Chapter Text
“I love it.”
“You do?” Bradley asked excitedly.
Cory hung back, watching her circle around the racks of men’s suit jackets in the empty store as if she was giving him a private tour of an art installation. “I think it’s magnificent. It says confidence, it says authority, but in a modern way, right?”
“Right! I’m so thrilled you get this, Cory.” Delighted, she started picking up garments.
Less than an hour ago, he had tumbled into her hotel room to tell her the news: Fred was gone for good, he was head of UBA, her suspension was lifted. Whatever she’d said to the Board, however bleary eyed she had been - it had worked. It was over. They’d played the Queen - it was checkmate. Before he could process how much of what he had just said had been a lie, they were locked in a clumsy hug, laughing, her lips somewhere between his cheek and his mouth, the pen he kept in his jacket pocket caught on her sweater. A series of fumbled apologies, then champagne, then, miraculously, Bradley had asked: “Does this mean you can open Barneys again?”
Cory watched her run the jacket sleeves through her fingers, appraising them, equally as delighted. It was a relief to be out, to be thinking of anything other than the ten days they had spent cooped up together at the Archer Gray, avoiding the paparazzi, Hannah constantly playing on their minds.
“I totally get this. It’s gender-neutral. It’s Pant Suit Nation Plus. It’s Bradley Jackson 2.0. As your new CEO, you have my full support. How many do you want to try on?”
She looked back at him, biting her lip. “Who said I would be trying anything on?”
“Um. I’m sorry?”
Bradley pointed behind him, where a stylist had appeared, rail of suits in tow. “Do you have a favourite type of pocket square?”
“We’ll take a selection, thank you,” Bradley replied before Cory could cut in. “In terms of silhouettes, what would you suggest?”
“For the modern executive, we’re seeing a lot of tapering, some roped shoulders. Double breasted is back, of course. I’d call it… Justin Trudeau crossed with Christian Grey. Don Draper meets Mark Zuckerberg’s suit of contrition.”
“Sounds fabulous. Shall we?” Hardly able to contain her amusement, Bradley gave him a brilliant smile and beckoned him to follow her.
——————
“So this is your idea of stupid fun.” Cory mused from inside the dressing room.
“Torturing you? It’s one of my ideas. How’s that trouser length working out for you?” Bradley called from the couch in the private lounge outside, where she’d installed herself with their bags and a complementary tray of canapés, surrounded by boxes of men’s shoes.
“Fine. And just so you know - I love trying on new clothes,” he added, guessing it would irritate her.
“Hey, you’re single, right?”
He paused halfway through undoing his shirt, momentarily unmoored. “Who’s asking, exactly?”
“Good,” Bradley laughed. “Keep it that way!”
“Ok.” Cory, still unbuttoned, pulled the curtain halfway back to poke his head through. “Alright. It was deeply inappropriate of me to ask you that, both in light of your contract negotiations and in my position as the head of the network, and I truly am sorry.”
“You got my point, though,” he said, as her lips curled in triumph. “That relationship dynamics make morning television and that you - as someone who saw your industry’s stale, outdated romantic plot lines for women journalists and raised them a self-possessed, unconventional, happily unattached professional rottweiler of an interviewer - you were bringing something new and exciting and fresh to TMS.”
Bradley folded her arms and kicked one foot against the glass coffee table in front of her. He’d never known anyone to combine this much petulance with complete composure. The time they had spent together in his room the night before had changed everything and nothing, he knew. She would have been waiting for a moment to do this bait and switch since he handed over the corporate credit card at the end of their first visit. All that tangled moment in his room had done was make her feel like she had permission.
“I understood, but I should have gone straight to the lawyers with that question. Or Time’s Up. Does UBA even have a whistleblowing policy?”
He dropped the curtain to pull on the next pair of pants. “Oh, I’ll be looking at it on Monday morning. For sure. Things are going to be very different around here from now on.”
“How’s this?” He stepped outside before she could lob back a sarcastic comment and turned so she could see him side on. It was a suit in exactly the same style as the one he’d been wearing when they’d arrived, only slightly darker.
