The True Love Experiment

Because the universe is a bored cat, and I am but a powerless mouse, Connor is without his usual crisp suit and is in a tight black T-shirt and jeans today. Even though I put on all this armor to help prop up my tender insides, it’s all I can do to not cross the room and paw all over him. I barely saw him last week and missed him so much I spent the entire weekend in my pajamas watching the first three episodes of The True Love Experiment over and over just to see him in the confessionals. Now his floppy hair, biceps, and pectorals outlined by soft cotton jersey are right in front of me. He’s exuding that trademark calm patience as he discusses something with Rory and… God, look at him. I love him, and it really, really hurts.

Ergo, I have decided I hate love.

I outlined a new book last night. It’s basically about a woman who falls in love with a man but she’s a hot mess and he rejects her, so she walks off a cliff. Except at the bottom of the cliff is a big bed of pillows—because I’m not really into literary fiction or horror—and then she suffocates in the pillows. Except she doesn’t suffocate, she just rolls around and feels sorry for herself until Uber Eats gets there with her Krispy Kreme order.

I also threw this outline in the trash.

And then I tried to sleep, because this week is probably the most important week of filming, but “sleep” mostly looked like me lying facedown on my bed crying into my pillow.

I want to go over to him, pull him aside, and tell him that I won’t ever do that again, I won’t run off like that. Does he know how much I admire his cautious side? He is the stillness to my storm, the shadow to my bright sunlight, the Styles to my Harry.

The date with Isaac is awesome. I mean outwardly, of course. Inside, I am all marionette strings and positive self-talk. Dad cracks his dumb, awesome jokes; Isaac talks about his job in AI research, and I can see my mother quietly losing her mind imagining a trio of smart grandbabies. I sip from my bottle of lime Perrier. Product placement deals for everything from sparkling water to sunblock to clothing retailers have started to crop up, so I am careful to keep the label turned out. See, Connor? I can be a team player.

My parents talk about what it was like to move to the U.S. from Hong Kong in their twenties, and the struggles of raising three kids with such different personalities. It will make for incredible, authentic television. In my quiet moments of dissociation, I can see this from above and know that we’re all doing a really great job.

There’s satisfaction in getting something right, I guess—I’m faking it like a pro while ignoring the hot giant behind the camera. Isaac is gorgeous and smart—my mom is half in love with him before we’ve even made it to entrées, and my dad keeps giving me that Eh? He’s pretty great, eh? look that means he’ll be asking me about Isaac for the next several months. This is exactly why I’ve never introduced my parents to a guy before. It would be one date and then six months of questions about how long I expect to wait for a proposal. I worry that they don’t entirely understand the premise here—that we’re just trying this dating thing out, and this isn’t a Meet the Family meal in the way that it usually would be—but I can’t even get it up to worry too much because I’m just so fucking sad, and right now every ounce of my focus has to be on getting through it.

“I like him,” Mom pronounces into her still-live mic as soon as we’re up and standing. “You should pick him. Think of how smart and pretty your babies will be.” Called it.

The crew chortles in the background and I reach up, carefully unclipping her mic from her collar. “The audience decides the winner, Ma.”

“But he should be your boyfriend,” she continues, unaware as I fumble to turn it off. “You look so good together.”

On instinct, my eyes turn to the row of cameras. Connor reaches up, slipping off his headset and placing it on the seat beside him before he picks up a clipboard and casually writes something down. No reaction, certainly no consternation. He doesn’t even look up the way he used to, that reactive flash of jealousy heating his eyes. Now it’s just relaxed Connor, not caring about the prospect of someone else being my boyfriend.

It’s cool, I’m fine.

Allow me to fling myself off a cliff into a bed of pillows.

Hugging my parents, I see them out to the confessional trailer to meet with the man himself, and then I sit down, waiting my turn.

A half hour passes before my parents find me for goodbyes.

“We told Connor that we think you should marry Isaac!” my dad whisper-yells, and then kisses my cheek.

I give them the best smile I can produce. “Awesome, I’m sure he loved that.”

Isaac leaves for the confessional and, honestly, I would pay a lot of money to be a fly on the wall in that room. I bet it’s the size of a teacup with the combination of their two hulking bodies, Connor’s quiet intensity, and Isaac’s dazzling charm.

Or maybe it’s fine. Maybe the room isn’t cold at all, and Connor isn’t weird with Isaac in the slightest, even though one of my favorite parts of Connor’s body was inside my body one week plus forty-eight hours ago and a casual observer would say that we were both being pretty dramatic about our big emotions. But I’ve never been in love, so I’ve never fallen out of it before. Maybe it does happen like that for some people—a switch flipped down, a match blown out.

There’s a shuffle behind me and I notice the crew start packing up gear. My heart feels like a mallet behind my sternum. Any second now one of the sweet PAs will call me in for my interview. I’ll recap the date, talk about what I liked, what didn’t feel right—even though I barely remember it, and I’m sure I’ll be a monotonic, yearning mess, but I don’t care, at least I’ll be near him. It was the only thing that made last week bearable, even though he made eye contact for approximately fifty milliseconds in the entire ten minutes. I’m going through withdrawals; I want to be alone with Connor so bad it feels like a vine of thorns wrapped around my heart.

It’s Brenna who comes over, eyes downward on her phone. “Looks like you’re free to go home!”

I shake my head. “I haven’t done my confessional yet.”

She recites from the text in front of her. “Connor says we’re skipping you tonight and covering both dates tomorrow.”

