The True Love Experiment

The next time Felicity Chen walks into my office, she shows up ready to play. Instead of ripped jeans and boots, she’s wearing a black tailored suit and an expression that leaves no doubt she’s planning to oversee everything from this point forward. She politely passes on Brenna’s offer of coffee and crosses the room to where I’m standing in front of my desk to greet her.

“Felicity, it’s good to see you.”

She gives me a handshake alongside her wide smile. Amazingly, she makes the ballbuster aesthetic look like a good time. “Call me Fizzy. No one calls me Felicity, except the guy at the DMV.”

I laugh. “Fizzy it is.”

Instead of sitting at a chair at my desk, she settles down onto one of the small leather sofas framing the coffee table. I remember reading once that confident people use furniture wrong. They sit sideways, they loop an arm over the back of an adjacent chair or sit on the edge of a desk. Fizzy isn’t doing any of those things, but she’s still a portrait of confidence. Her posture is relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, hands casually crossed at the wrist, one index finger and thumb tapping as if she’s counting down to something. Her shoes are bright blue suede with heels at least four inches tall. It takes more effort than I’m comfortable with not to let my eyes linger on the tiny glimpse of her exposed ankle.

“How are you?” I ask, dragging my eyes away.

“I’m great.”

I sit down across from her, working to look as casually confident as she is. Normally, I am. Normally, I’m hard to fluster. But the duality of the intensity of her demeanor and ease in her body is distracting.

“Thanks for taking my meeting,” she says. Her hair is up in a bun; a few tendrils have come loose, and they fall softly against her long, delicate neck. She wears minimal makeup, I guess, but her lips are this perfect, soft red. However much of a shit show this program will end up being, this woman is going to be beautiful on-screen.

“Absolutely.” I swallow, trying to get my voice to sound less strained. “We still have a lot to hammer out.” An understatement. The requests her agent sent over read like a foreign language, but Nat told me to trust her so here we are. I feel like I’m stepping into a dark, foggy alley with nothing but a rolled-up newspaper to defend me against surprise knife attacks. This will be either an inconvenient but brief project that gets me what I want from Blaine, or the worst mistake of my professional career. “But before we get too deep in the details,” I say, “I wanted to ask if you have any experience with the DNADuo. Past user profiles are obviously confidential, but our legal department needs to know if we have any previous Gold Matches we should filter or add to the list for The One That Got Away.”

“I’m familiar with the app,” she says, smoothing a hand down her thigh to straighten a soft wrinkle there. “And, uh, I stopped checking my matches before I ever saw any Gold ones.”

“Okay.” I jot down the note, sensing there’s more beneath the surface there, but she doesn’t elaborate. Closing my notebook, I meet her eyes across the table. “Well, if you think of anything that seems worth discussing, let me know. We don’t need to know your dating history, but also don’t want to put you in an awkward position with someone you’ve met and didn’t like.”

“Thank you.” She keeps nodding but doesn’t take her eyes off my face.

Needing something to do under her scrutiny, I sit forward in my seat, reaching to pour us each a glass of water from a pitcher on the coffee table. “Is there something you wanted to discuss?” I ask.

“I can’t quite figure you out.”

“What would you like to know?”

“What’s your background?” She runs a thoughtful finger beneath her full lip. “North Star’s website doesn’t go very deep. Google doesn’t tell me much about you. All I know is you usually make documentaries and grew up a young pirate in Northern England.”

I laugh at the callback to our first meeting. “Blackpool. That’s right. Had to quit the looting-and-pillaging industry at fifteen, when my American father brought me to the States.”

“Fifteen.” She winces. “That’s rough.”

It was, but no reason to linger. “I went to USC for film and ended up here. And yes, until recently I’ve worked on documentaries. Coastal climate change, marine animals, you know.”

“USC for film but ended up in San Diego at a small production company,” she says. “Either you aren’t very good at your job, or you have a personal reason for being here. It seems like an important distinction if I’m your newest collaborator.”

I smile, not rising to the bait. “I had a very good job at Sony, in LA. I moved here because my ex-wife got a job and I wanted to be close to our daughter.”

Her expression falters—softening—before she reaches for her water. “Why did you agree to take on this show? Coastal climate change to a reality dating show? Not really a natural transition.”

“It was assigned to me.”

“So, you’re being forced.”

I go for honesty. We barely know each other, but I can already sense I don’t want to be caught lying to this woman. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice, no.”

“Are you at all excited about it?”

I reach for my water, taking a sip as I formulate an answer that is both honest and encouraging. “I’ll say this much: I’m truly glad you came on board.”

This makes her grin widely, brightly. “I know you are. You said yes to all my ridiculous requests.”

“If you thought they were ridiculous,” I say, setting my glass down, “why did you make them?”

“Because they’re hilarious. They’ll make the show different. Fun. We could all use a little more fun.” I can’t disagree there. “You said at our first meeting that one of the reasons you’ve brought me on is because our audiences intersect almost entirely. Tell me a little about this audience.”

“About eighty percent of the people watching dating shows identify as female ages eighteen to fifty-five, but about half of them are over forty-five. This is similar to the readership of romance novels. A third of all fiction sales are romance, and about forty percent of that market is women over forty-five, meaning a whopping twelve percent of all pure fiction sales are women over forty-five reading romance.” I pause, wondering what else she wants me to say. “It hasn’t been my demographic, historically, but I’m trying to learn.”

