Raine (Gods of the Fifth Floor #2) - M.V. Ellis Page 0,31
to fix this shit.”
“I get it, but we’re equal partners in this, and we agreed when we started that for major decisions, we need some semblance of a consensus.”
“Yeah, well, we all know that the reality is that some of us are more equal than others in this partnership.” We all looked at Dillon.
“What’s eating Prince Harry over there?” I nodded toward him.
“I have no idea.” Beck shrugged. “Dill. Anything you want to share with us? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You know me. I’m all good ninety-nine percent of the time, and in that one percent, sometimes shit just gets to me. Today is one of those times. I get that he’s the creative genius, and we have to put up with him spitting the dummy out every now and again, but occasionally, when he’s throwing his toys out of the pram like this, I get the urge to do the same, that’s all. Why is he the only one allowed to have tantrums, while the rest of us have to put our big-boy trousers on and suck it the fuck up with a stiff upper lip?”
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand half of what you just said, but I get the general idea.”
Beck turned back to me. “Can you come to the party just a little, and see things from our point of view?”
I folded my arms, and set my jaw tight. “Which is what?” I gritted the words out as though they were painful.
“Which is that the no female PAs thing is in place for a reason, and now not only are you talking about keeping this temp, but also buddying up with her as pretty much a creative team. You remember the reason we’re in this mess is you getting too close to a pair of female creatives, right?”
“I’m aware of how we got here, but while we’re adulting like pros, let’s get our facts straight, shall we? We’re here because I got close to a female creative who turned out to be bat-shit crazy, and probably has daddy issues.”
“That’s semantics of the worst kind.” Nate was back in the game, having seemingly put himself into a self-imposed timeout to keep from knocking my head from my shoulders.
“How do you figure that? Last I knew, I wasn’t responsible for other people’s crazy.”
“That’s true enough. You’re not. But you are responsible for where you stick your dick, and if you’d chosen not to stick it in this particular crazy—which by rights, should have been off limits for a number of reasons—we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
“Semantics.”
“Nice try, but no. So, working from the same principle. What part of you buddying up with a PA who you’ve catapulted into a high-pressured situation, working long hours, and making sweet creative work together, isn’t a steaming pile of doodoo of an idea?”
“The part where she’s a woman. We need a female perspective to nail this brief, and having lost the aforementioned crazy female, we don’t have any in the Creative Department.”
“We don’t. But we have women in the agency. In case you haven’t noticed. In fact, some would say we have a slight over-representation of the fairer sex. And if that’s not enough, or good enough, we can always get the strategists to hastily organize some focus groups to run our ideas by. You know that before any idea goes live, the client is going to test the fuck out of it anyway. That’s what’s gotten us in this mess in the first place. If they hadn’t jerked so much time up the wall testing shit, our ads would have been in the market by now and Free PE would have egg on their face, not the other way around.”
“I’m not talking about just any old rent-a-pussy.” I smiled to myself at my adaptation of the phrase that sent Noa reeling the night before. “And we don’t have time to organize focus groups if we don’t have a solid idea yet.”
“True. Though I hate to ever admit that you’re right, there’s definitely some logic to that last point.”
“I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment.”
“Which is absolutely the spirit in which it was meant.”
“Besides that, though, the main point is that this chick is actually really fucking good. Look.” I pulled out her doodles, and some of the ideas I’d been working on off the back of them, and passed them to Nate
He pored over the them in silence for what seemed like a hundred and fifty years, his face