Page 38 of Love.V2
“Oh, yeah. Big budgets. Fun, but major burnout,” he replied.
“What was the goal there? I mean, we want to get in with fast-food people. You infiltrated their inner circle.” The very weak joke got a soft laugh from around the table.
“Big on humanizing the brand. Social media campaigns to get more reactive to trends, almost snarky. They want to seem like a person, instead of a soulless corporation, you know?”
“Personal,” I murmured, considering. “Maybe that’s it. Robots are soimpersonal. In-human, even. Maybe we play that up. Chassie, you create anime, right?”
Usually quiet, Chassie glanced up, their eyes widening at being addressed directly. They were younger and didn’t have a huge role in creating the campaigns, but I’d insisted on everybody I could get my hands on for this meeting.
“I…dabble.”
“How would you start creating a character if you were beginning a whole new series?”
Down the table, hands poised over keyboards. Noel was already jotting something in her notebook.
“Well, I, um, I would consider the storyline. The hero’s journey. Their characteristics.” Chassie continued, picking up steam as wenodded along. I grabbed my printout of the creative brief and slipped from my chair, picking up a marker on the way.
Our meeting ran over by an hour, but by the end, our board was filled with little cartoons and concepts for Botto, the aspiring chef robot our collective brains had created.
I was chatting with Noel about identifying a color palette when Meery popped in, handing Dylan a drink tray with two coffees.
“This just came for you, Dylan. Tess, we still good to meet at six? I can’t wait to get my hands dirtyyyy,” she sang, wiggling her perfectly manicured fingers.
“Absolutely,” I confirmed, watching Noel rush out, still scribbling in her notebook. Victoria had bolted from the room the second everyone had started closing their laptops.
When the door shut behind Meery, it was just me and Dylan.
I glanced at the tray in his hands. “You have anything for me?” Brainstorming was thirsty work.
“That was incredible.” He sounded a little breathless as he handed over my latte. I popped the top to blow on it, giving me something to look at aside from his eyes as they skimmed across every plane of my face.
“I feel like I just completed a task without putting it on the list to begin with. Will I still be able to check it off?”
“You were going to put ‘be a creative badass’ on our list?”
My face heated. “More like, ‘do something you should have done a long time ago.’”
“Oh, yeah. We’re gonna let you checkthat one off.”
***
“How are you even doing that?” Meery scowled, mashing her fingers into the lump of clay in front of her. To her credit, she didn’t seem to mind the gray mush as it smudged into her long nails and shiny bracelets. She looked sideways at the beginnings of my pinch pot mug like it had wronged her. “You’ve done this before.”
“A little. I took a pottery elective in college.” I’d adored the class, but it had been so different from my usual medium of pencils and paintbrushes, I’d been too scared to sign up for the intermediate course. Every time I walked by a pottery studio, I had to stifle a little voice inside me that said,what if?
It hadn’t taken much thinking on my part to book a seat at an introductory class at a nearby pottery studio, Glazed.
“Well, next time you do an artsy thing, maybe bring someone who won’t embarrass you.” We both looked at the lumpy, uneven pot under her fingers.
I nudged her. “It’s not that bad. Most of the artistic process is failure.”
Meery hadn’t been my first choice in pottery partners, but Jasmine had just recently given birth and Lainey was tied up starting a new job and making goo-goo heart eyes at Sam now that they’d gotten back together. We’d planned to hang out soon, but then our group chat went silent, and I wasn’t sure how to revive it, or if that would be welcome.
While I enjoyed the occasional work lunch with Meery, our interests didn’t always overlap, and I sometimes felt a little bored listening to hergush about the latest celebrity scandal, or whisper about some office drama. But she had been one of the first people to befriend me at Jinx, and had come with me to R3that first time.
I’d thought about inviting Dylan, but that felt like breaking an unspoken rule of the list. We were supposed to be finding out who we were as individuals, not as a couple.
“You’re a trained artist, though. I never even went to college.” Meery sighed, now playing with her clay more than actively molding it. “Just out here living the dream, scraping by with a limited skill set.”
