Page 37 of Falling for Hailey

“Great, anyway, you and my brother are both all torn up about how complicated your love life is. You should just date each other, forget about the drama people in your lives,” she said cheerfully. I was thrown for a loop by that suggestion, even though I knew she was being playful and not really serious. If she knew the truth, I’d bet she wouldn’t be smiling so much.

“You would be okay with that?” I asked dubiously, careful not to seem serious about it.

“Yeah, why not? Always wanted a sister and he’s probably going to end up with some woman that speaks six different languages and invented a climate friendly way to make cheese or something.”

“Isn’t cheese made with mold? That’s pretty natural already. What would climate friendly cheese be like?” I asked.

“Yeah, I don’t know, I was just guessing what kind of stuck-up genius person he’d even propose to. Do you know we have never even met one of his girlfriends at a family dinner? I saw a couple of them just in passing when he brought them in to the diner to say hi or whatever, but nobody stuck around very long. I always tease him that he sends women running for the hills because he’s married to REM. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’ll just marry a VP from his company and they can raise their babies in the boardroom.” She laughed.

I was just flat out staring at her at that point. I didn’t even bother pretending to watch the movie.

“Seriously though, you’re like my two favorite people, Hay. Why wouldn’t I be on board? As long as I didn’t have to hear about the gory details.”

I shrugged and drained my wine glass. Then I tried to appear fascinated with the movie when really my mind was elsewhere. Like on the fact that Maria would be okay with Rick and me being a couple. That was one problem solved. That just left the issues with work and school—the fact that Maria might be fine if I dated her brother, but the administration at Berkley wouldn’t accept a romantic liaison between a professor and his students, nor would the HR guidelines at Rick Esperanza Marketing permit staff of different managerial levels to date. It was a policy designed to reduce quid pro quo harassment or work-related threats being made in a personal relationship supervisor and employee. So that didn’t exactly leave a loophole for a bottom-rung intern to be with the founder and CEO.

There were too many problems. It reallywascomplicated, no matter what Maria wanted me to believe. It was anything but simple and straightforward in this situation, and some things were better left unsaid. Like the fact that I was falling for my boss, and I was, cliché or not, definitely hot for teacher.

CHAPTER26

RICK

Whoever named it the walk of shame didn’t have to sit on a project update with someone they slept with. Maybe it should’ve been called the meeting of shame. Because I had sat at my desk trying to think up a plausible excuse to join the creative team’s progress recap session via video call instead of in person. When the conference room was on the same damn floor as my office, there was no viable reason why I couldn’t walk down the hall. It wasn’t like I had forgotten to wear pants or had unexpectedly suffered temporary paralysis that didn’t require medical care but prevented me from attending the session in person. If I could consign Hailey to a tiny square, one of many on my monitor, then I could focus on the content of the meeting and not let myself be distracted by her presence. I wouldn’t be able to smell her shampoo or lose my damn mind if she bit her lip or so much as doodled on a notepad.

I had to pull myself together. I was a grown ass man pushing forty years old, a CEO, a titan of West Coast marketing. I was not going to hide in my office to avoid seeing an intern I had hooked up with—which made the entire affair sound cheap and meaningless and all about instant gratification when nothing was further from the truth. If anything, it had meant too much, andshestill meant too much to me. In order to uphold a professional demeanor, I found it easier to simply avoid her. Now, when faced with seeing her in a room full of other professionals there to report on a crucial business project, I felt an acute sense of dread.

Anything seemed possible. I might go to her and take her hands, ask how she’d been and say that I’d missed her. Seeing her in class had been torment enough, my eyes drawn to her repeatedly despite my best efforts to seem unmoved. In the conference room where the creative team would present their preliminary results from the teaser campaign and soft launch, I had to attend and weigh in, make suggestions. There wasn’t a VP I could delegate this to, and it would be embarrassing to attempt to pawn the task off on someone else as if I didn’t care about this important new client’s account.

When I entered, they were setting up a projector and arranging charts on easels to make their presentation. Here I was unconcerned about their last-minute scrambling to perfect each detail. I was just stressed out about getting caught breathing heavily over the intern in the room. I opened a bottle of water and took a drink. Then Hailey adjusted a chart that was crooked, took a step back and dropped the ink pen she was holding. The next thing I knew, she knelt to retrieve it right by my chair. She looked so damn good, delectable in somber navy blue and like red-lipped sin right there on her knees. I looked the other way and asked Martin how the timeline looked for the rebranding rollout. He took this as a cue to begin and gestured for everyone to be seated. They fluttered to their seats swiftly and watched the screen with folded hands as if they were seeing the project for the first time, all rapt attention and no one playing with their phones or reaching for a soda.

Martin outlined the major tenets of the rebrand and pointed out the specific alterations the team developed in the packaging and ad lines. He played the teaser campaign ads including the five-second version used on TikTok featuring a song I recognized but couldn’t identify. When I asked what it was, Carlos chimed in that it was a snippet that trended on the app about three months ago and we got rights to use it.

“It was the kid’s idea,” Carlos said with a wry nod in Hailey’s direction. She looked up, lifted her chin and nodded to him.

“That sound matched up with the vibe of the rebrand better than the original track we had chosen. Its recent popularity made it perfect because it’s so recognizable right now. It gets the user’s attention right away and we’ve had strong interactions with the teaser on TikTok,” she said.

Martin switched the slide, and Crystal went to one of the charts to explain the demographic engagement on the teaser campaign. When she was finished, Rob took his turn with the news that putting the ad on the bus stops hadn’t been very successful.

“They tried to tell me it was old school, but I just thought it has been such a tried-and-true option for us to get a specific image in the eyeballs of consumers. Fact is, the people checking out the mobile launch site and the new app weren’t indicating that they learned about the rebranding from in person signage at all. Print advertising in the city magazine and newspaper, although they were a small part of the budget overall, didn’t give us much in the way of ROI,” he said a little sheepishly.

“Maybe that’s our problem, Rob, we want to stick with what works. We learn from the data and we—” I said.

“Pivot?” he said, and we laughed.

“Did we just laugh at a joke older than the rest of this team?” I shook my head.

“No, I remember it,” Martin said. “I just didn’t laugh.” We chuckled again and he joined in.

“Our best ROI has been through Instagram ads and influencer product placement so far. It’s the first project I’ve worked on that incorporated an influencer sponsorship, but once that was in place, our views went way up,” Martin said, “we set up one on CleanTok and another with a lifestyle influencer. Both of those have been giving us impressive click throughs.”

“Okay,” I said, “we’ll call that a new tool in our arsenal.”

“Toolbox,” Crystal said, “unless you’re considering using weapons.”

“Sorry, guess I had a senior moment and forgot the word,” I said sarcastically, “how did you select the creators to approach?”

“I’ll turn this question over to Hailey,” Martin said.

“I used your class as my focus group,” she said with a grin. “I researched the CleanTok and GenZ lifestyle creators with the top followings. I chose three names from each list, starting with the fourth most popular because I didn’t want to splash out on the budget and try to get the number one or two person which could take forever in negotiations. I watched their content, ranked them based on my opinion of how their content fit with the rebranding and then did a three-question survey on our class discussion board. That way I knew name recognition and interest levels. Maria sent the same survey to some people as well, so it wasn’t just a sample of university grad students.”

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