I jolt when I hear his message and stupidly glance around me as if he could magically be standing in my kitchen with me, observing my every move without me having previously noticed. I cannot believe he guessed it in one. It would be great if I was more into lying because I’d love to save face right now but . . .

“That’s . . . some serious psychic shit right there,” I message.

“HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!!”

His entire message just consists of his hysterical laughter. I’m laughing, too. It’s impossible not to. He texts again a moment later.

“You’re kidding. I was right? That’s amazing. Gotta be worth at least fifty points, don’t you think?”

I make a valiant effort to swallow down my laughter.

“I’ll give you twenty-five points. Twenty for the guess, and five for the laugh.”

“I am smoking this game. I’m gonna get to two hundred in an hour. Tops.”

I sink down, my back sliding along the kitchen cabinets, and breathe deeply. There’s no chance in hell I’ll ever let him actually figure out who I am, but . . . he’s down to do this for another hour?

“Seriously, though,” I message. “How’d you guess that about the dating shows?”

“Isn’t that what everyone does when they can’t sleep?”

“Is that what you do when you can’t sleep, Hoffman? Watch reality television?”

“Lately. Are you watching the dating show where they’re handcuffed together or the one where they’re in masks?”

“Handcuffs. The masks one is trash.”

“Really? Why? I liked the masks one!”

“Because after their faces were revealed they all ended up being hot anyway. It’s like, if you’re gonna make people fall in love without seeing each other, why not cast normal-looking people, you know?”

“Good point. Yeah. Now that I think about it, the show would have been way better if they’d been regular people. I guess nobody wants to see regular people fall in love.”

“I do! And, I wouldn’t exactly call what they did on that show ‘love’.”

“Another good point. You’ve got a remarkably discriminating eye for reality television, JD.”

“Thanks?”

“Okay, considering you watched Blinded Dates in its entirety I’m going to take an educated guess based on viewership demographics and say that you’re between the ages of twenty-five and forty.”

“Five points.”

“Boom! Okay, I can now eliminate the middle-aged to elderly contingent of women in my life.”

“You’ve got a lot of middle-aged to elderly women saved in your phone?”

“I’ve got my mom and aunts. Most of my mom’s friends. An old boss or two. A couple neighbors from my building. All in all, yeah. I’d say I have a very respectable number of older ladies saved in my phone.”

“You sound proud of that.”

“I mean, I’m not NOT proud of it . . . Hey, JD?”

“Yeah?”