The Love Experiment Read online

  When they connected, Jack aimed high, showing Ryan how patient he could be by laying a set of uppercuts to Ryan’s jaw and forehead. Ryan responded by pounding the need for tolerance into Jack’s ribs until he was breathless from it and disengaged to come at the other fighter with a new approach.

  Time shifted, collapsed into sweat and muscle strain, into reflex, skill, judgment and luck. The first three rounds were exploratory, a test of each other’s intentions. Ryan’s punches stung like guilt and Jack was distracted trying to anticipate the moment the man forgot he was boxing and kicked out like Ultimate Fighting’s Nate Diaz. It unbalanced him, made him hyper alert, and he loved it. No time for anything but adrenaline, anticipation, attack and response. It was the one thing that cleared his head, reset his expectations, let him focus. In this, unlike in the rest of his life, it didn’t matter whether he was matched fairly, if he won or lost—it only mattered that he survived.

  The next three rounds were brutal. A fist to the temple made Jack see Tweety Birds. He still recognized the moment Ryan understood his disorientation, but no amount of shaking his head prepared him for the onslaught. All he could do was curl forward and protect his gut until the ref pulled them apart, but somehow it was Ryan spitting in the blood bucket.

  They went on, attack, retreat, Ryan occasionally rocking back on a foot as if to ready for a kick, Jack pummeling him while he was mid-motion. After a while they both dragged their feet but were evenly matched—this could go on all night unless one of them went down, Ryan broke the rules or someone called it.

  Forty minutes after they’d descended into the pit, Jack spent a few seconds on one knee on the mat letting the ref get almost through the count before he stood. Ryan had more stamina—he’d learned his lesson and Jack was done, reduced to an autopilot haze of defend and withdraw as Ryan came at him, until a wild punch split his brow and needed styptic to stop the bleeding.

  They went one more round after that, getting mouthy, taunting each other to take a dive. Ryan sprayed bloody spittle at him. “Do yourself a kindness, Jack—take a fall.”

  “Fuck off.” He got a solitary hit to Ryan’s shoulder, could feel it slide off before it did much damage. His own body had taken all he could tolerate. When Ryan opened the cut on his brow again, the ref called it.

  They held each other up on the way to the showers. McGill put a stitch in Jack’s brow. Ryan’s jaw turned a sick shade of purple. “Feel better?” he asked from the adjacent rubdown table.

  Jack felt smoothed out, felt ready. “Feeling groovy.”

  “Who won?”

  They both laughed. St. Longinus was the near-blind Roman soldier who’d stabbed Jesus in his side while he was on the cross. Longinus recovered his sight before converting, was arrested for his faith and tortured, losing his teeth and tongue but still miraculously continuing to preach. In the Church of St. Longinus of the Cocked Fist, everyone who entered the pit and came out laughing was a winner.

  All Jack needed now was sleep and the contents of Costa’s envelope. But later, at home in bed, with an icepack on his shoulder, feeling bruised and stiff, the touch he remembered most was the brush of Honeywell’s knees on his thighs. Seeing her put her finger in her mouth to touch her aligner had made him imagine her doing that under different circumstances, not the one that had him scowling at her inside Donovan’s, practically blowing smoke in her face on the street, and shoving her into a cab he had no business expensing.

  He’d like to feel Honeywell’s knees across his thighs, her ass in his hands, her breath on his face. He’d like to feel her laugh ripple through her when their bodies were pressed together hip to lip, and look into those eerie eyes while he thrust inside her.

  He must have a touch of concussion. He didn’t even know how to talk to her with the aid of a questionnaire expressly designed for the purpose of creating intimacy, and here he was sore and cut and still capable of getting hard and annoyed about his self-imposed social impotence.

  He should’ve let Ryan knock him out, because he was clearly delirious and needed his brain reset.

