“So what did you and Tina do this weekend?” Kevin asked.

“Nothing much. We mostly stayed at home. We went out to Pagini’s last night for dinner.”

“Stayed at home, huh? I bet ya did. I bet ya did.”

Kevin’s rude, crude behavior reminded Jack somewhat of the old “Nudge, Nudge, Wink, WInk” Monty Python skit. While Monty Python had made it funny. Kevin was asinine. It creeped Jack out that there were several magazines on Kevin’s desk with Tina on the cover. There were issues from both before and after Jack had won Tina in the Find Forever Love Contest. Jack was glad that Kevin was his only male co-worker at Fantasy Frostings. Men all over the world had literally lusted after the person (Jack certainly thought of Tina as a person.) whom Jack was currently co-habitating with. Jack felt like a high school teen who was dating the most beautiful, popular cheerleader in the school, whom the other boys had all tried to date but been turned down. Now that Jack was with her, all the other males were jealous and gave him a hard time.

“I need to walk the line,” Jack said, excusing himself from the QA Lab where he and Kevin both had desks.

Jack put on his lab coat and his hair net before exiting the door that led from the lab to the production floor. The production area smelled like chocolate fudge today as small vats of it were kept at a warm temperature that would keep it liquified enough to flow through pipes and tubes as machines squirted it into plastic tubs of product. From a peg on a wall, Jack grabbed a clipboard that held QA forms he would need to fill out. He walked the chocolate dessert production line, greeting all the ladies working there as he did so. They all smiled and were happy to see him. Jack enjoyed working with the ladies at Fantasy Frostings. At least they weren’t weirded out by his relationship with Tina.

Nora, one of the ladies, had even commented to him once, in private, that he was better off without a modern woman. Nora was very bitter that she had two grandchildren she hadn’t seen in years, ever since her ex-daughter-in-law had divorced her son. Every Christmas, every birthday, every special moment missed, hurt her deeply. “But that bitch doesn’t care,” Nora would say, the only time Nora ever used profanity.

Jack finished walking the production line, jotting down the readings from the machines onto the forms on his clipboard. At the end of the line, he walked through a cooler door into a refrigerated area. It was time to collect a champagne cake for testing. It was his favorite part of the job each shift. He would carry one of the champagne cakes back to the QA lab and cut it up, sampling a piece for freezer burn. The other pieces would be shared with whoever wandered into the lab before they were all gone.

Jack was relieved that Kevin wasn’t in the lab when he got back with a cake. Kevin had been working lately on the other side of the production floor with the rows and rows of large ovens there. One of the main things Kevin did at the company was to take recipes for small, normal amounts of things that someone might fix in their home and to adjust those recipes to large, factory scale production. Currently, he was looking for the right temperature for a new kind of cookie that wouldn’t leave them underdone in the center and yet burn them around the edges. It kept Kevin and Jack apart for most of their shift, which was a good thing as far as Jack was concerned.

Jack’s phone pinged with the ringtone sound he had programmed in for messages from Tina.. Pulling his phone out of his lab coat pocket, Jack read a message. He had known that his life would totally change when he had won the Find Love Forever Contest, but he hadn’t imagined some of the ways. Tina had messaged him that the air conditioner fix-it guy had just left, confirming that she was safe. Jack knew that the air conditioner repairman, as well as the electric meter reader, a roof repair estimator, the telephone cable guy, or anyone who came to his house who was a stranger, including even Girl Scout cookie sales girls, had to be background checked or Tina couldn’t answer the door for them. This was one of the security measures he had agreed to as the winner of the contest.

Jack’s heart would sink in his chest if he imagined Tina answering the door for a stranger intent on stealing her. Jack knew that he loved Tina, that Tina was a person, even if she wasn’t a human. He didn’t care what anybody else thought or said.

With a sigh, he put his phone back in his pocket. He searched in one of the lab drawers for a knife to cut that day’s champagne cake.