn't in, wouldn't she have said that?

"Oh," Jane stays light. This is not how she wanted it to go. "Could I trouble you to take a message for him?"

A pause this time. Then: "Well?"

"Excuse me?"

"What is it?" The woman — Sam's mother — follows, clearly annoyed. "Your message?"

"Oh. Um." Jane pauses. "Can you tell him that I called and that I'm. That I'm sorry, about Noah and." She stops. She means to apologize for the lawsuit. But she can't quite say it. She doesn't know what to say — to apologize isn't exactly what she means — and even if she did know what to say, she knows telling his mother isn't the way to go about it.

But she has stopped without finishing the sentence and she imagines that the glaring lack of it, the well-supported guess of what she was going to say, is palpable to Mrs. Rosenberg as well.

"Is that all?"

"No." She says quickly. She doesn't want to hang up, despite his mother's clear desire to. "I wanted to tell you. Well, I. Mrs. Rosenberg." Jane closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she opens them, she is staring down at her lap. She knows what she wants to say this time. "He's our best reporter. And I'm honored to be his researcher."

How honored can you be, when you're suing to not be his researcher anymore?

Hopefully Mrs. Rosenberg doesn't think that. Hopefully, she hears the comment with the weight of the intention behind it. Hopefully, she tells Sam something about it, and Sam knows it means that she doesn't regret him.

"Right." His mother says. "If that's all, I'll let you go, Ms. Hollander."

"That's all," Jane breathes. "Thank you. Have a good night."

.

.

.

Maybe, it occurs to her later, her last name is as disliked by Sam's family as his is by hers.

After all, she had never told Mrs. Rosenberg her surname. Sam's mother had called her Ms. Hollander without Jane introducing it. Maybe, when she spoke to Sam about Jane, when Sam spoke about Jane, it bristled his mother just like it did hers. If they did speak of her, that is. They must, right? For his mother to know her? Or, maybe, she only knows the news story about Jane.

Or not. Jane has no idea. She's never met Sam's parents. He doesn't talk about them often, except as characters in childhood stories.

She imagines them. Their front steps, his childhood bedroom; his parent's kitchen. She imagines his house right down the block from the Benowitz's place.

Jane has read the articles she could find. Some just mention the suicide in their tally of crime from Sunday night. A few have a blurb about Noah, citing his specific service and his relation to the recent News of the Week investigation into veteran's returning stateside. One, though she has no idea how they found the information, nor any confirming source, says Samuel Rosenberg, the writer of the article, was the one who called the police. That he was there, when it happened.

She imagines Sam at home. Did he go home that night? There was a siren when he called her. She let him hang up.

How is he? Did he watch the news? Did someone call him with it?

Does he care, even?

She doesn't know. His mother will pass on the message, maybe, and then he'll call back. Or he won't. She can only wait.

.

.

.

The magazine spirals for a week. Sam is gone, Finn is gone (relocated, temporarily) and Scott, a suit from D.C. who hasn't managed a newsroom since '56, is the replacement. Gregory, unfortunately, manages to stay.

And then, after that first week, things mostly go back to normal.

She stays up on the complaint. No one talks about it in the office, but the headlines come in and the girls rolls their eyes about them after work. Jane collects them from the stand and skims every one just in case.

The London Times' cover reads: New of the Weeks' Sex Revolt.

Newsday has: Editor Files Story, Girls File Complaint.

When she comes home, debating her choice as the consequences fall out, all she has to do it look at these covers to remember why she is doing this.

Patti is working with another reporter.

"It's something I should've done months ago," she says, but she looks sad. "Doug is a really good man. And he deserves someone who wants the same things he does."

"Finn?" Cindy asks.

And Patti just shrugs.

Oh, that's complicated. Jane hadn't known.

Jane too, essentially (maybe permanently) switches reporters, going first with Doug while he finishes his investigative piece, and then with Gabe back on Nation, as low on the totem pole as she was when she started with Sam. With Doug leaving to Vietnam though, Gabe will move up (slightly) in the reshuffle of Nation to writing bigger stories, so he (timidly) asks Jane to help prepare him, which she finds sweet. Plus, she needs to work for someone.

Working with Doug is fine — he respects her position and she produces consistent work — and working with Gabe is easy — he has no grudge against her, despite his frequent lamentations on the women's movement. She's lucky, really, to have fallen to Gabe.

Or, maybe, with Doug on the way out, he's the only one who will work with her?

They blame her and Patti for the complaint. They blame her even though she was the second-to-last to officially join. Like, somehow, because she had so much privilege, because she held higher positions, she shouldn't have had anything to complain about. She had money and education and that meant she didn't deserve more. They seem to think that she must've been the one who convinced the rest of the girls to ask for more because she didn't feel satisfied. They think the complaint is her doing. Her and Patti.

Fine.

Okay. Let them.

In all, Jane spends time with the girls in the pit and time at Patti's where Cindy is also living. She does her work and she returns home and, on Tuesday, they meet for their first official set of negotiations.

And she dreams.

---

April 1970

"You did well," he tells her over breakfast in their first meeting since the press-conference. "Spoke eloquently. Made your point."

He doesn't say anything else. And he doesn't follow up after she explains the negotiations.

They talk about other news and world events — things that are happening to other people — and they don't talk of themselves.

Her mother still hasn't called.

(Fuck yeah, her brother said when they spoke, so at least she has a majority support).

.

.

.

So it's not back to normal. There is a hesitancy in everything they do. The conversation doesn't flow naturally back and forth from bullpen to pit. It's weird without Finn.

The magazine pointedly does not report on the complaint, even as every other major publication around the world does.

That's fine. It's better that way.

.

.

.

She tries again a week later.

He can be mad — he must be — but the Mai Lai folo is due in a few days.

"Can you tell him I called?" She asks when his mother picks up.

"I'll pass it on. Is that all?"

"Yes. Thank you. Goodnight."

It'll become a routine at this rate.

.

.

.

Jane has read the police report. She's looked at the photograph Ned had taken of Sam and Noah just a few weeks before. She's out of frame, standing beside the camera, but she was there. She was there, smiling at Noah. And, in that photo, there is Noah, smiling back.

.

.

.

She tries the following night.

This time someone else picks up. A man, but not Sam.

"Good evening. My name is Jane Hollander. I'm calling for Sam."

"What do you want him for?" The man asks, humor underneath the question. Younger, it seems. Sam has no brothers. Someone else. Family?

"Is he there?" She asks, just happy to have a different person on the other end. "May I speak with him?"

And then she hears movement and Sam takes the phone. Takes it, she can tell, as there is protest in the background.

"Jane."

She can picture him. Neck straight and phone held up. She knows what his lips look like when he breathes her name like that.

Jane open and closes her mouth. "Sam, I— I. I want to help. Um. I've called a few times. I thought about coming up, but, well." She swallows. "Your mother doesn't seem to happy to…."

Sam's laugh is strained. "She just thinks you're putting me out of a job."

"Sam."

She says it too quickly, as if to keep him from saying anything else, though after his name, she stops short. She doesn't know how to respond, except to cut him off. And then it's silence as he waits for her.

Finally she inhales. "I didn't know, that night." That night. When he called. She held this very phone against her ear. She stood on the other side of the table, just a foot from where she sits now, and let him hang up, not even realizing what she had done. She was drunk. She didn't pay enough attention. "I should've known, when you called. I knew something was —"

"No, it — Jane." He sighs, low. "You did nothing wrong." The phone moves, like it's shifting. She thinks he is checking his watch. She can visualize it, having seen him do it a thousand times before. "Look," he says, "I have to go. I know we have work to do. I'll be back in a few days."

She nods even though she knows he can't see her.

"I'll call you," he says. "Oh."

"Sam?"

"Hey," he breathes it into the phone. "Thanks for calling."

And then the line clicks.

.

.

.

They began going to another bar, but by the time the second week winds down, they're slowly making their way back to Cole's where the men they work with have never left.

She spends some time there, but more at Patti's. More, in the end, by herself.

On the second Sunday, she joins some others, including Gabe and Alex, Cindy's new reporter, to help move all of Cindy's stuff from the apartment she shared with Lenny. Eleanor gives her the name of a good — and affordable — attorney, and Jane reads over some of their stuff while Cindy begins divorce proceedings.

Things move on. Doug ships out next week. Scott already has reporters he's assigning with favoritism. Sam's desk remains untouched.

She doesn't call again. She dials once, but hangs up before it can ring. After that, she never gets as far as picking up the receiver. He's busy. He has things to do to. He'll call when he needs something. He'll call when he has to. He'll call like he said he would.

.

.

.

He's back by the time they go to print. He's missed two whole issues.

