Chapter 33
Logan
“To the two biggest nerds I know!” Dominic raises his glass, sloshing champagne onto Bennett’s sleeve. “Who somehow managed to change the world while the rest of us were just trying to get laid!”
“Speak for yourself,” Caleb mutters, and Serena elbows him.
The Alibi’s VIP section is packed with our friends, champagne flowing like someone forgot to turn off the tap. Bennett keeps trying to make a speech about ‘strategic vision’ and ‘long-term market positioning,’ but Dominic drowns him out with increasingly creative toasts.
“To neural implants! To the FDA finally getting their heads out of their asses! To Logan’s freakishly large brain and Audrey’s—” He pauses, grinning. “Also, freakishly large brain. What did you think I was going to say?”
“Something that would get you slapped,” Jenna says coolly from the corner, where she’s been nursing the same glass of wine for an hour.
“You wound me, Pemberton.”
“Not as much as I’d like to.”
Layla leans across the table toward Audrey. “How does it feel? Officially approved. The thing you’ve been working toward for years.”
Audrey shakes her head, still processing. “Surreal. I keep waiting for someone to tell me there’s been a mistake.”
“No mistake.” Bennett raises his glass. “I’ve seen the official documentation. NeuraTech is going to change lives. You two should be proud.”
“We are,” Audrey says, and her hand finds my thigh under the table.
Not holding. Stroking. A slow, deliberate path from my knee upward.
I nearly choke on my champagne.
“You all right there, Logan?” Caleb asks. “You look like your brain just crashed and needs a reboot.”
“Fine. I’m fine. Bubbles went down wrong.”
Audrey’s expression is perfectly innocent, but her hand keeps moving—tracing circles on my inner thigh, her fingers drifting higher before retreating. A pattern designed to drive me insane.
Two can play this game.
I lean over, pretending to reach for a napkin, and let my lips brush her ear. “You’re going to pay for that later.”
Her breath catches. “Promise?”
“Guaranteed.”
“Oh, get a room already,” Serena announces, pointing her champagne flute at us. “Audrey, your poker face is terrible. You look like you’re about to climb him like a tree.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Audrey takes a prim sip of her drink, but her cheeks are flushed, and her hand is still on my thigh—higher now, close enough to be dangerous.
“Leave them alone,” Layla says. “They just got FDA approval. They’re allowed to be disgusting.”
“Speaking of tech breakthroughs,” Bennett says. “Dominic was telling me about a new AI chatbot his team’s been testing. Apparently, it’s remarkably lifelike.”
“It wasn’t lifelike, it was a disaster,” I blurt.
“The natural language processing was adequate at best, and the emotional modeling was completely off. She never would have responded that way to a direct explanation. I ran forty-seven different conversation simulations and none of them accurately predicted how she’d react to me telling her why I blocked the kiss, which was the whole point of building it in the first place, so really it was a failed experiment from a technical standpoint even if it did help me organize my thoughts about—”
I stop. Suddenly realizing that everyone is staring at me and Dominic is making frantic cutting motions across his throat. But it’s too late. The word ‘chatbot’ triggered a cascade of panic responses in my nervous system, and my mouth moved before my brain caught up.
Shit.
“Wait. You’re talking about a different chatbot, aren’t you?”
A slow, cold horror dawns in the pit of my stomach. I look at Audrey, who is staring at me over the rim of her glass with an eyebrow quirked in a shape that, in my experience, signals imminent disaster.
“Logan,” she says, that perfectly neutral tone she uses before detonating something large in my general vicinity. “What chatbot?”
My mouth opens. Closes. I see Dominic mouthing, don’t say anything, don’t say anything, but my tongue is a traitor and is already in motion.
“The, uh. The one I coded when you were in Sweden.”
“Coded to do what, exactly?” she asks.
Caleb can’t hide his amusement. “Please tell me you didn’t build a sexbot version of Audrey.”
