Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
When I get to the Bellissimo conference room on Monday morning, there’s a fountain pen waiting at my seat. I look across the table at Campbell, but he’s bent over it writing in a notebook. My notebook.
“Change of plans,” Lucia says as she strides into the room. I place the pen carefully at the top of my space, like it might explode. “We’re going to take this meeting outside.”
When I glance back up, Campbell’s watching me.
“We still want to hear your micro-campaign presentations,” Lucia continues, “but it’s such a gorgeous day. Let’s do this from the West Terrace.”
“The West Terrace,” Dexter whispers so only I can hear. He pinches his fingers together like an Italian nonna. “Divine.”
The micro-campaigns are another of Lucia’s capabilities checkpoints: smaller pitches within the larger pitch. Busywork, if you ask Dexter, and, ultimately, a distraction from what we came here to do. Greg told us back in Chicago that Lucia was going to test us, and she’s delivering.
“Will we be able to project our slides?” I ask as we all rise from the conference table.
“Ah, French,” Campbell replies, though I was very much not asking him. “What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned voice-over?”
Lucia cuts in before I can respond. “Couldn’t agree more.” She holds the door for me. “You can send me your slides for review afterward, if you like.”
If I like. I can feel Dexter seething behind me, his temperature rising. What’s wrong is we spent most of yesterday making a slide presentation, which I’d never admit to being ruffled by in front of Lucia. But Campbell didn’t even give me a shot; by talking over me, he already made me look ruffled.
“French,” Campbell says, now, from the other side of the door. His eyebrows furrow in concern, and he points back to the conference room. “Did you forget your pen?”
Lucia and I look back at the same time. The fountain pen sits in the center of the table like a dare.
“Good eye,” Lucia says. She breezes past me and I’m left with no choice but to snatch the pen off the table and pocket it. When I look back at Campbell, he’s grinning. Goading me and becoming Lucia’s favorite, all in one gesture? He pulls it off every fucking time.
“This is ridiculous,” Dexter mutters as I push past Campbell through the door.
I give Campbell a pointed look—one that I hope clearly conveys He means you—before falling into step with Dexter. I feel the air change behind me, a sudden hike in temperature, and then hear Campbell’s low voice:
“Careful,” he says, right at the nape of my neck. “Wouldn’t want to be seen getting so flustered.”
“I’m not flustered,” I hiss, turning back to him as Lucia strides ahead of us with Nolan and Iris. Soraya trails in between, all of us headed for the wall of A-frame windows over the terrace.
Campbell’s eyes dip to my throat. At the open neckline of my blouse, my skin feels hot and blotchy with stress. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Stop looking at me,” I snap. I’m thinking of him in that spa robe, and the memory of it makes me furious—every scorching way it courses through my body.
Campbell shields his eyes from the sun and follows Soraya and Nolan through the glass doors to a cluster of patio chairs.
I fold between Dexter and Iris across from him, feeling suddenly breakable.
The way Campbell gets to torment me, and I have to stay professional, and our clients are still in love with him.
The way the golden autumn sun hits his face, now, unreasonably handsome. Dexter leans over to whisper in my ear.
“Don’t let him get to you.”
I close my eyes for as long as I can get away with—an extended blink—and reply with one, tight nod.
“Slater Faust,” Lucia says. I open my eyes to see her signal for a member of the waitstaff. “Why don’t we hear your ideas first? I’ll order us some cool drinks.”
“Thank you,” Soraya starts. She rises a little straighter in her seat. “We took an approach to this that stemmed from—”
“Why don’t I set it up?” Nolan cuts in, hardly glancing at Soraya before turning his attention to Lucia. “Really, we haven’t been able to stop thinking of what you said last week, about the unique power of a luxury vacation to suspend reality, in a way.”
He keeps talking, but I’m watching Soraya: the quick look she gives Campbell over Nolan’s shoulder.
One that so clearly says, Did you just hear this asshole interrupt me?
Campbell presses his lips to a line and widens his eyes at her.
It’s so fast, the flare of his eyelashes in the sun, before both of them turn back to Nolan.
Their faces settle into mirrors of each other: neutral and attentive.
It’s like watching a rehearsed dance, the repeated motion of a silent conversation Soraya and Campbell have clearly had a hundred times before.
It’s familiar. The itchy memory of so many small moments that summer at Slater Faust.
