The Love Experiment Read online

  “I’m the problem.”

  “I thought we could finish the story, give Phil what he wants and have this thing as well.”

  “What’s this thing mean to you?” They were starting a new page—he needed it to be one they agreed on.

  “Sex, Jack. Rip-roaring, sheet-soaking, mind-bending, ankles-behind-heads sex.”

  That was a page in a whole new book of erotic delights. “We can keep it quiet, but do you want to sneak around? The whole Madden-Potter thing is supposed to be secret, but it’s common knowledge.”

  “I hate that, all the gossip, and it makes it look like Shona gets favors.”

  “Madden is harder on her than anyone.”

  “But I don’t work for you, so it’s not the same.”

  “To summarize, you want a scorching fling with me.”

  “Fling,” she laughed. “I want whatever comes after all these questions. I want what comes of this physical tug between us, and I don’t know that we need to name it anything except good while it lasts.”

  “We’re done.” He tossed the apple core into the file box.

  “We didn’t talk about your problem.”

  He crumped the page and it followed the apple core. Then he moved the box and shuffled closer to her, took her shoulders and held her while he looked into her pale eyes. “My problem is that this is a public place.”

  “Have we done all the questions?”

  Neither of them had taken a note, but he wouldn’t forget anything she’d said. “We can extemporize the rest.”

  “Make it up as we go along.” Her smile was as wide as the sky. “You used the ten dollar word.”

  “We deserve it.”

  It was a million dollar kiss. Sweeter for the delay, for the relief he felt, for the knowledge that she wasn’t misty eyed about him, wasn’t on the Jackson Haley ride for any purpose other than their mutual pleasure.

  Derelie wound her arm around his neck and removed his cap and glasses. “You won’t need these for a while; I plan on being all you see.”

  A perfect prescription. He took them both down to the blanket and all they did for some time was explore each other’s mouths, share breath, touch with slow certainty. He kept his hips away from her, PG for the park, and in the growing glow they became together, he heard chirps, tweets and trills. He lifted his head to make sure they were real.

  They had to be because she heard them too. She squeezed his arm. “All we need now is stars. There are no stars in the city. I miss them.”

  The stars were all inside her, but he didn’t have the words to tell her that yet. “All we need now is food, because you’ve made me lightheaded.”

  They ate, they bickered and he couldn’t get enough of that because it proved they didn’t need a questionnaire to be friends, to be more. They traded kisses, he got more handsy than he should’ve but her twitchy, excited responses were intoxicating, and then both of them dozed in the fading heat, bodies twisted into each other. Later there was only one question remaining.

  “My place or yours?” he said.

  “Mine is tiny and yours has Martha.”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “I packed my toothbrush.”

  He ditched the box. He called a car to take them back to his place, stopping at his local market so he could pick up something to cook for dinner. Inside the store they separated, Jack going to the fresh food aisle and Derelie, wearing his cap, disappearing down junk food alley.

  It happened while he was selecting chicken breasts.

  “You’re Jackson Haley.”

  The woman was someone he vaguely knew on sight. Too much sunshine and Derelie in his head to place her. He wanted to brush her off anyway. “From Monday to Friday.”

  The woman laughed. “I love what you do, the whole champion of the city thing, and it looks like you cook too. That’s too good to be true. You don’t remember me? I’m Bridie. I’m on-air at WBBM after you. I’ve tried to catch your eye before. Can’t believe I’ve run into you here. What happened to your face? I hope you have someone to kiss it better.”

  Ah, that was it. The radio station. Bridie was an attractive woman, a well-respected broadcaster, and once upon a lonely Saturday he’d have considered starting something with her. He focused on the chicken.

  “I know this is none of my business, but if you feel like company...”

  He heard the dot dot dot she didn’t say. The way she put her hand on his arm said everything else. Untimely vaguely predatory behavior. “I’m with a friend.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She let go his arm, gracious about rejection. “Maybe another time. I really dig what you do.” And there it was, the phone number and her name on the back of a store receipt. He took it from her as she moved off because it was more of a scene not to. He was shoving it into his pocket when Derelie rounded the deli counter with a basket load of snacks.

  “I got—oh, sorry, did I interrupt?”

  “No,” he said, not sparing Bridie a glance. “You like chicken?”

  “Better than wieners.”

  He dropped the packet he was holding and made a grab for Derelie, backed her into the deli counter and tried to look threatening while he kissed her. “Don’t say that word. Don’t even think it.”

  “Too late. It’s in your head isn’t it?”

  He spent the walk home trying not to let that jingle take over his brain, even though Derelie hummed it. And while he cooked it was there, a silly little song that reminded him of laughter, of being loved, of the best part of growing up. Why it’d stuck so thoroughly he didn’t know—advertising jingle writers were demonically clever—and the memories he’d attached to the little ditty were happy ones.

  They ate chicken and salad in his hastily cleaned up kitchen, with Martha watching them from the floor flicking her tail. They finished up with ice cream that Derelie had chosen, and he couldn’t remember a Saturday he’d enjoyed more, but he realized he’d stopped trying to have a life outside of work and wondered what that meant, knowing it was about to change.

