Chapter 25 #2
“I hear what you’re saying, Doug.” Maddy said, like the two of them were on the same side.
“Running it back is the safe play. It tests fine. It airs fine. Nobody at this table gets fired.” Maddy swirled her wine glass and then set it down.
“But you laid it out yourself. The alpha. The sweetheart. The schemer. We cast the same archetypes every season, with different faces and names. They used to be the comfort of the show. Now they’re the problem with it, because the audience can name all three off the promo and already know who’s gonna make it to the finale. They’re bored.”
Doug opened his mouth. Maddy kept going before he could get a word out.
“You’ve seen the hype about Crucible?” She asked rhetorically, knowing he had.
“Everybody at the Variety dinner last weekend was talking about it.” She added an indifferent shrug for good measure.
“The concept doesn’t even make sense. But people have never seen it before, so they’re leaning forward, Doug. ”
Doug’s jaw set, but he didn’t cut in.
“You said people come back to us for what they already love. I agree.” She folded her hands on the table and leaned forward.
“So let them bring it back themselves. Let them vote. Let them spend eight weeks telling us exactly who they still love enough to fight for.” She was gaining momentum now.
“By the time we land in Fiji, the season’s already alive.
Fans have picked their players, made the brackets, revisited every blindside from the last sixteen years.
The audience doesn’t just watch the season, they help create it.
Then eighteen people who came back for a second chance to win the game they lost before, find out the rules have changed.
Once they reach the island, they are divided into three teams of six, and the teams are reshuffled every week.
No permanent tribe. No stable homebase. No guaranteed alliance access. No safe harbor.”
Doug’s eyes slid to Reese to find out whether Programming would back his play, because men like Doug never committed to a hill until they’d checked who’d watch them die on it.
Reese was watching Margaret. Which meant Reese would go where the table went.
Which meant the table was Doug, and Doug, Maddy had decided somewhere around his second bourbon, was hers.
“The vote, I like,” he said, turning his glass. “That’s marketable. Returning players always move the needle.” Then the but she’d been waiting for. “But why complicate it once they’re on the island? You’ve got your hook. Why touch the game that already works?”
“Because they already know how to play the game, Doug. Returnees come back with muscle memory. They’ve watched every season, they’ve got their alliances planned, they’ve got the vote-off order written in their heads before the boat even lands.
So we take away the part they’ve already solved.
” She watched him purse his lips. Time to bring it home.
“You get your brand protection. Margaret gets her format refresh. Marketing gets months of free engagement before production touches the budget. The board gets real-time audience data. And the audience gets exactly what you said they wanted: the thing they already love. We just make sure they can’t predict what it does next. ”
She had just handed him every word he liked best. Familiar faces.
Nostalgia. Built-in fans. Protecting the budget, and more importantly: himself.
His gaze turned distant, somewhere over Maddy’s shoulder, a small smile forming on his lips, and she knew—he was already picturing himself selling the idea to the board like he’d dreamed it himself.
Maddy leaned back and locked eyes with Margaret, who gave a tiny, subtle nod of approval and covered her smirk with a sip of water.
The one-hundred percent success rate was still intact.
* * *
Maddy got her front door open and ripped off the heels that had been actively plotting against her for the past two hours, leaving them where they fell.
She unzipped her dress on the way to her bedroom and abandoned it over the back of the reading chair she never read in. She threw on a T-shirt and lounge shorts and padded to the kitchen barefoot.
She poured herself a glass of the good merlot. By the time she dropped onto the couch she felt like a real person again, more or less.
The dinner had gone exactly to plan.
Redemption was happening. Her idea. Her first real swing as Co-EP, and she knocked it out of the park. She was proud, the adrenaline still coursing through her, and all she could think about was how she wanted to tell Aspen.
Maddy had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole her and Aspen situation. She’d replayed their conversation from the night before she left over and over in her head. She had a whole case built for why she’d done the right thing, and she’d been re-arguing it every day since she got back.
