Chapter 36 Come Again?
Come Again?
Once we left the club, he took me where we’d never gone before.
His place.
Upon arriving at his short-term corporate housing, I remembered our questions game at mini golf. He told me he didn’t like people getting too close. Yet there I was. Being let into a new dimension of his existence. If getting close had a synonym, it was walking into Hudson’s apartment.
Each time he showed me a new dimension of himself, each time he revealed some hidden element of Hudson Bailey, I felt honored. It was an exclusive club. A limited run. A highly rare element.
This home visit was no different. Except in all the ways that it was.
Because I knew now that I loved him. Empirical data or not, I knew. And this felt like proof that maybe he loved me back. Maybe if I jumped, the long fall into love wouldn’t be a lonely one.
The decor was all what I’d expected from a place you could rent by the month.
Clean, comfortable, and inoffensive. But everywhere I looked, there were new pieces of Hudson lore waiting to be uncovered.
Stacks of secondhand western paperbacks on the bedside table.
Graphic tees peeking out from a laundry hamper. Franken Berry cereal on the counter.
I felt both like a stranger in this place and perfectly at home. The entire experience was a microcosmic encapsulation of my relationship with Hudson. Familiar and alien all at once. I wanted to dive through everything, to unpack these fragments of him.
He gestured me to get comfortable on a kitchen barstool while he hunted through the cabinets.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starved,” I admitted.
We’d been in such a rush to get to the strip club that we’d not eaten anything before arriving.
I eyed the Franken Berry on the counter.
Fruity, fun cereals were not in my household growing up; I coveted them, especially on a sloshing-booze stomach.
“I’ll throw some dinner together,” he said, as if answering my unspoken request.
“You can cook?”
“Basic skill.”
“You’d be shocked how few people understand basic skills,” I mumbled, fully aware that I was one of those people. I could cook a takeout menu and popcorn—and sometimes, depending on the microwave, not even popcorn.
“Ramen?”
Men. I hadn’t had much experience with them, but saying “I can cook” when what they meant was “I’m a bachelor who can throw noodles in a pan” seemed typical.
My reaction must have been written all over my face, because he waved not a bag of instant ramen at me, but the fancy box I’d only seen in specialty grocery stores.
“This is the good stuff. You’re going to love it. Did you know there’s a Japanese word for the slurping you make when you eat ramen? Zuzutto.” He mimicked the sound. I smirked.
“Sort of sounds like the noise you make when you go down on me.”
“Hmm,” he said with a playful tilt of his head. “I don’t hear it. I’m just going to have to investigate your hypothesis later.”
So, sitting at the bar, I watched him roll the sleeves of his buttoned shirt to the elbows, slip into an apron, and go to work.
Not to get romantic about it or anything, but every movement enraptured me.
His hands beneath the faucet as he washed them.
The precision of his knife cutting through green onions.
The tosses of the wok cooking our ground pork.
The dexterity of peeling the soft-boiled eggs.
I was so lost in him that I didn’t register our silence until he set the steaming bowl in front of me.
After everything that had happened tonight, the quiet domesticity was jarring, but not unpleasant.
We slurped—zuzutto’d—for a while. I, however, felt like I was carrying a ball of electrons in my hand. Now that I had finally copped to loving Hudson, I wanted just the right moment to come out with it.
“You’ve gotten pretty quiet for a man who just fucked a woman in a strip club bathroom,” I said by way of an opener.
“I’m still waiting for you to explain what you were doing there,” he said, lips curved.
He doesn’t need to know that. “I told you. Girls’ night.”
“Wearing Leelah’s EEG headband?” My entire body tightened. Off my look, he shrugged. “She showed it to me the first week she got here. She’s damn proud of that thing.”
Damn. I’d been caught.
“We were running an experiment,” I conceded.
“Oh? And what experiment necessitated deep brain scans while at a strip club?”
Okay. Not only caught, but trapped. He wasn’t going to let me go without an explanation.
“I’m not a person who understands feelings,” I said, after a bit. “I have them. A lot of them. But I don’t necessarily get them. When I run up against something I don’t understand, I try to analyze it.”
“What feeling were you analyzing at a strip club, then?”
I chose the safest answer. An evasion. “Lust.”
He chuckled. “You understand lust.”
All I wanted to do was stare at my hands, but I forced myself to catalog every microexpression crossing his face as I explained myself.
“Yes. But I don’t understand the…other things I’m feeling. The things I’m feeling for you. And we thought the EEG—if I compared pure lust to whatever it is I’ve got going on here, I might be able to get a handle on it.”
My attention wasn’t rewarded. His face remained completely impassive. “I see. And what did you discover in this little experiment?”
“I didn’t check the data.”
I didn’t need to.
Finally, a flicker. His lips turned down at the corners. “It’s a little worrying. That you feel the need to check the data on us.”
“You’re leaving. Our time’s almost up,” I said, feeling defensive. “This was only temporary, you and me. I wanted to know the facts before I did anything reckless. You know how I am.”
The sad set of his mouth did not correct. I panicked.