He never called.

Instead, Sam is mid-conversation with Mark Friday morning, but he stops when he sees her arrive.

Jane swallows. She hadn't been expecting him.

She had been expecting him to call.

There is a moment, a pause, where he does nothing but look at her. And then he smiles. But he's careful about it, cautious. He's purposeful, like he has to try.

Jane responds in kind, nods in greeting, and walks past him, jacket over her arm.

It's rare she comes in after him, but she has no pressing work for Gabe. So here she is, surprised by him.

.

.

.

"Heard you've been with Greenstone."

Jane swallows. He's behind her as she faces the coffee pot. She's never seen him in the break room before.

"Not now that you're back," she says, patiently releasing her fingers from their grip on her cup. She has pictured this conversation a hundred times. He can make his choice, but she won't try to make it for him. She won't open the door for him to choose another researcher, but she won't fight it if he wants to either.

Slowly, Jane turns around.

He looks pale. Tired.

She moves aside when he gestures so that he can grab some from the pot.

"I called," she settles a few feet away, one hip against the counter to face him. "Spoke to your mother."

"Well acquainted with Joan Rosenberg, I've heard." There is an amusement to it. Sam finishes and replaces the carafe. He doesn't turn to face her though. He leans his back against the counter, so she's only seeing his profile. He doesn't look at her at all.

His sigh reverberates through his whole body.

"Sam. I'm sorry," she tries again. "I should've known, when you called. I should've gone right then. I knew it. I knew it, and I—"

"No," he cuts her off, like he had last time. Finally, he turns his head to look at her, still holding his mug in both hands. "You had a lot of other stuff on your mind."

She isn't sure what to say.

"I did," she offers, straightening even more. He takes a sip of his coffee. His silence spurs her into a rundown of all the work she'd been doing for Gabe.

"So," he says when she finishes. His lips, vaguely, have the shadow of a smirk. "Want to come back?"

She doesn't respond, but he understands, gesturing her out to the bullpen.

"I'm thinking of following up on the vet's story."

"You want to do a folo on Noah?"

"No. On what he said to us that first time. About the VA?"

"What about it?"

They're standing by his desk now. If she lets it, she can almost feel like nothing whatsoever has changed.

(she doesn't want that — she doesn't regret it, she's proud of it! it's just… it's easier, it was easier (worse, but easier) before)

"He said something—" Sam stops; frowns in thought. And then takes a seat. "The story should be about the treatment there. The delay. The lack of supposed help."

"Do you know if," she hesitates. "If they really are overcrowded?"

"Not according to the official number. But suicides rates have skyrocketed across the country for service members."

"If that's true, the VA isn't putting out numbers like that. Washington isn't saying anything either."

Sam does smirk, fully, now. "I did do some work this week. I can make calls on my own, believe it or not. Anyway," he pulls a folder from his bag and hands it to her. "If you're still, you know, researching."

He doesn't seem to mean anything by it. Or maybe he does.

It's a jab anyway, and it hits.

She doesn't apologize. She doesn't say anything about the meetings or about Eleanor or about the past two weeks without him. She says nothing about the change that is coming, about how she doesn't expect to be a researcher for much longer if Eleanor is right. If she is right.

It's not personal. He knows that, doesn't he?

Instead, in response, she simply straightens her shoulders, balances the folder in one arm and her full cup of coffee in the other, and tells him, point-blank: "I wasn't lying before. As long I'm here, as long as you're my reporter, I'm here for you."

Sam doesn't say anything as she goes back to her desk.

.

.

.

"Hollander, let's go."

Jane stands, looks between him and the top of the stairs past him. She shakes her head.

"Sam," she urges, but she won't say it.

He stops, frowns.

She hasn't been upstairs, hasn't spoken to one editor since the suit except in their formal discussions this past Tuesday. It's Monday now. She'll be back in there tomorrow for a very different conversation than the one Sam wants to have.

But Jane steels herself. She can't avoid it forever.

"We need to go to Pennsylvania." He begins as soon as they're on the couch, getting straight to the point. "There are two hospitals we have access to. Pittsburgh and Coateseville. Both of them are known for trying to get in psychiatrists to work on the mental trauma these men have, but the staff is hitting walls at every turn with the VA."

Scott gestures for more.

"They're being defunded," Sam leans forward. "Buildings with no staff, no systems in place to help the men stationed there except to patch wounds."

"I hate to break it to you, Rosenberg, but it is a hospital. That's what they do."

Sam inhales, slow, and then looks at Jane. She's the one holding the numbers.

"The hospitals don't have enough capacity to take care of those who need it. We know," she spreads her hand wide on the pages in her lap, "we know that men come back with more wounds than those that are visible. And the research directly supports that. There have been more suicides among service members who returned from duty in the last year alone than from any previous war."

Scott leans back. "The VA isn't saying anything close to that."

"No, but hospitals are."

"There's more than the suicide rate," Sam interjects. "There are more suicide attempts, more treatment for self-harm in institutions than ever before. Even more crime. Higher drug use, fights. I have a guy who says his calls these days on the beat in Pittsburgh for wife-beating have tripled for servicemen."

"Boys come back traumatized. They've seen some shit. We all know this."

Jane bristles. "But the VA and the administration is systematically covering it up."

"So that's the story? Fed cover-up?"

"Let us just go to the hospitals," Sam scoots forward on the couch, "to see where the breakdown is happening. There are real consequences here, Sir. We're sending young men to die and those that make it back aren't being provided for when they come home. There have been protests to end the war everyday for the last five years, but no one gives a crap about when these boys come to us needing help. Plus, of course, Nixon's tax-cuts have to come from somewhere."

Scott laughs, but it's not funny.

"Okay, okay. Take on the VA and Nixon. I have no problem getting my hands dirty." He gestures to Jane with his chin. "You taking her?"

"Uh, yeah. She's my researcher."

"Haven' you heard, son? She wants more."

Sam swallows. Stares at Scott.

"Can we go? Do the folo?"

"Sure." Scott waves them off. "No more than three days. Get me fifteen-hundred words by Thursday. And if it has enough in the bones, you can flesh it out for a few weeks."

.

.

.

Once, about a year and a half ago, Sam proposed they get married.

He was joking; joking like he'd always joked, but she thinks about it now. She thinks about how he said it and how he, even in jest, saw their future.

She thinks, if she were to tell him about it, where she would even start.

.

.

.

They drive in silence. The radio is on, but there is no news programming playing at ten am, so their sporadic conversation is only broken up by some rock and roll station.

Jane wasn't consulted about the trip.

She had no presumptions when she set up the visits in the hospitals that she'd be joining. It will be the first time they've really worked together overnight, or even gone further than an hour's drive.

Sam travels sometimes. He'd even gone abroad once. To Mexico. And he was out all night, so Jane was in the office taking all of his calls until dawn. And they've spent the night in the office before, many, many times, falling asleep at desks or in the infirmary or on the couches.

But they've never traveled together.

Jane looks out the window through the drive. She hasn't been so close to Sam in weeks. Under a month ago, they were having lunch at Cole's as though nothing could touch them, and now they're sitting in the same car — his parent's car again — only feet from each other, and yet, it feels as though there couldn't be a greater barrier between them.

It isn't anger.

He's not angry.

At least, not in a straightforward way that she can categorize and address.

Jane, too, isn't angry. But it is something akin to that.

She can't articulate what it is, which is likely necessary to overcome it. It feels like there has been some great shift; like some cataclysmic divide has arisen between them, pushing them further apart than they've ever been.

Sam know it too. When he does talk, he talks of nothing. He talks, mostly, of Charlie's story on Nixon's tobacco ad-ban. And even then, Jane can tell he isn't paying attention to what he's saying, which is unusual. Sam's heart is always, always, in everything. It's what makes him such a strong writer.

He's only speaking now to fill time.

She feels itchy, everywhere.

.

.

.

In college, Jane had a friend who decided to go to law school.

When they were graduating, only four percent of law students were women.

"Why would a girl want to do that?" Jane had asked their other friends, not meaning to be rude, but knowing it was.

She always knew the answer though, didn't she? Even back then when she posed the question to her circle of undergraduates, she'd been asking a question for an answer she'd always known.

.

.

.

Sam's older sister lived downtown after joining the yippies, but Jane had met the younger sister once last year.

At the time, Evie had been on spring vacation during her senior year at Michigan, and Sam had asked if Jane would give her a tour of News of the Week.

Jane often gave tours to visitors, but Sam was embarrassed to ask. He swallowed a lot and looked earnest as he made the request.

It had made her all the more glad to grant it.

