"So freaky, dirty, and weird don't do it for you?"
"I guess not. Not with her, anyway." Matt's gaze conducted a quick sweep of my body, but before I could process the mysterious shift behind his eyes, he pointed to a sign across the street. "That's the place I want to go. They have coconut ice cream."
"Sure. Fine. We can go there. But, about your lady friend who you were using for hot sex, maybe if you-"
"I wasn't using her for hot sex. I don't use people. I liked her at first, or I thought I did. I wasn't just looking for a hookup. She was smart, worked for Yoodle as a team leader. I thought, okay, here's someone I could be with, shares my interests, let's see where this goes. And then, she starts showing up at my work every day, every day, at all different times." His gaze swung back to mine. "She accused one of my managers of trying to seduce me, in front of my entire team. She put a camera in my house."
"Oh no. That's so awful."
"She told me she did it because she loved me, and that I'd never been loved before, so I didn't understand."
"That's not love."
Matt gathered a deep breath, and shook his head. "She cheated on me, with lots of different guys. She took pictures of herself doing it, and then left them all over my bed."
I sucked in a shocked breath. "That's so bizarre. I'm so sorry."
He shrugged. "By the time it happened, it was a relief. I decided, if that's what love is, if that's how people behave when they're in love, I didn't want any part of it."
"Wow." I was stuck on his words if that's what love is. I was assembling the puzzle pieces of Matt Simmons, and finding that much of his repugnance for long-term relationships made a lot more sense now. "So, that's the last time you dated someone?" I wondered if he had any more buried horror stories.
"No." He gathered another deep breath, shaking his head. "I tried dating a few times after that."
"What happened?"
"Well, one woman wanted to take pictures of us all the time, for her Instagram account. The few times we went out it felt like we were dating for the sole purpose of posting pictures to Instagram. She wasn't ever happy with how I looked, or how I dressed, and she wouldn't let me drink my coffee-you know, at coffee shops when they put a design on the top-until she'd photographed it. And then she always wanted me to take pictures of her, so she could get just the right one, and post it to her account. Then she'd spend the whole date on her phone reading comments on her photos. She couldn't understand why I didn't think this part of her personality was cute." He made a face. "It wasn't cute. It was annoying. And childish."
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."