“Sorry, too close? I didn’t mean to—”
She would have finished the sentence, if he hadn’t closed the distance between them and just—kissed her. Just like that.
It was little more than a peck—just his lips pressing against hers, and his hand on her waist to steady her a little. It was a kiss, but barely, and it certainly didn’t warrant the way her heart pounded in her chest, or the fact that there was something warm and liquid looping at the bottom of her belly. Not unpleasant, but confusing and a bit scary nonetheless, and it had Olive pull back after only a second. When she eased back on her heels, it seemed like for a fraction of a moment Adam followed her, trying to fill the gap between their mouths. Though by the time she’d blinked herself free of the haze of the kiss, he was standing tall in front of her, cheekbones dusted with red and chest moving up and down in shallow breaths. She must have dreamed up that last bit.
She needed to avert her eyes from him, now. And he needed to look elsewhere, too. Why were they staring at each other?
“Okay,” she chirped. “That, um . . . worked.”
Adam’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t reply.
“Well, then. I’m going to . . . um . . .” She gestured behind her shoulders with her thumb.
“Anh?”
“Yeah. Yeah, to Anh.”
He swallowed heavily. “Okay. Yeah.”
They had kissed. They had kissed—twice, now. Twice. Not that it mattered. No one cared. But. Twice. Plus, the lap. Earlier today. Again, not that it mattered.
“I’ll see you around, right? Next week?”
He lifted his fingers to his lips, then let his arm drop to his side. “Yes. On Wednesday.”
It was Thursday now. Which meant that they were going to see each other in six days. Which was fine. Olive was fine, no matter when or how often they met. “Yep. See you Wed— Hey, what about the picnic?”
“The— Oh.” Adam rolled his eyes, looking a little more like himself. “Right. That fu—” He stopped short. “That picnic.”
She grinned. “It’s on Monday.”
He sighed. “I know.”
“You’re still going?”
He gave her a look that clearly stated: It’s not like I have a choice, even though I’d rather have my nails extracted one by one. With pliers.
Olive laughed. “Well. I’m going, too.”
“At least there’s that.”
“Are you bringing Tom?”
“Probably. He actually likes people.”
“Okay. I can network with him a bit, and you and I can show off how steady and committed we are to the department chair. You’ll look like a wingless bird. No flight risk whatsoever.”
“Perfect. I’ll bring a counterfeit marriage license to casually drop at his feet.”
Olive laughed, waved goodbye, and then jogged up to Anh. She rubbed the side of her hand against her lips, as if trying to scrub her mind clean of the fact that she had just kissed Adam—Dr. Adam Carlsen—for the second time in her life. Which, again, was fine. It had been barely a kiss. Not important.
“Well, then,” Anh said, tucking her phone into her pocket. “You really just made out in front of the biology building with associate professor Adam MacArthur Carlsen.”
Olive rolled her eyes and started up the stairs. “I’m pretty sure that’s not his middle name. And we did not.”
“But it was clear that you wanted to.”
“Shut up. Why were you looking at us, anyway?”
“I wasn’t. I happened to glance up when he was about to jump you, and I just couldn’t look away.”
Olive snorted, plugging her headphones into her phone’s port. “Right. Of course.”
“He’s really into you. I can tell from the way he stares at—”
“I’m gonna listen to music very loudly now. To tune you out.”
“—you.”
It wasn’t until much later, after Olive had been working on Tom’s report for several hours, that she remembered what Adam had said when she’d told him she’d be at the picnic.
At least there’s that.
Olive ducked her head and smiled at her toes.
Chapter Seven
HYPOTHESIS: There will be a significant positive correlation between the amount of sunscreen poured in my hands and the intensity of my desire to murder Anh.
Tom’s report was about a third done and sitting tight at thirty-four pages single-spaced, Arial (11 point), no justification. It was 11:00 a.m., and Olive had been working in the lab since about five—analyzing peptide samples, writing down protocol notes, taking covert naps while the PCR machine ran—when Greg barged in, looking absolutely furious.
