Five minutes before the conference begins, I pay my driver and ease out of the cab. Keeping my hair out of the wind, I hurry into one of the four main buildings of McCormick Place.
This is the grandest convention center in the country, so massive that it takes several minutes to wind through the walkways and halls to reach the auditorium where Saint is keynote speaker.
The press is already in position near dozens of steel folding chairs: neighborhood papers, community radio stations, five local news teams. It’s a big deal, apparently. Hundreds of professionals fill up the room, sharp and prepared with cameras, notepads, microphones.
As I wait in line at reception and try to discreetly comb my hair with my fingers, a small group of new arrivals near the entrance spots me. I’m given a thorough examination and then, the whispers start.
Fuuuck me.
Red down to my toes, I force myself to stand in line until I reach the woman with the clipboard. “Hi, Rachel Livingston with Edge, here for Malcolm Saint.”
“Honey, they’re all here for him,” she mumbles without looking up. She locates my name on her page and I silently thank Saint’s press coordinator for the favor—or Saint himself. I notice how reluctantly the woman locates the badge, until she finally hands it to me. I fake confidence as I take the badge with my name and head inside.
There’s a crowd gathered already, applauding when a bald presenter in a gray suit takes the stage. “Welcome,” he says into a microphone.
Though I try to keep my attention on the stage as I search for a seat, there’s no missing the stares coming my way.
I feel an uncomfortable squeeze in my stomach when I think of Victoria and wonder what she’s doing, if she’s covering for that stupid magazine whose blog she exposed me in. She must be thirsting for my blood after Malcolm killed her article.
I don’t see Victoria here, thank god. But people see me. And suddenly, I. Don’t. Care. What they say.
I’m impassioned here. He impassions me. Just thinking of watching him speak today lights up my writing fire, so I should let him light me up and let me burn.
I stand before an empty chair at a back row, next to a long aisle.
That’s when a commotion from the entrance draws my eye, and the sight of Saint walking inside hits me with a jolt of feminine awareness as he takes the room with a trail of businessmen behind him. Malcolm owns every place he’s in, every floor he steps on. More virile than any man I have ever had the pleasure of staring upon, he uses that eat-you-up stride as he heads to the front of the room.
It’s impossible, but I swear even the air shifts—dynamically, energetically—with him in the room.
The presenter speaks his name into the microphone, and then, behind the wooden podium, stands Malcolm freaking perfection Saint.
“As many of you know, since inception, M4 has experienced record-breaking growth across all platforms . . . but there’s been an area among the M4 holdings that has captured my attention the most. For over the past year, a team of more than four thousand specialists and I have been laboring to bring to you Interface, which, in its short time online, has beaten every social-media site in the areas of engagement and user signup,” he says, and then he eyes the audience with a pause.
He’s so much larger than life that my eyes are wide as I absorb the full impact of him up there—owning the room. Owning everyone in it. Especially me.
But . . .
He’s not reading my speech. I’m a little bit confused, then I realize—I really did lose it. I’ve lost my spark, I’ve lost it all. He believed I could write well, maybe. Enough to want me to work at his company. He gave me a chance, and now he’s realized I’m no good. He won’t want me, even for a job. He won’t want me at all.
I’m stressing so much, I regret that I miss some parts of his speech, until the room bursts into applause.
I swallow. Look up at him.
I feel his presence in the knees. He smiles, waits for one of the reporters to ask him a question, his eye contact direct.
Noticing the enraptured looks of my companions, I can already predict the words used to describe his presentation and him: Mesmerizing. Concise and sharp.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was only 270 words long. Likewise, Saint seems to embrace brevity and run with it.
As he starts to answer questions, I also notice that most everyone is standing, even when they have chairs, a phenomenon not many people accomplish.
God, what would it be like to say yes—yes—and work for him? See him at work every day, taking on the world, chasing and attaining his every ambition?
No, I could never do this.
NEVER work for a man who’s seen me naked.
It has to be a rule.
But it would also be complete and utter torture to never see him again . . .
A reporter from Buzz asks a multipart question, and after Saint lists down the answers and the man continues looking eager for more, Saint adds, “Now, what part of your question did I not answer?” His voice is low and deeply solid, the crowd hushes as though affected by its timbre.
“Saint! Saint! They say you couldn’t fit all your followers on your Facebook page and before it exploded, had to create your own Interface to fit them all.”
“If I’d created Interface for myself, I would’ve called it MyFace.”
Laughter.
He calls on someone else.
“Speaking of you, Saint, is it true you have as many men followers as you do women?”
“I haven’t been following the statistics.” He smiles. “But it is true the world is made of both.”
My stomach, which had been all gnarled up, seems to like that smile.
“Your M4 conglomerate is the most powerful corporation in the state. Is it true a lot of your employees aren’t college graduates?”
He keeps eye contact with the silver-haired, bearded reporter who asked, and succinctly answers, “We hire people who want to make things different. We encourage education and partner with educators across the country, but we prize free thinkers and people who can get things done above all else.”
He scans the crowd then, and suddenly a shockingly brilliant pair of green eyes lands on me. I had forgotten I’d been standing there with my arm raised. He calls on me.
“Rachel Livingston from Edge,” I hastily identify myself, as is customary, but when I hear gasps in the audience—fuck—I just forget what I was going to say.
Scrambling, I blurt out the second question that comes to mind, bypassing the real one I want to ask: Why did you not read my speech? “Interface, as a word, is a shared boundary across which two separate components of a computer system exchange information. In choosing this name, did you mean to make fun of how dispassionate relationships can become through online communication, the loss of personal contact?”