“Hmm,” he said with a playful tilt of his head. “I don’t hear it. I’m just going to have to investigate your hypothesis later.”
So, sitting at the bar, I watched him roll the sleeves of his buttoned shirt to the elbows, slip into an apron, and go to work. Not to get romantic about it or anything, but every movement enraptured me. His hands beneath the faucet as he washed them. The precision of his knife cutting through green onions. The tosses of the wok cooking our ground pork. The dexterity of peeling the soft-boiled eggs.
I was so lost in him that I didn’t register our silence until he set the steaming bowl in front of me.
After everything that had happened tonight, the quiet domesticity was jarring, but not unpleasant.
We slurped—zuzutto’d—for a while. I, however, felt like I was carrying a ball of electrons in my hand. Now that I had finally copped to loving Hudson, I wanted just the right moment to come out with it.
“You’ve gotten pretty quiet for a man who just fucked a woman in a strip club bathroom,” I said by way of an opener.
“I’m still waiting for you to explain what you were doing there,” he said, lips curved.
He doesn’t need to know that.“I told you. Girls’ night.”
“Wearing Leelah’s EEG headband?” My entire body tightened. Off my look, he shrugged. “She showed it to me the first week she got here. She’s damn proud of that thing.”
Damn. I’d been caught.
“We were running an experiment,” I conceded.
“Oh? And what experiment necessitated deep brain scans while at a strip club?”
Okay. Not only caught, but trapped. He wasn’t going to let me go without an explanation.
“I’m not a person who understands feelings,” I said, after a bit. “I have them. A lot of them. But I don’t necessarilygetthem. When I run up against something I don’t understand, I try to analyze it.”
“What feeling were you analyzing at a strip club, then?”
I chose the safest answer. An evasion. “Lust.”
He chuckled. “You understand lust.”
All I wanted to do was stare at my hands, but I forced myself to catalog every microexpression crossing his face as I explained myself.
“Yes. But I don’t understand the…other things I’m feeling. The things I’m feeling foryou. And we thought the EEG—if I compared pure lust to whatever it is I’ve got going on here, I might be able to get a handle on it.”
My attention wasn’t rewarded. His face remained completely impassive. “I see. And what did you discover in this little experiment?”
“I didn’t check the data.”
I didn’t need to.
Finally, a flicker. His lips turned down at the corners. “It’s a little worrying. That you feel the need tocheck the dataon us.”
“You’re leaving. Our time’s almost up,” I said, feeling defensive. “This was only temporary, you and me. I wanted to know the facts before I did anything reckless. You know how I am.”
The sad set of his mouth did not correct. I panicked.
“How familiar are you with the concept of entropy?”
“I’m a glorified IT guy, Scout,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “Entropy sounds above my pay grade.”
“Well. Entropy is basically how much chaos is in any given system. Evolutionarily speaking, entropy is an enemy. It’s dangerous. So our minds learned to compensate for entropy by developing predictive powers. We take all of the inputs and information we’re getting, our mind makes snap judgments aboutwhat could happen next, and we make decisions that keep us alive, unhurt, and functioning. A predictable existence is a safer one.”
I fiddled with my chopsticks.
“I have always—especially after everything that happened with Lloyd at GalacticSolutions—tried to minimize entropy. I thought that maybe the EEG, the data, would help me reduce my entropy in our relationship. It’s especially scary now, with The Fantasy launch approaching. I’ve been getting better at delegating in the office, but in other areas, like with you, I don’t know how much uncertainty I can handle right now. This seemed like a solution.”