Bradley appraised him with her head on one side, affecting a look of deep concern. “No. I’m sorry, but no. You just cannot wear a collar like that with that shade of black.”
Cory pulled the curtain back across, chuckling in spite of himself, and started to unbutton again. “You know, for someone who’s so committed to changing the culture at UBA, you’re oddly keen to find a reason for me to take my shirt off for you.”
“And how’s that Sexual Harassment Policy coming along?”, she shot back.
“You think the people outside who have given up their Saturday night for us aren’t just a little curious as to what you’re doing in here with me?”
“Hmm. Well, they know I’m not your PA, so I’m guessing I’m don’t bear any great resemblance to the people you’ve traditionally been screwin’ around with at Barneys.”
Cory looked up, ready to defend himself, then caught his expression in the mirror. Who are you kidding.
“You’ve been talking to Cecily.”
“I’ve been talking to Cecily. I knew you were lyin’ about her the minute I saw you together the night you invited me to the Archer Gray.” Bradley laughed again, a little too keyed up, then said, more seriously, “And, just FYI, she is way too talented to keep following the Cory cabal around all day. You know she’s directing an off-Broadway play right now?”
Cory smiled to himself. “I do.” They’d both laughed about the impossibility of him ever seeing the project she’d been devoted to in the three years they’d been sleeping together. Then he’d dug out an old Lakers baseball cap and snuck in to watch from the back row on its opening night. You give me notes and I’ll kill you, Cecily had whispered to him in the taxi back to the hotel from the after-show party, as he tipsily stroked the arm of her cashmere roll-neck.
“And what’s the ‘Cory cabal’, by the way?”
He heard Bradley sigh. “Oh god, you must have noticed it. Cecily’s assistants. The people who answer your phones, juggle your calendar, bring you juice, crunch the numbers on your workouts, bookmark things in Vanity Fair for you. All hoping that by being in your orbit all the goddamn time, some of the genius of the super-forecasting media strategist will rub off on them.”
“The genius?”
“Well, the intrigue, anyway.”
“Got it.” Cory stepped out from behind the curtain again. “This one feels better. Much more ‘me’.”
Bradley rolled her eyes and gestured at him to turn around. “Honestly, Cory. Plaid is so last season. You want people to take you seriously as a CEO? Try on the next one.”
He inhaled, suppressing a feeling close to severe irritation not unconnected with pure joy, just as he had the first time he brought her here.
“So, tell the grand media strategist, how have the UBA focus groups been for you?”, he asked brightly, stepping back into the dressing room and selecting the most outrageous of all the outfits they’d brought in for him to try on next, knowing it would make her laugh. “Speaking as the person who, after tonight, has the power to suggest we order many, many more of them to workshop your brand identity at TMS.”
He could almost feel Bradley pouting through the curtain. “Oh, enlightening. Inspiring. Game-changing,” she pretended to gush. “Now I feel so much more ready to reach my full potential as an influencer and a creative.”
“And then you said to them, Enough about Cory Ellison, we’re here to work on my image.”
“Fuck off.”
“Fine. In your professional opinion, how do you think the American public will react to this?” He flung back the curtain, gave her a raffish twirl.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Barneys. It’s the combination of the hat, the gentleman’s cape, and - what do you even call that? A neckerchief?”
“A cravat?”
“I guess? You tell me, you’re the one who went to Oxford. It’s - well. It’s perfection. I think we’re finally starting to get somewhere with this, Cory.”
“Alright,” he said, shrugging off the first layer before she could start filming him on her phone. “Are you about ready to eat now?”
“Hold on, hold on,” she said, getting up to dart behind him to the clothes rail, as he knew she would. “One more? We can’t leave without buying something, you’ll be blacklisted.”
He rolled his eyes and accepted the hangers from her. “One more.”
She flashed him a satisfied grin as he snapped the curtain closed. Advantage, Ms Jackson.
