Leah lay in her bed and stared at the text message from him. Her Alan. The message was exactly 38 characters, and she had seen it exactly 43 seconds after it had reached her phone. She had no way of knowing exactly how long the message was in transit, which worried at her sensibilities, but some napkin math she had once done during a similar situation led her to believe it was somewhere in the three to ten second range depending the tower and how much network traffic there was at any given moment in time. She had changed providers shortly after that - reasoning that being on the same network as him would reduce lag time.

Leah, who was comfortably cocooned in her blanket, groaned in petty annoyance. If he couldn’t make it to their usually scheduled meeting, then it meant his routine had been interrupted. She didn’t want to get up and face the world but she absolutely abhorred change, and felt it best to catalogue and understand situations as they developed. Privately she considered their M&M game only relevant to Alan and herself but she begrudgingly accepted the presence of the others, because she gathered that they made him happy. Except Jacob. Jacob had become something of an eyesore recently. His petty sniping and jealousy had reduced the total time she spent directly speaking to her Alan by an average of thirty second to a minute each session. Which was unacceptable.

Thankfully Leah was not a woman without means, and plans had already been set in place. A single facebook message and some judicious redirection of attention should be all that was necessary to see Jacob banished from her time with him. Nothing overly malicious, she wasn’t unnecessarily cruel - but if Jacob found his work shift changing and could no longer make it to their game, it was the simplest thing in the world to refuse to change the time slot.

She frowned, rising from her bed and sliding off her sheer green nightgown. It was his favourite color, and she had spent a significant amount of time working it into most of her wardrobe these past few months. Unfortunately, looking at the nightgowns varying frills forced her to count them. An exercise she knew would result in 29 individual frills. Slowly she began the arduous task of dressing herself, in a modest sweater that came down past her waist to fall close to her knees, and a pair of jeans that she felt accentuated her figure just right. All the while counting in her head until something else could drag her attention from uncomfortable sensation of infinity that prime numbers forced upon her.

‘Twenty Nine, Thirty One, Thirty Seven.’

Under normal circumstances, Leah would have never purchased an article of clothing that so bothered her. If she was gifted with one she would hide it well out of sight. But this one was special, and she could neither fix it nor get rid of it. It was just one of a dozen small concessions she made for love.

Carefully stepping through her room she plucked her cellphone and laptop from their perch on her nightstand, and traveled the 26 strides to her kitchen, where she placed them at a right angle to the edge of the table and stepped over to pull a premade breakfast in a plastic container from the fridge.

‘Forty One, Forty Three, Forty Seven’

Alan, bless his soul, had once made the absolutely amateurish mistake of logging in to his email on one of her laptops. He had been looking for a message from one of his professors about some trifling academic assessment, but that was secondary to the point. What was important was that - despite logging out afterward - Leah had been able to glean his password from the exchange. From there it was a simple matter to use it in conjunction with the lost phone function most smart phones had to enable herself to locate him via his phones gps.

With a mechanical efficiency she ate the perfectly proportioned meal in front of her, which was no doubt delicious as she had cooked it, but that from a purely technical standpoint, was just a heap of nutrients she would need to spend time exercising in order to ensure to they were directed to the right places. Her free hand flicked between the touch screens of her computer and her phone, quickly sorting any other messages and alerts she would need to take note of for the coming day.

Dan had cancelled for friday as well. A fact Leah only took note of because Alan appeared to be at his apartment. Inwardly she cursed the large man’s savvy, having been much more difficult to get rid of, track, or manipulate than she thought was the norm.

‘Fifty Three, Fifty Nine, Sixty One’

Leah pursed her lips, glaring at the computer screen as though that would make the red dot denoting Alan’s presence change its position. She considered calling him, but decided against it. Her love was just so shy sometimes. Like a scared rabbit. She had to be careful not to be too forward or he’d run away. It was cute in a maddening sort of way. Almost reflexively, she dredged up a picture of Alan she kept on her home computer, the one that never left the house, the one that she never let anyone else see.

It was just a normal picture really. Him, leaning against the glass barrier of a bus stop, waiting. She had taken it with a drone ofcourse. There were enough of those flying about the city that she felt comfortable in the knowledge that her hapless lover wouldn’t notice one among many stopping near him occasionally. But the sight of it, of him caused her heart to stop and made her fall in love all over again. Leah didn’t believe in love at first sight. She was far too smart for that. Nor did she believe that love was blind. That was just plain foolish. No, Leah firmly believed that love was all knowing. It was the product of absolute, and complete understanding of one's partner.

That’s how she had known it had to be him. The first time they had met, she had been exercising her most recent skill. The playing of M&M. Before him learning new things was really all she did. She chose a discipline, mastered it, and then moved on. She had no worry of ever forgetting anything - she made sure to commit everything she ever saw or heard to memory as a matter of course. She had just finished memorizing every line of text in the M&M Core Handbook, and planned to spend a week getting real life experience with the admittedly useless skill before dropping it in favour of the next item on her list.

‘Sixty Seven, Seventy One…’

But she had met him. He, who had so easily responded not just to what she said, to the normal, well adjusted person she so bitterly knew she was not. But to her very thoughts. It was during that first meeting when he had somehow known that the number of dice on the table were panicking her that she fell truly, deeply, madly in love.

‘Seventy Three…’

She was more than aware of her eccentricities. More than aware that there were few people in this world that would accommodate her, let alone understand her. And for the most part, she was fine with that. But if she believed in a god, which she did not, she would truly believe that her Alan had been placed on this earth, just for her.

She blinked once, and noted she had stopped counting much sooner than was usual for her. Her free hand was gently caressing her computer's screen, and more than a few minutes had passed while she was trapped in her own head.

Hurriedly, to make up for lost time, she checked a map for good places to set up, settled on a coffee shop near Dans home, and then donned her jacket and backpack. Inside the backpack she knew, would be her drone, carefully modified with the best camera and microphone available to a civilian.

After all - Love, she reaffirmed to herself, was all knowing.

And she did so love her Alan.