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"No."
"Neither have I. There's an obscene amount of sea bass up at that house and I can't make myself go and get any of it." He poured two glasses and handed me one. I held it without drinking. "Blaine will come down here, you know."
"He won't."
"No," Lance agreed, after a moment. "Probably not tonight."
We sat there in the quiet a while, the two of us, in the wreckage of the stupidest week of my life.
And I looked at my oldest friend — who’d carried my secret through a rehearsal dinner and a wedding, and who had stood up in Rhoda Cauthorne's kitchen that morning and confessed to his part in my production — and I discovered that I had exactly one thing left that was worth anything to anybody.
"Lance."
"Mm."
"I was wrong about the script."
His glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
"I knew by the fourth page. I've been telling you it's good all week, because good is a word you can say without doing anything about it." My voice went somewhere strange. "It isn't good. It's the best thing I've read in a decade and I want to make it."
He didn't say anything at all.
"If you still want me."
"If I still—"
Lance came up out of that chair like a man getting out of a burning car. The wine went all over the floor and he didn't even look at it.
"Gregory Normand, you unbelievable, catastrophic, selfish man, of course I still want you—"
And then he was hugging me hard enough to bruise something, and he was crying, and so was I, apparently, and neither of us mentioned it.
"Say it again," he said into my shoulder.
"I want to make your film."
"Again."
"Lance. Of course I want to make it."
"We should be shooting by next spring. I'll call the director tonight, she genuinely does not sleep, and if we go out with your name attached before anybody's read a page—"
"Lance."
He stopped, glowing, halfway out of the chair again.
"I need you to go," I said.
He looked at me a long moment.
"Why?"
"Because I have to make a phone call and I don't want you in the room for it."
"If you're calling Blaine—"
"I'm not calling Blaine."
