Amber Stephens - Confessions - A Secret Diary

‘Firstly a couple of words about Kate Hurley,’ Aidan began. ‘A hero of mine. One of this country’s finest journalists, and a pioneering feminist. She had a mind like a razor, a heart like a lion, and balls of steel. She will be missed.’

Though unsure about the third simile, Shelley found herself muttering ‘hear, hear’ along with everyone else.

‘Do you know? My mother used to read this magazine,’ Aidan continued, lifting the latest issue and waving it at the team aggressively. ‘She loved it. This magazine helped her through some difficult times.’ Freya nodded sympathetically and put her head to one side, blinking those doe eyes. Bailey nodded sagely.

Aidan walked over to the windows and everyone swivelled to follow. ‘She read this magazine in hospital when she had breast cancer,’ he continued, gazing meditatively out over North London. ‘She read this magazine at home after my father left her. She read this magazine in the nursing home as she watched over her own mother dying.’

He turned back to face the group, hands at his sides, his face simultaneously full of loss and warmth. Shelley felt a little funny, and squeezed her legs together and glanced around the room. Even Briony was staring at Carter, mouth open. Freya looked like she was about to have an orgasm.

‘Unfortunately my mother doesn’t read this magazine anymore,’ he said. ‘Do you want to know why?’

Briony hissed and mouthed ‘Dead?’. Shelley frowned back in distaste.

‘She thinks it’s too boring,’ Aiden said.

Grumbling and shaking of heads.

‘Things have changed. My mother has changed. The world has changed. She wants more from her magazines these days. More stories about having fun and not so many about illness, more stories about love and not so many about heartbreak, more stories about life and less about death.’

‘Fewer,’ Shelley said automatically.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘ F - fewer stories about death,’ Shelley stammered. ‘Not less stories about death.’ Why had she said that? Was she to get herself fired just as the magazine was being saved?

He stared at her hard, a strange look on his face, then he snapped out of his trance and walked off towards the window again. His square-jawed, brooding face shadowed before the May sunlight pouring in.

‘My mother is tired of sickness, sadness and saying goodbye,’ he continued. ‘That was the past. People choose life these days. People choose … happiness … and people choose sex .’

He spun for the finale.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to your new magazine.’ And with that he stepped over to an old ad board lying against the wall and flipped it to reveal a blown-up magazine cover.

Briony had been wrong. The new editor wasn’t just going to faff about with fonts and page orders. He’d changed everything, including the name.

The cover was an almost naked Mimi Corvair, the model recently dropped by most of her sponsors when she was filmed having a coke-snorting threesome with the boyfriends of two other models. Her days as a cover-girl had been declared well and truly over, and now she was relegated to the name-and-shame pages only. The lads’ mags still wanted her, but for what her agent considered the wrong reasons.

If Aidan wanted her on the cover it meant he was trying to make a mark. He was trying to kill Female Intuition and get the revamped mag back in the press. That was shocking enough.

But it was the new title that hit Shelley hardest.

In hot pink, and crowding the raunchy image beneath with huge letters was the new, bold title.

VIXEN .

Aidan paused for a moment, and then continued: ‘I can’t let this magazine die, I owe it to West End, I owe it to you and I owe it to my mother.’

A solitary clapping from Bailey was taken up by the rest of the room, and soon even the post boys were joining in.

But Shelley reckoned she wasn’t the only one who was totally terrified. If sex was the new direction this magazine was taking, then she wasn’t at all sure it was the right place for her. Sex wasn’t really her thing. She’d only done it a few times, and if we were talking, y’know, proper sex, she’d only done it with two different men.

As they stood and applauded, she wasn’t thinking about the future of the magazine, or the fresh opportunities she was being presented with.

She was trying to remember if she’d even had any actual sex at all in the last year.

Chapter Two

Briony and Shelley went to Dino’s for lunch, like they always did. Shelley toyed with a salad while they talked about the events of the morning. Aidan had told them that after lunch he was going to speak to each of them individually and define their new roles. Dishy as he was, Aidan was still management, and he used lots of phrases like ‘going forward’ as in, ‘We’ll roll out these new synergies, going forward,’ or, ‘We’ll revise our budgets quarterly, going forward’. The editor in Shelley wanted to point out that you could hardly do these things going backward.

‘Do you fancy him?’ Briony asked.

‘Do you?’ Shelley replied.

‘Yes, of course. The question is, do you?’

‘Why is that the question?’

‘Because Aidan’s obviously not interested in me, he’s interested in you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Shelley said. ‘If he looked at anyone today, it was Freya.’

Briony snorted, ‘Only because she hung off him and kept getting in his way. Aidan Carter wouldn’t go for a girl like her anyway.’

She chased a troublesome cherry tomato around her plate with a fork as she spoke.

‘Why not?’ Shelley asked, intrigued.

Briony speared the tomato savagely, splattering juice over the plate. Then she looked up and eyed Shelley mischievously.

‘Because he’s the kind of man who likes a challenge.’

Shelley shivered.

‘So I suppose that’s why he wouldn’t be interested in you,’ was the best comeback she could manage.

Briony laughed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. So what are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ Shelley replied, pouring herself more Diet Coke to avoid having to look at Briony’s smirk. ‘Anyway, how do you know so much about Aidan?’

‘I’ve been looking at his CV.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t play the innocent, I know you googled him after the Christmas party.’

‘Don’t be disgusting!’ Shelley snapped. ‘I did not!’

Briony sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘I mean you looked him up on Google.’

‘Oh … yes. Yes, I did,’ Shelley agreed. ‘I thought googling meant something else in that context.’

Briony looked puzzled for a moment.

‘People these days like to write about themselves on social networking sites, you know, like Facebook or MySpace. If you want to know about someone, you just look them up. Aidan Carter’s MySpace page is very revealing.’

‘Really? What does it say?’

‘It says he’s single and looking for love. His ideal woman is his intellectual equal, someone who gives as good as she gets, in the office and the bedroom.’

Shelley wilted.

‘Well that’s me out then,’ she said.

‘You’re not his equal in the office?’ Briony asked, smirking.

‘I meant the bedroom,’ Shelley replied.

‘Nonsense,’ Briony said. ‘You’re just out of practice.’

‘Fat chance of getting any of that in the near future, the hours I’m working,’ Shelley said.

‘You’re making excuses. Your problem is that you don’t put yourself out there enough, you never go out these days, you’ve had three dates in the last two years … how many times have you had sex in the last year?’