Raine (Gods of the Fifth Floor #2) - M.V. Ellis Page 0,26

speaking. “...creative skills. C’mon.” I beckoned her to my office. “Don’t look at me like that. I won’t bite. Unless you want me to, of course. I’m joking. Totally joking.” In hindsight, it was a poorly joke to make with someone as humorless as she obviously was. “Jesus. I don’t know what you’ve heard or read about me, or whatever, but I’ll leave the door open if that makes you feel any better? Best behavior, I promise.

“I haven’t read anything. I hesitated because I couldn’t imagine you’d need me for anything, that’s all.”

“Well you should give yourself more credit, some of the stuff you jotted in your doodles sparked some ideas in me. I wanted to run what I’m thinking past you.”

“Me?” She actually pointed at herself, I guessed in case I didn’t know who she was referring to.

“Well there’s no other fucker here, so yes, you.” I had the distinct impression that she’d have been more trusting and willing if I was some weird guy down an alleyway asking her to get into his van to see his puppies. “You know what? Forget it. Stay there.”

I couldn’t believe I was doing what I appeared to be doing, but I retreated to my office and grabbed the papers, before heading back out of the door, and moving toward her desk. “Mountain to Mohammed, and all that. Here.” I handed her back her stack of doodles—I’d already taken some quick photos of them on my phone, anyway, so it wasn’t like I needed them anymore.

“Sit.” I pointed to her chair. She sat.

“You see what I’ve circled?”

She nodded slowly, frowning heavily, as she looked at the words.

“Talk to me about them.”

“Love yourself. Live your way?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, and raised an eyebrow, indicating that she should continue.

“What do you want to know?”

“What they mean to you. Why you wrote them.”

“I don’t understand, why...”

“Because this campaign is aimed ninety-nine percent at women, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not one. I don’t think it is any coincidence that the last time we nailed this brief, the best work came from the only female team in the whole agency. But now they’re gone, and we don’t have time to recruit anyone else to work on this, so it is what it is. I see these words and I get a sense of their importance, but I can’t define it in the way a woman would.”

It was absurd really.

The number of women I’d been over and under, I should have been an expert in what made them tick, but the fact was that, beyond what I needed to know to get one on my dick, get them off, then get them off, I actually didn’t know much about women. Not really. Nothing like the way I knew dudes, and not just from my own experience of being one, but from all the time I spent with other guys. Even with dudes who weren’t my people, I at least had some kind of sense of what made them tick in some way, even if I thought it was weird bullshit.

“I need to hear it from the horse’s mouth, and I can develop concepts from there. So, think of yourself as a consumer research group of one. Rent-a-vagina, as it were.”

“What?” Jesus, she looked so horrified it was almost comical. I kind of hadn’t thought the phrase through before I’d said it, but I also didn’t expect anyone around me to be so precious. It was advertising, for fuck’s sakes. Unless we were with clients, we let it all hang out. Even more so when it was just the other guys and me, then nothing was off limits.

“Nothing. Just explain.”

“Umm... well it was a doodle, so I didn’t put too much thought into it, but the basic idea was that sports campaigns specifically, but advertising in general, tend to put out this idealized and totally unrealistic image of women. I mean, perfect women in their perfectly fitting, designer yoga pants contorted into insane positions like human pretzels, or crazily fit women scaling mountains or running marathons before heading home to their newborn twins and managing their own NGOs, or super-strong women killing it like the Williams sisters.

“That’s like 0.0001% of the population. The rest of us are just trying to figure out if we can get away with not brushing our hair that day, and are working out in old t-shirts that have been relegated to the gym pile because there’s something wrong with them. The t-shirts,