  Next morning the pain in his body was a leveler. He chugged water and chewed ibuprofen, working at home for a few hours on the contents of the Costa envelope and got into the office early afternoon. He’d barely made it to his desk when Potter appeared.

  “Did you win?”

  “The other guy did.” He’d had a text from Ryan, checking up on him. Nice gesture. The guy had Jack on points in the fight as well as in basic decency.

  Potter leaned on the top of his cubicle wall. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Can hardly contain my excitement.”

  “I’ll do the love experiment story with you instead of Derelie.”

  “No.” He turned his back on her to face his screen. Potter was a solid reporter and a good operator. They’d been colleagues for years. Didn’t mean he was going to play nice.

  “You know Phil wants it to happen.”

  “I know Phil has an agenda, and since you sold the story to him you can unsell it just as easily.”

  “It’s a good story. Marketing likes it a lot. A couple of big advertisers jumped on board.”

  “Awesome.”

  “When do you want to meet?”

  “When I said awesome, I meant fuck off, Potter. Honeywell would’ve told you I’m out. I thought about giving her nothing worth writing about, but she’s a nice person.” Better that he thought of her that way, farm-fresh, wholesome, apple pie and cream. “She showed me the error of my ways, so I’m out.”

  “Phil wants you in.”

  He spun his chair to face Potter. “You want our esteemed editor-in-chief to want me in, and you want to do this instead of Honeywell because she told you lover-boy was with some other woman last night. This is another get back strategy.”

  Potter folded her arms across her chest. “Phil and me, we’re not... That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Yeah, guessed that in one. Honeywell didn’t have subterfuge in her repertoire and Potter wasn’t above playing politics. “Don’t care.”

  “Haley.”

  “On a deadline, Potter.” He spun back to his screen.

  “Got a responsibility to the paper, Haley.”

  “To my part of the paper, the part that...” He faltered. Once upon a time he could’ve said the part that sells papers; now that wasn’t so clear. Readers seemed to want Jesus toast and goat-eating pythons and fifteen sexy wash-and-go hairstyles for summer more than ever before.

  “You were saying?”

  “It’s not Honeywell’s fault.” He didn’t want his resistance to be construed as her failure. He turned his chair to face Potter again.

  “I should’ve realized you two wouldn’t click. She’s not your type. She’s too, I don’t know, guileless. Great girl, solid writer, enthusiastic, does excellent work, but you know, not from here.”

  He was being played. He could smell it over the liniment he was liberally coated with. “Go away, Potter.”

  “We need the first story by the end of next week.”

  He turned back to his keyboard.

  “What if you’d died last night? Huh, Haley, what would you most regret not having told someone?”

  That was one of those fucking questions from the study. “No regrets.” Only nervous intensity, buried in rampant workaholism and a deep-seated feeling of misplaced shame. The entire reason he went to the Church of the Cocked Fist.

  “Haley.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Well, maybe one regret, but not even with his tongue still in his head would he preach it.

  Chapter Seven

  Jackson Haley showed up for work with two strips of white tape over his brow. Did he walk into a door, or get into a fight on the way back to the office last night? Maybe it was an e
xtreme paper cut from his alien existence envelope. He had a bruise on his jaw and a scrape on his neck and a five o’clock shadow at one fifteen, and Derelie had no business noticing all these things as she watched him argue with Shona all the way across the room in the gap between cubicles.

  She had no business telling Shona about Phil either. It just slipped out between “Haley won’t do the love experiment” and “I’ve axed two paragraphs from the how not to play safe using emojis in the office” story.

  She badly needed to work on her honesty, rein that sucker back to a more acceptable three wise monkeys in the urban jungle level. That was the hardest part about the city, having to transform herself into someone new; someone slimmer, with straighter teeth, who had a good wardrobe full of nice corporate clothing and knew how to stand all day in heels, ate green things, drank without getting drunk, got enough sleep, and knew how to play office politics.

