Chapter 37 Post-Orgasmic Bliss
Post-Orgasmic Bliss
The week and a half before OFest was the happiest time of my life.
I say that fully aware that it wasn’t a high bar to clear. I wasn’t a particularly happy person to begin with, and my career and personal peaks never lasted long.
Still. For a lonely, sad girl, those precious days meant the world to me.
Hudson and I spent every waking moment together.
I hung out with Addie and Leelah, even inviting Clara along to join us for coffee a few times.
Aside from our current marketing hiccups, the work on The Fantasy couldn’t have gone better.
Now that I had let go of my white-knuckle grip on the project, the teams felt more confident than ever to press forward with their work.
We’d fixed the bugs, the design looked fantastic, ecstatic fuck reports poured in, and Hudson impressed everyone with his newfound, comprehensive sex toy knowledge.
In short, we were ready to knock our OFest presentation out of the park, I was having incredible sex daily, I began to feel like a real adult instead of a cog in a machine, I had friends, and as for love…?
It was so close I could taste it in every single one of Hudson’s kisses.
Naturally, this put me on guard for calamity to strike.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I muttered as I placed my luggage on the X-ray machine at DFW.
We were all heading to the national OFest convention.
None of that rinky-dink regional shit that Hudson and I had first visited all those weeks ago.
Our equipment and prototypes had been shipped ahead of us, but the team was flying together to JFK for the big event.
Usually I attended alone, but given everything that was at stake for the company, Clara decided that all personnel were essential this time.
Besides my keynote speech and product rollout, we would need people to staff our booth on the display floor, make sure that the marketing materials were properly organized, keep our prototypes in fine working order, have face time with potential buyers, run the focus groups and testing, finish the hype video for our presentation… it was a massive operation.
Before Hudson, before Addie and Leelah, before the events of the last few weeks, their presence would have annoyed me. I would have wanted complete control. Now I looked forward to letting the team flex their muscles to our competition.
In short, the nerves in my stomach had nothing to do with OFest and everything to do with, well, something else.
Someone else.
Addie grumbled beside me, still groggy from the four a.m. wake-up call for our flight. “All right, Han Solo-Play. Cool it with the ominous portends.”
“I don’t know,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet with pent-up, nervous energy. “I’m just too happy. The universe must be waiting to pull the rug out from under me.”
Leelah, looking perfect in her head-to-toe matching athleisure, struggled to fit her carry-on through the machine.
“You’re only worried because you’re going to see Lloyd Exeter again.
Don’t worry. You’re going to ace your presentation, show all the haters wrong, and then become a millionaire with your stock options in BuzzCorp. We’ll see who’s laughing then.”
“I don’t know. This doesn’t feel like a Lloyd Exeter worry.”
“What, then?” Addie asked.
Finally free of her bag, Leelah shuffled into the body scanner line behind us. “It’s Hudson, isn’t it? You know he’s leaving soon.”
“Jesus, Scout! You haven’t told him how you feel yet?”
“I can’t,” I spluttered.
“Why not?”
“Because he has to make the first move.”
Addie tightened the strings of her Eras hoodie. “This isn’t the 1600s. We have feminism and dating apps. You don’t have to wait for the guy to take the lead.”
Believe me, I knew that. It was all I’d been thinking about since my EEG experiment. When he hadn’t immediately jumped on the opportunity to tell me how he felt that night over ramen, I posited that I should have confessed my feelings first.
But it wasn’t so simple as that. Not with Hudson.
“He is the worst people pleaser I’ve ever met,” I said.
“Once, I ordered Thai takeout, and he literally made himself physically ill because he didn’t want to disappoint me by saying it was too spicy for him.
He told me he signed up for a pyramid scheme, fully knowing it was one, because he didn’t want to hurt the essential oil lady.
He’s still technically a Junior Scent Queen in that company, paying money every month because he’s too afraid of what canceling will do to her downline. ”
“And?”