Plus, she was happy to meet Sam's family; honored even, that Sam would want her to spend so much time with his younger sister.

So Jane had walked Evie through the building, from the presses to the morgue to the clippers all the way back to her desk. And then they all three had lunch at Cole's.

Sam took the afternoon off and he and Evie took the ferry to Ellis Island. Neither had ever been. They invited Jane, but she'd said No. She had work. And, at the time, it had felt like an intrusion.

But as she made calls throughout the afternoon, she couldn't help wishing that she'd gone with them.

She has never asked on Evie since she graduated. Jane remembers Sam attending the graduation, but she doesn't know more than that. Had Evie ended up working for the schools like she wanted? Was she in the city? Still in Ann Arbor? Up in the Bronx?

She can't ask now, but she wants to. She should've done so, before.

.

.

.

They get in a little after seven and Sam starts in right away.

He asks the front desk for recommendations on where to eat in town. He doesn't say that they're from News of the Week — surprising, as he always does; he always used to before the EEOC complaint — and then he takes Jane to the place the man recommended.

"You start here," he says, as they walk into a restaurant not far from the hotel, "but only have a drink. It's curated. Start here and then go down."

"Down?"

"Hill," Sam doesn't look at her as he speaks. "You begin with the recommendations from locals and keep going to worse places. The hotels always start with the nicer ones, so talk to people there, see what they have to say on your questions. And then take their recommendations. And do it all over again. You don't want to just take a guessing game. Not until you have to."

"I have the number for the Philly bureau?"

"We don't need it."

Oh. Okay.

Jane wonders, again, why she is here.

.

.

.

She doesn't do more than wet her straw. Sam drinks, but not much.

They go from bar to bar and hear stories about the return. Sam, sometimes, tells people they're from the news. He doesn't push anyone. He doesn't ask many questions, but opens the floor to them.

Maybe he doesn't push because he had with Noah? Maybe he's scared to; maybe he thinks last time he went too far. It's all her own conjecture, but she does know he's purposeful when, here, he hardly pushes at all. Not like he used to. When he talks, instead, it's sad.

He is sad. He's heavy. In his eyes, his shoulders; the downward slope of his mouth.

So he has Jane, when they want an answer, ask the harder questions.

And Jane, she's pretty. And she has always known to leverage it.

So has he.

And so she laughs at their jokes that aren't funny and sometimes touches their arms and sometimes holds back and it's not all manipulative, but she knows what Sam is looking for, and Jane, too, knows how to get a story.

She hears stories of men who enlisted, some who volunteered, and many who didn't. Stories of men who came back and others who didn't. Factories closing and wives with husbands unrecognizable from when they left.

Did Noah know these men; was Noah like these men?.

Sam doesn't ask anything like that.

He doesn't ask on suicide, at all. Those men who came back different — self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head — are mentioned, but not discussed.

She goes to sleep very late that night.

.

.

.

Pittsburgh is cold, but the hospital is sweltering. Inside, they sweat. They take off their layers. Sam undoes his collar.

It's dirty. It smells.

Chemicals. Urine. Stale heat. Chlorine.

She feels sick.

But she keeps her head up and is judicious in her questions and smiles back at all the men that smile at her.

It's filled with men. Men, bodies, big, unruly. They're not… fragile. Most of them aren't slim and pale. They're big and hairy and tan. On the street, upright, full-limbed, they'd look indestructible.

It's filled with men, everywhere…. except, they're not — they're not upright, full-limbed, and durable. They don't look like men. There is nothing manly about what she is seeing; nothing powerful about what is before her.

No surprise, really. It's war. These men lived. That's enough, right?

That's what she'll tell them, at least. It's what she's thought, in the past. They've lived. That's enough.

Except it isn't — it isn't enough.

Jane has seen photographs. She's met injured vets over the years. But seeing it here, here, before they're released on their own, is unlike anything else, anywhere else, she's ever known.

Fragility. Humility. Leveling.

Death.

Jane takes short breaths from her mouth and tries not to smell more than she has to and feels poorly for it the entire time. She knows — knows — they're stronger than she will ever be, to be so physically-destroyed like this, but it's. It's just bodies. Falling apart.

Missing limbs, bloody pee in bedpans. She smiles and she meets their eyes, because, if she looks anywhere else, she won't be able to breathe.

"We're from News of the Week," Sam says a few times now. Perhaps, they wouldn't have seen the news here? Perhaps, Sam thinks the lawsuit help them… whether because they'd support the men or women, Jane doesn't know. Or maybe it has nothing to do with that. Maybe they know When Our Boys Come Home or of Noah or just appreciate the reporting and have no opinions on the "women-problem."

She'll ask him, maybe, later. Probably not, but maybe.

All she knows is, when Sam says it, he's doing it purposefully.

Jane likes to think (has thought, these past few weeks) that Noah would have really supported her.

"So you're not from Pennsylvania at all?" Sam asks the man he's speaking to.

"Middlewood, Ohio. Not too far."

"Surely there are hospitals in Ohio," Jane licks her lips. "Wouldn't your family prefer you closer?"

The man shrugs as much as he can considering he's in bed, some pillows behind his back to help him up. "Doc says care here is better."

Sam eyes her.

Here? This is better?

"And how old are you?"

"Twenty-one."

Younger than her.

Jane swallows.

"We're from all over the States," he says. "No clue why we're here."

"Alcohol," a man sitting nearby adds, though it doesn't make sense.

"Well what about you?" Sam follows up, "you're not from Pittsburgh?"

"Fishtown."

The man is in a wheelchair and he swivels around to face them.

"Philadelphia isn't too far."

"When you can't walk, might as well be Mecca."

Sam nods, writing something down.

"There's too few beds," the man continues. "Too few doctors…. They don't have stuff for your head. Once you're no longer bleeding, they send you home."

"You're no longer bleeding."

"And once I can piss on my own, they'll let me go." A look to Jane. "Ma'am."

She leans forward. "Do you think the VA should keep people after they're healed?"

The man snorts, like her question is unbelievable.

"Look at these people. Do they look healed?"

She inhales, straightens, and Sam, for a moment, puts his hand on her shoulder.

Sick.

.

.

.

She breaks, finally, and goes outside in late morning sun and gulps the open air, as though in doing so, she'll clean out all the dirt inside her.

And then she closes her eyes, tips her head back against the concrete wall of the hospital, and lets the sun hit her face. It's cold out for April and the sun is like a fleeting bit of warmth, like a hot-press through her clothing: touching her briefly only every few seconds.

She remembers when he came back from the Calley hearing. Weak, she'd thought, if only for a second.

This is it. This is what Sam had seen, isn't it?

Men — defeated.

Her hands are shaking.

This whole time — she thought her life was hard? Her hurdles high?

She shouldn't have come if she was going to be so fragile.

He comes out a few minutes later. She'd hoped he wouldn't. Silently, he stands beside her, back pressed against the wall. He leans there and says nothing.

What does he see when he looks at her? Weakness?

What had he seen when he looked at Noah?

Does he see Noah, now, for what Noah was?

Jane turns to look at him.

He's big beside her even though he's so skinny in comparison to most men. His mouth, so wide when he smiles, is heavy and cast down.

For weeks, months, Sam had been saying that Noah changed. But Sam had changed — he ordered ryes and had a Master's and interviewed the Fed Chair. Noah hadn't changed like that though. He hadn't changed by choice. The Noah Sam knew was never just a previous version, an unevolved-type. The Noah Sam knew had died a long time ago. He was gone for a long time before Sam tried to find him.

"Do you feel guilty," she asks, staring up hard, refusing to look away even though they're so close, "for using your ability to stay?"

Sam blinks slowly, expression never changing.

Some men had their numbers called while still in school and they dropped out to join. No men she knew, but some had. Sam hadn't. His number was called — birthdate: December 13 — and he stayed in school. He didn't go.

"Jane," he says, but doesn't follow up.

She stares at him for another moment and then looks away. How pitiful they are out here. "I feel so stupid." And she knows she looks it (looks delicate), hearing the draw of her inhale shake, "in these clothes. With this hair. Asking these questions…. It reeks of death in there."

"Noah said the article would help." His voice, too, shakes. His hands, by his sides, flutter. "That we were helping people."

It's the first time she's heard Sam say his name.

But he says nothing more on it. Not after they leave, not through the afternoon as they distract themselves in speaking to the staff and visiting the state budget office to understand the federal distributions.

He says nothing more about Noah, about the hospital, about her inability to stomach hopelessness and, she imagines, he probably won't say anything on it for a long time.

.

.

.

That night, Patti tells Jane that News of the Week asked Nora back as a reporter.

That's corporate's solution? Hire back a researcher who'd quit over five months ago?

