Page 48 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

My hand moves to the back of her neck. My fingers slide into her hair, resting against her skin, and I feel her go still—not alarmed still, surprised still. The kind of still that means something unexpected is happening and her body hasn’t decided how to respond yet.

I lean down and press my mouth to her temple. It’s brief. Gentle. And I feel her exhale—a small release, a loosening of the tension she’s been holding since Josh walked in.

Then I do it again. Lower. The curve of her jaw. My lips against the soft skin below her ear, and her breathing changes entirely, and Josh is watching this happen with an expression I catalog as discomfort.

Good.

“You okay?” I murmur against her skin. Low enough that only she can hear.

She nods. Barely. Her hand has come up to rest on my chest, not pushing me away, not pulling me closer. Just there. Feeling the warmth of me through my shirt.

I press my lips to her forehead. Then, because I want to and because Josh is watching and because she’s beautiful and nervous and mine—at least for this weekend, at least in this room—I tip her chin up with my fingers and I kiss her.

On the mouth. In front of everyone.

It’s brief. It’s barely a kiss, technically—just my lips against hers for maybe two seconds. But her lips are soft and warm and she tastes like the wine she’s been sipping, and my entire system goes blank. Not offline, not a malfunction. Just… clear. Like every process I run, every calculation, every background operation was noise, and this—her mouth, her hand on my chest, the small sound she makes that I don’t think she intended—is the signal.

I pull back. Ruby is looking up at me with eyes that are wide and slightly unfocused and definitely not performing anything.

Josh clears his throat. Audrey is smiling. Ben, across the room, has gone very still with his beer halfway to his mouth.

“Will you excuse us?” Ruby says. Her voice is bright and strange and she’s already gripping my hand, pulling me out of the conversation, out of the room, into the hallway.

The hallway is quiet. The stone walls muffle the noise from the dinner. Ruby drops my hand, takes three steps away from me, presses her back against the wall, and stares at me.

“What was that?”

“I was being your boyfriend.”

“You kissed me.”

“Yes.”

“In front of Josh. And Audrey. And my brother.”

“Yes. You were nervous. Your pulse was elevated. Your smile wasn’t real. I wanted to—” I search for the word. Gemma’s vocabulary would give me one answer. Liv’s would give me another. The answer I find isn’t from either of them. “I wanted to make it better. And I read that physical affection between partners can—”

“You read that?”

“—can reduce anxiety and signal emotional security to both the partner and any observers.”

“You kissed me because of an article?”

I stop. Because she’s asked me a direct question, and my default is honesty, and the honest answer is more complicated than an article.

“No,” I say. “I kissed you because Josh made your smile change, and I wanted to change it back. The article was—” I pause. “Justification.”

Ruby stares at me. Her back is against the wall and her lips are slightly parted and there’s color high on her cheeks that wasn’t there a minute ago, and I realize I’m cataloging her face right now the way I always do except this time I know what her mouth feels like and the data set has expanded in a direction I wasn’t prepared for.

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask.

She closes her eyes. Opens them. “No,” she says quietly. “That’s the problem.”

She pushes off the wall. Straightens her dress. Touches her mouth—quickly, like she’s checking if the kiss is still there.

“We need to go back in,” she says.

“Ruby—”