Love, Comment, Subscribe by Cathy Yardley

CHAPTER 19

Tobin meant to be ready by the time Lily got there. He really did.

He’d been thinking of possible videos for them to shoot since the last time he’d been up in LA and she’d made him “hawt,” quote, unquote. He hadn’t felt particularly hot, truth be told. If anything, he’d felt self-conscious as hell, which pushed all his anxiety-driven humor and an almost intolerable amount of talking. Normally he was able to channel that nervous energy into his videos. Some had joked that he sounded like a hamster on crack in a lot of his videos, and admittedly, with a lot of game playthroughs especially, he tended to rattle off a lot. But it wasn’t a big deal.

Also, he tended to not film videos in his underwear. He imagined that was Lily’s revenge, and he couldn’t really fault her for that, per se.

He sighed. Lily was going to be here any minute. He’d told her specifically to come on Friday, because it seemed to fit her sense of schedule: film in Ponto, at his place, on Fridays, up in LA at her place (or wherever she deemed appropriate, like Ion’s workshop) on Tuesdays. So that worked.

He just didn’t have a damned idea.

He jolted when she rang the doorbell. At least he was fully clothed, he thought with a rueful grin. He let her in. “Sorry for the late start,” he said. He’d told her not to show up too early, making up something about an appointment, when the only appointment he’d had was trying to somehow cudgel creativity out of his tired brain.

“You’re all right?” she asked, with casual curiosity.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Completely uninspired and without a video idea, but fine. “Um. Right. Are you hungry? Do you want to eat something? I’ve got some food, or we could go out and grab lunch.”

She frowned at him. “It’s a long drive, Tobin,” she pointed out. “Probably better if we just jump right into the video, don’t you think?”

“Um, yes . . . ,” he hedged. “About that.”

Her eyes widened. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“I, uh, may not have an idea quite ready yet.”

She goggled. “Are you kidding me? We need to post a video tomorrow!”

“Technically,” he said, “my viewers aren’t, like, religiously following my posting schedule. I try not to go more than four days without posting, but I also mix things up.”

“Well, I am supposed to have a video up on Sunday,” she said, her voice firm, “and my viewers are kind of rigid about it. I’ve only missed a video posting once in the past five years, remember?” She paused. “And that was because of you too.”

“I told you that filming with me was going to be more of an unstructured experience,” he carped back at her, feeling both guilty and attacked. “And in my defense, I knew we’d need to film, and I figured I would have an idea by now. I tend to come up with things best under pressure. Either that, or just before I go to sleep.”

“Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?” Lily snapped. “So what are we going to do now?”

He gestured to his office. “Now, we brainstorm.”

She sighed, then walked in, settling herself in on the small couch with the “fox” pillow, hugging it to her. “I am interested in seeing how you brainstorm,” she admitted.

“Well, I don’t go all design crazy like Josh,” he said, remembering the brainstorming session that had spontaneously burst out at the Belly Up. “He’ll have you color-coding Post-its and index cards and doing doodles, and he has, like, a whole system. I just mind-map a little, or write words that help me think of things.”

She nodded. “I do that too. Like springs, florals, new makeup palettes, designers and MUAs I want to promote.”

He wiped down his whiteboard before pulling out a dry-erase marker. “The trick is coming up with stuff that will fit both of us,” he said. “The intersection between our two audiences. Personally, I think that funny works.”

“You’re the funny one,” she pointed out. “Not me. So I don’t know what I can contribute there.”

“I think you’re funnier than you give yourself credit for,” he said and was surprised to see a shy half smile emerge. “Besides that, though, you’re a great straight character to my goofy over-the-top one. You need the balance for the jokes to land.”

“You don’t usually work with a partner, though.”

He shrugged. “I still understand the theory. And I think that, other than the dick factor of scaring you, our initial video worked wonders.”

“Our last video did pretty well too,” she said.

“I know. I got a bunch of new subscribers,” he said. His agents were pretty happy with the collab, too, telling him to keep it up. “A lot of them said that I was ‘hawt, if somewhat annoying.’”

“You could put that on your tombstone,” she said with a grin. “Hawt, if somewhat annoying.”

“I should have T-shirts made,” he added and was rewarded with a laugh. “I’ll add it to my merch.”

“Speaking of . . . thanks for plugging Ion’s clothes,” she said. “Ion said that she’s sold out of those hoodies, and she’s scrambling to make up new orders. She’s also sold out of a lot of her other stock.”

He was glad. He liked supporting smaller, lesser-known businesses of all types, and Ion was pretty cool.

“All right, let’s hash out ideas,” she said, the getting-down-to-business look in her eye gleaming. He was well acquainted with this expression. “All right. Um . . . dance challenges? They’re all over TikTok. Maybe we can do something from that?”

