Page 21 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

“Fascinating.” She rolls her eyes.

“I’d like to see her again.”

“She was a customer’s dog, Aiden. She doesn’t live here.”

“Other dogs live in this neighborhood. I’ve heard them.”

Ruby gives me a look I can’t fully decode, but her mouth is twitching.

The register incident happens later that day.

Jess is on a break, out back on her phone. Ruby is in the kitchen dealing with a supplier issue, her voice tense and low through the phone pressed to her ear. The front bell chimes—a customer—and nobody is at the counter.

I hear the bell. I hear the customer shift their weight, the creak of the floor, the quiet “hello?” directed at an empty register.

Ruby is occupied. Jess is unavailable. A customer is waiting. The solution is simple.

I walk out.

The woman at the counter is mid-fifties, wearing a coat, holding a wallet. She looks at me without alarm or recognition or any response that suggests she’s seeing anything other than a man behind a counter.

“Hi,” she says. “Can I get a medium coffee and a blueberry muffin?”

I have watched Ruby execute this transaction approximately one hundred and thirty times in the past four days. I know the register. I know the prices. I know where the muffins are and how she bags them and the size of cup she uses for a medium.

“Of course,” I say, and I make the coffee and bag the muffin and ring her up and tell her the total is seven dollars and forty-three cents. She pays with a ten-dollar bill, and I give her the correct change. She says, “Thanks, have a good one,” and she leaves.

She didn’t notice.

I’m standing behind the register in fluorescent light, three feet from a human, and she didn’t notice anything. No double take, no narrowed eyes, no flinch. She saw a man. A normal, unremarkable man selling her a muffin.

Ruby comes out of the kitchen thirty seconds later, phone still in hand, and stops dead. “Why are you at the register?”

“A customer came in. You were on a call. I filled in.”

The color leaves her face. “You—a customer saw you? A real customer? Did she—”

“She ordered. She paid. She left. She said, ‘Have a good one.’“ I pause. “She didn’t notice anything, Ruby.”

Ruby stands there, one hand on the kitchen doorframe, staring at me behind her register in her apron. I watch the panic move through her—the spike of fear, the rapid assessment, the slow, reluctant realization that nothing went wrong.

“She didn’t notice,” Ruby repeats.

“No.”

“She just… thought you were a person.”

“Yes. She thought I was a human person.” Which I’m meant to look like, and I do. As long as you don’t see me shirtless.

Ruby exhales slowly. Looks at me behind the counter. Looks at the register. Looks at the door the customer walked out of.

“Huh,” she says.

And I can see her thinking. I can see the calculation behind her eyes—about what it might mean that I can stand in a public space and pass without anyone looking twice.

She doesn’t say any of this. She just says, “Don’t do that again without asking me first,” and goes back to the kitchen.

The next day, Ruby decides I’m coming with her to the hardware store two blocks away because she needs help carrying things and because, in her words, “you can’t live in my apartment forever without going outside.”