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With that settled, feeling a bit more confident about my clothing plans, I focus instead on Love, Lilly and how to capitalise on the fact that the brand has become Insta famous (it’s a thing!). In the last few days, I have been getting flooded with messages, comments, and DMs from people wanting to know how they can get their hands on my treats. With this amount of engagement, I am trying to turn my popularity into a way to make money. I know I need the help of someone who is an expert in marketing, and my mind goes straight to Oliver, though if I’m honest, my mind doesn’t often stray away from him these days. I send him a quick text asking him the best way to make money from being Instagram famous. In typical Oliver fashion, he replies it is not something he can detail over text, so we lock in a lunch date tomorrow to discuss potential strategies. With this in place, I sigh to myself, knowing that all this time I am spending with Oliver is not helping me check off number four on my to-do list but also understanding this is a necessary step to get numbers one and two done. What a conundrum I have made for myself.
With this step sorted, I continue to scroll through my most recent posts, and I stop on a picture I posted of me, Amy, and Oliver at my Love, Lilly stall, all smiling, surrounded by sugary goodness. Oliver has his arm around me, and I am resting my head on his chest, beaming so much it almost hurts to look at me. This post generated quite a lot of attention, with many people wanting to know who the “hottie” in the photo is and how long we have been together. I have not tagged Oliver in the post, so I am hoping he hasn’t seen these messages, knowing that Emma would not be pleased. So far, he hasn’t asked me to take it down, so I am assuming he hasn’t seen it yet. After looking at the photo again, I can say we make such a great-looking couple. I gratefully get distracted when the girls message me back with thoughts on my date night attire, filled with make-up and hair suggestions. I sigh and pick up the phone to do a group call, knowing they won’t leave me alone until they have an approved head-to-toe look ready for me to go on Friday.
*****
Now that I have a plan to meet Oliver for lunch, my painful morning moves at a snail’s pace. Each minute feels like an hour, each hour like a day, and so on, until finally I can put the out-of-office message on my phone for the sixty minutes I get allocated for lunch and skip out of there. Oliver is sitting and waiting for me at a local café, and I have to stop myself short to catch my breath. Both from the skipping and from the sight of him. He is in what I would term business casual, a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm—who knew forearms could be so sexy?—and a pair of grey pants. Simple, but on Oliver, it all looks delicious.
I approach him with caution, attempting not to throw myself at him, and go to sit down across from him, trying to act like a normal human being. As it happens, it would seem that I am not one of those, and in the process of Oliver leaning over to kiss me hello and my attempting to sit down—which let’s face it, shouldn’t be so hard—I headbutt Oliver and end up missing the chair, landing on the floor. Hard.
“Lilly!” Oliver looks down at me with concern, rubbing the spot on his head where I headbutted him. “Are you OK?”
Why am I this way? I think as I pick myself up from the floor, cheeks and tail bone burning. Everyone is staring at us, and I sink into my seat, head in my hands.
“Lilly?” Oliver says in a soft voice. “Are you hurt?”
I shake my head, still unable to look up at him, and whisper, “Any chance you didn’t see that?”
Oliver snorts with laughter, trying to cover the sound with a cough.
“See what?” he asks, playing along.
I allow myself a tiny, rueful smile, looking at him and saying, “Oh, nothing much. Just another impressive display of my coordination.”
“You are a very graceful faller.”
“Why thank you, I’ve had years of practice,” I tell him, my mortification fading as we banter back and forth.
“Are you sure you are OK?” Oliver asks one more time, concern still written on his face.
Even though I am almost certain my tail bone is broken and I may never sit without pain again, I give him a dismissive nod.
“Yes, yes, fine. Let’s just order, shall we?”
I distract myself with the menu, talking through what I want to eat under my breath. “Focaccia or a sandwich? Focaccia or a sandwich?”
I glance up and see Oliver watching me with a soft look in his eyes. “Want to get both?”
I give him a wide smile and an eager nod. I hate having to choose between two good options; both is always best.
Once we have ordered, I broach the subject of Dale, to get a sense of how Oliver feels about our interaction at the Market Place.
“So your friend Dale seems nice.”
Oliver’s cheeks flush a bit as his gaze darts around the room, refusing to make contact with mine. “Does he?”
At his reply, I let out a small laugh. “Well, he’s your friend. Shouldn’t you think he’s nice?”
At this, his big brown eyes snap to mine, and he pays me close attention. “Why the sudden interest? Would you like to get to know him better?”
Now with the tables turned on me, I backtrack out of this conversation by taking the food that has just arrived.
“Never mind, just making conversation,” I tell him around a mouthful of toasted sandwich goodness.
Oliver also takes his food and the path out of this awkwardness, and while we eat our shared lunch, he outlines the best strategies for profiting from Instagram and general social media popularity.
“You need to get sponsorship deals, where you either get paid to post an advertisement, which is ideal. That is a pay-per-ad deal. Or you could post particular items as an influencer ad and offer a discount code. Any time one of your followers uses that code to purchase said item, you get a percentage of that purchase.”
I look at Oliver as he pulls out a detailed synopsis of all the research he has done on this, and I think to myself, not for the first or hundredth time, that Emma is the luckiest woman alive.
