The True Love Experiment

I sit up, shoving the sheets away. My former therapist’s reminder floats up into my thoughts: You don’t have to deal with it right this second, but you do have to deal with it. I’ll give Felicity Chen the same courtesy. She doesn’t have to deal with me this instant, but eventually, she will have to face this.

With deliberate patience, I shower again and get dressed. As much as I can, I put the room back together, ignoring the way images flash into my head as I straighten the sheets—the long plane of her neck as she throws her head back and cries out—as I hang up our towels—water dripping from her lips as she stares between us and watches me fuck her—as I put the champagne bottle in the recycling bin—the view of her lips kissing down the length of me.

And then I sit in the chair by the window and slowly count to one hundred and then back down to one. The entire time, I think she must be on her way back.

She must be—just now.

Maybe now. She’ll walk in and I’ll put aside this anger and we’ll talk it out, one word at a time.

But when I leave just after four, the hallways are empty; the bar downstairs is predictably dark and silent. I have no idea where she went but am not going to chase her down with a text message or a call. Fuck this. The sleepy valet takes my ticket and pulls my car around. What a bloody mess.





thirty-eight FIZZY




I need you to say that again,” Jess says, cupping her warm mug of tea and tucking her feet under the blanket. “I want you to hear how insane it sounds.”

“I admit I have feelings for him,” I repeat robotically, pacing my living room floor. “We proceed to have the best sex of my entire lifetime. For hours. Twice. Then he tells me his marriage ended because he cheated. So I bolted.”

“Yes, but specifically the next part.”

“The part where I went and sat on the floor in an empty hotel ballroom for an hour?”

She nods, and then lifts her coffee to her lips to take a sip, letting my words ricochet off my silent living room walls. I did do this. I left Connor naked in my hotel bed while I bolted downstairs and hid in a dark ballroom for an hour, my mind spinning wildly out of control.

I sent up the bestie bat signal at five this morning and told Jess she had to come over as soon as she landed from Costa Rica and as soon as I got home from the Sunday post-wedding brunch. But given how much stuff there was to pack into cars, how many people there were to pay, and how many family members there were needing rides to the airport, it’s now nearly ten o’clock at night. I feel panicky and nauseated, but I’m not sure if it’s regret, resignation, or sheer exhaustion from a lack of sleep.

“He was trying to talk it out with you,” she says over the steaming top of her mug.

I don’t need reminding. Every regrettable, overreactive moment of my meltdown is imprinted in my brain like a bad, drunken tattoo.

I reach the end of my living room and turn to pace in the other direction, for the five hundredth time. “I know he was. And I know this all happened like eight years ago, and he was upset, and he’s older and wiser, but the fact that he decided to not just end his marriage but explode it…”

“Fizzy, we are all dumb when we’re young. I mean, you must see the parallels here: I got pregnant because Alec and I had unprotected sex in a bathroom at a party. Connor messed up, but then he stepped up. He went to therapy; he moved here to be present. Juno barely sees Alec once a year.”

An ache passes through me, and I stop my pacing to wince over at her. “Shit. I know. I’m a dick for venting about this to you.”

“No, come on, I’m the exact right person to vent to. Being hurt, being betrayed? It does weird things to us. I know this is your button and nobody would blame you for how you reacted.”

I resume my stride, turning to walk to the other end of the room, feeling her eyes on me.

“But we have to believe that the people we care about are conscious, accountable people,” she continues. “The fact that he told you, that he’s really done the work to grow… I mean, most men aren’t that evolved at thirty-three, let’s be honest.”

I groan, turning and heading the other direction again. “I know.”

“If you were the same person you were at twenty-four, you’d have a different guy every week and wouldn’t even be considering finding a soulmate, on a show or otherwise.”

“Not every week.”

“Stop pacing and tell me what happened next.”

I stop abruptly, collapsing onto the other end of the couch. “Once I got my shit together, I told myself that if he was still in the room when I got back upstairs, I would apologize and talk it out.”

She straightens. “And?”

“He wasn’t.” Jess deflates. “He’d left while I was gone. And maybe that’s a good thing,” I say, “because the other half of the deal I made with myself was that if he wasn’t there waiting for me, it was a sign that this Connor thing was doomed, and to move on.”

“You don’t believe in signs.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Remember the time that black cat was sitting on the hood of your car when you walked out of Twiggs and barely two seconds after you put it in your car, you got that horrible New York Times review?”

“I really don’t like this turn in the conversation.”

“You then took the doomsday cat home with you, and called me to complain, all shocked and outraged that this stray, feral harbinger of doom shredded your curtains within, what, thirty minutes?”

“I think,” I say, putting a single finger up as if to test the direction of the wind. “Yes, I think it’s time I find a new best friend.”

She laughs. “Should I even ask about Isaac? You said you saw a possible future there.”

“You know I don’t do love triangles!” I look up at the ceiling. “It’s like she doesn’t know me at all.”

She reaches across the expanse of couch, pulling me toward her and into her arms. “Connor did something dumb when he was in his twenties. Fizz, you of anyone should understand that.”

She doesn’t mean it as a dig. She’s paying homage to my battle scars, my medals of honor for adventure, my backlist of sexual exploration. And I went through this exact thought process, too, when I sat there on the floor in the dark. First, there was my indignation, my bright, hot panic that the person I had big heart and pants feelings for was a cheater. But then my blood cooled and the other things he said echoed a little louder: That it was the worst thing he’s ever done. That he’s done a lot of work on himself, gone to therapy. That Nat has forgiven him.

But even if I could view his past with some perspective, my fight-or-flight moment left me feeling unsteady, remorseful, and anxious. How are the heroines in my books so sure of themselves and the person they fall in love with? How does anyone really know what and who they want? It’s all such a risk. Who chooses to fling their heart out into the blackness of uncertainty, blindly hoping someone catches it?

“The thing is,” I say into her shoulder, “I signed a contract saying I wouldn’t date during this show. They’re paying me a lot of money to do this. And this isn’t just a little lie. I could be in breach of contract if I’m caught with him. Like, actual Big Legal Trouble. He could lose his job. I haven’t finished a book in more than a year, I’m avoiding my agent’s phone calls like I’m hiding from the mob, and I’m starting to feel like I can’t even do dating right. But last night in the hotel room, I didn’t care about any of that because I just wanted to be with him.”

She hums, listening.

“I’ve never felt that—that insatiable thing, you know? I want to be near him every second. If I eat something delicious, I want him there to take a bite. If I see something beautiful, I want to turn to him and point it out. If I hear something hilarious, I immediately want to call him and tell him everything.”

“Oh, honey.”

“But if it got out or I couldn’t fake it well enough, it would mess up his life, and mine.” I swallow as the hardest one bubbles to the surface. “I know that and still none of it mattered.”

“We do crazy things when we fall for someone, Fizz.”

“Yeah, but you know the only thing that scared me enough to get me to leave that room?”

“What?”

“That even if by some miracle everything goes right, I could still get hurt.”