23
Bex
“I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into coming here,” Bex said to her four roommates as they put on their lanyards holding their name badges and the PNW Open for Business convention logo. She looked around at the massive lobby of the Oregon Convention Center. Normally, she liked being around this many people. Right now, though, she didn’t want to socialize.
She didn’t even want to talk shop in all the lectures or with the business products owners, which had never happened. But everyone said that coming was good “roommate bonding” and it would “get her mind off of things.” She was pretty sure they were all wrong.
“Should we go check out the exhibit hall?” Timini asked, eyeing the big doors leading into the vendor area.
Addison glanced at her watch. “As long as we don’t stay too long. I want to catch some of the programming.”
The five of them started going up and down all the aisles in the exhibit hall, checking out all the displays from companies who had products to help business owners. Everything she saw, though, reminded her of Roman. The business planning software reminded her of their brainstorming sessions. The break room furniture reminded her of sitting on the bench in Tsuru Island at the park together, eating dessert. The phone system reminded her of him being so sweet and talking her down from a panic attack over an imminent bird attack. It all made her heart hurt.
“Anyone want to catch a panel or lecture? I need to...” She pointed toward the exit, but couldn’t find a way to end the sentence. They all seemed to get it, though.
“I want to!” Peyton said. “Ooh. There’s one starting in ten minutes.” She pulled out her convention schedule, and they all crowded in to look at it.
“That one,” Ian said, pointing at the one on social media marketing. “I am terrible at that. Anyone else?”
Four minutes later, they were all filing into the big room numbered A105-106 and finding a seat. She sat down on the seat between Peyton and Timini and pulled out her notebook. Instead of being a panel of people discussing a topic, it was actually Tarak, the interviewer at Business Success, who she’d spoken with at the awards ceremony, pulling in one panelist at a time, asking them questions.
It was probably a really interesting conversation. She just couldn’t seem to focus. Instead, she was doodling. At first, it was just in the margins of the notebook. Before long, her doodles covered the entire page, and she hadn’t a clue what the speakers had said. She had thought her mind was just blank—not thinking about Roman at all—but then she noticed that most of her doodles resembled Roman’s company logo, one of his app’s logos, or something from one of her interviews with him. Oh, look—that one was just like the cat shaped like an avocado that he had painted in their class.
It hit her how much she missed him. She had never in her life missed a guy before. There had just always been plenty of interesting things to move on to. But she missed just being in the same room as Roman so much it physically hurt.
She heard the name Roman Powell over the microphone and her head jerked up. Roman was walking right onto the stage and taking the seat next to Tarak.
She looked at her friends surrounding her so they could all share in the shock at seeing him on stage, but none of them looked nearly as surprised as she was. She leaned over to Timini. “Did you know he was on this panel?”
“Shh,” she said. “I’m listening.”
So Bex listened, too.
“A lot of you might recognize our next panelist. Roman Powell became much more of a household name when he made the cover of our magazine and it became our third best-selling issue of all time.”
“It’s good to see you again, Tarak.”
“You, too. I’m glad you finally responded to my email to join me on the stage here.”
Roman chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Better late than never, right?”
Bex missed running her own fingers on the back of his neck. She missed touching that spot where his hair curled just slightly right in front of his ear. And the way his mouth curled up on one side when he was amused, kind of like it was right now.
“Now, your business was rocking before the Business Success issue with you on it. Which is why, of course, you were on it in the first place. But your business has exploded since then. You’ve had a new product release, Nudge Out.” Tarak turned to the audience. “Which you should all get right now. Roman told me about it in our interview, and the second it went live, I downloaded it. It got me to try synchronized swimming which, I’ve got to say, was much more difficult and more fun than I had ever guessed. I’d like you to tell us, Roman, what you did to capitalize on the success of that issue.”
“You know the old saying that the three most important things in a business are location, location, location? When you have a digital offering, I think it’s more along the lines of excellent employees, luck, and finding your target audience. Thanks in part to a very persistent and very skilled social media and marketing manager at my company, and in large part to a lot of different pieces falling into place, I managed to get an interview with Bex Sterling of Bexlandia. A four-part interview, actually. She has a massive fan base that just happened to be my target audience, and those interviews helped a ton.”
There was just something about the way he said things. They were just more charming when they came out of Roman’s mouth. He was so confident and relaxed up there, and was connecting with the audience so well. She never would’ve guessed that from their first couple of meetings, but he had just gotten more and more at home with it every time. It made her long for the time when they were bantering together in front of the camera.
She couldn’t leave. She wanted to see him again so badly that she couldn’t pass up this chance to see him shine on stage. But she knew that watching him and being reminded about all the things she loved about him was going to wreck her later. He seemed to have moved on without her amazingly well.
“Oh, that’s a great show,” Tarak said. “I was there nearly two weeks ago when she won an Eddie for it. Everyone, if you’re not already watching Bexlandia on YouTube, you really should check it out. I interviewed Bex that night. We are having a special issue with creators of digital content come out in about two months that she’ll be in, and we’re pretty excited about that.” He turned back to Roman. “But I saw you, too, that night, and it didn’t look like things were going so well for you.”
“No, they were not.”
Oh my goodness. How awkward. She couldn’t believe Tarak was asking him about that. Especially since Roman didn’t want anyone to know that they had been dating. Roman probably wanted to exit the stage pretty quickly right about now. Honestly, she wanted to exit the room, too, because she didn’t want to relive the moment when things went so downhill for them. She looked to the left and the right. How had she managed to get stuck in the middle of the row? They were toward the back of the room, but it had several hundred people in it, so there was no way she could escape without making a scene.
Roman looked down for a few moments, and then looked out at the audience. “You know how you’re running your business and you still don’t have everything figured out and everyone around you starts giving you advice?”