Chapter 28
Julie
Krysten slumped back in her seat, a hand to her forehead.
“I should have recognized how dangerous you were from the very beginning, little one,” she said, and I dropped down at the desk across from her, folding my arms on the table. The office was lively around us, but right now I was so locked in that all of it seemed to disappear into the background.
“Let’s be honest,” I said. “You absolutely did.”
“I thought I did! But I had no idea what was coming.” She picked up her coffee, taking a long sip before she went waving it around dangerously. “You’ve been doing a lot with my brand without my authorization. How do you think that reflects on you?”
The wildest and weirdest part of all this was that I didn’t even feel anxious in this kind of exchange.
Just a couple months ago I freaked out in confrontation and shrank into myself like a dying little flower.
But now it just felt a little like how people communicated sometimes, and it wasn’t like I was doubting myself.
I mean, I was the one Helena Warrick called her girl.
“Ambitious,” was the answer I gave. Krysten laughed.
“Ambitious! I think you are colluding with my blood pressure.”
“You can still withdraw,” Helena said, sinking gracefully into the seat next to me.
“But you have to admit, Julie’s handed you a good opportunity, neatly curated on a platter.
You were looking to expand, and now you have a full expansion plan, a target audience already cut out, everything in place for a launch, and financing to boot. What else do you want?”
“A longer timeframe, for one.”
I laughed. “Yeah, touché. But once we’re working together full-time, we’ll be able to work out better timelines.”
“Listen to her talk.” Krysten polished off her coffee and set it back on the desk, leaning forwards. “You have not even talked to my tech team.”
“Your tech team? What kinda enterprise do you think you are?” I turned two inches to Tanner. “Hey, tech team. Can we make this work?”
He didn’t even flinch. “We can have an MVP to present in time for it.”
Krysten waved him off. “Tanner! You are sabotaging my case.”
“You put us in charge of the event,” Helena said brightly. “I think you’ll find we’ve made something promising out of it.”
“Besides,” I said, “it’s too late to complain. Let’s make this event work and then you can lay into me once it’s done.”
Krysten put her hands to her head, massaging her temples. “Oh, now she wants to talk timelines! The timeline for the event, no, but the timeline to make me yell at her later, oh, yes, she can talk about that.”
I grinned. She glowered.
“This is because of that strange man,” she said. “Your eccentric genius Kingmaker. I lay this at his feet.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s probably fair,” I said, and Helena nodded.
“It’s pretty squarely his fault.”
“So maybe you can yell at him instead!” I said. “I can give you his contact.”
“I do not wish to speak to the strange man. No, no, no.” She groaned, standing up. “Well? Don’t just sit there looking satisfied with yourselves, you pair of demons. We’ll need a key stakeholder meeting. Linyue and that investor man you think will support us…”
“Oh, Mr. Cheng,” Helena said. “I can get him on the line. He’s very excited to brag to his friends back home about becoming a patron of the music industry. We’ll get it scheduled.”
“So, it’s a yes?” I said, leaning back in my seat, and Krysten put her hands up.
“If this event works, we can work together full-time and we will see if you can do this consistently. If it does not, I will bury you.”
“That’s a good deal.” I stood up with her, offering her a handshake, and she scowled, but she took it, moving onto Helena next, but she kept the scowl on me.
Honestly, that was fair. I was the annoying one between the two of us. But she seemed to like me anyway.
∞∞∞
Helena and I spent a lot of time in the office over the next weeks.
Everyone on the team put in the hours, scrambling with the stakeholders to get everything in place, but the network came together perfectly, in no small part thanks to Helena.
Linyue pitched in as though she didn’t already have her own full-time job outside of it, and she complained the whole way, but I was pretty sure that, for some reason, she almost kind of liked me, so even though she kept yelling at me, I just nodded and told her she was definitely right.
The second bedroom in Helena’s place started to feel a little silly, because I did not make much use of it.
Even when Helena and I didn’t have sex, she dragged me into the bedroom to sit and talk about silly little nothings late into the night, and I’d fall asleep while trying to keep my eyes open a little longer to take in how pretty she was.
