Re: Newspaper office: Cat/Jack
[Jack submerged the teabag in hot water, the whiskey shading it straw-colored, and doctored tea constructed, he sipped his own. Rich people didn't want news if it didn't affirm everything they wanted to read, Jack thought. It tied nicely in with his experience of school and of wealth through journalism but she hadn't asked about them, had she?]
The good ones go to school in the Capital and they intern there. We're small and we're full of ads and we won't get picked up for reprinting by a national. Even if we were any good. And you know why I haven't wanted us to be.
[The first open reference to the bonfire, to the look on her face when she'd left. But it was true he wasn't going to make it a venture with ambition. He'd turned over that challenge since firelight and ugly stories, and if there was room within the gray area between nothing at all to save himself and the big broadsheets, then there was space.
But Cat asserted and Jack swallowed on tea.]
Not what I said. Balls aren't required for assertions in news. Assertions don't make an article to make people think, or to convince them. Balls digs up the dirt and prints it even if the people filthy with it want you not to. The paper hasn't done it but it doesn't make it, or me, a eunuch. I promised a story for red ink, you're here but you haven't got dirty yet.