Page 65 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

She narrows her eyes, glancing over at me once. “Your research is going to get you left on the side of this highway.”

“You wouldn’t leave me. You like me too much.” I pause. “You especially liked me last night.”

“AIDEN.”

We drive in silence for three miles. I count the mile markers. I watch a hawk circle over a field. I think about Ruby’s shoulder and the freckle I found there that she didn’t know she had, and how I told her about it and she said, “You found a freckle during sex?” and I said, “I notice everything about you,” and she put her face in the pillow.

“One question,” she says eventually. “One. And then we’re done.”

I consider my options. There are forty-seven questions in my queue. I scroll through them, discarding the ones that will make her drive into a ditch, and the ones that will make her face turn red, and the ones that involve specific anatomical details I’d like to revisit but understand are not appropriate for a moving vehicle. I file those away for another time.

“Was last night—” I stop. Start over, because the question I actually want to ask isn’t about technique or feedback or improvement. It’s simpler than that. And harder. “Was it real? For you. Not the performance. Not the fake boyfriend thing. Was what happened between us last night real?”

Ruby is quiet for a long time. For a full mile. The music plays. A truck passes us on the left.

“Yeah,” she says softly, still looking at the road. “It was real.”

Something settles in me. A calculation I’ve been running since the utility room, since the towel, since the first time she said my name—it resolves. With a certainty. The kind I can’t prove but don’t need to because it feels more solid than any data.

“Good,” I say. “Because I’d like to do it again.”

“Noted.”

“And I’d like to tell your friends.”

She swerves again, the car jolting violently to the left. “What?!”

“About last night. I’d like to tell Liv, Gemma, and Avery.”

“You absolutely cannot tell my friends that we had sex.”

“Why not? It was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I want to share it.”

“That’s—” She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “That is not how humans work, Aiden. You don’t just tell people about—”

“Liv told us about her sexual encounters in detail. Twice. During the same dinner.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Because Liv has no shame and I have a small amount of shame and I’d like to keep it.”

“Shame seems counterproductive.”

“Welcome to being human.” She shrugs.

“I’m not human.”

“You were pretty human last night.” She says it before she can stop herself, and then her face flushes and she stares at the road.

I file that comment in the highest priority storage tier I have. Right next to her laugh and the playlist and the first time she said my name.

“We’re not telling people,” she says firmly. “Not yet. Maybe not ever. Definitely not Liv first because she will make it into a group chat event and I will never recover.”

I consider this. “Gemma would be more clinical about it.”

“That’s worse, Aiden. That’s somehow worse.”