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Chapter 11
Jules was hoping to grab lunch with Cameron after the morning session on subscription models, but she makes the responsible choice and heads to her hotel room to tidy up her presentation for tomorrow and do a practise run. It means she won’t see him until the show tonight and she’s pre-emptively missing him. A tad pathetic? Maybe. But she’d had so much fun at breakfast with him, talking about music and making a start on appeasing that ache inside her that’s eager for all things Cameron. The more they chat and the more she gets to experience the full Cameron—the little eyebrow twitches and dimpled smiles and huffed laughs and his floral scent—the fonder she gets. She’s not ready to definitively say they have longevity, but so far, no red flags.
She knows the symphony invite wasn’t him asking her out asking her out, but it’s got to be a good sign that he’s making plans to spend more time with her away from a bed. Cat and Tori had thought so when she’d texted them the news.
Experiencing the full Cameron, after having experienced the full Cameron last night, has also built a need in her core. All morning, her thoughts have been scrambled from the great sex of last night. The seminar she attended was fascinating, but she kept daydreaming about Cameron’s hair and his thick fingers and his wicked smile instead of soaking up any knowledge. She even pulled out her phone at one point to text him before realising she doesn’t have his number. How is she meant to organise spontaneous fling-related sexual rendezvous without it? Though that would make them less spontaneous.
The point being, she intends to have many rendezvous with this man, however they may come about. After this morning’s confab with Cat and Tori she’s all aboard the conference fling train, stopping frequently for orgasms.
She pauses her run-through as her thoughts get the better of her, necessitating a trip to the bathroom to splash water on her face. Her lips tingle. They feel flush with blood and tender despite not having been kissed at all today. Her eyes sparkle at her in the mirror, her pupils blown wide from the sensual daydream of a minute ago featuring Cameron, limited clothing, and the desk in her room.
Drying off her face, she takes a few deep breaths, trying to refocus so she can finish her run through.
***
Her lips are still tingling when she heads off to the James McCarthy talk which Samantha has been texting her non-stop about like she’s some stalker-fan. She gets lost in the rabbit-warren of level six and ends up racing down corridors to get to the talk on time. She’s puffing as she enters the packed room, and heads immediately swivel to her. Wow. Samantha isn’t alone in her appreciation of this James person.
She’s already hot from the racing around, but the attention sends a new flush over her skin. Jules’s chest is on fire but she attempts normal breathing and heads to an easy to get to seat on the edge of the front row. She cranes her neck to see if she can spot Cameron, but no luck. She didn’t expect him to be here. His printed schedule had a circled session on brand fluidity or something like that at this same time, but her kiss-desperate lips inspired some wishful thinking.
She does catch his friend Matteo’s gaze though, and he waves at her. There’s no little fizzle in her gut today like there was last night when he’d introduced himself. He’s pleasing on the eye and if Cameron hadn’t offered himself to Jules for her conference fling, there’s a chance she would have followed Matteo down an empty corridor and into a secluded stairwell for some beneath the clothes fumbling in the name of a conference fling.
Who is she kidding? She wouldn’t have been brave enough for that. And after last night it doesn’t matter, because Cameron made a move and he’s the only man Jules wants to follow into a secluded stairwell for a heavy make-out session anyway. Her skin buzzes as she thinks about it, imagining his large hands pressing her against a wall, his lips on hers. If she shuts her eyes and concentrates, she can actually taste him on her tongue.
The noise in the auditorium drops away and her eyes snap open as an older man looking like the dictionary definition of ‘scholar’ strolls onto the stage. Tan chinos, a checked shirt, glasses perched on his nose and a jacket with actual elbow pads.
It makes her daydreams seem indecent and she smooths her skirt down over her knees. It’s probably a good thing Cameron isn’t in the room to break her concentration.
‘Welcome everyone,’ the man greets them, spreading his arms wide. Jules pulls her laptop from its case and hovers her hands over the keyboard.
‘My name is James McCarthy. I’m the founder of McCarthy Media. I’ll keep the intro short because it’s all online and I know you’re not really here to listen to my bio.’
He speaks with confidence and a self-aware manner that has half the audience laughing, even at the dry stuff about how he founded his company that runs marketing and research methodology workshops and critique services. She gets sucked in despite herself. It’s the energy he has, that enthusiasm and utter belief in what he’s talking about. Like she used to have when she first started at Infinity.
The session flies by. Jules takes plentiful notes for Samantha’s benefit, but also because she’s drawn to James’s charismatic way of talking. For a man who looks like a stereotype, his presentation is anything but stereotypical. Filled with funny anecdotes, colourful animated graphs and musical excerpts, Jules appreciates the presentation on more levels than she was expecting. Not only is it well presented, but the information is new to her. It’s lateral thinking problem-solving techniques that make sense and she can see herself applying them at Infinity to make further improvements on the archiving system, and even the intranet. Her notes for Samantha are peppered with asides to herself she’ll need to delete later. ‘Can we use this for image tagging?’ ‘Improve search function – eBook site?’.
The applause when James finishes speaking is thunderous, and Jules claps as hard as anyone. James might have found himself a new fangirl.
People hover outside the auditorium afterwards, but Jules heads for her bedroom where she left her portable charger in her haste to make it to this session.
A man steps out of a plain door ahead of her and she almost crashes into him, pulling back at the last moment.
‘Sorry, Mr McCarthy,’ she apologises, recognising the patched jacket immediately.
‘That’s quite alright.’ James turns to her, pushing his glasses up the slope of his nose. ‘Hang on.’ He assesses her quickly. ‘You’re the lady from the front row! You were certainly taking plenty of notes during my presentation. I think you must have gotten a full transcript!’
His cheerful laugh reminds Jules of her dad and she finds herself laughing along with him. ‘Yeah. I probably did. It was a fantastic talk.’
‘Thank you, thank you. I hope you learned something while you were busy typing away?’
‘Oh for sure. So much. I actually loved it more than I was expecting, to be honest.’
James purses his lips. Jules’s skin heats at her slipped confession, and she rushes to say, ‘Not in a bad way, I promise. I meant, I’ve never considered how strongly contextual and social factors can influence how people interact with technology, even in the publishing sphere, and how that can influence their responses to surveys and in focus groups and the like.’
‘Ah.’ His lips lift into a smile. ‘Most people don’t. It’s why I run a whole company to teach people that exact thing.’
‘Yeah. I’ll have to look into it.’
‘Here. Let me give you this.’ He flicks open his briefcase and passes her a business card. ‘Website, email, phone number are all on there. Enjoy the rest of your day,’ James says, starting to leave.
