Wow! Amazing response to the first chapter! Thank you so much! I only hope I'm helping with the pain that has come after Sunday's bombshell.
Rating has gone up due to harsh language. Also, note: The acoustic version of Let Her Go is far more appropriate for these two than the single!
I own neither The Newsroom, nor Passenger, nor their song. Damn.
Chapter 1: Two weeks later
But you only need the light when its burning low...
Saturday. The most depressing day of the week.
Well, after Sunday.
Saturday used to be the most depressing day of the week, because Sunday had always meant it was only one day 'til he'd be back in the Newsroom. Back with her. Them! Them, he told himself; resisting the urge to throw his beer bottle over the side of the balcony.
In fact, screw the beer. He was certain he had some Scotch somewhere.
He was so mad, and he wasn't even sure who he was mad at. Mac, for giving up; Charlie for letting her; Jim for doing the right fucking thing; or Nina for turning out to be a nice person and making him want to ask her out.
Of course, he should really blame himself, but he couldn't do that right now. Because he was too damn angry, and if he directed that back at himself, he wasn't sure what would happen. Mac, Charlie, Jim and Nina were safe, not on this balcony with him. He wasn't sure he was safe from himself.
But he was going to drink anyway.
Two weeks earlier...
She said it so quietly that he had to ask her to repeat it. All he had made out was 'Nina' and 'not'.
When she repeated herself, she found a growing ball of warmth in her stomach that seemed to be counter-acting the intense dryness in her eyes as her mind started to catch up with what her brain had just processed.
When she looked up at Will, his eyes were so wide that he might have been high there and then – hopefully he was: she might get an answer out of him that way.
"Will…" She actually felt like she was doing weights. The effort this sentence took for her was immense, purely because of the amount of emotional strength she had put into it over the last two months. "What did the message say? And – I swear to whatever Deity you so prefer, if you don't answer, or if you lie, then I'm taking Nina's answer as writ and that's the end of it. We don't ever come back to it and its over."
He had already blown it. They both knew it.
She saw his eyes widening as he tried to figure out what to do. That he actually had to think about it was making her want to walk away before he even had the chance to speak at all.
"You said –" She started again, nervously twirling a strand of hair in her hand, partly for comfort, but more because the pressure on her roots as she tugged it reassured her that this was not some horrific nightmare – it was painfully real. "You said a minute ago that you were still –"
She couldn't finish the sentence. Not if it wasn't true. Not if he was lying. Or even if he had just been high; she couldn't –
Will turned on the spot, lingering with his back to her for a few seconds. All the while Mac just wanted to smack him around the head and maybe grab his shirt front and shake him until she forced the truth out of his reluctant, frustrating, and annoyingly gorgeous body.
"Itbasicallysaidiwasstillinlovewithyouandtojustign orethemessageifyoudidntfeelthesame."
His breath came in spurts after that. Like he had been lifting weights too.
He was looking at her as though she could turn into some sort of dangerous animal that might attack him at any moment – Lord, if only she could!
For seconds after his words she was unable to actually understand what he had just said. Her brain seemed to have slowed right down and the sentence was crawling through her usually ridiculously high-speed mind.
When it had finally computed, all she could do was stare at him dumbly, unable to find words that could justly express her feelings. Not knowing what else to do, she turned back towards the conference room, determined to pretend that hadn't just happened – at least until she could find a darkened room somewhere. Possibly equipped with a punching bag. But Will caught her arm just as she got the door open.
"Mac –"
No.
All the ire and suppressed feelings of devastation that had been slowly building since Charlie's meeting caused her go with the tug, almost knocking him over as she turned into him, sticking her face right next to his so that there would be no misunderstanding her emotions.
"Are you blind?!" She wasn't going to be quiet about this either. If Will was not willing to give her some space and privacy then she really didn't give a shit. If he wanted to have this out in front of their staffers, then so be it – he had the power to fire her (as he had so often reminded her all those months ago) and right now she was not entirely opposed to the idea.
"I –"
"No really, Will? Are. You. Blind?" The tears probably weren't aiding her mission to make him feel remorse – she was supposed to be tough and angry right now, for crying out loud! But she was too worn to try and stop them.
"Are you seriously telling me that if I had just answered a voicemail – a voicemail which, by the way, I couldn't answer because the woman you've been fucking -" she spat the word at him, "for the last six weeks –"
Her voice cracked. God she couldn't talk about this.
