The Love Experiment Read online

  He shifted closer to Derelie, one hand to the wall behind her, the other to her cheek. He brought his forehead to hers so they were sheltered in each other. Her eyes went to his mouth and her chest rose with short, quick breaths, and all the blood in his brain took a fast train south. He was vaguely aware of a car pulling up, men’s voices, but the whoosh of his own heart was louder than the city.

  “Are you going to kiss me?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  He thought her earlier head shake might have meant he was going to need to explain how he’d ended up mauling her in the name of a story to Madden or some flunky in HR. Her “oh” left no room for misunderstanding, it simply dripped with disappointment and landed in his gut like a barrage of fists.

  He kissed Honeywell, being as gentle as he knew how, touching his lips to hers as softly as possible. He meant it to be brief, playacting, something she was prepared for because she’d sensed it, because of what happened earlier, but now he caught her flavor and one of her hands brushed over the nape of his neck and into his hair and that, that did things to his body, revved his engine in the same way as preparing to enter the pit did. But no, this was different, this was a liquid heat that spread right through him, loosening his muscles from his bones.

  Nothing hurt anymore, not the bruises on his ribs, not the strain in his shoulder and forearm. Jesus Christ, she was like sunshine. She was warm and pliant and molded to him as if she was cast for his weight and height, as if she was specially fitted to his physical form and the carnal desires he spent most of his time ignoring. He wasn’t capable of ignoring them now.

  He took that kiss and lit it on fire, angling his head to connect with her better, increasing the pressure and slapping the wall in triumph when she opened her mouth to his on a helpless groan. The first tentative touch of her tongue was a new shock, but he was nothing if not a guy who could roll with the punches. He dragged her hips a little closer and they both groaned. She’d feel how hard he was. She didn’t care, this was sudden and out of order, he felt fingernails in the side of his neck and the inside of her knee against his thigh. That dress had a split, he could get his hand under her thigh, and when he did, she clamped down on his bottom lip with a satisfied hiss.

  It was the blare of car horn close by that brought him back, the laughter of people spilling from Elaine’s that made him pull away from Derelie’s lips. She was lost to the moment still, body pressed to the glass, fingers pressed to the back of his neck, eyes closed, lips wet and parted, and he was in a world of hurt beyond anything Madden could stir for him.

  He broke contact altogether and stepped back. “I’ll get you a cab.”

  He dragged his eyes away from her blissed-out expression and made for the curb. She didn’t follow, which gave him a chance to settle his head. No way that should’ve happened. That was all kinds of workplace inappropriate and personally compromising.

  He flagged a cab, but let another couple take it. He had to talk to Derelie and it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in the office.

  When he turned to check on her, it was to see her straighten her dress, smooth her hands over her hair, nervous gestures and no attempt to meet his eyes. He went back to her side. “We got them. Thank you. Couldn’t have done it without you. I’ll make sure Potter knows what a help you were.”

  “Help.” She looked down at her shoes.

  “I wouldn’t have gotten what I needed without you, Honeywell. It worked out swell.”

  “Swell.” She put her fingers over her lips. She looked dazed. Maybe she’d banged her head.

  He leaned closer and ducked his chin to look more closely at her. “Are you all right?”

  Quick shake of her head. “No. No.” Then her eyes snapped up and she shoved him. “You kissed me.” She wasn’t dazed, she was pissed off.

  “You asked me to.”

  “You said no.”

  “I lied.”

  She flapped her arms. “Why would you do that?”

  He lied again. “I’m on a story. You do what you have to do.”

  “Kissing me like your blood was on fire was what you had to do?”

  “For the story.” For the story, because what else was there? She was farm-fresh and he was busy and bad news for her.

  “Well, now it’s my turn.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Goddamn, he needed a smoke. “There are no turns.”

  “Isn’t that the trick you just showed me? Do what you have to do for the story.”

  He turned to look at the flow of traffic for a cab, using his body to signal the argument was over as well as his words. “Honeywell, we’re done here. Time to go home.”

  She grabbed his arm. “We’re not done. It’s my turn. I’m doing what I have to do for the story.”

  “What story are you talking about?” And then it hit him. “Ah no, no chance.”

  “You took advantage of me. You have to do the love experiment now.”

  He pulled his arm free of her grip. “This is work. You knew I was using you, and you could have left the restaurant anytime if you didn’t like it, and anyway I don’t go around feeling up colleagues. You started it, with the whole girlfriend, birthday, cuddle up shtick.”

  “My family is famous for dying in their sleep.”

  “What?”

  “Two sets of grandparents went to sleep, never woke up. That’s how I think I’m going to die, question seven. You’re doing this with me so I make Shona happy, so she makes Phil happy, so I don’t get volunteered for a layoff.”

  She really thought that could happen. “I’m not. You won’t. I’ll square it with Madden.”

  “I thought this was a mistake, that you’d sent this invitation to the wrong person and then I bought this dress because—”

  “It wasn’t a date.” That’s what he needed her to get. This didn’t mean anything. It was all for his story because that was all it could be. “You said it was old.”

