by JD Hawkins
My mind knows that’s a silly idea, that it could never happen. But there’s something deep inside of me, no matter how much I try to deny it, that hopes it could happen again—wants it to happen again.
After another solid hour of painting, all of us back to singing along to the radio, I realize I haven’t even told them anything about Wyatt working with me—and it feels like it’s almost too late now. But how long can I keep this all a secret? And what happens if—no, when—they find out?
6
Wyatt
I make my way to the MESS offices on automatic, my mind still stuck somewhere a few nights ago, my spirit still caught in the afterglow. I greet the lounging employees, open the door to my office, and open up my laptop.
I can still taste her sweat on my lips, still feel the softness of her breasts in my hands, my gut still twisting as I remember the curve of her thigh, like some background image to the rest of my thoughts.
A spreadsheet. A calendar of appointments. A half-finished strategy I’m sketching out. Her glossy hair in my fist, her head pulled back to reveal her throat…
I played it cool for the rest of the weekend, only sending a quick hello text on Sunday afternoon, knowing she’d get the wrong idea if I told her I wanted to see her again. But now it’s Monday and we finally have to face each other, come to grips with what we’ve done. Does she regret it? Do I?
I take a shot of coffee so strong it should probably be classified as a narcotic and glare at the laptop screen almost angrily.
It’s never been like this before. All the one-night stands back in New York, the city’s plethora of voracious man-eaters and sophisticated, sexually confident women. Fiery, week-long romances that started and ended with incredible sex but always left me feeling detached afterward, already on the prowl for the next trophy.
I don’t need a psychotherapist to tell me why I do this; why I purposely get myself involved in messy situations so I can bail at the first opportunity, and why I haven’t had a relationship last longer than a month since I was in high school. I learned everything I needed to know about love from my parents’ divorce.
It’s been six years now since they walked away from a thirty-three year marriage. Despite the love and support of their two promising and happy kids, stable careers they mostly liked, and a tight-knit group of friends as close as family. They had all of that and they still couldn’t keep it together. So why build anything when it can get destroyed so easily, when you can just throw it all away without a second thought?
The more you believe in something—in someone—the more it’s gonna hurt when you lose it. Lose them. Let alone what it’ll do to the people around you. There’s no such thing as ‘happily ever after’ and ‘til death do us part’ is just a hollow cliché. The more you trust, the harder you’ll fall.
And yet. Something happened that night with Melina that I can’t shake off as easily as I should. I’m still not sure what to think about it. All I know is, it’s got me on edge.
As I walk inside the office, my phone alerts me to an email. I bring it up and scan it over the rim of my coffee cup—New York teaches everyone the bad habit of walking, drinking, and reading at the same time. I slow a little when I see it’s from a woman I don’t know, my assumption that the message is work-related quickly evaporating at the tone.
‘I’ve heard so much about you…really just looking for a good man to make happy and share my life with…’ It isn’t until I skim to the bottom that it all finally makes sense. ‘Your mom said you’d love to meet up for coffee soon, so let me know…’
I groan as I push through the door to my office. My mom’s still trying to set me up. God knows how many girls she’s handed my details out to in her well-meaning but very unwelcome attempt to get me wanting to put down permanent roots here as soon as possible.
I drain the coffee, take off my blazer, and try to suppress the chaos in my thoughts by staring at the three-month goals list that Melina and I put together on Friday afternoon.
“Meeting, my office.”
I look up to see Jim, smiling from the doorway.
“Now?”
“Social media review. Just you and me.”
Is this the same guy that’ll dismiss his employee from an important meeting for an aura cleansing? I give him a look of despair that he seems completely oblivious to. If I wasn’t so twisted up inside, so distracted by my thoughts, I’d tell Jim what I think of all these meetings. I’d do my job and address what is clearly a problem with his management. I’d get this out of the way so I could actually do some real work.
But I’m not up to it, not this morning, not with my brain in a muddle over what happened that night. And not when it’d mean the immediate end of my consultancy here.
“Let’s get to it, then,” I say, and it comes out sounding like a sigh of defeat.
I walk with Jim to his office—his lemon-yellow shirt and lurid green shorts like looking directly into the sun—and the moment I close the door behind us he drops the hippie-stoner smile for that stockbroker frown.
“Presumably we’re on the same page about this,” he says, “but I’d like to know what we’re going to do—or who we’ll maybe hire to take Melina’s place. What do you think?”
“What?” I say, immediately confused.
“Well she’s got to go, right? I mean,” he pauses so that he can spin his laptop to face us and click a few buttons to bring up a graph, “she hasn’t had any impact on the profit margins since she started.”
“You want to fire Melina?”
Jim shrugs as if that’s self-evident.
“Of course—you’ve seen the stats, haven’t you? We’re not selling any drinks. She’s getting us some attention on social media, but if it’s not translating into sales then—”
“She’s barely had a chance to work on anything,” I interrupt. “I thought we agreed we’d start with the product first—that we’d come up with a story that appeals to our demographic, a fresh perspective, a new angle, and build that out into our advertising?”
