The Love Experiment Read online

  Replaced by reporters like Honeywell, who were content creators whose job was to reflect the post-truth world, entertain it, not examine or question it too deeply.

  “How does that make you feel?”

  Like he was under attack and Honeywell was making him admit it. He came around the counter to pour the wine. He had no other skills and he’d made so many enemies there was no easy way to cross over from hack to flack and take a PR job. It also made him angry. What kind of world was it going to be if there was no force powerful enough to pressure wrongdoers to account? It’d be a world where men like Bob Bix never need fear exposure.

  “It makes me frustrated, despairing.”

  “Which makes you want to hit things.”

  That about covered it.

  She looked down at her lap. “If you had a crystal ball, what would you want to know about your future?”

  “For farm-fresh, you own some devious, woman.” It was Honeywell’s turn to blush. She had her cell in her lap. “This is a love experiment sneak attack.”

  “Oh look, Martha is cleaning herself,” she said, pointing at the cat, who stopped in the act of licking her butt and stared at them. Charming.

  “Okay, let’s do it then.” He went back to the stovetop. “If I had a crystal ball, I’d want to know what the world is like when we’ve forgotten the value of looking at things critically. I’d want to know how I’m going to keep making a living.” He waved a plastic stirrer at her. “And you?”

  “I’d want to know a whole bunch of silly things like how long Ernest is going to live and how my parents are going to age and whether the farm can remain viable.”

  “Nothing silly there.”

  “I’d want to know if I fall in love, if I marry, if I have kids.”

  “What would make you think you won’t?”

  “I’m twenty-eight and I’ve had two steady boyfriends and a couple of lovers, but I’ve never been in love and not everyone gets what they want.” She shrugged. “On the one hand, why should I be so lucky to get what I want? And on the other, I’m not so special that I’m not like most people, and most people do the marriage and kids thing. It’s like yoga, mysterious, unfathomable, but I’m still trying.”

  The ten percent of him that wanted to kiss her also wanted to assure her she’d get the lover, the family she wanted and admit that he’d wondered about those things for himself on nights when he wasn’t too tired and days that were made for families—the holidays, the Thanksgivings and Labor Days.

  The other ninety percent of him understood he was largely a bystander in his own life. He asked questions and formed opinions on events outside of himself and he liked it that way. He cooked the pasta and tried to remain objectively, professionally distant, which was much harder to do barefoot in his own kitchen with Honeywell’s eyes on him than it was when he was suited up Jackson Haley, a living version of his byline.

  “The question you asked me earlier, the one about whether I was doing what I dreamed of doing, what’s your answer to that?” he asked.

  “My version of your tank-driving, firefighting, soldier comic book writer was Dr. Doolittle. I wanted to fix animals by whispering to them. I wanted them to follow me around and be the only one who could understand what they said. But I wasn’t a fan of actual sick animals and got bored with cones and bandages and the amount of time it takes to fix bones, so that was a bust. I never seriously considered becoming a vet. I thought I’d like to write stories and here I am doing that. It was the most unlikely thing for a girl from Orderly to want to do.”

  He dished the pasta into bowls, hearty servings for both of them, and placed them on the table with a salad that was mostly various types of lettuce and tomato that was past its best. It wasn’t a picnic, but it would do.

  “This looks great,” she said with a gorgeous smile that had the impact of an uppercut, and he lost his place in the conversation, returning to his corner and the safety of a question.

  “What’s up next?”

  “A load of questions I never thought I’d get you to answer.”

  “I promise to behave.” If she kept smiling at him he’d likely do anything she asked, except move the one hundred and ten folders—because that would screw with his internal filing system—and touch her again, because that would screw with his animal instincts; that would make him want what he shouldn’t have.

  “What’s the greatest accomplishment of your life?”

  He grimaced, and that hurt his face. “You go first.”

  She delayed by trying the pasta. He’d likely overcooked it, but she tucked in. “So far, it’s moving to the city. I was comfortable in Orderly, but I wasn’t going to learn anything new, meet anyone new, and I wanted more.” She pointed her fork at him. “Quit stalling.”

  “Being able to help people who’ve been wronged get justice, or at the bare minimum have their stories heard.”

  “I thought you’d say having your own dinkus.”

  “You like to live dangerously.”

  She looked at her plate. “Only with you, apparently.”

  Shit. Not convenient he felt the same about living dangerously with her? He should take Honeywell’s plate away and bundle her out the door immediately with a stern warning to lose his address. “You got another question for me?”

  “Do you still call me Honeywell in your head?”

  He stalled with a mouthful. She was Honeywell because that’s what he did. He used surnames. It kept things professional. He used her surname because it was supposed to stop him from thinking about her as a person he might care about more than he should. He’d had to scrub her surname from last night’s email and replace it with her first.

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No, Jack. I only wondered.”

  It would be useful if he could step down the aggression. “Do you call me asshole in yours?”

