“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.”

“And, obviously, nature really matters to us. And being in harmony with nature and with ourselves.”

“And, so, being frank and strictly off the record, we’ve been a little bit worried that some elements of your lifestyle are not necessarily compatible with what we see as healthy and positive living.”

I was pretty sure that they could have gone on like this for at least another hour but, mercifully, it seemed like they thought they’d made their point. And now they were gazing expectantly at me.

Somehow, I didn’t throw the seeds at them.

“I completely see where you’re coming from,” I told them. “And, being frank and strictly off the record, I’ve not been in the best place recently. But I’ve taken time to reflect and look inward, and although I think it’s going to be quite a slow, holistic process, I’m beginning to take steps to really realign myself with where I’m supposed to be in life.”

Tamara reached across the table and laid her hand across mine like a benediction. “That’s really centred of you, Luc. Not a lot of people have the courage to do that.”

“Just to be clear”—Adam suddenly looked a little bit uncomfortable—“it’s not about the gay thing.”

A nod from Tamara. “We have lots of gay friends.”

I widened my eyes in a look of reassuring disbelief that I had been practicing for way too long. “You know, it never even crossed my mind that it might be.”

A couple of hours later, they’d gone, having formally un-pulled-out of the Beetle Drive—which, y’know, they could do because their Johrei retreat wasn’t happening. I celebrated and/or consoled myself with a terrifyingly good chocolate caramel brownie. Like, seriously. Better than a real—I mean nonvegan—chocolate caramel brownie. My working theory was that getting a dessert from a vegan restaurant was like having sex with someone less attractive than you—they knew it was a tough sell, so they tried harder.

“How was the jackfruit?” asked Bronwyn, popping up beside me.

“Surprisingly good. There was even a thirty-second window when I stopped wishing it was meat.”

She folded her arms. “You’ve been bottling that up, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I have. They are the worst people, Bronwyn.”

“I blame the yoga. All that time in facedown dog’s not good for you.”

“They actually used the phrase ‘It’s not the gay thing.’”

“Oh, so it was the gay thing then?”

“Yeah.” I hoovered up the last crumbs of brownie. “They’ve got to that place where they’ve realised being homophobic is bad, but haven’t quite reconciled that with the fact they’re a bit suspicious of gay people.”