Hungry Love

Chapter 1

Climbing Without Ladders

There’s a kind of hunger that looks like ambition and tastes like survival. At Pulse, it comes dressed in mood boards, curated cool, and the confidence to make it all look effortless. The work is real. The rest is just camouflage.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, my survival looks more like this: the sidewalk doing that New York thing where walking’s a team sport, and I’m the weak link. A tourist family forms a human barricade in front of me, debating directions to Central Park. Something squishes under my heel. Fruit, maybe, though unidentified organic matter feels a lot more honest. Someone behind me yells into his AirPods like all of Midtown is his therapist. And suddenly, I have the brief, irrational urge to flee to a remote village and churn my own butter.

When I finally reach my destination, I stop and crane my neck. The glass tower rises above me, so sleek it looks photoshopped onto the grimy, gum-polished sidewalk beneath it. It’s not just a building. It’s a mirror. A myth dressed in steel and glass—a skyscraper-sized dare. It’s home to Pulse, where the espresso’s free, but the expectations aren’t.

I pull the strap of my tote higher onto my shoulder. Somewhere at the bottom, my Converse sulk like they’ve been benched in a pivotal playoff game because, for once, I’m wearing heels. Not towering stilettos, just enough lift to say I’m serious without seeming desperate. Because today matters. I have a chance to be seen not as someone who makes other people’s visions look good, but as someone with a vision of her own.

In the building’s glass, my reflection stares back. I smooth my blazer, arrange my expression into something that could be mistaken for confidence, and stand up straighter, but I still can’t tell if I’m bracing for success or impact.

The lobby is chilled to a temperature best described as you can’t perspire if you can’t feel your skin.

In the elevator, the ride is like being reeled upward by a thread I can’t see, but feel knotted under my ribcage. I doubt Darwin ever imagined a world where survival meant smiling through microaggressions and contouring your cheekbones like your life depended on it. But here we are. The modern working woman: evolving faster than our ancestors ever imagined, yet somehow still not fast enough. When the elevator doors hiss open, I release the breath I’ve been holding and step onto the fifteenth floor.

I’m greeted by a familiar sprawl of cubicles, an awkward landscape of half-walls and fluorescent lighting that somehow combines the worst parts of open concept and solitary confinement. A layout clearly designed by someone who’s never tried to meet a deadline next to Greg from Sales and his daily tuna wrap.

The air smells faintly of expensive perfumes, microwaved quinoa, and anxiety. The espresso machine sputters in the staff break room. Heels click like metronomes against white marble floors in the corridors. Manicured nails clatter on keyboards. This is our orchestra of overachievers, performing their tight-smiled overture to capitalism, one Slack ping at a time. And like any orchestra, it needs patrons.

Pulse profits from the idea that women are too busy to curate their own best lives but will happily buy someone else’s if it comes with flattering lighting and a swipe-up link. It’s the brainchild of Marisol Von Phelps, lifestyle oracle and chief curator of want, supported by a “teensy” team of seventy-five. I help oversee the editorial department for print and online, which means I spend most of my time editing other people’s words and managing the chaos of Pulse’s food and other lifestyle content.

I duck into the staff kitchen long enough to air-fry a plate of tater tots—breakfast of champions—and start weaving my way back toward my desk. I try to slip past Valerie Thorne, our Executive Editor, former Paris bureau chief of Elle, rumored descendant of minor European royalty, and firm believer that dressing down is a moral failing. But her all-glass human terrarium of an office is the corner-office equivalent of a watchtower, and she’s impossible to miss, leaning in the door frame like she’s posing casual for one of our fashion editorials. Her silk sheath is cinched at the waist with a belt I’m 60% sure is vintage Hermès and 100% sure costs more than my rent.

Several staffers hover nearby, all clearly focused on the man she’s flirting with. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, every inch of his posture radiating ease and power.

It’s not until he turns slightly—devastating profile, hair too artfully disheveled to be accidental—that my stomach does a swan dive into my heels.

Gavin Jones. The man I’ve spent eight years avoiding, and who has always treated me like a problem he hasn’t decided how to solve.

I spin to retreat, hoping to slip away unseen.

“Ava,” Valerie calls out.

I freeze.

I consider pretending I didn’t hear her and bolting.

Instead, I turn.

And I walk straight into Gavin.

The plate jerks in my hand, and a few precious, ketchup-bright stars streak across his very white shirt, one landing like a comet right above the second button.

“Oh my God,” I say automatically, stepping back. “Sorry. That was—You were—”

He looks down at the constellation, then lifts his eyes to mine. Something like recognition flickers there before it disappears.

“Still with the tater tots?”

My cheeks flare. “They’re restorative.”

Valerie steps in, lips pursed. “Gavin, I’m so sorry,” she says, shooting me a look. “Ava’s still learning to walk in heels.”

I don’t look at her. I can’t. I merely extend my free hand toward him, mortified but determined to keep some kind of professionalism.

