The True Love Experiment
: Chapter 36

I’m falling in love, but I’m also falling asleep, in the warm circle of his arms, with the hard planes of his body somehow forming the perfect mattress. We both wake up with a jolt when someone drunk bangs on the door across the hall.

Overheated, I slide off Connor’s body onto the cool, twisted sheets. He groans, rolling to reach for a bottle of water, offering me some and then taking a long drink.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Around three.”

We’d barely been asleep twenty minutes, but it felt like hours for how deep I’d been.

“I wonder if anyone noticed that we disappeared,” I say.

“I’m sure.”

“I’ll get a lot of questions about it at the brunch tomorrow.”

“Especially from your sister,” he says, and I laugh. Connor rolls away to put the water back on the nightstand and I take the opportunity to run my hands up his back, mapping the broad expanse. He returns to me, and I’m just as happy rubbing my hands all over his front. “Easy enough to answer, right?” he says. “We were watching tonight’s episode together.”

“Mmm, I know you’re saying words,” I say, tracing his ribs, “but all I see is naked.”

He puts a finger under my chin, tilting my face up so I look into his smiling eyes. “I meant to ask how the wedding was for you, but we got distracted.”

My first instinct is to look away and make a joke about replaceing joy in thwarting familial expectations, but the new instinct, the bigger one, is to be bare with him. “It wasn’t as hard as Alice’s,” I admit. “At her wedding, everyone felt sorry for me, and it completely caught me off guard because I was there to celebrate, and I got all this pity and concern instead that the younger daughter was getting married first. At least yesterday it felt like a meme that I’m single, rather than gossip.”

He studies my expression for a few quiet beats, then just gives a quiet “Hmm.”

“I’ll get married, or I won’t,” I tell him. “It shouldn’t affect anything anyone else does. But I know it isn’t that simple. My parents worry because they love me. They want me to be married because they are happily married; they want me to have kids because they love having us. Even though it stings, I know in my heart the reason my mom always refers to my ‘real novel’ is because she is sure I’m the best writer alive, but knows the world looks down on romance. She doesn’t want me to put myself in a position where I’m not valued for what I can do. It isn’t because she doesn’t value my skill, she just sees writing literary fiction as the more ambitious way to do it.”

“I don’t know,” Connor says quietly. “Seems it’s pretty hard to write a compelling book when the reader already knows how it ends.”

Perfect, I think. He’s perfect. I need a new track or I’m going to climb on him again and I don’t think he can fit more than two condoms in that wallet.

“What about your dad?” I ask. “I assume he knows about the show now?”

“He talked to Stevie. She told him.”

“And? Is he impressed that his son is being stalked on social media?”

“Not exactly.” He picks up a strand of my hair and twists it absently. “Your mum might not understand romance, but she’s proud of you. Her concern comes from a place of love and good intentions. The problem is that I’m not who my father wants me to be.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“I used to think it was something deeper, something unfulfilled in him, but I think he’s honestly just a shitty human.” His forehead furrows with a frown and I tip his face down, press a kiss there until the tension smooths out again. The idea that anyone could look at him and not see all the wonderful parts of who he is makes my insides boil. “But I have Natalia and Stevie,” he says with a smile. “More than makes up for it.”

“What was your wedding like?”

“To Natalia?”

“Yes?” I say, grinning. “Unless there’s another wife somewhere in an attic.”

He laughs. “It was at the courthouse. It was very simple.”

“How old were you?”

“When we got married? Twenty-two.”

“Oh. Babies.”

“Yeah. And baby.” He smiles at me. “She was pregnant.”

“Oh.”

Connor nods, rolling to his back and tucking one arm beneath his head. A bicep pops and I pretend that I’m not dying to touch it, because we’re having a serious conversation. “We’d been really good friends for a couple years, but only been lovers for about six months by then. I think I already knew we weren’t a great fit romantically, but it was a fun and easy hookup. I knew she’d had a thing for me almost since we first met. I mean, looking back I think I worried that I’d fuck up our group dynamic if I ended things.”

“That’s rough.”

“So then she replaces out she’s pregnant, and she wants to keep the baby—which, totally her call, I never had any issue with her making whatever choice worked for her. But since my own father was absent and”—he sighs—“such a dick, really, I wanted to do the right thing, and immediately proposed.”

“Ah,” I say.

He shifts to his side, toying with a strand of my hair again. “Yeah.” I sense this isn’t a story he tells very often because he’s taking longer than he normally would to put the words together. “It was nice at first. Stevie was a really easy baby. I loved the family Nat and I had made. I knew we would be good parents.”

I make a sound of understanding.

“But I wasn’t ever in love with her, and it got harder to pretend. I was sick with the decision about whether it was worse to stay, or leave and potentially make all the same mistakes my dad made. I never wanted Stevie to feel the way I did.”