My jaw drops. “No! God—no. It was a conversational simulator.” I turn to Audrey. “Modeled on your speech patterns and personality metrics.” My eyes drop to my champagne and stay there. “So I could practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Talking to you. Explaining why I—” I gesture vaguely at my face. “Why I did what I did. The hand thing. I didn’t know how to explain it, and I couldn’t figure out the right words, so I thought if I could simulate the conversation first...”
“You built a chatbot version of me,” Audrey says. “To rehearse apologizing.”
“It sounds kind of shit when you say it like that.”
“How does it sound when you say it?”
“Like a reasonable application of technology to solve an interpersonal communication problem.”
Serena is staring at me with her mouth open. Caleb looks like he’s witnessing a car crash in slow motion. Layla has both hands pressed over her heart.
“That,” Audrey says, “is the most unhinged thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I’m aware it crosses several boundaries—”
“It does. But it’s also weirdly sweet.”
I blink. “It is?”
“You missed me so much you programmed a fake version of me just so you could practice saying sorry.” She shakes her head, a smile tugging at her lips. “That’s... incredibly you.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”
“It is.” She leans in, brushing her lips against my cheek. “You absolute disaster of a man. I can’t believe you built me a chatbot.”
“Technically, I built me a chatbot. You were just the template.”
“That’s not better, Logan.”
“I know.”
Dominic finally lifts his face from his hands. “For the record, I tried to stop him. Multiple times. He wouldn’t listen.”
“You walked in on me mid-conversation with it,” I say. “That was... not my finest moment.”
“You were arguing with yourself about the statistical probability of forgiveness. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever witnessed, and I once watched Caleb try to salsa dance.”
“That was one time,” Caleb protests.
“It was three times, and Serena has video evidence.”
“Allegedly.”
Layla is still clutching her chest. “Logan, that might be the most romantic puppy-dog thing I’ve ever heard. I mean that as a compliment.”
“The bar for compliments in this group is concerningly low.”
“Did it work?” Bennett asks, ever practical. “The chatbot. Did it help you figure out what to say?”
“No. The real Audrey was nothing like the simulation.” I glance at her, feeling my ears heat. “She was better. More patient than I deserved. The chatbot would have thrown a drink in my face by conversation twelve.”
“You programmed me to throw drinks?”
“I programmed you to have realistic responses to emotional incompetence. Drink-throwing was a high-probability outcome.”
Audrey laughs, and I relax a little. She’s not horrified. She’s not running. She’s looking at me like I’m ridiculous and wonderful in equal measure, and I don’t know what I did to deserve that, but I’m not questioning it.
“I want to see it,” she says.
“Absolutely not.”
“Logan.”
“It’s been deleted. Permanently. The servers have been wiped. There was a small fire.”
“There was not a small fire,” Dominic says.
“There could have been. Hypothetically.”
Audrey’s hand squeezes my thigh—not teasing this time, just warm. Grounding. “You’re impossible,” she murmurs. “And I love you.”
“I love you too. Even though you’re definitely going to use this against me forever.”
“Oh, absolutely. This is ammunition for decades.” She tilts her head, considering. “I wonder what chatbot-me would say about us now.”
“Probably something about statistical improbability. I didn’t program her to account for actual happiness.” I pause. “That sounded less depressing in my head.”
“No, it sounded exactly that depressing.” She kisses my cheek. “Good thing the real version worked out better.”
Serena raises her glass. “To Logan’s emotional support chatbot. May it rest in digital peace.”
“It wasn’t emotional support—”
“To the chatbot!” everyone choruses, and I give up protesting and drink.
The conversation drifts after that—Bennett talking about expansion plans, Caleb mentioning a case, Layla showing Serena something on her phone that makes them both cackle.
Normal friend stuff. The kind of evening I typically love, because it makes me feel like I belong to something bigger than myself.
But I’m only half-present this time. Because Audrey’s hand has started moving again.
Slow circles on my inner thigh. Fingers drifting up, then retreating. A maddening pattern that has me gripping my champagne glass hard enough to risk shattering it.
She’s talking to Layla about wedding next-steps, her expression completely neutral, like she isn’t systematically dismantling my composure under the table.
“The lake house could work for the ceremony,” she’s saying. “But you’d need tents for the reception if the weather doesn’t cooperate.”
