“Come on, babe,” he said. “Road trip to Charleston! Huge meeting with Glitter! What, what!”
I sighed. “I know. Why am I such a drag right now? I am literally the worst.”
But Andrew was gone. It was my fault. I had pushed him away. He had texted me:I’m heading back to school. Can I come say good-bye?
And, bitch that I was, I had said,I don’t think that’s a good idea.
I mean, I was right. If he came to say good-bye, that would lead to a kiss good-bye, which might lead to other things, and any or all or none of it would make the heartbreak last even longer.
To top it off, I had been up all night two nights before with Wagner, stressed and panicked and terrified at how sick he was. Greg and I hadn’t revisited the moving idea, and Wagner’s school started in a couple of weeks. I had him enrolled in both Cape Carolina and Raleigh, but it was time to make a decision.
“You just need wine,” Trey said sunnily. “And maybe a steak.”
Now, that we could agree on. Every decadent bite and sip at Halls Chophouse that evening felt like an antidote as I was eating it.
Five hours later, as it was coming back up, I regretted the choice. Diana might have an immune system of steel, but I did not. Wagner’s virus had hit me hard.
I don’t think that’s a good ideawas running through my mind on a continuous loop. It’s what always happens to me when I get sick like this. I have some phrase or song lyric or something equally annoying stuck in my head.
This is the worst feeling on earth.Well, good. That was at least something new. It kind of puts everything in perspective, having a throw-up virus. What you’re going to say when you meet the client you’re trying to bag, and the fact that you have to be nice to your husband’s fiancée who you incredibly stupidly are trying to get to move to town with you, and whether you have completely ruined your own life all seem less important. Because all you can think about is how disgustingly horrible you feel. That’s it. You just want to survive.
No one wants to be alone when they’re sick like that, and you always want your mom. Always. Even when you know she’sdead, you want her to appear to hold your hair back and put a cold washcloth on your forehead and bring you ginger ale and break the whole pieces of ice into little bits with a spoon.
But she wasn’t going to come back. That was obvious. If she were, surely she would have done it by now. She would have come back to get my sister out of her horrible marriage. She would have come back to help me through my divorce. And, most of all, she would have come back to knock some sense into my head when I started dating Andrew.
Too exhausted to even get back to the bed, I curled up on my hotel room’s bathroom floor, my head on one wadded-up towel, my body on another, alternating between freezing cold and unimaginably hot. And I thought about Andrew. If my mom wasn’t going to come back, I just wanted Andrew. I knew he would rub my back no matter how disgusting I was and go to the store in the pitch-black dark to get me lemon-lime Gatorade.
It surprised me, lying on the floor, trying to catch a few minutes of sleep in between my bouts of sickness, that I felt like I could depend on Andrew. Because when the chips are down as low as they can be, when you’re lying on the bathroom floor in the fetal position, there’s a bare-soul, uncomplicated sort of truth about who it is that you are longing to have there beside you. I knew for sure that I had never wished for Greg like that.
Somewhere in there, I finally fell asleep, and, when my alarm sounded at eight thirty, all that remained was the feeling of exhaustion. But the nausea was gone, the vulnerability was gone, and the certainty that I was strong enough to getover a little summer fling—because that’s all it was—was back.
I showered and dried my hair, applied my makeup, put on a sophisticated-yet-sassy white dress that was just businessy enough, and swallowed away the nerves of a pitch that I couldn’t screw up just because I was tired and sad. I tried to ignore the awareness that Andrew was here, in Charleston, and that it was taking all the strength I had not to go find him.
While everyone else sipped gorgeous Bloody Marys with huge shrimp cocktails in the back garden at 82 Queen, I had ginger ale without a straw to save the turtles. The nausea was gone, but I certainly wasn’t going to risk it. Trey was as effusive as ever, and I thought I was too, but who knew.
Heather Sinclair was saying, “We’re extremely impressed with ClickMarket, but you know you have some competitors out there with lower percentage costs, and that’s a holdup for us.”
I knew what she was trying to do. I saw it all the time, and when I first started my business, sometimes I would cave to that pressure. But now I knew that all that did was end up hurting everyone involved. So I said, “Heather, I’ll be honest with you. You’ve seen our rate sheet. You can come over to ClickMarket and choose a lower percentage bracket. But the influencers you are going to be working with are not going to be those fabulous micro-influencers with rabid followings and gorgeous branding. Creating those brands costs them money, and there is no way they are going to promote Glitter—as much as they all love you—for seven percent when they can promote Neiman Marcus for ten. They won’t do it.”
“But those other affiliate companies don’t offer Neiman Marcus,” Heather said.
Trey smiled at her. “Enough said.”
We all laughed.
“Look,” Heather continued, “I won’t lie to you. Your site is the most user-friendly, and I see the benefits. I really do. But we’re talking three percent of a massive amount of sales. That’s significant.”
I’d had spreadsheets made up of what we predicted Glitter’s sales would be with ClickMarket over our main competitor, but I realized now that they didn’t matter. I prided myself on being excellent at reading people, and my gut told me that all Heather wanted was to feel like she had made a deal, plain and simple. I could give her that.
I did some quick math in my head before I said, “Look, Heather, it’s top secret, but we’re rolling out an ad partner program next month that is going to blow your mind. All the best influencers with the most proven sales records. You’re going to want to be a part of that. I’ll give you a three-month exclusive during which I’ll waive all my commission.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Exclusive as in…?”
I smiled. “Exclusive as in you will be our only client in the ad partner program for three months.”
It was a big move, a huge thing to give her. But I knew it would be worth it. Every blogger in the country would be clamoring for a spot, and other competing companies would line up to sign up for the program once they knew Glitter was our first exclusive customer. It was genius, if I did say so myself.
I glanced at Trey. He looked impressed.
