Science of Love

Chapter 2

[Time: 48 hours ago]

“It’s just not fair, you know,” Bella hiccups, pitifully through her steadily decreasing cognitive abilities, “it’s just not fair that I’m alone. Me. The prettiest of them all. It’s really not.”

She lays with her cheek pressed to the cool wood of the bar countertop, vision distorted by the empty bottle of soju that lays in between her  and- whoever is on the other side of the bottle, she can’t tell. Although on second thoughts, the wood isn’t that cool anymore. Bella’s sure she’s been laying like this for at least the past twenty minutes and the sweat and oil from the pores on her face have left a dirty imprint. The very thought makes her raise his head and her fears are confirmed by the strange sound of skin separating from wood. And the round circle shining in the bar lights.

She hiccups some more and takes one more swig from the bottle, after which it vanishes and is replaced with a tall glass of water. She doesn’t want to drink water; she’d come to get wasted. However, a light but firm hand coaxes her towards it, touch running up and down her back and the other hand edging the glass towards her. Bella is only human and so, she falls for the charm of the water.

She gulps down all of it and realises very belatedly that she was very thirsty. She feels better or rather, more rehydrated than before, and her vision clears up slightly.

“Better?” It’s Jessi’s voice, sweet and high and somehow not slurred, the biatch always having had alcohol tolerance in the infinite. Bella nods, bummed that she’s sloshed like this while Jessi’s taking care of her, again.

“Where was I?”

“Bemoaning the lack of a love life for like, the 100th time today,” comes Aly’s response. Right, right, she’d gone out drinking with Jessi, Aly and Luna. Jessi and Luna had dropped by her and Aly’s shared apartment for their Friday night clubbing ritual, taken one look at Bella’s sad and lonely mood which happened like 8% of the time and had suggested Sad Drinking instead. And now they were here. Well, Aly and Jessi were here while Luna had f****d off to God knows which other people’s  table.

Bella doesn’t appreciate the bite in Aly’s voice but then, she’s also really sensitive. Especially when it comes to this topic. “It’s serious.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Aly replies, sipping at some painfully bright fruity cocktail. “Just saying you’ve said it a lot in the past thirty minutes and we don’t know what to say anymore.”

“Tell me I’d find someone.”

“Okay, you’ll find someone,” Jessi deadpans, and Bella swats her on the arm out of habit.

“You both are horrible. You’re not taking this seriously enough.”

Jessi throws up her hands in the air, clearly frustrated. “I don’t know what you want us to do about it, Bella! We’ve set you up on blind dates and you’ve rejected them, I introduced you to Scott’s friends and you found a flaw in all of them, which, I don’t know how. You’re not as willing as you’re whining about it all the damn time!”

At the end of this tirade is a Jessi looking frustrated, a Aly with eyes wide and Bella with what she’s sure is a hurt expression on her face and lips near trembling. Jessi seems to realise she f****d up and went overboard  because she immediately surrounds Bella, wraps her up in that heady orange blossom scent she’s partial to and coos at Bella, apologising fervently. It’s only five minutes later but Bella feels better.

“Nice save, Jessi,” Aly adds cheekily, and Jessi glares over the top of Bella’s head while Bella just pokes her tongue out like a child. She knows she’s just much more sensitive but still capable of using her charms to emotionally guilt her near and dear ones. Not that she should feel that proud of it.

Bella remains in Jessi’s arms that feel like home while Jessi and Aly talk to each other softly, in a way couples often do. She doesn’t know if that’s true, however, because she’s only ever seen Jessi, Luna and Aly be the loudest people when together and logically, she knows that’s not the case 100% of the time. Like now, when she’s safe and secure between them, sure, but they still seem to be wrapped up in their world. Soft words, careful glances and just this established sort of love that Bella wants for herself too. Is wanting that so bad? He wants someone who would just get her  and understand her, someone she can imagine the world with. Not someone perfect but just- someone. It almost makes her cry again, seeing Jessi and Aly being themselves, and how much she just wishes. Gosh, she must be drunker than he thought she’d ever be.

Whatever they’re in the middle off is interrupted momentarily by the beep of Aly’s phone, the old lady never switching off the ringer like the rest of the hip people she hangs out with (Luna’s pointed it out a million times and Bella agrees). Aly looks at the screen with squinty eyes and then she shuts her phone off with an air of disinterest.

“Who was it?” Jessi asks, and Bella’s glad she did because Aly doesn’t do that, leave people on read or even if it’s a spam mail, not mock whoever sent it to her. She’s an opportunist, she makes the most out of every situation she gets.

Aly shrugs. “Hestia.”

Bella blinks, a little more awake than before. “Ex-Hestia? Dumped-you-at-a-barbeque Hestia?” She stops when Aly levels her with an unimpressed look, feeling sheepish. “Sorry. Just, we don’t hear about her.”

“Because she’s in the past.” Then the elder sighs, her impressive shoulders going down a notch. She gets like that sometimes, defensive automatically when it comes to things she’s not wholly comfortable with emotionally, no matter how okay she looks with her jokes and a kind smile. “We were a short fling anyway. And she didn’t like feelings just like I didn’t. There are no hard feelings involved.”

Jessi thinks otherwise, because she positively hisses, miffed like an old granny. “She dumped you at a restaurant and didn’t even pay for her share. She’s on sight.” Aly chuckles. Bella’s too drunk to accurately read the elder like she normally does, but if she has the correct inkling- Aly’s being honest.

“You’re cute, Jessi, but we know you wouldn’t kill her-”

“I’ll have you know-”

“You’d plan her death spectacularly in a gruesome way, all in line with the sticky notes you would have made about your plan. I don’t doubt you, love.” Jessi preens at this, happily pacified at having her passive dominance and just under the skin evilness acknowledged. Bella shudders internally at the kind of friends she calls her own.