  There’d been no office politics at the Orderly Daily Mail. There’d barely been an office to speak of—it was more of an abandoned shop-front full of old desks. Nor were there many colleagues to have politics with. There was Dan, who wrote sports, and Albert, who wrote general news, and the lead reporter was Maisy Brownlow, who wrote “The Downlow with Brownlow” and had done so for thirty-five years. There was nothing hip about Maisy’s reports on what the mayor was up to.

  Derelie badly wanted to know what happened to Jack’s brow. Didn’t she have a responsibility to find out? What if he was jumped on the way back to the office and lay comatose on the street for hours while she was bubble bathing in an attempt to stop her brain from exploding?

  Getting jumped was the kind of thing that happened in the city. That’s what yoga, with its lift your heart’s energy, marry your pulse to the movement, open your armpit chest and find your Drishti focal point in ocean breathing, was supposed to help with; the sense that the city was a foreign place with different rules, that the world was moving too fast and she didn’t have a firm foothold on it.

  Breathe the negative forces of the day out through your pores, suck the energy of the cosmos in through the soles of your feet. Leave the earth and enter the limbic system. That’s what she was supposed to do. She wasn’t entirely sure if entering her limbic system was a good thing. It was the news desk for emotions like fear, pleasure, anger, as well as drives for hunger, sex, dominance, care of offspring, which might account for her obsession with Yogaboy and how the sight of him in child pose made her offspring-making bits squirmy.

  Mostly she staggered through the class, trying to find length, soften her knees, breathe through her armpit chest and not dump her weight on the earth until the part where you got to lie like a dead thing on the floor to feel as light as a filament of air. She always kept her face turned toward Yogaboy. He always closed his eyes. He was just like Chicago, mysterious, complex, and confident. She was sure he never worried about getting on the wrong train and ending up in the wrong neighborhood where unspeakably awful things might happen to you. There was no wrong neighborhood for him. He fit.

  She didn’t need to know what happened to Jackson Haley. Who cared what bounced off his thick head? He was a bastard despite the meal and the cab home, if only because he’d already written her off as out of her depth and not worthy of his notice. Screw him and the good neighborhood he no doubt lived in and the hackneyed expense account he rode in on.

  Shona came back to her cubicle with a scowl. Derelie made herself not ask, and got on with her current story headlined “Six Common Laundry Mistakes.” Jack’s story today was headlined “Secret Pact Explodes Cartel.” No wonder he thought she was a waste of his time—she was common as laundry detergent while he got to blow things up.

  An hour later, he almost exploded her 3:00 p.m. energy crash, only-two-calories soup packet pick-me-up. His email said, Thursday night, 7:00 p.m. Elaine’s. Meet you there.

  She googled Elaine’s. A swanky reservation-only restaurant. He must mean this for someone else. How to respond? She could stoop to his level and be just as clipped and weird or channel her inner harmony. She popped her aligner off and sipped the tomato soup, then typed, I think you meant this for someone else. Also, what happened to your head?

  It took a while, but then she got, Can you do it or not? No mention of his head injury. Was this his ungracious way of agreeing to the experiment after all? Shona had intended to force his hand and Elaine’s looked amazing—it would be a legitimate expense account meal. Crazy not to go, even if it meant missing yoga. May absence make Yogaboy’s heart reach to the sky, while his shoulders traveled to the earth points of his very squeezable ass.

  A city life adventure. I can do it. See you there.

  Her life had been more like a series of carefully thought through decisions that’d left her bored and frustrated, because she was born in a small town where nothing much happened except economic hardship, but those days were over. Now she was a reporter for the Courier and the editor-in-chief knew her name and the Heartbeat of the City, the Defender of the People Jack Haley was going to answer some questions.

  Shit, she had nothing to wear.

  Jack would wear a suit. Even her best outfit wasn’t Elaine’s-ready. Elaine’s had chandeliers. But her deadlines for the day were met, and though she should be researching for tomorrow, online shopping looked a lot like research and express delivery was even better for you than properly aligned chakras, besides everyone did it. The mailroom was constantly complaining about personal deliveries.