Nolan is framed by Aspen Mountain as he keeps talking, where over the past week the trees have turned a marled gradient of green into gold.
If I held up my fingers, I could capture the three of them on a postcard: Nolan in the middle, flanked by Campbell and Soraya, the lighting warm and ethereal as a film set.
The West Terrace is so stunning it turns even Campbell’s sickly orange button-down into something halfway tolerable.
The surrealism of this moment—Nolan’s old patterns, the unyielding sun, the spherical ice cubes in the tall glass of iced tea that’s presented to me—allows me to reach a decision. And it’s that I’m not going to pay attention.
Just this once, I’m going to ignore Campbell Porter. I’m going to put him aside, and I’m going to put Nolan aside, and I’m going to put everything from the bar aside. Soraya telling me Campbell’s as good as it gets. The clear rapport between them now.
I’m going to take back a little bit of power. Don’t let him get to you.
And so as Campbell and Soraya finally get the floor to walk Lucia through their micro-campaign, I let my eyes lose focus.
I point myself in their direction and turn my ears off.
The one time Campbell looks over at me, I have the tea’s metal straw in my mouth, lazing it from side to side with my tongue.
He tracks the movement for long enough that I can tell it makes him stumble over his sentence.
I’ve spent years—my entire career—avoiding Campbell and the way he makes me feel.
Envious, infuriated, overheated. Here, that’s impossible.
Here, we’re either sparring or sabotaging, and he’s too close to me in every given moment to engage my very favorite fantasy about him: that he doesn’t exist at all.
I decide in that moment under the high Colorado sun that Campbell can go ahead and bait me with his pens. That he can use my notebook as his own. But that I’m done giving him my attention—handing it out like it’s something he’s earned.
When it’s our turn to present, I’m practically glistening with my newfound inner peace. I’ve managed not to absorb a single word Campbell said.
“Art Room,” Lucia says, turning to us on a smile. She’s on her second iced tea and is wearing Chanel sunglasses so dark I can’t see her eyes at all. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Dexter dives in. So quickly and with so much confidence I realize he must’ve been reworking our entire presentation in his mind as Slater Faust talked through their ideas.
I feel a numbing surge of affection for him.
When he turns to me, teeing me up to talk through the rest of our work, it feels like the best kind of dance.
This is the flow that makes me love this job—when it feels like Dexter and I are sharing one creative brain.
“Wow,” Lucia says once we’ve finished. Just the one word, lingering between the seven of us. I nearly look at Campbell—Did you hear that?—before remembering I’ve decided never to care about him again. “I’m impressed. Dexter, Mattie—thank you.”
Beside me, Iris beams like a proud mother. Promotion, my brain screams. I’m getting a ding-a-ling-dang promotion when we get back to Chicago.
“I’ll plan to see you all Wednesday morning for our hike,” Lucia says as she stands. “The shuttle will pick us up in the front drive and take us to the trailhead. Bring water and don’t forget your sunscreen.” She casts a smile between us. “Thanks for all your hard work so far.”
“Good job,” Iris murmurs, leaning over me so Dexter can hear her, too. “That woman’s hard to please and you’ve done it.”
“Thanks,” I say, hugging my empty glass of iced tea to my chest. “Dexter started us off so strong.”
He nudges his shoulder into mine. “And you brought it home.”
“Both of you, truly,” Iris says. “Out of the park.” She checks her watch. “Let’s take an hour and then reconvene to talk pitch concepts? Maybe by the fireplace in the lobby?”
We nod our agreement, and Iris leaves with a squeeze of each of our shoulders.
I’m making to stand, already picturing the incredible power nap I’ll take in my room, when my vision fills with black. It’s my notebook, thrust directly into my line of sight. I look up, slowly.
Campbell stands in front of me. Close enough to touch if I were to move even a little bit.
“Want this back?”
He’s haloed by the sun, his expression nearly impossible to make out. Everyone’s gone except the two of us and Dexter.
You want my attention so badly, I think. I shove down the memory of all the time I’ve spent wanting his, too.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice light. I take the notebook calmly from his hand and stand so we’re chest to chest. I pull his pen from my pocket and tuck it into the one on his shirt, careful not to touch him. He doesn’t back up a single centimeter.
When I look straight at Campbell, he seems surprised. That I’m not meeting him where he’s leading me, maybe. That I’m finally taking something lying down. His lips pull between his teeth: disappointed. He takes one step backward so I can step around the wall of his body.
