My stomach turned. This was fucked up.
And yeah, I knew it was #notallmen, but the fact that there was enough of these fucking assholes to fill the convention center said there were still way too many of them.
I held tighter to Maeve’s hand, wishing she would have agreed to stay at the hotel. I knew it was pointless to try and protect her from this shit but I still wished I could.
“This way,” Remy shouted over the noise of the crowd.
Bram and I flanked Maeve as we followed Remy toward a sign bearing the wordsDebate Stage.
Unsurprisingly, the crowd was mostly men, but they looked like a bunch of fucking robots. We were surrounded by a sea of polos and tight T-shirts designed to show off muscles that had been honed in expensive gyms.
I could almost smell the desperation in the room, a bunch of sad little boys who didn’t get enough attention from women in the world and who were too self-absorbed to realize it wasn’t because women were shallow gold diggers but because the men at Apex didn’t deserve it.
I’d heard it all in the months we’d been tracking Ethan Todd: the 80/20 rule (80% of women only wanted to date 20% of men), the 666 rule (six feet tall, six figures, six inches), and on and on it went.
Except everywhere you looked there was evidence that it was bullshit: short men with beautiful women, poor men with beautiful women, scrawny men with beautiful women.
Almost like what a woman really wanted was just a fucking decent guy who treated her like a fucking human being. Meanwhile these fucking losers worked on their bodies with single-minded devotion and stuffed down every emotional impulse in an effort to attract women who just wanted them to cook dinner now and then and care enough to make sure she got some sleep.
It boggled the mind that they could be so stupid.
And then there were theinfluencerslike Ethan Todd, men — and a handful of women — who capitalized on the collective insecurities and stupidity of other men by convincing them theyhad the magic bullet, the key togetting bitcheswhen the entirety of the key was to not think of women as bitches.
We joined the line outside the debate stage and inched our way forward.
“I hope we can get in,” Maeve said.
She’d worn her hair pulled back into a ponytail and kept her face free of makeup, and I hadn’t needed her to say it to know she was trying to be under the radar in enemy territory. The crowd wasn’t entirely men, but the women were a definite minority, and there was a strange kind of energy around them, a kind of revulsion-tinged desperation.
She looked so fucking pretty it almost broke my heart until I remembered the way she’d looked the night before, naked and tangled up in us at the hotel. We hadn’t been able to get enough of her, and we’d fucked long into the night, experimenting with every possible configuration until there was nothing but bodies and pleasure.
I forced myself not to think about it when my dick got hard.
I squeezed her hand as the line inched forward. “We’ll get in.”
A few minutes later, we did, and we entered a large conference room filled with people. It was standing-room only, just a ring of people crowding in around an elevated stage with two podiums under lights.
I heard snippets of conversation, caught Ethan Todd’s name in more than one of them. He was the star of the show and everyone was waiting to watch him take down the graduate student from Columbia who’d offered to debate him in place of NYNancy, who was a no-show for reasons that were obvious, at least to us.
A guy about our age in a suit and tie entered from the main doors and made his way to one of the podiums.
“Hello and welcome to the Apex Debate Stage!”
Maeve looked nervously around the room as the crowd cheered.
“Today’s debate will follow the usual format, with each pair of opposing debaters taking the stage for a total of twenty minutes,” the guys said. “Each debater will have three minutes to make their arguments on a predetermined topic of their choosing, followed by a one-minute rebuttal by their opponent. This will continue until the twenty-minute period is up. We ask that you remain quiet during the debate.” He paused. “We’ll start with Meredith K. Dunne, professor at NYU Law, and Jake Thurman debating the Nineteenth Amendment.”
They were going to debate a woman’s right to vote? Really?
Jesus fuck.
I scoped out the room while he read their bios. Meredith K. Dunne was an accomplished lawyer with two graduate degrees, including a PhD, and over twenty years of experience in constitutional law. Thurman was a thirty-year-old online influencer with a top-rated podcast and over five million social media followers.
Fucking perfect.
There were no doors other than the ones we’d used to enter the room — the same doors the moderator or MC or whatever the fuck he was had used to enter the room — which meant that the debate participants, including Ethan Todd, would have to use those same doors.
As if to prove my thesis, Professor Dunne and Jake Thurman entered the room to thunderous applause. The crowd parted to allow them room to get to the stage and I caught Bram’s eye and edged toward the doors.