  A day later, she was sitting in a booth at Elaine’s in her new Cooper Street Can’t Get Enough wrap dress in Barely Plum, waiting for Jack to stand her up. The restaurant was impossibly classy, the dress was a keeper, but the colleague was a late-ass, rat-faced piece of work who’d probably dumped her again.

  She’d nervously chewed through two breadsticks and waited an agonizing thirty minutes before he swept in, the wind in his hair and the tape off his brow. He stood at the maître d’ station and took in the room, definitely looking for someone who wasn’t Derelie, because he answered her wave with a nod, but made no move to come to the booth. When he did come, pocketing his earpiece and doffing his suit coat, she could see he’d had that brow stitched.

  “What happened?” She pointed to her own brow.

  “I thought you knew I boxed.”

  He’d put her in a cab and instead of returning to the office, he’d gone out to get smacked in the face. Okay then. “How do you want to do this? We can go back and forth or do a complete set and then swap, whatever you prefer. Do you mind if I take notes?”

  He blinked twice, then closed his eyes on an outbreath that was all exasperation. “We’re not here for that.”

  “We’re not?”

  “I thought you... Hell. I’m on a stakeout and I—”

  “What, like a cop?”

  “Same idea without the weapons.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “You’re backup. I can’t sit in a restaurant like this for hours on my own without it looking suspicious.”

  “I’m, what, a fake date?” She’d bought the dress for herself, for Elaine’s, it wasn’t a date dress. If she’d thought this was a date, she’d have gotten the Betty Basic Black dress that showed she owned kneecaps. If she’d thought this was a date, she’d have swallowed her aligner instead of simply leaving it at home.

  “A decoy.”

  Ah, that made sense, and way to go, coming up in the world. A decoy was at least one step up from a punishment.

  “But I didn’t explain myself and so you thought—and you look—ah shit, Honeywell.”

  “What?” No blush. Not even the hint of one. Such a pro. She looked down at herself. “This old thing? Who are we staking out?” Oh god, she was in a new dress, at Elaine’s, on a freaking stakeout. Take that, career, breathe that in and let it blow sky high through your limbic system.

>   “Bob Bix. A man who won’t take my call, and hopefully a few of his buddies.”

  That’s who Jack had been looking for. “But he’s not here?”

  “Not yet. But I had a tip-off he’d be here tonight.”

  “What do we do if he comes?”

  “We eat. I watch. You go home. I go back to the office.”

  She laughed. “No, really, what do we do?”

  He pushed his hand through his hair. “The veal is good.”

  “You’re not joking.”

  “Nope.”

  This whole time she’d been leaning forward, her ribs pressed into the table in expectation of learning stakeout procedure. She dropped into the padded seat back. “What do we do if he doesn’t come?”

  “We skip dessert.”

  Stakeouts seemed way more exciting in the movies. Jack’s eyes were down on the menu. “Why me?”

  He put the embossed folder down. “You ask too many questions.”

  Now that was a joke. It scrunched at the corners of Jack’s eyes and tipped at the edges of his lips. A good reporter found a different way to ask the same question until it was answered. But this was Jackson Haley, and she’d exhausted her bravado passing off the new dress as old, feeling like she’d been stood up and chomping the breadsticks.

  With nothing else to do, they ordered and then Jack got engrossed by his cell under the table and Derelie thought about the questions. She had the first set memorized. They couldn’t very well sit here all night in silence.

  “Do you have a secret hunch about how you’ll die?”

  His chin shot up. “I box. I don’t have a death wish.”

  He looked down again. End of discussion. It wasn’t the best question to start with. Morbid much?

  “What would be your perfect day?”

  Up came his head again. “Oh, fuck no, Honeywell, we’re not doing this.”

  “We have to talk about something.”

  His expression said, do we? “I told Shona to take a hike with this.”