by L. A. Witt
I cleared my throat as I broke eye contact, shifting my focus back to the menu that had somehow not slipped out of my hands. “Thanks. I, um, might take you up on that.” I chanced another look at him. Yep. Still smiling. Still hot. “So should we order some food?”
“Definitely.” He pushed himself up and gingerly headed for his suitcase. “While you look at that, I’m going to change into something more comfortable.” He paused, eyeing me uncertainly. “Should we, um, have some ground rules for things like changing clothes?”
Oh God. You. Naked. Or even without a shirt. Fuuuck.
“Um.” I gulped. “We’re both adults. I don’t think we need to hide in the bathroom to change.” Though maybe that would keep me from losing my mind before this week is up.
He watched me for a second, then dug through his suitcase, came up with a Seahawks T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts, and disappeared into the bathroom.
Well. In the full-length mirror, I watched the reflection of the door as he closed it behind him. Guess that answers that.
Maybe it was for the best, though. Neither of us was particularly shy, and we’d certainly seen each other naked before. But with the way things had been lately… yeah. A little discretion wasn’t a bad idea.
With a sigh, I shifted my attention back to the menu and tried to find something appetizing.
***
Marcus was oddly quiet the next day. We’d agreed not to bother setting an alarm because it would be our last chance to sleep in until the trade show was over. That and we were in another time zone now, and even bumping the clocks an hour ahead was enough to throw both of us off.
So, between the time change and some decadent laziness, we didn’t leave the room until almost eleven. The hotel lobby was buzzing with activity, and it was a good fifteen minutes before a valet was able to bring our van around. From there, we just had to drive across the street to the convention center’s loading dock. We’d be able to walk back and forth from our room to the trade show after this, which would be so much fun in the bitter cold.
We unloaded the van and staged everything at our booth, along with the larger pieces that had been shipped ahead of us. We set up displays, hung banners, connected electronics, filled literature holders… and all the while, Marcus barely spoke.
It wasn’t just that he was quiet or preoccupied. It was like he’d folded in on himself. Like he was barely aware of anyone or anything.
As I carefully arranged some literature according to a drawing he’d made—he really did think of everything—I watched him uneasily. What the hell was going on? I’d thought we’d made headway last night, breaking through all that bullshit that had been hanging between us for the better part of two months. We’d been able to make light, superficial conversation about the trade show, dinner, and what stupid TV show to watch until it was time to call it a night, and it had almost been easy. How the hell had we backslid so far already?
Except this was different. Or it sure seemed that way, since it wasn’t just me he was apparently shutting out. Instead of joining me and several guys from one of our suppliers in the restaurant for lunch, he’d stayed at the booth under the pretense of needing to make sure the projector was working properly. When a convention center employee came to ask him about something, Marcus’s answers were short, almost to the point of terse. When he had to talk to the facilities manager about a faulty electrical hookup, he spoke in a monotone, sounding either disinterested or irritated. He was still polite, of course, but he wasn’t exactly warm.
Seriously—what the hell was going on?
As we headed up to the room after we’d finished setting up, I watched him out of the corner of my eye, wondering how in the world to figure out—and fix—whatever the problem was. I had never been good at approaching people about anything. Ever. If a conversation had even the minutest potential of being uncomfortable or awkward? I’d run for the hills.
But for the next few days, I would be as good as glued to Marcus’s side. If he cold-shouldered me, we were going to wind up killing each other.
In our room, Marcus sank onto the edge of his bed, gaze fixed on his phone. I watched him, my stomach somersaulting at the mere thought of broaching the subject. Or even speaking to him at all since I had no idea where his mind was or if I’d done something wrong.
My eyes flicked toward my bed, which was all of two feet away from his. Our suitcases, which were parked side by side against the wall. Our garment bags, which hung next to each other in the open closet. Fuck. My ineptitude for uncomfortable conversations sucked, but so would spending most of a week in close confines with someone who was either ignoring me or—worse—quietly stewing over something we could fight about later.
Okay. Here goes.
Deep breath.
Fuck.
“Hey.” I swallowed my nerves, and when he looked up at me, my heart beat even faster. “Is, um…” Oh God. Fuck. How do I do this?
His eyebrows rose, though his eyes still seemed oddly blank. “Hmm?”
I moistened my parched lips. “Is… everything okay? With us? I mean, I thought we ironed a few things out, but all day today…” That was the best I could do. Not even a full sentence, and I’d already run out of steam.
Marcus’s shoulders dropped. So did his gaze. Then he put his phone aside and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I’m sorry.” He exhaled and rubbed his neck with both hands. “I probably should have given you a heads up about this.”
“About…” I blinked, then cautiously came closer and sat on the edge of the other bed. “About what?”
Eyes still down, Marcus kept kneading the back of his neck. “The other reps call it social hibernation. I didn’t even realize I do it until one of them pointed it out, but I kind of, I don’t know, close off for a day or so before a con starts.” He sighed, then looked at me through his lashes. “Sort of priming myself for having to be ‘on’ for days on end.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I… never realized…”
He smiled a little, his expression closer to shy than I’d ever seen it. “Even extroverts wear out sometimes. I’ll probably crash when it’s over too, so if there isn’t much conversation on the way home, don’t take it personally.”
