"All right, all right, I’m giving up for now, but only for now!" Alice muttered. "There’s something about that chick that has straight girls keeling over like they all just got hit with twenty million orgasms all at the same time and you don’t know what’s so hot about her. Okay, all right. I’ll buy it."

"Good," Jenny replied absently, frowning at the tv screen. "Al, I’ll talk to you later, okay? I still need to type up my notes and fax them to Bette so they’re waiting for her when she gets to the office in the morning."

"Right, right. Writer stuff, I gotcha. Talk to you later?"

"Yes, absolutely," she said, her eyes still focused on the image frozen on the television. "Talk to you later."

Alice might have still been talking when Jenny hung up the phone, but if she had been, Jenny hardly noticed. Setting the remote aside, she grabbed up her microcassette recorder and her laptop, sorting through several tapes until she found the first of the series. Slipping it into the recorder, she let the tape rewind as she opened up her laptop and pulled up a blank document so that she could begin transcribing the interview.

It had been long and suprisingly revealing – though, of course, still sticking to the rather stringent rules and regulations Shane’s PR firm had instituted from on high for her to follow – and she knew that the senior editor, Bette Porter, would love what she’d managed to get so far. Still, she had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to the story than Shane let on, but then, with her, there seemed to be so much more going on there than Jenny could even begin to imagine.

The tape recorder clicked as it reached the beginning of the first tape, snapping Jenny out of her reverie, and she pressed play, setting the recorder carefully aside as she settled the laptop on a pillow on her lap and leaned back against the headboard, fingers moving in an easy, practiced dance over the keys.

–

The hotel that Shane was staying in was way out of budget for the magazine, so Jenny was staying at a Best Western across town. It was a standard room, fairly simple and staid and there was something about the air that was cramped and faintly claustrophobic. Smothering and stale, even though it was a non-smoking room.