It's like Nora warned, like the EEOC attorney warned, like Eleanor had foretold.

You're blatantly missing the point, Eleanor had said at the negotiation meeting that morning, and, according to Patti, the men reshuffled their papers, too scared to meet Eleanor's eyes.

"It's almost embarrassing, isn't it?" Jane sighs as she says it, not saying anything at all about her time in Pittsburgh, "how difficult it is for them to understand?"

"Fucked up is what it is, Jane."

She laughs, but she's not happy. "Yes, that too."

Yes. That too.

.

.

.

"Oh my. Do you need help?"

"I'll manage."

She moves to let him in.

Sam makes it inside, typewriter under one arm and an open bottle of beer in the other. She hadn't even seen Sam pack the typewriter with them at all.

"You're awake?"

Apart from her shoes, she's fully dressed. Even her hair is still pinned up.

"Work."

"Good." He puts the typewriter onto the desk, moving aside her notes. He shuffles around for a moment. It's clear he wants to say something, clear he's been thinking about something.

"Sam," she speaks it slowly, warily, watching him as she closes the door to her room. "Is everything okay?"

He ignores her, pacing for a second, and then he moves to take a seat at the foot of her bed, half-full beer placed on the floor near his foot, precarious on the tan carpet.

Jane opens her mouth, but then stops. And waits.

Calley. Half a year ago. His hand on her wrist, hoping she'll stay.

"What you asked before," he begins, elbows on his knees, back hunched over, "do I feel guilty?"

She looks at the line of his spine, his neck, the slope of his skull.

"Yes," he says, and it sounds like it's been pulled from him involuntarily. "I do." His breath is long. "My parents worked for me to do this. To go to college. To do more than them. But it didn't have to be that way, you know? It's not like it was for you, Jane. College wasn't a habit, a way of life. It was an anomaly. My parents didn't go. I'm the only one of my friends to even have a graduate degree. So yes. I feel guilty."

She doesn't move. She's just watching him — can never stop watching him; could, seemingly, never stop — and standing back near the door.

"I forget, when I'm in the city. When I'm at News of the Week and people know who I am. When I'm with you. I forget that things are different. That I'm different. You're right. I feel guilty for being here when so many aren't."

Slowly, deliberately so he can see her do it, she comes and takes a seat next to him on the edge of the bed.

"I knew it too," Sam is saying, shaking his head in his hands. "And didn't do a goddamn thing."

He's talking about Noah.

He thinks he used Noah.

She thinks of Noah. Of his smile. And how quick it turned. Of Sam's hand on his arm, Sam's happiness when they were together. Of all the things Sam didn't see.

He couldn't have stopped it. Sam didn't understand enough to have stopped it. Maybe he could now, but not then.

"It wasn't just you," Jane says, low. She had seen it too. And she hadn't understood what she'd seen. "It was all of us."

"No." Sam breathes it, hard. He lifts his head, looks straight-ahead at the desk. "You too, Jane. I — I didn't know. And I should've known."

Oh.

It's time.

He wants to talk about this. He's ready. Is she?

She remembers him nervous once. He's nervous now. Back then, she'd reached over and touched his knee and he'd stopped. He had breathed deeply, gathered his wits, and pressed on.

She feels like she shouldn't touch him now. It feels dangerous. The barrier between them is too great. Crossing it is inappropriate.

"I never told you, Sam." She swallows, looks down, away from his knee. "For a long time, even I didn't know I wanted it. If I didn't know, how were you supposed to? You had no reason to."

"I did." Sam sits up fully, looks at her, eyes dark and apologetic. Angry, too. "I had every reason to. You're brilliant; the best researcher I will ever have. I watched you exceed at every task you were given. And I just kept thinking how lucky we were, how lucky I was, to have you. But it never occurred to me that I was limiting something by keeping you."

Jane laughs suddenly, loudly, loud enough that it seems to shake the room. They've been so quiet, she's changed everything in her laugh. But she can't help it. How ridiculous! Laughable! Ludicrous.

"Sam," she wants to say it better, to put emphasis behind her words, to make sure he understands how intent she is, but she's still laughing. "I'm here today, able to see what I want, because of my time working with you."

He's frowning at her, surprised and unsmiling. They're sitting like that there on the foot of her bed, two feet or so between them.

And. He's just looking. Looking, for a long time. So long, she looks away. His gaze, when he stares, is too direct.

Did he ever feel that way about her? All those times she found herself watching him?

Had that hurt him too? Hurt him, like his eyes could hurt her?

Finally, Sam sighs, shoulders dropping.

"I," he begins, a little softer. He gestures to the desk before them. "I thought."

"Good thinking." She nods. Good to move on. Good to work. Good he brought this typewriter in. She doesn't know what would have happened, what she would've said, if he'd continued looking at her like that. "I'll type up your notes from today."

They'll get much more done if he begins writing the copy now.

"I can do it tonight, if you'd like?"

"No. I thought," Sam swallows. She watches the line of it in his throat. It's hard to breathe. The air itself seems to have weight. "I thought I'd focus the story more on the suffering, not the fudging of the numbers. Not the funding."

She pauses. He's not making sense. Can he not breathe too?

"The stronger story is on the government's fraud." Suffering, she wants to say — hating how clear Scott's response will be to her, hating how true her statement would be — is a human interest story. Not worthy of the investigative beat. Jane takes a breath. "But, I can call the records office in the morning and cancel our visit. Maybe I can find a support group here that meets—"

"No." He says again. "Don't cancel. The funding is a better story. It still needs to be written. Just not by me." He takes a long breath, letting the words hang in the air before he turns to look at her. "Tomorrow you should have enough for the fifteen-hundred word skeleton and we can turn it in to Scott."

There isn't too much thought to the next part, but she is aware of what she is doing.

She is aware of what she wants, when she grabs his lapels, just like she always has, and pulls him forward to bring his mouth to hers.

Afterward, she'll think of how ridiculous she is, how there was nothing in this moment where he was displaying any sort of desire that might inspire a kiss to happen, how she was prompted to kiss him when he simply bestowed her a favor, gave her his approval (though it's not nearly as simple as that — actually, it wasn't that at all). But she will also know that this is something she wants.

It's something she has wanted for a long, long time. Maybe, it's something she has always wanted.

And so she kisses him, knowing she wants to. She doesn't know it all — the scope of it is something she doesn't have time to consider — but she knows, in this moment, she wants to kiss him.

She wants him. She wants it. She wants and wants and wants.

Sam, maybe, doesn't, but she doesn't think of that until he pushes her back.

Her heart is pounding, her mouth is dry, her lips hurt from pressing so sharply on his own.

He pushes her away, hands on her shoulders, and she is sure he is going to lecture her, to push further, out of reach from her hands still gripping his lapels. When she blinks him into focus though, he's not pushing further. He's not saying anything. He's looking at her. It's angry. And hungry.

(Arousal. Isn't it?)

He doesn't lecture. He pulls her back, kisses her back, kisses her open mouth and reaches further, pulling her closer.

It's hot and she's reaching, bringing him against her, holding him as close as he can get, chest flat against hers, fingers around his neck, in his hair, touching his ears. His jaw is hard, his lips heavy; his tongue warm.

She's huffing, but it feels like she can't breathe, like her inhales aren't enough.

She wants and she wants and she wants.

She has wanted, for so, so long.

Jane is the one to pull him down, to pull him with her against the hotel mattress, to open her knees and ask him to fall between them. She isn't wearing pantyhose — she doesn't anymore — and the brown wool of his pants is rough against her thighs. And then he is between her legs and she can feel, suddenly, starkly, his erection against her hip.

Hardness. Hard to understand. Hard to quantify.

It's so desirable. To think — to think! For her! This hardness, for her! He's kissing her — like she has wanted for so long, like he used to mock. This mouth, these arms, his hips and thighs and weight on his knees, these pieces of him she's paid so much attention to, she's known so well, for so long. She knows the slope of his shoulder, the line of his neck where his ear arches from. She kisses it now.

They're moving faster. Sam's breaths are hard and there is a noise behind them. She's spinning. Her stomach, her groin —it —

And then, suddenly, his hand is on her breast. His left palm is flat against her right breast, pushing it, holding it. It's one movement, one grip. They're intertwined, but somehow, the first touch moving it from simply kissing is too much for him. Too far, maybe.

Sam stops, tucks his chin to pull his mouth away from hers.

And then, before she can even catch her breath, even recognize his weight on top of her, he pulls away, sitting back, turning to be once more at the foot of the bed, legs hanging off it, back to her.

