Page 26 of Swiped

“Right, and you know why?” she said, taking his offered pepper jar and adding more to her slice. “Because it’s always delicious. Pizza is my rock.”

Rami laughed. “Put that in your BeTwo profile.”

“Well, I’ve definitely seen worse.” She pulled more napkins out of the dispenser for the grease puddles forming in the corners of her mouth.

“My favorite profiles are the ones that have thousand-word screeds all about who the person doesn’t want,” said Rami, taking some of Nat’s offered napkins.

Nat quoted a medley of profiles from recent memory. “No smokers, no kids, no games, no stupid small talk. I just want someone real and hot.” She paused. “And again, you really have to be hot.”

“Gotta be looking for something real, not just shallow hookups!” He dropped his voice. “And don’t message me if you’re under six foot, thanks.”

They chewed in happy silence as aggressive punk music blared from the speakers. Nat let her gaze wander to Rami. He was watching the late-night crowd teeter into the pizza shop in a constant, overdressed stream. He looked, as always, deep in thought.

“What kind of thing did you put in your profile?” she asked.

He hit her with a doubtful look. “Oh, come on. You must have it cached somewhere. You can just look it up.”

“Absolutely I can,” she said. “But I haven’t.”

He reeled back with genuine surprise. “Wait, really? Why not? Opposition research, Nat!”

She gave him an amused nod as she mulled the question and a gooey bite of cheese.

It truly hadn’t occurred to her to look up Rami’s old profile, which now seemed like an egregious oversight.

It wasn’t like her to make oversights. Was she afraid of what she might find in his profile?

But why? She glanced at Rami, his boyish face looking as relaxed as she’d ever seen it.

Contentment looked damn good on him, even in the fluorescent lights of a pizza dive.

“I don’t know, but tell me what your profile said, anyway.”

He sat up a little straighter and a small smile warmed his face. “Fine. It was dumb.” He wiped his shiny fingers on a napkin. “I wrote about how I was just out of a relationship, and wanting to take things slow but not looking for hookups, either.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He kept his eyes fixed on his hands and shrugged. “Well, I may have actually used the words, ‘My heart is a little tender.’”

“Aww!” cried Nat, feeling something deep inside her melt like a chocolate drop. “But it was!”

“Yes,” he said, meeting her gaze with his signature look of quiet mischief. “Which is exactly the time not to be on the internet.”

Nat had to concede that point. She bit her lip in thought as he stood and gathered their empty plates and balled up napkins.

The force of habit to rifle through her knowledge of profile search terms and metrics kicked in, but her mind seemed to be somewhere else.

She was too distracted to think about data and sharpening her algorithm.

It felt unfamiliar, but it also felt a lot like having fun.

“Ready?” he asked, gesturing to the door.

* * *

It seemed like the number of people on the street had doubled in the time they were in the pizza shop.

Nat squeezed close to Rami to avoid getting elbowed by drunken groups taking up the sidewalk in their crooked march to the next bar.

He leaned his body back toward hers in response and guided them through the chaos as a little unit.

They managed to walk a few blocks, and the crowd thinned out. Nat realized that she didn’t know where they were going, and that she also didn’t want to ask and have the answer possibly be “nowhere.” She also noticed that he hadn’t moved away from her, even though the sidewalk was now wide open.

Rami cleared his throat. “Shall we get a nightcap? We could probably make last call.”

Before Nat could answer with her definite Yes , she felt her phone buzz just as she heard Rami’s buzz in unison.

They pulled out their phones.

“Oh shit,” said Nat, reading.

“Shit-shit,” said Rami, also reading.

It was an email from Tracy Goodwin-King at BuzzFill.

She was reminding them of their pre-arranged midpoint check-in interview in the morning.

It seemed that neither of them had accepted the calendar invite, or maybe her intern had forgotten to send it — an idea to which she had added a smiley face.

Either way, the date was in the contract, so she expected to see them bright and early, and ready to give updates on their contest progress — on camera, obviously.

