The Love Experiment Page 28

  He didn’t want her standing by to watch him flail, be defeated. She would leave in increments, a thousand cuts, it was better to concentrate on one fatal wound. “It’s me telling you we’re over.”

  “You love me. I know you do.”

  Some truths he would always defend, and this was one of them. “I love you. I always will.”

  Her shoulders sagged with relief. “Then we—”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Loving you is first for me. It’s top of the tree, that bright star to the left of loving my family. Everything else comes second.”

  There was a moment in every fight where you knew you could turn it, deliver a crushing blow, win. This was the moment of no return for him and Derelie. The love experiment was bad science. A manipulation that didn’t allow for changing circumstances. There was no happy ending here.

  “Not for me.”

  She backed up again and sat. Her hands shook and her face contorted, but she would not give in to sobbing in front of him. He stayed where he was half a room away, a whole different lifetime only glimpsed, now exploded into sharp pieces of pain, regret and loneliness. Before Derelie he didn’t know agony like this existed.

  She put her hand on the throw rug, bunched at the end of the couch. “You want me to leave?” She’d take the concept of home with her.

  “It’s better that way.”

  She watched him, closely enough to see his self-inflicted injuries. “There are so many things I can fight you over, but not letting me love you enough isn’t one of them. What will you do?”

  Hope his heart continued to pump, hope his chest didn’t cave in and his knees held him upright. “Work the phones. Hit the road.”

  “What about Martha?”

  He’d have to give her up too, at least until he found a place to land. “Would you take her for me?”

  Derelie glanced toward the bedroom, to where only this morning they’d woken, legs tangled, lips following. She stood, cutting though skin, tissue, muscle, bone when she turned her eyes on him. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m a dog person.”

  “We’d never have made it,” he said, hands reaching behind him for the edge of his desk, his forced humor as destructive to him as her cool acceptance.

  “Just as well we broke up. I’ll pack a bag. Let me know when you’re going to be out and I’ll come back for the rest of my stuff and leave my key.”

  This was how it had to be.

  She went to the bathroom, then the bedroom, and he followed her movements through the sound of her opening and closing drawers and closet doors, a zipper, a clip, the sound of a suitcase wheel on his hardwood floor.

  She rebuffed his help. She worked efficiently, calmly, and in no time packed most of her stuff to go and rolled her case over to the door.

  He shut Martha in the bedroom. “Let me carry that downstairs for you.”

  She kept her back to him, hand to the door handle. “I’ll take the elevator.”

  “I’ll walk you out.” He wanted one last look at her face, one last chance to hold her.

  “Please don’t do that.” Her voice shook, her breathing was messed up.

  Ah fuck. “Derelie.”

  “I have one last question.”

  Martha pawed the bedroom door. Questions were the beginning of them. Fitting a question ended them. “Anything.”

  “Was it real, you and me, us, being in love, or did you just get carried away by the moment and decide to sweep me off my feet for the headline?”

  It was the challenge of her, the depth, the quick sweet intimacy and the promise of what they could’ve become had things been different.

  “It was real, but things have changed.”

  Martha switched from pawing to heaving her body against the door. Derelie turned the front door handle and tipped her bag onto its wheels. “The only thing that’s changed is that I discovered you’re a coward.”

  She rolled her bag into the corridor at the same time as Martha forced the bedroom door open and shot toward freedom. Jack grabbed one back leg, earning an angry yowl, and swept Martha into his arms.

  When he looked up, Derelie was pulling the door closed behind her. “Goodbye, Jack. Good luck finding what you’re looking for.”

  He didn’t find it in the ball of frustrated fur in his arms, or at his desk, or in the number of calls he made and emails he sent. He didn’t find it in bed, where he had trouble sleeping alone, or the bottles he tried to drown himself in. Martha sensed his self-destructive mood and stayed clear of him. He flew out to New York and did a round of coffee meetings and planned the same for Washington, but with the suit hanging over his head, he was too hot to touch.

  He’d had an email from Roscoe with a curt I’ll get back to you when I know something. Madden said he had nothing to add. Jack couldn’t wait much longer to find his own legal counsel.

  He hung out a writer-for-hire shingle, built a website and found its contact page flooded with spam and conspiracy theorists who wanted him to donate his time to their particular search for justice. For the want of a way to get paid, he could write about secret societies in control of the world, cults who could predict the end of the world, or shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptilian humanoids who wanted to eat the world.

  He read Derelie’s daily stories and saw the future of journalism in her words. He watched their Swoon video on endless loop like it would help him make sense of his life. The wonder in her smile, the laughter in her eyes. He remembered Barney’s images as well. In them he was the alien. A different man who looked at ease. Then after his longest absence from the Church of the Cocked Fist, he requested a fight and got put on the schedule.

  “Thought I’d see you sooner than this, Haley,” Barney said, when he arrived. “A month since you lost that job. Why now?”

  “Does it matter?” It always mattered to Barney, and it wasn’t about losing his job. “I lost her.”

  “Put her down and don’t know where? Not likely. She left you? No.” Barney laughed. “You pushed her out.”

