Page 61 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I kiss him. Not the sweet, slow kiss from the dance floor. This one is different—deeper, more deliberate, and I feel the moment it hits him, the moment his system catches up to what’s happening, because his hands come up to my waist and his fingers press into the fabric of my dress and he pulls me closer with a suddenness that tells me his body is leading again, outrunning whatever logic usually governs him.

His mouth is warm and his lips are softer than they should be, and he kisses me back with a focus that’s devastating—like I’m the only input that exists, like every sensor he has is tuned to the frequency of my mouth against his.

I reach for his shirt buttons. Undo the first one. The second. He goes still under my hands—not resistant, not frozen. Waiting.

The shirt opens. I push it off his shoulders and it falls, and he’s standing in front of me bare-chested in the moonlight, and I look at him. The broad shoulders, the defined chest, the skin that looks human because it is human, and the panel along his left ribs, that thin seam of engineered precision running through flesh. The smooth, unmarked plane of his stomach where a navel should be.

I put my hand on his chest. Flat. Over the place where the hum lives.

“Ruby,” he says, and his voice has changed—it’s rougher, unsteady in a way I’ve never heard from him. “When you touch me, my—” He stops. Tries again. “Everything gets loud. I don’t know how to—”

“You don’t have to know how.” I slide my hand up his chest to his shoulder. Feel the warmth of him, the impossible warmth radiating through my palm. “Just feel it.”

“I’m feeling everything.”

“Good.”

His hands find the zipper at the back of my dress. He doesn’t pull it—he stops, fingers resting against the metal, and looks at me. “Is this okay?”

“Yes.”

He pulls the zipper down. Slowly. The dress loosens around me and I let it fall, and I’m standing in front of him in my underwear and the gold earrings my grandmother gave me, and I should be self-conscious but I’m not, because the way he’s looking at me right now makes self-consciousness feel impossible.

His eyes move over me—reading, taking in every detail—but his face is different. Open. Unguarded in a way I haven’t seen before, like every defense he had just came down at once. His mouth parts slightly, and his breath—performed or not—catches. His hands are at his sides, and they’re trembling.

They’re actually trembling.

This man—this man who can lift an industrial mixer one-handed, whose hands are steady enough to pipe frosting with surgical precision—his hands are shaking because I took my dress off.

“Aiden.” I step closer. Take his hands. They’re warm and unsteady in mine, and I bring them to my waist and press them flat against my skin. His lips part again, and his fingers spread wide like he’s trying to take in as much of me as possible through touch alone.

“Your skin,” he says. “It’s—” He stops. Shakes his head once, frustrated with language, with the gap between what he’s experiencing and what words can carry. “I don’t have—there isn’t a word.”

“You don’t need a word.” That’s kind of the point… quieting everything, even if it’s only for a few stolen moments.

His hands move. Tentative at first, then less so. Up my sides, over my ribs, the curve of my waist. His thumbs brush my hip bones and I shiver, and he notices—of course he notices—and does it again, deliberately this time.

“You like that,” he says. Not a question.

I swallow and suck in a breath.

He’s learning me. In real time. The way he learns everything—observing, cataloging, adjusting. Except this isn’t a recipe or a stockroom or a social cue. This is my body under his hands, and every response I give him rewrites something in his programming, and I can see it happening behind his eyes—not cold analysis, not clinical observation. Wonder. Pure, unfiltered wonder at the fact that touching me makes me respond, and that my response makes him feel something he has no name for.

I guide his hands. Show him where. Show him how. He follows, careful, intense, his eyes moving between my face and his own hands like he can’t decide which input matters more.

When his mouth finds my neck—warm lips against my pulse point—I gasp, and he pulls back immediately.

“Did I—”

“Don’t stop.” I pull him back. “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t stop. His mouth moves along my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, and each kiss is a discovery, each point of contact generating a response in both of us that builds and builds. I can feel the vibration of his hum against my skin when his chest presses against mine, low and steady and alive.

I pull him toward the bed. He follows. We fall onto it together, and his weight is warm and solid above me, and his forearms bracket my head, and he’s looking down at me with those amber-dark eyes and his hair falling across his forehead and his mouth slightly open and he is, in this moment, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

“Hi,” I whisper.

“Hi,” he whispers back, and the corner of his mouth twitches—almost a smile, shy and uncertain—and I pull him down and kiss him because I can, because he’s here, because he wants to make me feel good, and the kiss deepens and his hips settle against mine and—