by JD Hawkins
“What’s a USP?” Melina asks.
“‘Unique Selling Point,’” I reply, and Melina nods though she still looks confused, “an angle that’s unique. We don’t have much mindshare now, so if we just zero in on one specific thing that sets us apart, and really hammer that home, we’ll have a platform to build a strategy on. The kombucha market’s incredibly flooded right now, so we’re up against a mountain. But that doesn’t mean we can’t differentiate ourselves. There’s plenty of…”
I stop to look at Melina, and she looks like she’s about three sheep away from falling asleep.
“You’re not interested in this stuff?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I know all this, Wyatt.”
“I’m sure you do—but stepping back and starting with the basics can help give us a better view, you know? Fresh eyes. We’ve got to start with the product—what’s good about it? What’s different about it? What’s unique and exceptional and sellable about—”
“Have you tried it?” Melina interrupts with a small smile as she sips her latte.
“What?”
“Have you actually tried the drink?”
I look down at the three bottles on the desk.
“Actually…no.”
“Maybe that’s where we should start then,” Melina says, suddenly sounding so innocent I’m getting worried.
“Sure,” I say nonchalantly, grabbing one of the bottles.
“That’s ‘Original,’” Melina says with a dubious look. “I wouldn’t start with that one. ‘Green Mist’ has the least aftertaste.”
I look at her and smile, then shake my head a little and continue unscrewing the bottle. Melina winces as I bring it to my lips, as if she’s watching me take a physical blow.
The drink hits my tongue like it’s trying to destroy it. A burning acidic sensation that feels like I’m inhaling fresh lava. I’ve never tasted melted tire rubber or rotten fish—but I can’t imagine it would be any worse than this. I finally manage to swallow it, the skunky liquid fighting me all the way down, grating my throat and clinging to my insides.
I smack my lips and shiver as I try to shake it off. Melina’s hand is over her mouth, but I can see the laughter in her eyes. I check the bottle.
“Is there sulfur in this?”
Melina shrugs. “Just probiotics and blue algae. A little cayenne. Lots of ginger.”
“You sure this hasn’t gone bad?” I ask.
“No,” Melina says, “that’s pretty much the expected outcome.”
I eye the remaining bottles. “These other two are better, right?”
“Well ‘Green Mist’ is more of a ‘if I just sit down for a few minutes I might not vomit’ sort of thing, and ‘Tangerine Dream’ tastes like you’re licking a rancid air freshener.”
“Ugh…” I say, the true extent of the job hitting me full in the face suddenly. “Ok… Ok… Well, maybe it’s an acquired taste. Nobody likes beer when they first try it either.”
“Be a lot easier to sell this if it got you drunk.”
“But it’s good for you,” I say, going over to the whiteboard, which inexplicably has half an Allen Ginsberg poem written on it, “maybe that’s our angle. Maybe we can even embrace the fact that it tastes so hardcore—”
There’s a hurried knock at the door that cuts me short, and we both look up to see Jim stepping inside.
“There you are!” the boss says. “Come on! We’re already running ten minutes over for talking stick time.”
Melina’s already getting up and grabbing her camera.
“Talking stick time?” I ask.
Melina turns to me and with stoic eyes says, “It’s where we all sit in a circle, take our turn with the talking stick, and speak openly about how we’re feeling in the company. It happens twice a month, every other Friday.”
“That’s right,” Jim says, “and I’ve just realized—Wyatt, you still haven’t had your chakras cleansed. We’ll have to do that right after if you’re going to be spending time here. Oh, also, I’ve got some PowerPoints I put together this week with infographics about our social media and distribution reach across the US. I’d like to go through them with you.”
“Wait,” I say, Melina already beside Jim at the door, “can all of this be done later? Melina and I are kind of in the middle of something urgent.”
Jim might talk—and dress—like a happy-go-lucky beach bum, but in an instant I see his expression change. It’s the same look I saw a thousand times over from hardasses all over New York. A ‘don’t push my buttons’ war face.
“No,” he says, his voice hard and flat. “Stick talking room. Now.”
He walks off immediately, stamping the last word. I look at Melina, who shrugs helplessly.
“Welcome to the mess,” she says.
The rest of the day has to go down as one of the most stressful and bizarre work days of my life. Talking stick time lasts a full four hours, several of the employees clinging to the twig for dear life as they tell what must be their entire life stories. All the while, Melina and I swap subtle glances and looks—who needs a stick to talk when you’ve got years of growing up together, and enough understanding of someone to read what they mean in the smallest flick of the eye.
After that, just when I think I’ve seen the true depths of crazy, my chakra cleansing happens. I’m seated in a room amid clouds of burning sage while people primal-scream around me, after which a woman with hair like a bale of hay sets a circle of quartz crystals around my chair and then whips her hands back and forth inches away from my body.
Then come the PowerPoints. I don’t know if Jim is just really proud of his PowerPoint skills, or only feels he can express himself in graphs and pie charts, but they’re endless. Bad enough that I wish the chakra cleansing was still going on.
