All while trying to decrypt not one, but two ominous warnings about my romantic prospects.
No pressure.
44
Standing O
We’d gone over the order of operations a dozen times in rehearsals. I would step out. Wave. The crowd would roar. I’d introduce the hype video. The hype video would play. And then I would give the pitch to end all pitches, selling this entire room, from Mr. Ose in the front row to Lloyd Exeter glowering on the sidelines to the sinfluencers in the back, on the fact that The Fantasy was the future of our industry. The future of pleasure. The future of sexual autonomy.
It went according to plan. The reception from the crowd left my ears ringing. My team cheered loudest of all, shooting me encouraging thumbs-ups from the middle of the convention hall, each decked out in a wall of matching black-and-pink BuzzCorp T-shirts.
However, then the auxiliary lights went out, and the hype video began to play.
Only it wasn’t the final one that Addie had shown me last night. Not the one I’d given dozens of notes on over the last few days. It was similar, to be sure. The theme of the video was “I want.” I want freedom. I want to feel good. I want to chase excitement. I want to explore. I want, I want, I want…
It was part Apple commercial, part “Why I Love Chick-fil-A” ad, and part manufactured authenticity, featuring testers and BuzzCorp superfans talking candidly about their sex lives and the ways in which our products have helped them. A group of older married women who had their own “postmenopause book club,” only instead of reading the same book every two weeks, they tried the same toy and swapped reviews and stories over chardonnay and pot brownies. The newly disabled woman who rediscovered her sexual power after an accident. The dead-bed queer couple who rekindled their spark. The religious apostate who took control of her own sexuality. A trans man exploring his true body. Divorcées, college kids, pensioners…
And Hudson.
Yeah. Hudson Fucking Bailey, staring right down into the barrel of the camera.
I startled at the sight of him. As he spoke, though, the coiled muscles in my body relaxed until I was totally transfixed. Hypnotized by the larger-than-life motions of his lips and the sight of his big hands gesturing across the screen.
“Hi. I’m Hudson Bailey. I actually used to work at BuzzCorp. Don’t anymore. But when I came here, I thought it would be just another job, you know? That what I was building was just the same as weather systems or online payment processors. I didn’t know anything about sex toys. There’s a million reasons for that, but mostly, I think, I was afraid of such intimacy.”
Oh my God. He was doing it. He was stopping his ridiculous people-pleasing act on the most public stage of them all.
“It takes guts, you know, to be vulnerable enough with someone to bring them that pleasure and let them bringyoupleasure, too. What if you say the wrong thing or suggest the wrong toy? What if you’re so inexperienced and weird that your partner, the person you care about most in the world, decides to stop calling you?”
Those words lingered in the air. My stomach twisted. I wanted to reach up, grab video Hudson, and hold him until heknewthat there wasn’t anything he could ever do to push me away.
“Anyway, as I got more familiar with sex toys, I realized that I hadn’t just been holding myself back in the bedroom, but in so many other ways, because I was afraid. So as I got more confident in the bedroom, I got more confident in general, too. I…I fell in love. And I guess doing this little interview is my way of expressing that love. Of finally refusing to let myself be silenced. My time at BuzzCorp taught me we should never be afraid of who we are or what we want. Orwhowe want.”
With that, he looked down the center of the camera once again, as if he knew he was talking directly to me, despite this being recorded (I could only guess) a night or two before. His smile was honest and sincere.MyHudson smile, not the one he usually reserved for everyone else.
The music behind his confessional swelled. Here it was. The big finish.
“My name is Hudson Bailey. I’m a big fan of The Penetrator. And I want to take my voice back. Because I want the woman I love to know that I’m hers forever.”
He loved me.
He loved me. And I’d let him go.
As the video played out its final moments, I realized that Hudson wasn’t the only man in the video. There were several of them in this edit, each speaking more enthusiastically than the last about BuzzCorp and our products.
Oh my God.
He’d given them the courage to come forward.
Him going on the record in front of the camera gave the other men in our focus groups the belief that they could do the same.
Hudson had solved our marketing problem.
I scanned the crowd, hoping to find him. The real him, not the projected image.
It was really for the best that I couldn’t. I probably would have pulled a silly stunt, run off the stage, jumped into his arms, and kissed him like in one of Leelah’s rom-coms.
Instead, with the confidence of a loved woman—a woman not just loved by a man but by her cheering friends in the audience and by, maybe most importantly, herself—I gave the rest of my launch speech.