"No," Jane says, breathless, high, but not weak. She's sure. She knows. "Sam," she scrambles to sit up. She's sweaty, wet behind her knees as she tucks them under herself and reaches out for his shoulder. "Don't stop."

It's enough, this time.

As soon as her hand urges him back, he turns, following her, crawling back and landing, completely, between her legs. He kisses her again, not even pulling his lips from her as he takes off his jacket; but then he is back down on top of her. And he's not holding his weight on his knees anymore, he's pressing into her, his belt buckle hurting her, holding her down, and kissing her like — like. Like she's always imagined it to be.

His fingers come up underneath her skirt; his palm so warm, it leaves a trail of heat in its wake as his fingers press beneath her clothes, against her skin.

And then he pushes forward, pushes, hard, right against her and. Oh.

Oh, right there.

She feels him. Hears him.

She wants to drown. The noise he makes against her mouth is so deep from within him, guttural, ragged, like she wretched it out. Jane wants to swallow it. To reach down inside him and pull it back, to suffocate beneath it.

Sam does it again, pushing forward in one long thrust and it hurts, almost, and Jane can't open her eyes. She can't look at him. She can't breathe. She's overwhelmed. She pulls her mouth from his and whispers into his neck, having him do it again and again, as though in doing so, she'll get closer to finding the source of that noise, as though it is a mystery to solve, an end to discover.

He does it again, in her ear this time, and she's so lost within it, fisting his shirt in her hands, nails in his back, that she doesn't hear the first time the phone rings. She only knows that it had, at least once before, because suddenly Sam stops and then, again, the telephone rings.

They're still, as though they've been caught, as though they've been spotted doing something they weren't meant to.

It's not, is it? A surprise?

No. It shouldn't be.

Should it?

Jane is holding her breath, but Sam's lungs are heaving, pressing her chest, her ribs, down further into the mattress with every inhale. She feels his exhale on her neck. Slowly, she opens her eyes. Above her is only the hotel ceiling.

Blindly, Jane reaches over for the phone, fumbling for it. Finally, she catches the receiver and pulls it over, stretching the cord.

"Hello," she's still breathless.

"Ms. Hollander? This is the front desk. I have a call for Mr. Rosenberg from, a, uh, Benjamin Collingsworth? It doesn't seem to be going through to his room, so Mr. Collingsworth asked I try yours?"

Jane closes her eyes, taking a long breath. "One moment." She moves the receiver from her mouth. "Ben for you."

And then, without asking her anything, although she hasn't let him go, Sam pulls away once more, and Jane's hand, still holding him against her, releases. She watches him, watches his mouth. Red.

He doesn't look at her.

He sits to the side, off the edge of the bed, phone in his hand as he takes the call. Jane's cheek falls against the pillow to watch his back.

She is tingling, everywhere.

How humiliating, isn't it? To want so much. To desire something like this so much? To not be able to take her eyes from his spine and the movement of his ribs right before her?

"I'll take it in my room." His voice, on the phone, is level, but his back is heaving.

Sam hangs up the phone. He pauses. Reaches forward and adjusts the base back in the middle of the bedside table. And then he stands in one movement, reaching for his jacket as he does so.

He stops at the door and, without turning looking back, says "I'll see you in the morning." And then he opens it and walks out.

He leaves everything else.

She listens as her door closes and his opens and then that closes too.

Jane doesn't move. She can't move. Her knees are still spread. She feels heavy, like his weight is still on top of her.

She's wet.

She understands that phrase now, understands what it means.

It's different than with Max. Than with Chad. Than with any of the boys before.

Her heart is pounding, deafening in the sudden silence of her hotel room.

She is scared to move. That's what it is.

So Jane waits. And waits and waits until her heart has returned to normal, until the sweat is cold against her skin. And then, slowly, carefully, she stands and straightens her clothes. She picks up Sam's beer from where he left it on the floor and takes a sip. It's warm. And finally, without stopping for anything else, she takes a seat at the desk and loads a sheet into the typewriter.

---

ii. jane

Jane goes to sleep very late that night working on mapping out the story.

Seems to come to them naturally, Patti had told her once, but it took them work. It'll take us work too, so don't be too hard on yourself if you strike out before you ever learned to hit the ball.

She's up before dawn though. She sets her hair as best as she can having not prepared it the night before, pulling it back into a ponytail and curling the ends. Presentable. Delicate.

Jane smooths out her dress in the mirror, looking at herself.

Mindless, unimportant, frivolous.

She wipes off her lipstick as soon as she puts it on.

What are these worries when she has a story?

She is antsy, jittery. She has a job. A tryout. Nothing official — of course not. Sam didn't have any authority like that — but it's something. A pitch. An opportunity. One she was afforded — no. No. One she created. Sam came to her about suicide rates two days ago, but she came to Sam about Nixon's defunding of the Veteran's Services two months ago.

No hospitals were at capacity, Sam had said back then, reading the official word from the administration, believing it on the outset.

He didn't believe it now. She wonders if he remembers that conversation, if he thinks about it these days.

.

.

.

She dances around the rest, too anxious to think about Sam's hands, about his hips, about his breath on her face and the taste of his mouth. It feels distant, like a dream; like something that happened to somebody else.

But it's real too. It's so real, so visceral, that, when she sees him in the lobby, she can practically taste him.

He says nothing to her about last night. He asks her about work and her notes for Coatesville. He has his bag already in the car when she finds him, and so he takes hers as she goes to return their keys.

.

.

.

It was a Thursday morning over a year before when she was on the phone with her brother's girlfriend, then still an undergraduate at Radcliffe, phone held between her and Sam so they could both hear Sally talk about how she knew those apartments on University Road and how the doors notoriously never locked, especially in winter.

"You mean anyone could have walked in, at any time?"

She'd been too nervous to talk to Sam, but she was annoyed and fed up with the Cambridge Police Department, and she was willing to speak with Jane.

Go ahead, Sam had mouthed, and so Jane took the whole interview herself.

"Anyone could walk in now," Sally claimed, "the police haven't even blocked off the building. People can go into her apartment at anytime!"

Sam exhaled. He looked at Jane.

"People are walking into Britton's apartment? The crime scene?"

"Boys do it. On a dare. A girl was brutally… the police are allowing it to be a game like that. And nobody is fixing the locks."

It was good stuff. Stuff that would get them the cover, again.

And Jane remembered how, after they finished with Sally, Sam put a hand on her shoulder and said: "You're it, Jane. It's all you."

.

.

.

They don't talk in Coatesville. They don't talk in Philly. They don't talk after Philly. She writes notes and speaks on her own, but Sam is slow to respond and, sometimes, unless she's posed a specific question, doesn't respond at all.

He doesn't even look at her in the afternoon.

His head, not hers, is somewhere else.

.

.

.

"You're tired." He's yawned for the second time in less than five minutes.

"Didn't sleep much."

Jane watches him.

"Me either."

No response.

"Let's stop," she sighs, looking back to the road. "Get some coffee. Do we need gas?"

They pull up to a station outside New Brunswick.

It's chilly, rainy. She wears her coat into the building as he waits for the attendant to fill the tank.

When the door closes to the small roadside diner, all the men turn to look at her. They watch her as she walks to the counter.

Jane doesn't look at any of them. She has had this sort of attention before.

And maybe it's not lecherous at all. Maybe they recognize her. After all, she has been on TV recently. Her photograph was on the cover of The Inquirer last week.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just cold and she's just pretty.

.

.

.

When they begin again, Sam has the radio loud.

Jane lowers it as they come back onto the turnpike.

"The news comes on in three minutes," he justifies, turning it back up.

She lets it go, but she wants to talk about her story.

Perhaps the best route for the overview Scott wants is to go to local governments directly, cold-calling across the country instead of focusing on the hospitals themselves? Or would it be better to just concentrate on the federal response and the disconnect between their numbers and the ones from hospitals?

Is that better, to understand what they're seeing in their towns in comparison to the federal rhetoric? How should she angle it? She'll have to have it typed tonight to be on Scott's desk by the time he comes in tomorrow.

It'll still be under Sam's name, probably. At least, until the story is finalized. Until it's approved maybe, like with Nora — who had turned in her work and got approval on the writing itself before announcing that she, not Gabe, had written it?

She wants to ask.

It's been fifteen minutes. They've completed the breaking news overview. And it's not anything important he's hearing — Sam doesn't even like this station.

She'll be home soon. She doesn't really need to ask — she has enough for fifteen hundred words and she knows, for the most part, how to make it interesting enough for Scott to sign off on another vet's piece.

But it could be better, if he'd talk with her about how to approach it. Just for tonight, just for the skeleton.

He's looking away when she turns to him. Clearly looking away — clear, to them both, that he won't look at her.

