The True Love Experiment

I get the strong sense that the types of directions Fizzy gives are the ones we warn our children not to blindly follow: trust me, sign here, eat this. And yet, here I am, following her out of the bookstore and into my car, where she directs me twenty minutes south to a taco joint in San Ysidro, just on the Mexican border.

In an unremarkable parking lot in front of an unremarkable building, she climbs out, stretches long, happily groaning, and then grins wickedly at me. “Are you ready to have your world changed?”

“Uh, sure?”

As she moves with ease toward the building in her black dress and heels, there’s something thunderous about her. Objectively slight, Fizzy has the ability to take up space in a way I’ve never mastered. I was always relatively tall growing up, but having been raised by a single mother, I felt conscious not to appear imposing in any way. It was this tendency of mine that drove my father insane on the rare occasions when he would visit. He would lecture me about entering a room with power, about the importance of claiming space. By the time I’d turned fourteen and was well over six feet tall, and taking up space was a foregone conclusion, he turned to other things to criticize: my lack of ambition, my deference to others, my protectiveness of my mother. Later it was my career choice, my shotgun wedding, my job title.

But as much as my father exhausts me, I can’t help but think that admiring Fizzy would be one thing we’d have in common.

“I’m going to order for us,” she says over her shoulder. “I’m going to put joy in your mouth, Sexy Lumberjack. Trust me.”

“Is trust required?”

She ignores this, stepping up to order for us, and I look down at my outfit. From Brit to DILF to Sexy Lumberjack. I can’t know for sure if this transition in nickname signals a good wardrobe decision on my part, but I changed three times before picking her up today, prompting Stevie to ask me whether I was going on a date.

It’s not a date. I mean, of course it isn’t. But there’s something about being this close to Fizzy that makes me want to impress her in the same way.

As she orders, I hear the words lengua, cabeza, buche, and tripa and am aware that I’m going to be eating some things I have never before put in my mouth. With a bulging paper bag in one hand, two drinks in a cardboard tray in the other, and a little nod for me to trust her yet again, we climb back into the car and drive a few minutes to a small road leading us to a coastal wildlife refuge.

At a weatherworn metal table overlooking an empty stretch of beach, Fizzy opens the bag and lays out an enormous selection of tacos. “Take your pick.” She points to each, describing what’s in it—from grilled beef and cactus, to pork belly, to tripe, to beef head, to tongue. And as I take my first bite of the pork belly, she watches me with anticipation, waiting for a reaction.

Letting out a low, involuntary groan, I feel my eyes drift closed. The sharp tang of fresh cotija and bright lime, with crisp bits of meat and a soft, handmade tortilla—this is easily the best taco I’ve had in my entire life.

It takes a minute for my senses to settle and I realize she’s still looking at me.

“You like?” she asks, smiling happily.

“Bloody lovely.” I wipe my mouth. “Are you just going to watch?”

She breaks her stare and blinks down at the selection in front of her, choosing what I think was the lengua. “I like seeing you like this. Outside of that office and that suit. This is a good vibe.” She motions to my clothes. “Still DILFy, but without the uptight CEO thing going on.”

“Not sure a coworker has ever called me a DILF before.”

She shrugs. “You didn’t bring me on because I lettered in propriety.”

“Fair.” I smile, taking a sip of my fountain drink. “But you seem awfully intent on pegging me.”

She barks out a laugh. “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

“Jesus Christ.” I flick my eyes upward in mock exasperation, and then finish the small taco. “You know what I meant.”

It’s a struggle not to stare at her while she eats. She hums happily as she chews, licks a tiny bit of salsa from the side of her mouth, and studies the food in her hand with pleasure-drunk eyes. So far in only this first outing alone I’ve seen two very different sides to Fizzy: effusive and public facing, and this more intimate, quietly playful version. Both charismatic, both sexy, both mesmerizing. First, I was resentful to be assigned this, then I was resigned. Now I feel a flicker of excitement over the challenge of capturing her brand of magic on-screen.

You’re going to be setting her up with other men.

The reminder crashes into the forefront of my thoughts, and I blink away. “I had a thought about the show.”

She glances up at me and laughs. “I hope you’ve had more than one.”

“This is specifically about the title. What do you think about calling it The True Love Experiment?”

“I think I’m mad I didn’t come up with it myself.”