  “I lied.”

  He let the air filling his chest go. He could’ve brought Potter. Or Berkelow. Hell, he could’ve had dinner with Spinoza or Barney. “This was for my story.”

  “I know that now, but I didn’t have anything good enough to wear to a restaurant like this and how was I supposed to tell you that, you great heaving dinkus? I’ve never eaten in a restaurant so fancy and you could’ve brought anyone as your decoy, but you brought me. The only reason you have to talk to me is the love experiment, so I thought—”

  “Oh fuck.” He’d walked straight into this, because he’d felt guilty about treating her poorly.

  “So you’re doing it. Question seven. Do you have a secret hunch about how you’ll die?”

  He did now. It’d be from acute embarrassment the day the Courier ran this story.

  Chapter Nine

  Jack wasn’t happy. But he was sitting opposite Derelie in a café chair with a coffee and a scowl, and that was a victory she’d paid for in a loss of brain function from the oxygen he’d deprived her of while putting his tongue in her mouth last night.

  And making her like it.

  Dammit, she’d liked it. She’d liked how convinced she’d been he was going to kiss her, how insistent he’d been he wasn’t going to, and how it felt to be lied to when he took such exquisite care in betraying himself.

  She’d never been kissed like that before. Confident but gentle, twisting into a lustful claiming that had her glad she had a wall at her back because the world and its expectations got slippery. Masterful was the word for it. His kiss had driven every thought from her head and made the city fall quiet. She didn’t get that kind of easy peace from yoga and it made her sad attempts at meditation look like frantic multitasking.

  That wasn’t to say he used his lips to put her to sleep, oh good
golly no. He used them to convince her body it was beautiful, to convince her brain they’d kiss forever and never need any additional substance to live on but each other’s breath.

  He was a professional level liar, kiss-deep.

  And just as well she’d caught him out because there was no way he’d be sitting there, sipping coffee and reading his phone screen to avoid her if she hadn’t.

  “We should start from the beginning and I’ll take notes.” She had to get this done and not screw up and not let him think that last night had affected her. She could be a professional liar too, if that’s what it took to succeed.

  He didn’t look up from his phone. “In the beginning there was journalism and it functioned to keep people informed, and civilization was fairer, better, for being open to examination.”

  “Are you lecturing me?” He was most certainly pontificating over his coffee cup.

  He looked up. “Could I get away with that instead of this?”

  “No.” She flipped her steno pad open and looked at the printed list of questions.

  “Wait.”

  She’d never wished she wore glasses more, because the idea of looking over them at him in a kind of authoritarian way was exceptionally appealing. She felt left out of the serious gesture game.

  “You’re clear about last night?” There it was, grave eyes behind not-to-be-messed-with glasses.

  “By clear you mean I’m clear that you kissed me and you liked it, but it was all for the story and it meant nothing to you.”

  “Right. It was for the story.”

  “But you did like it?”

  He made an exasperated gesture with one hand. “It had to be authentic. Move on, Honeywell.”

  Authentic my boot. If he’d been acting she’d have to admit she knew nothing about men and their swelling body parts. “I’m checking because I wouldn’t want to get the facts screwed up. Facts are important in reporting. Facts get you to the truth.”

  He resettled in his chair, a movement that made her think he might leave. “Never let a fact get in the way of a good story. Quit pushing your luck.”

  She’d push it exactly enough to get through this Q&A. She cleared her throat and pretended she had glasses to raise her eyes over. “‘Question one. Given the choice of anyone living or dead, whom would you want as a dinner guest?’ I’m sticking with Jesus and the whole ‘is there really a heaven slash hell’ thing. Also, I want to get a take on the idea of miracles—do they exist, what are the ten best. There’s also sainthood. What’s the ideal way to become a saint?”

  “You know you made that sound like clickbait.”

  Oh, not good. It was one thing to write list-style stories, she’d had to adjust to that—listicles didn’t feature in the Orderly Daily Mail, unless they were a list of stock and grain prices—but it was another thing entirely to go around talking like them.

  “Answer the question, Haley.”

  “I don’t do dinner guests. I can’t think of anything worse than having to make conversation with a stranger.”

  “That can’t be your answer.” And it sure didn’t explain why he’d invited her to Elaine’s last night.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re Jackson Haley. You’d want the scoop, the downlow, the exposé. You’d want Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or that investment guy who plays the ukulele or the Tesla guy who wants to go to space. You can’t dodge the question.”

  “I didn’t dodge it. I’ve interviewed those people.” She grunted in annoyance. Of course he had. She should’ve picked dead people. “I didn’t converse with them. I asked questions. They gave answers. They talked. I listened. I gave you an answer. It’s not my fault you don’t like it.”

  He was playing with her, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. He’d played with her last night as well and she’d been happy to be his toy, but now she’d happily brain him with her empty cup. “‘Question two. Would you like to be famous? In what way?’”

