Amber Stephens - Confessions - A Secret Diary

Shelley wasn’t really listening though, she was thinking about Aidan’s sleek, well-muscled back, his rock-hard, hairless buttocks, and two shiny-smooth …

‘Bollocks!’ someone shouted from Aidan’s office, which happened to be situated right behind Shelley. Then the door was flung open and Maya, one of the subeditors, marched out. Then she turned around and shouted back through the open door. ‘It’s all bollocks, Aiden Carter, and I’m not having it!’

She followed Stella Stargazer down the stairs.

The other subs went back to checking copy. It was Briony’s turn next; Aidan popped out before she went in and said:

‘I’d love a coffee, anyone else want one?’

The room went as quiet as a library. No editor had ever made even their own coffee, let alone made one for someone else. No one replied except Briony.

‘Yes. I would, thanks. White with three,’ she said.

‘Righto,’ Aidan said cheerfully and disappeared into the kitchen.

Shelley looked at her quizzically. ‘You already have a coffee,’ she pointed out.

‘I know. I want to see how well made his coffee is. Is he just trying to create a good impression by offering to make a cup? Is this the first cup he’s ever made? Or does he make a habit of it? If it’s shit, we’ll know he’s a fraud. If it’s good, we know we can trust him.’

Almost without thinking Shelley answered. ‘I trust him.’

Shelley surfed the net absently while she waited for Freya’s interview to be finished. Briony had come out of Aidan’s office looking thoughtful, but told Shelley she wanted to think things over before talking much about it. All she’d say was that Aidan had presented her with a challenge, an assignment tougher than anything she’d done before.

‘We’ll talk about it tonight, yeah?’ Briony said absently, checking her phone for messages. This of course made Shelley even more nervous and she tried to do some work to take her mind off it.

She was half-heartedly researching an idea she’d had for her column, which she was sure would never see the light of day again, at least not in its current form, but she needed to do something. Her column was supposedly about twenty-something singletons looking for love in the big city, but she was no Carrie Bradshaw and sometimes wondered if she should rename the column ‘Sad in the City’. For the past three issues she’d written pretty much the same column, how difficult it was to meet a man who wasn’t gay, hygienically-challenged, socially inept or carrying more baggage than a kleptomaniac Sherpa. She needed something new.

She had an idea to write about the new craze supposedly sweeping the singles bars – Nude Speed Dating. The reasoning was this: why go through all the trouble of spending five minutes finding the right life partner, only to find when you got them into bed that they had an unpleasant mole somewhere intimate? Or that the blonde hair came out of a bottle? It’s the future after all, who has that kind of time?

Shelley clicked on the site of one of the companies that organised the evenings and waited for the page to load up on the crappy old Mac, only to be greeted by a full-screen, hi-res image of the naked torsos of a man and a woman, each holding a drink. Shelley stared in horror at the well-toned bodies, the woman’s perky breasts and the man’s only partially flaccid penis. She stabbed with the cursor to close the image, but the computer was old, and had to think a while before attempting to perform the simplest tasks.

The door to Aidan’s office opened behind her and Shelley turned, feeling her face turn crimson. Aidan stepped out first and turned to wait for Freya to emerge, glancing curiously at Shelley’s monitor as he did so. Freya came out afterwards, beaming and shook Aidan’s hand warmly.

‘Thanks so much, Aidan,’ she said ingratiatingly, ‘I really appreciate this opportunity.’ She walked back to her desk, swinging her hips and looking very much like the cat that’d got the cream.

‘I hate her,’ Briony whispered. Shelley nodded.

‘Come on then Shelley, let’s be having you,’ Aidan said. Briony snorted as she walked into Aidan’s new office and the door closed behind her.

‘Now we have met before, haven’t we?’ Aidan said as he ushered Shelley into a comfy chair.

‘You held the lift for me yesterday,’ she replied. ‘Such a gentleman.’

Oh God , she thought, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Bennett?

Aidan smiled, then immediately frowned, ‘Yes, but I’m sure we met before that, properly …?’

‘Yes,’ Shelley confirmed, ‘at the …’ and she blushed again. What was wrong with her? ‘… at the Christmas party last year.’

‘Yes of course,’ Aidan said beaming, ‘“Macarena”, wasn’t it?’

‘I … no. That was …’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said, looking down at the sheaf of papers in front of him. ‘Now, I’m going to cut to the chase here, we don’t have much time. Your column, though well-written and very funny, is not going to be suitable for the new look of the magazine.’

Shelley was disappointed, even though she’d been expecting this. She’d half-hoped Aidan would say something like ‘Yours is the only bit I’m not going to change – it’s brilliant!’

‘Instead,’ Aidan went on. ‘I’d like you to do more investigative work. There’s no point having you stuck in the office writing … well, what you have been writing. I want you out there on the streets, undercover, getting me some grade-A hot stories.’

Could it be true? Could Aidan really want her to do hard-hitting investigative reporting? This is what she became a journalist for. This is what she’d dreamed of as a girl, and throughout university. She imagined herself hanging around the bars in Westminster looking for ministers willing to speak off the record, or blagging her way into the retinue of a gangsta rapper crime lord in South London.

‘I’ve already arranged your first undercover role,’ said Aiden.

Shelley sat forward in her chair.

‘It’s a lot of work. I’ll want a few thousand words a day.’

Shelley raised her eyebrows, but nodded. She could do that, she could do anything.

‘There’d be a bonus in it if you deliver,’ Aidan went on.

Shelley tried not to think in terms of bottles of The Crown’s finest dry white. ‘A few thousand words on what?’ she asked.

He sat back in his chair, grinned broadly.

‘The Secret Diary of a Sex Addict!’

A lengthy pause followed. The tick-tock of Kate Hurley’s ancient clock counted the treacherous seconds away as Shelley stared at her boss.

This couldn’t be right. ‘I’m sorry, I think I misheard you,’ she said. ‘You said Secret Diary of a … What Addict?’

‘SexAddict,’ Aidan repeated, gazing back at her steadily.

Shelley was floored. She’d been hoping to move away from love-soaked frippery and gossip; she desperately wanted to do hard-nosed, real journalism. Instead Aidan seemed determined to take her backwards. How could she, of all people, write a column from the point of view of a sex addict?

‘I need you to pretend to be addicted to sex.’ Aidan said, leafing through some pages on his desk. ‘We’ll come up with some convincing story for you. You can join a group, I already have most of this arranged, by the way. You’ll take a week to put together some stories. Feed them through and I’ll put them up on the blog site, when the next issue comes out we’ll run the best. We want them sexy, you understand? We want details.’

Shelley’s head spun. Was Aidan testing her? Or was he hoping to get rid of her? Did he want another walk of shame? Should she follow Stargazer and Maya the Sub down to Benny’s wine bar to drown her sorrows and draft her resignation?