The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

She looked away from her screen. Why would Jack write this? He hadn’t copied anyone else, unless blindly, so this was meant for her eyes only, or it was a trick, something new he was teaching her about office politics. She could close the email now, never finish reading it, delete it, and there’d be nothing he could say because she didn’t owe him anything—that he had right.

She closed the email. Her heart was beating too fast for a person doing nothing more physical than sitting. Jackson Haley confused her. She rearranged the items on her desk: paperclip, big foldback clip, little foldback clip, framed Ernest photo, yellow Post-it notepad, red pen, “Orderly, Home of the White Squirrel” coffee mug. He’d made her look like more of a fool yesterday. He did owe her honest answers.

She opened Jack’s email. She could forward it to every desktop at the Courier, he’d given her that power and it wasn’t like that was an accident. She picked up the big foldback clip and opened and shut its wings while she read on.

The last song I had stuck in my head was the Oscar Mayer wiener jingle. I can almost hear Derelie laugh.

She dropped the clip and grinned at her screen. That was a whole lot more embarrassing than the Taylor Swift song she’d had in hers.

My grandfather was born in Weiner, Arkansas. He used to sing that wiener jingle to annoy me. He’s been dead a long time and I still miss him trying to rile me up. I didn’t tell Derelie that, because I was mortified by the sorry state of my earworm, which haunts me every year around my grandfather’s birthday. I should’ve realized she’d laugh with me, not at me.

/> When we talked about fame, what I should have told Derelie is that the fame I do have sometimes scares me. I’d much rather go unnoticed, but you can’t do the work I do and not have something of a public presence. That public presence aids my work. That means I have to be tolerant of people expressing their opinions about what I write and talk about. It’s only fair; they have to listen to me. But if I had a choice, I’d be less of a public figure and still be able to do the work I love. I understand completely why Derelie said fame wasn’t something she valued.

I’m a little jealous that Derelie has a secret hunch about how she’s going to die and I don’t, although it’s clear now that my structural integrity can be dinged by a string of personal questions, so I’m not as hardy as I thought I was. I can only hope it’s as peaceful as her hunch she’ll die in her sleep. Given that I’m demanding on my bones, I think the question as to what I’d want to keep from my thirty-year-old body into my nineties had better be my brain, so far it’s in good condition if you discount how wrongheaded I was over a certain love experiment.

One of the more probing questions was about whether I’d want to change something about how I was raised. I dodged that one hard enough to pull a muscle. I’d want to hang on to my grandparents longer, particularly my jingle-singing granddad, who is my all-time favorite person. Of all the people in the world who I’d want to have over for dinner, it’s not someone I want to interview or get to know, it’s Pops.

There was another question about gratitude. Feeling grateful is one of those mindfulness activities that I’m hardwired to side-eye, but on reflection gratitude is like generosity, it’s a recognition that I have been luckier than most people in everything I have and do. I’m grateful for the circumstances in which I was born, to relative privilege and security that many people will never know.

Hmm, that was more like it. Now she was learning about who Jack was behind his dinkus.

The experiment has a question about what Derelie and I have in common. Because I was in deep jerk mode I picked the most obvious things, our profession and place of employment. I took the easy way out. The hard way out is to admit that I don’t know what we have in common other than our work in broad terms, but I have the sense that we both look for quiet spaces in our lives to help make sense of all the noise. It would be interesting to confirm that suspicion.

That leaves a few questions, but I’m going to answer them in a bundle.

My most perfect day would be the one where Derelie agrees to do the love experiment with me, knowing I’m on board, no side-eyeing, no being a superior twerp. I would treat the experiment respectfully. We’d escape the office and the incessant deadlines, ringing phones and pinging messages, and find a patch of sun. Maybe we could picnic somewhere there are birds chirping and a breeze in the trees, far from the sound of traffic and constant interruptions. I’ll tell her as much about me as she wants to know in four minutes or less. I’d want the same from her.

Our first twelve questions didn’t make friends of two strangers. They gave Derelie a headache, and me a huge serving of avoidance that says more about my insecurities than I ever imagined. I can’t help but wonder what answering twenty-four more questions might tell me about myself, but if Derelie is willing to try it, I’m all in.

She slumped back in her chair. Deny. Delete. Forward all. Reply.

Those were her options. Every one of them put power into her hands. Jack was taking a risk she didn’t use his wiener jingle earworm, his acknowledgment he’d carried on like a turd, to embarrass him. She read it again. It was publish-ready. Though the words sounded nothing like the Jackson Haley stories that appeared in the paper. He never injected himself into his news stories, never wrote I. He reported straight without the sense of being part of the story.

Jack might have been tired and regretting what had happened between them, but this wasn’t an emotional kneejerk, it was deliberately done. He admitted to sabotaging the experiment, he called out his own insecurities. He said wiener, and everyone knew that little jingle was about being loved, and she knew Jackson Haley was a kid who’d never had much love. He might scoff at lifestyle stories, but he knew how to write one.

She could add her own words and offer this to Shona as part one of their love experiment.

She stood. She had to talk to Jack, to make sure she was reading between the lines properly. Maybe there was some subtlety she simply didn’t understand. Maybe he was just showing off the versatility of his writing and this was another way to embarrass her despite the fact he’d called himself a superior twerp. For all she knew it was some sneaky kind of humblebrag trap she’d fallen prey to.

She pushed her chair back and stood, the feeling she was being set up in some way wrapping itself around her lungs.

“Hey, where’s the fire?”

She looked at her cubicle mate Eunice. Ugh. “Sorry?”

If Eunice, who wrote about arts and culture, and was the definition of focused, noticed anything Derelie did, it had to mean she’d done it violently.

“You stood up so quick you made me dizzy. Did you get laid off or something?”

Hell. “No.” They exchanged glances across the low cube wall. “Has it started?”

“Heard two people, Lopez in science and some nerd in tech,” Eunice said.

“That’s bad.”

“Lopez is ancient. Great editor. Once upon a time we had rows and rows of them. You’ll get used to it.”

Derelie would get used to it. It wasn’t like it was optional.