I will present our Quantum Monte Carlo studies of hard-core
boson Hamiltonians with ring-only interactions on the 2D
square lattice searching for a so-called Excitonic Bose
Liquid (EBL).  This phase, which can be viewed as a special
type of "Bose metal", had eluded numerical realization since
the first proposal a decade ago, as the original model
showed either charge-order at half-filling or phase
separation at generic density.  By a minimal modification of
the model by including more extended ring exchanges, we are
able to stabilize the EBL both at half-filling and away from
half-filling and start confronting the EBL theory with
unbiased numerical results.  I will also describe a
parton-gauge perspective on the EBL and some lessons for
Gutzwiller-type wavefunctions