Chapter 4
HOLLIS
Ileaned back in my chair and watched Callum hold court by the grill at Drew’s house. All of us Blackwell siblings had our homes right on the beach, up and down the southern California coastline. We all needed the ocean views to stay sane in our busy lives.
Our oldest brother, Callum, looked relaxed, like he was just grilling burgers, but I knew he was paying attention to everything.
One hand held a spatula and the other was wrapped around a beer.
He had on khaki shorts and an ugly Hawaiian shirt.
I had no idea why he had it on but assumed Victoria, his wife, put him up to it.
Callum in love was a strange and wonderful thing to witness.
He’d spent years being deliberately self-contained.
Always holding everybody together, never needing anything from anyone.
Then one day Victoria walked into his life and knocked him sideways.
Technically he knocked her sideways, literally, and the rest was history.
They fell in love and were in the process of living happily ever after.
She was good for him and vice versa.
Micah sat down at the table and handed me a fresh IPA.
“Thanks,” I said. “Where’s Drew? He went in to get me a drink like an hour ago.”
“Inside. Kensey’s in there with him.”
I snorted. “Ah. Of course. The newlyweds.”
Drew and Kensey had known each other since they were kids.
Everyone always knew they should be together except for them.
She moved away and started a whole life without him, but when she’d come back to California for the summer, their lifelong friendship became something deeper.
She’d taken a job working with Drew to help him out, and somewhere in the middle of it the two of them figured their shit out.
Kensey had gotten a teaching job here in LA and turned her whole life sideways to be with Drew.
I was glad she did. Drew was better with her here. More settled. And really happy.
The sliding door opened and they came out together, Kensey carrying a bowl of salad.
“Food’s almost ready,” she announced.
Ten minutes later, we were all sitting outside on the deck with the ocean breeze coming off the water.
I took another bite of my burger, trying to focus on the flavors. The texture was better than last week’s batch—I’d adjusted the binding agents—but something was still off. Some mushroom powder might help.
My imitation meat burgers were good. Really good. I even got my brothers to agree they were better than anything else on the market. But I could make them better. More importantly, I needed to work out how to keep the quality up while making them in bulk. So far, that had been no easy task.
“What’s that face?” my youngest brother, Beau, asked, pointing his beer at me. “You look like you’re doing calculus.”
“Just thinking about the recipe.” I set the burger down on my plate. “It’s close, but not quite there yet.”
“I thought you already settled on the recipe,” Micah said.
“I actually enjoyed the last one,” Victoria said. “Pretty close to a sirloin burger.”
I picked up a napkin. “If I can make something that tastes indistinguishable from the real thing but with better nutritional value, that’s the sweet spot.”
“No one will notice the difference,” Beau said.
“You’ve had exactly one plant-based burger,” I said. “Mine. You have no idea what the others are like. Trust me, there is a difference.”
“Because you’re the one creating it,” Micah said. “You notice because it’s your recipe.”
“I want more flavor but not spice,” I mused aloud.
“Why are you so obsessed?” Drew asked. “If it’s better than the rest, you’ve won.”
I shook my head. “No, if people take one bite and think ‘that’s pretty good for fake meat,’ I’ve already lost.”
Kensey, who was like a sister to all of us before she actually became our sister-in-law, looked at me. “Are we going to talk about the video?”
I groaned. Of course they’d seen it. That thing had legs. Toby was too good at his job. He’d crowed about how fast it took off. Initially, I thought that had been great.
Now, not so much.
“Oh man, that was gold,” Micah said.
Drew leaned back in his chair, grinning. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look at you with such pure contempt. It was refreshing, honestly.”
“Refreshing?”
“Come on, Hollis. Women usually melt when you smile at them.” He gestured with his beer. “This one looked like she wanted to throw you in the ocean. With cement shoes.”
“And then chum the water,” Kensey added.
Victoria laughed. “I watched it three times. She was not impressed by you at all.”
Beau snorted into his beer. “Bro, she eviscerated you on camera.”
“I screenshotted her face when she called your smoothie rat piss,” Micah said. “Pure poetry. You looked like someone just told you your abs weren’t real.”
I glared at him across the table. “My abs are real, asshole. And my shake is good. People feel better after they drink it.”
I’d worked too hard to build something real for it to get dragged through the mud by some suit in heels who wouldn’t know good taste if it slapped her in the face. Still, part of me couldn’t stop replaying the way she’d squared up to me, all sharp edges and zero patience for my charm.