It was unusual, but not too unusual. Greg was a bit of a hothead to begin with, and grad school came with a lot of angry outbursts in semipublic places, usually for reasons that, Olive was fully aware, would appear ridiculous to someone who’d never stepped foot in academia. They’re making me TA Intro to Bio for the fourth time in a row; the paper I need is behind a paywall; I had a meeting with my supervisor and accidentally called her “Mom.”
Greg and Olive shared an adviser, Dr. Aslan, and while they’d always gotten along fine, they had never been particularly close. Olive had hoped, by picking a female adviser, to avoid some of the nastiness that was so often directed at women in STEM. Unfortunately she had still found herself in an all-male lab, which was . . . a less-than-ideal environment. That was why when Greg came in, slammed the door, and then threw a folder on his bench, Olive was not sure what to do. She watched him sit down and begin to sulk. Chase, another lab mate, followed him inside a moment later with an uneasy expression and started gingerly patting his back.
Olive looked longingly at her RNA samples. Then she stepped closer to Greg’s bench and asked, “What’s wrong?”
She had expected the answer to be The production of my reagent has been discontinued, or My p-value is .06, or Grad school was a mistake, but now it’s too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decided to drop out?
Instead what she got was: “Your stupid boyfriend is what’s wrong.”
By now the fake dating had been going on for over two weeks: Olive didn’t startle anymore when someone referred to Adam as her boyfriend. Still, Greg’s words were so unexpected and full of venom that she couldn’t help but answer, “Who?”
“Carlsen.” He spat the name out like a curse.
“Oh.”
“He’s on Greg’s dissertation committee,” Chase explained in a significantly milder tone, not quite meeting Olive’s eyes.
“Oh. Right.” This could be bad. Very bad. “What happened?”
“He failed my proposal.”
“Shit.” Olive bit into her lower lip. “I’m sorry, Greg.”
“This is going to set me back a lot. It’ll take me months to revise it, all because Carlsen had to go and nitpick. I didn’t even want him on my committee; Dr. Aslan forced me to add him because she’s so obsessed with his stupid computational stuff.”
Olive chewed on the inside of her cheek, trying to come up with something meaningful to say and failing miserably. “I’m really sorry.”
“Olive, do you guys talk about this stuff?” Chase asked out of the blue, eyeing her suspiciously. “Did he tell you he wasn’t going to pass Greg?”
“What? No. No, I . . .” I talk to him for exactly fifteen minutes a week. And, okay, I’ve kissed him. Twice. And I sat on his lap. Once. But it’s just that, and Adam—he speaks very little. I actually wish he spoke more, since I know nothing about him, and I’d like to know at least something. “No, he doesn’t. I think it would be against regulations if he did.”
“God.” Greg slammed his palm against the edge of the bench, making her jump. “He’s such a di
ck. What a sadistic piece of shit.”
Olive opened her mouth to—to do what, precisely? To defend Adam? He was a dick. She had seen him be a dick. In full action. Maybe not recently, and maybe not to her, but if she’d wanted to count on her fingers the number of acquaintances who’d ended up in tears because of him, well . . . She would need both her hands, and then her toes. Maybe borrow some of Chase’s, too.
“Did he say why, at least? What you have to change?”
“Everything. He wants me to change my control condition and add another one, which is going to make the project ten times more time-consuming. And the way he said it, his air of superiority—he is so arrogant.”
Well. It was no news, really. Olive scratched her temple, trying not to sigh. “It sucks. I’m sorry,” she repeated once more, at a loss for anything better and genuinely feeling for Greg.
“Yeah, well.” He stood and walked around his bench, coming to a stop in front of Olive. “You should be.”
She froze. Surely she must have misheard. “Excuse me?”
“You’re his girlfriend.”