  Jack looked around the old garage. It was buzzing with men juiced up on adrenaline, looking for action, resolution, momentary oblivion. “I just want a fight.” To be in a place he could use his anger and not have to be careful about it. “I did it for her.”

  “In my admittedly limited experience, women do not like it when men make decisions for them.”

  “My life is unraveling, Barney. I’m being sued. The Courier is dodging responsibility; no other media company is going to employ me while that’s a factor. I can freelance, but it’s not going to keep me afloat. I’m the wrong fit for a corporate job, don’t have the right attitude, and in another month, I’ll need to get out of the city. Her career is just starting to take off. Why would I want to drag her though all of my muck?”

  “Maybe because she loved you.”

  He shook his head. “No.” Love needed sunlight, fresh air and birdsong. The part of him that wasn’t built from congealed anger and frustration was constructed of regret over Derelie, but not because he’d made her leave, because making her leave had been essential. “This shit storm would kill anyone’s love.”

  “Never took you for a coward.”

  Barney could call it whatever he wanted. Derelie had tried to goad him with the same insult. He’d have been a coward to hold on to her and drag her down, wreck her own chances to star.

  “I’m here to fight.”

  “Your whole life is a fight, Haley. You need to learn how to ask for help.”

  “You want me to quit?”

  “That would be your problem. Everything through the frame of right and wrong, winners and losers. You’re all black or all white and you don’t see the gray.”

  “I see it. I don’t like it.” The cruelty, treachery and falsehood that hid in th
e gray zone could be more deadly than the evil you could see clearly. He’d spent his career going after the shadows and hitting them with a spotlight.

  “It’s in the gray, that’s where you find real love. In the spaces between whatever shit storm passes for life. It’s easy to be in love when it’s sunny. It’s easy to abandon it when it’s thundering. What’s not easy is holding on to it through the ordinary times in between. You had that with your girl. She had that with you. You’re dumb as a sack of dicks you don’t know it, and I don’t know if I’m going to give you a fight.”

  What the old priest knew about love was warped by religion and distorted again by how his church betrayed him. “I’m on the schedule.”

  “My schedule, my rules. Your stubborn heart gets to fight when I say so.”

  “You know I can go stand on Michigan Avenue and get hit without trying.” Pick a more dangerous suburb like Chatham or Gage Park and that was more certain.

  “I know it.”

  “So put me in the pit where it’s safer.”

  “What’s the fucking lesson?”

  “Resilience.” He’d need it to get to the other side of this mess.

  Barney gave him a once-over and walked away without a comment.

  Jack didn’t get a fight that night or the next, and all that served to do was make him lose hold of his temper. He’d have taken on a brick wall bare knuckled and not cared about the damage to his hands. He thought about Ryan and Alvarez and all the men he’d been in the pit with, all the lessons he’d learned: kindness, patience, humility, generosity. They meant nothing.

  On the third night, he confronted Barney. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

  Barney left off tying another fighter’s laces and motioned to an assistant to take over. “Not about what I want.”

  “Christ, then put me in the pit.”

  “No one gets to hit anyone without knowing why they want to do it.”

  “You won’t like anything I have to say.” He hadn’t so far, and Jack had tried a variety of lessons out on the ex-priest.

  “Stalemate then.” Barney turned away.

  “I am full of rage I can’t put anywhere.” That made the other man stop, but not turn to face Jack. “I want to hurt someone. I want them to hurt me. I’m already hurt. I gave everything I had to give and it wasn’t enough. I don’t have a place in the world anymore. I’m numb, paralyzed. I want to be fury, let it burn through me so I can feel something again.”

  Barney didn’t walk away. Derelie only walked away because he gave her no choice. She’d stood by him till he failed her by insulting her generosity, cutting her out, rejecting a chance with her to be a bystander in his own crumbling life. He couldn’t be at the church without thinking about her, look into the pit without remembering what they’d done together there—laughed, learned each other, loved.

  “I should never have told her to go. I should’ve been more careful with her. I love her. I can barely function without thinking of her. She taught me to want a life outside of the one I’ve been living, but I know I’ve done the best thing for her. I want her back and I can’t have her, I miss her when I breathe and I’m dead inside.”

  “You keep talking, Haley.” Barney turned, yanked on the towel around his neck. “Because finally you’re making sense.”

  “She is not in the gray. She is the light and she’s bright enough for both of us, but I didn’t understand that. I thought it was a trick with mirrors, a party favor, bad freaking science, not something that was real enough to last. I didn’t believe enough in her, in us, so I quit on her. I quit. The only mystery I’ve ever quit on was the one person who saw through me.”

  “What’s your lesson, Jack?”

  It was a confession and a prayer. “Accepting love.”

  He got his fight, with an opponent bigger, meaner, and owning his anger, when it was too late to have discovered it wasn’t what he wanted. And he got hurt—a cut cheek, a smashed nose that was close enough to broken to call it that, both his eyes would be black. He hurt back, wildly, brutally, and the fight didn’t end till he was on his knees unable to stand without help. He wouldn’t make this mistake again. He’d fight for what was most important.

