Congrats, You're In Love!

You Two in Review

Cami took a deep breath. She didn't know what she was afraid of, really. Because if this all went downhill, then she just lost another friend. She was 30, she was used to that. She could move in with someone else, maybe someone who actually cleaned up after themselves after every DIY, someone who didn't need to spill glitter on the carpet every time he used it, or someone who didn't eat her food.

But then again. She didn't mind that about Zack. She liked him. Felt safe with him.

Safe enough to tell him what her analysis made obvious.

"Oh," Zack's face dropped a bit. Sad puppy. "It's serious."

"It could be," Cami said slowly, but she really couldn't figure out how to tell him. So she might as well just...show him.

"Here," she said, handing him her phone, after she'd opened her version of the KiligFinder app, the one they used to beta test new features. She tapped through the things, until the app showed her the analysis results on their messages.

Zack, who really needed blue light glasses if he was going to keep using phones and screens so frequently, squinted at the screen.

"You Two in Review?" He asked doubtfully.

"We're still workshopping the name," Cami explained. "Just look through it."

Zack obliged, and she could see the information scrolling on the screen, familiar, and yet so new that she knew that Zack was looking with her.

You have been social media friends since 2008, but you've been matched since 2012, and have exchanged a total of 169, 654 messages. That's an average of 43 messages a day!

You messaged each other the most in 2017, with 69,069 messages total!

"Nice," Zack said, nodding appreciatively at the number. Cami rolled her eyes and playfully pushed at his shoulder.

"Just keep reading."

Your response time has lengthened over the years, but one thing's for sure. Zack always replies faster, with an average response time of 2 minutes. His average for 2017 was one minute, fifteen seconds!

"What happened in 2017?" Zack asked, looking adorably confused.

Cami smiled. It wasn't that Zack was so achingly gorgeous. It was that he could be anxious and excited at the same time, worried and silly, serious and adoring. It made him who he was. It made Cami feel safe with him.

It...it made Cami love him, really.

She inhaled sharply, surprised at how easy it was to come to the conclusion, when she'd been sitting with the evidence for the last week. And to tell the truth, she didn't have to, because Zack had never done anything to make her doubt the way he felt about her. He loved her. And she knew he did.

And after examining with her own feelings, after making her own analysis, it was easy to come to her own conclusion.

She loved him. God it was going to hurt like a bitch, if he didn't return her feelings.

"Cami?" Zack asked. "What happened in 2017?"

"We decided to live together," she reminded him. "But look at the archived texts. We chose random ones, just for fun, but...I think you'll like it."

He looked at the phone again. He scrolled through their most frequently used GIFs (a baby koala clutching a pant leg for him, Lilo lying on the ground next to a record player for her) and emoji uses (he used a wider variety, and she stuck with a limited range, but used emojis more frequently) before he arrived at the archived messages.

January 7, 2017, 3:00 PM

Zack: I think we could be amazing together.

You could cook, I would build you a stepstool so you could reach things.

You and I would be very happy.

Cami: As friends?

January 8, 2017 1:00 PM

Zack: As...whatever happens after that.

Cami: Let's do it.

Let's live together.

"Aw," Zack smiled, even if she saw that it didn't quite reach his eyes, could hear his voice shake slightly. "A truly historical moment."

Cami nodded, smiling despite the feeling that her slides were twisted into knots. She'd never been this nervous in her entire life, not even when she was made to present her work when she was taking her masters.

But just like then, she knew she had everything she needed to say what she had to say.

"Look at your response time to my question. Almost 24 hours before you responded. You could have been busy, but it's right in the middle of our peak year, our peak hours, so it's unlikely."

"Oh," wrinkles appeared on Zack's forehead as he went deep in thought. "It's an outlier."

"Exactly," Cami nodded. "But I think it's more important to note what the analysis doesn't say. That maybe you didn't respond because you realized something, long before I did."

Now he looked like he didn't want to talk about it. He actually stood up and paced, but there was nowhere else to go, and Cami only really had one more thing to say.

"So I've been avoiding you, because I don't really know how to ask you. But we're here, and you're here, and we're probably going to plummet to our death soon..."

"We are not going to plummet to death in this elevator," he assured her.

"But Zack," Cami pressed. "Do you love me?"