“I . . .” Really am not. But. Even if she had been. “Greg, I’m only dating him. I am not him. How would I have anything to do with—”
“You’re fine with all of this. With him acting like that—like an asshole on a power trip. You don’t give a shit about the way he treats everyone in the program, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to stomach being with him.”
At his tone, she took a step back.
Chase lifted his hands in a peacekeeping gesture, coming to stand between them. “Hey, now. Let’s not—”
“I’m not the one who failed you, Greg.”
“Maybe. But you don’t care that half of the department lives in terror of your boyfriend, either.”
Olive felt anger bubbling up. “That is not true. I am able to separate my professional relationships and my personal feelings for him—”
“Because you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”
“That is unfair. What am I supposed to do?”
“Get him to stop failing people.”
“Get him—” Olive sputtered. “Greg, how is this a rational response for you to have about Adam’s failing you—”
“Ah. Adam, is it?”
She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Adam. What should I call my boyfriend to better please you? Professor Carlsen?”
“If you were a half-decent ally to any of the grads in the department, you would just dump your fucking boyfriend.”
“How— Do you even realize how little sense you are . . .”
No reason to finish her sentence, since Greg was storming out of the lab and slamming the door behind him, clearly uninterested in anything Olive might have wanted to add. She ran a hand down her face, unsettled by what had just happened.
“He’s not . . . he doesn’t really mean it. Not about you, at least,” Chase said while scratching his head. A nice reminder that he’d been standing there, in the room, for the entirety of this conversation. Front-row seat. It was going to take maybe fifteen minutes before everyone in the program knew about it. “Greg needs to graduate in the spring with his wife. So that they can find postdocs together. They don’t want to live apart, you know.”
She nodded—she hadn’t known, but she could imagine. Some of her anger dissipated. “Yeah, well.” Being horrible to me isn’t going to make his thesis work go any faster, she didn’t add.
Chase sighed. “It’s not personal. But you have to understand that it’s weird for us. Because Carlsen . . . Maybe he wasn’t on any of your committees, but you must know the kind of guy he is, right?”
She was unsure how to respond.
“And now you guys are dating, and . . .” Chase shrugged with a nervous smile. “It shouldn’t be a matter of taking sides, but sometimes it can feel like it, you know?”
Chase’s words lingered for the rest of the day. Olive thought about them as she ran her mice through her experimental protocols, and then later while she tried to figure out what to do with those two outliers that made her findings tricky to interpret. She mulled it over while biking home, hot wind warming her cheeks and ruffling her hair, and while eating two slices of the saddest pizza ever. Malcolm had been on a health kick for weeks now (something about cultivating his gut microbiome) and refused to admit that cauliflower crust did not taste good.
Among her friends, Malcolm and Jeremy had had unpleasant dealings with Adam in the past, but after the initial shock they didn’t seem to hold Olive’s relationship with him against her. She hadn’t concerned herself too much with the feelings of other grads. She had always been a bit of a loner, and focusing on the opinion of people she barely interacted with seemed like a wasteful use of time and energy. Still, maybe there was a glimmer of truth in what Greg had said. Adam had been anything but a jerk to Olive, but did accepting his help while he acted horribly toward her fellow grads make her a bad person?
Olive lay on her unmade bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. It had been more than two years since she’d borrowed Malcolm’s stepladder and carefully stuck them on the ceiling; the glue was starting to give out, and the large comet in the corner by the window was going to fall off any day. Without letting herself think it through too much, she rolled out of bed and rummaged inside the pockets of her discarded jeans until she found her cell phone.
She hadn’t used Adam’s number since he’d given it to her a few days ago—“If anything comes up or you need to cancel, just give me a call. It’s quicker than an email.” When she tapped the blue icon under his name a white screen popped up, a blank slate with no history of previous messages. It gave Olive an odd rush of anxiety, so much so that she typed the text with one hand while biting the thumbnail on the other.
