Page 51 of Embracing Love

She felt her eyes start to well up.

For goodness sake get your act together. You can’t break down now.

Three deep breaths.

She took them.

Slowly.

But time was running out.

Nadine’s spiel would soon be over and she had to get up there and hold that level of attention.

She couldn’t. Not in her dowdy outfit, looking like this. She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear under the table.

“And with the continuing expansion of our Paris office, it made sense to have the campaign move over so that both Flight Europe and our Paris agency could work together to bring that same cohesive marketing message that Flight wanted to deliver on. Now, I’m going to hand you over to our marketing maestro in Europe, Tanya Braun.”

Tanya absorbed the notes for the slides with one snap of her photographic memory. She got up and thanked Nadine who had left her in a good position to take over.

Tanya switched to her slideshow and began to talk. The words came slowly, but they came. She walked around a little and talked about the designs, then showed the audience the original ad that Nadine had created. The words began to flow more easily. The more she spoke, the more the words came to her.

When she felt she had started to get into the zone, she stood at the center of the floor, directly in front of the three head honchos: Michael, Russell and Gabriel and nodded to acknowledge them. She began to talk about how they had settled on changing the design at Gabriel’s recommendation based on a different type of running shoe which outsold all the others in Europe.

It was starting to come back. She didn’t need her notes and this time she addressed the audience, growing more confident by reading the reaction on their faces.

She had them. She continued, everything coming back to her like one continuously playing movie.

Smooth, scripted and interesting.

She knew what she was talking about, didn’t need any cues, could refer to each and every slide and quote numbers, figures, style layouts, creatives.

Settling in more she moved effortlessly and easily through the slides until she was almost three quarters of the way through.

And then she saw that the order of her slideshow had changed. This was where she’d made the changes.

Godammit.

The re-order threw her briefly and she’d gone ahead of herself. She carried on talking, and clicked the mouse, moving back a slide. Talked about that one.

She took a question from the floor.

Answered it easily.

Took another question.

Moved the slide forward, talked some more. Except it was a different slide. She glossed over it, carried on talking, ignoring the sweat she felt damping her underarms, swallowed again, to ease her dry mouth.

Please let this be over now.

What time was it anyway?

She decided to forget the order and just talk about the slides as they appeared.

“What’s that?” Someone asked, and a low murmur rippled through the crowd. She turned to see her slideshow had ended and she’d accidentally switched to her social media page.

She hadn’t closed the freaking thing down.

You have got to be kidding me.

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