It was hard to stay on top of my other job as a talent agent while I was working overtime with Jewel, but it dovetailed in well enough that I made it work.
I was starting to find more people than I could reasonably take on, and I was drowning in people who wanted to be part of a talent mixer, before I knew it.
Krysten’s team busted their asses expanding the app, and my closest music contacts signed up for beta versions that made it easy to get feedback, because knowing them personally meant they would complain to me personally about the functionality.
My own team built up quickly, and Helena pitched in a bit of her own capital to invest in our star, bringing in vocal coaching for Stephen, and Sheila came in to help write his songs.
Kid had a whole team of his own around him before long, and every time, he reacted like he’d never dreamed of anything like it, and he left every session together excited to tell his momma all about it.
I brought him to Daniel Harding before the big event, got him a carefully tailored styling session, and once Stephen was dressed like a sleek star, I think he finally got the image enough that he stopped trying to drop a freestyle beat.
After all the early mornings and late nights that went into it, the mixer itself was almost anticlimactic.
I’d expected to be running around the whole day with my hair on fire, shouting matches in backrooms, people crying their makeup off like it was on reality TV, but it turned out reality and reality TV didn’t have that much in common.
Everything had already been set up in place, and all Helena and I did was monitor it, make sure everything went smoothly.
The most jarring thing about it was that people kept talking about me like I was a celebrity.
I was the center of attention as I went about the event space, between tables and groups and planned activities, a million people I knew, all taking their opportunity to talk to me in front of the people they were trying to impress here, introducing me to everybody around them in a way that made it clear they were trying to humblebrag that they were friends with the organizer, the Jewel collaborator and music agent, industry lynchpin Julie Branch, which, like, what the fuck?
I mean, Helena fucking Warrick was right there, and people were talking to me. It actually kind of pissed me off a little.
But the important thing was that it worked for everybody there.
The Jewel platform launch was a bit bumpy, but it was there, and people were signing up in droves.
Agents got people’s Jewel contacts and the talent looked happy, and for all her complaining, Krysten was clearly in her element, glowing as she worked the floor like a pro.
Cheng Shiyi was fucking stoked. He got up on the stage and gave a speech that made it clear why he was good in business—he was well-spoken when he was rehearsed and not trying to flirt with a bartender—and his enthusiasm was infectious.
I think he believed in the Jewel expansion more than Krysten did, lofty ambitions that were hard not to catch secondhand from him.
“New York has long been a cultural touchpoint on the world stage,” he said towards the end of his speech.
“But the city never sleeps, and it never takes that for granted. The city continually rebuilds and reinvents, and the people, too, are always remaking themselves. With this partnership, we look across the oceans and out to the world. In our increasingly global world, the music industry is at a crossroads. All of us here have chosen the future. All of us have chosen a tomorrow where anything is possible. That is what makes this city so alive… forever looking forward, and never backward.”
Sitting in the front row, clapping softly along with the crowd as he held the space gracefully, I snuck a glance over at Helena, sitting next to me, right as she looked at me, and I stifled a nervous laugh.
Looking forward. Always ready to choose something new.
She winked. I made a noise like a dog toy run over by a car. Smooth. Why was everyone acting like I was important here?
I missed the end of Cheng Shiyi’s speech, having to slip into the back, and I met with Stephen Shale to make sure he was ready for his performance.
He knew what he was doing, just didn’t know that he did—he stammered and panicked, and I had to reassure him that he was going to do a great job and that his momma was going to be very proud of him, and in the end, I had to bring in the big guns, going to the back doors where the legendary woman herself was waiting, Stephen Shale’s mom, a tiny woman with a big energy, and I brought her up to meet him in the back, where she squeezed his shoulders and told him how he was a very special boy and how he could do anything he set his mind to, and it worked like a charm. Woman had a magic touch.
Stephen Shale knocked it out of the park with a performance, and once he was on the stage and didn’t have a breakdown or try to hide behind the piano, I knew all of my real work was done, so I gathered all of the audacity I had in me, and I went back to where Helena was still sitting in the front, and I offered her a hand.