The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

It started:

Recently I had an epiphany. It happened fittingly at church and it hit me like a power-packed right cross.

She knew what that meant. Jack had been putting his fists to use.

It will seem like a small thing when I tell you about it. It seems ridiculous when you know my life’s work has been about helping others who had no voice to help themselves.

The bastard had written this ready to drop into a feature again. The last time he’d done that, she’d met his Jesus jeans and Martha. She’d surprised him into answering questions and they’d kissed without pretending it wasn’t for the sheer pleasure of it. But she’d asked him a final question and he’d answered it. He didn’t love her, and what she’d thought was real was a lie and there was nothing more to say.

My name is Jackson Haley. I’m an investigative reporter. I like to ask questions and hunt for the answers. I’m owned by a large, rambunctious, freedom-seeking cat. I’m addicted to clove cigarettes. They’re going to kill me and I’m trying to give them up. I’m currently unemployed and as a consequence of not knowing how to be loved, I lost the love of my life.

Except maybe that. She was helpless not to read on.

It started with an experiment and considerable masculine posturing. The idea was to test out a questionnaire designed to develop intimacy. The theory being that thirty-six questions could kickstart a relationship and lead to love. I wasn’t a willing participant.

Since I spend my time writing about crime, nefarious practices and wrongdoing, call me a cynic about love. My partner in this exercise called me other names, some not suitable to print, and she was right. She was also generous and clever and wise and heroic and, Jesus toast, I was attracted to her from the moment we met, falling for her by question two (Would you like to be famous?) and in love with her by question five (When did you last sing to yourself?).

And by the time we talked about our greatest hopes and fears, she was in love with me.

We answered thirty-six questions, looked deeply into each other’s eyes and had an emotional reaction, and then we strayed outside the boundaries of the lab to kiss, and it was chemical, and the rest as they say is swoon.

[Insert swoon meme visual, gif or video link here]

Apart from that editorial instruction, which was presumptuous and so very Jack, Derelie was unshakably engaged in the story, eyeballs locked, attention loaded.

But then I messed it up. I ran into some career challenges, in that my career fell off a cliff and I was too much of a man, which is to say, stupid, to ask for help. I became the guy who makes decisions for other people on the basis of what works best for himself. I told the love of my life she was better off without me and I put conditions on how I loved her in return.

As you might imagine, she had little incentive not to agree with my ugly stubborn heart and moved out of my life without a backward glance. Told you she was smart.

I didn’t know a home until she was in my life, and no one told me the immensity of that would rock my world. I cratered it by asking her to leave.

It took thirty-six questions to find her and only one to let her go.

Oh, Jack.

Maybe we weren’t meant to be. She is a dog person, after all. She has no reason to give me a second chance.

I’ll admit I’m rattled. That’s how I felt when faced with the experiment. I didn’t think I had much other than my work that would interest anyone else. I didn’t want to share the details of my life in case they proved a disappointment. I didn’t have anything to lose then, and still reluctance was the foot I led with. I have a whole new vision of what my life could be now, and rattled is too simple a word to express how that makes me feel. My crisis of the heart is more terrifying than my career crisis ever could be.

I’m not usually a quitter. In fact, I’ve had more than five minutes of fame based on fighting for people who’ve been disadvantaged. This time I’m fighting for me. I’ve got a question to ask this wonderful woman, and depending on what she says I might get a second chance at love.

What? It ended there. A cliffhanger. There had to be more. She scrolled and there was nothing until his email signature, above which was the line:

You Won’t Believe What Happens When She Meets Him at Their Picnic Spot in the Park Today at Five. (Text Y/N to confirm.)

She stared at the screen. She wasn’t meeting him in the park today. She wasn’t cutting out early so he could pull this elaborate stunt. She didn’t fight for Jack because it wasn’t her job to teach him how to be loved. He had to want what she could give or she would burn herself out on him.

He was a cat person. He’d dumped her, insulted her, made a fool of her. It’d been fun while it lasted, but all good things come to a clichéd end and no

amount of being clever and cute could make her forget that. Besides, she was busy. She wasn’t open to being manipulated like this. Clickbait while you were at your desk looking at a screen was one thing, exploring it in real life made no sense.

It was safer, more considered to stay right where she was.

And if she’d followed that advice she’d still be in Orderly, home of the white squirrel, and the Orderly Daily Mail, where the most exciting thing that’d happened to her was a drunken entanglement with a barbwire fence and a sordid affair with a probably married salesman.

She picked up her phone, opened Jack’s number, typed in one letter and pressed send.

An hour later she walked into the park with no idea what to say if Jack asked her to come back to him, because not only had he been quick and brutal in ending their relationship, if he was going to move to New York or Washington or the moon, it made no sense to follow him when she was doing well in Chicago. She couldn’t trust him enough for that.