“Ava Diaz,” I say, like we haven’t shared eight years of holidays, and one extremely tense family cruise to Mexico.

He reaches out. His hand is warm and familiar in a way it shouldn’t be.

“Gavin Jones,” he replies, like I haven’t known that name since the first time Jared brought me home, and Gavin looked at me like I wasn’t nearly good enough for his baby brother.

Valerie’s gaze flicks between us, interest sharpening. “Well,” she says, placing her hand gently on his shoulder, “let’s get you a shirt from wardrobe, Gavin.”

Fifteen minutes later, I’m still wondering why Gavin Jones was in Valerie Thorne’s office. Corporate espionage? Feature profile? Or maybe they’re secretly merging into some kind of morally flexible power couple.

I stop to check in with Kiki, our production coordinator and one of my favorite humans on the planet. Kiki has this way of dressing like she’s a walking protest sign against conformity. Today, it’s a Kusama-inspired polka-dot blouse and a pair of men’s plaid pants that might’ve once belonged to a very fashionable grandfather or a Wes Anderson movie extra. While others judge, I cheer quietly from the sidelines.

“You look… irritated,” she says.

Today’s pitch is the biggest of my career: A Girl’s Gotta Give, a charity campaign I built from the ground up. Marisol has even flown in to hear it in person. It’s not just the most ambitious thing I’ve ever created; it’s the most me.

“Pitch got moved,” I say. “To later today. Valerie wants more time to… channel the muses.”

She furrows her brow and bites her bottom lip.

“What?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Kiki.”

“Minion,” she says, using the nickname we use for Valerie’s assistant, Minerva, “asked to see the deck.”

“To review?”

“That’s what I thought, but she went into the conference room. With Valerie. And Marisol,” she says, voice getting faster. “And our potential VC investor. The hot guy in the suit,” she says all in one breath.

My stomach drops. This can’t be happening.

I slip inside the conference room as quietly as I can, my hands shaking. Marisol gives me a brief smile before turning back to the presentation. Valerie barely glances over—she’s in full performance mode—as I take a seat in the outer ring of chairs with the assistants. Not because I belong there. Because I don’t trust myself not to do something unhinged if I sit any closer.

And then I see him. Again.

Gavin, in a new tater tot-free shirt. In my seat. Next to Marisol, legs casually crossed. Cool as a glacier and just as likely to crush someone without trying. The chill in his gaze as it meets mine isn’t new. Still, it always stings. Apparently, he’s the high-profile VC Valerie and Marisol have been courting.

I catch the other staff stealing glances at him like he’s the Second Coming, if the Second Coming wore Tom Ford, went on silent retreats in Iceland, and had a face that made ovaries reconsider their retirement plans.

I force myself to look away and back toward the head of the room, where Valerie—hair in the kind of perfect high ponytail I’ve never once been able to replicate—stands beside the screen.

She starts the video I spent forty hours editing, and I see it.

My introduction, word for word. Even my punctuation. But Valerie’s name sits beneath it like it’s always belonged there. The audacity is almost impressive. Almost.

Marisol and Gavin lean in as images flicker by: a boy in India blinking into the camera, a nurse steadying his arm for a vaccine. A mother in Alabama, clutching a paper grocery bag like it’s oxygen. A classroom of Sudanese girls, their notebooks balanced on chipped desks, their faces lit up with hope.

They are the people we could be helping, if Pulse chose to.

The room is spellbound.

Our head of public relations wipes a tear from her eye as Valerie clicks off the presentation, and the lights come up. There’s a brief moment of silence as everyone looks to Marisol for her reaction.

Marisol beams. Valerie beams. Me? My pulse pounds.

As the room bursts into applause, I press my hands into my thighs, willing my heartbeat to slow and my face to behave. Minerva looks to me for my reaction, a weird combination of guilt and pity crossing her face.

From across the room, Gavin’s eyes flick once—quick, sharp—to Minerva’s face, then to mine. It’s like he’s connecting dots he shouldn’t even have access to, then his gaze tightens as if he senses the undertow, the part of me pulling away.

This was my chance to show Marisol how much I’ve evolved, and how much the company could evolve by doing more good in the world. Now it’s Valerie’s crowning achievement. I think of all the late hours spent helping her meet deadlines, all the stupid social posts I ghostwrote to shape her public image while mine remains unseen.

I come back into my body just as Marisol turns to Valerie.

“It’s perfect, Valerie. Fabulous job.”

More applause, each clap a reminder of all the dinners I abandoned, the weekends I forfeited. I’d dressed those sacrifices up as ambition, but now they stand exposed as the na?ve bargains they were. I’d been so determined to climb the shiny career ladder in front of me, I didn’t realize it was leaning against the wrong wall until I was already halfway up.

I catch Valerie’s smile. Triumphant. Unbothered. And, for once, I see her actions clearly: this wasn’t a slip or misunderstanding. It was a choice.

I’ve spent years swallowing things I shouldn’t. But I’m done being hungry in a room full of people who keep eating.