“I couldn’t.”
“The room is a double, of course,” he offered, as if that piece of information could have possibly changed her mind.
“It’s not a good idea.”
“Why?”
“Because people will think that we . . .” She noticed Adam’s look and immediately hushed. “Okay, fine. They already think that. But.”
“But?”
“Adam.” She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “There will be only one bed.”
He frowned. “No, as I said it’s a double—”
“It’s not. It won’t be. There will be only one bed, for sure.”
He gave her a puzzled look. “I got the booking confirmation the other day. I can forward it to you if you want; it says that—”
“It doesn’t matter what it says. It’s always one bed.”
He stared at her, perplexed, and she sighed and leaned helplessly against the back of her chair. He’d clearly never seen a rom-com or read a romance novel in his life. “Nothing. Ignore me.”
“My symposium is part of a satellite workshop the day before the conference starts, and then I’ll be speaking on the first day of the actual conference. I have the room for the entire conference, but I’ll probably need to leave for some meetings after night two, so you’d be by yourself from night three. We’d only overlap for one night.”
She listened to the logical, methodical way he listed sensible reasons why she should just accept his offer and felt a wave of panic sweep over her. “It seems like a bad idea.”
“That’s fine. I just don’t understand why.”
“Because.” Because I don’t want to. Because I have it bad. Because I’d probably have it even worse, after that. Because it’s going to be the week of September twenty-ninth, and I’ve been trying hard not to think about it.
“Are you afraid that I’ll try to kiss you without your consent? To sit on your lap, or fondle you under the pretext of applying sunscreen? Because I would never—”
Olive chucked her phone at him. He caught it in his left hand, studied its glitter amino-acid case with a pleased expression, and then carefully set it next to her laptop.
“I hate you,” She told him, sullen. She might have been pouting. And smiling at the same time.
His mouth twitched. “I know.”
“Am I ever going to live that stuff down?”
“Unlikely. And if you do, I’m sure something else will come up.”
She huffed, crossing her arms over her chest, and they exchanged a small smile.
“I can ask Holden or Tom if I can stay with them, and leave you my room,” he suggested. “But they know that I already have one, so I’d have to come up with excuses—”
“No, I’m not going to kick you out of your room.” She ran a hand through her hair and exhaled. “You’d hate it.”
He tilted his head. “What?”
“Rooming with me.”
“I would?”
“Yeah. You seem like a person who . . .” You seem like you like to keep others at arm’s length, uncompromising and ever so hard to know. You seem like you care very little about what people think of you. You seem like you know what you’re doing. You seem equally horrible and awesome, and just the thought that there’s someone you’d like to open up to, someone who’s not me, makes me feel like I can’t sit at this table any longer. “Like you’d want your own space.”
He held her gaze. “Olive. I think I’ll be fine.”
“But if you end up not being fine, then you’d be stuck with me.”
“It’s one night.” His jaw clenched and relaxed, and he added, “We are friends, no?”
Her own words, thrown back at her. I don’t want to be your friend, she was tempted to say. Thing was, she also didn’t want to not be his friend. What she wanted was completely outside of her ability to obtain, and she needed to forget it. Scrap it from her brain.
“Yes. We are.”
“Then, as a friend, don’t force me to worry about you using public transportation late at night in a city you’re not familiar with. Biking on roads without bike lanes is bad enough,” he muttered, and she immediately felt a weight sink into her stomach. He was trying to be a good friend. He cared for her, and instead of being satisfied with what she currently had, she had to ruin it all and—and want more.
She took a deep breath. “Are you sure? That it wouldn’t bother you?”
He nodded, silent.
“Okay, then. Okay.” She forced herself to smile. “Do you snore?”
He huffed out a laugh. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. How can you not know?”
He shrugged. “I just don’t.”
“Well, that probably means you don’t. Otherwise, someone would have told you.”
“Someone?”
“A roommate.” It occurred to her that Adam was thirty-four and likely hadn’t had a roommate in about a decade. “Or a girlfriend.”
He smiled faintly and lowered his gaze. “I guess my ‘girlfriend’ will tell me after SBD, then.” He said it in a quiet, unassuming tone, clearly trying to make a joke, but Olive’s cheeks warmed, and she couldn’t quite bear to look at him anymore. Instead she picked at a thread on the sleeve of her cardigan, and searched for something to say.
“My stupid abstract.” She cleared her throat. “It was accepted as a talk.”
He met her eyes. “Faculty panel?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not happy?”
“No.” She winced.
“Is it the public-speaking thing?”
He’d remembered. Of course he had. “Yeah. It will be awful.”
