The True Love Experiment

I smile at the disdain in her voice. “Not a fan, I presume?”

“Oh, I get it, it’s beautiful.” She sits on the sand. “But it’s a little like sex on your period. It sounds like a lot of work, and you definitely don’t want to do it every day, but once you get going, you’re like, ‘Hey, this isn’t too bad.’?”

“Oh my God, Fizzy,” I say with a small laugh.

She looks up at me. “What?”

I sit down next to her, swallowing down the way infatuation rises like a sleeper wave in my chest. “I’m not even going to touch that one, I think.”

She laughs, slipping off her shoes and wiggling her toes into the cool, damp sand. “Now that we know how I feel about the beach, tell me what we’re doing here.”

“Well, I grew up on the water, so I brought you here because I feel very peaceful at the shore, but tonight’s not about the beach specifically. It’s a moment.”

She tucks her knees to her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs as she listens. Around us the sun has dipped below the horizon, the sky darkening like a bruise.

“My weekends with Stevie can be pretty routine,” I explain. “We go for a bike ride, take Baxter to the park or somewhere he can run and play, we watch movies and do homework and cook together. Basic stuff. When she was about six, Baxter had surgery on his paw and couldn’t come with her for the weekend. We decided to try something different. We packed a picnic and came to watch surfers and ended up staying most of the day. We should have gone home once the sun set—it was getting cold, and I knew she’d be a bear the next day—but she was having so much fun just running around and doing cartwheels in the surf that I decided to stay a bit. It got dark and we were just getting ready to leave when I saw this blue spark in the water, and then another. When the waves crashed it was like there were hundreds of fireflies in the surf.”

“Oh, I know this one.” She snaps her fingers, trying to recall the word. “Bioluminescence. It’s algae, right?”

“Right. Some types of algae use bioluminescence to avoid predators, so when it’s disturbed by something moving through the water, or even something getting too close, it produces this burst of blue light to scare them off.” I point. “Look over there.”

She leans in and follows my gaze to where a surfer is leisurely cutting across the surface on their way to the shore, leaving a swirl of blue light in their wake. “It doesn’t look real,” she says.

“I remember the amazement on Stevie’s face and how I wanted to bottle that moment and experience it over and over again.”

Fizzy looks up at me. “That’s the answer you should have given me in your office.”

“Answer to what?”

“When I asked you about what gave you joy.”

My eyes move like magnets to her mouth. “But then how would I have monopolized all your time these past several weeks?”

She laughs.

“Besides,” I say, “I never asked you what brings you joy.”

Fizzy leans into me, bumping my shoulder. “This. Hanging out with you.”

“But before I became the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“Jess and Juno. My family. Travel.” She inhales deeply. “Sex. Writing.”

“Still feeling stuck?”

She nods. “I can’t remember the last time I opened a Word doc.”

“To be fair, you’ve been busy. There’s this whole reality show we’re planning.”

“But maybe that’s a convenient excuse.” She picks up a small piece of seaweed and drags it across the sand. “Every idea I come up with fizzles before I can even get started.”

“I don’t pretend I understand what this is like, but is it something you’ve been able to talk about in therapy?”

“Oh, for sure,” she says. “But I got so tired of going over the same thing and not getting anywhere. I would do little writing exercises, but they felt pointless.” She stares out at the water for a long moment. “I know I’ll be okay if I don’t write again. I know that the death of my writing wouldn’t be the death of me. But I miss that me. I liked that me, and I’m not sure how to find her. Focusing on it in therapy started to make it worse, if that makes sense.”

“It does.”

“I’m normally pretty self-aware and can work through most things, but this—” She shakes her head. “It’s got me beat. I’d all but lost interest in any man until yo—” She pauses, and then squints out at the ocean. “Until, you know, the show.”

Until you, she was going to say. My heart twists uncomfortably.

She clears her throat. “But yeah, love stories. My current brain block.”

“Maybe your brain needs to live one for a change.”

“Look at you, producer.” She smiles over at me. “Bringing us full circle.”

I watch her tilt her face to the sky, eyes closed as she takes a deep breath. Finally, tonight, our last night before I endeavor to help her fall in love with someone else, I can admit it.

I am falling in love with her.

“What can I say,” I murmur. “I try.”





twenty-one FIZZY




I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a talker, but I’m good with silence, too. Jess and I have spent many a workday sitting across from each other in productive quiet. I love the gentle moments with Juno on my couch, her little head in my lap while she reads. I love the big-sky serenity of a hike with my brother, Peter, or the leisurely peace of mah-jongg with my mother. Truth is, you’ll never meet a book lover who hates the quiet.

But after the easy, overlapping flow of our conversation tonight, this silence with Connor is heavy. Side by side we sit in the sand, our legs stretched out before us, toes wiggling up at the sky. He’s rolled his pants up, exposing feet, ankles, the lower half of his calves. His legs are tanned and lightly dusted with hair, muscled. The way he leans back on his hands, face tilted to the night breeze… it’s like he’s offering his body up for worship. That geometric, superhero chest. The long, corded neck, the bunching density of his shoulders. I feel my brain shrieking all the breathless, desperate thoughts, like Your body is unreal

and I want your hands on me

and Fuck me into the sand.

But what surprises me is that the silence has quieter thoughts, too. Things like I really like you

and You’re sort of my favorite person lately

and I want to be excited for tomorrow but all I can think is how I don’t want tonight to end.

Of course, this final thought lands just as Connor coughs into his fist, breaking the stillness. “So,” he says, and smiles shyly over at me in a way that acknowledges how heavy things just got, how there is something hot and tangible in the air between us but maybe if we talk over it, it will dissipate. “You ready for tomorrow?”

Inhaling sharply, I sit up straighter. Right. Get yourself together, Fizzy. “I am. I hope I can sleep tonight. I really don’t want to show up all puffy and shadowed tomorrow.”

“I was going to say,” he says, smiling, “you’ve appeared very calm for someone who’s about to be on television.”

“I won’t deny that I’ve had regular facials since I agreed to do this and invested in some new gravity-defying bras.” He laughs. “But I’ve also done so many signings where people have taken and posted photos of me from awful angles, there’s really no point pretending to be a supermodel now.”

“You don’t have to pretend,” he says. “You always take my breath away.”

We both go still, staring straight out at the surf while the echo of his words spirals around us. My pulse goes quiet for a moment and then it roars to life, a walloping throb in my neck. And I can almost feel it in him, the way he wishes the waves would stretch up here and wash that moment away.