She had meant what she’d said—she hadn’t wanted to end anything. She’d wanted to keep talking, keep seeing each other when their schedules allowed, and let whatever this was grow at a pace that would let them integrate into their new reality without blowing up Maddy’s career.
Mostly, she’d needed Aspen to understand what dating Maddy actually looked like before either of them committed to anything.
It was easy to say she was willing to do whatever it took to make things work when Maddy was still standing right in front of her and they had just spent the world’s most romantic and incredible two and half weeks together.
It was an entirely different thing when Maddy was living three hours away, taking twelve hours to reply to a single text, missing FaceTime dates, and spending three months living on a remote island six thousand miles away.
Aspen would end up resenting Maddy, Maddy would feel guilty about it all the time, and then one day, Aspen would be done with it all and dump her.
Maddy had made so much progress over the past month. She wasn’t sure she could handle getting her heart broken by Aspen St. Claire because she realized the reality of dating Maddy didn’t match the fantasy.
The case was airtight, but God, she missed her. She thought about her constantly—what she was doing, how she was feeling, whether she was thinking about Maddy too.
And the part that had been gnawing at Maddy for the past ten days, was that she had never actually said any of that out loud.
Because if she’d said it, Aspen would have sworn she knew exactly what she was signing up for, and Maddy would have believed her because she wanted to.
But how could Aspen know what to expect, actually, when it wasn’t something she’d ever experienced?
It wasn’t even something Maddy had experienced.
But now she wondered if she’d made a mistake in not saying it. In not telling Aspen that Maddy really wanted this. Wanted her. Wanted them to build a relationship slowly, with both eyes open. Maybe if she had said it, Aspen wouldn’t have ended things.
The whole open, honest, speak-from-the-heart thing was new to Maddy. And she could admit, she hadn’t done an exceptional job at communicating her feelings for Aspen before she left.
Before she could overthink it, Maddy picked up her phone, pulled up Aspen’s contact, and hit call.
It rang twice, her pulse climbing through both, and then went straight to voicemail.
Her stomach dropped. Aspen had hit decline. Maddy’s eyes went hot. She stared across the room willing the tears not to fall. They didn’t listen.
Two months ago, Aspen St. Claire had been nothing but a name she hadn’t thought about in fifteen years. Now Maddy was crying on her own couch because the woman had ignored her call. If her past self could see this, she’d have demanded a drug test.
Her phone buzzed once in her hand and Aspen’s name popped up on her screen. Maddy had never tapped a notification so fast in her life.
Aspen: Hey, sorry, I’m out to drinks right now, is everything okay?
Good fucking question. Nothing about this felt okay, but she didn’t want to worry Aspen either. She should keep it simple. Maddy looked back down the screen and typed her response.
Maddy: Yeah, sorry…just wanted to check in.
Three grey dots appeared. Vanished. Appeared. Vanished. Her heart lifted and dropped with each one.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, come on!” She grumbled into the empty room.
The dots disappeared, and no text came through.
“No, no, no. Please, come on.” She set her wine down and held the phone out in both hands. “Please. Please say something.” She watched for the dots to come back. They didn’t.
Maddy dropped the phone in her lap, squeezed her eyes shut, and let out a groan.
Then she thought about Aspen’s text again, and her eyes popped open.
She picked up her phone and re-read it. Out to drinks. If she was out to drinks with someone Maddy knew, she would have referred to them by name. Which meant she was out to drinks with someone Maddy didn’t know.
Was Aspen on a date right now?
Her heart squeezed. She dropped the phone and cradled her head in her hands, feeling dizzy and nauseous.
Fuck. Of course she was, Aspen was gorgeous and kind and perfect, and Maddy had practically handed her back to the world of available women gift-wrapped.
And right now some stranger was buying her a drink and on the receiving end of Aspen’s mesmerizing gaze and intoxicating smile and infectious laugh, and Maddy was going to throw up on her own coffee table.
She breathed through it, the slow four-count she ran when everything was on fire at once. And suddenly, the pitch she’d spent all evening selling Doug on circled back to her.