Page 114 of Hooked
“Yes.”
Ox shook his head slightly. “Whatever you want, man. Just tell me what Saturday you want me to pencil you in.”
“Awesome.”
Tayla turned her monitor around. “There. Are you happy? Can you do the profile pages?”
“The app is not Facebook, Tayla.”
“But it is a social network combined with an online store. Users want a place they can find items they’ve favorited, forums they’re following, and also their profile info and posted pics.”
Rudy threw his head back and groaned.
“Just do it,” Tayla said. “This is directly related to what Kabisa was talking about at dinner last week. You can do it. I’ll even donate your tattoo. Finish this by the end of the month and Ox will do it for free.”
“Hey!” Ox said. “You can’t just—”
“Shhhh.” She waved at him and mouthed,I’ll pay you!“What do you say, boy genius?”
Rudy stared at her through the computer, his eyes intent on the camera. “Fine.” He spun around and picked up the juggling balls again. “Watch this— I just learned it from YouTube last night.”
Tayla watched Rudy attempt to juggle the balls approximately half a dozen times before she made her excuses and shut down the video conference.
When working with Rudy and the other new hire at SOKA, Chevela, Tayla made a point of using video conference instead of texts or phone calls. It was more personal and allowed the office in San Francisco to feel like they were part of her office here in Metlin too.
When Azim and Kabisa had agreed to let her spend three weeks a month in Metlin, she’d been ecstatic. Tayla truly felt like she’d managed to “make the world her bitch” as Ginger so eloquently put it. She threw herself into proving she could be the model employee even from two hundred miles away.
Three months later, Azim had to sit her down and tell her she was stressing everyone out by trying to do too much.
Work and life balance was the key to happiness in any job, but when your office was in San Francisco, your home was in Metlin, and your market was the entire world, it could be difficult to create boundaries. The stress had gotten to her, and had even begun affecting her relationship with Jeremy, which was still finding its feet.
“You need to relax,” Azim said, reassuring her. “We didn’t hire you as a trial. We believed in your vision for your role at SOKA, and we believe it will work. Don’t feel like you constantly have to prove yourself. Take a breath. You’ve done more work in three months than we expected out of you in six.”
She’d taken charge of the social media accounts for the company and leveraged her network to create relationships everyone was really excited about. Two months after they’d launched the app, SOKA had a product go viral. A celebrity had shown up at a music festival, wearing a Kenyan dress she’d bought through SOKA. Fashion bloggers quickly found it, helped along by Tayla racing around the internet the day after the photo had been published, posting links everywhere.
Supplies had sold out almost immediately. The Nairobi office bought every version of the dress they could find. Kabisa had even been invited to a national morning show to talk about the dress phenomenon and the website. Of course the hosts were dazzled by her.
The vendor made more dresses, and they sold out just as fast. It was the trend of the summer. In another month, Tayla guessed Kardashians would be calling her.
In short, it had been a good five months.
Tayla stood. “I’m going to grab lunch for me and Jeremy.”
Ox didn’t look up. “See you.”
“Is Emmie coming back with something for you?”
“Probably. But… she might forget.”
Emmie and Ox were still living together in the apartment over INK. And Tayla technically was their roommate. But for the three weeks a month she was in Metlin, she lived an awful lot of it at Jeremy and Pop’s house.
She zipped outside and unchained the brand-new mint-green cruiser she’d bought at the bike shop a few months ago. It was finally starting to cool down from the sweltering summer heat, and Tayla was enjoying her rides again. She called Tacos Marcianos on the way over, picked up a box of tacos from the take-out window, and put it in her bike basket before she rode back to the comic book shop.
When she walked inside, she heard a low whistle from the back racks.
“Jeremy?”
“Is that my girlfriend bringing me Martian tacos for lunch?”