“I want you to come back here tomorrow with Mia,” he said as the thought occurred to him. “It’s a different era at TMS now. The ‘Get Loud’ era. For the foreseeable future you’ll be the acceptable face of feminism in America. If that doesn’t call for another wardrobe upgrade, I don’t know what does”.
Bradley said nothing.
“You realise not everything you read on my Wikipedia page is accurate, right?”, he nudged, trying to recapture the teasing rhythm of their conversation. She’d leant against the wall outside the dressing room rather than returning to the couch, and he liked the sense of her presence on the other side of the curtain.
“Yeah, but I have my own sources.”
“Of course you do. Tell Claire to say hi to her father for me, would you?”
“God, this business is so incestuous. You get a graduate scholarship to Oxford in the 90s, intern for Claire’s family at the BBC, and now here you are. And here she is, my assistant. And here I am, I guess? And I’m somehow surprised the past month has felt like being stuck inside a crazy period drama transplanted to a newsroom in 2019. Or one of those British sitcoms with hardly any episodes which only start to make sense in Season Three.”
There was real venom in her voice. Cory back-pedalled. “Look, I get why you’re frustrated. You know I only sent you to those focus groups to smarten them up, don’t you? UBA’s audience development program is one of the worst in the industry. I should be paying you consultancy fees.”
“No,” Bradley said quietly. “Believe it or not, that was not apparent to me. I’m not like you. I can’t treat every interaction like a chess game, Cory.”
No, you treat every interaction like you’re interviewing a witness in a corporate fraud investigation, he thought.
“I don’t have nine lives left. You said it yourself: you get a lot of second chances. Our stunt with Mitch, taping Hannah, being pulled off air, Alex going AWOL, whatever happened or didn’t happen between us” - she breezed past this quickly - “I’ve used up all of mine. I can’t go back home. No other network would have me, and besides - maybe they are all universally disappointing. You seem to think I’m somehow in control of the script, but seriously - what other options do I have right now?”
Cory paused, tie loose around his neck, considering his own reflection. He felt the memory of the previous night heavy in the air. Her fingers curling up under his collar, the scent of her perfume, the subtle shift in the dynamic between them as he hooked a strand of her hair behind her ear and let her reach for his belt. You first. “The option where we leave together. Tonight.”
He heard Bradley laugh darkly.
“I’m serious. We go back to the hotel, pack our bags, fly to L.A. Go freelance. Whatever niche exists between hard-hitting investigative journalism and entertainment production, we fill it. Of course we do. Your raw talent and star power combined with my contacts? We end up selling our start-up to a multi-billion-dollar media conglomerate and then we buy a house on the beach - well, I already have a house on the beach, but we’ll find another one that you like, or, quite honestly, a house anywhere you want - and then we travel the world, eat good food, read good books, indulge in stupidly over-ambitious interior design projects, get a dog, lie in on weekdays. No more social media analytics, no more stylists. We start living.”
Breathless, he drew back the curtain to face her.
“You’re right,” Bradley said, her expression unreadable.
“I am?”
“You do need something to eat.” Before he could reply, she drew close to him and started tying his tie. “You want my honest opinion?”
“You’re not a dog person?”
Bradley rolled her eyes.
He softened. “Always.”
“I don’t like this suit on you at all.”
“It’s the one I was wearing when we got here.”
She winced, playful again. “So why isn’t it time to spice it up with a gentleman’s cape? Now you’re CEO, and all.”
Cory sighed, leaned back so she wouldn’t graze the stubble on his chin with her hands. “Because I come to Barneys to find things I don’t already have in my closet?”
Bradley grinned.
“I really should have said something earlier, by the way,” he added slyly under his breath as she finished tying the knot and smoothed down his lapels. “I’m quite embarrassed. This whole time, well.”
She frowned, suddenly uneasy. “What?”
“I’m sorry, Bradley, but I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who wears suits off the rack.”
“Fuck you, Cory.”
“Yeah,” he said softly, catching the tips of her fingers in his as she turned away. “Fuck you, too.”