Bex introduced Roman to her.
“So good to meet you,” Jules said as she shook his hand. “I have a racquetball background, too, and I’ve also been accused of hitting a pickle ball a little too hard.”
“You watched my interview?” Bex asked.
“Of course I did! I love your show. And I’ve been a fan of Roman’s ever since his Business Success interview, so I doubly couldn’t miss it.”
The three of them chatted for a few minutes. He was really starting to enjoy himself and forget about all the worries that had been creeping in.
Until he saw the two photographers taking pictures. He turned his back toward them, hoping he could just use that tactic all night.
“Anyway, I am thrilled you won,” Jules said. “You are going to be amazed at how much more visible you’ll be. I nearly doubled my subscriber count the year I won.”
“Doubled!”
“Yeah. It was insane.”
One of the camera men had made it around to their side of the room, so Roman went around to Bex’s other side, so he could still have his back to the man. Bex shot him a confused look, but kept the conversation going.
Then, she looked out to the people dancing in the middle of the room and turned to him. “Come dance with me.”
He joined her, but definitely didn’t feel at home on the dance floor, dancing to the fast music. Sure, he’d been great at the choreographed dance routines of his youth, but it didn’t really translate into real world fast dancing. The business get-togethers he went to never involved dancing to fast music, and it always made him feel like a remote control toy robot whose controller was in the hands of a toddler.
The thought of the people he normally hung out with being someplace like this was laughable. They were all a bunch of hard-working CEOs and business consultants and strategists. They all seemed to think that the only way to be successful was to work all the time. If they saw pictures of him here, dancing like he’d lost the ability to control his own arms and legs in a place that looked more like a club than a respectable business gathering, half of them were never going to let him live it down. The other half were just going to quietly lose all respect for him and make underhanded comments about it.
It wasn’t that his friends never had fun—they did. Every time they scheduled it. They just had fun in more respectable ways. Like playing golf. Or going yachting. Or having donuts brought into the office on National Donut Day.
Having pictures of him, trying to dance, out there for everyone to see was not an option. So he tried to subtly move them toward the end of the room away from the photographer. Was this going to be his life if he kept dating Bex, especially now that she’d won? Was he going to have to constantly try to keep their relationship and everything they did together from being a big thing online?
Guiding Bex toward the other end of the room, though, had been a bad idea, because it led them right down to the area where the second photographer was. And now that he was closer, he could see that this one was the photographer who took his pictures for Business Success magazine. And not too far away was Tarak, the man who had interviewed him, talking with one of the winners in a different category. He quickly moved to where a crowd of about five people blocked them from the interviewer’s view.
Of course Tarak and his cameraman would be here for this—all of the finalists were business owners, after all. Even though he hadn’t expected them to be here, even a little bit, it made sense.
He definitely had to stay away from them. From the email he’d gotten from Tarak a month after that issue had come out, he knew that issue with him on the cover had their second biggest circulation numbers. If they saw him, they would likely want to talk to him, and they might want to mention something about him being there with Bex. Even if they only mentioned it on their social media and not in their magazine, it would get back to his dad. Anything related to Business Success would get back to him.
The words his dad said to him two nights ago were so fresh they were still running in a constant loop in his head. How he had made a fool of himself in her interviews, and how his dad had never been more disappointed in him. How he wasn’t living up to the professionalism required of someone with the last name of Powell, and how any serious relationship needed to be with someone who had a respectable career, and someone who would not bring down the Powell name.
Yet, here he was, two days later, at a ceremony where they gave out awards for placing “simpleton content on a simpleton site.” And the one that won was the one where he’d “made a fool of himself” for all the world to see.
Tarak saw them and headed their direction. So he did a spin move that took them out of his line of sight.
Bex had seen the interviewer, though, and apparently wasn’t fooled at all about what he’d done. She stopped right where she was, a hand on her hip. “What is up with you tonight?”
He tried to act like his mind wasn’t full of everything he had heard from his peers and his dad on Thursday night, but she wasn’t buying it. Instead, she grabbed hold of his hand and led him to the doors leading out of the party and into the triangular space just beyond.
“Why have you been such a jerk tonight? I wouldn’t have pegged you as someone who would get jealous of another person’s success, but maybe I was wrong.”
“What? No. It’s not that at all.” He did not want to have this conversation with her tonight. Or ever. This was her night, and all of his frustrations about what everyone he knew thought about him and Bex dating was irrelevant. So instead of bringing up any of that, he instead said, “I just don’t want to be in a bunch of pictures that people are going to be posting online.”
“You’re embarrassed to be seen with me?”
“No.” He said the word emphatically, and he thought he meant it without any hesitation, but even he could hear the lie in that one single word. If he was worried about what his business friends, his brothers, and his dad thought about the two of them together, and what they would think of him because he was here and dating her, then embarrassed to be seen with her was exactly what he was. “Let’s just go back inside.”
“No,” she dragged the word out, irritation clouding her features, “there’s something you want to say but aren’t saying. Spill it.”
Why was she pushing a conversation that shouldn’t be happening tonight?
“Now.”
Frustration that had been building all night burst free. “I am thrilled that you won the Eddie. I am. But, come on, Bex. Your job is about creating things that help people procrastinate the important things they should be doing.” He knew it was a mistake the moment he said it and instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry, Bex. That’s not what I meant to say.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then, in a voice that was eerily calm, she said, “Maybe not, but I think it’s the first honest thing you’ve said all night.”
“No, I—” He reached a hand out to her, but she stepped back.
“I know you don’t want to be here, so you should just leave. I’ll find my own ride home.”
“Bex, I’ll stay.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you to.”
Then she turned and walked away from him and back into the party. He stood in the hallway for a long moment, running his hand through his hair and trying to calm his breathing, cursing his own stupidity, and wishing he could redo this entire night.