“That’s what I said!” Layla exclaims. “Bennett wants to risk it, but I’ve seen Chicago weather in June. It’s chaos.”
“Total chaos,” Audrey agrees, and her fingertips brush against me through my pants.
I inhale sharply. Dominic glances over, eyebrow raised, and I pretend to cough.
Audrey doesn’t even look at me. “Maybe a backup venue? Somewhere indoors that still has that outdoor feel?”
“Ooh, like a conservatory?”
“Exactly. The Garfield Park Conservatory does events.”
Her hand presses more firmly. I’m going to die. I’m going to die at this table, surrounded by my friends, because the woman I love has decided to torture me in public.
“We should go,” I announce, too loudly.
Everyone turns to look at me.
“Lab tomorrow,” I manage. “Early calibrations. Very important. Time-sensitive.”
“It’s barely eleven,” Caleb says.
“Science doesn’t sleep.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
Audrey is biting her lip, eyes bright with barely contained laughter. “He’s right, we should head out. Big day tomorrow. Lots of... calibrations.”
“Calibrations,” Dominic repeats, deadpan. “Right.”
“Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for celebrating with us.” I’m already standing, pulling Audrey up with me. “We’ll see you all soon. At a future social event. Which I will attend. Like a normal person.”
“Smooth,” Serena says. “Very subtle.”
“I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“I’m implying that you’re about to go have sex, and you’re doing a terrible job of hiding it.”
“That’s—we have calibrations.”
Audrey tugs my hand. “Give it up, babe. We’ve been made.” She waves to the table. “Night, everyone. Don’t wait up.”
We escape through a chorus of catcalls and wolf-whistles. Audrey’s laughing, her hand warm in mine, and all that matters right now is getting her home.
We changed the world today.
The night air hits us as we push through the club’s doors, cool against my overheated skin. My car is already waiting at the curb—I don’t use a driver that often, but when I do, he knows to stay close so I can text him when we’re wrapping up.
“Mr. Whitman,” he says, opening the back door. His expression remains professionally neutral, even though Audrey is already pressed against my side like she’s trying to fuse with me.
“Thank you. Home, please.”
“Of course, sir.”
The privacy partition is already up. Bless my driver and his impeccable discretion.
The second the door closes, Audrey’s hand is back on my thigh.
“You’re evil,” I tell her.
“You liked it.”
“I nearly had a cardiac event at the table.”
“But you didn’t.” She shifts closer, her lips brushing my ear. “You held it together. Barely.”
The car pulls into traffic. The city lights blur past the tinted windows, and Audrey’s fingers trace patterns on my leg—spirals, figure-eights, a slow migration upward that has me clenching my jaw.
“Fifteen minutes,” I manage. “That’s how long the drive takes.”
“I know.” Her hand slides higher. “What should we do to pass the time?”
“Audrey—”
“Hmm?”
“My driver is right there.”
“He’s very focused on the road.” She presses her palm against me through my pants, and I have to swallow a groan. “And you’re very focused on not making a sound. I find that interesting.”
“You find my suffering interesting?”
“I find your self-control interesting.” She strokes me slowly, deliberately. “I want to see what it takes to break it.”
The next fourteen minutes are the longest of my life.
She doesn’t let up. Not when we stop at a red light. Not when we pass a group of pedestrians who could theoretically see through the tinted windows if they looked hard enough. Not when my breathing goes ragged and my hands grip the leather seat.
By the time the car turns onto my street, I’m wound so tight I can barely see straight.
“We’re here, sir,” the driver announces through the intercom, and I’ve never been more grateful for those words.
“Thank you. Take the rest of the night off.”
“Very good, sir.”
I’m out of the car before he can come around to open the door, pulling Audrey with me. She’s laughing, breathless, her eyes bright with mischief and want.
“Someone’s eager.”
“You spent fifteen minutes trying to make me come in the back of my own car. Eager is an understatement.”
“I wasn’t trying to make you come.” She grins up at me as I fumble with my keys at the front door. “I was trying to get you desperate.”
“Well, mission accomplished.”