The Inverse Variable

Gillian Simms is a lead biomaterials engineer with a sharp mind, a sharper email style, and a body she has spent years hiding behind lab coats. Patrick Coats is a systems integration analyst who communicates in code and treats human interaction like a bug to be fixed. They have never met in person, only clashed across seven months of hostile email threads. A catastrophic failure of their prototype spacesuit threatens a £350 million ESA contract.
With no time to hire a test pilot, they must become their own subjects. To get clean data, they strip away every barrier: first the compression suits, then the swimwear, then the adhesive shields, until nothing remains but their ordinary, un-airbrushed bodies. But the software keeps failing. The sensors register their embarrassment, their muscular guarding, their rising attraction. Each new variable corrupts the baseline.
Desperate, they retreat to a weekend of domestic normalisation... cooking, cleaning, playing board games... entirely naked. When even that fails, they write a spreadsheet of their deepest aversions, hoping to make the inevitable encounter deliberately unappealing. The inverse variable of fear is intimacy. And the math is about to get very, very hot. The Inverse Variable is a slow-burn, neurodivergent-friendly erotic novella about two analytical minds who discover that the only way to calibrate a universal baseline is to first map the extremes of human connection.
Includes explicit verbal and non-verbal consent, sensory-rich descriptions, autistic-coded protagonists, competence porn, forced proximity, and a happy ending that proves the delta between fear and intimacy is a universal constant. The math doesn't lie. Wordcount: 18, 900