Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
Slater Faust Chicago Headquarters
Five years ago
“What are you doing this weekend?”
I cut my eyes at Campbell. He’s got his left ankle crossed over his right knee and I can see his socks: dark green, ribbed, with mallards on them.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I say. “Cute socks.”
“Thank you so much.” He opens a new browser on his laptop and pulls up . “And yes, that’s why I’m asking.”
It’s nearly five on a Friday, early August, just a couple weeks until Slater Faust makes their hiring decision.
Campbell’s working on social content for a protein bar brand I always forget the name of; I’m picking apart a draft press release for one of our pro bono clients.
Normally, I wouldn’t work in a meeting room with him like this, but they’re shooting a promo video on the intern floor and the kitchen’s full of people starting in on happy hour.
“Working,” I say.
“On what?” I narrow my eyes over my laptop screen, and Campbell laughs. “Wouldn’t I like to know?”
I think of that meeting, a month ago, when he’d tried to take the SkinnyNosh work from me.
I think of the hard snap of Nolan’s voice and the way Campbell looked at me as he’d left that room.
How angry he was, and the way it changed him.
How it changed my understanding of him, too, and the way I’ve buried that memory someplace deep and hidden that I’m too scared to look at.
Imogen and I wrapped the project last week.
I say, “So you can be smart sometimes.”
“Once in a blue moon.”
It reminds me of his ringtone, “Moon River.” Campbell’s phone rang three times today while he was in a meeting on the forty-first floor and I had to listen to that song repeating itself, over and over.
“I’m going to Milwaukee with my roommates,” he says. Like I’m not actively working, like we didn’t come in here for the express purpose of finding some silence. “There’s a cheese festival.”
“Okay,” I say. “I didn’t ask.”
“You like cheese, French?”
I glare up at him. “Obviously, I like cheese.”
“Got any other hobbies?”
I exhale through my nose and close my laptop. This is futile. It’s almost the end of summer, and I still have so much work to do. I have to work so hard to keep up with him, here in his duck socks and his languid smile and his weekend plans with his roommates.
“What are you getting at, Campbell?”
He shrugs, his chin tipping up, up, up to maintain eye contact with me as I stand. “Just wondering if you work every weekend, or if there’s a personality hiding somewhere in there.”
Jesus Christ. “Maybe you forgot,” I say, “but there’s a job on the line.”
“How could I forget?” he asks as I make for the door. “It’s got my name on it.”
“Oh, yeah,” I snipe, stopping in the doorframe to look back at him. “Obviously, they’ll give it to you.”
Campbell grins. He’s bordered by Lake Michigan through the floor-to-ceiling windows, his hair sun-bleached and his eyes glinting. He’d be frameable, there in black and white: twenty-three, smiling crookedly, smart as a knife. He takes it out of me in every single way. “Who else?”
“Gosh, I don’t know, Campbell.” I widen my eyes at him. “If not you, who?”
“If not me,” he agrees, lifting one hand in the air.
I roll my eyes as I leave the room, and he doesn’t come after me.
I spend the rest of the weekend writing headlines in my bedroom, thinking about the drawl of Campbell’s voice all the way across the state line in Wisconsin.
Dexter is hovering. We’ve been working on the beach all morning and he’s acting like a human umbrella—craned over me to block everything out.
“You can relax,” I mutter, after I sneeze and he nearly jumps out of his seat to offer me a tissue. “I’m not going to spontaneously combust.”
He sits back on his beach chair and eyes me. “Are you sure?”
I glare at him. My eyes were so puffy from crying all night that I lay in bed with ice on them for an hour this morning. I couldn’t find any plastic bags to take to the ice machine, so I filled two socks with ice cubes and then put them on my face. That’s the state of affairs.
“For what it’s worth,” Dexter says, carefully, “Soraya told me Nolan isn’t going to tell Iris. Campbell asked him not to.”
It binds something in my throat. “And Nolan will listen?”
“I don’t know,” Dexter says. “She made it sound like he would.”
I hesitate. “Did she say anything else?”
I know how pitiful it sounds, and when Dexter gives me a sympathetic look I immediately turn back to my laptop. “Forget I asked.”
