Read Maxed Out for Free Online Page A

it
finally comes all of my defenses melt right through my fingers.
    “Okay,” I say. “I’m going to go grab a muffin. Do you want
anything?”
    “Coffee?” he says.
    I’m so enamored of him right now that I go to the place
across the street instead of the break room to get it, and when I get back, I refuse
his offer to reimburse me. It’s really nice to have something go my way for
once.
    I can’t imagine that this will last.

8
     
    “It’s brilliant,” Phil says.
    I’ve finished the article in record time, thanks to Jeremy’s
notes. It’s the sort of thing Phil likes to see first before I pass it on – he has
this obsession with conspiracy theories, exposés and the like. There’s a whole
cabinet in his office devoted to crazy stories that we didn’t have enough
evidence to run. Every once in a while he gets this gleam in his eye that
suggests that he might actually believe that there’s someone stopping us from
printing them, that it’s not just an issue of credibility given that we can’t
back them up.
    We get stopped from printing things all the time, of course.
Phil knows this . He doesn’t care about those kinds of stories – they’re
inevitably boring reviews or critiques that we don’t run to avoid offending our
advertisers. Whenever we have something negative to say about one of our
clients, someone on the business end crunches the sales we’d gain from printing
it versus the cost of losing the advertiser, and a decision is made. This
basically means that the bigger the company, the more newsworthy something
negative we print has to be.
    The logical extension to this is that any of those stories
that are interesting enough for Phil to care about are interesting enough to
sell papers, so they get printed. Anything interesting conspiracy wise would
get printed instantly if we could find evidence to sell it. Phil doesn’t
care. He has too much fun living in this little fantasy world where the
Rothschild family sends their kids to the Build-a-Bear group or whatever to
control global politics, one where people beyond our advertisers actually care
what we print.
    So, of course, this is right up his alley.
    “This was the sort of thing I hired you for,” he says,
obviously to Jeremy.
    “Jeanine did all the heavy lifting,” Jeremy says. “I just
did a little research for her as a favor.”
    “I didn’t see her here all night—“
    “I was just investigating her leads across a time
differential,” Jeremy says, cutting him off. “Really, it was all her.”
    Phil shrugs. “Whatever. I’m just glad you two are working
together – I thought I caught a whiff of something earlier.”
    “No problems here,” I say. I mean it, too.

9
     
    We go out to lunch, Jeremy and I. To say that he’s grown on
me since this morning would be an understatement on the scale of ‘the holocaust
was bad’ or ‘Skrillex has stupid hair.’ It’s almost unbelievable how much my
feelings for a person can change in such a short time.
    My phone keeps buzzing, interrupting any chance of me
actually talking to Jeremy now that I don’t hate his guts. First it’s Renee,
worrying about me having to work with that prick that I described last night.
I’m surprised she cares: all my friends seemed to care about last night was my
relationship with Max. I tell her that everything is working out alright, that
I overreacted, and her next text is ‘please don’t fuck him’ in about as many
words. Thanks, mom, wasn’t planning on it – but if I was, it wouldn’t be any of
your business. She probably thinks I’m on rebound from Max still. I’m not. We broke
up like civilized adults. Still, I’ve always been rather attracted to Jeremy,
and now that I respect him professionally –
    My phone saves me from finishing that line of thought. It’s
Tiff, telling me she’s ‘there if I need her.’ I try to stay positive with my
reply, but the degree to which my friends think I’m an invalid because Max and
I