Last night they were making out on her hotel bed and now he won't even pay attention to her.

What had changed?

Is kissing really that much of a mistake? Something he's angry about?

That's an answer for a question she doesn't want to ask.

When the first large story ends, Sam lets the radio run. It's just sporting commentary for a game she knows he read about this morning.

Last time he was angry with her was when he found out (pointedly, from someone else) about Chad. Now, he's angry because… what? She kissed him? Is that it?

Jane taps her fingers on the dash, annoyed.

Finally, she reaches over and turns the volume all the way down.

Sam looks at her fingers on the dial and, in protest, turns it back up.

She doesn't bother with the audio. She turns the whole apparatus off.

"Want to tell me what you're thinking about?"

The silence without the radio is stark.

Sam is gripping the wheel.

"No."

She watches his mouth as she says it. He used to smile at her all the time like she was the sun.

Jane stretches her hand out on the dash, spreading her fingers into a star-shape, and then she pulls it back, holds it in her lap, then by her side.

She's ready, even if he's not.

She can tell that if they weren't stuck in this car, he'd leave. If this were the office, he'd walk away.

Goodness, she might as well hitchhike.

Okay.

Okay, sure. She shouldn't have kissed him. That's fair.

It was wrong of her to approach him without knowing what he wanted. When he'd asked her out before, in addition to the joke of it, he'd never actually physically moved in. He'd simply asked.

Here, she hadn't given him too much of a choice.

But he did have one.

She might of kissed him first. But then he had kissed her back. He'd kept going. He'd wanted to do it, even if it was just sex, even if he didn't —

He's an adult. He can make his own choices. He had made his own choices.

Suddenly, Jane is angry. She's furious.

This is something! She's doing something here! Doesn't he see it? Can't he understand it?

Her blood, all of a sudden, is boiling.

"You're right, Sam," she says, hard and pointed, even as she looks away as she says it. "About what you said last night."

She can tell, despite her eyes on the Jersey landscape in the setting sun, that from the next seat, Sam is holding his breath.

She's ready. She's done braver things than this.

"I was raised differently. I was given everything, right? Whatever I asked for. That's what you think, isn't it?"

He exhales, ready to speak, to clarify or to confirm, she doesn't know, but she doesn't give him the opportunity for either.

"But I've rarely made my own choices. I've only ever done what someone else thought I should do. I'm not doing that anymore." She takes a long breath. "And I deserve to get it, don't I?"

There is a pause and, slowly, Jane turns to look at him.

He's frowning at the road.

"Deserve to get what?"

She's surprised by the question. Doesn't he know?

"What I want."

Sam is angry too. He's always worn everything on his sleeve.

Neither says anything. They sit in silence, but the tension doesn't deflate. Her heart pounds in her ears. She keeps her gaze squarely on him.

And then, in a jerk, Sam moves the car to the outermost lane, cutting off someone in the process. Dangerous, on the interstate. He pulls onto the shoulder and ignores the honks of the other cars as he turns the key and kills the engine.

One of Jane's hands is pressed against the window and the other on the dash where she'd reached to steady herself in reaction to his jolt. Her seatbelt is tight on her chest.

She works to take a deep breath, to right herself. She opens her mouth, but then stops.

It's dusk.

She can hear his breaths. She looks at his knees.

Dangerous.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Her mouth is dry.

"Did I do something that would make you think that I — that you couldn't…. Did you think I would go to Finn?"

Furious. Incensed.

But he's hurt too.

Of course he wanted an explanation. So did she. She also wanted to know, but she couldn't articulate it. She never could, even to herself.

Sam's breath is shaky. "You didn't have to. I mean. I understand why you wouldn't. But." She watches his knees. "But I thought that we, you and I. After last year, with your boyfriend." He looks at her. She can see it, in the corner of her eye. "I have to ask."

He sounds sad, now, defeated, like he wasn't before.

Oh — was going to ask about Chad?

The conversation she'd always known she was meant to have. Ineluctable, even as she ignored it for years.

Why had she never told him?

She knows, now, she thinks.

She understands.

Why doesn't he?

Chad feels like something distant, something unrelated to this, unrelated to Sam and to the EEOC.

She understands though. Why hadn't she seen it before?

These things are connected for him. Like the locks on Patti's door and her being asked to get coffee for important men. Like Gregory, showing his penis to his employee as a joke. For him, those things (the complaint and her ex-boyfriend) were interchangeable. They came from the same source, the same conclusion was drawn for each.

They're different, she wants to say, in his silence, as he thinks about what he wants to ask.

She understands about Chad. She's understood that for a while. She understood it before last night. She understood it at Patti's party. She maybe understood it since the day she met him.

Not warning him of the lawsuit — she has no answer for that. She'd hoped, maybe, he'd understand. He understands her, sometimes more than she understands herself. She'd hoped, even if she only recognizes it now, on the side of the turnpike on a Wednesday night, that she would've figured it out by now.

But she doesn't. She doesn't know.

"Why'd you let me make a fool of myself for so long?"

That's his question.

She wants to protest it. To alleviate what is obviously something weighing on him. Something that hurts him even though it isn't something that exists.

He equates them because, for him, Sam and Jane are a team. They're partners. Friends. And, as he sees it, she'd lied to him.

For her, the issues are separate. She kept both from Sam, but they're not connected in any way.

Jane swallows and looks out her window.

"For a long time," she says, careful in her words, "I pretended I didn't see what was right before me. As though if I got too close, I'd see all the flaws. Like when you get too close to a painting and you see the brush strokes. That's how I looked at life. But, I've thought of it for so long." For so long. "Since my first day." Isn't that something? "It's never been anything else." Jane takes a long breath. "Making excuses for what I was told was acceptable."

She knows it's convoluted, but Sam doesn't question her.

She rests her elbow on the door. Outside, the trees are tall.

"You're no fool, Sam. I am." She inhales. "I thought you were joking." Slowly, so he can look away if he wants, she looks back at him, meets his eyes, for the first time in hours. "But I never was. Even when I wanted to be."

His eyes are dark.

For so long, she was always watching him.

"Civil rights coverage is what put News of the Week on the map. Finn is spicy. He's youthful. He takes liberal stances and urges the momentum forward. He pushes boundaries. It's a double standard. And I didn't understand it for what it was."

Sam sighs. "I've watched men be shitty my whole life, Jane." He glances down. He palms the steering wheel. "We see so much horror, in this job." His hand flexes. "But we also see people step forward. We see heroes. Courage." Sam swallows and, when he looks up, he's looking at her again. "You're stepping forward, Jane."

She laughs in surprise. She hadn't expected that.

She doesn't even know what to say in response.

"I'm serious," and suddenly, he's smiling too. It's soft, but it's there. "If you were someone else — if I'd only seen the press conference or read the paper and hadn't met you before." He laughs. "Well, I'd do anything to write that profile. You're it, Jane."

I deserve, she thinks to herself, repeating it one more time, to get what I want.

"A profile wouldn't be assigned to you."

Sam smiles wider. "Doesn't matter. I'd hunt you down."

"You wouldn't."

She loves his smile. It's the best thing she has ever seen. It contorts his whole face.

"Wouldn't do too well trying to get your number with some other researcher, but I'd give it a helluva try."

Jane mimics his expression. She can't help it.

"Hm. Good thing you have the best researcher around."

And there is moment, just then, where they're doing nothing but smiling at each other.

"Lucky me, then." He says, softly into the cool air of the car.

And suddenly, it's dark. She could see him and now she can't.

Without saying anything more, letting the hum of the motors on the interstate zoom past, Sam turns the engine back on and drives them back toward Manhattan.

They speak some as they drive. She asks him her question on the skeleton. She tells him of Eleanor and the demands they're making. She'll tell him how it goes, as they continue.

She'll give him this, right now. She wants to share it between them. And right now, she'll give him whatever he asks for.

.

.

.

There is a note under her door when she returns. It's from a woman who lives on the first floor.

Thank you, it reads, for being so brave.

Jane tucks it back into its envelope and props it up atop her dresser.

.

.

.

Work resumes easily.

Sam is almost finished with the Mai Lai story. He hadn't worked on it at all while at home with his parents, but it was only the final touches anyway.

If Scott is upset with the delay, or gives Sam any grief for it, nobody tells Jane.

.

.

.

"You're pretty impressive, Jane 15B." Max is walking down the hall, hands in his pockets. "Out there changing the world. I thought I was the revolutionary here."

Jane rolls her eyes, smiling. "Signing your name on an SDS petition doesn't make you a revolutionary."

"Someone best tell John Mitchell that."