  “What’s question three?”

  “What’s wrong with question two?” A bus belching smoke pulled up at the corner with Haley’s face, sans devil’s horns, on its side. No way.

  He pointed to the bus. “There you go?”

  She wouldn’t have put it past him to sneakily plan that. “But do you like it? I don’t want to be famous, it seems like a lot of trouble.”

  “There are worse things.”

  She wrote on her pad and recited, “‘Jackson Haley gets a hard-on from having his face plastered on the city’s buses and he likes it. He doesn’t do idle conversation.’” But since he did get scoops, he had to have a talent for asking the right question and hearing what got said between the lines.

  She didn’t get a ghost of a grin; she got, “Okay, Jesus Toast, get on with it. This can’t take all morning.”

  “Question three, I know this one. You don’t rehearse phone calls and I do. Do you rehearse for your radio and TV spots?”

  “I have an idea what I’m going to talk about. I know how I want the segment to go. I don’t practice my speech in front of a mirror, if that’s what this question is getting at.”

  The big dinkus didn’t have to rehearse because he was supremely confident and his head was big enough to put on the side of a bus. “‘Question four. What would constitute your perfect day?’”

  She gritted her teeth against him saying “not having to do a love experiment” and he said, “Not having to do a love experiment.”

  “Oh, puhleeze. I knew you were going to say that.”

  “We must be highly compatible then. Hurrah, the experiment works. Can we stop now?”

  “No. Because all I have down is that you’re a fame hog who doesn’t like people and is so sure of himself he doesn’t rehearse.”

  “And that’s a bad thing? What’s your perfect day?”

  She looked away from his infuriatingly superior expression. God help the businesspeople he interviewed, alive or dead, if he was this rigid and forbidding on the job. They’d surely tell him all their secrets and turn over all their cash if he looked at them so sternly and used that particular do as you’re told voice.

  It didn’t help that his face was still bruised, the cut above his eye red and irritated, and that she wanted the Jack of last night back, the one who looked disheveled and on edge after they’d kissed. The one who for about five minutes might have worshipped her, who caressed her face and held her body as if he knew she felt out of place, was starved for affection, and he was the only man capable of making her feel good.

  “It wouldn’t be in Chicago.” The city was seductive but it was also untrustworthy. It lulled you into believing you needed a nice dress for a good restaurant when you were simply set dressing for a play you didn’t understand. “It would be somewhere quiet. No, not quiet, just with less industrial noise. Not this clanging and whirring that never stops.”

  She looked up at a patch of blue sky between the buildings, and the long shadows of other buildings, the unforgiving harshness of so much concrete and glass. “I could take birdsong, the sound of the wind in the trees, and the smell of fresh air—it’s much sweeter than you think. It’s a rush.”

  She looked at Haley, wondering if someone born here could possibly understand how alien this built environment was to her. “The air here smells like diesel and grime, underarms and old shoes. I’d want sunshine that’s fierce and not filtered between buildings and hardly warms you. That would be a start. Then I’d want endless velvet skies at night and a million stars. And I’d want close friends around me.” She wanted Ernest and his mad enthusiasm and sloppy kisses. She missed him so terribly. “Laugher, good food, and I’d feel at ease, just happy to be. That’s a perfect day.”

  He probably thought her lacking in imagination, and now that she’d had that thought, she realized she was. She could
’ve wished for anything and she’d wished for nothing more than home. She should go for a do-over.

  “Which tells me you hate the city, you’re lonely as fuck and unhappy besides.”

  “That’s not true.” She didn’t hate it; it was her future. It was just taking a little bit of time to acclimatize. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You love the city, the sound and smell of industry, the clamor of millions of strangers who’ll never care about you sharing your space. You love the visual and physical pollution, the lack of sunlight and green things and stars, they’re your jam. I see.”

  Jackson Haley, covert grade listener.

  She waved a hand in the direction of Lake Michigan. “I like all the water. I do love the city.” Another gesture toward the river. “It’s exciting. It’s where I want to be.”

  “Aha. What’s question five?”

  He said “aha” like you’d humor a child. He didn’t think she was a child when he’d had his hand up her skirt. “You didn’t answer question three.”

  “My perfect day would be too unsuitable to print for readers.”

  She squeezed her pen and the top popped off the end. “I think I hate you.”

  “You think? Try harder. It’s a stupid question. A day you wake up breathing and it doesn’t hurt is a good day.”

  “Are you always this chipper or is this a perfect day?” She didn’t wait for a response. “‘Question five. When did you last sing for yourself or someone else and what was the song?’ I’ll start. I sang a Taylor Swift song this morning in the shower.”

  “Because you knew you’d be answering this question.”

  She couldn’t stop her mouth twisting. She was such a dimwit about not cheating the questionnaire when he had no intention of treating it with any respect. “You don’t sing. I remember.”

  “What Taylor Swift song?”

  “As if you care. Do you even know who she is?”

  “Now who’s being childish?”