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He grinned. “Not at all. I crushed on older women when I was growing up. I can still see Ms. Rockaway bending over in her tweed skirt to pick up the chalkboard eraser.”
“Who was she?” Unpleasant emotion speared through Stella.
“Chemistry teacher sophomore year. I hope you’re jealous, so you know how I feel about Dexter kissing you,” he said, his face thoughtful as he ran his fingertips down her arm.
“Dexter?”
“Maybe Stewart. That’s a good name for the kind of guy I’m picturing.”
“Don’t picture him.”
“Mortimer.”
She laughed. “No.”
“Niles.”
“Michael.”
“Don’t tell me his name is Michael.”
“It’s not. You’re my only Michael. Do you really want to know his name?”
He was quiet for a moment before he released a heavy breath and said, “It’s better if I don’t. Since you don’t want me to beat the shit out of him.” When she stiffened at his language, a hard smile touched his lips.
She caught her breath, unsure what to say. It wasn’t Philip she cared about. It was Michael. If he went after Philip, there could be awful consequences. Lawsuits, jail, HR claims. Even though she would have liked to see Michael in action, one nasty kiss wasn’t worth all that.
“I’m glad you like the dress,” Michael said with a softening expression. “I’m looking forward to seeing you wear it tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
After a lunch of catfish soup with pineapple and celery over rice, Stella rushed back to the office. She wanted to look at the data again.
Philip lifted a hand at her when she passed by, but she didn’t have time to deal with him. She strode past his office, tossed her purse in her desk drawer, and sat down, clicking through screens on her monitors until she came to the function she’d formulated to model men’s purchasing behavior with regard to high-end boxer shorts. It was an elegant equation with five key variables that included things like age and income bracket and several minor variables.
She’d boiled the termination of male purchasing of boxers down to a single binary variable, ß, and had found markers that led to its activation, things like increased spending on fine dining and luxury gifts. It seemed counterintuitive to Stella that in a time of decreased price sensitivity, men suddenly quit buying their underwear. Even luxury boxers weren’t that expensive.
Now, as she looked at the math and the numbers, Michael’s words trickled through her brain. Women like to take care of the people they love. Somehow, some way, Stella had used market data, math, and statistics, to quantify love into a single variable.
ß was love.
ß was a zero or a one. A yes or a no.
And it was overwhelmingly linked to the time when men quit purchasing their own underwear. It wasn’t an absolute, of course. People were people, and they hated to be entirely predictable. But it was a visible trend. You could gamble with this data and win more than you lost.
If a woman purchased underclothes for a man, it meant she loved him.
Stella was fully capable of purchasing underclothes.
She left work early that day to go shopping. When she returned home with her find, she wrapped it in a red bow and hid it at the bottom of the drawer Michael had appropriated for his underclothes. If he stopped buying boxers now, it meant he loved her back.
If he loved her, her labels wouldn’t matter. She’d tell him everything.
{ CHAP+ER }
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