I have never in my life been surrounded by so many nerds and I have never in my life felt so at home.

Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, or at least the part about feeling at home. There are a ton of nerds here, including me, considering this is a conference on autonomous vehicles.

That’s right, self-driving cars. It’s a lot more than that, but the place is really buzzing with the recently approved Envoy Mark 1, the first commercially available self-driving car in the world. It’s hitting streets soon, and the inventor and CEO of the Envoy company is here at this conference to talk it up.

I have only one goal here. After four years of study, of being the only girl in engineering courses, of dealing with brain-dead asshole guys making comments about how girls can’t do math, all of that garbage, my only goal now is to meet David Carlson and get on his team.

Maybe that sounds a little silly. I’m supposedly all about female empowerment, but all I want is to meet some dude. I get it, not exactly burning my bra here, but whatever. The Envoy is the most interesting self-driving car and I want to be a part of that team, and to get there, I need to meet the young CEO himself.

I spot him for the first time during a lecture he gives on the regulation problems and ethical dilemmas facing self-driving cars. I barely hear anything he says, because I’m too busy staring at his handsome face, full lips, thick hair, tall frame, light blue eyes. He’s handsome, easily the most attractive man in this whole room, and he’s rich as hell and brilliant, to top it all off. I don’t know how he got so lucky, but the man is a genetic marvel, practically a freak of nature. I knew he was handsome, since I’ve seen pictures and interviews, but seeing him in person is a totally different game.

Still, I keep it together. I bide my time. There’s a meet-and-greet tonight at a bar nearby and I know he’s supposed to be there, or at least my super-secret source tells me that’s where he’ll be.

I get to the bar early and order a glass of wine. I sit on a stool in the corner of the room, watching as more and more nerds fill the place up. It’s actually pretty crowded by the time eleven rolls around, and I’m guessing my super-secret source wasn’t so super or secret after all. It’s a guy I met on Reddit who claims he works at Envoy, and I’m starting to think he went around telling every single person alive. To think, I put up with a week of flirting and one dick pic to get this info, and apparently it’s not worth anything.

I drink my second glass of wine and as midnight gets closer, I’m starting to despair. I don’t think I’ll ever have another chance to run into David, and if I can’t go through the man himself, I’m practically screwed. Envoy is notoriously hard to get hired at through conventional means, which is why I’m taking this unconventional route.

When I finish my second glass, I’m ready to give up. Just as I’m getting up, there’s a murmur in the crowd, and suddenly a group of ten people come into the bar. Like a rock star and his crew, David Carlson posts up at a booth and they start ordering drinks.

I’m freaking out a little bit. In my head, I’d play it cool, walk up to him, make some small talk, that sort of thing. Instead, in the actual moment, I’m panicking. I know, I know, we’re just in the same bar at the same time, so it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? It’s not like he’s some amazing celebrity. He’s just a rich tech genius that owns the company I totally love.

I realize suddenly that I need another drink. I get up and walk over to the bar. Fortunately there’s an empty stool at the very end that I grab, my back to David and his group. I ask for another glass of wine and just as it comes, I feel someone looming over my shoulder.

Ready to tell whoever it is to back off, I turn my head slightly and stare up at David Carlson’s face.

He’s not looking at me, so I quickly look away, and then I do a double-take. I can’t help myself. He’s that handsome, and it turns out that I’m a huge nerdy fangirl for this guy.

Right in the middle of my double-take, David looks down at me, and this wicked grin splits his face.

I blink and I swear my whole face turns red. I turn back to my wine and grab it, taking a long drink.

“Do I know you?” he asks me.

I try to force down that panic that threatens to overwhelm me. “I don’t think so,” I say. “But I, uh, I know you.”

“Creepy,” he says, still smiling.

“Uh, I mean, it’s because, you know. You’re David Carlson.”

“I know,” he says, holding out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Emma,” I say. “Emma May.”

“Emma May.” We shake hands briefly as he leans up against the bar next to me. “Really, though, I wasn’t trying a line on you. Were you at my lecture earlier?”

“I was,” I say, blinking. “It was really good, by the way.”

“Thanks. Yeah, I think I remember seeing you. Third row, far right?”

“That’s an impressive memory.”

“Well, not really. You were one of maybe three women in the crowd, and by far the most attractive.”

I feel that blush hit me again. “It’s a male-dominated field,” I say stupidly. He knows all this already, of course. I feel like a little girl and I’m totally blowing it. I don’t know what I expected to happen. I guess I thought we’d have a conversation and he’d be impressed with my natural intelligence but of course that’s an idiotic thing to think. That’s not how real life works at all.

“So let me ask you something, Emma,” he says after the bartender returns with his drink. It’s a double whisky, neat. “If you had to change one thing about the Envoy, what would it be?”

I blink at him. “Really?”

“Really,” he says. “Please, be brutally honest.” He nods his head back toward his table. “The people over there are brilliant, but there’s a lot of ass kissing when you get to a certain level of success. Sometimes I think nobody will give me a straight, honest answer.”

I can’t help but laugh a little bit. “You really want my brutal, honest opinion?”

“Please,” he says. “I honestly do. I was just trying to pry something out of them but so far all I’ve gotten is ‘more cup holders,’ which isn’t super useful.”

