Huh.
That was… inconvenient. The idea didn’t arrive whole. It leaked in around the edges. What if he hadn’t just wrung his libido dry? What if it had packed up because there was no good reason to stick around?
His agent’s mantra surfaced:“Feelings? Fuck around with them and you’re fucked.”Nate had treated it like gospel. Not because he fully believed it, but because it shut up the little voice whispering maybe all the squishy, messy, human stuff wasn’t a trap. Maybe it meant something.
“Well, bravo, Nate,” he said aloud.
Six months. His record for anything pretending to be a relationship. Always with women from the industry. Gorgeous and capable, and perpetually weary. Everyone hyperaware of angles and lighting, even in the dark. Especially in the dark. As if an audience lived permanently in the back of your skull, taking notes.
And now, here he was. Unemployed and talking to himself. His apartment silent, his plants dead. Yes, even the stupid succulents had thrown in the towel. He sighed and pulled out his phone. He could still make tomorrow’s 6:45 to LAX. Be home by nightfall, sitting cross-legged on his rug, pretending to meditate while deleting DMs from strangers who opened with,“Hey, I saw your work in—”
The thought made his skin prickle. He locked the screen and shoved the phone away.
Another day. Buy himself more time to figure out what normal meant for someone like him. Manual labor? He had the shoulders for it. Stocking shelves? At least soup cans didn’t have opinions. Or, Christ, go work for his brother’s tech startupand nod thoughtfully while people said words like “scaling” and “synergy.”
Hell, just surviving a day without someone telling him where to stand, or a director barking“Reset, Steele!”, felt like a Herculean task. Then there was the couple fantasy, suddenly padding into his head like a stray cat he didn’t dare feed. Netflix on the couch. Occasional hand-holding. Boring closeness that almost sounded nice.
He grunted and shook his head.Come on, Nate, don’t be a clown. No woman in her right mind wanted to explain to her parents that the Steel XXL™—Amazon’s top-selling anatomically accurate vibrator, with a frankly ridiculous number of settings—had been modeled after the guy sitting across from them at brunch. And yes, he had his own IMDb page.
Still.
Statistically speaking, there had to be someone out there. That one lunatic of a woman who might shrug and say,“Sure. Let’s give this a shot.”
He caught his reflection again. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “If you’re doing this whole ‘new you’ thing, might as well go all in.” His eyes dipped to his groin. “Sorry, buddy. You’re benched.” He popped a chip into his mouth and crunched. “Temporary,” he added, as if it were a promise instead of a guess. “Until we sort our shit.”
Then, on impulse, he bent forward and scrawledNATEacross the glass in greasy paprika dust. Because apparently this was how vows worked now. Made to vending machines, certified by fluorescent lighting, and filed by the universe under Very Serious Adult Decisions.
“Starting now.”
The machine hummed in what might have been agreement.
Chapter Three
Allegra had a plan: blend in, drink cheap wine, and avoid doing anything that would end up trending on TikTok with the hashtag#PrincessGoneWild.
She perched on a wobbly stool at La Petite Reine—a dive bar across from the train station—swirling her rosé in a plastic cup. Beside her, Liam, an intern from the World Health Organization, was saying “epidemiology” like it was foreplay.
“So the burden isn’t biological per se,” he declared, swinging his blue UN lanyard, “it’s mediated by all these upstream social and economic drivers.”
“Oh, wow. Uh-huh,” Allegra said, fingers twitching toward her ponytail—newly walnut-brown courtesy of a drugstore dye job that had promised luminous confidence and instead delivered the texture of overcooked ramen. She’d threaded the whole thing through the back of a Servette Football Club cap earlier, ostensibly for sporty credibility—the kind of woman who knew what a midfielder did and wouldn’t confuse a transfer window with an actual pane of glass. In reality, the cap was there to shield her eyes and, hopefully, her face. The ponytail was collateral damage: glued to the back of her neck by the July heat, refusing to swing, breathe, or show mercy.
Her thick-rimmed reading glasses, purchased from one of those racks by the toothpaste aisle, slid down her nose for the third time in as many minutes. She shoved them back up with a knuckle, willing them to stay put.
For her first outing as a normal person, Allegra had reinvented herself. Tonight, she wasGeneric European Backpacker. Yes, she’d Googled it. The budget clothing store on Place de Cornavin had been her battlefield; the racks of discounted summer wear her arsenal. She’d emerged victorious in high-waisted denim shorts, a mustard-yellow tank top with a plunging neckline, and a push-up bra doing the Lord’s work.
The goal was simple: keep attention south of her collarbone. A lifetime in the tabloids had taught Allegra that men and cameras alike were drawn to all the wrong places.
Liam droned on. Something about mosquito-borne diseases. Or food-borne diseases in cafeterias. Or mosquitoes in cafeterias? Allegra had checked out around “vector control” and never quite found her way back. She nodded along, swirling her wine as if contemplating the fragility of the global health system instead of his cheekbones.
He really was unfairly cute. The kind of cute that made her want to lean closer, just to check those lashes were real. And the accent? Each sentence rolled out like a lullaby for very bad decisions.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” he said, raking a hand through his hair.
“It totally does,” Allegra replied, though she had no earthly idea what it was. Whatever. His forearms looked like they could lift a piano.
“So, you agree?”
“Uh, absolutely! Like, health is just so important to life, right?” She cringed, drained the last sip of her wine, and waved a hand as though that might magic away the sentence. Okay, so maybe she was a little drunk. But in that pleasantly fuzzy, I-have-no-title-and-no-security-detail kind of way.
