The Perfect Wife an App Chose for Me

The app was called Soulmates and it cost more than my car. It wasn’t one of those dating apps where you swipe your thumb across a hundred faces until you feel dizzy. This one was different. You paid an absurd sum, filled out a three-hour questionnaire, and an algorithm gave you back a single name. One person. The one who, according to them, fit you even in the folds you didn’t know you had.

I was thirty-eight years old, with a divorce behind me and the uneasy certainty that the relationships I’d had were all just patches. I was looking for something final. I was looking, without daring to say it out loud, for the woman I would stop looking for anyone else with.

The questionnaire had stripped me bare more than any lover ever had. Questions about fear, about what I kept quiet at family dinners, about the fantasies I had never typed into any chat. I answered with a sincerity that frightened me. Maybe that’s why, when the result came in, it wasn’t what I expected.

The email said only one line: “Your match is ninety-seven percent. Her name is Daniela.”

***

The profile photo was restrained, almost elegant. A woman with dark hair to her shoulders, brown eyes, and a smile that seemed to hold a question inside it. Thirty-six years old, literary translator, living in a coastal city two hours from mine. There was nothing exaggerated about the image. No staged pose, no filters erasing the person. That was the first thing I liked.

We started writing that very night. And that was when I understood why the algorithm had given us ninety-seven.

Daniela wrote the way I thought. She finished the sentences I left hanging. She laughed at the same absurd things, despised the same clichés. We talked about books until three in the morning, about the difference between being alone and feeling lonely, about why the two of us had paid a fortune to a machine to tell us who to love.

She told me she translated noir novels from French, that she had an old cat named Borges, and that she detested people who said “everything happens for a reason.” I told her about my divorce without the rehearsed script I used with everyone else, without varnishing my share of the blame. It was strange to tell the truth to someone who existed for me only as a voice on a screen. But with her, the truth came out on its own, effortlessly, as if speaking any other way would have taken more work.

This is ridiculous, I thought at dawn, with the phone hot in my hand. I’ve been talking to a stranger for twelve hours and I don’t want to stop.

There was something, though, that I noticed from the beginning. A caution in her. Every time the conversation moved toward the body, toward desire, toward “what would you do if we were in the same room,” Daniela pulled back with precise elegance. Not with fear. With care. Like someone protecting something that had already been broken before.

—There are things I’d rather say while looking you in the eyes —she wrote the third night—. Not on the phone. Does that seem old-fashioned?

—It seems perfect to me —I answered.

We agreed to meet at a hotel halfway between the two cities. Neutral ground, she said. A place where neither of us was playing at home.

***

I arrived half an hour early. I sat in the lobby bar, ordered a whiskey I didn’t touch, and watched the revolving door like a teenager. Every dark-haired woman who came in made my pulse speed up. None of them was her.

And then one of them was.

Daniela crossed the lobby with a calm that filled the space. She was wearing a midnight-blue dress, simple, the kind that doesn’t shout but forces you to look. She was taller than I’d imagined. The way she walked had a confidence that wasn’t in her photos, as if the camera hadn’t dared capture her all at once.

She stopped in front of me and, before sitting down, said something I wasn’t expecting.

—Before you order another drink, I want to tell you something. And if after hearing it you want to leave, I’ll understand and I won’t say a word.

My heart clenched into a fist. I thought of a thousand things: that she was married, that it was a scam, that the algorithm had made a spectacular mistake.

—I’m a trans woman —she said, keeping her eyes fixed on mine—. I’m telling you now because you deserve to know before anything else. Not after three drinks, not after going up to a room. Now.

The silence between us lasted as long as a heartbeat. I waited to feel the rejection I was supposed to feel, that automatic recoil they teach you without you even realizing it. It didn’t come. What came instead was something else: the sudden awareness that this woman had spoken to me for three nights straight and that every word she’d said had been real.

—Is that why you pulled back? —I asked—. When we talked about touching.

She blinked, surprised that was my answer.

—Yes. Because I’ve seen too many faces change.

—Mine isn’t changing —I said.

And it was true. I looked at her and saw only Daniela: the one who finished my sentences, the one who laughed at three in the morning, the one who had paid a fortune for the same reason I had. The algorithm hadn’t been wrong. I had been the fool for thinking I knew what I was looking for.

***

We went upstairs unhurriedly. In the elevator we didn’t touch; we only watched each other in the mirror, the two of us in profile, measuring the exact distance left to cross. She smelled of something warm, cedar and clean skin. I was too aware of my own breathing.

The room had a huge window with the city lit up below. Daniela left her bag on the dresser and turned to me, and for the first time all night I saw that she was trembling a little too.

—You can change your mind —she murmured.

—Stop giving me exits —I replied, and took the last step.

I kissed her slowly, holding her face with both hands. She answered with a contained intensity, as if she had been saving it for months. I felt her fingers sliding up the back of my neck, the heat of her body pressing against mine. The kiss deepened, slowed, and I could feel all the caution of the last few nights unraveling between us.

I lowered the zipper of her dress without taking my eyes off hers. The fabric fell to the floor with a whisper. I ran my open palm down her back, the curve of her waist, the warm line of her side, and felt her shiver under my hand.

—Look at me when you do it —she asked, her voice husky—. I don’t want you to close your eyes.

I didn’t close them. Not once.

I took her to the bed and took my time. I kissed her neck, the line of her collarbone, the exact spot beneath her ear that made her let out a sound that was anything but rehearsed. I learned her body the way one reads a new author and discovers they understand every sentence. Daniela didn’t fake a thing. Every reaction of hers was a direct answer to something I was doing, and that honesty turned me on more than any trick ever could.

She didn’t stay still either. She pushed me until I was on my back and took her turn without haste, tracing me with her mouth and her hands, attentive to every place where my breathing changed. She had a way of looking up at me, holding my eyes, that turned every gesture into a conversation. There was nothing mechanical in what we did. It was all question and answer, just like the three nights of words that had brought us to that bed.

When we finally found each other completely, she wrapped her legs around me and dug her nails into my shoulders. We moved with a synchronicity we hadn’t negotiated, just like in our conversations: I started something, she completed it. The rhythm rose slowly, in waves, until there was no modesty left, no fear left, no two strangers left.

—Don’t stop —she panted against my mouth—. Please, don’t stop.

I didn’t stop. I held her while her whole body tightened, while she said my name with a surrender that pulled me under too. We came almost at the same time, forehead to forehead, breathing the same broken air.

***

Afterward we stayed silent, her head resting on my chest, my hand drawing slow circles on her back. The city still glowed beyond the window. Neither of us was in a hurry to speak.

—Do you know what’s the strangest part? —she said at last—. The app was right. It was really right. And I almost didn’t come.

—Why did you come?

—Because you talked to me like you already knew who I was. And it turned out you did. You were just missing one fact.

I laughed softly, and she felt the vibration in my chest and smiled against my skin.

I thought of the three-hour questionnaire, of all those questions about fear and what I kept quiet. Maybe the machine had read between the lines something I hadn’t admitted to myself. Maybe it had understood that what I was looking for didn’t have the shape I thought it did. Or maybe it had just been lucky, and we had supplied the rest ourselves.

—Are you going to tell your friends how we met? —she asked, half-joking.

—I’m going to tell them I paid a fortune to find the perfect woman —I said—. And that, against all odds, I did.

Daniela lifted her head and looked at me for a long time, searching for the catch, the empty courtesy. She didn’t find it, because there wasn’t any.

—Old-fashioned —she murmured, and kissed me again.

Outside, dawn was starting to break. For the first time in years, I wasn’t in any hurry to look for anything else.