“How familiar are you with the concept of entropy?”
“I’m a glorified IT guy, Scout,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “Entropy sounds above my pay grade.”
“Well. Entropy is basically how much chaos is in any given system. Evolutionarily speaking, entropy is an enemy. It’s dangerous.
So our minds learned to compensate for entropy by developing predictive powers.
We take all of the inputs and information we’re getting, our mind makes snap judgments about what could happen next, and we make decisions that keep us alive, unhurt, and functioning.
A predictable existence is a safer one.”
I fiddled with my chopsticks.
“I have always—especially after everything that happened with Lloyd at GalacticSolutions—tried to minimize entropy. I thought that maybe the EEG, the data, would help me reduce my entropy in our relationship. It’s especially scary now, with The Fantasy launch approaching.
I’ve been getting better at delegating in the office, but in other areas, like with you, I don’t know how much uncertainty I can handle right now. This seemed like a solution.”
“I see.”
“You do?”
My heart swelled. Of course he would understand. Hudson always understood. Now he would take my hands in his and say he didn’t need an EEG either—he knew that he loved me, and we should be together, walking bravely and certainly into our future…
Only…that didn’t happen. He reached into his breast pocket and fished around.
The topic shifted on a dime. No more love talk. In fact, the further we got away from that subject, the more he perked up.
“Speaking of uncertain futures, I wanted to pass this along. I was thinking about your rocket problem—”
“I don’t have a rocket problem. And all this thinking you did—was this before or after you went home for lunch so you could jerk off to the thought of me?” I teased.
“Ha-ha. Look, the world has a rocket problem and that problem is you not making rockets. So, here.”
“What is it?”
Having found it in the depths of his breast pocket, he handed over a small card. It was worn from years inside a file folder, meaning he’d had the thing for a long time and only fished it out for me.
“This is the contact info for my friend, Malcolm McEwan, CEO of SkyTech. Brilliant scientist. Always looking to expand his team. I think you two would get along really well. You know, if you ever wanted to go back to aeronautics. No pressure or anything. I don’t want to commandeer your choices like everyone else does.
I know, I know. Entropy. You don’t want to rock the boat now.
But if you want to get coffee while you’re in New York, maybe after the product launch, I think he’d appreciate the phone call.
You have a real gift for design and engineering, Scout.
I want you to work on whatever will make you happy. You’d be an asset anywhere you went.”
It wasn’t a declaration. It wasn’t his heart on a silver platter. But it was a considerate gesture that left me with hope.
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “Is there…is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything else we need to get out in the open now that I’ve totally embarrassed myself with my EEG story? I mean, we’re going to go our separate ways after OFest. If there’s any time to be honest, it’s now.”
He searched my face. What he found, I couldn’t begin to guess. “We’re here. That’s all that matters. Who cares about the details?”
I did. I cared about the details. Details were everything to a scientist.
More importantly, now, as a woman falling in love, the details were more than everything. They felt like the only thing.
To press him, though, would be to push him away. Or worse, he might just lie to avoid hurting me or rocking the boat. I couldn’t have that.
I could bide my time. He just needed to trust me with his heart the way he trusted me with his cock.
I’d wait, I decided. We had until OFest, after all.
Time to change the subject. I’d at least enjoy him while I had him.
Sitting up from my barstool, I crept onto the kitchen counter, crawling along it until I was in front of him, breasts dangling right before his eyes.
“Can I ask you a question, then? I’ve always wondered…”
As he traced the line of my bra, he chuckled, breathy and low. “You can ask me, tell me, do anything you want to me right now. I’ve never been so suggestible.”
“How did you know? Like, when you touched my leg in the office that day, how did you know I’d be into it? That was a time when you were afraid to tell me anything else you wanted, but you still told me that you wanted me. You had to have some inkling that I felt the same.”
“Bold of you to assume I knew that. Could have just been a shot in the dark.”
“C’mon. You were so confident. Was it that obvious I was into you?”
“We had adjoining rooms, Scout.”
Those words were heavy, like I should have been able to read some deeper meaning from them. But without any context, I was just as in the dark as I was before he said it.
“At the conference we went to right before the Lloyd thing came out,” he explained. “We had adjoining rooms. You didn’t know, did you? Anyway, the walls were not very thick. The night before we left…I heard you.”
Oh.
Mortification infected every inch of me. Retreating off the other side of the counter, I put as much space between us as I could. This new information might as well have been an unleashed toxic spore I was trying in vain to escape.
“You heard me masturbating that night?”
His lips quirked ever so slightly. “And screaming out my name when you came. Yeah.”
I slammed my eyes shut, as though that would keep the truth out. Hudson had heard me masturbating over him. We were basically strangers and he’d caught me fucking myself to the very thought of him.
Cringe. That was all I could feel. Cringe.
Moving to my side, he tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.
“It was very flattering, really. Especially because I’d been fantasizing about you since the day we met. I just can’t believe you didn’t hear me screaming your name about ten minutes later.”
In that moment, through the haze of humiliation, I knew that he had to love me. We were made for each other.