“Mattie…” He says it slowly, like he’s weighing whether to finish the sentence. “She said Campbell’s fucking sad.” He leans closer to me. “Those were her words. ‘Fucking sad.’ ”
I close my eyes. Me, too. Longing for Campbell has filled every far edge of my body, smothering everything else out.
I find myself looking for him every time I turn a corner in the hotel, all of me rising with the yearning to be close to him before I remember I’m not supposed to want that, now.
That running into him would be the worst thing. The hardest.
“Just three more days,” I say, instead of telling Dexter how horrible I feel. “Then it’ll all be over.”
He considers this. Beyond him, down the beach, a surf instructor in a Wicksteed wet suit leads a middle-aged woman into the water. “What’ll be over?”
“This pitch,” I say. My voice squeaks up an octave, and Dexter reaches out to squeeze my hand. “This feeling.”
“Yeah,” he says, gently. “Let’s just get through this and get home.”
But there’s still so much this to get through.
Thursday night, our last evening before the pitch, we have dinner at a restaurant on the shore.
Wicksteed Bodega doesn’t have its own restaurant, but they rent out the back room of a fish house overlooking the water-carved cliff line for both agency teams. When I walk through the front door with Dexter and Iris, Campbell’s the very first thing I see: clear at the back of the restaurant, across an entire expanse of tables and waitstaff.
He’s seated at a round table in that Wicksteed-red suit, the top button of his dress shirt undone so I can see the hot flush of his throat.
He holds my gaze for every single one of my steps across the room.
“Art Room,” Lucia says, standing to greet us as we come in. The private room is insulated and close; when the host closes the doors behind us, all the sound of the restaurant falls away. Behind Lucia, a wide window looks over the Pacific. “Thanks so much for joining us at our favorite little spot.”
I force a smile as she shakes my hand. When my gaze falls back to Campbell, he looks like he might be sick. There are circles under his eyes so dark it’s like he hasn’t even been trying to sleep. Against every better instinct, I want to cross the table to get to him.
I want you. I want you with me all the time.
Nolan clears his throat, and it jolts me back into my body.
When I glance at him it feels like vertigo—a mean, unsteadying rush.
He’s looking at me like he saw that, like he knows every way Campbell’s ruined me and all the ruining I’ve done in return.
It’s enough to remind me why I chose this, and what we’re doing here at all.
I lower into my seat and focus on Lucia.
She tells us how grateful she is. How much fun she’s had, this month on the road. That she won’t sleep tonight, she’s so eager to hear our pitches in the morning.
“We know our methods at Wicksteed are unconventional,” Lucia says.
I’m so aware of Campbell across the table that everything feels distorted; I can hardly hear her, for how tuned I am to every shift of his body.
“And we know you’ve all sacrificed to be here.
We don’t take it lightly, the lives you paused at home to be on-property with us for as long as you have been.
” She lifts her wineglass from the table, preparing for a toast. “We brought you here to immerse you in the Wicksteed brand, but also to see how you worked together. Not only within your teams, but with one another. It says a lot about a creative team, how they share a sandbox with their rivals.”
I bite my lip—I can’t help it. If I don’t tamp myself down somehow, I might burst into tears again. I came into all this with a rival, but I’ll be leaving it with something so much worse.
I stare down at my lap, the napkin twisted in my fingers, so I don’t have to see Campbell’s reaction. So I don’t have to confirm whether Dexter and Soraya and Nolan are all watching the two of us, or if it only feels that way to me.
“So, I’d like to raise a glass to the six of you,” Lucia says.
My wrist wobbles when I reach for my wine.
I keep my eyes trained so carefully on the garnet liquid, scared to look anywhere else.
“I know I speak for all of us when I say that no matter what happens next, we’ll miss spending time with this exceptional group. ”
Miss, I think. The way I miss Campbell is too big for as small and common a word as that. If anyone could think of a better one, if anyone could name this agony for me, it would be him.
As Lucia keeps talking, as dinner is served and conversation is muddled through, I know I should be thinking about our presentation tomorrow. I should be thinking about all this work Dexter and I have poured ourselves into.
I should be thinking that I made it, here to the end. That I did my best. That I chose the right thing.
But instead of any of that, I’m thinking:
If it was the right thing, why do I feel so awful?