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There wasn’t a whole lot of workspace in my apartment, so I pulled out my laptop and sat on my bed. As soon as I did so, Bagel curled up next to me and put her head on my lap so she could watch me log in.
I began checking messages and email and, so long as I stopped to pet her every ten seconds or so, she was content. Before too long, she fell asleep and began to snore, occasionally kicking a leg and letting out a tiny yelp as she chased rabbits in her dreams.
It was a funny thing. At work, I had my comfortable office chair and two monitor setup, but I was always on edge. Here, lying in my bed, I was as relaxed as I could ever remember being. I managed to make it through my morning routine in record time and in an hour or so, I’d accomplished more or less everything that I’d set out to do that day. Other than leading a meeting in about a half hour, I had nothing left to do.
I put my laptop down and cuddled up next to Bagel. Before I knew it, my computer chimed to give me a five minute warning before the meeting. I opened the video chat software and let my mind wander as I waited for my team to join. And, as it wandered, it went straight to Leo.
I wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier just to stay the night before. After all, I went home and immediately imagined the situation continuing and enjoyed it. And now I was making an effort to hide something that never even happened. Maybe I could have just done it. It seems like it would have saved several steps and a handful of minor stressors that added up like rubber bands forming into a ball. I was a virgin, but not because I wanted to be, or morals and values per se. The time, the chemistry, and the man were just never right. And if the time was never right, so be it. It wasn’t that big of a deal. At least not to me.
Or at least it hadn’t been until now. I had just met the guy, and there was something so magnetic about him that I felt I had to be around him in the same way that I needed to breathe.
It’s just the hormones, Mila, I told myself. Those injections I’d been doing for months had somehow made me hornier. Even though they hadn’t. Nobody else had that effect on me. Just Leo, the boy next door.
There was a chime as Erik came into the meeting. It woke Bagel, who got up and stretched, then got up to explore.
“Mila,” Erik said. There was an eager smile on his face. Genuine excitement that I’d never seen from him before. “We’ve got some big news.”
“What is it?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s not fair. It was Cheryl’s work. I’m not going to give it away.”
“Okay,” I said. Honestly, I didn’t care. This had never truly been a passion project for me, but I smiled all the same. “I can’t wait to hear.” I tried to put some energy into my voice, though there was too much else on my mind to completely focus on whatever he was saying.
“Why didn’t you come in today?” he asked. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked over at Bagel across the room. “A friend needed me to dog-sit for him. No big deal.”
“Cool, cool.”
We sat in silence for a while, waiting for Cheryl to join. Erik started flipping through different browser windows, without realizing that I could make out what he was looking at via the reflection in his glasses. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been too surprised that he was into stepmom porn, but I would have been happier to have just assumed it.
When Cheryl eventually joined after the three longest minutes of my life, she said, “Mila, you’re not going to believe this.”
“What?”
“Well, you know how you were saying we needed to improve the matching algorithm?”
I nodded. In my years in tech, I’d learned to limit the amount of spoken words in these video meetings. The audio delay almost always resulted in people talking over each other. Visual confirmation was cleaner and made things move along faster.
“Well, my boyfriend teaches at Cal State Northridge and said that there’s a professor in their computational psychology department who specializes in relationship dynamics. I met with her and—”
At the same time, just as with any conversation, sometimes it was necessary to cut people off so they would get to their actual point.
“Cheryl,” I said. “Skip the sales pitch and explanation. Tell me what you’ve got.”
I looked up over the screen and realized I’d lost track of Bagel. Where had she gone? Maybe she sniffed her way into the bedroom.
“Okay,” she said, “it turns out that relationship compatibility can be determined to a two sigma certainty based on the answers to just five questions.”
“Two sigma?” I said with a deep sigh, nerd talk always makes my head hurt.
“95%,” she said. “That’s the standard in psychology.”
That sounded pretty good to me. Other sites had developed a series of hundreds if not thousands of questions that didn’t have much luck in producing successful matches. If we could get a more accurate result in only a handful of questions, we’d be leaving those other apps in the dust.
“What are the questions?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” Erik told me. “They seem to be completely random, but it works. They were developed using Markov chains and a neural net algorithm.”
