Ready for Two Weeks

Melissa Sanderson was building something, and she was building it faster than the people around her knew, and the gap between her speed and theirs was starting to feel less like ambition and more like loneliness.

She had the pitch in a document that was not a client brief, on a laptop angled the way Clark Edwards angled his over on the Mavericks side, though Melissa would not have appreciated the comparison and did not know she'd made the same instinctive move. The pitch was a category - a whole new lane for the division, a class of client the Munchies team had never gone after, the kind of growth play that would either double the division in eighteen months or expose, in the trying, exactly how small they actually were. She'd been working on it for a month. It was ready. It had been ready for two weeks.

The problem was Jayme.

Not Jayme as an obstacle, exactly. Melissa loved Jayme, in the complicated way you love a person you've known long enough to predict, and the prediction was the problem: Melissa knew, with total certainty, that the moment she put the pitch in front of Jayme, Jayme would find a reason to table it. Not kill it. Table it. Let's revisit after the summer campaigns. Let's make sure we're not overextending. Let's get the current clients fully stable first. All of it reasonable. All of it true. And all of it, Melissa had come to believe, a way of not doing the thing, dressed up as a way of doing the thing responsibly.

There was history under it. There was always history under it, with the two of them. They'd come up together, in a different city, at a different agency, back when neither of them ran anything and the whole future was theoretical. The version of their friendship from that time had a clarity this version had lost - back then they wanted the same thing, or close enough that the difference didn't show. They'd spent a hundred nights in a hundred cheap rooms drawing the agency they'd build someday on the backs of takeout receipts, and the agency on the receipts had been bolder than the one they actually worked at now, bolder than anything Cynthia would have signed off on. Somewhere in the years since, the wanting had diverged. Jayme had learned to want stability, the holding-together, the not-breaking of what they'd built. Melissa had never stopped wanting the thing on the receipts. And neither of them had ever said it cleanly, which meant it lived under everything, a current under the surface of every meeting, every late conversation, every careful let's revisit after the summer.

The cruel part - and Melissa let herself think the word cruel, alone, at her desk, where no one could see her think it - was that she understood exactly where Jayme's caution came from. She'd watched Jayme carry the division through two bad quarters without dropping it, watched her absorb shocks that would have flattened a less careful person, and the caution was not cowardice, it was scar tissue, it was a person who had learned the hard way what it cost when a thing you built came apart in your hands. Melissa knew all of that. And she still believed, in the place where belief lives underneath knowing, that the caution was going to strangle the best idea either of them had ever had, slowly, with the most reasonable hands in the world.

She typed a line at the top of the pitch document - the vision is clear, the timeline is the question - and she meant the client timeline, the rollout, the market window, and she also meant, underneath, the other timeline, the one about how long she could keep doing excellent work inside a ceiling somebody else had decided on. She read the line twice. It held both meanings. She left it.

A competent professional at a laptop. The late sun had come around to her window and was laying a long stripe of yellow across the desk, across her hands, across the closed cover of the pitch, warming all of it like it belonged to her. That was what the room would see if anyone walked in. A strategist doing strategy. What the room would not see was that she was further along than this, that the pitch was a held breath she'd been holding for weeks, that she was waiting - had decided, that very Thursday, to wait - for the right moment to stop waiting.

The right moment would not arrive on its own. Melissa knew that too. Answers arrived, but you had to be ready for them, and being ready, she was starting to understand, sometimes meant making them arrive.

She closed the laptop before anyone could read the screen, and the closing of it was the most honest thing she did all day.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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