He stuck his hand in his pockets. "I didn't want my mom to find you in another room.”
My face fell a little bit. "Okay."
“And I didn’t want to sleep alone again. I missed you, you know. I’m not talking about sex, either.”
"What brought this on?" He gestured at the way that I was still hugging him, smelling the scent of his body. I wanted mine to be all over him, my lipstick on his collar, so that people knew that my husband belonged to me alone. "I met your neighbor, Mary Jo."
Stud
Amelia
He scrubbed his face with a hand. "What?"
"I was walking around the house. She came over. She said that she wasn't the kind of friend who needed to call. Your cell reception out here is extremely poor, you know that, right?"
"Yeah, we're pretty far away from the cell phone towers in Madison." He blinked. "What happened?"
"I don't know. She accused me of being a fat thief."
He blinked. "What?" He pinched his earlobe and tugged, like he couldn’t believe what his ears were telling him.
"Yeah. I told her that I was pregnant and lived here now, but she didn't really believe me at first. She tried to call you, but there's no reception out here. Also, can I have your cell number? It's not like I can call you from my cell, but if I need you, I'll call you on the landline."
"Oh yeah. Just give me your phone. I'll put it in your Contacts app."
I handed him my iPhone, and he tapped away at it.
"There. You have my number now."
He gave me back the phone.
"You named your contact information 'Stud'?" I held back a laugh. “I’m going to change it to Studly Husband.”
He flexed his arms. "I knocked you up, didn't I?" He leaned down and kissed me gently, making me lean back. "I'll be here for you."
"Where were you anyway?"
"This might come as a surprise, but I have a job."
"A job?" I raised an eyebrow. I smirked a little. "Hm."
"Yeah, I had a meeting in Madison. I think that we should have gone on a honeymoon after we got married, but I didn't want to miss this opportunity."
"Must have been a really good one."
"Yeah. Madison is a hub of technology, and nobody really realizes it. Dane County is one of the counties with the highest percentage of tech workers in the entire country. Madison is the third-ranked city in the United States for percentage of college-educated adults. If you throw a stick, you'll probably hit someone in the tech industry."
"So what did that have to do with today's meeting?"
His eyes lit up. "You want to know?"
I nodded.
"These guys have done something incredible. Quantified self is on the rise. FitBit is the prototypical example of that, but these guys have an integration app that can pull together all the medical devices."
"There are plenty of those on the market. Apple has HealthKit or whatever. What makes these guys special?"
"They've integrated it with the data sets from a bunch of different studies. If you have diabetes and you are a 40-year-old Chinese male, you'll get a different set of steps than a 25-year-old white girl. It's really amazing technology. Moving forward on genomics is the next frontier in healthcare."