“Oh, poor Hollis couldn’t smile his way into her good graces,” Beau teased.
I wanted to argue, but they weren’t wrong. I’d gotten used to a certain level of favorable attention, at least from women. Having someone look at me like I was a cockroach that needed to be squished was discomforting.
“Hot though,” Beau said thoughtfully.
“Oh, here we go,” Kensey said.
“What? I’m just saying,” Beau said with a shrug. “The crazy-to-hot scale is relevant here.”
“If you don’t mind sleeping with one eye open, crazy can be good,” Micah agreed. “Crazy is fun in the bedroom.”
“You’re such a pig!” Kensey said with a laugh.
“She wasn’t crazy,” I said, not sure why I was defending her. “She was just annoyingly passionate. She honestly believed I was another scam artist.”
Micah raised an eyebrow. “Passionate about calling your product rat piss.”
“In front of like fifty people,” Drew added helpfully.
“I was there, thanks.” I picked at my burger. “I remember.”
“So you posted the video as revenge?” Callum asked.
“Not revenge.” I shifted in my seat. “Simple marketing. I turned it into something positive for the brand. Making lemonade out of lemons, you know? I figured people would get a kick out of it. And maybe try my product.”
“Oh, the people got a kick out of it,” Micah said, scrolling on his phone. “People have reposted it thousands of times.”
I should have been happy about that. The video had driven traffic to my website like nothing else. By all business metrics, it was a massive win. Everyone wanted to try the smoothie that made the woman lose her shit.
So why did I feel guilty about it?
“Have you seen the remixes?” Beau asked, turning his phone toward me. “Someone put it to that Cardi B song.”
“And there’s an AI version where she’s yelling at historical figures,” Beau added. “It’s actually pretty funny.”
I’d looked last night. Someone had edited the video to make it look like she was yelling at a crying baby.
Another showed her face photoshopped onto a medieval painting.
The comments were worse than I remembered.
They were saying things about her they would never say in public. A bunch of keyboard warriors.
“People on the internet are awful,” I said. “Cowards that talk a big game from their moms’ basements.”
“You made the video,” Victoria reminded me.
“She came at me hard and I made a joke out of it. But all this other stuff?” I gestured at the phone. “It’s gotten mean-spirited. That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to refute what she said about my smoothie. I didn’t say shit about the way she looked.”
“You can’t control what the internet does once something goes viral,” Drew said. “You know that. How many times have Mom and Dad warned us about taking certain selfies?”
“No dick pics,” Micah repeated a phrase that had been drilled into us.
“I know.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I just didn’t mean for it to snowball like it has.”
Callum studied me over his beer. “You feeling guilty?”
“Yeah. I am.” I looked around the table at my brothers. “She didn’t deserve this kind of shitstorm.”
“So take the video down,” Kensey suggested.
“Won’t matter,” Micah said immediately. “It’s already been downloaded and reposted. Taking down the original won’t stop anything now.”
“What if I post another video?” I asked. “Something telling people to leave her alone?”
Drew shook his head. “That’ll just draw more attention to it. Make it worse.”
“The Streisand effect,” Beau agreed. “You try to suppress something, it only makes people more interested.”
I slumped in my chair. “So there’s nothing I can do?”
“You could apologize,” Victoria said gently. “To her, I mean.”
“I looked up Young at Heart after the expo,” I said. “I was curious about who had the audacity to trash my product so thoroughly. The company is legit. They partner with smaller wellness brands. Give them resources and distribution. They actually make good stuff too.”
The woman—Juno, I’d learned her name from their website—was Dan Young’s daughter. The Dan Young who’d built Young at Heart. She was listed as Director of Partnerships and Acquisitions. She had credentials too. She was a registered dietitian, licensed and everything.
“So she wasn’t just some random hater,” Callum said.
“Random but not,” I said. “I didn’t invite her to try my smoothie. I didn’t pitch to them. She took it upon herself to try it.”
“I would guess it’s her job,” Drew said. “Probably looking for products to invest in.”
“You fucked that up,” Beau said.
“What’s done is done,” Callum said.
I wasn’t so sure. The conversation shifted to other topics. I participated enough to not be rude, but my mind was elsewhere.
I left Drew’s house an hour later, driving up the coast toward my place with the windows down. The ocean air usually cleared my head, but tonight it wasn’t working. I kept seeing those comments, kept imagining what Juno must be feeling every time she checked her phone.
That made me feel like shit. I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t cruel.
I needed to fix this somehow.