She loses track of the conversation after that, somewhat pacified with unhealthy amounts of alcohol and friends petting her sadness away. The sadness, she knows, won’t really go away- it’s been ingrained into him for a while now, maybe since she got addicted to those infamous Korean dramas and realised that she liked her neighbour Noah and not his brother Brad. She knew somehow that finding love for people like her- beautiful, fabulous and eccentric would be a difficult endeavour.

Cue the big, silent, heavy sigh tinkering around in her brain.

Somewhere along the way, the night melts away and Bella wakes up to soft beds, bright lights and a couple of heavy bodies cuddling all around her, making it much too hot to breathe well. Her head is aching, worsened by the aforementioned and aftermath of things and also the constant drilling noise she’s subjected to every morning from her neighbors renovation.

Right. So they’re in her apartment then.

A brief look around shows her that the pair of bodies are in fact Jessi and Luna, with Aly nowhere on the scene. Not that it’s strange, because the elder is an early riser and can’t stand sleeping with too many people around her anyway.

Her suspicions are confirmed when she walks into the kitchen and sees Aly whipping eggs in a bowl, not even looking close to a hangover. It’s f*****g unfair how she had to go and be friends with three people with stellar alcohol tolerance and (maybe) good babysitters. Bella’s, specifically.

“Morning, pretty,” Aly sings, much too cheerful than what Bella’s ready for. Last night’s melancholy has carried over into a new day and that sucks too. Everything sucks. But a lack of a potential love interest to share that suckiness with sucks the most.

“How are you so happy in the morning? I swear I saw you down, like, ten shots.”

“The power of genetic alcohol tolerance and the presence of the two chaotic loves of my life, what else,” Aly replies back smoothly, almost cheekily, and Bella positively hisses because wow, a low blow. She says so even.

“Wow, I was not expecting a low blow like that so soon.”

“Oh, quit moping,” Aly brushes off airily, putting scrambled eggs onto Bella’s plate. Rude, she didn’t even ask Bella if he wanted eggs. Bella’s ideal partner would have. “I have news in that department. Maybe good, depending on your reaction.”

Bella immediately narrows his eyes, picking up on the subtle tones of mischief apparent. “What kind of news?”

Aly takes a moment before getting her phone out and thumbing through a couple of things.

“So you remember Hestia texted me last night?”

“Ex-Hestia?”

“Jesus, yes,” Aly says exasperatedly. “I get it, I have an ex, big deal.”

“No, the big deal is you got dumped and not the other way round.”

Aly narrows her eyes then. “Careful, you might not get the good news after all.” Bella holds up her hands in the air as a sign of surrendering and waves at the elder to continue. “Right. So. Apparently she’s dating now.”

“Great…”

“No, hold up. Right, so, she’s dating this genius psych researcher who is the love of her life- that’s what I glean from these messages- and said love of the life is looking for potential…subjects.”

Bella frowns. That doesn’t sound like good news at all. “Subjects for…?”

“Um, an experiment. A social-psych one, about- wait a minute, what the f**k is this- right. About the science of love.”

Cue pin-drop silence.

“Okay,” Bella says after five precise minutes, “what the f**k?”

“Yeah, same sentiment.”

“No, wait,” Bella shovels more eggs in her mouth and downs her coffee because this just worsens her headache even more. “Be clearer.”

“I don’t know, Bell, Hestia just wrote this brief paragraph about what the experiment is about-and apparently, they’re trying to see if love can be ‘made’ if the right set of conditions and questions are asked between two people. Thought you’d like it since you were, you know, eating our brain up about the lack of it in your life.”

Bella’s sure she’s blushing bright red at that, but she’s also- baffled. That’s the word. She is utterly confused because she loves “Love”, you see, with the whole capital L, balloons and hearts that are not what hearts actually look like. SHe’s a sucker for the fanfictions and clichés and opposites attract (they don’t, really) and she adores it because she’s grown up that way, watching first from  her grandparents in love and then her parents, who loved each other so much and of course, her too. She likes the romantic aspect and the platonic one, and at one point, before Jessi got serious with Aly (way before they both decided to court each other), she’d even made a pact with Jessi to raise a child together.

So she likes Love. She just doesn’t get what this experiment wants from her, and she expresses as much to Aly, who just shrugs, sending something over text where a moment later Bella’s phone beeps with a listed contact. Matthe Lee, it says, and she’s not familiar with the name at all.

“This is the guy. I think it’ll be better to ask him all the questions. Hestia just asked me if I’d know someone or not.”

“Surely there are plenty of others.”

“My guess is this guy is looking for the rainbow railroad enthusiasts.” At this Bella shuts down, a temporary lid to the number of questions threatening to overflow her very self. It makes sense that the researcher in question might be looking for a specific kind of people. Isn’t that what plagues her as well? Her pool of selection is reduced because sure, boys are there, but Bella always been more of a homoromantic and she’s never found one that she just clicks with. Because Jessi is right, the others have looked for ones for her and she’s rejected most of them; a couple she’s gone on dates with that never progressed to second or third ones.

She wonders if it’s worth it because, above all, she doesn’t want to be- used for her emotions and beliefs. But if this Matthew person is dating Hestia, then there’s a high possibility it’s a genuine research thing and not some sick sort of homoerotic fetishizing game. She’s unfortunately met a lot of those weirdos as well in her woeful journey.

“Sounds cool,” she says at last, because it is cool, even if a bit strange. It’s somewhat like a blind date but like, with science. Is love a science? SHe knows attraction is biological but can love really be a product of an experiment?