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They’d tried to avoid this.  They both had.  After the breakup, they’d succeeded in keeping to opposite hemispheres for three solid months, licking their respective wounds in as much privacy as weekly, televised travelogues would allow.  They’d followed rules.  They’d not mentioned each other, even obliquely, at least not on the record.  And then there’d been Oktoberfest in Blumenau, and despite the million soused Brazilians mobbing the streets they’d met, cameras on, and words had been exchanged, and footage had been leaked, and an intern had been out of a job, but by then it was too late, and the web was saturated with clips of Sam Ryder calling Samantha Cohen a “whining, imitative shrew without a shred of credibility on or off screen,” and Samantha throwing a full stein’s worth of beer in his face.  Both their ratings had soared, but there was such a thing as dignity, and they’d agreed (via their assistants) never to cover the same place at the same time again.  But this required clearing their schedules with one another, and Sam’s assistant had quit after the Cook Islands controversy, and it had become clear that more drastic measures were necessary.

So: a gaudy, Americanized, mid-grade Italian restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, the least inflammatory place either of them could think of.  A map of the world, and two highlighters.  She chose blue.  He took yellow. 

Unwilling to descend into pettiness on the first exchange, Samantha swallowed her bite of bread and neatly outlined Russia and Hungary in blue.  He went to work next, until she raised her eyebrows as his marker encroached on Serbia.  “The Balkans are not Eastern Europe,” she protested.

He sighed.  “It’s debatable.”

“No, it’s really not.  I want Croatia.”

“Oh, get over Dubrovnik,” he sneered.

“That’s a bit rich, coming from someone who can’t get enough of Poland.”

He held up a hand.  “Let’s not start,” he said.

Bastard.  With his stupid moral high ground, as if he hadn’t begun it.  She outlined Croatia in blue.  “As you seem so sick of it,” she said.

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