  He watched her lick the back of her spoon. His fascination with her mouth knew no end. I like you, Derelie Honeywell. I like you in your cargo pants and your hair all full of the wind. I like you sitting opposite me in the kitchen I felt duty bound to clean up. I like the fact that we’re going to take what we did last night and today in the park and do it all again but this time skin to skin. I like the fact you have an IUD and that you’re not scared of me and that you brought your toothbrush. I hope you didn’t bother with PJs. I’d like you in my T-shirts.

  He didn’t say any of that because it didn’t seem necessary. That experiment had acted like a fast-forward button, shooting them past the initial awkwardness of discovery into the excitement of consummation.

  “Do you want anything else to eat?”

  She patted her stomach. “I’m full. I’ll help you clean up.”

  “It can wait.”

  “The way you’re looking at me could boil water, Jack.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I really, really like it. But I ate too much, so can you back off the smolder so I don’t end up with indigestion? That would be so unsexy.”

  He laughed. The way he was about her, everything she said and did was sexy, except the mention of wieners. That made him want to tickle her till she cried for mercy. They washed up and he took her through to the living room. He’d cleaned it up too.

  “What happened to your filing system?”

  “It was all digital anyway. It was just a way for me to process the pieces of the story like a jigsaw puzzle. We could fool around some more.” He pointed at the couch. Which Martha promptly jumped onto and lay down full length over both cushions.

  “We’d be putting Martha out,” she said.

 
; “We could go to the bedroom.” They stood in his living room, indecisive and deliciously awkward, both of them looking at Martha. This never happened to him. He’d never cared enough to feel like what he said next to a woman he was taking to bed made a difference. He never intended them to be around long enough for it to matter.

  Derelie gave him the sauciest possible grin. Prego had nothing on her. “That might be nice.”

  “If we go in there we’re staying put a while.”

  She shrugged. “I guess I can cope.”

  He’d wanted to swat her wiener-jingle-humming butt the whole way home. He did it now, with his arms around her, less a swat than a hand clamped down on her ass so she knew what he wanted, and there were no misunderstandings. “Give me ten minutes to tidy up in there.”

  She pulled on his neck to bring their faces close. “You know, the hottest thing about this whole day is that you weren’t so sure we’d end up there that you didn’t clean up the bedroom first.”

  “That’s what you find hot? My domestic incompetence?”

  She responded by grabbing his ass. “Go on then. Martha and I will have girl time.”

  When he moved, Martha got up to follow, so he shut the bedroom door on her. She wasn’t the girl sharing his bed tonight. He shoved clothes in drawers. Sprayed the room with air freshener. Closed the closet doors and changed the sheets. He turned a side table light on and drew the curtains. He felt the same kind of energy he associated with waiting for a big story to break.

  But once he got back to the living room, it was as if he’d misread it all and someone else had broken the story.

  Derelie was gone and so was Martha, and on the floor was a foldback clip wrapped around a wad of business cards and slips of paper he’d collected and kept because Roscoe had said it might be useful to have the names and addresses of people who approached him in public if he was ever threatened again.

  He was threatened now.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The thought of Jack making his bedroom presentable was an unaccountable thrill. It was just a man making his bed. It shouldn’t have made Derelie feel so effervescent, but she was the glass of soda she’d drunk at dinner, bubbling and fizzing and set to explode if shaken.

  She wanted that shaking so badly.

  “How do you do it, Martha? Hang out with such a sexy beast and keep your calm. I’m ridiculous. I just want to kiss him all over and never stop.” She laughed as Martha turned away from the closed bedroom door after head-butting it a few times. “Yeah, if I didn’t know he was coming back I’d do that too.”

  The cat skirted by as if Derelie took up an unnecessarily large amount of space and Martha was offended by that, and jumped onto Jack’s considerably tidier desk. “Are you allowed on there?”

  Martha picked her way over the pile of folders and wove between the two computer screens, then pushed some items around to make room to curl up. Two of those items she simply tipped off the desk, a box of tissues and a foldback clip holding a stack of business cards and notes.

  “So that’s the way it is then.” Derelie picked up the tissues, but when she put her hand to the foldback clip she recoiled. The first card in the stack had a picture of a naked woman, tastefully silhouetted, on it, with a phone number and the words Jane F, available for no strings sex. The next card showed a woman in a red corset—her name was apparently Heidi, and she liked uncomplicated arrangements.

  She dropped the clip to the ground. That woman in the market had handed Jack something he’d put in his pocket. Derelie had had his cap on, pulled down low and thought she’d mistaken it, but no, the other woman propositioned Jack, and so had the owner of every card or note in this stack. Why would he keep them? Why would she want to be part of the stack?

  She was such an idiot. He’d never said why he was single other than being busy. This was how he’d been busy. She didn’t need her heart broken this way.

  It took two seconds to collect her purse and her overnight bag and fling Jack’s front door open. Let him figure out what went wrong, he was the investigative reporter.

  She’d have gotten away with her swift exit too, but Martha was a slick ninja and slipped out the door and bounded onto the landing before Derelie could react.

