“I have so much on the line.” Later I would regret pouring out my worries, but this morning it felt good to have someone to listen. “I have my regular accounts that I maintain. Then there’s your rebranding.”
“Which is going incredible,” Lachlan said, clearly midchew. “I’m smokin’ hot now, so… mission accomplished.”
I pushed a bite of eggs across my plate. “If only it were that easy.” Lachlan was a bit of a wild card. He wanted a more professional image, yet he still had his stubborn limits. “We can’t afford to fail.”
We ate for a full minute in silence, then, “Have you ever failed, Olivia?”
“College. Junior year. I was studying abroad…”
“That’s the only time things didn’t work out for you?” Lachlan sounded strangely unimpressed.
“That semester scarred me for life.” If I closed my eyes, I was right back in Italy. My parents informing me the university had kicked me out. The PR company emailing to rescind their invitation for my paid internship my senior year. I was adrift. Until Celeste had saved me. “Then there was Taylor. Major disaster.”
“Because you broke up?”
I guess my husband could hear the ugly truth. “Over a year ago, Celeste dangled another New York promotion to our team. I was dating Taylor, and we were serious. I thought I was in love.” How pathetic that all seemed now. “After college, I had sworn all fealty and allegiance to my life plan. But Taylor started talking marriage and our future, and I fell for it. No ring and no formal announcement, but we had a date, and we’d made plans.”
“For a wedding?”
“Yes.” How stupid did I feel about that now? I’d even talked to Paisley, my cousin who worked as an event planner, and we’d taken a tour of a few wedding venues and talked ceremony details. “The job opportunity came up, and Taylor told me he had no interest, but he would follow me to New York if I landed it.” I could still see that one night so clearly in my head. It was forever imprinted in my memory. “One evening we had dinner at our favorite restaurant, and I spent the entire meal telling him I’d made contact with a potentially big client. I stupidly laid out my entire PR plan, the one that would’ve secured my promotion.”
“I think I hate this Taylor guy already.”
“The next Monday he had lunch with the company CEO, pitched hermybranding ideas, then won her over. She signed with Flair two days later.”
“You knew this because Taylor told you?”
“I knew this because Celeste announced Taylor’s promotion at a staff meeting.”
Lachlan let out a ragged exhale. “As if staff meetings aren’t bad enough.”
“The worst.” I’d had to stay in the room for the rest of the hour, looking at his satisfied face while a war of shock and confusion waged inside me. “Taylor left for New York after that. I didn’t go with him.”
“Geez, Livvy.”
“Yeah.” Going off-plan? Not for me. It had never, ever served me well. I needed to remember that. “So, yes, I’ve fumbled more than once.”
A plate clanked and a fork followed. I wondered if I’d ruined our little breakfast with my tale of a love gone wrong.
“In gaming you fail forward,” Lachlan finally said.
“No thank you.” That sounded absolutely terrible. “No time for that.”
“But it’s a good thing. The idea is without the fails, you won’t move forward to your destination where the best stuff is—to your real reward. You fail forward, learning how to do it better and better, until you eventually defeat the Big Bad.”
Sometimes I wondered if Lachlan was my Big Bad. “I take it that’s the enemy?”
“If you think of it as your enemy,” he said, “you’ve already lost. The Big Bad is the challenge. And yeah, maybe it’s the evil character you have to defeat, but more than that it’s the things within yourself you need to overcome to make that happen.”
A butterfly of anxiety flapped inside my chest, and I took a drink of coffee, hoping to numb the flutter. “Maybe I’ll look into failing forward next year.”
“What if your time is now, Olivia?” I’d never heard his tone so serious. “What if the things you think are catastrophes are really opportunities to take you to a better place?”
That sounded like the inside of a Hallmark card. “Your failing forward might work for games, but it doesn’t work in my business.”
“What would you do if you knew it was a guaranteed success? Forget about money or fears or Celeste’s expectations. What would you try, Olivia?”
Revisit our kiss.