Jim snorts dismissively.
“Sure, sure,” he says. “But the product sells itself, and the fact that we’re doing so poorly means there must be something wrong in the messaging. She’s got to go.”
I stare at him for a few seconds, the same way I stared at my dad when I was six and he accidentally revealed that Santa wasn’t real.
“‘The product sells itself’?” I repeat back at him.
“Yeah,” Jim says, nodding.
Once again I let a few moments pass so I can make sure he actually said this.
“Hold up,” I say, holding back a grimace. “Have you actually tried the product?”
Jim laughs briefly, but awkwardly, and breaks my gaze.
“Pfft! Sure! Yeah…” he says, to some imaginary person behind him. “I mean, it’s kombucha. It’s just fermented tea, right? It’s from this old recipe a guy sold me in Tibet—the real deal—people’ve been drinking this stuff for ages.”
“And you know how it tastes?”
“Sure!” Jim says, a little too loud and a little too high-pitched for it to be the truth. “I mean—I don’t drink it regularly or anything. I’m very finicky about what I put in my body—and I’m lucky that I’m healthy enough to not really need kombucha. But our stuff’s got it all.”
I lean around him and look at the diet cola can on his desk. He sees me notice it, and gets a little more defensive when I look back at him.
“Look,” he says, getting stern, “this is exactly what millennials want right now. Every metric, every projection, suggests that these drinks should be killing it in that demographic. The kids want something that’s good for them, that has the ingredients we’re using, superfoods, probiotics, organic shit, but also has a sense of culture and history behind it—”
“But they also want something that tastes good.”
Jim looks confused for a moment.
“What are you saying?”
I p
ause for a second, thinking of the most diplomatic way to put it.
“The drink isn’t exactly an easy sell,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Jim says, sounding offended. “An incredibly healthy, super tasty, reasonably priced drink that’s on-trend isn’t an easy sell?”
I clear my throat. “Well, ‘super-tasty’ is kind of subjective.”
“That’s why we have three flavors!” Jim says, smiling like he’s trying to sell me a car.
“I’m just saying that the drink is an acquired taste. It’s not OJ, right? It’s very…different. That’s all.”
Jim shakes his head.
“Look, maybe you don’t like it, and I…” he stops himself before he admits it. “Well, I don’t like seafood—but god knows people buy sushi by the boatload. I don’t like country music or the NFL either, and you know how those sell. The drink isn’t the problem. Like I said, I’ve designed and calculated every aspect of the drink—from the ingredients, to the bottle shape, to the name—to maximize its popularity. The product isn’t to blame.”
“But Melina is?”
It comes out sounding proud and defensive, almost angry, and I take a deep breath afterwards to cool the heat.
“Of course she is,” Jim says severely. “I hardly think she’s doing the drink justice. You’re the consultant—you’re supposed to tell me what—or who—would be better. So?”
I nod and pretend to think, as if I’m actually considering the merits of the question, actually considering whether firing Melina is a good idea. Even if I didn’t know her, even if I didn’t suddenly realize how much I like the idea of working with her, seeing her every day—it wouldn’t be the right choice. Still, I pretend.
“Well,” I say, as if ready to relay some deeply-considered ideas, “she’s definitely talented. If you do fire her, it might take a while to find someone as good as her—certainly someone as cost-effective. I’d like to see what she can do with a new strategy I’m developing. She’s a good storyteller, and she may just need to be given a little free rein.”
“Hmm,” Jim says, looking from me to his graph. “I don’t know.”
“Listen. Give her—me—a little time to see what we can do together. You bring in someone else, you’re gonna be at square one again. Let’s see if we can kick up the momentum on the campaign you’ve already got going.”
He sucks air through his teeth, enjoying the power of having a decision to make, even though it’s a no-brainer.
“Ok,” he says finally. “But I need to see results in thirty days. We’ve already lost far too much time. If not, I’m clearing her out and starting from scratch—regardless of what you recommend. This product’s on the brink of taking off, and I don’t like waiting.”
“Sure,” I say, turning back to the door. “I’d better get right on it, then.”
I leave Jim’s office feeling like my spinning mind’s just been revved up a little more. As if the other night wasn’t enough, as if virtually being Melina’s boss wasn’t enough, now I’ve got the fact that Jim wants to fire her thrown into the mix. A gasoline can on a bonfire. If there wasn’t so much riding on this, my entire reputation staked on it, the possibility of running an entire consultancy out here on the west coast if I get it right, I wouldn’t put up with any of this. For now though, all I can do is ride these bumps.
I need time to think, to break it all down and weigh my options. But time is exactly what I don’t have. I’m leaning back in my desk chair, rubbing my temples, when I hear a knock.
The door opens and I see Melina there, smiling shyly at me.
“Hey,” she says, stepping in and closing the door behind her.
