Tempting the New Boss(73)
“Don’t be nervous.”
“I’ll try, but I’m supposed to give a speech.”
“Me, too!” he confided with a grin even wider than when he’d been snatching a French fry. “But I’m not nervous at all.”
“You’re a better man than I am, Nathan.”
“I don’t think so. But thank you.”
Mason smiled. “You’re welcome.”
The woman board member stood up and went to the podium in the center of the dais, then tapped on the microphone that he had been distressed to see was there.
“Now, ladies and gentleman, we’ve let you eat long enough. It’s time for the actual ceremony part. We are so lucky to have with us tonight a man who has given so much of himself to Camp for Kids.”
“That’s you,” Nathan stage whispered.
“I guess.” He barely got the words out.
“And tonight he’s giving us something even more precious, a little of his very valuable time to meet some of you and let us thank him properly for his contributions.” Someone handed her a plaque. “Mr. Talbot.” She waved him over.
“You better go,” Nathan said, very loud, and the audience laughed. Softer, he added, “Don’t be scared.”
Mason nodded and went up to the microphone.
She handed him the plaque as the audience clapped. His face flushed under the bright lights, and his breathing sounded very loud to him in the microphone. After a minute, the board member faded back, resuming her seat, and he was up there, alone, the only noise some rustling of chairs as people positioned themselves to listen to him.
He set the plaque down on the table and reached into his inner pocket for the speech Marcia had meticulously typed out for him in eighteen-inch font so he could read it easily even if the paper was vibrating from his nerves. He set it down in front of him, smoothing it out with his hands.
The silence felt stifling and he looked up, a sea of expectant faces. Then he looked over to Nathan, who smiled.
“Uh, thanks,” he began, gesturing to the plaque. “I, ah, I appreciate it.”
The words of the speech that Marcia had written were right there—when he had started the charity, how happy he was that it flourished, how wonderful it was to be here tonight.
He pushed the speech away. For a second, he wondered how it would feel to have Camilla sitting next to him at the dais, smiling at him, sharing the moment. Sharing all the moments.
“I, uh, I started Camp for Kids, and most people probably think I did it for the tax deductions.”
There was a laugh from the audience.
“Which are very good.”
Polite silence.
His voice was shaky, and he probably wasn’t fooling anyone about how nervous he was, but he continued talking anyway.
“I haven’t been out to see any of the actual camps or meet the kids, before tonight that is.” He looked over to Nathan who was beaming and nodding, making it clear he had met him. “And it’s not because I’m so busy or my time is so valuable. It’s, uh, sort of for the reason I started the camps in the first place.”
He took a deep breath, his heart pounding.
“When I was, uh, little, maybe five or six, some people, I mean my, my family, thought I might have something they called a long, funny name. When I looked it up it meant something they didn’t think was very good. They called it Asperger’s Syndrome.”
The audience was dead silent now, everybody staring at him, and he rushed to get it out, to say what he had to say.
“It had to do with being different, not what people expected. And it made everybody quite sad to think I might have it. Doctors were involved of course. Diagnoses. About a year or so, it went on and all I remember from that time was how different I really felt. Not good. Not special. Different.”
He glanced at Nathan, who had wandered off to Mason’s rolls now and wasn’t paying attention. Mason looked back at the audience, his voice stronger. “And I didn’t like the feeling. Even when all the doctors consulted their guidelines and the results of their tests on me and came back with their pronouncement that I didn’t have the horrible thing with the long, funny name, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief, it didn’t matter to me. I was still the same kid I was. I was still different. And I felt that way my whole life. Different. Not what people expect. I don’t feel comfortable in crowds, I don’t warm up to people easily, I’m cranky.”
The audience laughed.
“That’s why I never came before tonight, was afraid to meet people like Nathan here.”
That caught the young man’s attention, and he stood up and waved. Everybody laughed louder as he grinned and hammed it up, bowing, until the woman next to him said a quiet word and tugged him down.