“And if I tell him that I’m in love with him, he’d probably lie and agree just to keep the peace. Just so he wouldn’t hurt me. That’s who he is.”
“Seems like a stretch,” Addie groaned as the body scanner line inched forward.
“Have you asked him about love?” Leelah asked.
“I hinted at it once.” I don’t understand the other things I’m feeling. The things I’m feeling for you. “He didn’t bite.”
“Maybe he’s scared.”
A TSA agent waved me through. I stepped into the scanner, feeling less transparent there than I did talking with my friends.
Once we regrouped on the other side to collect our bags, I continued:
“I want him. More than anything. And I’m ready to take the leap—whatever that looks like. But until he tells me what he wants, I can’t risk it. I need to know that he’s genuine, not that he’s faking it to keep the peace until after OFest.”
“If only someone had an EEG machine and we could empirically see if he was telling the truth…” Leelah joked.
“We’re not hooking Hudson up to your sci-fi headband.” I’d already considered it and dismissed it as an option. He’d never agree to it. “Does it really count as a declaration of love if a machine tells me and not him?”
Our bags plodded out onto the conveyor belt—a bright purple number for Leelah, a sensible backpack for me, and a crossbody with barely enough room to fit a book for Addie.
As she threw the latter over her shoulder, she asked: “What if he doesn’t confess his undying adoration for you in the next few days? ”
“He will,” I said, my voice a little shaky.
“You think so?”
“That’s my hypothesis, anyway. C’mon, ladies. It’s New York City! It’s the fall. And time is running out. I believe that he does love me back. He just has to find the courage to say it out loud.”
Neither of them looked very sure. Rather, they looked about as sure as I felt. But they respectfully bowed out and we went our separate ways—them in search of coffee, me in search of the gate.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I think I need to pull you for a secondary search.”
I giggled as Hudson’s breath tickled my neck, spinning out of his grasp and righting my suitcase as I went. “Don’t! Clara might see.”
“What?” he said oh-so-innocently. “We’re just two colleagues messing around in the airport.”
Joining the throng, we walked past duty-free shops and cheap barbecue joints.
“Well, last time we messed around together at an airport, we ended up fucking each other’s brains out just a few days later.”
“I’m not waiting a few days this time,” he purred. “I intend to have you all over New York City as soon as possible. How much do you think we’d have to pay a cabbie to let us fool around in the back of his car?”
My stomach tightened at that mental image, but…“I wish I could. Unfortunately, I’m on a tight schedule today. I need to visit the convention center first. Get some work done.”
“Can I go with you? It’s a perfectly acceptable place for us to hang out together. Just work, you know.”
He winked at me, and I could practically read his thoughts. He wanted to go to the convention center to get some hardware or ideas for our later play. Dirty man.
Not that I could blame him. I wanted that, too.
Soon we rejoined our group. After loading up on breakfast Panda Express and Auntie Anne’s pretzels (hey, it’s an airport, the concept of “temporally appropriate food” does not exist), we all boarded our flight.
I sat a row behind Hudson, on the opposite side of the plane. From my place, I watched him settle in. Once he was…
Mile High Club? I texted.
His shoulders shook with laughter. He typed; then his response pinged through.
We literally did it in the strip club like two weeks ago. Maybe we should pace ourselves with the semi-public sex.
I typed my reply through a pout. Spoilsport.
Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get plenty of attention in New York. Share a room with me?
Wouldn’t have it any other way.
We took off moments later. And as the hum of the plane’s engines sang me to sleep, a saccharine-sweet tang coated my tongue, sharper than the ice-cold Diet Coke served to me by Delta’s finest.
There it was. That hope. I was feeling hope, not forcing it this time.
I was going to New York with my friends. My future looked bright. The industry would see me as a force to be reckoned with. And Hudson would finally tell me how he felt.
Nothing could go wrong.
I wouldn’t let it.