“I don’t believe that there is a measurement yet devised by scientists to capture true love,” she said, ever the romantic. “Its very essence is unknowing. Leaping into what we don’tunderstand, damn the consequences. But if you’re convinced that this will help you make that decision, I’m all for it. So long as you know what you’re getting into.”
This apparently caught Addie’s interest. “Yeah. Say you realize you love him. Or your brain does, anyway. What do you do then?”
That one question lit the fuse on a billion of my neurons, each carrying their own renegade thought or anxiety.
I never got the chance to address any of them, much less Addie’s question, because the door to Kevin swung open, revealing Clara, standing in her Goop-beautiful glory, sipping a green smoothie.
“Ah! What are you three chickens doing in here?”
We all froze like we’d been caught looking for our Christmas gifts early.
“We were just—” Leelah squeaked.
“We’ve reappropriated some of Leelah’s old tech,” I said, gesturing to the headband. “Testing what stimuli trigger what parts of brain activity in non-sexually-intimate scenarios, so we can capture those same triggers in our toys.”
“Right,” Addie said, catching on fast. “Like, what parts of our innermost psyches are tickled by a man in a rolled-up button-down shirt? Or at a nightclub, when you’re dancing up on some cutie? If we understand the brain’s reaction in those scenarios, we can perhaps import the data and attempt to excite those same responses by use of our toys.”
Clara’s face positively lit up. That was the beauty of being the money and the brains rather than the scientific arm of a hardware start-up. You could be easily distracted by shiny things, no matter how ridiculous the explanation sounded. So what if you didn’t get it? You probably just didn’t have the technical know-how to understand. Just keep smiling and nodding and let the geniuses get to work.
“That’s fantastic. What a fresh approach. We should put these on some of our in-house testers.”
Leelah tensed. Due to the legal headaches currently swirling around her dissolved former company after her boyfriend embezzled all their funds, this tech from her previous companytechnicallywasn’t even supposed to see the light of day. “It’s not ready for such a mass trial yet.”
Clara quirked her head. “Is this your first time using it, Scout?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you’re the perfect test subject. Who better than a virgin mind to research the effects of sexual stimulation on the brain? And if you’re willing, I’m happy to bankroll you all on a little fact-finding mission.”
33
Stripping His Way Through Head School
Look, I’m sure they knew what they were talking about when they saidmoney can’t buy happiness. But Clara’s money got us into the city’s most exclusive, high-end strip club on one phone call’s notice, so…it couldn’t buy happiness, but it could buy a prime viewing location for Texas’s premier, 100% USDA prime ass, tits, and dicks.
“I cannotbelieveyou two agreed to this,” I mumbled, sinking down deeper into my seat.
Addie furrowed her brow. “She’sClara Mason. How the hell do you say no to her?”
“Besides, she thinks this is for science,” Leelah pointed out. “If we turned her down, she would’ve wanted to know why, and neither of us wanted to blow your cover.”
The atmosphere in this club was nothing like the movies. Its refined finishes and inset lighting made it look more like the strip club on a spaceship for high-end sex fiends, and the whisper-core horny playlist would probably be as dated and cringey in twenty years as the sax solo in “Careless Whisper” is today.
The dancers moved around a central, W-shaped catwalk, with the VIP tables positioned at each of the five points of it.Clara had apparently called ahead for us, so obviously we were at the central apex—the I-est of VIPs.
The dancers paid us special attention, each of them giving us the best angles, the sluttiest of teases, the most brazen of removals. But every time one approached, I suddenly found the ice in my old fashioned very, very interesting.
“Scout, you’re supposed to look at the dancers, you know,” Addie said as a particularly flexible blond lady pranced away at the conclusion of her number.
“She’s right. Being hereisa good thing, really. Not for whatever Clara thought we were doing, but good for the purposes of your experiment, I mean. We already have your baseline reading.” Leelah leaned across to me, displaying her phone screen. The application showed a readout of my brain, and with a simple slider on the bottom, she could control whether we looked at past readings or current ones. First, she showed me one from half an hour ago, when we were in the car on the way over and I was blissfully unaware of our destination. “Here at the club, you’ll experience lust, which we can then compare to your readings when you see Hudson. If the same parts of your brain light up when you see him, you’ll know it’s nothing more than an infatuation. If this part here lights up, though, it’s clear that it’s not just his pants you want to get into.”
“It’s his heart.”
“Yeah, I got that, Addie, thanks.”
“Might as well enjoy it,” Leelah said, pocketing the phone. “Relax. Have another drink. It’s on Clara’s card. I, for one, am going to have a good time tonight.”
Oh, and enjoy themselves they did.
