![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
At twenty-six years of age, Mallory Quinn Pike had found himself settled into a strange ambiguity concerning knowledge, his grasp of it, and his pursuit of it. He felt he knew a great deal about everything; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what he knew, he knew exceedingly well, and of the subjects he did not know, he had no idea at all. He tired of the regular, the mundane and overdone, the so terribly normal, and his writer's mind and soul which he had been indulging from the point of graduation, right through degree and settling into a journalism spot, were both hungry for more than that which he was currently offering, that which he was barely sustaining them with.
For over four years he had sniffed out stories in gossip for The Herald. Four and a half years to be precise, of lingering, listening, snooping, reading between the lines. He would make appointments with slick men and highly strung women, charm them to the point that they would have sailed to the moon perhaps, if only he had asked. He would ask the right questions, and leave the right gaps of silence for them to fill with words they otherwise would not have dared to utter. He would let them think they had everything under control, and leave with smiles upon their faces, and kisses upon the cheek, and he would be safely back in his office looking upon scribbled notes and a laptop screen before their faces fell and they began to pray their casual words would not be taken amiss. And the next day they would find themselves sprawled across the pages of The Herald, and whisk themselves away to any number of exotic and barely-inhabited islands until the interest died down.
Four and a half years of the same old, same old, where public figures and celebrities would act as though they were the first to be outed, the first to have an old affair crawl back out of the woodwork, the first to have those things left unspoken printed on the page to be gossiped about instead. The news can so stretch things to unreal proportions that one feels no guilt in then speaking of it and poking at issues they never would over a regular dinner party. When it is happening to someone else, when it is know by all and common gossip, then surely not to talk about it is the sin.
Mallory spent little time at dinner parties or with cocktails in his hand. He had his own share of scandal and gossip the public might just revel in; his passions, his lusts of the flesh, his nights of debauchery and corruption of those up to ten years younger than him. An old-fashioned man, was Mallory Quinn at heart; a firm believer that a woman, a wife, was a man's property, but even more old-fashioned, to the point of being historically-fashioned, was his belief that the male sex were preferable to the wife anyway. Men were of a higher species, and so to bed with one was a much higher course of living. To fuck and be fucked, in a world he deemed far too overstuffed anyway to have it be of any concern or threat to the human race.
Even this hushed and well-juggled lifestyle was not enough. When the thrill is simply not in one's work anymore, you cannot resort to filling your bed night after night and expect it to eradicate the gap. There was a bitter taste to the art of gossip columning, a funny lingering in the mouth that made you grit your teeth and contort your face as though sucking a lemon. A bitter, sour taste to kicking people down into the dirt, but perhaps only because the self-worth that came from seeing someone else down was a poor comparison. To compare one's self to those at their lowest point, well, you are always sure to come out on top. Where is the challenge in that?
His passion for writing was still there. He would twirl a freshly sharpened pencil in his fingers and receive a great deal of pleasure from putting it to paper, and spilling out what he saw at four in the morning as moonlight snuck in through the curtains and painted the slight figure beside him in the bed with a light and purity they no longer possessed. A second chance, or a second opportunity that Mallory would painstakingly commit to paper; he had always preferred fact (or near-fact in the case of gossip) over fiction, and then toss the notepad aside as he woke his bed partner and stole the opportunity, lest it slip away. It was not the journalists way to simply let opportunities pass you by, no matter how they manifested themselves. And that would be how Mallory Quinn did come to know one Henry James Beech.
[To Be Continued...]