A sunburst of pride spreads quickly through my torso. “Brilliant.” I reach for a mystery taco. “So, to recap: We’ll cast the eight Hero archetypes. Filming will be Monday to Thursday, with Friday for crash editing, and a Saturday broadcast. Voting will take place over twenty-four hours after the episode airs, and the following Monday we’ll reveal to the cast who has made it through each round.”

She mumbles a happy sound around a bite.

“And,” I continue, “I think we should go in with the understanding that the show won’t be so heavily produced. I don’t mean from an aesthetics angle, but the actual story lines. I’ve been thinking quite a bit on this, and I really want to do something different, as much as we can. From what I gather, some of these shows are plotted out from episode one, which makes me question the sincerity of any relationship that comes out of them. Since viewers will be voting on our outcome, we want to give them the truest possible narrative we can.”

She nods, licking her lips again, and it splits my focus into foggy tendrils. I squeeze my eyes closed for a beat to recapture the thread. “Because it’s a limited series, you’ll only really be tied up for about five weeks.”

“Tied up, huh?” Fizzy grins. “Sounds fun.”

“You’re trouble.”

She laughs. “I think that’s why you chose me.”

“I chose you because you’re beloved by your fan base. But yes, I am excited to do this in part because you’re also a bit mischievous.”

“Excited?” She drops her balled-up napkin and plants her elbows on the table. “That’s a new development.”

I take a bite, chew. “What can I say? I am continually evolving.”

“I see that.”

“I know this matters to you,” I tell her. “I want you to know it matters to me, too.”

Fizzy takes a long breath, opens her mouth to speak, and then seems to change track. “You said you moved here when you were fifteen?”

A flicker of unease quells the vibrating hum in my blood, and I take a bite to delay what I suspect will be a gentle but surgical interrogation. “Yes, that’s right.”

“And your mother is the Brit?”

I nod. “She lives with her parents now, just outside Blackpool, but she met my father when she was studying abroad in the States. She got pregnant, and my father wasn’t interested in being a father yet. He’d visit every year or so to pop in and tell her what she was doing wrong.”

“Wow, sounds like a nice guy.”

“He’s a mixture of unbearably selfish and unremittingly dutiful.”

She laughs at this. “Why’d you go live with him?” I narrow my eyes at her, calculating whether I want to get into it, and she smiles under the inspection. “What?” she asks. “Is this story escandaloso?”

“Perhaps a bit.”

“Oh, well now you have to tell me.”

“My mum and I were in a very bad car accident when I was twelve. We were both fine, eventually, but the entire thing really shook her up.”

Fizzy’s expression straightens. “Oh no.”

“For… a few years,” I explain, “Mum didn’t leave the house. I had to for school, of course, and to take on odd jobs. But she suffered from a great deal of anxiety. This whole period is when I got into film, so I can’t resent the solitude, but in hindsight I do see how much I missed of my adolescence.” Before this can veer too bleak, I wrap it up: “Anyway, my father visited when I was fifteen and didn’t like what he saw. By then he’d married and had a couple of kids with my stepmother, but eventually Mum conceded that I needed a change of scenery and agreed to let him take me until I was ready to go to university.”

“Do you ever go back to England?”

“Of course,” I say. “I spend some Christmases there. I speak to my mother regularly. I’d planned to move back after I’d graduated uni, but life had other plans.”

“And what about present day?” she asks. “Are you remarried? Out every night, living the hot single life?”

I clear my throat, frowning as I adjust the napkin on my lap. “I—no. Neither,” I admit. “My daughter is still quite young. I only have her on weekends, and I work late most weeknights—so I haven’t. I don’t. That is, I don’t date much.” I hear the stumbling clutter of my words and squint past her, to stare at a flock of birds picking at something on the sand.

“What’s her name?”

I’m grateful that she’s letting me move on. “Stefania Elena Garcia Prince.” Fizzy bites back a smile and I laugh in understanding. “I know. My last name always sounds like the sad friend at the party. She’s a trip, though. Part princess, part evil mastermind.”

“She sounds like my kind of girl.”

“I genuinely fear the day you two meet. I think Nostradamus wrote about it.”

When I look up at her, I register that she’s been studying me. Her dark eyes are wide and gently set on my face.

“Anyway, we should be talking about you, not me.”

She doesn’t look away as my gaze holds hers. It’s this, and the way her voice goes a little hoarse when she says, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” that make me suspect I am absolutely, irrevocably, and undeniably fucked.