Fizzy’s gaze has an intensity I’ve seen in some of the most powerful executives in Hollywood. “What does that mean?”

She isn’t being harsh, but I still don’t like being put on the defensive, don’t like how carefully I need to tread here because she hasn’t officially signed the contract yet and I need this before I let her leave today. After going over Fizzy’s ideas, Blaine gave me two months of preproduction, with five weeks of filming, the finished episodes airing at the end of each week. That means crash editing every week. I’ve never made something with this kind of editorial pressure before. We’ve already spent so much time waiting for her terms and running everything through our legal department. I can’t start over again.

“It means I’m learning this the way I learn about any new audience,” I tell her. “Market research. In this case, studying what other things that audience does in their free time.”

She stifles a smirk and I lean back in my chair, inhaling deeply, getting my bearings. “Ask what you really want to ask me, Fizzy.”

“I don’t want to sign up to do this if your only research here is reading Nielsen reports. The documentaries you’ve made help convince me that your heart is in the right place, but why you? Why this? Why you for this?”

“It seems the company is taking a new direction.” I shrug, choosing transparency: “We’re small. There are only a few of us. That’s probably why me.”

“Have you read anything I’ve written, or did you ask me because your ex-wife had some of my books on her shelf?”

“I’m finishing Base Paired right now. It’s funny, sexy, creative, and…” I trail off, searching for the word that eludes me. I began reading per Nat’s instructions, looking for what it is about romance she loves so much, trying to find that kernel that has built such a huge following for Fizzy. If I can understand it, I think, I’ll be able to unlock what we need to make this show a success.

“And?” Fizzy prompts sardonically, like she’s expecting an insult to wrap up my list.

“Joyful.” It comes out in a burst. “There’s a lot of joy in your writing.”

I can see I’ve hit something important. She leans forward, happier now. “Yes. Now we’re getting somewhere. Romance is joyful. What brings you joy?”

“My daughter. My work, historically speaking.” I dig around for something that makes me sound more dimensional, but sitting here with this bestselling author talking about joy and connection makes my life feel like a lather, rinse, repeat of arid routine. “Watching footie. Mountain biking. Exercise.”

As I speak, I see her point: none of this really qualifies me to speak specifically to this audience. It’s true that, other than my time with Stevie, nothing in my life brings me outright joy anymore. Most of it, I realize, is a way to pass time when I’m alone, and none of it is about seeking connection.

I think about the chapter in her book I read last night. It was a love scene where, afterward, the heroine admitted that she was afraid of how fast things were moving. It wasn’t that this type of conflict felt groundbreaking, but the way it was written with such vulnerability and self-awareness after the most scorching sex scene I’d ever read left me feeling pensive all night. Fizzy is the playful, wisecracking alter ego, but I’m beginning to see that Felicity Chen is smart—brilliant, clearly—and I must give her more than just a confident smile and measured responses. She reads people expertly, and right now she needs to be convinced she won’t be stuck with a two-dimensional Hollywood stereotype.

“I sound like a boring git.” I laugh. “There’s something about reading your book that has made me hyperaware of the sterile banality of my current life. I am,” I admit, sifting through words because I rarely get personal with relative strangers, and never with colleagues, “a bit of a workaholic. But I am not an egomaniac. I brought you on because I know you are connected—literally and figuratively—to this audience. I want this to be a success.”

“I want that, too.” Fizzy’s posture eases and she leans back. “Listen, Hot DILF. I need to confess something. I’m good friends with someone involved in the DNADuo technology. He’s not thrilled about this show happening, but because of the way the deal was structured, he doesn’t get a veto on media use.”

“Will that be a problem?” I ask, ignoring for the time being that I think she’s just called me a Hot DILF, or the fact that I wouldn’t have understood that phrase a few weeks ago.

“No. But this show needs to be smart. It needs to be delightful. It needs to be irreverent. It needs to be sexy, and real, and relatable.”

“I agree.”

An edge of vulnerability appears in her next words: “The problem is, even though I’ve just interrogated you, I must admit I am a little worried about whether I’m even the right person to do this.”

Oh.

The power in her posture, the shine in her eyes—both of those things have dimmed without me noticing. I sort through the words in my head. “I completely understand that you’d want to do right by this technology, given your personal connection to it, and I wouldn’t expect you to do all the heavy lifting here. But even knowing you just the tiny bit that I do, I know you will absolutely delight the viewers. You have a magical quality that is rare, Fizzy. I’m sure you know that—it translates in your writing, and it translates in person, too.”

“Well, thank you. But no.” She reaches up, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. “I used to be fun. I used to have a million ideas. I used to be spontaneous and playful and sexy and inspired. I haven’t felt any of those things in ages.”

My pulse slows and then rocket-launches up my throat. “So—what are you saying?”

Did I really go through all of this for her to back out now?

“Joy,” she says behind her hands, and then drops them onto her lap.

“What?”

Fizzy takes a deep breath, and then exhales slowly. “I’ll sign the contract on your desk under one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“In the two months we have before this show starts filming, you and I get out of this office, away from our keyboards, and rediscover joy.”