I snort a little bit at that and turn red again. I have a tendency to snort instead of laughing, which isn’t the most delicate and feminine thing in the world.

“Well, uh,” I say, “battery storage is still an issue. Acceleration is decent, but not great. Those are all tech problems and will eventually get solved. I think the real problem is ethical.”

He smiles a little bit brighter. “Really now?”

“You talked about it in your lecture. When given a choice of saving a person outside of the car, or saving the person inside of the car, how does the vehicle decide? Does it swerve off the road and kill a baby to save the driver? Is there a way to program fluid human ethics into a machine?”

His eyes are bright when I finish, and although I know I’ve just parroted his talk back to him, it’s honestly something I’ve thought a lot about. It’s the whole reason I want to get into autonomous vehicles in the first place, and he’s at the forefront of this. Our smart cars and devices have to be ethical if they’re going to be making choices that have serious ramifications.

“Tell me more,” he says, watching me seriously.

“Who’s making the choice?” I ask him, sipping my drink and getting into my topic. “You brought up most of the questions, but you didn’t talk about the most important one. Who are the people that are going to program these cars to think ethically?”

“Programmers, I’d imagine,” he says, head cocked.

“And why do they get to make those decisions? Why don’t we all get to decide how our vehicles choose to behave in situations that affect our lives?”

“I never thought about it like that,” he says softly, thinking. “But you’re right. We want our programmers to think ethically, but why do we even give them that power to begin with?”

“Exactly,” I say. “We need serious limits and regulations and deep, deep thought. More thought than went into the Envoy Mark 1, I bet.”

I shut my mouth, shocked that I just said that. He stares at me for a long moment, and I’m suddenly afraid that he’s upset. I feel like I just crossed a line by suggesting that there wasn’t enough thought put into his flagship vehicle, the most advanced self-driving car in the world and the first to be approved for mass sale. I’m just some random girl at the bar, I shouldn’t get to be critical of David Carlson right to his face.

“Emma May,” he says softly. “Would you like to get out of here with me?”

Now it’s my turn to stare. I wasn’t expecting him to say that, not even a little bit. I glance over at the table of people that are waiting for him. “What about your friends?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “They’ll survive without me.”

“Okay,” I say, standing up. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t you want to know where you’re going?” he asks me as he puts money down on the bartop, clearly enough for both our drinks and then some.

“No,” I say. “I don’t really care.”

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to go home with strange boys?”

“You’re not a stranger. We just introduced ourselves.”

He smirks at me. “But Emma, I’m trouble.”

I grin at him, not sure where this confidence is coming from. “So am I.”

His smile is so genuine, and I follow him from the bar back to the hotel where the conference is at. He has the topmost penthouse, a huge, gorgeous space with multiple rooms and beds.

We order room service and stay up half the night talking. I never in a million years expected this to actually happen, but here we are, completely by chance. If I hadn’t gone to the bar and sat in that seat, I doubt I would have ever spoken to him at all, let alone ended up back in his room.

We eat, we have a few more drinks, and when we asks me to take off my clothes, I listen. He watches me, and when I finish, it’s his turn. He takes me into one of the bedrooms and kisses me, and somewhere deep in the back of my mind, I know I’m making some kind of mistake. I don’t know what kind, probably a stupid one, but in the moment it feels so fucking good.

He’s as beautiful in bed as he is in normal life. He’s muscular and lean and his hands find me wet and already aching for him. David knows what he’s doing as his fingers tease me, pressing deep inside, rubbing my clit before he slides down to the edge of the bed to taste my dripping pussy.

I moan under him as he fucks me. I completely forget who he is and I lose myself in the pleasure of the night, sweating with him, writhing as he makes me feel things I’ve never experienced before. I don’t make him wear a condom, because I know I can’t get pregnant. I had cysts on my ovaries when I was younger, and my doctor said they caused some scarring that would last the rest of my life. He fucks me raw and deep and I find myself panting his name, begging for more, experiencing a deep, lasting pleasure that I didn’t know was possible.

We fall asleep just before the sun comes up, and we’re barely out for an hour before someone calls his phone to wake him up.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay longer,” he says to me. “Last night was fun.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Weird that it just ended an hour or two ago.”

He grins at me and tips my chin toward him. He kisses me softly. “The room’s paid for, stay as long as you want.”

“Okay.”

He stands and stretches. “I’ll call you, Emma May.”

“You better. You’d be missing out if you don’t.”

He grins at me. “I think you’re right.”

He doesn’t say anything else before leaving the room. I hear a shower running briefly before I end up falling asleep again. A few hours later, I wake up to the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window, and the penthouse is empty. David’s gone, and I feel like the night before was a dream.

He doesn’t call. I hold out hope for a couple of weeks, but he never does. I’m upset, but I shouldn’t be. I was just another one-night stand for a rich and important billionaire, and I’m a total nobody. I thought I impressed him, but clearly I didn’t.

It’s okay. I still have that night. And it all feels like a dream, at least until a month after everything happened and I don’t get my period.

I go another two weeks, in total denial, before I finally take the pregnancy test that changes my whole life.

They say miracles really do happen, and apparently that’s true. It’s a one-in-a-million chance that I got pregnant, and my doctor has no clue how it even happened. Sometimes, miracles don’t look like how you think they will, at least not right away.