“More like BuzzKill,” Rami grumbled.

“It really is.” Nat sighed. She eyed Rami’s figure standing next to her in the hazy street light. “Unless . . .”

“Unless you don’t want to give the interview, for some reason,” he said, voice turning up into a taunt as he finished her sentence.

She balked. “I have no reason not to! Everything is going fine for me.”

“Good. Me too.”

“Good.” Nat shifted her weight and straightened her coat. “So then we can both just report on our respective dating success tomorrow.”

“Absolutely.”

The idea of this same voice deriding her app, her work , was all too real, no matter how sweet it sounded to her now. After all, she’d heard him do it before. She stuck out her chin in defiance. “I’ve been meeting great guys through BeTwo. I haven’t found the right one yet, but I will.”

Rami nodded and tucked a few of his glossy curls behind his ear. “Yeah, and I just had a great night with a cute girl I met totally organically . . .” He hesitated, biting his pouty bottom lip. “I met her at a tech convention.”

Instinctively, Nat nodded with a tight smile.

Then his meaning hit her. The city street seemed to hush around her.

All she could see was his face — his doe eyes under expressive brows, and strong, stubbled jawline offset with a shy smile.

For the first time with him, her mind went blank. She just stared.

“Sorry, bad joke,” he said, as cars and sirens and other people’s conversations swirled back into her awareness. He rubbed his hands together with an awkward laugh. “I should probably call it a night.”

But she didn’t want to call it a night. “No,” she said, stepping forward and taking his hand. She let the warmth of his body fill her with courage. “I had a nice time with you, too.”

Rami drew close to her, and his soft fingers curled around hers. Chemistry, that thing she had been chasing all night, practically sparked in the gap between them like electricity. His eyes searched hers, and she nodded silent permission. Slowly, so slowly, Nat could feel her shaky breath.

He leaned in, and their lips touched.

And it worked. His lips moved with hers, and she felt his broad chest pressing against her. She wrapped her arms around his steady shoulders. He pulled her close with a deeper kiss. The city was hushed for her again, and the only sound she heard was their breath.

She felt his hands rest on her hips as she leaned away. “That was nice, too,” she whispered. But it had been so much more than nice.

“You’re nice, too,” he echoed back to her.

* * *

Rami opened the door to his apartment in between their kisses.

“I don’t understand anything about you,” she said, barely taking a breath.

“I don’t understand anything about you,” he said, flicking on the lights and pulling her into the hallway toward his room.

“And yet you want to punish me,” she said.

She felt him smile through her kiss as he closed the bedroom door behind them. “I really, really do.”

She smiled back and pulled off his jacket. “Yes,” she moaned. The thud of his jacket on the floor brought her briefly back to her senses. “I mean, no! My app. You want to punish my app.”

Rami pulled off his shirt and leaned his bare chest against her. “What’s an app?”

She kicked off her shoes and lay back on his bed, pulling him down with her.

Rami. She let his name fill her mind. His arms were golden brown and muscled as he leaned his weight into her body.

He had a dark thatch of hair on his chest, leading a trail into his waistband, a trail she wanted very badly to follow with her tongue.

Rami. He was also going to publicly attack her app in approximately eight hours.

Her body and brain had very different agendas going on right now.

“So, bad dates? That’s why you hate BeTwo?” She arched her back so he could slip a hand under her blouse.

“Can I tell you later?”

Nat shook her head and so genuinely wished she could lie. “I’m just gonna be distracted until I know what it is.”

He nestled hungry kisses into her neck, and she sighed with pleasure. He whispered in her ear, “Your app isn’t perfect. No one’s is.”

“Yeah.” She panted, rubbing her hands across the smooth skin of his back. “Yeah, but did they also spend the best years of their life on their apps, and now it’s somehow being turned against them?”

He raised his face and hovered above her. “Are you sure this is about the app?”

“Just tell me,” she urged. “Should I make it ultra exclusive, maybe?”

