The Experiment Read Online Free PDF

the leggy young thing with a girl’s face on a woman’s body. After he broke it off she’d had to take a long look at her attitudes toward everything—toward herself, toward men, toward sex—and she’d found that she’d had none. Everything she had thought and everything she had been was for Jack and when she left—or, more accurately, when he threw her out—she had discovered that she really had no attitudes of her own at all. She was no one.
    It had been a terrible, desperate and despairing time after the split, dragging on for over a year, and she had lost everything. Her lover, her home, her friends, her confidence and her idea of whom and what she was. And the worst part of it was the discovery of how shallow his feelings for her had been all along and how shallow he himself was. She saw now that he had never loved her, not as she understood the word, not as she had loved him. She had been his toy, his trophy, someone he liked to show off and use to enhance his own status.
    She remembered how at parties he would show her off, have his friends go up and feel her breasts just to show them that they were real, or pinch her ass to show them how tight it was. She had gone along with it despite her embarrassment. She had even felt a twinge of pride that he was so proud of her.
    And he had betrayed her. Not once but many times, with women she had called friends. He had used her, had actually gone so far as to promise her to some of his friends in exchange for their women, all without ever telling her. And when she’d refused this final indignity, he’d thrown her out, literally, leaving her things in the hallway while he went off with someone else.
    So for now she was still living with a survivor’s mentality, living alone and seeing to her own needs, keeping things as simple as possible as she slowly reassembled a life. She was living far below her abilities—a nowhere job, a third-rate apartment—and she knew it, but for now it was enough. She had some friends. She could probably find lovers if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. She had decided that sex was just too dangerous, a luxury she simply could not afford right now. Maybe when she felt more healed, but not now. She never wanted to love anyone again like she had loved Jack. She never wanted to give so much. It just wasn’t worth it.
    She had always been attractive, beautiful when she wanted to be, but her beauty was just another thing that she had no interest in anymore—something from her past life. It seemed to her that her looks had always served her badly, had always led to her getting involved with the wrong type of people, people who put a great value on physical appearance and nothing else, and so the hell with them. She didn’t disguise her beauty, she just ignored it, piling her long brown hair up under her waitress’s cap, putting on a little eyeliner—that was good enough. Really, she didn’t care. She looked back on the girl she had been with the perfect makeup, the exquisite body, the expensive clothes, and all she could think was fool .
    At night, sitting in the turret window of her third-floor walk-up with her cat and her glass of wine, she would look down on the streets and think about her life and what had happened to her. This was where she’d sat those many days and weeks after the breakup, slowly and painfully trying to put herself together. It seemed to her now that she had perhaps put some new pieces in and left some others out, so that she was no longer certain of just who she was anymore. She felt as if she might finally be ready to find that out.
    In the end, there was no doubt but that she’d go back. She’d never be satisfied unless she went at least one more time, one more session. It wasn’t just the money, though the money was certainly welcome. It wasn’t the mystery, though the purpose of the experiment and how he’d come by her name nagged at her. It was what had happened to her that she wanted to know