Chapter 43 What the Fuck Were You Thinking?
What the Fuck Were You Thinking?
We managed it.
Somehow, God help me, we managed it.
Finding new couplings, retrofitting our prototypes and floor models to use them, adjusting our costings, and redrawing all our manufacturing specs…
Done.
Now all we needed to do was launch the damn thing.
Over the last few days, I was too swamped to think about much besides work.
I hadn’t had the time to talk to Hudson, and even if I had, he was always running around doing some errand or another, so I couldn’t grab him.
By the time the final day of the convention, the final day of Hudson’s contract, rolled around, though, I couldn’t ignore the dread pooling in my stomach.
Not about the presentation. That, I could handle.
But saying goodbye to Hudson? How was I supposed to weather that?
As the last half hour before my rollout speech ticked away, I paced around our HQ in the bowels of the Javits Center, stewing over my presentation.
The rest of the team was high aboveground; they were finishing up with the last of the rollout details.
Clara was no doubt glad-handing with the likes of Mr. Ose, while the rest were handing out swag bags and checking that the AV elements of the talk were all ready to go.
I was alone. Until I wasn’t.
The sight of Hudson in the doorway robbed me of my breath.
I hadn’t been expecting him. Yet there he was. Looking handsome as ever…and heartbroken. The circles under his eyes told me I wasn’t alone in my postbreakup insomnia spell.
“Hey,” he said, weary but warm.
“Oh, hey.” I overcompensated for the awkwardness with a false friendliness. “How’s the crowd looking up there?”
“Very eager. The marketing department has the crowd in the palm of their hands.”
“Are you staying?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. My contract technically ended EOD yesterday and I do have a flight to catch right after, though, so…I think this might be goodbye.”
Goodbye. I’d never hated a word before. Words were neutral tools. But that word, wielded against me by Hudson…I discovered a new way to despise syllables.
Tell him you love him, you idiot, my brain told me.
He’s leaving. He wants to turn the page, I replied. I have to let him go.
“Right. Well. Thanks for staying. It’ll be good to look out and see you.”
“You don’t need me. You’ll knock ’em dead.”
“I hope so.”
His reply teemed with confidence. Like it was a foregone conclusion. Like I was foolish for thinking anything different. “How could they not love you?”
You didn’t was my first thought.
You didn’t love me enough to say it was my second thought.
Okay, maybe you loved me enough to say it, but then you got scared was my third.
And then I don’t really care about being loved by anyone but you.
“I met with Malcolm, by the way,” I added, trying to divert from any love talk. “You were right. We got along well. I think…I don’t want to jinx it, but I think he’s going to offer me a job.”
“He’d be crazy not to.”
We lapsed into silence. Hudson went for his pullover, which he’d left carelessly tossed over a chair yesterday. Ah, so that was why he was here. Not for me, but for that damn sweatshirt—the same one I’d borrowed during our flight from Cleveland. The one he’d given me after our first kiss.
The memory ached. An old bruise made fresh again by new pressure.
“He told me about what happened with you and your business,” I said.
Hudson’s cheek jerked. Not quite a smile. I wondered if I would ever see a smile from him again. “Malcolm’s got a big mouth. Always has.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you. You didn’t deserve that.
And…I’m sorry that it’s still eating you up, all these years later.
That you don’t feel safe to be yourself just because of what some assholes did to you back then.
” And there it was. Laid out in front of me like a big sign that read Hello pot, this is kettle…
“I guess we’re not so different after all, huh?
Still letting our pasts get the better of us. ”
Hudson gave his head a little shake, sending a wave of his signature scent wafting on the AC right in my direction. “Not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I decided to take your advice. Just like you took mine. I guess we’ll see how it all pans out, hm?” His dimple appeared. I was gripped by the urge to kiss it. “See you around, Scout.”
Just like that, he was gone. For a moment, I hesitated, totally torpified. I wanted to run after him, to try and fix this. But it was too late.
I was too late.
He’d all but said he wanted to start over without me. Without the baggage of the past. I guess it was my turn to do the same.
No matter how much it hurt.
I sank into one of our chairs. There was no telling how long I wallowed there, head in my hands. But eventually, Clara materialized, breezing over to me with her usual flair, completely oblivious to my overwrought emotional state.
“So! How ready are you to crush it out there?”
“I’m having sex with Hudson Bailey.”
The confession came out like a sob—unprovoked and unstoppable. Not the way I’d planned on telling her, but there was no holding it back now.
“You’re what?”
When I looked up, she was blurry through my tears.
“I’m having sex with Hudson. I mean, I’m not anymore.
But I’ve been having sex with him. When you told me to live a little, I went out, and I did that with him, and we’ve been having sex basically since the Lloyd Exeter podcast thing.
But now we’re broken up, and my world is totally upside down, and I don’t think I can go another minute without telling you, because I’ve been hiding it for so long and I still love him more than anything and I needed you to finally know. ”
Slowly, Clara lifted one hand to her temple and rubbed it in tight circles.
