Shit. I was going to have to end this, wasn’t I? Before it got too serious to take back?
Well. At least I had a sure-fire way to do that. To make sure Hudson wanted nothing to do with me ever again.
“Will you take me back to my house?” I asked.
“Oh. Um. Yeah.”
The way he played with his cuffs told me everything I needed to know—that he thought I was ditching him. I backtracked.
“Sorry. I mean…will you come back with me to my house?”
Even in the low light of the dark car, relief etched itself all over his face. The sight pierced me straight through. He’d been so afraid of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, and losing me.
“Of course. Absolutely.”
My heart broke for him a little. Because he wanted to keep me. And in a few minutes, he’d understand why he shouldn’t.
Why he couldn’t.
28
All the Whore-y Details
“So…you have to promise you won’t laugh. This is pretty embarrassing for me.”
My bedroom had two walk-in closets. One I used for clothes. The other I’d briefly considered making my sex toy depository, but that seemed a little sad back in my virgin days. So, instead, I’d made it into a secret workshop. Soundproof and still, it had just enough room for a desk, a chair, and a little bit of pacing space. I’d taken out the shelving so I could paint one wall with chalk paint.
Whenever I had a hard day at BuzzCorp, whenever I needed to put pleasure away and return to my roots, I went in there to work on my own little fantasy projects.
When we returned home, I brought Hudson there. Too big for the small space, he stood in the center, staring at the dozens of computations written on the chalkboard wall and the sketches of rocket ships and thrusters and engines on the other walls. A scale model of the Hathor, the pipe dream of a rocket I’d been designing in secret since getting fired from GalacticSolutions, dangled above our heads.
“What is all this?” he asked.
Nothing. Just a lifetime of abandoned dreams.
Since I wasn’t a character in a melodrama, though, I just shrugged. “I don’t really talk about myself either, you know. I get that it can be scary, letting people see deeper than the surface.” One of my fingers brushed a drafting-pencil sketch of a fuel injector. “This is what I’m hiding.”
He slunk deeper into the closet, his own fingers trailing across my hand-drawn design specs. “These areamazing. But why are you showing me this?”
“You asked why I let my parents talk to me that way. Why I believe them. Why I can’tdothe normal things other people do.”
“I didn’t ever ask that last thing. You’ve always been normal to me,” he replied.
“Here’s the thing. My parents are right about me.”
“Absolutely not—”
He reached out for me, but I held my hands out in ano closergesture. “Just listen, and then make your judgments, okay? I need you to understand why you can’t want me. Why we can’t be…anything more than we are. Why it’s pointless to care about me. I’ve never…I’ve never told anyone all of this. I need you to listen.”
A response was clearly on its way, so I cut him off before he could.
“So…” I said, taking a seat on the floor. Might as well be comfortable. “You know how I grew up.”
“Prodigy stuff,” he said hesitantly. “Right.”
“Yeah. And my parents were always there. Once they realized how smart I was, they dedicated themselves to making sure I had the best of everything. They kept my schedules, they drove me everywhere, they bought my school supplies, picked my clothes. Everything.”
“They didn’t give you any independence.”
