“I see.”
“You do?”
My heart swelled. Of course he would understand. Hudson always understood. Now he would take my hands in his and say he didn’t need an EEG either—he knew that he loved me, and we should be together, walking bravely and certainly into our future…
Only…that didn’t happen. He reached into his breast pocket and fished around.
The topic shifted on a dime. No more love talk. In fact, the further we got away from that subject, the more he perked up.
“Speaking of uncertain futures, I wanted to pass this along. I was thinking about your rocket problem—”
“I don’t have a rocket problem. And all this thinking you did—was this before or after you went home for lunch so you could jerk off to the thought of me?” I teased.
“Ha-ha. Look, theworldhas a rocket problem and that problem is you not making rockets. So, here.”
“What is it?”
Having found it in the depths of his breast pocket, he handed over a small card. It was worn from years inside a file folder,meaning he’d had the thing for a long time and only fished it out for me.
“This is the contact info for my friend, Malcolm McEwan, CEO of SkyTech. Brilliant scientist. Always looking to expand his team. I think you two would get along really well. You know, if you ever wanted to go back to aeronautics. No pressure or anything. I don’t want to commandeer your choices like everyone else does. I know, I know. Entropy. You don’t want to rock the boat now. But if you want to get coffee while you’re in New York, maybe after the product launch, I think he’d appreciate the phone call. You have a real gift for design and engineering, Scout. I want you to work on whatever will make you happy. You’d be an asset anywhere you went.”
It wasn’t a declaration. It wasn’t his heart on a silver platter. But it was a considerate gesture that left me with hope.
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “Is there…is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything else we need to get out in the open now that I’ve totally embarrassed myself with my EEG story? I mean, we’re going to go our separate ways after OFest. If there’s any time to be honest, it’s now.”
He searched my face. What he found, I couldn’t begin to guess. “We’re here. That’s all that matters. Who cares about the details?”
I did. I cared about the details. Details were everything to a scientist.
More importantly, now, as a woman falling in love, the details were more than everything. They felt like theonlything.
To press him, though, would be to push him away. Or worse, he might just lie to avoid hurting me or rocking the boat. I couldn’t have that.
I could bide my time. He just needed to trust me with his heart the way he trusted me with his cock.
I’d wait, I decided. We had until OFest, after all.
Time to change the subject. I’d at least enjoy him while I had him.
Sitting up from my barstool, I crept onto the kitchen counter, crawling along it until I was in front of him, breasts dangling right before his eyes.
“Can I ask you a question, then? I’ve always wondered…”
As he traced the line of my bra, he chuckled, breathy and low. “You can ask me, tell me,doanything you want to me right now. I’ve never been so suggestible.”
“How did you know? Like, when you touched my leg in the office that day, how did you know I’d be into it? That was a time when you were afraid to tell me anything else you wanted, but you still told me that you wanted me. You had to have some inkling that I felt the same.”
“Bold of you to assume I knew that. Could have just been a shot in the dark.”
“C’mon. You were so confident. Was itthatobvious I was into you?”
“We had adjoining rooms, Scout.”
Those words were heavy, like I should have been able to read some deeper meaning from them. But without any context, I was just as in the dark as I was before he said it.
“At the conference we went to right before the Lloyd thing came out,” he explained. “We had adjoining rooms. You didn’t know, did you? Anyway, the walls were not very thick. The night before we left…I heard you.”
Oh.