“That was a lot of information to have thrust upon me in thirty seconds. And at eight in the morning, too.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just been weighing on me.”
“Why?”
I blinked. A few of the tears trickled down my cheeks, clearing my vision so I could see her again.
Wasn’t it obvious? “Because I’m about to go out and do the biggest presentation of my life and if anything goes wrong, I need you to know that it’s my fault.
I’m distracted. I’ve wrecked everything. I always wreck everything.”
Her eyes snapped open, giving me the full force of her emotions. To my surprise, she wasn’t angry. She was hurt. “You do not. And when you do, you fix it. Just like this week with the couplings. I mean why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to think I was taking my eye off the ball at work.”
“Oh no.” She snorted. “Your eyes have been very much on the ball. Two of them, in fact. Hudson’s.”
Cringe. “I deserve that.”
“You know I wouldn’t have minded you being distracted. In fact, I think I even told you a little distraction might be healthy for you. What’s really going on here?”
“I didn’t want you to see me fail again. I couldn’t let you see me fail. If I told you about him and we didn’t work out or if our time together made me blow it with The Fantasy debut, it would be yet another misfire in front of the one woman I always want to impress.”
The clock was ticking toward my presentation. I struggled to get my emotions back in check, to cordon off the horrible disaster area that was my heart so I could continue my work.
But my breaths were shaky. My shoulders shuddered. And when Clara wrapped her arms around me, tight and fierce, I couldn’t stop my tears.
She whispered as she held me.
“I couldn’t ever have children, you know.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. But I just couldn’t.
And I know I can never replace your parents.
But I hope you know that I’ve always thought of you as my daughter.
I’ve loved you and looked after you and there’s nothing you could ever do that would make me leave you behind, Scout.
Nothing you could ever do that would make me love you less.
Not a botched job, not a busted product launch, not a failed relationship.
Nothing. I love you because you are Scout Porter. And Scout Porter is fucking awesome.”
The tears were hot and fast. Inescapable. “He told me I hated myself.”
“He’s right,” Clara said, not unkindly. “You do.”
“He tried to help me with my parents,” I explained. “And he tried to get me to stand up to Lloyd. And he tried to help me find a job in the aerospace sector. And he went and made me fall in love with him, the big dumb idiot.”
“A new job?”
Shit. Pulling out of her embrace, I tried to explain. “Right. About that, I’m sorry—”
She brushed one of my tears away. “Don’t be. I always knew I would lose you when you saw your own potential. I’m just glad he said it instead of me. You’d’ve never gone job hunting if I said so.”
“I barely went job hunting when he said so.”
A ghost of a smile haunted her thin lips. “Journey of a thousand steps and all that.”
With that, she took my hand and helped me to my feet.
Together, we walked to the green room. Once inside, I was set upon by the management staff of the conference, who started hooking me up with a wireless microphone system for my presentation.
A makeup woman helped me fix my tear-stained face.
Someone else swapped my jacket with a loaner, since this one was wrinkled now.
But once they were gone and there was nothing left to do but wait, I sank against the nearest wall and miserably returned to the topic.
“He tried to help me with so many things, Clara. And every single time, I shot him down. And he was here. He was right here just a few minutes ago and I didn’t try to fix things. I let him leave. I didn’t fight for him.”
“Because you don’t think you’re deserving of love. You don’t think you’re deserving of anything.”
There it was again, that casual acknowledgment. “Does everybody know? I feel like I’m the last person to learn this about myself.”
“Pretty much. But there are many things you can tell someone and they believe it. Looks like rain. There’s spinach in your teeth.
When you get to the light, take a left. This is Tottenham’s year.
But how do you tell someone that they’ll never be happy until they stop despising themself?
You don’t. You just love them until they realize that they’re worth loving.
” Her eyes swam with silvery tears. My own mother had never looked so proud of me.
And I’d never felt more loved than in that moment.
“It took you a long time. But I think you’re there.
Welcome to the rest of your life, Scout. It’s going to be beautiful.”
“How?”
“It’s like I’ve always said. You can have anything you want. You just have to believe that it should be yours.”
The unspoken question hung in the air. It echoed through my mind in Hudson’s voice.
So what do you want, Scout?
I knew that answer better than I knew my own name.
I wanted to stop being afraid all the time. I wanted to stop questioning myself. I wanted to stop hating myself. I wanted friends. I wanted a fulfilling career. I wanted a life that was thoroughly and messily and unapologetically my own.
But most of all…
“I want him, Clara. I love him. I just don’t think he loves me back.”
Her eyes glistened. “What a fascinating hypothesis. And, what’s even more exciting—you’ll get to test that hypothesis very shortly.”
“What do you mean—”
It was at that moment that a set of nearby curtains twitched and a stagehand in uniform black clothing and a headset appeared, calling me forward.
Here it was. The launch. The moment we’d all been waiting for.
Once I stepped out, I would be in front of a crowd of thousands, selling them on the future of sex as we know it.
All while trying to decrypt not one, but two ominous warnings about my romantic prospects.
No pressure.