Page 102 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“What?” he said, and his smile was so sweet.

“Nothing,” I said, “I just wasn’t expecting any of this. So what’s the business proposition?”

“Okay, you know that what I do is machine learning with advertising, right?”

“Yeah, but admittedly I have no idea what that is.”

“So imagine basically, say I look at your Instagram followers. And I write a program that will analyze all of their Instagram accounts and find common features, patterns they share, people or brands they follow, usage patterns, words in their bios, basic demographics like gender, age, location. And I make, like, a perfect profile of the average Ghost subscriber.”

“Cool,” I said.

“And then I use that profile to buy ads and show those ads exclusively to people who are perfect Ghost subscriber material.”

“Oh shit!” I said.

“Margo, you’re gifted at the writing, the character you made up for Ghost. And I thought, what if we started a consulting company? Where we offer this in-depth data-driven analysis of their target demographic to OnlyFans content creators and make ad recommendations. Lots of companies could do that—they aren’t right now because they don’t even know what OnlyFans is, but they’ll figure it out eventually and provide stiff competition. We could do more than that. You could offer them a critique of their character, of their persona, and give them ideas for how they might tweak it to make it more successful. I mean, we could even offer a prestige service where you write actual scripts for them.”

“Oh my God,” I said. I had stopped shredding, and Bodhi squawked to get my attention. I gave him another wisp of roast beef. “We could even, like—we could run storylines.”

“Exactly,” JB said.

We stared at each other. What JB was offering, it was beyond even my own wildest ambitions. JB was offering me the chance to become Vince McMahon.

“So do you like this idea?” he asked.

“JB, I fucking love this idea.”

JB nodded, though he looked concerned or maybe a little disgusted. “Margo?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think I can eat any more.”

“Wimp,” I said. “Hand it over.”

He gave me the brisket, and I went to work as we kept talking. There were a million things to discuss. There was no reason we needed to be in the same geographical location to start the company, even if JB was sure he didn’t want to stay in D.C.

“So are you going to do this in addition to your regular job? Do you think you’ll have time?”

“Oh, no, I already quit my regular job. I quit it the moment I realized I hated it, like three weeks ago.”

“Oh!” I said.

“I just feel like I need something new. I don’t know that I would move to L.A. necessarily, I was also kind of thinking about Seattle. But I need you to know, if I moved here, I wouldn’t be trying to start something, I wouldn’t be—”

“No, I get it,” I said. But I didn’t. If JB and I lived in the same city, if we worked closely together, something would happen. I used the back of my fingers to stroke his hand and felt every hair on my arm prickle. “Are you seeing this, though?” I asked. Maybe I was wrong, and the effect was only on my side. But I couldn’t imagine sitting next to JB in a car without violently making out.

“Yeah,” JB said. “I mean, that part might be kind of a problem. We would have to agree to not be physical. Because if we start being physical, it’s all over.”

I took my hand away. “Do you think it’s realistic, the idea of us never being physical?”

JB didn’t answer right away. Bodhi was getting more and more worked up, screeching for more meat, and when I finally gave him some, he threw it right back at me. “I swear Bodhi is getting the meat sweats, he is totally done in here, can we go outside?”

“Yeah, yeah,” JB said. “You take him, I’ll clean all this up.”

I pulled Bodhi from his highchair and shook all the meat and bread crumbs off him, then perched him on my hip and pushed out into the cold gray afternoon. It was windy, and the cars driving by were loud and sounded kind of like the ocean. When JB came out, we decided to walk a little, so I strapped Bodhi into his carrier, where he fell almost instantly asleep. We talked as we walked, but only about how the business would work and what the pricing would be. The open question of what we would do with the volcano of our physical attraction was carefully ignored. He hadn’t said anything about whether he really did object to my work, whether he could handle being with me while I still rated other men’s dicks. And maybe he hadn’t said anything because he didn’t yet know how he felt about it.

We quickly realized that we should offer different packages, different levels of service.

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