Pinching her nose, she determined that she had to finish this sentence or she would lose the last remaining self-respect she had. Using a technique she and Jim had been taught in the Middle East, she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth a couple of times before she felt calm enough to go on.
"Are you telling me that if I had answered we would have gotten back together?"
Will simply stood. And that made her so fucking angry.
Obviously he didn't think much of her right now, but could he not even give her a simple fucking yes or no?
She was fairly sure that she could feel the burning stares of the twenty or so people in the room behind them, along with those few people at the surrounding workstations. She wanted the floor beneath her to open up and swallow her whole, because the look in Will's eyes was giving her the answer she was dreading.
She would rather hear that he would hate her guts for all eternity and he wished she was damned to suffer the punishments that awaited adulterers than have him tell her that she had missed her chance because of…well, because of the woman he had been taking to bed instead of her.
She was so mad at him for giving her that little flame of hope. That hope that had been burning inside her like a beacon for weeks now. That hope that had urged her to not give up; on him, on them.
Sure, it was humiliating and degrading - the next few days and weeks were going to be as bad as, or if not worse than, those that had followed her leaving him five years earlier. But mainly it just hurt because she loved him.
And apparently that counted for sweet fuck all.
Finally, "I don't know."
Silence.
"But we might have?"
Silence.
OOOOO
They didn't talk for the rest of the afternoon. The two follow-up rundowns were conducted through the staff as intermediaries, and during the broadcast she never answered his questions, only gave him information as required, and by the time he had exited the studio, he merely caught the swish of her coat round the far corner as she left the Newsroom.
Ten hours, six text messages and three unanswered calls later, she finally responded to him.
Sorry, but you dented my fender. "I don't know" was a little too inane, if you get my drift.
That was the last time they had talked about Nina Howard. And since then they had barely talked at all.
Now he was sitting in his penthouse, Nina's clothes and perfumes gone and their essence removed with several layers of bleach and air freshener to try and erase those memories from his brain and his home.
It hadn't worked.
His guilt and his anger had gone into overdrive since she had left.
All the things that had been in his head about moving on and opening a new chapter in his life – all that bullshit – had evaporated the moment she had told him that she was leaving for four weeks. It was like trying to hold water in his hands – he just couldn't. The thoughts and intentions just seeped through his fingers and were gone. He hadn't been able to find them again.
The nights came early now, and all he could think about was the laughter and the banter that had filled the days following his hospitalization in the late evening of Summer. The renewed sense of hope and determination, and sense of family that had existed in those few precious days before Genoa and Nina Howard had torn it all down again.
These days the Newsroom was just a place of work. A place where people arrived in the morning and tried to remember the mantra that there absent leader had once hammered into them until they got to leave, relieved at the end of the day.
And Will hated it.
Hated that within a couple of hours of Mac leaving the slump had already set in.
That she could hold so much of them in her hands and her heart that one day away was enough to break their backs and leave them drifting. One week was crippling. And there were so many days yet to be. God, that she was the one who really held all the power, and now she was gone.
Gone because of him.
He hated that she'd exposed him to that. Hated that everyone knew it too.
But God he missed her.
It had been nine days.
Nine long, excruciating days since she had left. And there were another three whole weeks to go until she would return.
If she returned, he thought darkly. Was this just her go-to solution these days?
And whose fault is that? Another slightly more reasonable voice queried from the back of his mind.
God, he was losing it.
It was coming on for one in the morning, and the blackness hung over the jagged outline of New York like a dark blanket keeping out the light.
All the old clichés he had ever heard about winter, and the dark and the frost coming seemed sharper, new meanings creeping into his mind the more he brooded on his own failure and fallibility.
Usually, he didn't mind the night. It was peaceful (a time he had treasured all the more since he had moved to the vibrant hub that was the Big Apple), and had always been reassuring and inspiring to him. You could see the stars - or you could in Nebraska. But even with the glare of Broadway's lights poisoning the blackness, he knew they were up there: wonder and impossibility – the engines of human innovation.
But now it was cloudy and foreboding and unfriendly, like it was blocking him out, or maybe keeping him in.
Or perhaps it was something else.
Maybe his life was just darker, steadily growing more so as his troubles and the depression that accompanied him deepened. There was no light that he could find, and the worst part was that he knew why.
It wouldn't be this dark where she was. And not just the sky…
Well you only need the light when it's burning low…
Two chapters within hours of each other! I've actually managed to shock myself!
Thank you for reading everyone! Please review/follow/favourite if you can. Your comments have been amazing! ;) Cheers! x