“Hey,” I reply a little gruffly, leaning forward across the desk. “What do you need?”
It comes out sounding a little cold, tinged with irritability. The frustration of having to deal with Jim, of being put in the position of saving her job, of having her body so close to mine and not being able to do something about it…
Melina just smiles and brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. Every gesture seems so intimate now, so focused at me, for me—or maybe it always did. I try not to think about her body, or how she smells, or how breathless her voice sounded when I was inside her, but the thoughts just turn into a low vibration in my body, a tension building up.
“Um. You did tell me to drop in on Monday, remember? To go over the new marketing plan with you? I mean, that’s what you said Friday night…before we…”
“Yeah,” I say, glancing back at my laptop, trying to look formal and work-oriented. “Yeah, of course.”
Christ she’s beautiful. Even moreso now that I know how her body feels beneath my hands, now that I’ve explored her naked skin. The animal in me wants to forget the world, forget the work, and just take her right here again. It’s hard to think about anything else, but the meeting I just got out of reminds me that we’ve got to focus on more important things right now.
“I heard you had a meeting with Jim?” she asks, her gaze searching, almost as if she’s reading my mind.
I shrug and wave it away.
“It was nothing,” I say, smiling at her. “You know Jim; PowerPoints and pressure.”
She laughs but it sounds forced.
“Anyway,” I say, steering the conversation firmly into safe-for-work territory, “let’s get down to business.”
Somehow, we manage to spend the rest of the morning actually talking about strategy, about roadmaps and goals. We don’t mention what happened between us, and after an hour it’s like we’ve formed some unspoken understanding. That’s the thing about Melina: half the things we expressed to each other we just understood, almost telepathically. There was never any need to talk about the ugly stuff—we just got it. I never had that with anyone but her.
We look over her previous posts, study competitive brands and what they’re doing with their social media outreach, and talk about how we can frame Divinity Kombucha as a unique product somebody would actually pay money for. At least once—even if they regret it. We talk about how to sell the lifestyle and the Divinity brand, not just the drink itself.
She sits next to me at the desk, staring at the same laptop screen, and the brush of her bare knee against my pants, the twist of her hair so close to my face, the occasional meeting of our eyes sets a riot going in my chest. It takes every ounce of self-discipline and restraint to keep my hands off her, my imagination like a wild horse, running away with all the possibilities of our bodies being so close.
I wonder if she’s thinking about me the same way—if what we did is playing back in her mind over and over, if there’s a part of her that desperately wants it to happen again.
Only the work, the possibility of her getting fired, the baggage of all our families, of a life-long friendship being ruined, and of my own hang-ups about getting involved with anyone for longer than a few weeks (and knowing I can’t treat Melina like she’s just another fling, even if that’s the only kind of relationship I’m capable of)—only all of that combined can bring the fire inside to a bearable, manageable level.
The day passes almost too fast, most of it spent creating moodboards and brainstorming ideas, both of us splitting off for a while to take lunch alone, then coming back together to build up our master plan.
By three in the afternoon most of the other employees are already leaving, and we’ve both put in enough hours to call time. Melina slings her purse over her shoulder, her camera around her neck, and stands up to leave.
“So,” I say, looking at my notes, “we’ve got the daily posts, we’ll build up a bunch of images we can use to jump onto any relevant hashtag trends—you got the list, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Melina says, looking at her own notes.
“Meanwhile I’ll reach out to these influencers and see about photo shoots, and you can take some pictures of the office and co-workers for the brand page. Looks good enough for now.”
“Don’t quote me on this, but I think our plan coul
d actually work,” she says.
“Absolutely. We just need to get out there and get the content.”
Suddenly I stand up and start pacing, feeling frustrated—and not entirely because of Melina.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
“It’s not enough,” I answer, spinning on my heels. “It’s too conventional, too typical. We need something that’ll get us not just competing in the market, but standing out.”
“Okay. Like a hook?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Something that’ll really stick with people. Something…viral.”
Melina sighs and leans back on her chair, stretching her arms above her head. I try not to get distracted by the lines of her body, by those breasts swelling beneath her shirt…
“I got nothin’. The only thing that stands out about this drink is how nauseating it is,” she says, nonchalantly. “Maybe we could partner with Pepto-Bismol.”
I stop my pacing and stare at her.
“That’s it!”
“What? That was a joke.”
“Not that—the nauseating part. Maybe we should just embrace the fact that the drink tastes horrible.”
Melina looks at me sideways, a bemused smile.
“Um…how would that work?” she says. “Apart from making us a laughingstock?”
“Think about it,” I say, leaning back on the desk and clasping my hands together in focus. “Every other drink out there tries to convince you of how great it tastes—the world is full of great-tasting drinks, apparently. If we’re the one product that flat-out tells people it tastes bad, we’d get attention immediately, raise curiosity.”
“No such thing as bad publicity?” Melina ventures.
“Exactly. People will try it just to say they did.”