I don’t open the notebook until I’m through the lobby, up the escalator, alone in my room.
He’s ripped out every page he wrote on, left no evidence behind.
There’s just one line, in his black block print, on the first blank spread.
Is that all you’ve got, French?
Slater Faust Chicago Headquarters
41st floor conference room
Five years ago
“Is that all you’ve got?” Joaquin asks, lifting his eyebrows at Anna. It’s our Monday morning traffic meeting, halfway through July and sweltering outside. Through the giant window behind Anna, the account manager who leads these meetings, Chicago’s shimmering in the heat.
“You wish,” she says. “We’ve got a new business opportunity from Kent in strategy that’s due next Tuesday, an indie art museum in the Mag Mile looking to rebrand.
Nolan, they want you on it.” She glances at him, where he sits at the head of the table with a tall to-go cup of coffee.
“Then there’s the second-round video assignment for Westlake.
” Her eyes flit over me, then Joaquin, who I’ve been supporting on those scripts since June.
“And something new for SkinnyNosh, a social campaign for their microwave dinner line launch. We’ll need to get that staffed and running this week, preferably with interns since we’re strapped right now. ”
“Mattie and Imogen,” Nolan says, pointing between us. Imogen, a design intern, meets my eyes across the table and pulls her lips into a line. We’re the only two women in the intern program this summer. SkinnyNosh is a diet brand, all pink packaging and promises.
“Does anyone else have capacity to take that one?” I hear myself say.
Campbell, bouncing his knee in the chair beside me, goes still for the first time all morning.
I feel everyone in the room look at me, and I nervously touch the metal curve of my nose ring.
“It’s just, Westlake wants a full rewrite on two of those videos.
And I’ve got a social media calendar coming in on Wednesday from—”
“We’re all busy,” Nolan says, slicing through my sentence. When I look at him, his expression’s so apathetic I have to turn away. “This is the job. You go where you’re needed.”
I remind myself to breathe. By twenty-two, I’ve spent the better part of five years trying to unlearn the diet culture I grew up in and all the ways it’s followed me out of my teens. I can’t stomach the idea of selling it to other women.
“I’ll take any other assignment,” I tell him. When I glance at Imogen, she nods. “We both will, if someone else can cover this one.”
“Why?” Joaquin asks. He doesn’t sound angry, just surprised. And that’s fair: he’s never seen me anything but eager, anything but tripping over Campbell to wrest every assignment out of his grip.
But I’m at work, not my real life. I’m not home in the living room with Ava. There’s only so much room at this table for my honesty.
I can feel Campbell looking at me when I say, “The subject matter is hard for me.”
Nolan scoffs, and when I turn to look at him, I see a muscle in Campbell’s jaw tighten.
“It’s advertising, not the ER,” Nolan says. “You’ll do the assignment with Imogen.”
“We’ll take it,” Campbell says. He looks at Miguel across the table, the design intern I’ve been working with on Westlake.
Miguel nods. His eyes pass over me before he looks at Anna. “Yeah, it’s no problem.”
“It’s a women’s brand,” Nolan says. His voice is halfway to laughter. He shifts over the table to look between us. “It needs your perspective. Campbell, I need you on the museum pitch. And Miguel, you’ve got too much on your plate with the Alero production Thursday.”
I swallow through the hot clench of my throat. It’s a women’s brand. And Campbell gets the better assignment: a pitch for an art museum.
Our job, the whole task of it, is to be chameleons, throwing our voices and perspectives to match the client.
I have to do it all the time: become an expert in things I know nothing about and don’t have an interest in.
Protein powder, prescription eyeglasses, rice crackers.
But it’s a bridge too far, apparently, to expect a man to do this work.
I make myself try one last time. “Please, I’d really—”
“No, enough.” Nolan stands and gestures at Campbell. I can’t remember the last time someone talked to me in this tone: dismissive in a way that borders on disdain. “Come with me. We’ll review the museum brief in my office.”
Campbell hesitates. I can feel his gaze on me but can’t rip my own from my fingers, which are twisted so tightly in my lap they’ve gone white at the knuckles. He rolls back his chair and follows Nolan to the door.
When I glance up, just once, Campbell’s looking at me over one shoulder. His jaw is cut glass. He looks so angry I feel the echo of it like a beat in my own heart.