Melina and I sit in his office for hours watching him present graph after graph of numbers that go back to the company’s inception. I start to wonder if someone, somewhere, has ever thought to use this as an actual torture method, my mind going numb until I feel almost detached from my body, the surreality of the entire day causing me to have a semi-existential crisis in front of a line graph showing a small, mysterious spike in sales in Canada several months ago.
I’m still zoned-out and discombobulated when I stumble out into the sunny parking lot at 5 PM.
“You ok?” Melina asks, her hand on my arm pulling me back into the present.
“What the fuck just happened?” I say, only half-joking.
She laughs, and that familiar, melodic sound feels like the only antidote I need to the day I’ve just experienced.
“You’ll get used to it,” she says. “It’s not like this every day, I promise.”
Then, so quickly I don’t have time to pre-empt it, she snaps a photo of me.
“Hey!”
“Sorry,” she says, “you just had a great look about you then—all heavy and distant. And those dark clouds behind you seem to match your mood exactly.”
I grin. “You know, you don’t have to apologize every time you take a picture.”
There’s a moment’s hesitation before she speaks, and I can tell she was going to say ‘sorry’ again.
“Ok,” she says, seeming to relax a bit. “Listen, do you want to go get a drink? Something not good for you? You still look pretty wound up, and there’s nothing waiting for you on the freeway right now but a serious dose of rush hour traffic. Plus, it’s Friday.”
The suggestion alone makes me feel a whole lot better.
“Absolutely,” I say, smacking my tongue, “I still have that kombucha aftertaste.”
We take surface streets to a place Melina recommends, near her apartment in Silverlake. A German-themed pub where the waitresses wear traditional Bavarian dresses while serving trendy craft beers—though at this point nothing feels strange to me.
After we settle into a cozy booth in the corner, beneath the dim yellow glow of a suspended lantern, we order a bunch of beer flights. When they com
e, I take a long gulp and let my head fall back, closing my eyes to savor the normality. When I open my eyes again, Melina’s looking at me and laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
She shakes her head.
“I’m just remembering your face when you drank the kombucha. I haven’t seen you look so disgusted since we went camping and you watched Aiden eat that worm.”
“Christ, I think I’d rather eat worms than try that drink again.”
“At least you kept it down—first time I tried it I couldn’t even swallow.”
After she says this her cheeks go pink and she immediately clears her throat awkwardly, and I wonder if she’s thinking what I’m thinking. Maybe I’ve got a dirty mind, maybe being with Melina I feel like a kid again, but I can’t help smiling a little at the innuendo, and then I can’t help imagining it. Her lips wrapped around…
I stop my thoughts quickly and take another gulp of beer.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” I say, “the product or the company.”
“Both,” Melina says. “Both of those things are the worst.”
I laugh.
“You think we can do it? Take a drink that tastes like that and sell it to the world? Because if so, this will be the crowning triumph of my entire consulting career.”
Melina takes a second to think, her smile playful, a totally different person from the shy girl I found in the pantry, and then she says, “To be honest, not really. I think the best we can hope for is to have a little fun while we try, though.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I say, raising another small glass. “What a week.”
She clinks it and we both drain our drinks, quickly ordering a couple more full size beers after finishing off the remaining samples in our flights.
“You never did tell me why you actually came back to L.A.,” Melina asks, leaning back in the booth.
“I missed all this,” I say.
“What?” Melina says. “Don’t they have beer and bad jobs in New York?”
“They don’t have you there,” I say, words coming out before I can think about them.
Melina’s smile drops slightly, her gaze faltering for a second. In her shy awkwardness I realize how much I’m getting sucked into the moment, how much the long, weird work week and this third (or fifth?) beer is making me forget myself, forget circumstance.
“I mean,” I say, as if backpedaling, “everything in NYC goes a hundred miles an hour: The work, the parties, the people I know, even the—”
“Women?” Melina interrupts, then laughs at herself for showing her curiosity. Maybe she’s as buzzed and unguarded as I am right now.
“Yeah. The women too.”
“I thought you liked that,” Melina says, leaning in now. “That high-intensity, all-action life. Fast cars and faster women and all that cliché crap.”
“I thought I liked it too,” I say, leaning closer to her. “But now I’m not so sure. It just…wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want, then?”
I take a long time thinking about it, my mind somewhere else.
“I don’t know. Something real? Less transient?” I shrug. “I guess I haven’t figured it all out yet. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Melina says, nodding. “I haven’t figured it out either.”
I take a long drink of my beer and look over at her again. “Honestly, though? Just sitting here, having a beer with you, is the best time I’ve had going out in months. Relaxing, kicking back in a low key place, just talking…it’s the kind of thing I missed.”
Melina laughs, then takes another swig from her beer, a little foam catching on her lips. Lips that look swollen, a shade of reddish-pink that stirs something physical and lewd in me, making me want to possess them.
She looks at me, getting self-conscious. “What?”
“You have…” And I reach out, using my thumb to brush that foam across those lips, feeling their texture, their softness and shape. Slowly, as if I want to make the most of every brief millisecond, her chin in my palm. “All better,” I tell her as I draw back, my voice a low rumble.
