Page 24 of The Boyfriend Algorithm
My mother just said the word “network” like she learned it from a LinkedIn tutorial, and I love her so much it hurts.
“I’ll think about it, Mom.”
“Wear the green dress. It brings out your eyes.”
“Goodbye, Mom.”
“Call me later! Love you, sweetheart.”
I hang up and stand in the kitchen for a minute with my phone pressed against my forehead. Nobody tells you how embarrassing hope gets after thirty. Being single wasn’t the hard part. Being treated like a problem to solve was.
Josh is going to be one table away. Caroline Whitfield is going to be in the room. My mother is going to spend the entire night watching me with that careful, worried expression she thinks I can’t see. And I’m going to be standing there alone, fielding questions about my love life, pretending my bakery is thriving, trying to pitch myself to a food festival organizer while my ex slow-dances with his fiancée ten feet away.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I go back to the counter and smile at the next customer and pretend my jaw doesn’t ache from clenching it so hard.
After closing, I head upstairs and open the apartment door and immediately know something is different.
My bedroom door is open—I always leave it closed—and from the hallway I can see that the bed is made with military precision, the pillows are arranged symmetrically, the books on my nightstand have been stacked by size. My laundry basket has been emptied. The clothes I’ve been meaning to fold for three days are folded and put away.
“Aiden?”
He appears in the bedroom doorway, holding something.
My stomach nearly drops out of my ass.
“Ruby,” he says, with the tone of a man asking about the weather, “what is this?”
It’s my vibrator. He’s holding my vibrator. In his hand. Like a flashlight he found in a junk drawer. He’s turning it slightly, examining it, and his expression is pure clinical curiosity, and I want the earth to open up beneath me and swallow me whole. It’s purple, slightly curved, and fits nicely in his palm, which he is currently using to weigh the thing like a medical curiosity.
“Put that down.”
“It was in your nightstand drawer. I was organizing and—”
“Put. It. Down.”
He sets it on the dresser. Gently. Like it might be fragile. “Is it a medical device?”
“No, Aiden, it’s not a medical device.” I release a slow breath through my teeth.
“It has multiple settings. I found the power button by accident and—”
“Oh my gosh.”
“—the vibration pattern suggests it’s designed for targeted stimulation, but I’m not sure of the application. Is it therapeutic? For muscle tension?”
My face goes hot, even though it’s just Aiden, and I shouldn’t care what he thinks.
“It’s… personal.”
He tilts his head. “Personal how?”
“Personal as in private. As in mine. As in you don’t need to know what it’s for.”
His brows push together. “But I don’t understand its function, and I’ve been trying to categorize—”
“It’s for pleasure, Aiden.” The words come out before I can stop them, flat and desperate. “It’s for personal, private, physical pleasure, and I need you to never touch it again and to forget you ever saw it and to absolutely never bring it up in front of anyone, especially Liv, because she will never let me live it down.”