  “Sometimes I think of you as Dinkus. I used to imagine you wore very ugly underwear.”

  That was a new one. He’d been called all the crude, insulting, anatomically violent, unprintable names there were, but as far as he knew, no one imagined his underwear, which was ordinary, and most of it was in the basket he’d shoved in the corner.

  She went on. “Because you were intimidating and being afraid of you wasn’t going to get me my story.”

  “Are you afraid of me now?” He’d wanted to get out of doing the love experiment, and he’d own up to intimidating her, but he didn’t like what that said about him. He was often awkward with people socially, with women particularly, and he’d been especially wrong-footed with Honeywell because she came with the pressure of having to show he could be more than his headlines.

  She picked up her wineglass and looked at him over the top of it. “About as much as you’re afraid of me.”

  He should be examining his conscience. He’d made a colleague feel vulnerable, deliberately. Intimidation was a tactic he used to get information he needed. He used it in the fighting pit as well. Intimidate your opponent and they’d be on edge, more likely to make a mistake, let slip the words you needed to bring them undone, lower their guard. Intimidate a woman, outside of some bedroom game she was in on—that wasn’t the kind of man he wanted to be. But then Honeywell was a colleague and she didn’t ask to be treated differently from anyone else.

  This was fucked up. What he had on his conscience was a vision of Honeywell’s dress on his floor, and that intimidated the shit out of him.

  “The next two questions are about friendship,” she said. “What does friendship mean to you?”

  Talking about friendship was at least five grades smarter than thinking about sex with Honeywell, than wondering if she was thinking about it with him. “It was easier to have friends when I didn’t have a dinkus.”

  “But you have friends
?”

  He almost laughed at the worried edge she put on that. He had old friends, married with kids, with busy lives. He could say he didn’t have time for friends or he needed to make time to reconnect, or people sought him out for friendship of one kind or another but always with an aim to what benefits would accrue to themselves. Both answers made him look pathetic.

  “I need to work on the friendship thing.” Still a pitiful answer, but it was honest.

  “Me too,” she said. “At least I don’t have to worry that people want to be my friend for what I can do for them.”

  If he lurched across the table and grabbed her, backed her up against the wall and kissed her till her knees knocked, that would be aggressive. It wouldn’t make them friends, and that was the best outcome for this experiment.

  “What do you value most in a friendship?”

  He needed to move, so he picked up their empty plates and took them to the sink. “That feeling where you don’t need to explain yourself but at the same time a good friend holds you accountable to your own truths.”

  “Oh, that’s good. My hometown friends tried to talk me out of coming here. Said I’d hate it, said I’d come slithering back. It hurt. It’s like they expect me to fail and they’ll be happy when I do. I realized it was because they thought I was judging them, but I’m not. I just wanted something different than living in the same town my whole life.”

  “Friendship, it’s overrated.”

  “Maybe for you. I miss having close friends. I have colleagues and acquaintances, and I’m on nodding terms with the dealer who hangs on my street corner; he’s stopped trying to sell me crack. There’s a man I like at yoga and Spinoza likes me.”

  “Stay away from Spinoza.” He came back to the table. He didn’t like the idea of her living close to a dealer or having the attention of the man at yoga.

  She laughed. “What’s your most treasured memory?”

  Kissing you against the glass wall of Elaine’s. “Time with my Pops. He made everything an adventure, and I was the hero of all of them.”

  “I had this one weekend.” The way she said it made him pay more attention. Please don’t let this be a memory about losing her virginity. “I guess you’d call it a one-night stand, except it went on for three nights.”

  Oh fuck me. Friends should be able to talk about this kind of thing, but he didn’t want to be that kind of a friend. He was scum. He wanted to be the kind of friend who saw her naked and desperate.

  Often.

  “And that’s when I knew I had to get out of Orderly.”

  He made a sound of relief and covered it with a cough. He couldn’t have stood there and listened to her talk about having sex without damage to his intestinal fortitude, and damn the cliché.

  “What’s your most terrible memory?”

  Without hesitation, it was Pops’ death. The funeral. His own rage at having been left alone and the way his parents hadn’t known what to do with his grief and alternatively disciplined and distanced themselves from him.

  “The scoops I couldn’t get. The leads that went to other reporters at other papers and networks, or fell apart for lack of evidence.”

  “Not buying it. Too general. You think I can’t take hearing that losing your Pops was the worst thing that ever happened to you?” She narrowed her eyes to a ferocious parody squint. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  “I think this experiment is evil.” And the woman had a bead on him he found uncomfortable, which was why he didn’t want to do this in the first place. Self-examination outside Barney’s church was designed to make him twitch. “I’m not talking to you about grief.”

  “Why not?”

  Because that was something he kept locked up tight. It was an old scar, long healed and flexible enough he didn’t need to consider it as he moved through the world. Talking about it would only needlessly irritate it.

  “Scaredy cat.”

  “Taunting me won’t get you what you want.” Unless she wanted to take this up close and very personal, and then it might unwrap her.