“Thanks.” She looks down and smiles politely, clearing her throat again. I say nothing, and that alone says too much. “God,” she laughs gently, breaking the silence, “we spent so long in Jim’s office today, I didn’t even get to break for lunch. I’m starving.”
“Yeah,” I say, snapping back, “me too. You wanna pick something up?”
Melina thinks for a second, then smiles knowingly. Her brown eyes sparkle at me.
“Do you still have a thing for Top Ramen?”
I laugh and nod. “You mean the way I used to when I was a kid? With chopped—”
“Mushrooms, and green onions all over the top,” Melina finishes.
I chuckle gently, memories falling through my mind’s eye like a warm rain.
“Absolutely, but you can’t forget the—”
“Boiled egg,” Melina finishes again, her face glowing now. “Of course not. I got you covered.”
I look at her anew, something shared from our past together bringing us even closer.
“Sounds perfect,” I say.
“Back to mine it is, then,” Melina says, already standing up.
I hesitate for a moment, debating how to play this, wondering exactly what kind of invitation she’s extending. Because as much as I’d love to throw her up against a wall right now, crushing that perfect body against mine as I run my hands down every curve, I don’t want to cross a line with her. It could ruin everything.
“Wyatt?” she says, looking back over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming?”
And in that moment I’m hers, and my mind is made up without another thought.
“Right behind you,” I say.
4
Melina
I’m feeling drunk as I lead Wyatt up the stairs to my apartment. Loose and open in a way I rarely feel, in a way that feels cathartic. It’s as if the long, stressful day has worn down all my ability to hold back, leaving me too exhausted to overthink things the way I usually do. The beers have stripped away my last few barriers, so that I’m rambling about Top Ramen flavors all the way up the stairs, laughing at how ridiculous I must sound, but incapable of stopping.
And then there’s Wyatt himself. Being with him again is enough to make me let go of all the hang-ups and self-consciousness. This old friend, from so long ago it feels like a former life. Maybe the only person I ever felt understood me and my need for quiet time, the only person who I could ever really be myself with. Here again, right beside me as I open the door to my apartment, making my insides glow. The only person I could ramble about Top Ramen to without feeling like an idiot. Or at least, a little less like an idiot.
“…a little soy sauce to make it incredible, but if you really want your mind blown you have to try chapagetti.”
“Chapagetti?” Wyatt says, as he enters behind me and closes the door.
“Oh yeah. Black bean noodles. Instant. But they’re amazing.”
I wish I could stop rambling, but if I do I might start thinking about his thumb on my lips again, about the surge of lust that it caused in me, about how difficult it was not to take his thumb in my mouth and start sucking…
“I just hope I have mushrooms,” I say, opening the fridge, “dried ones are the best. I had these dried shiitakes that were incredible— Oh! I’ll tell you what I have, dried seaweed… Yeah, you ever had dried seaweed in ramen? You’d love it, it gives it this…”
I can’t stop my mouth going a hundred miles an hour, but my mind is doing two hundred. What did he mean when he said New York didn’t have me, that he wanted something real? How beautiful did his eyes look when he said it? Did he notice how awkward I was when I said the word ‘swallow’?
He takes his blazer off and drops it on the couch in the living room, then leans against the doorway as he watches me buzz around the kitchen. I glance back at him, but it’s hard
to look at him now. Every time I do I notice the strength of his jawline, the focused look in his eyes, the cling of his shirt, hinting at the perfect torso underneath. And if I look, I’m worried he’ll read it all in my face—how completely distracted I am by my lust for him, or the way I’ve been avoiding him at the office all week so he wouldn’t catch me drooling over him—the same way he always seemed to be able to tell what I was thinking.
“Ok,” I say, turning to face him with the two ramen packets in my hands, “I’ve got beef, and I’ve got beef, shrimp, and yummy masala. Pick one—or two, if you wanna mix.”
Wyatt doesn’t say anything, leaving me standing there at the other end of the kitchen, the noodles in my hands. Instead, he unfolds his arms, pushes himself from the wall, and walks toward me with an intent purpose, as if he’s decided something.
“Wyatt?”
He crashes against me like a wave, pushing me back against the counter, hands around my waist, lips fixing themselves on mine. I let the packets fall from my hands and press my palms into his back, pulling him closer. His mouth is strong and demanding, as if this kiss has been pent-up for years. For a second I forget everything and just lose myself in the feeling. It’s like fire, our tongues flickering like flames, hot and hungry and relentless. I half-expect to wake up, to realize this is just some daydream, but as his hands lift my ass onto the counter, and he moves his own body between my legs, I feel too alive for it to be fake.
He breaks his lips from mine to look at me, as if reading my thoughts and wanting to convince me this is actually happening.
“I can’t pretend anymore,” he says, in a voice so deep it can only be true.
“Then don’t,” I say, pulling his lips back to mine. “We can blame it on the beer.”
This time he’s hungrier, his tongue fucking my throat like he wants to fill every space inside of me, hands clutching at my ass as I wrap my legs around him, grinding against the bulge in his pants with an animal desire. I’ve never wanted anyone so bad.