Page 90 of The True Love Experiment

Connor nods. “I’m really not that guy anymore. I’m nearly a decade older, Fizzy. Infidelity is a hard limit for both of us.”

“I know. I wish I hadn’t run off like that. I’m sorry I left after what we’d just done. After what we’d just said.” I take another deep breath. “I spent a lot of time by myself downstairs, thinking.”

Connor hums, an unspokenGo on, then.

“At first I was panicking,” I say, my anxiety ratcheting higher with his silence. In any other situation, even patient, measured Connor would say something to lighten the mood, to make this easier for me, but he’s being so still, like he’s bracing himself for something. “But then I let myself process what you’d said, and I realized something. About my feelings for you.”

His eyes are on the floor and I stare at his amazing face, giving myself a few beats to calm down. Getting these words out feels like fitting my whole body through a straw. I’ve never said this next part. “I’ve been fickle my whole life,” I admit. “I’ve never been someone who could close her eyes and visualize what it would be like to be with one person forever. I thought I was doing more of the same when I bolted today, but—”

“Fizzy—”

“No, let me get this out.”

“I don’t think—”

“I promise I’m not gonna be a jerk again.”

“No, no, it’s not th—”

“I realized something important tonight.”

“Fizzy, listen—”

I know how this exchange would be written in a transcript.Overlapping, it would say. The staccato of words coming out one after the other, crowding the space, drowning us in bursts of noise. I laugh, shoving past the way he doesn’t want to hear what I’m going to say.

So I blurt it out, loud enough to drown out his protest: “I’m in love with you.”

And it’s a beat before I realize my words barreled right over his: “I can’t do this.”

Everything falls nuclear-winter-level silent. The stillness in the room is absolute. And then the sound of him carefully clearing his throat feels deafening.

“Oh God,” I say, laughing awkwardly, but inside I’m shriveling up in humiliation. “Did you just say what I think you said?”

His gaze is soft but steady. “I’m sorry.”

“If this is about the show,” I quickly say, “we can go back to our original plan. We can be secret if we need to.” Desperation rises in me the longer I face this stiff, cold version of Connor. “I’m not going to let anyone get in the way of this if you’re willing to try. What I said in the hotel about being crazy about you? I meant it. I’m all in. We can sneak around. I’m very small; I can be stealthy. In fact, my high school guidance counselor gave me two career paths: romance author or secret agent.”

I expect a grin but I don’t even get a flicker of a reaction. Instead, he breaks his gaze away and turns it toward the dark fireplace. With his profile illuminated, I see how tired he looks. His chiseled cheekbones seem gaunt, and I realize that it’s because there’s no smile in his eyes.

Dread falls like a weight in my stomach. Of course. I broke this. The way I left the hotel room, the way I revealed my fickle, impulsive side… was the exact wrong way to handle Connor. I knew he was guarded, knew he entered into things only after cautious deliberation. Knew he was trusting me with something he probably hasn’ttold many people, and I smashed that laboriously constructed trust with the mighty Fizzy hammer.

“I fucked up, didn’t I?” I say quietly. “Leaving you last night blew the whole thing up.”

He inhales deeply and slowly. “I told you from the start,” he says to his lap, “that I didn’t want something if it was only sex.”

“I know.”

When he turns his eyes up to me, the distance in his gaze sends a chill down my arms.

“What we shared felt much deeper than sex, Felicity, but at the first sign of trouble you fled. I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours feeling angry and hurt and incredibly stupid for trusting you. It makes it very hard for me to believe you now.”

Mortification isn’t a swift punch to the gut; it is a slow seeping of ice-cold water into my veins. I can’t imagine what Connor thinks about me right now—I wonder if he’s regretting putting the Heroes’ hearts in my hands, let alone putting his own precious heart there. I agreed to do this show in the middle of my worst and deepest writer’s block, and I justified it by saying I was doing it for the audience. And now I’m telling him to date me in secret, putting his job and his life here in jeopardy after I fled the hotel room like a panicked idiot the first time he confessed that he might not be a perfect human. It was supposed to be us against the world, and I blew it all up.

I have never in my life felt like such a profound failure.

thirty-nineCONNOR

This time when Fizzy leaves, I only feel blank inside. I’d wanted to hold on to this anger—had spent the day going from indignant to hurt to disappointed and back again—but as I watched the excited flush drain from her face, breathless hope replaced by grim understanding, my anger slipped away, and I just felt… tired. Now there’s only the silence of my thoughts, and the flat bleakness of the door firmly shut, literally and metaphorically.

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