  “How do you know what I want?”

  It couldn’t be the same thing he did and didn’t want. Complication. Step it back. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “You can answer the question and I can be the kind of friend who doesn’t judge.”

  “You don’t want to be my friend, Honeywell.”

  “My name is Derelie, and there’s only one thing I want more than being your friend tonight.”

  It was a trap to ask what that might be. He let the silence between them grow. He knew how to use it to force others to show their hands.

  She stood abruptly, startling Martha, who was sprawled on the floor like a rug needing a good vacuuming. “There you go, that’s intimidating, that thing you do where you don’t talk. It’s not friendly. I should go.”

  “I felt abandoned.” She went quiet. “On the day of the funeral I stole a car. All I was good for was crashing into a fence. I think I wanted to die too.”

  She returned to her seat at the table. “Were you hurt?”

  “Bruised, scratched up, a touch of concussion.”

  “It’s your pattern.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “You said it earlier. You put yourself into a position where you’re going to get hurt to deal with the world.”

  First instinct was to protest, but she’d turned his own words against him. Astonishing. Second instinct, default question. “What’s your most terrible memory?”

  “You’re just going to skip right over that revelation.”

  “That’s what I was planning, yes.”

  “All right then. My most terrible memory is the night my dad had a heart attack. We didn’t know if he’d make it. I’ve never been so frightened or so relieved. He has a pacemaker now and nothing stops him. I’m sorry about your Pops.” She looked away to Martha, who was snoozing. “I don’t want to ask you the next question.”

  “It must be a doozy. Hit me. I use pain to deal with the world.”

  “How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?”

  Ah. Like ripping off tape and taking the top layer of skin with it. He hated this. He hated feeling that he owed her his answer and the shock of vulnerability that came with it.

  “We didn’t touch in my family. We weren’t the average definition of loving. We didn’t spend time together. Work, the hospital was the priority for my parents, prestige and money too. But I had everything I needed. I had a home and food and an enviable education. I didn’t turn to a life of crime. I don’t drink to excess or do drugs, other than over-the-counter painkillers. I came out of it fine. My childhood wasn’t traditionally happy, but it wasn’t tragic either and it’s a long time ago.”

  “I would die without touch.” She stopped, her face flushed. “We were always hugged and kissed and squashed and sat on laps and pushed around and chased, tickled till we wet ourselves, brushed and scrubbed and smoothed. That’s my whole childhood.” She put her hand over his where it lay on the table. “It makes me so sad you didn’t have that.”

  What would it mean if he flipped his hand over? If he tangled her fingers in his? If he wanted touch now like he wanted the next inflation of his lungs?

  “I don’t want to ask the next question either.”

  He slid his hand out from under hers. “Pain, remember?”

  “How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?”

  He had an obligatory and grudging relationship with his mother, but how to tell her that? “I messed up my mother’s career. That’s not a guess. She told me. She couldn’t work through part of her pregnancy because it was difficult, and then she took a leave of absence for six months and was penalized by the hospital system for t
hat. She’s never gone so far as to say she wished she didn’t have me, but that’s the territory we flirt with. To both my parents I was an inconvenience on my way to being a disappointment. My parents aren’t a factor in my life. They’re people who should never have had children.”

  She stood. Martha opened one eye, but didn’t otherwise stir, not even when Honeywell stepped over her on her way around the table. He pushed his chair out to stand, but she put a hand to his shoulder.

  “I’m not going to tell you how great my mom is. She was the opposite to your mom. Us kids were made to feel like we were her universe.” She put pressure on his shoulder until he opened his body to her and then she was in his lap, her arms around his back, her face tucked into his neck. When he didn’t immediately move to touch her, she said, “If you don’t hold me I’m going to be very embarrassed.”

  What choice did he have? He banded his arms around her, shifted their bodies so her hip rested on his belly, and they were chest to chest. He bit down on a groan. She was soft and smelled like soap and fruity shampoo. He shouldn’t have her in his arms again. It was where he wanted her, but it made him feel vulnerable.

  “If you knew that in a year you’d die suddenly, would you change the way you’re living now?” she said, without lifting her head.

  He wanted to touch her hair, take it out of the band that held it, but he kept still, enjoying her weight and warmth. This was what he’d change. He’d add this—a strong, willing woman he admired. Someone to share a meal with at night, to share a bed with.

  He breathed her in. Not a colleague, not a rookie he was charged with teaching, not an experiment, not a friend. “I’d want this in my life. I’d want not to be so alone.” To stop being a bystander, to make himself a life outside work.

  The admission went so deep it might’ve stopped his heart.

  “Me too.”

  Her voice hitched with emotion. She meant she’d want touch, comfort. “You’d go home to your family.”

  She lifted her face, and they were eye to eye. “I’d go home, but I’d want more.”

  Now he touched her hair, smoothing his hand from her temple to the knot of it at the back of her head. “What would be more?”