Chapter Ten Adam
“So, we met at work,” Eleanor says matter-of-factly. “Where was our first date?”
We find a couple of free lounge chairs across the pool from the stage, and I open the bag of pretzels I snagged from the snack bar on the way over and hand them to Eleanor. She needs to eat something, and I figured these would be a safe choice, since they’re packaged and bland.
I make myself comfortable, legs stretched out and one of the complimentary towels tucked under my neck like a pillow, while Eleanor sits with her legs crisscrossed on the chair next to mine, pretzels cradled between her palms and her back ramrod straight.
She is taking this extremely seriously. Which is hard for me to wrap my head around, to be honest, because she’s right—we have zero chance of winning.
None whatsoever. Despite the fact that Eleanor seems to know this, it’s obvious part of her is still hoping.
Maybe it’s a side effect of seeing her suffer through a panic attack earlier, but I am not equipped to crush that hope. So I play along.
“Where’s your favorite date spot?” I ask her.
“I don’t know. Just pick somewhere.” When I take too long thinking, she huffs and says: “How about Bestia?”
My nose wrinkles automatically. “A dinner date? That’s so boring.”
“It’s not boring, it’s classic.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is cliché.” I’m aware that this conversation is going off the rails a bit. That none of this is particularly important, in the grand scheme of things. But Eleanor’s nostrils flare when she gets indignant. It’s cute and I can’t help myself. “What about the zoo?”
“Was this a date or a fourth-grade field trip?”
I snort a laugh, and Eleanor’s lips twitch with the urge to smile in response. “Oh, or the botanical gardens!”
“… Sure. Fine. You took me to the botanical gardens.” She shakes her head and shoves a pretzel into her mouth.
I turn my face toward the sun and grin. “And since it’s right there, we took a stroll through the zoo after, so you could see the sloths.”
This actually does sound like fun. I’d go on this date. Not with Eleanor, necessarily. Though it takes surprisingly little effort to picture the two of us strolling through the gardens, one arm slung across Eleanor’s shoulders to keep her close.
“How’d you know I like sloths?”
“You had that calendar on your desk,” I say, feeling some mixture of caught out and smug. “One of the months had a photo of sloths, and after the month was over you tore out the page so you could hang that picture up.”
Her eyebrows hike up toward her hairline. “I forgot about that.”
The unspoken addendum is that she can’t believe I remembered.
Which admittedly is kind of weird. It’s not like I remember every little interaction we’ve ever had.
But we started at Exeter together, and then she became a bit notorious in our shared circles, and then the whole thing with Maya happened.
So yeah, it’s fair to say Eleanor has always been on my radar.
I clear my throat. “So, next question. Biggest pet peeve?”
“Um…” Eleanor blinks hard and refocuses her gaze on the nearest shimmering pool. “I guess when someone listens to something on their phone without headphones in public. What’s yours?”
“Wet socks.” I shudder at the thought, and don’t miss the twitch at the corner of Eleanor’s mouth.
“How is that a pet peeve?”
“Oh my god, have you never been walking through your kitchen and stepped in a puddle you didn’t see? It is the worst sensation in the world.”
“Why are there puddles all over your kitchen floor?”
“There aren’t usually. But, you know, it happens.”
“… How, though?”
“I don’t know. Spills from cooking. Or watering plants.”
I do not actually own any houseplants. My mom gave me a succulent when I first moved into my apartment, but it died, like, immediately, and I haven’t replaced it.
Eleanor’s smirk stretches wider, and I get the feeling she’s picturing me getting my socks wet and having a meltdown over it.
“How about your favorite album?” I ask.
“Like, at the moment? Or of all time?”
“Both.”
She blows out a breath. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Teddy Swims and Arctic Monkeys lately. But of all time… probably Nevermind.”
I huff a small laugh.
“What?” she asks. “Is that too trite?”
“No, not at all. That’s actually my favorite album too.”
She beams. “Really?”
“Yeah. Nirvana was my favorite band as a teenager. I come back to that album all the time. My mom actually saw them live once.”
Eleanor’s eyes go wide. “No shit?”
“Unfortunately, she didn’t get any merch to pass down to me,” I say with a nod to her Bowie shirt.
“But yeah. She was really into the live music scene before my dad kind of… soured her on it all.” I snort.
