Chapter Fourteen - Maya
I wake up twice during the night. The first time, I’m afraid for a moment. I don’t know where I am, or why the shadows on the wall are so unfamiliar. I don’t understand why there is a body next to me. But when I reach out to feel the body--that body--it all comes back to me. It’s all I can do not to wake up him for another round. My God, how does a person come back from something like that?
The second time, I wake from a dream in which all of my exes are standing in a line, trying to get my attention. In the dream, I’m wearing the stupid lab coat that Conrad and I keep joking about. He’s standing at the end of the line and knocks them all down with a swipe of his arm. I wake, giggling. Conrad stirs. “What’s going on?” he mumbles.
“Nothing,” I say, running my nails lightly down his back. He turns onto his side and I scoot up behind him, pressing my chest against his back, trying to get as close as possible.
I wake up feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck that was full of all my favorite foods. There’s no better feeling. If I could put this feeling in a bottle I wouldn’t have to worry about work, that’s for sure. Conrad is snoring lightly beside me. You know how they say that what you see in a person is only the tip of the iceberg? How everything real lies below the surface? I see now that there is a lot more to Conrad beneath the surface. More than most people. I keep thinking about how he said that it was all a game. Now it just looks like something he wants to reassure himself of. I don’t think he really believes it.
I keep thinking about shared moments. I’m not sure if last night was something we shared. Did he take it? Did I? Did we share it, or each other? It felt kind of like a showdown, but with very different stakes. In any case, I’d say we both won.
I don’t want to wake him up, so I tiptoe out of the room and go downstairs. Something was bothering me yesterday and now I see what it was. There aren’t any pictures here. The cabin is obviously occupied, but there are no hints, or knick-knacks, or pieces of personalization that would give you any sign about what kind of person lives here. Someone with money, yes, but that’s all you would know. It makes me sad. There’s no texture. No richness. This is just a place and I want to know its owner better. I look out the window. The ducks are gliding on the surface of the pond. I wonder if their night was as good as mine. Angela is going to lose her mind when I tell her about it, although my powers of description aren’t going to do it justice.
Suddenly his arms are around me from behind. How does a man his size move so quietly? He kisses the back of my neck but says nothing. Then he’s carrying me back upstairs to the shower. I had thought that things could not possibly get hotter than last night. Shows what I know.
After, we go downstairs to find breakfast on the table. “I feel like we’re out in the middle of nowhere,” I say. “Where do these elves keep coming from that are making all of these deliveries?”
Conrad smiles, but he seems preoccupied. “I think I’m ready to tell you about what I’m doing out here,” he says.
“Okay.” I sip the coffee, which is so good that I feel like I’ve never had coffee before. A whole new world opens up when you’re on his arm. But now I’m nervous. He looks so serious. I know that this is all temporary, but I’m not ready for whatever it is to end yet. I don’t want him to say anything that will change it. And if I’m being honest, I don’t want him to say anything that’s going to make me less horny. I can’t believe it, but I’m ready to go again.
“I wanted to see if I could fall in love,” he said. “That was originally going to be an idea for the book. Something like ‘Two weeks to fall in love. Is that super cheesy?”
“No.” But I’m not sure if it’s cheesy or not. I’m not sure what it is. “Does that mean we’re going to be here for two weeks?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to decide. I wanted to see if it felt cheesy once I tried.”
“Conrad, there’s one important question here. What do you think love is, and how are you going to recognize it once it shows up?”
“I was hoping you could help me with that. But another answer is that, given all the research that I’ve done, we should fall in love. This should be enough time. Given our personality types, and all of our sub-modes, and the obvious physical attraction, and our ages and so on, this should work. Whether it does or doesn’t, that’s what I want to write about.”
Jargon aside, transactional conversation aside, I’m well aware that this might be the most vulnerable that anyone has seen him. Maybe it’s just the oxytocin flooding through me, but it feels like a privilege. No one who follows his exploits in the tabloids would believe this for a second.
“I had this idea of turning this cabin into a laboratory,” he said. “I came out here and decided to fill it with everything a woman would want. Something that would make it, and me, irresistible in the long term. But I immediately realized I was in over my head. Every time I thought about putting the experiment in motion with someone I liked…it never even got far enough to come out here. It was all too easy. Every woman acted like I was perfect, her dream man, within five minutes of meeting me. They didn’t have any interest in knowing me, so I’d get bored right away.”
I can’t decide if I’m annoyed or charmed by all of this. It’s a lot to take in. When you perform an experiment, you start with a hypothesis and then try to prove it wrong. “I’m not some lab rat,” I say. Was his hypothesis, “I can make her fall in love with me?” Or was he telling the truth and it was something closer to “It is possible to fall in love during two weeks of isolation, given that you’re with the right person and you have just fucked each other nearly to death?”
I can’t focus. My God last night was good.
“No,” He says. “You’re no lab rat. Although if you were, you’d be the sexiest lab rat in history.”
“So what now?” I say.
“Now we just spend time together,” he says. “I want to talk through the ideas I had. I want you to help me think about them. Then we see if there’s any overlap. We decide if we think it’s real. Assuming that you’re interested in following the method to its conclusion, of course.”
“I think I could be persuaded,” I say. How can anyone look this good in a robe? Conrad makes flannel look like a black tie. “Walk me through the method, professor. Exactly how do you see this going?”
He nods. “It’s simple. You form a hypothesis. Your claim. If this was a third-grade science fair project it could be something like Water Boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.” Then you’d heat up a pan of water to 212 degrees. If it boils, you conclude that your hypothesis was right.”
My current hypothesis would be something like, “Hints of an orgasm appear within 20 feet of Conrad Storm.”
“And then?” I say.
“Then, if you’re wrong, you tweak something. You make a new hypothesis. You test it again. And you repeat until you can reproduce the same result over and over.”
“So what’s your hypothesis here?”
He pours himself another coffee. His hair falls over his forehead and he brushes it away. “That we can fall in love before you leave.”
“And what would the conclusion be, if you had to guess?”
“We experiment so we don’t have to guess. But I know the conclusion I would want.”
“And?”
“You wouldn’t leave. And that’s what all the signs point to unless I’m wrong about everything.”
I take a deep breath. “So where do we start? Do I need a lab coat?”
“I like you best with the fewest clothes. But there might be a lab coat around here somewhere.”