Page 3 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I lower the rolling pin. Not all the way. Halfway. “Are you hurt?”

He considers this for a beat too long. “No.”

“Do you need help?”

His eyes hold mine, and for a second I see it—a flicker of something raw and unguarded behind all that stillness. I don’t have a word for it. Confusion, maybe. Or recognition. Like he’s seeing me for the first time and trying to figure out where I fit.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I think so.”

I’m going to regret this. I already know I’m going to regret this. This is the kind of decision that future me is going to look back on and say, “Ruby, what were you thinking?” And present me is going to say, “I wasn’t, that’s the whole problem.”

I set the rolling pin on the shelf. Grab a towel from the clean stack by the mop sink. Hold it out to him.

He takes it. Our fingers brush, and his skin is warm—noticeably warm, not clammy or cold like it should be after being out in the rain—and I pull my hand back a little too fast.

He doesn’t wrap the towel around himself. He just starts wiping the mud off his arms, his chest, methodical and unhurried, like he’s cleaning a surface rather than a body. Like modesty isn’t a concept that he’s aware of.

Then he stands up.

All the way up.

He’s tall—taller than I expected, tall enough that the utility room suddenly feels like a closet—and he’s just standing there, still holding the towel in one hand, wiping mud off his shoulder with the other, completely unbothered by the fact that he is very, very naked and I am very, very much in the room.

My eyes betray me. They drop for exactly half a second before I yank them back up to the ceiling, my face going hot so fast I’m surprised I don’t set off the smoke detector.

“Okay—towel. Around your waist. Now, please.”

He looks down at himself, then at the towel, then at me—and I swear I see the faintest flicker of confusion, like he’s trying to connect why one has anything to do with the other. But he does it. Wraps the towel low on his hips and stands there looking at me with that same quiet focus, waiting for the next instruction.

My heart is doing something it has absolutely no business doing right now.

“There’s a lost and found bin in the kitchen,” I say. “Sweatpants, a couple T-shirts. They probably won’t fit great, but they’re better than, uh—” I gesture at the general situation. “That.”

Chapter Two

Aiden

Nobody’s Perfect

The woman is talking very fast.

She’s pointing toward the kitchen with one hand and gripping a rolling pin with the other. Her voice is doing something my audio processing categorizes as elevated pitch, rapid cadence, inconsistent volume.

She’s telling me about a bin. A lost and found bin. Sweatpants and T-shirts. She’s gesturing at me—at my body, at the towel she told me to put around my waist, at the general area of myself that seems to be causing her discomfort.

I don’t understand why she’s uncomfortable. I followed her instruction. The towel is where she told me to put it.

“—and they might be a little small, but honestly, at this point, you just need to—” She stops talking.

I watch her eyes move. Down from my face, to my chest, across my torso. She was looking at me before—quick, darting glances that moved away as fast as they landed. This is different. This is…assessing.

Her gaze settles on my midsection, and stays there.

I look down to see what she’s seeing, but I already know. My torso is unremarkable to me—I’ve never had a reason to evaluate it aesthetically. Skin over framework. Functional. But I’m aware that the smooth plane below my ribs lacks a feature that humans have. A small indentation, a scar from where they were connected to another body before birth. I don’t have one because I was never connected to another body. I was never born.

“Who the hell are you?” She wants to know, pointing the rolling pin at me again, but the answer is complex, and I pause to consider the best response.

Her eyes move up to my ribs. To the left side, where the access panel sits. The seam is thin—barely visible, easy to miss unless you’re standing close enough to touch me, which she is. It runs about four inches along my lower rib line, a hairline interruption in the skin.