  “No, Martha. Be a good girl and go back inside so I can avoid making a huge mistake. Big scary things live out here, like falling for the wrong men, like thinking you’re smarter than you really are, and trusting an experiment.”

  Martha gave her paw a cursory lick and looked at Derelie. There was only the width of the corridor separating them. She could do this—grab Martha, shove her inside and take off. Derelie put her bag down. If ever she’d wanted to be an animal whisperer, this was the moment.

  “Come on, Martha, you don’t want to be out here. It’s noisy and smelly and there are too many people and not enough trees, and you can’t see the stars at night. That’s not the kind of world you want to live in.” She took a step toward the cat, another. “Good girl.”

  She ducked down and reached out and got her hands to Martha’s shoulders, but she didn’t hold tight enough or Martha was made of liquid silver; all she got was a handful of loose fur.

  “Shit.” Martha took off down the stairs and Derelie couldn’t simply let her go. Three flights down, there the slinky ninja was, grooming her tail. If she’d stuck with the Dr. Doolittle ambition this wouldn’t be a problem. Instead she had to think she was a match for Jackson Fucking Dinkus Haley.

  “Here, kitty. Come on, Martha. You’re not meant to be out here.”

  Martha took that instruction to mean bolt. Derelie didn’t catch up with her until she hit the bottom landing. Martha was standing with her front paws on the glass door that led to the street. If someone came in, she’d make her escape, but she was also well placed for Derelie to grab her.

  She picked Martha up under the front legs and flipped her like Jack did so the cat landed in her arms like a baby with her tail over Derelie’s arm. She gave up her bid for freedom and lay there like a big warm fur loaf of bread.

  “You’re trouble, just like your owner.”

  She knew Jack was on the stairs behind her, he’d made a racket. “Come take her, Jack. I’m going home.” She didn’t turn around; he’d have to come to her.

  “I can explain.”

  “Cliché.”

  “Sometimes a cliché is the shortcut you need. ‘I love you’ is a cliché.”

  Like nothing in a tough yoga pose or moving to the city, that made her body go tense. But this was Jack who picked up women in markets—he was just making a point and being a dick.

  “Please, don’t go.” He stepped up beside her and fastened a collar with a lead attached to it around Martha’s neck. Martha looked at him adoringly and Derelie dumped the cat in his arms.

  “In the market, that woman you saw propositioned me,” he said. “It happens more than I’d like. Sometimes it’s women, occasionally men who hit on me, and honestly, that’s the easy part. Sometimes people approach to abuse me because they don’t like something I wrote or said on radio or TV, or just don’t like me, the way I look or talk or breathe.”

  Oh God, that was awful. “Why?” She knew why he got propositioned. He was GQ in his suit, an adventure catalog in his jeans and boots and shirtless, well, stop the clock. But why did people think they had the right to abuse him?

  “It goes with the job. Will you come back upstairs?”

  “No, I’m going to sulk here for a while.” It might be possible she’d overreacted.

  Jack backed up and sat on the steps, putting Martha between his feet.

  Derelie sat beside him and poked Martha in her large rump, earning a tail flick. “She doesn’t look like she’s got fast in her repertoire.” Martha’s ears flattened as if she wasn’t sure of the compliment.

  “And
I look like I’ve got player in mine.”

  “A little. I should’ve guessed.”

  “I haven’t taken up with someone who propositioned me in a long time. It was fun before the death threats started. Before I quit owning a car because it kept getting vandalized. I only keep that stuff because the lawyers suggested I should.”

  “Are you extemporizing?” It would be easy to make it up, tell her anything.

  “I’ve had four credible death threats. That’s over and above the number of suits people bring against me. We once had to evacuate the Courier because of a suspicious parcel.”

  “Suspicious how?”

  “There was a phone call to the news desk insisting we print a retraction on one of my stories or we’d be mailed anthrax. It turned out to be cornstarch, but it made everyone jumpy.”

  She looked at him for the first time since sitting. “That’s so weird, Jack.”

  “It’s not normal, but I’ve gotten used to it.”

  “I kind of freaked out.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  She bumped her shoulder against his. “I’m so full of feeling about you and we got here so quickly. I thought I was okay with a hookup, but I’m not sure I can be another woman you sleep with in a long line of uncomplicated entanglements.”

  “There’s no line. There’s just you.”

  “I don’t know what to trust.”

  “That makes me want to—”

  “Hit something?”

  He turned his head to look at her, mouth drawn down. “Cry, Derelie. I want you to trust me. This is only going to work if you do.” She leaned her head on his shoulder and his arm circled her waist. “Come upstairs, we can talk more.”

  “I need more sulk time.”

  “Mind if I wait with you? I feel a little sulky myself.”

  They sat in silence a while and then Martha yawned. “Do you walk Martha on that lead?” The thought of Jack with Martha on a leash out on the street was almost enough to push the sulks away.

  He scratched behind Martha’s ear and she gave a yip of approval. “No. But she’s such an escape artist, on occasions when I need the apartment door opened for more than a second it’s useful to put her in this and slip it around something heavy. She’s so busy trying to get out of it she’s distracted. I used to close her in one of the other rooms, but she throws herself against the door so hard I worry she’s going to hurt herself or bust through.”