Chapter Eleven #2
“This is going to be casual,” she says, which is client-speak for Impress the hell out of me in the chillest way possible. “Lucia calls it a ‘headline-off.’ ”
I tighten my cheek muscles, hoping they’ll hold my smile in place.
“I give you a topic,” she continues, “and you have two minutes to come up with as many headlines related to it as you can.”
I breathe slowly through my nose. Even Wicksteed’s proprietary room scent isn’t inspiring calm, here. I hate working like this—on the spot, no prep time—and Campbell’s great at it. He thrives in chaos, like a toddler.
“Fun,” he says, like he means it.
Of course this first demonstration of our skills, pitted directly against each other, would be the sort of test he excels at, and the sort that makes me break out in hives.
“You can write your lines on the boards.” Suni gestures to a jar of dry-erase markers on the coffee table between us. “I’ll take photos of all of them at the end to share back with Lucia.”
Diabolical. Campbell and I reach for markers at the exact same time, and he swats my hand out of the way to make sure he gets the blue one.
I catch a breath of his cologne as he dips past me—faint, crisp, so staunchly embedded in my sense memory that it brings me right back to our intern desks at Slater Faust. I hate that I’ve betrayed myself by remembering what Campbell Porter smells like.
I hate even more that I have to settle for black ink, and that I can’t shoot him a look because Suni is watching us.
“The first topic is promoting the stables at Wicksteed Aspen,” Suni says. “What would the headline be? Think social media or a digital ad. Time starts now.”
I think of Nantucket and our horrible afternoon in the autumn-painted foothills. The claustrophobia of my own sweaty turtleneck as I baked in the high Colorado sun. I bite the insides of my cheeks and start writing.
The view from here: golden aspens, sunshine, and two soft ears to guide you down the trail.
Life is better on horseback.
That one’s not only stupid but untrue, but I refuse to embarrass myself by erasing my own work as I go. From behind me, Suni says, “Oh, I love that one, Campbell.”
I crane my head to read what he’s written. There are already five headlines racing across the board in his blue block print. Suni taps the third one, which says, Go where your worries can’t reach you.
“Love leaning into the emotional benefit,” Suni says, and I turn violently back to my own board. I would emotionally benefit from leaving this room, but instead I try to focus. Our time is up before I’ve managed to articulate a third line.
“Okay, next one,” Suni says. I feel Campbell looking over at me and wish I could cover my entire whiteboard with my body so he can’t see it. “What would the headline be to promote holiday break at Wicksteed Aspen?”
My brain stutters over itself as Campbell dives back toward his board. Holiday break, I plead, squeezing my eyes shut. A holiday break that doesn’t break the bank! Don’t break your back planning your holiday break! I want to jump out the window and impale myself on the top of the gondola.
I’ve always been this way, needing time.
The plight of the only child, maybe—I can’t really think unless I’m alone.
I only like brainstorm meetings if I’ve had a chance to come up with my own ideas first. I write best in absolute silence, with no one looking over my shoulder.
I can’t thrive here, like this. I’m failing in real time. I’m spinning out so goddamn hard—
“You okay, French?”
I look at Campbell, whose marker is poised over his whiteboard. He’s written about three hundred headlines.
“Fine,” I say, light as a feather.
Suni’s watching us, but Campbell doesn’t start writing again. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I turn to look at him head-on. Think, Don’t give this to me.
The only thing worse than Campbell beating me is Campbell thinking he needs to go easy on me.
I hate every single thing that’s happening in this room, most of all the way he’s looking at me now—like I’m not his competition, but maybe a person who needs help. In front of Suni. “I’m fine.”
He blinks, hesitating for the thinnest split of a second before nodding once and starting to write again. It’s like there’s no barrier between his brain and his hand; the words just flow. I despise how good he is at this. It’s torture to watch his mind at work.
