His addition of the descriptor childish made me pause, because Matt often did things that were somewhat child-like, like his propensity to ask all manner of questions without gauging their appropriateness, or his tendency to be honest in all situations.
He just seemed candidly curious about everything, which never struck me as childish. I associated childish behavior with selfishness, and child-like behavior with never being taught or knowing better. But I hoped he’d never know better. I hoped this part of his personality never changed, because I loved his unguarded curiosity.
“So you broke up?”
“She dumped me when she found out I’d automated my text messaging.”
“Um, what?”
“You know.” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “I built a program that would respond to her text messages.”
“You did what?” I thought we’d reached a point in our relationship where he couldn’t shock me anymore. I was wrong.
“She texted me a lot. I didn’t have time to respond to her immediately—or at all, not the way she needed—so I designed a simple AI with several different modes to immediately respond to her messages, dependent on key words.”
“Like what?” I should have been outraged on her behalf, but I wasn’t. This was too fascinating.
“Like, she’d send me a text saying something like, You’re so sexy. And so the program would go into sexting mode.”
My mouth fell open with more shock, but he wasn’t finished.
“Or she’d ask me what I was doing and it would go into conversation mode. Or she’d text about how she was angry about something or upset, and it would go into supportive mode.”
“I can’t believe you outsourced your relationship to an AI.”
“It’s actually where I got the idea for the Compassion AI. She was perfectly happy until she texted me while we were together, my phone was in the other room, and the AI immediately responded. Oh, something cool, I also programmed it to check my calendar and respond with dates and times if she was trying to schedule something. All in all, it saved me hours of pointless texting.”
“Matt.”
“Marie.”
“If you truly like a person, their texts aren’t pointless. You’ll look forward to them.”
He shrugged noncommittally.
I gave him the side-eye. “Have you been automating your texts with me?”
“No! No. Of course not.” His expression grew intensely serious. “You don’t seem to require frequent texts, or immediate responses for that matter. Plus, don’t I usually message you first?”
“That’s true.” I realized he was right, usually he was the one to initiate text conversations between us. “So, why didn’t you just break up with her if you were unhappy?”
“Because . . .” he visibly struggled to explain, his attention darting from the sky to the sidewalk to the street, “No woman is going to like how much I work, how unavailable I am. If it wasn’t her, it was going to be someone else, because I’m the problem.” He took a deep breath, wiping his face tiredly with his hand. “I know I work too much. My job, my research, that’s what I want to be doing.”
I nodded. “I get that. You love your work. It’s difficult to justify giving up time spent working for a person you can’t be certain is worth the investment.”
“That’s part of it,” his gaze hardened, then turned contemplative. “But I also have to wonder . . .”
I waited for him to continue; when he didn’t after several moments, I prompted, “What?”
“I wonder if I’m just not built for that. You know? With Kerry, we weren’t ever in love. We cared about each other, but it wasn’t what I see with people like, let’s say, Fiona and Greg. Or even Kerry and her new husband. We were good friends, and it was convenient to get married, so we did. We saved on living expenses, got to move into the married people dorm, always had someone to go see movies with. And then everyone since, I’ve never—” He shook his head, like he was frustrated.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he said with a touch of melancholy, his eyes lifting to the sky.
My heart beat quickly, frantically, and the crazy in my mind had been awoken. It was currently screaming from its padded cell I’ll love you! I’ll teach you how to love! You’re so smart and funny and sweet and unfairly handsome. Let’s have hot sex!
I had to seriously concentrate on my breathing and roll my lips between my teeth, because I couldn’t calibrate my smile and my lung function at the same time.
Luckily, he wasn’t looking at me when he continued speaking his thoughts aloud. “But I do love my job. I do love my work.”
Unable to contain myself, I stopped him by tugging on his arm and waited until he looked at me before saying, “You sound so sad, Matt.”
He stepped closer, a small smile on his lips, his expressive eyes twinkling down at me like I was wonderful. But I also saw something different there as well. I saw self-possession, restraint, and frustration.
“How can I be sad? I’m with you. Here.” He wrapped me in his arms.
I rested my cheek against his chest and felt his heart beat. I’d never been particularly touchy-feely with any of my male friends, but with Matt, it didn’t matter where we were, embracing usually felt completely normal.
But not tonight.
Tonight there was a stiffness in his posture, like he was holding me close, but not too close. Something was bothering him, but I didn’t know how to push the issue.
A few people passed by on the sidewalk, taking no note of us. I tried snuggling closer to his chest, hoping to dispel the sense of disharmony. It didn’t work, the tension remained, so I inhaled the scent of him. He smelled like peppermint, making me think he had a mint habit, and also a lovely cologne or aftershave I couldn’t place.
“Are you smelling me?” he asked, tilting his head to the side. “Because, if you are, you should know I’m totally into that.”
“Maybe.” I pulled away, wagging my eyebrows at him, wanting to disperse the odd dark cloud that had emerged over the evening, and instead replicate our previous light-heartedness. “You’ll never know for certain.”
Matt fell into step beside me. “Because you’ll never tell?”
I nodded.
“That’s not right, Marie. Real friends have no secrets between them.” He shook his head like he was disappointed in me, and I could see he was also trying to recapture our earlier mood. “I demand you tell me the color of your underwear.”
“What? Never.”
“Come on.”
“Nope.”
He leaned close and whispered conspiratorially, “Black, right?”
I shook my head, fighting off a shiver at his proximity.
“I’ll get them off you—er, I mean—I’ll get it out of you one of these days.”
I said nothing, because my instinct was to say, Yes, please. How about tonight?
And he would probably think I was joking.