The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

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.”