  Barney came to him as he was cleaning up. “I want to talk to you about work.”

  He popped a couple of ibuprofen and washed them down with water. “Go ahead.”

  “Freelance. How does that go?”

  “I come up with a story—” dear God, his face hurt “—and try to sell it into a newsroom.”

  “They buy it, so that’s how you get paid.”

  “That’s right. The issue is writing something they want to buy.”

  “What if someone else was willing to pay you for writing stories the papers didn’t want to publish? What if you were the publisher?”

  “You’re talking about a sponsor.”

  “More like a benefactor.”

  Privately funded journalism. He’d heard of it. There weren’t a lot of writers doing it. “What are you thinking?”

  “That there’s a way to keep you in Chicago and pay you to do what you do.”

  Jack worked his jaw. “The work I do is risky, complex, and not even the big media companies have an appetite for the trouble it can cause, legal trouble.”

  “Yeah, but I got that covered too.”

  “You’ve got it covered? A broke-down old priest who runs a shady fight club?”

  Barney laughed. “A broke-down old priest who’s fucking well enough connected in this city to front a high-profile group of concerned citizens, men and women in business and the law, in government and industry, who know the value of the truth, believe in social justice and are prepared to pay for it. We never forgot what you did for the church, shined a light on the foulness and forced things to change. This city needs what you do, Jack, and there are enough of us who think so to put you back to work and keep you there.”

  Jack manipulated his jaw again and one ear cleared. “You tell me this now.”

  “Been waiting for you to ask for help, Jack. You’re a stubborn bastard. Figured you’d walk through my door weeks ago. Figured when you didn’t, maybe you’d decided to give up the fight.”

  “You can find a way to fund me to keep reporting?” He was having trouble piecing this together. Private funding would allow him to chase story leads. He could freelance and publish on his own website, use his other media contacts to drive readers to his stories, build a list of subscribers. It could work. It could fail miserably, but it was worth a shot.

  “I’m only a broke-down old priest who runs a shady fight club, but you had to wonder how I keep managing to do that. First thing we do is get you clear of any legal trouble.”

  They talked the details out. Barney’s lawyer—another man Jack had met in the ring, Abdullah Khan—would remind the Courier about their obligations. It felt remarkable to know he had people in his corner.

  “And Derelie?”

  He should’ve guessed Barney would remember her name. She’d been in Jack’s corner too. He just had to come up with a way to ask her to come back and be there again.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Would you rather be a romance meme or break your hand hitting a punching bag? As far as Derelie was concerned, yoga was dead to her, dog and cat people had no common ground, and bring on the bandages.

  Bring on the love for Artie Chan too. He was easy to fall for. He was intelligent and humble and quick-witted. He had a sense of humor that made you instantly warm to him. He wasn’t reticent or difficult or moody disguised as complex like a certain other person Derelie had tried the love experiment with.

  Like that other person, Artie’s family had been upset when he dumped medicine for journalism, but they’d adapted, got with the program, loved and respected his choices.


  “It was the fluids thing,” Artie had said. “I couldn’t handle the blood and pus and poop, you don’t want to know what else. I feel a little sick if I have to say the word—” he’d shuddered “—viscera.”

  They’d laughed, trading answers, sharing information joyfully. Around the time Artie said he sang opera badly in the shower but K-pop in his car, Derelie thought it was a tragedy he was single. When he said the greatest achievement of his life was not murdering his annoying baby sister, and blushed when admitting his relationship with his mother was very close, she wanted to hug him. Artie hadn’t met the right girl yet because once he did he’d have to pry her off with his cold, dead hands. Artie liked a good cliché and he knew a lot of ten dollar words and he knew Derelie was pissed off.

  It wasn’t so easy to learn how to deal with a punching bag, but it made her feel better. Despite the aching arms, abs and a stiff neck, it felt fantastic to whack something, to go full-on Wonder Woman does Supergirl on a leather wiener. Violence was an antidote to being humiliated and having your heart broken, who knew?

  Well, the whole newsroom, that’s who.

  And that was her own fault. If she’d said no to that newsroom kiss, if she hadn’t practically fallen into Jack’s arms in front of everyone, she wouldn’t have had to explain that they were no longer together. Not that she’d explained in words so much as action. She showed up to work tired and worn, took her first sick day when a stress headache got the better of her and generally acted like she had a thorn in her paw.

  When Phil asked how Jack was getting on, she might as well have stabbed a sharpened pencil in his throat by telling him exactly what he could do with that question. She told him if he was so concerned he could call Jack himself and that she had no idea since her skillset had not been aligned with his strategy going forward and he’d dumped her a month ago.

  Way to take your private life to work. You go, girl.

  And that was humiliating too.

  But it would pass. She knew it. Mom kept reminding her of it. Phil brushed her apology away as if he’d expected to get grief from her, Eunice brought her good coffee, Spin insisted on patting her on the back in a “we’re on the same team” manner every time they crossed paths, and Annie Berkelow invited her to lunch and neither of them mentioned Jack. And the only thing she could do to feel better was take it out on a punching bag, enjoy her new friendships and write up her story with Artie.