"She'll love you; she's very affectionate. And thank you for letting us stay in your beautiful guesthouse. It's very generous of you."
"You can stay as long as you need to. All my grandchildren practically live here. I would love it if you came over for dinner while you're staying here."
Talon pipes up. "We'll definitely take you up on that. I haven't had a chance to test out the wife's cooking yet, but I'm pretty sure she's going to try to poison me with tofurkey." He folds up his napkin and places it on the table. "I have some extra clothes in one of the bedrooms here. I'm gonna go grab some so I don't have to go back to the condo today and deal with Mikah's drunken idiocy."
As soon as he's out of earshot, his grandmother smiles broadly at me. "You're worried you made the biggest mistake of your life?" she asks. "It's okay, you can be honest."
"I'm not sure what to think yet," I answer truthfully. "We don't seem to be very well-matched."
"Give it time. I know he can be a handful, but behind his goofy, sarcastic front is actually a very deep, passionate young man. He just hides it well."
"Well, we're both committed to the process of trying to make this work, so that's a start. I'm hoping after we spend more time together, we'll start to have feelings for each other."
"Honey, I am positive you will. I practically raised all these kids, I know all of their hearts like my own."
That definitely sounds like a small glimmer of hope at the end of this strange tunnel.
After our visit with Gram, we walk back to the guesthouse so we can do our first video chat with Dr. Hollister, which we had to agree to in order to be selected for the experiment, in addition to keeping our written journals. Once a week, we have to meet via online video separately, and occasionally together, to discuss how things are progressing. After the first month, the chats are spaced out to every other week.
"There's a laptop here so we can just use that in the guest room," Talon suggests. "That'll give us each some privacy for the video chat."
"That sounds good," I agree. "Do you want to go first?"
He shakes his head as he digs the laptop out of a desk drawer and grabs the power cord for it. "No. I'll set it up, but you get to go first."
Great.
I close myself up in the guest bedroom with the laptop and connect to the video chat five minutes later than the scheduled time. Suddenly, I'm staring at Dr. Hollister's face on the screen.
"Asia! Nice to see you. How is everything going?"
I feel strange talking to a computer screen. It feels like I'm talking to a television.
"It's been interesting."
"Interesting?" she repeats, jotting something down on a notepad she's holding. "Can you tell me what you mean by that?"
"Well…we're both a little confused, because neither of us seem to have the qualities, or even the physical attributes, we described in the questionnaires and the meetings."