She laughs and unlocks her door. "Would you like a glass of wine?"

Max stops and turns to her. "You're inviting me in?"

"As neighbors." She says, then huffs at his expression. "As friends."

He holds his hands up as if in surrender. "I know nothing!" He says in an imitation of Sergeant Schultz.

Jane shakes her head and opens the door, leaving it ajar for him to follow behind.

.

.

.

Next Wednesday, the office is almost completely empty by ten.

They're up doing research and drinking from Sam's bottle of whiskey and she's not paying attention to the time or the hour or the fact that the work really isn't pressing enough for her to be here right now.

Instead, she's reading Richard Rovere's piece in the New Yorker on the Senate's rejection of Haynesworth and Carswell and Sam is looking at her.

That's all they're doing, really. Not working in any particular way. Her: reading, Sam: looking.

What do you want from me, she wants to ask once she can no longer concentrate on the text before her.

She keeps blinking, trying to refocus.

"You know," he says eventually, and she closes the magazine. "The night Noah died? We had a good time."

Oh. She didn't realize he was thinking about Noah. He doesn't talk about Noah — not really; not in any way that wasn't connected to the vet story he was planning on writing. And he certainly hasn't spoken about that night. At least, not with her.

She is here though, for now, or later, or whenever he wants to.

Jane nods, urging him to continue.

Sam huffs, smiling, moving his gaze past her, seeing something she doesn't.

"We had beers. Went back to his place for a bit afterwards."

She knows it was at his apartment. She knows Sam called the police. She knows Sam called her. And that's all. She has no idea what precipitated it or what followed it.

"Talked about you."

"You did?"

Sam laughs in his exhale. "He really wanted me to ask you out."

She doesn't smile. She feels her neck get warm.

Joking again, isn't he? Even though they've kissed. Even though they've done more than kiss. But he's never spoken about it. Sex is one thing. Asking out is another. He's not interested in that, is he.

Why would he be? She may have turned her back on all the things that divided them, but he hasn't.

Why would Sam even want her? He knew people burning their draft cards. She spent weekends at the country club.

Wow, rich girl crosses the line, they'd say. What are you doing to do, join the hippies? The communes?

It makes Jane blush.

"There was this ball," Sam says, moving on, still looking distant. He's paying Noah attention, not her. "Noah's dad's. Mickey Mantle's from his first season with the Yanks." Sam smiles and meets her eyes. "We loved that thing. And when we're kids — I don't know, ten, eleven? — we decide we're gonna play ball too."

Jane patiently takes a sip of her whiskey. She can picture them. Skinny limbs. Dark hair combed back. Baseball caps. Saving up for trading cards and listening to games on the radio.

"You know, Jews, they don't-" Sam licks his lips. "There weren't many playing sports professionally, you know. But baseball. Baseball was the way. When they did it, they did it through baseball. And it's the most American sport there is, you know? It means something. In the Bronx, it means something. So, me and Noah, we're gonna play too. We're gonna be like Mickey and DiMaggio and all of 'em. And so we sign our names on the ball too."

"You didn't!"

"We did." He laughs again, louder, shakes his head at the memory of it. "Anyway. We got in huge shit for it. Noah's dad never forgave me actually, I think. Still wasn't happy to see me there. Though, you know, I think they. Well." Sam pauses. Swallows. Looks down at the glass in his hand. "I was the last one with him. I was the only one with him."

"Sam," she tries, but she isn't saying anything more with it.

There is nothing more, really, to say.

"Anyway," he repeats, looking back up at her. He reaches closer to her, opening the top drawer of his desk. He picks up a baseball. "Gave it me right before." He hands it to Jane. "A parting gift."

Jane puts down her drink and takes the ball in both hands.

She turns it over. Sam Rosenberg. Mickey Mantle. Noah Benowitz. She traces her thumb over his name. He would've been smiling when he wrote this.

She wipes away a tear with the back of her hand and Sam looks away.

.

.

.

Jane finishes her final run through of Sam's copy on Saturday night.

It's her first weekend night since the press conference. She'd thought it'd be stifling — staying so late once the editors had left and when all sense of decorum was usually long gone. It's not bad though. Half the office is still around, finishing their stories at the last minute. Writers are pacing, mostly waiting on the women to finish so they can sign-off.

Jane is the same way — finishing. Except it's the final draft of an already-heavily edited story that could have gone to press the previous week. So her reporter isn't here pacing, he's long gone at some dinner with plans to come in and put in her few tweaks in the morning and easily have the piece done by the time the magazine goes to print tomorrow.

It's almost eight when she gets up to leave. It's good she finished tonight. Now she won't need to come in tomorrow. She can go to the museum. Maybe call one of the friends she hasn't seen in a while — maybe see her parents or finally take Max up on his offer to hang out and see what his friends in the village have to offer.

Jane leaves the work on Sam's desk.

It's an in-depth story on the massacre which will be the cover unless J.P. gets a source to go on the record (which Sam thinks is unlikely). Either way, it'll be run. Longest story in the magazine since When Our Boys Come Home.

She doesn't make it to the waiting area before she turning back and checking on the story one more time. It's squarely on his desk, leaning against his typewriter. Jane stops and looks at it. Then reaches out and adjusts the paper so it's next to the typewriter — just so it doesn't slip in the night and fall to the floor.

This time, she's not even out of the bullpen.

Typewriters are still going. A light film of cigarette smoke settles in the air even though they're not supposed to light up in the office anymore.

Jane stops and turns back and takes the paper off the desk in totality. She grabs a folder to carry it. Who knows — maybe it'll save him the trip? He'll probably be grateful.

It's warm out. Dark and warm, but not yet muggy, and she knows which train to take to Sam's place even though she's never taken it herself.

Her father will continue to pay for her apartment until she finds a place that she can afford and that he considers safe enough. It's a compromise she is fine with. She doesn't mind holding off for a few months. She knows desperation is always the worst bargaining chip, especially in real estate.

She doesn't take any other money, so she has to take the train now. On her own these days.

Jane grows anxious as the subway takes her further downtown, worse, the closer she gets. She hasn't thought it through. She probably shouldn't do it.

Why drop it off? What is she asking? Sam was already planning on coming in tomorrow. He didn't need her to bring it tonight.

Why is she going?

Really, she should keep her distance. Not healthy, for her own sake, to follow Sam when she wants something he doesn't. They're friends. She cares for him deeply. She doesn't penalize him for his lack of desire. But she shouldn't press it either. It's not good for her.

So why is she going?

She feels like a child, almost. Like she is in college again and she opened her door to see her best friend sneak a boy out of the bedroom, unsure where she was going or what she was meaning to say. Feeling like a child trapped in an adult's body. Like she didn't belong. Like, in the end, she really didn't know anything.

There is no reason to feel like that. Jane, very rarely, is out of her depth.

She has been to Sam's before. Once. She knows Sam more than she knows almost anyone.

There is no need to feel like she is treading water.

Jane steers on.

She kicks and kicks and treads and tries not to think about it as she raps her knuckle to his door, folder pressed tightly against her chest, mouth dry.

"Just a sec," she hears. Then, "who is it?"

But Sam pulls the door open before she can respond.

He has a peephole, but he hadn't looked through it. She can tell, because he's surprised at her appearance, his shoulders raised, a slight, unsure alarm in his eyes.

And then, as quickly as he had pulled the door open, he exhales and lets his shoulders fall and lips quirk.

"Jane Hollander. You're not who I was expecting."

She purses her lips to fight the grin. "Oh? Were you expecting someone else on a Saturday night?"

"Depends." He seems bigger, like he is leaning closer even though he hasn't actually stepped up, arm still holding the door open. "Is it work related?"

Jane exhales into a laugh.

No need to be anxious. He's always so easy.

Her stomach, though, still feels light.

She extends the folder with her edits to him.

"Oof," he mock-groans as they're shoved into his chest. Sam steps back, dropping his forearm from the door and moving to hold it wide with his body so that she may enter.

It's been months since she was here, but it looks unchanged. The overhead light is still missing a cover. It's just a bare bulb lighting the entire room apart from one lamp near the couch. She remembers that — the naked lightbulb. She remembers how Sam has a smell. It's not something she'd ever noticed until she was in his space and, now, it hits her again. He has a smell. And this is it.

"I'll get you a drink," he says, letting the door fall closed behind her. He's looking at her edits as he walks into the kitchen. "Coffee?"

Jane, standing in his living room, looks over her shoulder.

Sam glances up in time to catch her eye. "Stronger. I get it." And then he disappears into the kitchen.

She takes a long breath, both hands holding her bag in front of her.

She feels weak, like her knees are about to buckle and she's going to fall right over. Her legs are numb. She hopes he doesn't notice.

