Page 40 of The Mysterious Billionaire
“You can’t possibly be saying you’re demisexual? That you need an emotional connection with a girl before you’re sexually attracted to her?”
“Why not?”
“Because you had sex with me less than an hour after meeting me!”
“Yeah, but you were hot.”
We both laugh.
“Seriously,” she says. “I’m confused.”
I shrug. “I can’t explain it. Wren and I have always been friends, but we’ve never gone down that road. I didn’t even consider it when she asked me to donate.”
“But you still didn’t say yes to donating right away?”
“No…”
“Why not? You know you don’t have a limited supply of little swimmers, right?”
I give her a wry look. “I am aware. I was very sympathetic to her situation. She’d been to the fertility clinic, and they’d told her there’s a two-year waiting list for single women.”
“Jeez.”
“I know, so I understood her plight. I just needed time. I wasn’t sure…” I stop and run my hand through my hair.
“Wasn’t sure about what?”
“I do plan on getting married eventually, and I wasn’t sure how my wife would feel knowing I’d fathered another woman’s child.”
“You could just not tell her.”
“I wouldn’t want to keep a secret like that from her.”
Another curious look. “Really?”
“You don’t feel the same way?”
“I do, I wasn’t aware there might be men who did.” Her voice is flat.
“Are you talking about your ex?”
It’s her turn to shrug. “I thought we could talk about anything, but it turned out he was keeping a lot of his feelings to himself.” She pauses. Then she says, “Do you know how I found out that he’d been thinking about breaking up with me?”
“No.”
“I’d put my laptop away and wanted to ask ChatGPT something, and his laptop was open, so I quickly hopped on it and found a thread where he’d discussed our relationship.”
“Fuck me, seriously?”
“Yeah. He’d listed all my faults. Laid out every reason I pissed him off. And at the end, ChatGPT said something like: ‘taking into account everything you’ve told me, I believe you should think about ending your relationship.’”
I stare at her, speechless for a moment. “That’s awful,” I say eventually. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ah, it was a good thing in a way. I mean, I knew we weren’t exactly the golden couple, but I tend to be a bit… fuzzy about things like that. I can’t take a step back and look at it from a distance.” She glances at me. “Anyway, it just surprised me that you’d feel a need to admit to a partner what you did for Wren. If the decision was made before you met your wife, why would she care? Wren wasn’t asking you to be involved, right?”
“No…” I think about the way I couldn’t get Cupcake out of my head. How obsessed I became. “But I’d already met you, Maddie.”
“What do you mean?”