“Right.”

“I’d love to say I talked about this with her,” he says, “but I didn’t. I loved her, but I wasn’t in love with her, and in hindsight I was just looking for a way to make her stop loving me. I was immature and not very evolved.”

When he says this, I think I know. But the heat of his body and the sweetness of his fingers drawing delicate vines across my collarbones makes it feel like his next words are spoken with invisible ink.

“I cheated on her.”

He lets the sentence sit and it penetrates me like poison, first with a sting at the surface and then with a flashing burn as it takes root inside, ulcerating.

“I have no defense.” I feel him looking at my face, but I can only fix my gaze on a tiny scar on his shoulder. My heart is squeezing so tight I can barely swallow. I am all locked up inside. “We got in a fight while I was at work and I just… didn’t go home. I went out, met a woman at a bar—whatever, it’s such a boring story. I knew if I stayed out all night I couldn’t lie about it the next morning. I sat in my car until the sun came up. Nat knew as soon as she saw me. And yeah,” he says quietly, “that definitely ended things.”

I’m still unable to figure out how to make sound. I nod numbly.

“Maybe it would have happened eventually. We’ll never know. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself. A lot of therapy. Nat has forgiven me, but it took a long time.” The shoulder I’m staring at lifts in a shrug. “It’s why I don’t think I can stomach casual relationships anymore. Like, I don’t even remember the woman’s name or her face. What a vile thing to do.” He exhales slowly. “That feeling has never really left me.”

I hear what he’s saying; I even hear the emotional weight of his words, the regret and the self-flagellation and the sincerity. But the contradiction of him marrying Nat to do the right thing and ending it in the cruelest possible way feels like a hot and cold wire, twisted around my windpipe.

Suddenly I’m up,

I’m standing,

I’m searching through my open bag for my clothes.

Underwear, joggers, T-shirt. My joints move like they’re programmed, muscle memory, locating everything and panic-dressing myself in the dark.

Connor pushes up. “Fizzy.”

“I’m just realizing people are probably still down at the bar.” I laugh like, Duh me!

His pause feels as deep as a canyon. “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

“I know, but I’m the big sister and just left the wedding without saying goodbye to all my family.”

“You did say goodbye.”

“Not to everyone!”

He goes silent and I can’t look at his face. My thoughts are a flurry of broken trust and fear and anger and sadness. I feel nauseated and frantic, but I see from a distance, too, how this is unfolding. How wild I must look to him right now.

Connor’s voice is steady. “This is about what I just told you. I completely understand why this upsets you. But I need you to come back and talk this out with me.”

I trip as I shove my foot into a shoe. “I swear it isn’t about that. And I’m sure that was super hard for you to share. I’m sorry to do this right now, I just really should check to see if anyone is up that I need to spend time with.”

My card key is on the dresser and I grab it, shoving it into the pocket of my hoodie.

“Fizzy. Please stop.”

I take a deep breath and look at him. He’s sitting up, has pulled a sheet over his lap to cover himself. His hair is a disaster, eyes bright even in the dim room. He’s devastatingly gorgeous,

and I think I love him,

but I also think if someone can justify cheating once, they can justify it again. You’re either a cheater or you’re not.

“Fizzy. Come back.”

“I can’t.”

“Talk to me about what’s going on right now. I was a dumb kid. I’m not that guy anymore.”

“It’s fine. This isn’t about that.”

“It is. And it’s okay. I don’t like that I did it any more than you do, but I want us to be able to live with our fuckups. I want us to talk about them.”

I look away, at the ugly bamboo wallpaper, but I don’t even feel like I’m in the room with him anymore.

I’m in a crowded restaurant and Rob’s wife is glowering down at me. I’m aware of my confused date slowly putting the pieces together across the table from me. I’m home alone later, devastated to discover that I am the worst of things: a home-wrecker.

Before Rob, I thought I was bulletproof. I thought I’d always be enough for myself, that I didn’t need anyone, that no man could tank my feelings or sense of self-worth. And then Rob and the whole situation made me question it all. I promised myself I would never feel that way again.

Now I see that Rob was a paper cut. Connor could obliterate me, and it wouldn’t take something as enormous as cheating.

I look over at him. “You want me to be honest?”

He nods immediately, forcefully. “Always.”

“Okay, well,” I say, clenching my jaw and grasping the first lie that comes to me. “I think we were both tipsy and then sex-drunk and we got way too heavy. I don’t know what I was thinking. We barely know each other.”

Connor gusts out a disbelieving breath. “We do know each other. Getting to know each other has been our singular focus for months.”

The words fly out of me: “Then I was wrong about you. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

When he can’t come up with anything to say in response, I turn and leave.