“I think he was always weirdly jealous of some of the acts she saw before they got together. Like he wanted to be the sole music aficionado in the relationship.”
“Well. She sounds pretty cool in her own right.”
I nod. “She’s the best.”
Eleanor bites her lip and looks down at her pretzels. She stuffs one in her mouth and avoids my gaze while she chews. Once she’s swallowed, she keeps her gaze locked on her fingers, still picking at the bag of pretzels as she prompts: “What song would we have had our first dance to?”
“Um…” I think about Eleanor’s comment at the chapel this morning, about missing out on an Elvis impersonator. “ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’?”
“That’s a good one.” Her smile softens, and she dips her chin as if to hide it. “Your turn.”
“What’s your dream job?”
Eleanor gives me a funny look. “A&R manager.”
“Oh. You don’t want to become an executive down the road?”
She shrugs. “Not particularly. I mean, I wouldn’t hate getting promoted to director one day, but I definitely want to stay in artists and repertoire.”
This surprises me, mostly because Eleanor is ambitious.
I’d assumed she had the same ambitions as me—to rise through the ranks and gain enough experience to run a record company one day.
Then again, her indie label is much smaller than mine.
Not as many executive positions in the first place, and those that do exist probably stretch a person that much thinner.
“I’d like to have an impact at the label,” she goes on, “and help Josie develop a strategy for the future. But discovering new artists and supporting their careers is what I love to do. I have no interest in taking on a bigger role in finance or business aspects.” She gives a self-deprecating laugh.
“And in case it wasn’t obvious, fiscal responsibility is not my strong suit. ”
“Sure,” I tell her, a bit distractedly. The thing is, as much as I hate to admit it, there’s another reason I assumed Eleanor wanted to be an executive.
It makes my skin itch and feel too tight for my frame, to think about the things people have said about Eleanor.
To acknowledge how much of it I readily believed.
Eleanor wasn’t the only intern people gossiped about—me being Atlas’s son was certainly a topic when we started, and everyone liked to rag on another kid whose uncle was a producer.
Nepotism runs rampant in this business, something that’s ridiculed by bitter peers at the same time it’s accepted as the norm.
So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Eleanor went from being one of us, almost an underdog considering she had no industry connections, to the person all the other interns collectively decided didn’t belong.
If I had to choose one moment that turned the tides against her, it’d probably be the day she brought everyone band merch.
Which sounds ridiculous, because it was ridiculous, that a bunch of underpaid interns who were always psyched to score free stuff reacted with anything but gratitude.
The problem was, the swag came from a marketing meeting with Exeter’s biggest artist of the year.
A meeting Eleanor had no real business attending as a lowly A&R intern.
We were all eating lunch in the kitchen area when Eleanor came in and dropped the armful of T-shirts and stickers and other swag right in the middle of our cramped table.
“Oh, sweet,” said this kid Sanjay, immediately lunging for a branded baseball cap.
“Whoa, hang on, were you at the Reagan Marquette meeting?” This came from Dana, the only other girl out of a half-dozen interns.
“Yeah. Mr. Hastings asked me to sit in.”
Dana was sitting across the table from me, so I was the one she made eye contact with. Her brow quirked, and it read to me as that’s some bullshit, am I right?
I dropped my gaze back down to my lunch. I didn’t even look up when someone finally broke the dead silence that had settled over the group with a mumbled “Of course he did.”
It hadn’t escaped any of our notice that Griffin had taken a special interest in Eleanor.
And it hadn’t taken long for jealousy to turn into speculation, about what kinds of things happened in their closed-door meetings, about whether it was a coincidence that they came in on the same elevator some mornings.
Eleanor cleared her throat. “They had samples of all this stuff sitting around, so I figured you guys might want some of it.”
“How thoughtful,” Dana said as she viciously stabbed at her salad.
It was beyond clear that Dana did not read this gesture as thoughtful. She—all of us, maybe—had read it as calculated. Like Eleanor only brought us that stuff so she’d have an excuse to brag about meeting Reagan.
That’s how it went from then on. Every time Eleanor tried to defuse the tension and offer an olive branch to the other interns, it blew up in her face.
I was an asshole, and a sheep, so I never defended her.
I didn’t even tell Billy to knock it off when he dragged her after I closed Maya’s contract earlier this year, or when he said that stuff about her and Griffin on the phone this morning.