Fatal Conference Hookup

I sat through forty minutes of a panel on sustainable event design before I started checking my phone under the table. The speaker was on her fourth slide about biodegradable table linens and I swear I could feel my soul leaving my body one fiber at a time.

I'm Aldo, by the way, thirty-three, I plan weddings for a living, and I was at this tech conference for exactly one reason, which is that my best friend Ellie begged me to go with her because she was pitching a startup and didn't want to eat lunch alone. I don't code. I don't know what a hackathon is. I know centerpieces and how to keep a drunk uncle away from the cake table, and I had been useful exactly once that day, which was when I told her to stand up straighter before she went on stage.

So after the linens slide I leaned over and whispered, "I'm gonna walk around, want anything?"

She didn't even look at me, she was typing notes on a laptop like her life depended on it, which honestly it kind of did, and she just waved a hand at me and said, "Coffee, if it's real coffee."

So I went looking for real coffee, and I found the kind that comes out of a machine that tastes like a warm pencil, and I drank it anyway because there was nothing else, and then I just kind of wandered. The convention center is huge, three floors, all the same gray carpet, signs hanging from the ceiling that tell you where things are but only if you already know where things are.

I passed a room where a guy was demonstrating a robot that folded shirts. I passed a room where forty people were all staring at one person's laptop in silence. I passed a woman asleep in a massage chair with her shoes off. That one I lingered on for a second, not gonna lie.

By then I'd been gone from the panel about an hour and I figured I should probably get back before Ellie noticed and gave me the look, so I started hunting for the way back to the ballroom, and that's where the signs betrayed me. There was a hallway that said BALLROOM LEVEL and an arrow, and I followed it, and it led to a service corridor, all cinder block and fluorescent light, with a heavy door at the end that had an EXIT sign above it and a push bar, and I thought, great, this dumps me outside and I can walk around the building.

I pushed it, and it didn't dump me outside.

It opened into a lounge, dimly lit, low warm lamps instead of overheads, a couple of those big soft couches, and it was empty except for one guy sitting on the end of a couch with his phone in his hand and a lanyard around his neck. The door clicked shut behind me and the noise of the convention center just cut off, like that.

"Sorry," I said, "is this the way out? I think I took a wrong turn, there was a sign that said exit and I am, clearly, an idiot."

He looked up, and he didn't answer right away. He was probably thirty-four, tall, dark hair pushed back like he'd been doing it all day, jacket off, tie loose, and he had this look on his face, not annoyed like you'd expect from someone whose quiet room just got walked into, but more like he'd been staring at a wall for an hour and I was a better thing to stare at.

"It's the meditation room," he said. "Or it's supposed to be. Nobody uses it."

"Oh. Well, I'll leave you to it, then." I put my hand on the door.

"You could stay," he said, and it came out kind of fast, like he hadn't planned to say it. "I mean. It's quiet in here. That is the entire point. I'm not meditating or anything, I'm reading pitch feedback, which is worse."

I should have left. I would like to claim there was a reason I stayed, some deep thing, but the reason was that he was good looking and the rest of that building was full of robots folding shirts. I sat down on the other end of the same couch, because there were two couches and a chair and I picked the one he was on, and even I noticed that about myself.

"Bad feedback?" I asked.

"Terrible feedback." He turned the phone toward me, and it was a wall of text with red highlights. "This guy wrote two paragraphs about how my pricing slide made him physically angry. Physically. Angry. A slide."

"Did the slide hurt him?"

"He didn't say. I'd ask but he's anonymous." He put the phone face down on his thigh. "I'm Preston, by the way."

"Aldo."

"What do you do, Aldo? You don't strike me as a startup guy."

"I plan weddings."

"Huh." He said it like that had never once happened to him, meeting someone who plans weddings. "And you're here because?"

"My friend is pitching. I'm the emotional support animal."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and I felt it in my chest, which was a warning sign I ignored completely. He had a nice laugh. He had nice everything, honestly, and up close he smelled good, some kind of clean cedar sort of thing, and I noticed that too and told myself to knock it off.

We talked for a bit, about nothing, about the conference, about how every lounge in every convention center looks like someone's dentist office was designed by a millennial, and it was fine, it was actually easy, which surprised me because usually I have to work at this. Somewhere in there he took his tie off the rest of the way and dropped it on the couch between us, and I don't think he meant anything by it but my eyes went to it anyway.

"So what's the pitch?" I asked. "The one that made a man physically angry."

"Software for restaurants. Inventory stuff. It's riveting, you'd hate it." He was turned toward me on the couch now, one arm along the back of it, and he wasn't looking at his phone anymore, he was looking at me, and not in a casual way. In the way where you can feel it.

"What?"

"Nothing. You've got a, uh." He gestured at his own collarbone.

"What, a stain? Great, I've been walking around all day."

"No, it's just your collar's crooked." He reached over and fixed it, two fingers, quick, and then his hand was back on the couch but the spot where he'd touched me stayed warm for way longer than it should have.

The room was really quiet. Through the wall I could hear the muffled crowd noise, a hundred conversations happening somewhere we weren't, and in here there was just the hum of a lamp and both of us not saying anything. He was still looking at me. I was looking back, and I knew I was looking back and I did it anyway.

"So," he said, after a while.

"So," I said.

"You came in here looking for a door out."

"Yeah."

"And now you're sitting here."

"Yeah, I am." My mouth was dry and I had drunk that whole sad coffee so that was unfair.

He studied me for a second, and then he said, "I got up on stage about an hour ago and bombed in front of two hundred people, and my cofounder left early, and I've been sitting in this room reading why a slide made a stranger angry, and I'm having the thought that this is the best I've felt all day."

"That's a low bar, but I'll take it."

"I don't mean the conversation."

I knew what he meant. Of course I knew what he meant. The lamps were low and the couch was soft and he was looking at me like that, and I had walked in here by accident and stayed on purpose, and there was a door right there and I hadn't touched it.

"Okay," I said, "before anything happens, I have rules."

"Go ahead."

"Rules," I said, "like, we talk first. I don't do the grabby thing, I don't do the mystery thing. And I don't even know your last name, for God's sake."

"It's Whitmore. Preston Whitmore."

"That's a founder name if I ever heard one."

"Please don't hold it against me."

I laughed, and the laugh kind of broke the tension and rebuilt it at the same time, and he was still turned toward me with his arm along the back of the couch and his fingers were maybe four inches from my shoulder and neither of us had moved to close that gap yet, but we were both aware of it, I could tell. Outside the wall the convention center kept humming along, the shirts got folded, the pitches got pitched, and in this one quiet room a guy I'd met less than an hour ago was looking at my mouth.

"I'm gonna be honest," he said, "I'm very bad at reading these situations, so I'm just going to ask. Can I kiss you?"

And that, right there, that's the moment the whole afternoon turned. I put my coffee cup down on the floor and said, "Yeah. Yeah, you can."

He leaned in slow, like giving me one last exit, and I didn't take it, and then his mouth met mine and it was a good kiss, a sure one, none of that hovering nervous stuff, he kissed like someone who had decided and I moaned into him before I even meant to, which embarrassed me for about half a second and then I stopped caring. My hand found his shirtfront and I pulled, just pulled, no plan behind it, and he came, and the kiss got messier and deeper and I could feel him smiling against my mouth which normally would be annoying but wasn't.

"Okay," he said against my lips, "okay, wow."

"Shut up and keep going."

"That's the plan."

He kissed me again and I turned more toward him on the couch, knee