The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

“Put her down and don’t know where? Not likely. She left you? No.” Barney laughed. “You pushed her out.”

Jack looked around the old garage. It was buzzing with men juiced up on adrenaline, looking for action, resolution, momentary oblivion. “I just want a fight.” To be in a place he could use his anger and not have to be careful about it. “I did it for her.”

“In my admittedly limited experience, women do not like it when men make decisions for them.”

“My life is unraveling, Barney. I’m being sued. The Courier is dodging responsibility; no other media company is going to employ me while that’s a factor. I can freelance, but it’s not going to keep me afloat. I’m the wrong fit for a corporate job, don’t have the right attitude, and in another month, I’ll need to get out of the city. Her career is just starting to take off. Why would I want to drag her though all of my muck?”

“Maybe because she loved you.”

He shook his head. “No.” Love needed sunlight, fresh air and birdsong. The part of him that wasn’t built from congealed anger and frustration was constructed of regret over Derelie, but not because he’d made her leave, because making her leave had been essential. “This shit storm would kill anyone’s love.”

“Never took you for a coward.”

Barney could call it whatever he wanted. Derelie had tried to goad him with the same insult. He’d have been a coward to hold on to her and drag her down, wreck her own chances to star.

“I’m here to fight.”

“Your whole life is a fight, Haley. You need to learn how to ask for help.”

“You want me to quit?”

“That would be your problem. Everything through the frame of right and wrong, winners and losers. You’re all black or all white and you don’t see the gray.”

“I see it. I don’t like it.” The cruelty, treachery and falsehood that hid in th

e gray zone could be more deadly than the evil you could see clearly. He’d spent his career going after the shadows and hitting them with a spotlight.

“It’s in the gray, that’s where you find real love. In the spaces between whatever shit storm passes for life. It’s easy to be in love when it’s sunny. It’s easy to abandon it when it’s thundering. What’s not easy is holding on to it through the ordinary times in between. You had that with your girl. She had that with you. You’re dumb as a sack of dicks you don’t know it, and I don’t know if I’m going to give you a fight.”

What the old priest knew about love was warped by religion and distorted again by how his church betrayed him. “I’m on the schedule.”

“My schedule, my rules. Your stubborn heart gets to fight when I say so.”

“You know I can go stand on Michigan Avenue and get hit without trying.” Pick a more dangerous suburb like Chatham or Gage Park and that was more certain.

“I know it.”

“So put me in the pit where it’s safer.”

“What’s the fucking lesson?”

“Resilience.” He’d need it to get to the other side of this mess.

Barney gave him a once-over and walked away without a comment.

Jack didn’t get a fight that night or the next, and all that served to do was make him lose hold of his temper. He’d have taken on a brick wall bare knuckled and not cared about the damage to his hands. He thought about Ryan and Alvarez and all the men he’d been in the pit with, all the lessons he’d learned: kindness, patience, humility, generosity. They meant nothing.

On the third night, he confronted Barney. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

Barney left off tying another fighter’s laces and motioned to an assistant to take over. “Not about what I want.”

“Christ, then put me in the pit.”

“No one gets to hit anyone without knowing why they want to do it.”

“You won’t like anything I have to say.” He hadn’t so far, and Jack had tried a variety of lessons out on the ex-priest.

“Stalemate then.” Barney turned away.