True Love

"Where is he? You know who he is. You know how he touched me. You know that I touched him. You have to tell me. You have to give us a chance," she pleaded.

"Why did you say your name was Smith, Ms Washington?" I asked as though her pleas were pointless.

She changed her demeanor from forceful to defeated. "I lied my way into the Beta group to prove that it was bullshit. A scam to take advantage of people's hopes and dreams," she confessed.

"Are you a reporter?" I asked with a ton of questions to follow. ByMySide wasn't a public conversation until this evening's orgy. How did she know it existed?

"My father constantly talks about being in love, yet will fuck anything that moves. Now he's selling a fucking dream about love to every person out there," she explains, staring at the investor folder on my desk. "I didn't want to believe he had a clue. He said he loved Mom but then he keeps falling in and out of love every fucking year. He's a fraud. A fucking fraud."

Now I was frozen. "Who is your father?" I slowly asked, hoping she would say he was an angel investor.

"Dels Van Hoy," she humbly stated, "is my father. My mother was Angela Smith. And Washington, DC is the capital of the United States," she laughed.

I was numb. I stared through her like I was reading her DNA. Searching for any resemblance I should have seen before now. She saw that I was terrified.

"Please don't worry. I won't tell my father. I just want to meet the guy I fucked. I just want to know if it was real. If he was real," she calmly explained. "Wouldn't you want to know?"

"I would want to know, too," I agreed. "I would want to know how Elsa could put together two people based on a bunch of numbers and know that they would connect. Most of her pairings were intentionally negative, because she needed more data to support her positive results. But she found a perfect match. A match that my team wanted to test in order to confirm that the work they were doing was worthwhile."

I got up from my desk and sat next to her, staring out of the window. She stared at me hoping I was going to help.

"So I agreed to take the risk and let you meet your TrueLove, skipping all of the protocol Elsa had initiated," I continued. "I wanted it to be true for my team, but I secretly thought it was bullshit, too."

Now, we were both staring out of the window.

"I thought it was bullshit when the HoneyMoonSuite contained two people fucking each other like there was no tomorrow," I continued. "The data was as pure as my team had ever seen before the hour, but it became perfect with every caress, lick, thrust, and shiver. That's all they needed. But none of that meant anything to me. I'm not a data geek."

We sat silent for a minute, still staring at the tall evergreens opposite our modern building.

"And then it happened," I added.

With a tear I couldn't see, she asked, "What happened?"

"You told me your name."