Morning Glory by Diana Peterfreund

and lipstick.
    But when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before heading off to work, I groaned and scrubbed it all off. Might as well scream “Jersey girl,” right?
    “You look nice,” said Sasha at the morning meeting. “Hot date?”
    “Cute suit,” said Colleen as we prepped for her food segment. “Got a new job interview already?”
    “Hey, fangirl,” said Mike, “your hair’s looking awful big today.”
    I flattened my bangs and glared at him.
    Around seven, Lenny knocked on my office door. “I’m out of here,” he said. “Don’t forget you’ve got that ‘appointment’ at the bar tonight.”
    “I’m getting scared of you and your odd obsession with my personal life.”
    He shrugged. “You forget. I had your job, and I know better than anyone else how much someone in that position needs to have an outlet. It’s self-preservation, really. I don’t want you marching in here one day with a shotgun.”
    I smirked. No, I’d leave that behavior to Mike Pomeroy.
    “So get a boyfriend or a Boston terrier, I don’t care, but get out of here.”
    I waved him off, but as soon as he was gone, I took one last crack at my hair, then grabbed my briefcase and headed out.
    Schiller’s looked like the illegitimate love child of a French bistro and a subway station. There were a group of people with IBS ID tags clustered near the bar. Adam was among their number, and he spotted me right away.
    I put up my hand to wave, and accidentally tossed my BlackBerry across the room. A few of the producers laughed.
    Smooth one, Becky .
    I was down on my knees looking for it when I spotted Adam’s loafer-clad toes. I rose, taking in nicely tailored pants, the ubiquitous untucked dress shirt, and a hint of five o’clock shadow beneath his smiling jaw. He handed me my phone. “Slippery little bugger, huh?” he said. “You look like a woman who needs a drink.”
    “Yes, please.”
    Adam waved to the bartender. “Beer?” he asked. “Or are you a hard liquor girl? Please tell me you don’t do cosmos.”
    “Beer is fine,” I said.
    “For now.” Adam waited as I put in my order. “You’ll need something stiffer after Mike really starts getting to you.”
    “Oh, he’s getting to me,” I said, as the bartender brought my beer. “Usually, I drink Sprite.”
    Adam laughed. “I almost needed an intervention before I left Nightly News .”
    “So it’s better now?”
    “Absolutely. Plus, the hours are better at 7 Days .” He grinned at me. “I get to go out now.”
    Go out. Go out go out? Man, he was vague!
    “Hey, let’s grab a table before this place fills up. Look, there’s one.”
    I glanced at his group of friends. “Oh, don’t you want to—”
    And then he put his hand on the small of my back, and I completely forgot what I was about to say. He guided me toward the empty booth while my mind raced. So this was a date? I mean, I didn’t even get a chance to meet those friends of his. Maybe Lenny was right, and he’d … lured me here under false pretenses. Got me to come on a date without asking me on a date. Maybe this was how things worked in the Ivy League.
    But why would a guy like Adam Bennett need to do that? Wasn’t he the sort of person who could just saunter up to a woman and go “Pick you up at eight, baby,” and they’d fall all over him? I knew Tracy would. Sasha too, come to think of it.
    And … me. If he’d actually asked me out, I’d have gone.
    So now here he was, seated across from me in a booth, and checking out the description of the nacho platter on the dinner menu.
    “Are you hungry?”
    I started gulping my beer. Okay, so … date.
    We ordered some nachos, and chatted about our early jobs in television news. Seemed Adam had come straight to network out of college; I guessed those were the perks that came with the Newsweek legacy.
    “And you were at some show in Jersey before, right?” he said.
    “Yeah.” I looked down at my glass. “Then I got ditched