“It’s probably for the best, anyway,” I said, dismissing the backhanded compliment. “I don’t need to like him any more than I already do.”
“Isn’t liking him more a good thing?” A retort danced on my tongue. She cut me off. “And Iswearif you say a single word about The Fantasy and the OFest deadline, I’ll smear this nougat and caramel all over your tablet screen.”
“He’s leaving at the end of his contract. Liking him would be a complication. And long-term, I don’t think I could handle a relationshipandall my work stress. He’s just a way to blow off some steam. To get some worldly experience in a safe environment.”
“Famous last words,” she snarked.
Wrapping up my burrito, I scrubbed at my hands with a nearby napkin as vigorously as if I’d just spilled coolant on them. As if I was trying to rub Hudson’s increasingly viscid self from my mind. “Besides, he’s got his own stuff going on. He probably wouldn’twantanything else. This morning, for example, he asked me what I was doing, and when I told him I’d be working late, he said he was planning to take advantage of the weatherand go mini-golfing. See? He doesn’t need me. Or want me, probably, beyond sex.”
For a long moment, Leelah stared at me and said nothing. It was the stare I gave to Clara every time I had to re-explain why I couldn’t magically make the C690 axis in our Final Thrust toy work silently when paired with a standard G570 lever: aWhy aren’t you getting this?look.
Now that I knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of such a look, I owed Clara an apology. A big one. “What?”
“He was trying to ask you out,” Leelah said.
My first instinct was to shut her down. No one ever asked me out.
But then my scientific brain took over. His nervousness. His casual question about my plans. The anxious book reordering. Our conversation the other night about opening up to each other, my impulsive, curiosity-driven desire for him to tell me about himself.
Ohhhhhhhhhhh.
The evidence was conclusive. He was trying to ask me out the only way a people-pleasing, never-wants-to-say-the-wrong-thing person could. By making it seem like an accident. He was trying not to push me too hard, trying to back-door his way into the kind of intimacy I’d hinted at during our talk.
I’d made him feel safe enough to try and take our relationship in a new direction…but he was still too nervous of my boundaries to come right out and say it.
“You know, now that I’ve run the data back, I believe your logic is pretty unimpeachable.”
“Great!” She practically cheered. “Now that you know, you can tell him you’dloveto go mini-golfing.”
“I can’t” was my sharp, knee-jerk reaction. “I’m working late.”
“You’renotworking late, Scout. There’s absolutely no reason for you to work late.”
WhileIdidn’t have anything in particular thatIneeded to stay late for,somany things had gotten away from me in the last week during my and Hudson’s sexual bliss-out. I hadn’t kept up on any of the follow-ups and double-checks I did on my team’s work…Hence my lunchtime review of Addie’s marketing schemes. “I’ve been slacking—”
“You mean you’ve been working normal business hours, but go on.” She dropped her chin into her hands and batted her eyelashes sarcastically. “Please.More excuses.”
“I need to stay on top of things, that’s all,” I grumbled after a beat.
“Jesus, Scout! This isn’t fucking rocket science. It’s notfuckingscience, either! Just text him right now, tell him you’re not working late, and ask if he has room on his scorecard for you. Literally and metaphorically.”
“I’m drowning in work. Speaking of, when are you going to send me that data we were discussing earlier?”
“I’m not. And you’re not working late tonight.”
“But I’m looking through the marketing concept Addie is drafting up with the PR team. They’re just not getting it right. I wonder if I should start sitting in on the meetings. Maybe I should call a few, just to make sure I’m getting my two cents in. And I would just feel more comfortable if Terrence—”
A small, soft, perfectly manicured hand, with each nail painted like Warhol’s soup cans, came to rest on top of mine, weighing it down until it came to rest on top of the notebooks stacked up in my lap.
Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized that I’d been gesticulating like a malfunctioning armature robot, frantically cutting through the air with each word, letting my stress carry me away.
“Addie and Marketing are perfectly capable of doing their own jobs, Scout,” Leelah said, her voice full of empathy. Care.“Just like I’m capable of running my own numbers and Terrence is capable of running his own tests. And if you weren’t trying to do everyone’s job on top of your own, maybe you wouldn’t be so freaked out about failing all the time. Maybe you’d have more time for sex and friends and lunch and Hudson.”
It was so tempting. I’d already gone this far, after all.
But old habits died hard. And old fears died harder.
What if, one day, after BuzzCorp shuttered and I was the laughingstock of the mechanical engineering world (again), and Lloyd Exeter was dancing on my grave (againagain), I looked back on this moment and regretted my choice? What if letting myself go on a date with Hudson was the decision that ultimately ruined everything?
