“Look,” I say, pointing at my screen.
It’s just two lines: “This isn’t working. What’s next?”
“What’s next?” Luke points at my screen. “Your guess is as good as mine, lady.”
He looks at me, a serious expression on his face. “Do you have any interest in running away to Aruba with me?”
I scrunch my nose. “Too hot.”
“Okay, then the coast of France. Or anywhere, really.” He drops his head back, dramatically. “Maybe I just need a different career.”
I’m about to ask him if he’s interested in being a mattress tester but think better of it. Luke would run with that. He’d have way too many jokes.
I let out a breath. “I’ve got to fix things for my client first; then maybe we can get out of here.”
“That’s probably the right way to do things,” he says, looking at me. “River’s a good guy. I can’t leave him hanging.”
“Is he?” I ask, curious. I don’t know all that much about River except that he does an amazing job of putting on pointy ears and playing one of my favorite characters.
Luke nods. “Yeah. Great guy. Good heart.”
I stare at him, unconvinced. “He started this whole PR war,” I say.
“Maybe,” he says, rubbing his chin with his fingers. “But he pushed back on a lot of what I pitched when the blind item came out. The stuff that did go out—he’d always ask me afterward whether it made Bailey look bad. He wanted to make sure he never crossed a line.”
I snort. “You definitely crossed some lines.”
Luke bobs his head side to side. “That’s your opinion.”
I roll my eyes at him. If I think about it, though, every move they made was in response to something that happened first.
I think I forgot that there’s another person—a human with feelings—on the other end of a PR war. I get so laser focused on my side that I forget there’s always more to the story, more nuance to the truth.
“Well, right now both of our clients look stupid. So what should we do?” I ask.
“Short of getting Bailey to fake getting back together? I have no idea,” Luke says.
“At this point, I don’t even think that would work.”
Luke stands up and walks out in front of my desk, pacing back and forth in the small area. It reminds me of old times, when we used to work together. I didn’t have an office back then; we had cubicles next to each other. He’d pace out in front of them when he was brainstorming.
“I feel like everything we’ve done so far has been reactive,” he says after a minute.
“Yeah,” I agree. We’ve been responding to every fire instead of preventing them. The blind item, the reconciliation rumors, the boycott threats, the body language breakdown. Every move we’ve made has been damage control, not strategy.
“We need to change that.”
“I agree. But how?”
“We need the show to be front and center,” he says.
“Yes, but we tried that with the statement, and it backfired,” I say.
He nods. “We didn’t really give them the show, though. We just promised that River and Bailey were committed to it.”
“Right.” I nod. “What if we could get some behind-the-scenes content?”
Luke stops pacing, turning toward me. “That’s a great idea.”
