Page 12 of What Happened Last Night

“The old design sucked,” Stone said. “I agree with that. But the shirts can’t be too expensive.”

“How expensive is too expensive?” I asked.

Stone turned his gaze to me. I was struck again by how like Will, yet unlike Will, he was. As if someone took Will and drew him in harsh lines with a dark marker, adding a beard and a lot of muscles. “Fans are willing to pay, but they don’t like being ripped off,” he said. “When you’re asking over a hundred bucks for a T-shirt, fans get mad. And they stop being fans.”

“Agreed,” Neal said. “It needs to be a good quality shirt, tough enough to last while you sweat through a lot of shows. I have shirts from my twenties that my daughter wears now. So fans are willing to pay up to a point. But it can’t be a money grab.”

Aside from being the band, I realized these guys were our target market. They had been fans first, and they’d been going to shows—and buying the shirts—probably since their teens. “What if they were American made?” I asked them. “Is that a selling point?”

“A definite selling point,” Denver said. “Also, each show could have its own design. It’s a piece of memorabilia.”

“If my girlfriend were here,” Stone added, “she’d bring up women’s shirts. As in, we should have them. They should include large sizes. And they shouldn’t suck.”

I pulled up my Notes app and started typing, adding to what Will had sketched out last night. Before I knew it, we’d spent forty-five minutes on the shirt problem. Will lobbed questions and ideas at me, as fast as his rapid-fire brain could invent them, and I asked my own back. The band chipped in their approvals, denials, and insights about what their fans would and would not buy.

The numbers Will had spitballed into his document sometime late last night were thorough. He had guessed almost to the penny what our profit margin would be. No one would be buying a yacht with T-shirt money, but we could do a lot better than the cash for a few cases of beer, which was what the band had been making off T-Shirt Mike in the early days.

It was only shirts, but I found myself smiling after the band left and we packed up, as if we’d solved an unsolvable calculus equation or invented the theory of relativity. I’d never had a work experience like this one. Fetching coffee for architects and covering a receptionist’s cigarette breaks hadn’t prepared me for what it felt like to bounce ideas like I belonged, to feel something forming. Will had taken every single one of my ideas seriously. So had the band. No one had suggested I fetch anything.

I was flushed with triumph, but as we left RKS, Will was already thinking about something else, as if this was any other workday. For him, it was. It’s easy. The easiest work I’ve ever done, he’d said, because he’d done this a dozen times, a hundred, in the businesses he’d started and run.

He was so freaking smart.

I was going to keep this job if it killed me. Which meant my boss couldn’t know I had a crush on him.

FIVE

Will

Luna threw herself into her work after the visit to RKS. She seemed especially enthusiastic, probably because she’d met the band. Fucking rock stars. I had no illusions that my assistant was batting a thousand because I was a particularly great boss. I was good, but not that good.

The band liked her. Maybe a group of guys who had put up with T-Shirt Mike for a decade weren’t the best judges of character, but it said something. “Don’t fire her and don’t let her quit” was Stone’s assessment in his usual wordy style. My reply was, “Okay.”

That was how Stone and I had a conversation. I couldn’t have said why it was satisfying, but it was. I’d never had a sibling growing up, and Stone wasn’t exactly the emotional type, but emotional wasn’t what I wanted. Stone had stepped up in his brotherly role over the last few months by bringing me along to local concerts, texting me, and getting me drunk a few times. There were only a handful of people he gave his attention to, and I was one of them. I understood his language, and he understood mine.

I met Luna at a food truck near our office a week after the RKS meeting. It was a family-run Greek place, and after asking what she wanted to eat—“I’ll eat anything” was her reply—I ordered for both of us and brought our lunches to a nearby picnic table. Luna arrived a minute later, walking quickly over the grass in her white Keds, which she’d paired with a knee-length skirt and a tank top. It was a warm late-summer day, the sky searing blue, and she looked like any office worker who had escaped for a lunch break, except that her skirt was a vintage pale-pink-and-cream striped print instead of boring work colors. Her smile lit up her face. I made an effort not to look at her knees and her pretty calves as she approached.

“You’ll do anything to avoid the office, won’t you?” she teased as she sat across from me. As she adjusted herself, I caught a glimpse—just the smallest hint—of a lace bra in the dip of the neckline of her sleeveless top. I dropped my gaze to our lunches and slid hers across to her.

“Pretty much,” I said. “This is Portland. When the sun is out, you get outside, because it isn’t going to last.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m starving.” She unwrapped her lunch and took in the fresh-baked pita wrapped around tender meat, seasoned with garlic, lemon, and the best homemade tzatziki sauce I’d ever tasted. “This looks so good.”

We ate for a few minutes, and she got a hazy look in her eyes. I was glad I’d found something she liked. The souvlaki was a win, the meat flavorful and juicy, the pita buttery perfection. When we finished, Luna scrunched her wrapper, took a long swig of her water, and straightened. “Okay,” she said, turning her tone to business. “T-shirts.”

I nodded, swallowing my last bite. She’d seemed to take to this project, so I’d let her run with it. It was one more thing off my plate.

“I went through all of the quotes,” she said. “I have my own opinion, but I have samples back at the office you need to look at.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I went on a site for local designers and put out a call,” she continued. “There are a few that I think would be good. We should do more than one design. More than one color, too. I think it’s too boring just to do the black concert tee. It’s outdated. We don’t have to go crazy with colors, but we can do better than the square black tee straight from the eighties.”

I was paying attention to what she said, but at the same time my mind was dwelling on a question. “How do you know so much about this, Luna?” I asked her. “You don’t have any marketing experience listed on your resume.”

Her cheeks went pink. This woman blushed a lot. “My family owns a B and B in Bend,” she said. “It’s a vacation house that was handed down from my grandparents, and my parents have run it as a B and B all my life. I never worked there like my brothers did, but at every family gathering we talk websites, bookings, brochures, and advertising budgets. I know how to work the booking system and I have access whenever I want. We’ve had shirts and hats printed with the B and B logo on them to sell. So you could say it’s in my blood.”

I crumpled my lunch wrapper. “Why didn’t you work there?”

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