Mortification infected every inch of me. Retreating off the other side of the counter, I put as much space between us as I could. This new information might as well have been an unleashed toxic spore I was trying in vain to escape.
“You heard me masturbating that night?”
His lips quirked ever so slightly. “And screaming out my name when you came. Yeah.”
I slammed my eyes shut, as though that would keep the truth out. Hudson had heard me masturbating over him. We were basically strangers and he’d caught me fucking myself to the very thought of him.
Cringe. That was all I could feel. Cringe.
Moving to my side, he tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.
“It was very flattering, really. Especially because I’d been fantasizing about you since the day we met. I just can’t believe you didn’t hear me screamingyourname about ten minutes later.”
In that moment, through the haze of humiliation, I knew that he had to love me. We were made for each other.
37
Post-Orgasmic Bliss
The week and a half before OFest was the happiest time of my life.
I say that fully aware that it wasn’t a high bar to clear. I wasn’t a particularly happy person to begin with, and my career and personal peaks never lasted long.
Still. For a lonely, sad girl, those precious days meant the world to me. Hudson and I spent every waking moment together. I hung out with Addie and Leelah, even inviting Clara along to join us for coffee a few times. Aside from our current marketing hiccups, the work on The Fantasy couldn’t have gone better. Now that I had let go of my white-knuckle grip on the project, the teams felt more confident than ever to press forward with their work. We’d fixed the bugs, the design looked fantastic, ecstatic fuck reports poured in, and Hudson impressed everyone with his newfound, comprehensive sex toy knowledge.
In short, we were ready to knock our OFest presentation out of the park, I was having incredible sex daily, I began to feel like a real adult instead of a cog in a machine, I had friends, and as for love…?
It was so close I could taste it in every single one of Hudson’s kisses.
Naturally, this put me on guard for calamity to strike.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I muttered as I placed my luggage on the X-ray machine at DFW.
We were all heading to the national OFest convention. None of that rinky-dink regional shit that Hudson and I had first visited all those weeks ago. Our equipment and prototypes had been shipped ahead of us, but the team was flying together to JFK for the big event. Usually I attended alone, but given everything that was at stake for the company, Clara decided that all personnel were essential this time. Besides my keynote speech and product rollout, we would need people to staff our booth on the display floor, make sure that the marketing materials were properly organized, keep our prototypes in fine working order, have face time with potential buyers, run the focus groups and testing, finish the hype video for our presentation…it was a massive operation.
Before Hudson, before Addie and Leelah, before the events of the last few weeks, their presence would have annoyed me. I would have wanted complete control. Now I looked forward to letting the team flex their muscles to our competition.
In short, the nerves in my stomach hadnothingto do with OFest and everything to do with, well, something else.
Someone else.
Addie grumbled beside me, still groggy from the four a.m. wake-up call for our flight. “All right, Han Solo-Play. Cool it with the ominous portends.”
“I don’t know,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet with pent-up, nervous energy. “I’m justtoohappy. The universe must be waiting to pull the rug out from under me.”
Leelah, looking perfect in her head-to-toe matching athleisure, struggled to fit her carry-on through the machine. “You’reonly worried because you’re going to see Lloyd Exeter again. Don’t worry. You’re going to ace your presentation, show all the haters wrong, and then become a millionaire with your stock options in BuzzCorp. We’ll see who’s laughing then.”
“I don’t know. This doesn’t feel like a Lloyd Exeter worry.”
“What, then?” Addie asked.
Finally free of her bag, Leelah shuffled into the body scanner line behind us. “It’s Hudson, isn’t it? You know he’s leaving soon.”
“Jesus, Scout! You haven’t told him how you feel yet?”
“I can’t,” I spluttered.
“Why not?”