She concentrates on her inhales. Carefully, Jane places her bag on the couch.

His couch is long and thin and not entirely comfortable. Nothing here is entirely comfortable. It's too small. Too bare. There is a large dining table against the wall which doubles as his desk. The door to his bedroom, right off the living room, is open. She can see his bed is made.

That's a surprise. It makes her laugh.

And then she turns away, offering him the privacy he doesn't know she's already violated.

Jane wrings her hands.

No. She shouldn't be here. This was a mistake.

There is no sound in the apartment apart from her heels on the creaky floor.

Jane moves over to the table. There is a half-written list of sources. It's usually how she organizes her lists — names, DOBs, telephone numbers, and addresses. She doesn't know all these people though. They're not all from Pennsylvania.

Sam comes back, handing her a tumbler.

"I don't have any bitters. It's mostly an old-fashioned though."

"Mostly." She tries to stay light. She should go. Finish the drink quickly.

Sam takes a seat on the couch, leaning back.

"How was dinner?"

He shrugs. "Short." He gestures at his notepad she'd standing right above. It's clear she's been reading it. "I'm going to have you call some people next week. Just trying to figure it out."

She looks at him over her shoulder, smirks.

Sam licks his lips. "Fine. I'll work on it tonight. Have something for you by Monday."

Jane turns back to the table, taking a sip of her drink and letting it warm her mouth before she swallows to ease the burn of it. She reaches out and moves his papers to see what else he's working on. Sam lets her. He's silent as she skims and then doesn't say anything until she moves it aside for another one.

"Are you going to take your jacket off?"

"Hm?" She's caught off, too immersed in his notes.

It's casual, though she could hear a strain in his voice.

Oh, does he want her to go? Does he too know she shouldn't be here?

His drink is on the wooden arm of the couch. His hands are clasped in his lap as he looks at her, brow vaguely furrowed, like he doesn't mean to frown.

"No, I." She swallows. She'll leave. "I was just here to drop off the copy."

It's panic. She doesn't know what to say.

She knows what she wants. She knows, too, he doesn't want the same thing.

And she's scared of it. She's terrified.

She's strong. She's capable. She's a revolutionary.

But she's scared of him. Scared of its meaning. Scared of what she wants and how much she wants it.

Sam smiles.

"Thank you for the drink though."

He nods. "Have you eaten?"

"I have food at home."

"Okay."

Okay, then.

She has another sip, intending to leave her drink on the table and then gather her things and leave him alone, but she stops, her eyes catching on something she hadn't noticed before.

"Jane," he says, sharp, a little high, and he scoots forward on the couch to sit on the edge of it, reaching out a hand as though that'll stop her. But she's not paying attention to him.

On the table, leaning against the wall, is a framed note. Jane turns all the way around, reaching across the table for it. She gets it, not understanding why, even though, if she's honest, she recognized it the moment it fell under her eye. She leaves her glass on the table, taking the frame up with both hands to read the elegant script.

"I haven't hung it yet," Sam says. He sounds far away, like she's hearing him underwater.

A month or so ago, Bea Burkhart, owner of the magazine, had sent Sam a personal note.

She'd mentioned Jane in it as Head Researcher before Jane had been promoted. Sam had compliments all the time, but this was the highest one he had received. It was the highest, at the magazine, she had received.

She's not surprised he kept it. It's a huge honor. It's. It's that — here, framed.

"Of course I did," he says, and she isn't sure if she even said anything aloud or if he understands her intention without her saying anything. "It's our names. A congratulations to us." She huffs and he rests his elbows on his knees, licking his lips, words slow and deliberate. "I always thought of it as Us, Jane." He waves a hand. "Can you believe it? I was so proud of you for being called Head Researcher by Burkhart even though you weren't yet. I thought that was your highest goal." He exhales. "God. What a goddamn idiot. I can't believe how fucking…." He trails off.

Jane is so surprised by it though, she hardly hears what he is trying to say, and yet she knows. She knows. Maybe she's always known and has just been too scared of the consequences, too terrified of her own desire, she categorized everything as something other than it was.

You're no fool, Sam. I am.

I am. I am.

She glances over at him.

He's embarrassed. His knee is jumping. He's trying for unaffected though, and that makes it more… just. More.

Her breath quickens.

"You sound like a school-girl, writing names in your book." She laughs, high and relieved and so terrified, she is almost delirious (and yet, seemingly, feels like she has never understood him more). "You know, I have a picture of you. Of us." Her words are shaky, but she's done holding herself back. "Harry took it. We're in Finn's office, talking and…." she licks her lips. "It's just of us. I saved it. I have it. At home."

Sam's looking at her like. Like he has so many times before. Like he had the night of Patti's party. Like she has always seen him look at her and somehow always forgot that he did that.

"I know the one." He's laughing too, delirious too. "They didn't have copies, when I went. Harry couldn't find it when I asked."

Oh. She'd thought he'd had the option and hadn't taken it. He'd asked Harry though. He'd asked, too.

Oh.

All this time.

"Did you know I took it?"

Sam exhales, rubbing his hand over his face. "No. I think it's good that I didn't. It would've kept me up. I'd have read too much into…." He makes a noise as he exhales.

Jane puts the framed-note down flat on his table and turns fully to look at him.

She's standing, shoulders straight, looking at him directly as he sits there, watching her.

He looks down, away, and then back. He's blushing. She's never seen that. She thought she'd seen every side of him. But he's here now, face reddening, smiling from the embarrassment of it.

Jane smiles too, slow, shy.

What has she always been so unsure about? She knows this answer.

It's the one she's been looking for.

"We're going to have sex aren't we?"

"Yes," he says clearly, saying it for the fact that it is. He drops his forehead in his hand, tilting so he's still looking at her. Smiling. Blushing. "If you want to."

She thinks of his hands. Doesn't he know she wants to? How she has always wanted to? How sometimes, even two years and one lifetime ago, back when she'd planned on marrying someone else, back when she'd just met Sam and assumed everything in her life was already written out, back when she thought of him as just her reporter at her temporary job, she'd still woken up dreaming of his hands? His hands. His long legs. His ears, wet.

"Make love," she says, because it's clearer. It's truer.

Sam swallows. He looks up at her.

He's so cute. That smile. That smile! Nothing else like it.

"Yes," he says, and he looks so young as he says it. He's smiling, exasperated.

This is love, isn't it? This is it.

"It'd be good, Jane." He continues. "I'd make it good for you, real good. It'd be—"

"I know." She almost laughs at how clear it is, how funny it is, that they've waited this long. Except it's not funny. And she doesn't laugh. "I've wanted."

"So long," he finishes, and he's breathless.

"So long," she repeats, and she waits in silence until he stands up. He says nothing more. He stops smiling. And he follows her back into his bedroom.

.

.

.

She picks out a place uptown. She moves out of her apartment two weeks later.

.

.

.

There are other things going on with the world. Bombs are going off in their own city. People are dying. Monks set themselves on fire on television. Young boys are getting killed every single day and their own government has forgotten about them.

They still have stories to write and they still stay in the office late more nights than not, keeping on opposite sides of the building at their respective desks. She still wakes up an hour earlier than necessary because, deep down, even though she despises it within herself, she is still scared to not look the part, to not keep up, to show that it's not more work — the warpath — and she will still be able to handle herself as a reporter.

She's still called his "girl" and "that girl" by people she's never met and by people she's known for years. Sam still published full-sentences she has written under his byline.

But he's worked hard with her on her first draft, helping her edit and rewrite; sometimes at work when no one is paying attention, and sometime in his bed, writing thoughts on notepads. He puts forward the full story in May, but the paper turns it down. And then, without his help (but with him by her side), she sells it to another magazine.

And so, the world turns: bombs, ink, the buzz of the telex and the wires and the ringing of phones all against the smell of burnt coffee and mimeograph and stale cigarettes.

And in August, on her last day of work at News of the Week, box in hand, the other by Sam's foot as he waits outside the building, a little sweaty even in his short sleeves, two weeks after the negotiations broke down for the second time, two days after she accepted at job at the Enquirer, Sam reaches for her hand and presses his key into her palm (a gift to her, not a replacement of what she already has) and then picks up her second box and they carry them all the way to the train and take them up to her place.

She'll keep writing. Always. It's hard to believe that once, only half a year before, she'd thought, one day, she'd be satisfied with stopping. After all, there is nothing like the flush of the story, of the success, of the praise. Of him.

There is simply nothing like it.

---

thank you for reading (genuinely for making it this far with me). Please find me on tumblr if you're the only other fan in the

world of this show so we can discuss!

thank you!