That feels elementary.
No hugs, no kisses, no sex
You don’t even answer my texts
I’ll take heartbreak for 500, Alex
True, but where does it go next?
Love is the fifth natural force
Making rings on the ocean with its oars
Reshaping the planet to its core
Oh I just want things to be like before
Well, if anything’s worth melting the glaciers for
it’s you
Better, songwise. But depressing to think about.
He checks his email and there’s one from Celestia’s assistant.
Celestia is compiling her list, v. excited. Will have it to you next week. In the meantime, please sign the attached contract and NDA so we can proceed.
J isn’t sure what the assistant means by a list, but figures he’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, the contract and NDA are an astonishing thirty-four pages long. J understands the bottom line is that he can’t speak of anything that happens at the wedding; fair enough. He also sees that Celestia wants to maintain control of the song after the wedding; she won’t own it outright, but J will need her permission to record or perform it outside the wedding. J decides for this price, he can agree to that.
It is only one song, after all.
If J’s week is somewhat formless, V’s appears to grow more and more intense. The investors have been wooed, and now offers are starting to be made. When he meets his financial suitors, Thor is savvy and strategic and enigmatic. Outside these meetings, he is a complete mess, suddenly paralyzed by the notion that he could make the wrong choice and doom the whole endeavor to failure. Rather than talk it out with V, he runs off to be with his new love, Meta, and their new dog, Macdougal (Mac for short). It has been left to Vand the chief financial advisor, an American named Grant, to play the potential investors off each other to get the best offers possible.
J has pieced this narrative together from shards of quick conversations. Since V is always at work, he is always catching her at work. Time and time again, he offers to stay up for her, to be ready when she is done, even if it’s three or four in the morning, his time. But in response he always gets the same refrain.
Don’t stay up.
I’m so tired.
Don’t stay up.
I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
At one point he gently suggests that maybe she needs to take a break, take a few hours for herself.
“You just don’t understand,” she tells him.
“What don’t I understand?” he asks.
“This.Work.”
As soon as she says it, she apologizes, says it came out wrong. She tells him she is only getting three or four hours of sleep each night, and even her dreams are work-related nightmares.
“Is it worth it?” he has to ask.
“When they give us tens of millions of dollars to do this site the right way, it will be worth it,” she tells him.
Then she says she has to go. Another call is coming in.