“The fact that they’re all over TikTok doesn’t help us,” he said. “We need to come up with something that’s more original.”

Her eyes gleamed. “This isn’t because you suck at dancing?”

“No,” he said, taking the question seriously. “Because my sucking at dancing would actually work even better. It’s funnier.” He sighed, thinking it over, then wrote DANCE CHALLENGE on the whiteboard. “We’ll hold this in reserve for right now, in case we can’t come up with anything better. Let’s think—and I hate to say this, because it’s so clichéd—outside the box.”

She frowned. “What do you normally do?”

“Video game playthroughs, like I said. Except you don’t play games all that much, and besides, I do Twitch streams all the time, and I have other collabs that might work better for that.” He grinned. “You should watch my livestream of the last Minecraft bed-wars tournament I was in. That was fun.”

“I will,” she promised, and he got the feeling she wasn’t just saying it to placate him. Of course, she probably saw it as homework. “What else?”

“Um . . .” He pulled out a notebook where he’d jotted down his ideas and past videos. “I’ve done physical challenges, to a certain extent. The tandem skydive was particularly popular, but I don’t know if that’s what we want.”

She looked green. “That’s a no from me,” she said, swallowing hard.

“Those kinds of challenges take a hell of a lot more prep than we can do in one day, honestly,” he said. “We’ll put a pin in that one too. Um, so other than physical challenges, I’ve done a few cooking things, but those never are as popular. I think I need to rethink how those get done or have a more unique approach than just ‘GoofyBui makes char siu bao’ or whatever.” He paused, rubbing his stomach. Mmmm. Char siu bao.

“Hmmm. Maybe something difficult, like a wedding cake? Or, um, like something from a Bake-Off?”

“Maybe,” he said, still feeling a little skeptical of the idea. It just didn’t feel right, and his content needed to if it was going to succeed. He’d been doing this long enough to know that.

“What about your weaponized silliness?” she asked.

He grinned at the sound of the phrase coming out of her mouth, especially when she said it earnestly. “Those are usually skits that I come up with. Those can take a while to percolate. The Beacons video took months to plan out. The Tater Theater ones were quicker, because we already had the speech in place, and it was just the chat filter. Still, those didn’t perform as well as I would’ve liked.” He groaned.

It went like that through the afternoon, and he could tell Lily was getting frustrated. Hell, he was getting frustrated with himself. Why couldn’t he come up with an idea? Damn it, he’d done this a million times. Why was he stuck now?

After they’d grabbed some tacos and burritos from a nearby hole-in-the-wall (the best hole-in-the-wall, as far as he was concerned), she was rubbing her face. “That’s it. We go with the dance challenge,” she pronounced. “We’re running out of time.”

He grimaced. “You know . . . hold on a second.”

He whipped out his phone, calling Asad. “’Lo?” Asad answered.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“What’d you have in mind?”

Tobin looked over at Lily. “You know how Hayden wanted to get people together before the reunion? When is that, anyway?”

“It’s in about two weeks,” Asad answered. “And you know I’m always down to get the townies together, anytime. Game night, you think?”

“I’ll bring Harbinger.” Tobin had one of the largest board game collections known to man—he sometimes reviewed them, so he was offered a lot of free ones. “And I’ll also bring Lily.”

“You’re still collaborating, huh?” He could hear the grin in Asad’s voice. “How’s that going?”

“Well, she hasn’t killed me yet. So far, so good,” he said. “Around six?”

“Sounds good. See you then.”

As soon as he hung up, Lily looked at him, angry. “Where am I going?”

“Asad’s. We’re having a party,” he said. “And I’m going to get inspired there. I promise.”

She crossed her arms. “We could have an okay video without it,” she said. “The dance challenge.”

“Yeah, but don’t you want the best video possible?” he countered. “The idea is to use these collabs to build our audience. We need stuff that’s going to be shareable, viral. Different.”

“Do you really, one hundred percent promise me you’ll get a video idea out of this?” Her eyes bored into his soul, it seemed. She was not here to play. She was seriously pissed.

He nodded. “We won’t stay too late, and if I don’t get inspired, then we’ll just do the dance challenge, and then I’ll edit it myself, okay? It’ll be up by Saturday, right on schedule.”

She waited a long minute, then rubbed at her temples.

“Fine.”

He nodded. “It’ll be fun, you’ll see,” he said.

Now, he just had to come up with an idea. He was getting pretty damned tired of being in this position. But hopefully being with his old friends, and even Lily, would help jump-start his creativity. And if he was lucky, even though Lily had lost touch with a lot of the Nerd Herd since moving to LA, hanging out with their old high school crew might spark a few new ideas for her as well.