Page 85 of Boyfriend Material
“Thanks. I do have some self-loathing issues, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for bean curd.”
“Little bit of advice if I may, Luc. Stop talking like this when your guests are here. They won’t like it.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m just trying to get it out my system before I have to be polite to the Clarkes.”
Her face contorted. “What, you mean the Gaia people?”
“Not a fan? Are they like the Starbucks of veganism?”
“It’s not so much that. But they’re very… Well, let’s say I do this because I think eating animal products is unnecessarily cruel and an avoidable environmental catastrophe. I don’t do it because I want to bathe the world in healing goddess energy and flog yoga mats.”
I gave her a faintly alarmed look. “You’re not going to say that to them, right?”
“Of the two of us, which was the one dissing tofu in front of a vegan chef?”
“I thought I was more dissing myself, but fair enough.”
“Anyway, I’ll leave you to the… Oh, you’ve eaten all the seeds.”
Fuck. I had. “I don’t suppose I could have some more? What do you put on them, anyway? Crack cocaine?”
“Salt, mostly, and a few spices.”
“They’re really moreish.”
“I know, and they don’t even come out of a dead cow.”
A few minutes after she’d gone back to the kitchen, and the teenager had replenished the seeds, Adam and Tamara wafted in, looking willowy, bronzed, and smug. They Namasted at me and sat down across the table, making it feel unpleasantly like a job interview. Which, I suppose, in a way it was.
“Oh, this is charming,” said Tamara. “Well done, you.”
I put on my best smile. “Yes, the chef’s been on my radar for a while. And when I heard she was doing a pop-up, I thought of you immediately.”
“I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve spoken.” Adam popped a seed into his mouth. He was handsome in this weird picture-in-the-attic sort of way. The last time I’d Googled him, he’d been in his early fifties but he looked like he could have been anything between thirty and about six thousand and nine.
“It has.” I was pretty sure Adam was hinting that I hadn’t stroked their egos enough recently so I fell back on the strategy of making an excuse that sounds like a compliment. “But now the franchise rollout is underway, I’ll be a lot less worried about bothering you. I hear it’s going well?”
Tamara, who was just enough younger than Adam that it came across as creepy but not so much younger than you didn’t feel judgmental for thinking it was creepy, pressed a hand coyly to what I strongly suspected was a chakra. “We’ve been very blessed.”
“If you put good energy in the universe,” Adam added, “good energy comes back to you.”
God. By the time this was over, I was going to have a near-fatal buildup of unused sarcasm. “I think that’s a really positive philosophy, and I know it’s one you’ve always lived by.”
“We very much feel we have a duty to set a positive example.” That was Tamara.
Adam nodded approvingly. “It’s particularly important to me because I used to work in a very negative industry, and even with Tamara’s help, it took me a long time to come through that.”
At this point, I got a momentary reprieve when the teenager came over to take our orders, and Adam and Tamara gave him the third degree over where the restaurant’s ingredients were sourced from and which bits specifically were organic. I half wondered if it would have been a better strategy to take them somewhere less in line with their values so they could have the satisfaction of being unsatisfied with it. In the end, I went with the jackfruit Caesar—despite not knowing what jackfruit was—because I figured it was a good compromise between making an effort and trying too hard.
“Anyway”—Tamara leaned forward earnestly—“we’re really glad to have this opportunity to speak to you, Luc. As you know, we find the work that Coleoptera Research Project does in restoring the natural balance of the earth to be incredibly important.”
I tried to match her earnest for earnest. “Thank you. We’ve always been very grateful for your generosity. But, more than that, we’ve always felt you had a real understanding of our mission.”
“That’s really great to hear,” said Adam. “The thing is though, Luc, our values are central to our way of life.”
“And…” Now it was Tamara’s turn “…some of the things we’ve been hearing recently have actually been quite concerning to us.”
“Like we were saying earlier. We think it’s really important to put out the right sort of energy.”