It breaks something open in me and finally, finally I start to think again. When Suni calls time, I have six lines. She taps one with her fingernail and smiles at me before calling the next topic: the resort’s Michelin-starred restaurant.
By the time our hour’s through, I feel like I’ve climbed to the top of the Sears Tower and all the way back down it. My forehead is prickly with sweat, and my handwriting’s gone lopsided, but the words are there, and they’re good. (Some of them are good.)
“Great work,” Suni says. She holds up her phone to photograph the boards, and I step out of frame. “I hope this was as fun for you as it was for me.”
“Heart-pumping,” I assure her, and Campbell rasps up a laugh.
“Feel free to hang out and enjoy the view.” Suni gestures at the windows, then the bar. “Or help yourself to a drink.”
I glance at the bottles of liquor, the glistening cut-crystal glassware. All the glasses are dipped in gold at their rims, like anything you taste at Wicksteed should be twenty-four karats.
I’d love a drink in anyone’s company but Campbell’s. We both smile at Suni until the penthouse door falls shut behind her.
“ ‘Go where your worries can’t reach you,’ ” I say, and Campbell raises his eyebrows at me. “Cute.”
“Thank you so much.” He puts a hand over his heart, signet ring glinting. “I thought you were broken there for a minute.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” I say, stiffly. I gather my bag and lift it over one shoulder.
“Oh, I don’t worry about you.”
I look at Campbell, my eyes tightening. “Then why’d you try to throw me off by taking the blue pen?”
Campbell feigns surprise, his expression so cartoonishly overdone I know he’s bullshitting me before he even opens his mouth. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Right,” I say, flatly. I need to lie down, or maybe lock myself in my room with the blackout shades drawn to do some box breathing. I wave an arm around the suite. “I’ll leave you to this. More your speed than mine.”
Campbell slides his hands into his pockets. “How do you figure?”
I try to laugh, but it comes out crabby. “Easier to write a headline about holiday break when you’ve actually holidayed in places like this.”
It’s a cheap shot, insulting, and I know it. I just can’t make myself admit what happened here, which is that he showed me up entirely.
“Ah, French,” Campbell says, rocking back on his heels. “Don’t sell me short. I’ve never stayed in a place like this.”
I hear the rest of the sentence, the part he doesn’t say out loud: I’m just a better writer than you.
“No?” I say. “Could’ve fooled me. You seem like the type.”
“Really,” he says, not quite a question. “I’m flattered, I guess, but I grew up vacationing in a tent in my backyard.”
I stare at him, trying to discern if he’s lying to me.
“Rode to school with my next-door neighbor,” he says, “because we only had the one car. Went to college on a scholarship. Just paid off my ad school loan last year.” He leans closer, and I catch his cologne again. “Need I go on?”
I didn’t have a spare thirty grand, I’d told him from the back of that damn horse. It’s humiliating to have misread him like this for all these years. To have admitted I’ve misread him like this.
And the truth remains that Campbell looks perfect in this room: even in that ridiculous shirt, I’m so frazzled that I can admit that he’s beautiful enough to fit right in.
“You look shocked,” Campbell says, and I make sure my jaw is snapped shut. I take a step back from him, as if that could save me now. “But why do you think I needed the Slater job so badly?”
We stare at each other. I tell myself it’s the adrenaline of writing all those lines, what’s happening in my body.
That it’s just the jolt of learning he’s not who I thought he was, if only in this one way.
That all this explains the flip of my stomach as he holds my eyes—as they narrow, glinting, and I can tell he’s thinking through how to best me next.
There’s a rush, knowing Campbell’s energy is directed at me. That it’s me he’s going to be thinking about when he leaves this room.
I hate that it’s true, but it is: Campbell’s brain, everything it’s capable of, amazes me. Stuns me absolutely stupid. There is no other feeling like having his attention.
“Understood,” I whisper.
He’s left his fountain pen on the coffee table next to his room key. I slip the pen into my pocket, looking up one last time to watch him watch me do it, and then I turn out of the room.