“Okay. Good to know.” I inclined my head. “So, you’re okay, then? And we’re…”
The smile grew. “Yeah. We’re good.”
I exhaled. “Thank God. I thought things might have gone back to being weird.”
“No, no. I’m just having a little pre-con weirdness. It happens.”
“You? Weirdness?” I put a hand to my chest. “I’m shocked.”
He rolled his eyes and playfully swatted at my leg as he stood. “Asshole.”
I just laughed and wondered if he knew how relieved I was that we were okay.
“Want to go find something to eat?” he asked.
“Or we could stay in and do room service again.”
He turned to me. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all. Especially if you need to charge your batteries before you have to be Mr. Charisma tomorrow.”
Marcus chuckled, though his shoulders were still visibly heavy with fatigue. “I wasn’t all that impressed with their food, though.”
“Want me to check GrubHub? There has to be someplace that delivers.”
His lips quirked like he was considering the idea. Then, meeting my gaze with a hint of caution in his eyes, he said, “If we order pizza, do you promise not to tell my trainer?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “You promise not to tell mine?”
The caution evaporated. “Deal.”
We held each other’s gazes for a few long seconds, my heart fluttering with giddy relief at the playful callback to our pre-awkwardness days.
Then I took my cell phone out of my pocket. “Extra cheese?”
His grin gave me goose bumps. “Fuck yeah, extra cheese.”
Chapter 6
Marcus
; My alarm went off at six.
In the next bed, Reuben grumbled and buried his head under the pillow.
I would have loved to do the same, but I’d learned the hard way a few times how late I could be to a trade show if I started hitting the snooze button. So I was up, showered, and dressed in minutes even though I definitely didn’t want to be.
There will be coffee. The words repeated in my brain like a mantra. There will be coffee. All you have to do is get downstairs, and there will be coffee.
In theory, I could have made some with the provided machine in our room, but I’d never been impressed with the taste of hotel coffee. That, and the smell would likely wake Reuben. Somehow, I doubted he’d magically transformed into a morning person in the last few years; even if it meant delaying my coffee, it was better to let sleeping engineers lie.
Once I had on my shoes, I tiptoed between the beds to get my phone, watch, and wallet, and before I turned to head out of the room, I froze.
A jolt of cold panic almost negated my need for caffeine. Oh shit. Did I almost…?
Yeah. I had. Because even though it had been more than half a decade since I’d woken up in the same room as Reuben, it was almost automatic to lean down, press a kiss to his prickly cheek, and murmur, “I love you. I’ll see you at work.”
I stood there, staring at him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, my heart racing as it sank in just how close I’d come to going through those habitual motions. How easy it would have been. How awkward it would have made things.
I shook myself, double-checked I had my room key, and got the hell out of there.
In the elevator, I took a few deep breaths and forced Reuben as far into the back of my mind as I could. It was show time. The trade show didn’t actually start for a couple more hours, but most of the attendees were staying in this hotel, which meant I had to have my game face on as soon as I stepped out into the lobby.
Or sooner, it turned out—when the elevator stopped on the sixth floor, three familiar faces stepped in. It took me a second to connect them, but I was already greeting them and shaking their hands before I remembered they were the president and two senior engineers from the company that manufactured springs for some of our product lines. I hadn’t even had coffee yet, and it was already go time.
As it always did, the elbow-rubbing and ass-kissing continued through the coffee line, through breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant—which was “meh”—and all the way across the street to the convention center. I was introduced to the vice president of a compressed gas supplier we’d been working with forever, got a business card from a start-up that had some promising ideas for expanding our online presence, and asked a field rep from our rival torch manufacturer to give my regards to his hospitalized coworker. In the convention hall, I paused to catch up with a couple of competitors’ marketing directors—they were competition, but we considered each other colleagues and had always been friendly.
And then the convention started.
Trade shows like this naturally didn’t attract much traffic from the general public. We’d sometimes get students coming through to do research for science projects or for business classes, but the vast majority of the crowd were people directly or peripherally involved in the compressed gas business. Regulator, distribution, and welding equipment manufacturers like ours. Gas distributors. New start-ups and crowd-funded innovators with fresh ideas for everything from product design to assembly line efficiency to marketing angles.
It was a big industry, though, and this was one of our biggest trade shows west of the Mississippi, so as soon as the doors opened at nine o’clock, the wide walkways between rows of booths were jammed with people. Voices echoed off the high ceiling. Demo machinery clanked, hissed, beeped, and whirred. A crackly loudspeaker occasionally broke up the noise with an announcement about a seminar, a featured demonstration, or a cell phone missing an owner.
Our booth was one of the endcaps, and we had no shortage of traffic. By ten o’clock, I was about to text Reuben and beg him to come down and help me out when—
Oh hello. There he was.
By all rights he should have blended in—another gray-haired white guy in a sea of the same—but nope. He stood out, at least to me.
