Page 52 of The Naughty Ex

"Lance—"

"Zephyr said something to me the first night." He reached over and brushed something off my sleeve. "He said everybody in my life is delighted to see me and nobody has asked me a serious question in four years. And I’ve decided not to think too hard about the fact that a fraud in a linen shirt got closer to the bone in nine seconds than anybody I actually pay to care about me."

The wind came through the redwoods.

"So that's the ask," Lance said. "Read it. That's the whole ask. Take it to bed tonight, and if it isn't for you, say so, and I will never mention it again."

"I can't."

His face didn't move. "Why?"

"Bad timing."

"Say the real reason."

"That is the real—"

"Say the real reason or don't say anything."

And I sat on a platform in the middle of my ex-husband's wedding and heard myself say the thing I have never said out loud to a single living person.

"I made the biggest film of the year. Once. Highest grossing. You got nominated, remember." I tried for a wink and it didn't entirely come off. "Then I stood in a room in a tuxedo that cost more than my first car, and every single person I have ever wanted to impress came up to me and told me I'd done it." My mouth had gone dry. "There's nowhere to go from there. There is only down. And I haven't had to find that out yet, because I've spent two years on a boat. The day I open a script and try again is the day I find out whether I was any good or whether I was lucky."

Lance was quiet a long moment.

"That's the most honest thing you've said to me in years."

"Thank you."

"It's also the stupidest, but we'll come back to that." He stood, put the sunglasses back on, and brushed off his trousers. "You don't have to answer today. But Gregory — you're going to lose Blaine on Saturday. You know that, don't you? Whatever you think is happening here. Saturday happens, and then it's Sunday." He paused. "And then what? What do you actually do with the rest of your life?"

He started walking away across the grass.

"Lance."

He stopped.

"Leave it," I said. "I'll read the script."

* * *

The meeting between Steven and Zephyr was at two, in the sun room, and it was a triumph.

Steven Ellis Bland came in with a laptop, a legal pad, and a printed one-pager, and he was — I'll say it — extremely good. Whatever anybody thinks about that man, he knows his business. Audience numbers. Comparable practitioners with revenue attached. A launch calendar, a name for the vertical, and a budget line he had cleared before he sat down.

And Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian let him get all the way to the end.

Then he did the thing.

He didn't refuse, and he didn't accept. He laid both hands flat on the table and said he had spent his life declining to become a product and would not become one now, and that what Steven was describing was not a partnership but a harvest — and then, before the man's face had finished falling, he said that the members were another matter entirely. That eleven million men were not a market. They were a congregation nobody had thought to feed. And that he would consider — consider — sitting with them. Not as a brand. As a man in a room.

Steven closed the laptop very slowly.

"Oh my God," he said. "That is so much better than what I came in with."

"Yes," said Zephyr. "It is."

Steven was already typing. "Okay, so — I'm taking this to the team tomorrow, and honestly this is so much stronger, because harvest is exactly the objection our members have about the whole wellness category. So if you're the one saying it—" He looked up. "Gregory. You're his producer. Do you have a rate card, or—"