Olive: Did you just fail Greg?
Adam was never on his phone. Never. Whenever Olive had been in his company, she’d not seen him check it even once—even though with a lab as big as his he probably got about thirty new emails every minute. Truth was, she didn’t even know that he owned a cell phone. Maybe he was a weird modern-day hippie and hated technology. Maybe he’d given her his office landline number, and that’s why he’d told her to call him. Maybe he didn’t know how to text, which meant that Olive was never going to get an answer from—
Her palm vibrated.
Adam: Olive?
It occurred to her that when Adam had given her his number, she’d neglected to give hers in return. Which meant that he had no way of knowing who was texting him now, and the fact that he’d guessed correctly revealed an almost preternatural intuition.
Damn him.
Olive: Yup. Me.
Olive: Did you fail Greg Cohen? I ran into him after his meeting. He was very upset.
At me. Because of you. Because of this stupid thing we’re doing.
There was a pause of a minute or so, in which, Olive reflected, Adam might very well be cackling evilly at the idea of all the pain he’d caused Greg. Then he answered:
Adam: I can’t discuss other grads’ dissertation meetings with you.
Olive sighed, exchanging a loaded look with the stuffed fox Malcolm had gotten her for passing her qualifying examinations.
Olive: I’m not asking you to tell me anything. Greg already told me. Not to mention that I’m the one taking the heat for it, since I’m your girlfriend.
Olive: ”Girlfriend.”
Three dots appeared at the bottom of her screen. Then they disappeared, and then they appeared again, and then, finally, Olive’s phone vibrated.
Adam: Committees don’t fail students. They fail their proposals.
She snorted, half wishing he could hear her.
Olive: Yeah, well. Tell it to Greg.
Adam: I have. I explained the weaknesses in his study. He’ll revise his proposal accordingly, and then I’ll sign o
ff on his dissertation.
Olive: So you admit that you are the one behind the decision to fail him.
Olive: Or, whatever. To fail his proposal.
Adam: Yes. In its current state, the proposal is not going to produce findings of scientific value.
Olive bit the inside of her cheek, staring at her phone and wondering if continuing this conversation was a terrible idea. If what she wanted to say was too much. Then she remembered the way Greg had treated her earlier, muttered, “Fuck it,” and typed:
Olive: Don’t you think that maybe you could have delivered that feedback in a nicer way?
Adam: Why?
Olive: Because if you had maybe he wouldn’t be upset now?
Adam: I still don’t see why.
Olive: Seriously?
Adam: It’s not my job to manage your friend’s emotions. He’s in a Ph.D. program, not grade school. He’ll be inundated by feedback he doesn’t like for the rest of his life if he pursues academia. How he chooses to deal with it is his own business.
Olive: Still, maybe you could try not to look like you enjoy delaying his graduation.
Adam: This is irrational. The reason his proposal needs to be modified is that in its current state it’s setting him up for failure. Me and the rest of the committee are giving him feedback that will allow him to produce useful knowledge. He is a scientist in training: he should value guidance, not be upset by it.
Olive gritted her teeth as she typed her responses.
Olive: You must know that you fail more people than anyone else. And your criticism is needlessly harsh. As in, immediately-drop-out-of-grad-school-and-never-look-back harsh. You must know how grads perceive you.
Adam: I don’t.
Olive: Antagonistic. And unapproachable.
And that was sugarcoating it. You’re a dick, Olive meant. Except that I know you can not be, and I can’t figure out why you’re so different with me. I’m absolutely nothing to you, so it doesn’t make any sense that you’d have a personality transplant every time you’re in my presence.
The three dots at the bottom of the screen bounced for ten seconds, twenty, thirty. A whole minute. Olive reread her last text and wondered if this was it—if she’d finally gone too far. Maybe he was going to remind her that being insulted over text at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday night was not part of their fake-dating agreement.
The Love Hypothesis Page 11