Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 103102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
“Not him. But a few guys with guitars. I think it’s the law. All teenage girls fall for at least one guy with a guitar.”
“I can play guitar.” Where did that come from?
“I remember,” she says. “You used to play ‘Wonderwall.’”
“It’s a good song.”
“It’s kind of a sensitive guy cliche.”
“And I suppose you’re too sophisticated to enjoy the song?”
“No,” she admits. “It’s a good song. And you sang it well, too.”
Oh, hell.
She heard me singing.
I feel cracked wide open. On display. Naked—only I’d feel a hundred times less exposed without my clothes.
“Is that the kind of music you like?” she asks. “The soft nineties rock.”
I swallow hard. I force my eyes to the street. The traffic is moving fast now. The ride is easy. “Do you like it?”
“No,” she admits. “It’s too sincere. I like witty lyrics. The guys who have sharp tongues.”
“Sounds painful.”
“The Lexi-isms don’t suit you,” she says bluntly. “I don’t believe your head is going straight to sex.”
It is. Thank fuck it isn’t showing.
“Why are you dodging?” she asks.
I’m not. She’s dodging. Okay, maybe I’m dodging, but she is, too. “You prefer the guys who pretend they don’t have pain.”
“You could say it that way.”
“Because you connect more with them than the people who run to their pain.”
“Who does that?” she asks. “It defies human nature.”
“What about Fleetwood Mac?” I counter.
“It’s different that way,” she says. “She’s working through it, not reveling in it. Or maybe it’s the same. I don’t know. Maybe I love it because my mom loved it and it’s not more complicated than that.”
Maybe. I could see that. “And you love these guys because you relate to them.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes fill with surprise. She doesn’t understand how I see her.
I don’t, either, to be honest.
“I wanted a few guys when I was really young,” she says. “Then I moved on fast. To preferring a vision of us as peers.”
A laugh spills from my lips. “And how did a programmer relate to a musician?”
“Music is all math,” she says. “Patterns. Musicians understand that intuitively, not analytically, but they understand it all the same.”
“And the cheeky lyrics?”
“Well…” Again, she blushes.
And again, my body begs me to pull the car over and have her right here, in the parking lot of the small chain market, in broad daylight, with enough onlookers we’re sure to face arrest.
“I thought I liked witty guys,” she says. “But I tried them. I manually adjusted the algorithm to test it. To see if I did like witty guys.”
“How do you measure wit?”
“A combination of message text, interests, and questions. We tag people’s favorite movies, TV, songs. Well, we’ve got songs okay, but we’re struggling with movies and TV. With humor especially. It’s subjective.”
“So, if guys like these witty artists, they get points in witty?”
“That’s the simple explanation,” she says. “There’s an element of machine learning, too, where the AI learns from what is working and uses that. But I overrode all that. I added a filter so I’d only match with witty guys.”
Wow. “And?”
“I liked some of them, on the first date,” she says. “But by the third, I was tired of them. They were so determined to prove they were smarter than I was, funnier. You know there’s this saying that when women say a man has a good sense of humor, they mean ‘he makes me laugh,’ but when men say it, they mean ‘she laughs at my jokes.’”
I believe that.
“And I like someone who makes me laugh, but I don’t want it to be a competition.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Really.”
“No.” I shake my head. “You can’t turn your competitiveness off.”
“I can, too.”
“I won’t make a bet, because it would only prove my point.”
She smiles. “It would, I guess.” She settles into her seat, easy, happy, in tune with the music and the sunshine. And me. “What kind of music do you like?”
No. Not yet. “Do you think those guys are romantic, deep down? The lyricists? Maybe that’s why they’re so cheeky and guarded?”
“No, but I can see why you’d say that.” She turns the stereo down and looks to me. “And you probably don’t see it, and I don’t know why I’m admitting it, but I started to hate those guys because I saw the worst of myself in them.”
This is good. Useful for my mission.
Only I don’t really care about my mission at the moment.
“I always want to feel like the smartest person in the room. It’s not a great trait. Maybe it has benefits, but it’s got a lot of drawbacks. Especially in my world. Rich men want to feel like the smartest person in the room. I really had to learn to bite my tongue.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“It was hard to do,” she admits. “A lot of my exes hated it…that I was so concerned with intelligence, so logical. I don’t know. I love my brain, but I get tired sometimes. I want to turn it off. I’m sure they get annoyed, too.”