Chapter 4
Monday
The car honking behind me does nothing but cause my blood to boil and my shoulders to tense while Waze attempts to recalculate the route to my office in Culver City. Every option shows the usual five-minute drive will take at least twenty minutes. A message from Kelly pops up on my phone screen.
Kelly
Just got home. Thank you for such an amazing weekend. Will keep you posted with the insurance. K x
I force my shoulders to relax back into the seat and loosen my grip on the steering wheel.
It’s a timely reminder that I need to put things into context.
The traffic will pass. Kelly is okay. And I am going to be an uncle to a baby boy.
I just wish Kelly and I had had longer than the two and a half days we got to spend with each other.
I fire off a quick response, keeping one eye on the traffic jam in front of me.
My car creeps forward with everyone else, and I finally pass the source of all this frustration: Two smashed-up cars are pulled over to the side of the freeway, the drivers standing over to the side talking to a couple of cops. Ugh. What a way to start your week.
The parking lot seems busier than usual this morning and I struggle to find a spot, finally locating a single compact space on the third floor that I squeeze my Jeep into. More stress I don’t need when I’m already on a tight timeline.
A chill races across my skin the instant the indoor air conditioning meets it.
It’s a welcome relief from the morning heat outside.
It shouldn’t be this hot before 9 a.m. Small sweat circles are already forming under my beige polo shirt.
I really should look into Botox for my armpits, the way Alexander’s stylist suggested.
“Morning, Chris!” Carol’s bright yellow blouse matches her cheery demeanor as she greets me from behind the reception desk. The Elemental Creative logo towers above her on the wall behind.
“Morning Carol, good weekend?” I ask. I grab my pass out of my jeans pocket to scan on the wall reader and open the glass door into the open plan office.
“Good, thanks. And yours?”
“Great, thanks.” I smile back at her and close the door behind me before making my way through several rows of desks, past the kitchen next to the boardroom, and over to our small alcove of desks.
The rest of the team, minus our boss, Pietro, are already seated in their spots.
Framed images of various creative marketing campaigns done for our clients adorn the walls.
The sight of the Brewed Coffee logo, printed on the paperwork sitting between Toby, another account manager, and Sara, who is supposedly our shared assistant but has been co-opted by Tony, makes my blood boil yet again.
The Brewed account should have been mine, a crowning achievement after years of hard work for the company, but it was handed over to Tony after I missed a pivotal sales call.
Alexander had gotten hurt when we were at a skate park back in London and I’d taken him to the hospital, totally forgetting about the meeting.
I had lost the account and been put on probation at work as a result.
My frustration with Tony’s grandiose attitude about working on what he calls “the number one brand in the country” is compounded anytime a new client is brought in that he deems beneath him.
Tony suddenly becomes too busy to take on small accounts, leaving Pietro to assign those clients to me.
But when bigger brands come in, he miraculously has space available in his portfolio.
He’s also become less discrete in his interactions with Sara around the office.
More than once, I’ve caught his hand lingering over hers.
And they regularly return from lunch breaks with disheveled appearances.
Even Linda and Paolo, from finance on the other side of the office, have asked me if something is going on between them.
I take two deep inhales as I pull my laptop from my bag and remind myself, I will control my anger, I will not let my anger control me.
“Morning, Chris.” Julie looks up at me from her laptop with a broad smile. “Pietro’s running late this morning. He’s been called into HR and asked to push back the meeting to nine-thirty.”
Her smile turns to a smirk as she nods toward Tony and Sara.
An eerie tension hangs in the air.
“Morning guys,” I say to the two of them.
Sara looks up, cutting me a look of distain for misgendering her, with a complexion that almost matches her red dress.
She’s not worth it.
I sit down and take another deep inhale.
“Sorry. Morning, Sara.”
Her attention turns back to her laptop.
“Morning,” Tony mumbles. His shoulders are hunched over, making his black oversized T-shirt ride up, exposing his hairy lower back.
