While I might possibly want to kill at least one of them at any given point in time, I couldn’t ask for a better team around me. I often reflected on the fact that we were like a luxury chocolate selection box. We each brought something different to the party and there was something for everyone.
This was another huge key to our success, that nobody else had managed to effectively replicate. We walked into a room, and one, I defied anyone not to be impressed; we were good-looking, smart, wealthy, and confident as fuck. A winning combination. Two, between the four of us, we’d charm the pants off whomever was there—male or female. Basically, we couldn’t lose. Well, not so far, anyway.
As we left Raine’s office and headed to the sixth-floor boardroom, James, his assistant, approached us looking a little flustered.
“I’ve settled the guests into the waiting area with coffees, but I thought I should warn you that it’s not who we were expecting. I mean, they’re from Beyner, but there has been a huge crisis with one of their biggest toys, so the international marketing guys who were supposed to be here today have stayed in Zurich. They’ve sent the VP and Senior VP of Marketing for the Americas, instead.”
Great. Just what we fucking needed. The first rule of Pitch Club, of course, was that you didn’t talk about Pitch Club. So the first real rule was only to pitch directly to the people who would be making the final decision. There was no point in spending time courting a bunch of flunkies who would have zero impact on the outcome at the end of the day. The next rule was to research whomever you were pitching to a point just shy of stalking. In the past we had literally hired private detectives to glean information about our victims future clients.
We never walked into a room blind. Now we were armed to the teeth with everything we needed to know—and plenty we didn’t—about Thomas Treichler and Anton Lagman, and nothing at all about Mary Sue and Patty, or whomever the fuck they’d sent in their stead. Peachy. Just fucking peachy. I’d known waking up to The Dream was a bad omen, and now it was confirmed.
“Did you only just find out about the switch? They didn’t let us know?” That kind of lack of consideration didn’t bode well either.
“I was away from my desk looking after…an issue for Raine. When I got back I got pulled straight into urgently helping with the final set-up of the room. I see now that there is a voicemail waiting for me, but I haven’t had a chance to check it. They said their PA called, to let us know of the switch, so I’m guessing that’s what that message is.” Fuck.
The problem was that given that they had already arrived, it was too late to pull out, much as we would have liked to do exactly that. We couldn’t though—it was rude even by our standards—and despite doing nothing to dispel our ‘bad boys of advertising’ rep, we didn’t want to cross the fine line into uncooperative diva territory.
“Names?” I snapped.
“Martin Lorde and Melissa Reid.”
“Martin and Melissa, how very fucking cute.” If I had been in a bad mood before, it was pitch black now. No pun intended.
Raine rolled his eyes before speaking. “Nothing we can do about it now, except go in there and make this presentation our bitch, and hope the dead wood they’ve sent knows good creative work from a hole in their butt. Let’s also hope they have the power to influence the big daddies in Switzerland at the end of all this. Otherwise we might as well open the windows and throw a ton of burning one-hundred-dollar bills out of them, for all the time and money we’ve wasted on a dead end pitch.” The rest of us nodded tersely, straightened ourselves one last time, and strode confidently for the elevator. We were going to nail it to the wall regardless of the less-than-ideal circumstances—it was what we did.
Mel
Present
“Did you find it?” Martin asked as I climbed into the car.
“Did I…?” For a moment, I had no idea what he was referring to.
“Your iPad.”
Why was he looking at me as though I had lost my mind? He wasn’t wrong.
“Oh yes, of course.” I patted my purse conspiratorially, intimating it was safe and sound inside. Just another lie to add to the mounting pile. It wasn’t even a thing.
“When I went back up to the boardroom, they’d already started to strike it, and weren’t quite sure where it was. I had to wait for one of the assistants to locate it for me, which took longer than anticipated.” Martin looked somewhat skeptical, but nodded regardless. I just hoped I didn’t reek of Beck, and sex; and look like I’d been dragged backward through a hay bale.
I believed this whole situation was what was referred to by experts as a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I mean, if there was a Richter type scale to measure fuck ups, this would be off the scale, and the UN and G8 countries would be sending aid. I wished someone would send help. God knows I needed it.
Failing that, a teleporting device that would immediately whisk me away to paradise without a trace, or a time machine that would erase the last two and a half hours of my life would also work. As if the scene that had unfolded back at BR&ND HQ hadn’t been bad enough, I was then stuck in a Town Car with my boss, as my brain tried to reassemble the shattered pieces of my already fragile sanity.
How the fuck could this be possible? Of all the advertising agencies in all of the country, why did he have to own and run one of the two my international bosses had chosen to shortlist as their new creative lead? What were the chances? I was no statistician, but I would have guessed somewhere between “slim,” and “only if your life is totally fucked.”
Why hadn’t I realized he was one of the partners? I had read the briefing documents Faye had provided me with several times. Beck, Raine, Nate, Dillon — BR&ND. Beck, not Tyler, or Ty. Beck was new. Or was it? I hadn’t seen him for more than a decade—how would I know what was new and what was old? Tyler-fucking-Beckett. Not so much a blast from the past, as a devastating tsunami from the annals of time.
So often over the years I’d thought to look him up and get in touch to let him know what had happened to me, to… us. But then I’d been consumed with doubt. What if he hated me, and didn’t want to speak to me? What if I had just been some insignificant pre-Yale, puppy love blip in his life that he would rather forget? Or worse, had already forgotten? I honestly didn’t think I could have coped if that was the case. On top of everything I’d been through, the rejection would have been an extra slap in the face I couldn’t have coped with.
Then I’d think that surely if he’d wanted to find me all these years, he could have or would have. It wasn’t not hard to hire a private detective. Especially since he was apparently richer than God these days, so money wouldn’t have been an issue. I might have changed my name, and kept my social media profiles discreet, but other than that, I had hardly been hiding. I would tell myself with every passing day that he had moved on. Of course he had. He wouldn’t want a ghost from his past crawling out of the woodwork to haunt him. The more time passed, the easier it was to believe the narrative I spun.
From the look on his face when he’d stepped off the elevator and seen me—and his demeanor for the rest of the conversation in the hall—it was safe to assume he hadn’t forgotten me. Whether he hated me or not was harder to discern. He had visibly blanched, the color draining from his skin, and his hackles were up—despite the cut of his flawlessly fitted designer dress shirt, I could see the tension bunched around his shoulders and neck.