The True Love Experiment

“Amaya thinks this is a good idea?” Jess asks, skeptical.

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but both she and my film agent think it could be great exposure. And since I have literally nothing else going on, I was ‘strongly encouraged to consider it.’ She also reminded me that the whole reason I did the DNADuo in the first place was for research and I should go into it with that mindset.”

She briefly looks up. “And, you know, the whole possible soulmate thing…”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I say, watching her absorb the list and work to keep her shit together. “So, what do you think? I put some real thought into it.”

“That much is clear.” Her gaze snags. “Vampire? You expect them to cast a vampire?”

“Hot Brit tripped on that one, too. How they do it isn’t my problem, is it?”

Her eyebrow points skyward and she looks over the top of my phone at me. “Dom?”

“Gotta respect the genre.”

She reads some more, smothering her smile with a hand. “Twenty percent or more need to have gone to therapy, thirty percent are required to have a female friend they have never had sex with? Fizzy, you’re such a troll.” She shrieks briefly: “No poets.”

“This might be the greatest idea I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, it’s never going to happen.”

She tilts her head side to side, a maybe, maybe not gesture. “What do you do if he agrees to your terms?”

I wave this off. “I won’t get my hopes up. And even if he did, I’d really have to wrangle my shit into order and bring my A game.” That truth sinks in. I hadn’t actually imagined a situation where Hot Brit would agree to these preposterous terms. There’s been safety in my outlandish demands; literally any other woman on planet Earth would make this show easier than what I’ve just requested. To think, even briefly, that I might end up doing this makes my stomach clench. I’d have to be funny, and engaging, and—shit—convincingly fake being open to love.

“There’s absolutely no way he wants me bad enough to say yes to all of this.”

“I’d tend to agree with you.” Jess hands me back my phone, nodding to the screen where a text has landed from my new contact labeled British McHotpants. “Except I think he just did.”





nine CONNOR




The next time Felicity Chen walks into my office, she shows up ready to play. Instead of ripped jeans and boots, she’s wearing a black tailored suit and an expression that leaves no doubt she’s planning to oversee everything from this point forward. She politely passes on Brenna’s offer of coffee and crosses the room to where I’m standing in front of my desk to greet her.

“Felicity, it’s good to see you.”

She gives me a handshake alongside her wide smile. Amazingly, she makes the ballbuster aesthetic look like a good time. “Call me Fizzy. No one calls me Felicity, except the guy at the DMV.”

I laugh. “Fizzy it is.”

Instead of sitting at a chair at my desk, she settles down onto one of the small leather sofas framing the coffee table. I remember reading once that confident people use furniture wrong. They sit sideways, they loop an arm over the back of an adjacent chair or sit on the edge of a desk. Fizzy isn’t doing any of those things, but she’s still a portrait of confidence. Her posture is relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, hands casually crossed at the wrist, one index finger and thumb tapping as if she’s counting down to something. Her shoes are bright blue suede with heels at least four inches tall. It takes more effort than I’m comfortable with not to let my eyes linger on the tiny glimpse of her exposed ankle.

“How are you?” I ask, dragging my eyes away.

“I’m great.”

I sit down across from her, working to look as casually confident as she is. Normally, I am. Normally, I’m hard to fluster. But the duality of the intensity of her demeanor and ease in her body is distracting.

“Thanks for taking my meeting,” she says. Her hair is up in a bun; a few tendrils have come loose, and they fall softly against her long, delicate neck. She wears minimal makeup, I guess, but her lips are this perfect, soft red. However much of a shit show this program will end up being, this woman is going to be beautiful on-screen.

“Absolutely.” I swallow, trying to get my voice to sound less strained. “We still have a lot to hammer out.” An understatement. The requests her agent sent over read like a foreign language, but Nat told me to trust her so here we are. I feel like I’m stepping into a dark, foggy alley with nothing but a rolled-up newspaper to defend me against surprise knife attacks. This will be either an inconvenient but brief project that gets me what I want from Blaine, or the worst mistake of my professional career. “But before we get too deep in the details,” I say, “I wanted to ask if you have any experience with the DNADuo. Past user profiles are obviously confidential, but our legal department needs to know if we have any previous Gold Matches we should filter or add to the list for The One That Got Away.”

“I’m familiar with the app,” she says, smoothing a hand down her thigh to straighten a soft wrinkle there. “And, uh, I stopped checking my matches before I ever saw any Gold ones.”

“Okay.” I jot down the note, sensing there’s more beneath the surface there, but she doesn’t elaborate. Closing my notebook, I meet her eyes across the table. “Well, if you think of anything that seems worth discussing, let me know. We don’t need to know your dating history, but also don’t want to put you in an awkward position with someone you’ve met and didn’t like.”

“Thank you.” She keeps nodding but doesn’t take her eyes off my face.

Needing something to do under her scrutiny, I sit forward in my seat, reaching to pour us each a glass of water from a pitcher on the coffee table. “Is there something you wanted to discuss?” I ask.

“I can’t quite figure you out.”

“What would you like to know?”

“What’s your background?” She runs a thoughtful finger beneath her full lip. “North Star’s website doesn’t go very deep. Google doesn’t tell me much about you. All I know is you usually make documentaries and grew up a young pirate in Northern England.”

I laugh at the callback to our first meeting. “Blackpool. That’s right. Had to quit the looting-and-pillaging industry at fifteen, when my American father brought me to the States.”

“Fifteen.” She winces. “That’s rough.”

It was, but no reason to linger. “I went to USC for film and ended up here. And yes, until recently I’ve worked on documentaries. Coastal climate change, marine animals, you know.”

“USC for film but ended up in San Diego at a small production company,” she says. “Either you aren’t very good at your job, or you have a personal reason for being here. It seems like an important distinction if I’m your newest collaborator.”

I smile, not rising to the bait. “I had a very good job at Sony, in LA. I moved here because my ex-wife got a job and I wanted to be close to our daughter.”

Her expression falters—softening—before she reaches for her water. “Why did you agree to take on this show? Coastal climate change to a reality dating show? Not really a natural transition.”

“It was assigned to me.”

“So, you’re being forced.”

I go for honesty. We barely know each other, but I can already sense I don’t want to be caught lying to this woman. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice, no.”

“Are you at all excited about it?”

I reach for my water, taking a sip as I formulate an answer that is both honest and encouraging. “I’ll say this much: I’m truly glad you came on board.”

This makes her grin widely, brightly. “I know you are. You said yes to all my ridiculous requests.”