Chapter 21 Business Lunch
Business Lunch
A few days went by like that. With sex-ploration.
Boldly cumming where many men, women, and beyond have cum before.
We settled into an easy rhythm, showing off my impressive toy collection as we worked our way through (I’m assuming, having never read it) the first several dozen chapters of the Kama Sutra.
We were emphatically not dating. Not dating, you hear me? I was just insatiably horny for him, he for me, and sometimes he fell asleep at my place, holding me in his arms like a sexy, naked security blanket. Nothing more.
I’d done a decent job of maintaining work-life balance.
We both stayed focused and disciplined at the office.
Deadlines were met. Progress reports completed.
Notable improvements to The Fantasy prototype turned in.
Every once in a while, intrusive thoughts about wanting to have sex with him in the supply closet imposed on my mind, but like a normal, high-functioning adult, I nudged them aside until after close of business when he could fuck me in the privacy and safety of my own home.
One morning, though, while I was tying my shoes for work, Hudson kept rearranging my collection of bedside erotica. First alphabetically, then by color.
“Everything okay?” I asked playfully.
“Hm? Me? Yeah. I was just thinking…what are you doing tonight?”
“I was planning to stay late at the office and get some work done,” I said, without giving it much thought.
A copy of Good Girl’s Guide to Kink dropped to the floor. Hudson rushed to pick it up.
“Oh yeah. Cool. Cool.” He cleared his throat not once but twice.
Adjusted his glasses. Put the book back on the table.
“Well. You enjoy that. Let me know how it goes. I was thinking about maybe doing some mini golf or whatever. Just a fun thing to do on a random evening. The weather’s nice, you know. ”
I did know. Leelah, who’d become my most constant text companion, had woken me up with gushing messages about the crisp fall air. We were having lunch to celebrate. “Great. Maybe we can link up after I’m done with work?”
“I’d love that.”
That was what he said, anyway. His tone, though, lodged in my head like an annoying math problem I couldn’t quite figure out.
It still bothered me that afternoon, when Leelah and I found ourselves together at lunch.
In the center of the Trio Towers, where the BuzzCorp offices were located, sat a fabulous outdoor oasis, where every day new vendors would come to hawk their wares and entice the office-dwelling ghouls to come out of their cubicles for lunch.
I absent-mindedly chowed down on a Korean burrito with one hand while scanning Addie’s latest marketing report.
“You know,” she said, picking at her salad, “when I said we should hang out more, this is not what I had in mind.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, mouth full of bulgogi and rice.
“Can’t you put the laptop away for, like, a second?”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t what friends do. Friends don’t work through lunch, Scout. They gossip and laugh and talk shit about their coworkers.”
Not that it was worth mentioning, but now that Jared was gone, I liked our colleagues.
I flipped a page in the marketing report and frowned.
The campaign, which would debut at OFest in New York, was not shaping up how I wanted.
“Our deadlines are agnostic on the topic of friendship. No, in fact, they’re actively hostile to the concept. ”
“Scout,” Leelah groaned.
“What? We’re work-eating outside. This is practically, like, a friendship field trip for me. Now, do you have that performance data we discussed earlier? I want to rerun your numbers after I double-check the tests that Terrence proposed today—”
“No. Close your laptop.”
“But—”
“I said close it. I thought you were trying new things. Based on what I’ve heard, working through lunch is not new for you.”
Finally deigning to look up at her, I found my friend—still weird to think of anyone as a friend—glowering at me with a mixture of frustration and concern.
“I’m trying new things in moderation,” I explained. “I am not letting this get in the way of The Fantasy. I’ve got to be responsible here, not go on a ‘normal human experiences’ bender and wrap my life and career around a tree.”
“That’s too many metaphors. Stick to STEM, babe. Well, STEM and sex. How is that going, by the way?”
Ah, so we’d reached it. The real reason she wanted me to take my head out of work and place it firmly back into my bedroom. So she could get that sweet Hudson-and-Scout-Kissing-in-a-Tree gossip.
Heat flooded my face. I returned to my work. “Good.”
“Just good?” The wind kicked up, feathering her blowout so it perfectly framed her sneer. “What’s wrong with him, then?”
I spit out my water. “Excuse me?”
She snatched the laptop out of my hands and used the hem of her sweater to wipe it down. Clever woman. Now I’d never get it back. “If he’s just good, and not, like, spectacular and stunning, then he’s got to have red flags somewhere. ACAB? More like, yes, ACAB, but also AMAB. All Men Are Bastards.”
“Bold statement coming from Miss Rom-Com. Weren’t he and I supposed to be in love by now?”
“Not yet,” she said, sounding it out like I was a small child failing a phonics lesson. “You only just broke your ‘we’re only having sex for one night’ rule. This is the getting to know you, fun-and-games phase. You can’t expect to fall in love with him after just a week.”
“I don’t expect to ever be in love with him,” I retorted.
“And why not?”
Because I ruin everything I touch. Because no one has ever shown me before that I’m lovable and I’m inclined to believe them, no matter what Hudson says. Because I was burned on love once; now I’m not even sure I’d know what it looks and feels like.
“About a million reasons. But…” My emotional walls tried to slam shut, but I forced myself to talk anyway. This was what friends did. She wasn’t going to be giving my laptop back, so I might as well get this off my chest. “He won’t tell me anything about himself.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. What man doesn’t like to talk about himself nonstop?”
“Okay, I’m glad I’m not overreacting. Like, I asked about his ex-girlfriend, he was super cagey. I asked him what he wanted for dinner, he never gave me an opinion, just agreed with anything I offered. We talked about kinks and interests, he just said he wanted what I want.”
Leelah thoughtfully opened a candy bar and gave it a long chew before answering.
“Maybe he’s just insecure. Maybe he’s afraid if he says the wrong thing, you’ll ditch him and never look back.”
“I’m no prize. I can’t imagine anyone being sorry they missed out on me.”
She blinked at me. “Amazing. That minds can defy God to send man to space and defy man to give women the best orgasms of their lives…yet you don’t have imagination enough to think of yourself as valuable. Some inquisitive mind you’ve got there, Scout.”
Oh God. Was friendship just saying nice things about each other all the time? Abort. Abort.
“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 I swear if 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 relationship and all 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’t want anything 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 weather and 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: a Why 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.
Ohhhhh-hhhhh-h.
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’d love to go mini-golfing.”
“I can’t” was my sharp, knee-jerk reaction. “I’m working late.”
“You’re not working late, Scout. There’s absolutely no reason for you to work late.”