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Ruby is asleep. She fell asleep at 11:47, which is early for her. She had a long day; she spent ten hours in the bakery, came upstairs, ate the pasta I made her, and fell asleep on my shoulder before she finished her wine.

I carried her to bed, pulled the covers over her. I watched her for eight seconds, which is the amount of time I’ve allotted myself before it becomes the thing she told me not to do, and then I came back to the living room.

Biscuit is on the couch. Her usual spot—the left cushion, the one with the dent from her body because she sleeps in the exact same position every night, curled with her nose under her tail and her floppy ear covering her eye.

I sit on the floor. My spot. Back against the couch, shoulder near her head. She opens one eye, registers that it’s me, and puts her paw on my arm.

“Hello, Biscuit.”

Her tail taps once. Lazy. It’s a greeting, not a request.

“Ruby said I could tell you things.”

Another tap. I choose to interpret this as consent.

“She said it in the car, after the wedding. I asked if I could tell the dog, and she said yes. She was laughing when she said it, so it’s possible she didn’t mean it literally, but I’m choosing to take it at face value because I have things to say and you’re the only one in this apartment who won’t interrupt me.”

Biscuit yawns. Her teeth are small and white, and her tongue curls, and she looks at me with an expression of total, uncomplicated availability.

“I want to tell you about Ruby.”

“She’s the first person who touched me like I was real. Not my skin—Gemma touched my skin. The lab technicians touched my skin. They touched it the way you touch equipment. Checking function. Testing response. Their hands were clinical, and their attention was elsewhere, and when they were done, they moved on to the next task.”

I pause, thinking about it.

“Ruby touches me like I’m a person. Her fingers on my jaw. Her hand on my chest. The way she pushes my hair off my forehead when she thinks I’m in shutdown and I’m not, and I keep my eyes closed because I don’t want her to stop.

“The first time she touched me intentionally—not accidentally, not the brush of fingers during a towel exchange—was when she opened the panel. She sat on the coffee table, and her hands were shaking, and she pressed both ends of the seam, and I felt every point of contact like it was the first time anyone had ever been careful with me.

“Because it was.”

Biscuit’s ear twitches. I adjust my position on the floor. Her paw stays on my arm.

“I want to tell you about what it feels like when Ruby kisses me.

“It feels like everything stops. I’ve said this before—to Ruby, in the hotel room—but I didn’t explain it well because I was still learning the vocabulary. Here’s what I mean: I run constant background operations. Thousands of them. Scans, calculations, assessments, temperature monitoring, audio processing. They never stop. They’ve been running since I was activated, and I have never—not once—experienced silence.

“Until I kissed Ruby. And everything went quiet. Like every system I have collectively decided that the only thing worth processing was her mouth and her hands and the sound she made, the small one, against my lips.

“She told me I can’t tell anyone, except maybe a dog, about the first time we had sex.” I pause, looking at Biscuit. “I know you don’t understand sex. You’re a dog. But I need to say this to someone who won’t make a face.”

My memories drift back to that night. Happy. Complete. With purpose—maybe for the first time ever.

“I was terrified. Not of the act—I’d researched it thoroughly. I knew the mechanics, the positions, the physiology. I knew where to touch her and how to read her responses and which techniques had the highest satisfaction ratings across peer-reviewed studies and Reddit threads.”

I pause, reliving the moment briefly.

“None of it prepared me.

“Because by the time she took her dress off, I could see her and she was letting me see her, and the trust of that was bigger than anything my system has ever processed.

“She guided me. Her hands on mine. Showing me where. Showing me how. And every place she put my hands became the most important place in the world, and every sound she made rewrote something in me that I didn’t know could be rewritten.

“I told her I was larger than her purple toy. By a significant margin.”

I pause, remembering that too. The patience I had to have. It took a little bit of time, some effort. Persistence. Her trust in me. The warm, half-dazed look in her eyes. I become a little aroused just thinking about it, then I remember that I’m talking to a dog and I shut it down. Later I tell myself.

“There have been one hundred and sixty-three times now. I keep count. Ruby says counting is weird. I think counting is a way of saying ‘each one mattered and I remember all of them,’ which doesn’t seem weird to me at all.