Reuben usually wore a shirt and tie to the office, but it had been a long time since I’d seen him in a suit. Holy shit. Had he always been that hot in—oh, who was I kidding? Of course he had. Though he’d also gone a lot grayer since we’d dated—from salt and pepper to completely silver—and somehow that, coupled with the perfectly tailored dark suit, made him jaw-droppingly sexy.
“Marcus?”
I shook myself and turned back to Steve Horton and Greg Schaeffer, a couple of potential clients interested in one of our manifold systems. “Sorry. Sorry. Um.” I cleared my throat. “Our senior engineer just got here, so let me grab him. He’ll be able to tell you exactly what you need for your setup.”
They both nodded, and I turned as Reuben stepped into the booth.
“Sorry I’m late.” He was shrugging off his jacket. “Got hung up talking to someone from—”
“It’s fine. It’s fine.” I gestured behind me. “Your timing is perfect, actually, because these two gentlemen are interested in one of the 7000 series manifolds.”
He glanced past me, eyebrows up. “Oh. Okay. Um.” He looked around. “I left a spiral notebook down here, didn’t I?”
I picked it up off the table beside the projector. “Right here.”
“Perfect.” He flashed me a disarming smile, pulled a mechanical pencil from his shirt pocket, and went to where Steve and Greg were waiting.
I’d worried about how Reuben would handle a trade show like this. He was easily overwhelmed by people, especially people he didn’t know, and a constant stream of strangers right in his face seemed like a recipe for disaster.
Clearly, I’d underestimated him.
When I glanced over from trying to charm some business out of another pair of attendees, Reuben seemed far more in his element than I’d expected. He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbows and tucked his tie into his shirt, and he was leaning over a table, sketching on that spiral notebook as Steve and Greg nodded along. He was animated and—hell, even a bit boisterous.
I smiled to myself. Apparently that was the secret to getting Reuben out of his shell. Put him in front of people who were interested in something he was excited about. The 7000 series manifolds had been one of his pet projects for the last couple of years, and he really did seem to get a thrill out of telling people how it worked.
The two guys seemed downright mesmerized by him. I couldn’t say I blamed them. Hell, even our sales reps could learn a thing or two from him. They always sounded like they were excited to sell the client something. When Reuben told people about products, he sounded more like a kid who’d discovered a new game and couldn’t wait to explain it to his friends.
Steve and Greg were at our booth for over an hour. A few other people had drifted away from the foot traffic and were listening, and by the time Reuben had finished, he had reps from three other companies waiting to ask him some questions as soon as he was done scheduling an on-site consultation for Steve and Greg.
“Nicely done,” I said to him once there was a lull while people headed to a keynote speech. “Less than half a day on the floor, and I think you’ve made three major sales.”
Reuben blushed, smiling shyly. He looked around, and now I could see him visibly running out of steam. As if he’d kept the energy going until the conversations were over, but now that there was a break, he was crashing.
“Hey.” I touched his arm. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Just…” He exhaled, rolling his shoulders. “I think I could use some more coffee.” When our eyes met, the subtext might as well have been written across his forehead—I need to get away from the booth for a few minutes.
“Why don’t you go grab some, then?” I motioned at our surroundings. “It’s probably going to be quiet
until the keynote is over anyway, and after that is lunch.”
Reuben released another breath. “And this show is how long?”
“Doesn’t end until Sunday.”
He groaned.
“You’ll be fine. I promise.” I paused. “Honestly, you’re handling this better than I thought you would.”
He eyed me like he wasn’t sure how to take that.
“Come on. I know you. Crowds and people aren’t your thing.” I nodded toward the notebook he’d tucked under his arm. “But I guess all we have to do is give you a sketchpad and something interesting to talk about, and you’re good.”
Laughing, he shrugged. “I guess so, yeah.” He scanned our surroundings. The throngs of people had noticeably thinned, but not everyone had gone to the keynote, so the place wasn’t deserted. “Are you sure you can hold down the fort while I go get coffee?”
“Don’t sweat it. In fact, would you mind grabbing something for me?” I pulled out my wallet. “I’ve got the corporate card, so—”
“I got it. Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I’ll be back.”
“You don’t have to buy. We can expense this, you know.”
Reuben winked. “I have a corporate card too, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” Why were my cheeks burning? Clearing my throat, I pocketed my wallet. “Well then, I don’t feel so bad.”
We exchanged smiles, and as he left to find us coffee, I watched him disappear into the crowd.
Of course, it was just my luck that even though not everyone had gone to the keynote, most people had. The speaker was from one of the major laser cutting manufacturers, and a lot of people were interested in what she had to say, so for now there was a serious lull in traffic here in the exhibition hall. Which meant I had some downtime. Downtime with my thoughts. My thoughts about Reuben.
I hadn’t expected him to be so comfortable in this environment. He wasn’t a wimp by any means, or someone who was so painfully shy he couldn’t hold his own. But one-on-one interactions with strangers intimidated the hell out of him. The spotlight scared him half to death. And yet, when he had something to talk about that excited him, he did all right. If I was honest, he’d impressed the hell out of me. Enough that I was sorely tempted to text his father and beg for Reuben to be sent to more of these events.