He shook his head, sinking into thought as he nibbled down the line of her shirt buttons. “Honestly, I don’t know if that would fix it.”

“I agree,” said Nat, unbuttoning them. She started to wriggle out of her blouse. “It’s because of the users—”

“No, the flaw is in the design,” he said. “Not the users.”

Nat froze and stiffened. Rami looked up from nuzzling her belly button.

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head, his eyes dark pools of regret. “But you asked.”

“It’s fine.” Nat sat up and tugged her shirt closed.

“It’s obviously not fine.” He slumped over on the bed. “Look, my app has flaws, too!”

“Well, then how about I go on a rant about them for the entire world to see?” She stood and buttoned up her shirt.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“So, it’s OK to drag my app through the mud, but not yours?” She scoffed as he buried his head in his hands. “Yeah, that seems really fair.”

“My app is just about predicting the weather!” He stood and started looking for his abandoned shirt. “The stakes aren’t nearly as high.”

“Hmm, I guess I didn’t realize that I had to make the world’s most emotionally intelligent algorithm.”

“Why didn’t you?” He pulled on his shirt and looked at her with rumpled hair. “BeTwo is about the search for lifelong companionship. Is there anything more sensitive than that?”

“Come on, it’s not that big of a deal,” said Nat, putting on her shoes. “It sucks when you don’t connect, but it’s not personal.” She could practically feel the cameras on them already. She gritted her teeth. “It’s just a numbers game.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes,” she lied.

He shook his head in disbelief. “Right, so when you find yourself with a stomach condition because no one has responded to your profile for weeks, or people actually harm themselves because of the rejection they feel from your little algorithm, it’s all just a silly game that has no bearing on human emotion? ”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I? Have you checked in with your users about that?”

Nat waved his words away. “There will always be bad actors. I can’t be responsible for every time someone acts like a jerk on the internet.”

Rami stood his ground. “And yet you know that now there’s all sorts of ghosting and toxic messaging and abuse and general people-treating-each-other-like-shit that’s happening because of platforms like BeTwo, and on a scale that it never did before.”

She shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t see the doubt in her eyes.

She’d always known those things were happening, of course, and on every app, not just BeTwo.

But for the first time, she was a victim of the bad behavior herself, instead of just an outside observer.

She had to admit that it hit differently.

“So, then it comes down to this,” he said. “Either you think something about the technology is encouraging people to act like assholes, or you think all of humanity is just, innately, a bunch of assholes.” He crossed his arms. “Personally, I can’t be that cynical.”

“You take it too seriously.”

“You don’t take it seriously enough!”

Fully clothed, from opposite sides of the room, they glared at each other.

Anger and exhaustion and bubbling tears throbbed in Nat’s chest. How had she gotten here?

Not just the ruined night with Rami, or the ruined night with Nick, or the one with Eric, or even the years of ruined camaraderie with Jo.

But how had the one thing that had always been the antidote to all the ups and downs of her personal life — her steady, successful work — led her to this?

Burned out and humiliated from some disastrous stunt that put every single aspect of her life on the line. And she wasn’t even close to winning.

She should never have pivoted from sorting fishing lures to trying to match people. Then the conversation about her app would have focused on the quality of her work instead of being a referendum on her love life. Then she could have at least kept her dignity. And maybe a boyfriend, too.

“I just think . . .” Rami trailed off and blinked away the tears of frustration forming in his eyes. “People are getting hurt.”

“I’m fine,” said Nat.

She watched his face harden. He gave her a cold nod. “You sure about that?”

She picked up her purse. “See you tomorrow.”

Rami sank onto his bed. “Sure, have a good night.”

Nat’s feet stayed put. She didn’t want to leave. “Good luck finding your next date.”

“You know what? I hope that you find a really good date, too,” he said. “I really mean that.” He held her eyes with a look of genuine tenderness before it flashed into defiance. “Then you might remember what actual human feelings are like.”

Suddenly, Nat couldn’t leave fast enough. “You have no idea what my feelings are like,” she said, and left before he could see her tears fall.