When I left, bouncing my way through the crowd as Leelah and Addie cleared it for me, my mentor had tears in her eyes. I blinked back my own. This wasn’t goodbye. Just asee you later, old friend.
And speaking of seeing old friends later…I had a date with Hudson Bailey.
I just had to find him first.
45
Big Finish
The reckless, rom-com-brained part of me wanted to run straight to the airport. The rational part of me knew I needed things like, you know, a phone. And a license.
So once I was free of the convention hall throng, I raced back to our HQ. There was so much to do. I needed to book an earlier flight home. I needed to catch Hudson at his apartment. I had to convince him that I loved him.
Oh God. How would I do that?
Just come out and say it?Hello, I’m in love with you.
Nope.
Or a video of my own?
Hard pass. Not photogenic. Also, the marketing team were probably sick of getting bribed to work off the clock.
Maybe a lab report? I could explain in detail how my experiment in sex turned into a successful proof of love.
Only…Hudson wasn’t an experiment. Our relationship wasn’t a proof. I didn’t need to analyze or explain what I felt for him or what had transpired between us.
It justwas. He’d made me fall in love with him, beyond all boundaries of known science and logic. It defied everything Iunderstood about the universe, which somehow made it even more real than if I could put it in a box and study it.
However, I didn’t have time to make a decision.
One was made for me.
When I returned to our empty HQ, I found that it wasn’t so empty after all. Hudson sat there, drinking a glass of the celebratory champagne we’d stocked there for after The Fantasy’s big moment in the spotlight.
Every neuron within me vibrated with an intensity even the Richter scale couldn’t measure.
He’d stayed.
“Thought you had a plane to catch,” I breathed.
“Turns out I have terrible hand-eye coordination. Couldn’t catch a plane to save my soul.”
“Very funny.”
“Girls like funny guys.”
Forget the Richter scale. I wasn’t an earthquake right now.Iwasn’t anything on my own. When two black holes merged, their gravitational forces were said to be the most intense thing in the known universe.
We were two black holes.
Destined to merge.
Destined to rattle the entire cosmos with our energy.
“I thought I was going to have, like, a whole flight back to Dallas to figure out my grand gesture. And my speech,” I said.
He tipped his champagne glass, amusement toying at the edges of his otherwise placid expression. “Yeah? What were you planning?”
