“What?”
She shot him a direct look, but her voice was tight. “Were you hiding from me?”
He sighed. “Maybe a little. But things with my parents got worse after I left for school. It was hard to stay with them.”
“So you’re saying it wasn’t because I’m so sexy and amazing?”
He laughed at the repetition of her words from their earlier argument, grateful that she’d lightened the mood. “You are sexy and amazing.”
“Thanks. Too bad no one else knows that.”
“I have a hard time believing other people don’t see it. At least two-thirds of our high school baseball team was in love with you.” Including me.
“Then why didn’t I date anyone on the baseball team?”
“Because I said I’d go after them with a bat if they messed with you.”
“Ah. You always were an excellent hitter. But what about you? With that face and body, you must be kicking people out of bed left and right.”
He snorted and shook his head. “A few, here and there. I actually broke up with someone about a year ago. Well, I guess she broke up with me.”
“Was it serious?”
This was something he almost never talked about, but it was easy to open up to Michelle. “I think she wanted to get married eventually. And I don’t.”
“What happened?”
“The gym was more important.” Gabe knew how it sounded, saying that right after sex. It was laying down a boundary, but it was what he did now, what the people he had sex with needed to know about him. The business was his number-one priority.
Liv, his ex, had never understood that. She’d come from money, and work had been a lark to her, something to pass the time between vacations. She’d hated that Gabe couldn’t take off on “weekend getaways” with her whenever she felt like going to Napa or Vegas or Sedona.
Michelle didn’t ask him to elaborate. She just unplugged her laptop from where it was charging on the kitchen counter. “Then we’d better get started.”
“I’ve gotta get my stuff,” Gabe said, glad for the chance to get out of the kitchen. He needed to shake the feeling that he’d revealed more of himself than he’d intended. Sharing with Michelle felt too easy, too right.
He ran upstairs to the bedroom that once again held his suitcase. He should’ve known his attempt to leave would be met with failure. With a sigh, Gabe pulled out his laptop and ergonomic Bluetooth mouse and mouse pad. He knew way too much about hand and finger-joint injuries to use the touch pad, and even the laptop keyboard, despite being a larger one, was pushing it. It was why he was going to teach the hand therapy class with Charisse when he got back to LA.
Downstairs, he sat across from Michelle at the old wooden dining table where they used to sit side by side doing homework. It wasn’t ideal positioning, since they’d have to spin their laptops around to show each other something on the screen, but having the table between them was symbolic of the distance they were trying to maintain.
Michelle had her laptop, a mouse, a fancy notebook, and at least half a dozen pens in different colors spread out next to her.
Once Gabe finished setting up, Michelle spun her laptop to face him.
“There’s a bit of a disconnect with your branding,” she said, getting right to business. The screen showed a website he was very familiar with—the Agility Gym home page.
“The design is . . . fine,” she went on. “But it’s very cold.”
There was that word again. Fine. And the website had cost over two thousand dollars.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s . . . okay. I would have done better, but not everyone is me.”
Gabe frowned at the website, which showed an artsy photograph of a fitness model lifting weights. “What do you mean?”
She gave him a look like she couldn’t believe how dense he was being. “It’s light blue, slate blue, and navy blue.”
“That last one is Yankees blue,” he pointed out. He’d been proud of that choice.
“Gabe. This branding was clearly designed by two dudebros. It’s boring.”
Before he could dispute being called a dudebro, she moved the cursor and opened the “About Us” page on the website.
“Look here,” she said, pointing at the photo of Gabriel and Fabian. “This looks like it’s out of some beefcake calendar, like ‘Real Househusbands of the Los Angeles Gym Scene.’”
Gabe groaned and covered his face. “It was our investor’s idea and that’s exactly what he was going for.”
“Really?” Michelle gave the picture a skeptical glance. “You look like two guys from the high school wrestling team about to win the dance battle that will save the rec center.”
A teen movie reference was absolutely not what Gabe was going for. “It’s not great.”
“The first thing we have to do is reconcile what your brand is saying about you and what you want it to say about you.”
“Me?”
“The gym, Gabe. Keep up. You’re the face of the gym. It’s named after you, right? Aguilar. Agility.”
He nodded, pleased that she got it.
But then she shrugged and added, “It’s a little heavy-handed but I guess your clientele doesn’t care, or doesn’t notice.”
Before he could comment, she shoved a sheet of paper at him.
“Fill this out and let me know when you’re done.” She took her laptop back and popped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones.
Gabe stared at her for a moment, then shook his head and looked at the paper. Michelle had always been this way. Her brain moved a mile a minute, especially when she was working out a problem.
When he reached for one of her pens, she swatted his hand away. After digging in a black zippered pouch that literally said Don’t Touch My Pens on it, she passed him a regular ballpoint pen with a bank logo on it.
He accepted it with a sigh and got to work. But after skimming the questions on the paper, he scowled. Shit like “What are your brand’s core values?” and “How would you identify your ideal customer avatar?” made him sweat. How did you even put such abstract concepts into words? He flipped the paper over to make some notes and saw—god help him—that there were questions on both sides.
He was almost at the end—having skipped at least half of the questions—when Michelle shifted the headphones down to rest around her neck.
“Here’s a question for you,” she said. “Fabian is Haitian, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re Mexi-Rican. Except none of that Latinx flavor is present in your brand. Why is your website full of photos of white people?” It was clearly a rhetorical question, because she kept going. “Have you done any TV commercials?”
Gabe shook his head. “Not yet.”
Michelle tapped a pen against her lower lip as she skewered her laptop screen with a look of fierce concentration. “Maybe we could do something fun with music . . .”
Gabe tried to imagine playing merengue music in the gym. It was nearly impossible to picture. “I don’t think that fits the brand,” he said.
“Don’t you get it? You are the brand. You and Fabian. And there’s nothing of you guys in the messaging aside from this eighties porno picture.”