Page 44 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I look at myself in the mirror. I look fine. Good, even.

I open the bathroom door.

Aiden is still on the bed. He looks up from a page about golden retriever rescue organizations, and he stops.

Just stops.

The TV keeps playing. But Aiden has gone completely still in a way I recognize now—the way he went still when he heard music for the first time, the way he went still when that dog pushed through the kitchen door. A full-system pause. Everything in him redirected toward one input.

Me.

His eyes move over my face, my hair, the dress, and back up. Slowly. Without any attempt to pretend he’s not doing exactly what he’s doing.

“You—” He starts, and then stops. Starts again. “Ruby.”

“Is it okay? Is it too much? Liv said, but maybe I should’ve—”

“You’re beautiful.”

He says it the way he said it in the car. Like it’s a fact. But this time his voice is different—quieter, rougher at the edges, like the word had to push through something on its way out.

“The dress is—” He stops again. “I don’t think the dress matters. I think you could wear anything and I would still—” Another stop. He looks frustrated with himself, with his own vocabulary, with the gap between what he’s experiencing and what language can carry. “You’re beautiful,” he says again, like it’s the only word that works even though it’s not enough.

“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out strange—a little breathless—and I turn away to grab my bag.

I check my phone. We have forty minutes before the dinner.

“You should change,” I say. “The blazer. The white shirt.”

“Right.” He stands, and without hesitation pulls his T-shirt off over his head in one motion, and I spin toward the window so fast I nearly trip on my own shoes.

“Bathroom, Aiden! Change in the bathroom!”

“You’ve said this before, and I still don’t understand—”

“Because I—” I release a slow exhale. “Men and women don’t just change in front of each other.”

“But I’m not a man.” He sounds almost confused by my logic.

The reason I can’t watch him change is the same reason I packed the vibrator, and I am losing my grip.

“Just please, Aiden.”

“Fine,” he says, and I hear him walk to the bathroom. The door closes.

I stand at the window, looking out at the vineyard, breathing carefully.

He volunteered to be my sex toy. He told me he has a full understanding of female pleasure from one hundred and forty-seven sources. He called himself a more realistic alternative to purple silicone. And then he looked at me in a green dress and couldn’t finish a sentence.

What the hell have I gotten myself into?

The bathroom door opens. I turn around, and he’s in the blazer and white shirt, and his hair is pushed back, and he looks like a man. Just a man. A devastating, impossible, shouldn’t-exist man who is about to walk into a room full of my family and pretend to be something he isn’t.

“Ready?” he asks.

No. Absolutely not. Not even close. But this is my circus and these are my monkeys and it’s time to face whatever the hell I’ve gotten myself into.

“Ready,” I say.