“Wait—why?” On my call sheet it had a confessional for each night this week.

She only shrugs. “It’s what he said.” She scrolls back through her messages. “Looks like he’s already left.”

Sleep is a fickle mistress. It probably doesn’t help that I spend most of Monday night cheating on her with a neurosis named One Thousand Things I Did to Fuck Things Up. I forget to set an alarm, so it’s a good thing I fall asleep with my phone under my pillow (in case Connor calls me in the middle of the night because he changed his mind and loves me, too) and that it starts vibrating beneath me.

It’s Jess. I answer with whatever sound it makes when my mouth is pressed directly on the receiver.

“Well, good morning,” she says back.

“Time is it?”

“Just after eight.”

I push to sit up in my too-bright room. I hadn’t bothered to close the curtains last night, and sunlight streams in like there’s something to celebrate. “Shit.”

“What time do you have to be on set today?”

I squint at the wall, thinking. “Ten, I think.”

“You have plenty of time.”

“I know.” I reach up, rubbing my face. “I meant Shit, I have to pretend to be fine again today.”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?”

Jess whisper-squeals through the phone: “Who’s joining you for today’s date with Evan?”

With a relieved groan I collapse back onto the bed. “Ohthankgod, that’s right.” Despite the dark cloud following me everywhere, I giggle. The date with Evan was originally supposed to be with my brother and his new wife, before we realized during scheduling that they’d be on their honeymoon. My sister was the second obvious choice, but has been shifted from “taking it easy” to official bed rest. I have a pool of about a zillion aunties I could choose from, but that would honestly be a circus, and even with all of this self-loathing, I don’t hate myself that much.

“How’s River feeling about being on TV again?”

“Grouchy, but stoically resigned.”

“My favorite version of him.”

She laughs. “I’ll see you soon. Go get ’em, tiger.”

I give my most pathetic roar.

Of course, the first thing that happens when I go from the bright sunshine outside to the dim elegance of the restaurant is I collide directly with a wall of Connor. It is not unlike running face-first into brick—physically, emotionally, spiritually.

We do one of those terrible bursting, overlapping apology dances before abruptly turning in opposite directions: me, to hair and makeup in the back, and him to the row of cameras setting up for the day of shooting.

The restaurant is quiet; I’m the first to arrive. Up front, it is just Connor and Rory huddled around the cameras. I swear I hear every rumbling murmur of his voice, feel it like a vibration down my spine. Liz has to keep reminding me to tilt my chin up and turn my face to her, because I keep unintentionally turning my head toward the front of the restaurant, drawn to him in these unconscious, aching ways.

My entire life I’ve felt grounded in who I am and what I want, but lately… lately it feels like I have no identity anymore. I’m not a writer, I’m not a wild date, I’m not even a pesky best friend or bawdy aunt. And in all this quiet in my mind, the who am I really? shouts the loudest. One of my favorite things about Connor was that he didn’t need me to be anything. I could be silly and loud or thoughtful and contemplative and it was all just… me. He told me that I was more than my playful, sexy, adventurous author persona. He said I had thoughtful depth and sensitive layers. It felt like he had a pocket Fizzy Decoder (and I am not just talking about his dick).

(Though the dick helped, too.)

Evan arrives in a suit and looks objectively hot. I’m so conflicted. On the one hand, I could choose him for the trip. It’s not going to happen with us—I think we both know that—and maybe a relaxing ex-to-friend trip together to Fiji is just what I need. But on the other hand, with the show’s popularity, I don’t want to do the public “breakup,” don’t want to have to pretend to have been in love and fallen out of it.

But if I choose Isaac, I’d be doing us both a disservice. Isaac is exactly who I would have expected to fall for, but in this reality, I now only feel very platonic things for him. Are his feelings genuinely romantic? Would a trip with him be the most excruciating, awkward ten days? Could I maybe learn to like him?

I groan, and Liz gives my chin a gentle pinch, reminding me to hold still while she applies eyeliner.

“What’s with you?” she asks, her breath sweet and minty near my cheek. “You seem stressed.”

“I am.”

“Are you worried the audience won’t choose the one you want?”

Liz has never asked me anything about the show. I always assumed it was a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of thing, but maybe it’s as simple as everyone not being a nosy asshole such as myself. A smart woman would say yes. A dumb one—me—says, “I don’t think I want either of them.”

She straightens, and her voice comes out in a whisper. “Which one do you want most?”

I go for broke: “The one who’s seven feet tall with the god-tier bone structure.”

She laughs but seems completely unsurprised. “Yeah, you two are a trip.”

I don’t immediately know what she means, and a self-conscious flush flashes through me. Because then I do know. She means what I feel, too, which is that the real story has been the friendship that has bloomed between me and her boss, Connor Prince. The cameras haven’t captured this most beautiful of all story arcs: how this towering, intentional man and this small, chaotic woman came together first with friction and then with mutual admiration and then with something that felt a lot like love. I had the real story right in front of me this whole time, and blew it.

“He’s been so off,” Liz says, breaking into my thoughts. “Everyone feels it.”

These last words pull me up to the surface again, newly aware. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs, sweeping one last pass of blush to the tops of my cheeks. “Oh, you know.” I can’t press for more without making it weird.

Liz steps back and surveys her work, pulling the protective cloth from my collar. “You’re good,” she says. She lifts her chin, and I turn to see a PA standing behind me.

“Ready?” he asks, and gestures to the trailer outside. Panic ignites in my bloodstream. “Rory wants a confessional first. You can head on out. Connor’s waiting for you.”