“Or maybe you’re too old to understand the irony?—”
“Careful.”
It comes out sharper than I intend. Or maybe exactly as sharp as I intend. Greg stops and recalibrates, a stroke of worry crossing his features as we approach the subject of my age.
“I’m just saying…” His tone shifts to something smoother, more patronizing, “…younger consumers understand nuance. They appreciate subversion. Perhaps it’ll take a younger designer to connect to their peers and encourage them to buy. Your generation isn’t purchasing as much. Hailey would whip out the credit card to purchase a twelve-hundred-dollar Dior.”
“Technically thatismy generation buying, seeing as Hailey is twenty-two and the only credit card with a limit high enough to finance her expensive clothing taste is Daddy’s…or yours, perhaps. Or is she calling you ‘Daddy’ yet?”
“Who I’m in a relationship with is none of your business.”
“Relationship? Oh, please. You’re plowing through twenty-somethings like Viagra is never going out of stock.”
“Celeste—”
“What?” I snap, my temper barely under control. The microaggressions are crawling under my skin like fire ants and it’s taking everything in me not to leap out of my chair and snatch his stupid Adam’s apple that bounces up and down every time he swallows his words. I know Greg wants to unleash his temper too, but he’s not a sociopath. At times I see the guilt behind his eyes for how he ended our marriage. He permanently lives in that damn doghouse he built two years ago.
“We have to stop letting our incompatibility as a couple interrupt our business partnership. We both want the same things.”
The shock renders me immobile for a moment.We want the same things?No, that can’t be right. Greg wants women with taut skin, full breasts, flat stomachs, and thick hair that has a fighting chance of recovering from all the chemical beautytreatments. He wants something I can’t give him: the past. The only way he wants me is frozen, ten years ago, the time he still saw me as a woman he desired, and not simply the lynchpin of his company. As for me?
What do I want?
Maybe to stop being so bitter.
To stop focusing on what’s behind me and have hope that the best parts of my life are yet to come.
Or maybe I should do what Elphaba did and just embrace the dark side—broom and all. I could play the jilted, bitter ex and haunt this office with my snarky comebacks and not-so-subtle lip-syncing of Sabrina Carpenter songs. Greg is indeed the textbook definition of a manchild.
“Look,” he says, removing my sticky notes from one page in particular. The shift dress with white lace. Admittedly, my favorite of what Hailey created. “This is your taste and style. It’s pretty, right?”
Reluctantly, I nod. “It has potential.”
“Good. Then here”—he leans back in his seat and crosses his arms, gaze locked on mine—“I’m listening. How do we market this?”
I take one more deep breath, and this one feels less strained. “Air…light…simplicity…” I murmur mostly to myself, playing around with how the words feel on my tongue.
“What?”
I pull the folder closer to my side of the desk, reexamining the illustration I so quickly dismissed this morning. Fueled with fresh perspective, I examine the dress as my old friend—inspiration—who has evaded me for weeks now, decides to enter the meeting. “I like the neckline as is. Let’s pull out the midsection and re-layer this lace around the rib area so it’s sheer. I want to see two versions. Hemmed above the knee and then one to the ankles with a high slit, filled by the lace.”
Greg releases a small hum of agreement and I steal a glance in his direction, catching the look of pride on his face. “I like that.”
I reflect on my own disastrous sketch that’s going nowhere fast. All the sharp lines look rigid and angry. I want light, soft, curves, flow. I want the models to be able to…
“Breathe,” I say. “That’s the marketing angle. The tension in the world is suffocating right now. I want this line to feel like relief after taking a deep breath. That’s our inspiration.”
Greg nods. He understands my creative process, and so to him, this isn’t nonsense. It’s gold. “Genius.”
“Tell Hailey to sit with my notes. She has a week to deliver me new sketches?—”
“A week?” he balks.
I narrow my eyes. “Three days if she works better under pressure.”
“A week it is,” he grunts, his gaze grazing the ceiling on its way back down. It was a nice moment of reprieve but our usual demeanors of casual resentment always quickly return. “Can I ask you an honest question?”
“Sure.”