His focus is locked onto his screen. The browser is open to a chart on a metrics website that reviews celebrities’ audience demographics and reaches on socials.
He adjusts his Harry Potter glasses with one hand and rapidly writes data from the screen down in his black notebook with the other.
Julie motions with her head toward the kitchen, and I get back up to follow her, pulling out my food container from my bag as I do.
“What’s wrong with them?” I ask, opening the fridge to slide in my lunch of chicken, rice, and avocado. I close the door, grab a glass from the side, and head over to the water fountain.
Julie reaches for a coffee cup and starts up the coffee machine.
“HR put a meeting request in over the weekend with Pietro,” she says, barely audible over the coffee machine grinding the beans. “I’m not sure, but I think word may have gotten to them about an inappropriate relationship going on between two of his team members.”
“You didn’t!” I gasp, my finger still pressed on the cold water button. The water starts to overflow my glass and I jerk it away.
“Of course not. Plausible deniability.” Julie wipes her hands on a towel and holds them up, then grabs her coffee from the machine. “But with the way they’ve been carrying on the last couple of weeks, it wouldn’t be hard for, say, Carol or Paolo to have noticed and mentioned something to HR.”
“Do you think they know?” A wave of excitement rises in my chest.
Exposure of their not-so-secret relationship would wipe the smug look right off Tony’s face.
His holier-than-thou attitude would come down to earth with a thud.
Heck, having a relationship with a junior colleague is a lot worse than missing one call, while on vacation no less, with a client.
I might even get the Brewed account back.
“I told them that Pietro was in with HR when they got to the office, but they already looked pretty somber before I told them. Either they already know, or something else is going on between them.”
The wave of excitement turns into a ball of confusion.
What else could be going on?
“Keep me posted, won’t you?” Mischief is written all over my face.
“Of course, hun.” Julie winks at me as we make our way back to our desks.
“Bring me up to speed on where we’re at with the Brewed campaign,” Pietro says, looking at Tony from his position at the top of the table in the board room.
The glow of the TV screen behind Pietro gives him an all-powerful aura.
Across from me, Tony twiddles nervously with his pen.
Sara had smartly chosen to sit beside me, the first time she’s done so in months.
Her right leg bounces up and down under the table while Julie sits opposite Pietro, taking notes.
“I got an email last night from Emma at Creative Artists Agency,” Tony says, stuttering slightly. “And due to a tour sponsorship issue that Sabrina Carpenter has with McDonald’s for her North American tour dates, Emma said Sabrina has to pull out of the campaign.”
“What?” Pietro’s tone is stiff and surly.
Tony’s face turns a shade of white that’s unusual even for him.
“Apparently McDonalds wanted to pull their entire sponsorship for her tour, citing a conflict of interest given their aggressive push of their caffeine range in Q4…”
“And what did you go back to Emma with?” Pietro interjects. His voice is clipped, filled with a dark rage. He pulls himself up in his chair and rests his elbows on the wooden table.
“Well…erm.” Tony’s stutter worsens as he flicks back a few pages in his notebook. “Emma suggested some alternatives to replace Sabrina, but none felt like the right alignment for Brewed.”
My eyes meet Julia’s as she takes a sip of her coffee. Her eyebrows are almost up at her hairline as the drama unfolds.
I’d always thought Sabrina Carpenter was a poor, lazy pick to advertise Brewed’s new line of drinks for their Christmas campaign.
Her demographic skews 63.2 percent female, and her audience is primarily made up of teenage girls, which doesn’t align with Brewed’s key demographic of twenty-two to sixty-year-old urban and suburban middle-to-upper class workers.
If the campaign were about utilizing a song as a soundtrack for the advertising campaign, rather than including the person’s talent in all the campaign materials, then it would have made sense to use Sabrina.
Her song Espresso is one of the biggest songs of the decade.
But she isn’t recognizable to your average Joe walking down the street.
Plus, I could have seen the issue coming up with her McDonald’s sponsorship a mile away.
But as my therapist says to me, Not my circus. Not my monkeys. Not my peanuts.