Adam stared at her and said nothing. Not that it would be fine, not that the talk would go smoothly, not that she was overreacting and underselling a fantastic opportunity. His calm acceptance of her anxiety had the exact opposite effect of Dr. Aslan’s enthusiasm: it relaxed her.
“When I was in my third year of grad school,” he said quietly, “my adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk.”
“Wow.” Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like, being expected to perform something so daunting with so little forewarning. At the same time, part of her marveled at Adam self-disclosing something without being asked a direct question. “Why did he do that?”
“Who knows?” He tilted his head back, staring at a spot above her head. His tone held a trace of bitterness. “Because he had an emergency. Because he thought it’d be a formative experience. Because he could.”
Olive just bet that he could. She didn’t know Adam’s former adviser, but academia was very much an old boys’ club, where those who held the power liked to take advantage of those who didn’t without repercussions.
“Was it? A formative experience?”
He shrugged again. “As much as anything that keeps you awake in a panic for forty-eight hours straight can be.”
Olive smiled. “And how did you do?”
“I did . . .” He pressed his lips together. “Not well enough.” He was silent for a long moment, his gaze locked somewhere outside the café’s window. “Then again, nothing was ever good enough.”
It seemed impossible that someone might look at Adam’s scientific accomplishments and find them lacking. That he could ever be anything less than the best at what he did. Was that why he was so severe in his judgment of others? Because he’d been taught to set the same impossible standards for himself?
“Do you still keep in touch with him? Your adviser, I mean.”
“He’s retired now. Tom has taken over what used to be his lab.”
It was such an uncharacteristically opaque, carefully worded answer. Olive couldn’t help being curious. “
Did you like him?”
“It’s complicated.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, looking pensive and far away. “No. No, I didn’t like him. I still don’t. He was . . .” It took him so long to continue, she almost convinced herself that he wouldn’t. But he did, staring at the late-afternoon sunlight disappearing behind the oak trees. “Brutal. My adviser was brutal.”
She chuckled, and Adam’s eyes darted back to her face, narrow with confusion.
“Sorry.” She was still laughing a little. “It’s just funny, to hear you complain about your old mentor. Because . . .”
“Because?”
“Because he sounds exactly like you.”
“I’m not like him,” he retorted, more sharply than Olive had come to expect from him. It made her snort.
“Adam, I’m pretty sure that if we were to ask anyone to describe you with one word, ‘brutal’ would come up one or ten times.”
She saw him stiffen before she was even done speaking, the line of his shoulders suddenly tense and rigid, his jaw tight and with a slight twitch to it. Her first instinct was to apologize, but she was not sure for what. There was nothing new to what she’d just told him—they’d discussed his blunt, uncompromising mentoring style before, and he’d always taken it in stride. Owned it, even. And yet his fists were clenched on the table, and his eyes were darker than usual.
“I . . . Adam, did I—” she stammered, but he interrupted her before she could continue.
“Everyone has issues with their advisers,” he said, and there was a finality to his tone that warned her not to finish her sentence. Not to ask What happened? Where did you just go?
So she swallowed and nodded. “Dr. Aslan is . . .” She hesitated. His knuckles were not quite as white anymore, and the tension in his muscles was slowly dissolving. It was possible that she’d imagined it. Yes, she must have. “She’s great. But sometimes I feel like she doesn’t really understand that I need more . . .” Guidance. Support. Some practical advice, instead of blind encouragement. “I’m not even sure what I need, myself. I think that might be part of the problem—I’m not very good at communicating it.”
He nodded and appeared to choose his words carefully. “It’s hard, mentoring. No one teaches you how to do it. We’re trained to become scientists, but as professors, we’re also in charge of making sure that students learn to produce rigorous science. I hold my grads accountable, and I set high standards for them. They’re scared of me, and that’s fine. The stakes are high, and if being scared means that they’re taking their training seriously, then I’m okay with it.”
She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“My job is to make sure that my adult graduate students don’t become mediocre scientists. That means I’m the one who’s tasked with demanding that they rerun their experiments or adjust their hypotheses. It comes with the territory.”
Olive had never been a people pleaser, but Adam’s attitude toward others’ perception of him was so cavalier, it was almost fascinating. “Do you really not care?” she asked, curious. “That your grads might dislike you as a person?”
“Nah. I don’t like them very much, either.” She thought of Jess and Alex and the other half a dozen grads and postdocs mentored by Adam whom she didn’t know very well. The thought of him finding them as annoying as they found him despotic made her chuckle. “To be fair, I don’t like people in general.”
“Right.” Don’t ask, Olive. Do not ask. “Do you like me?”
A millisecond of hesitation as he pressed his lips together. “Nope. You’re a smart-ass with abysmal taste in beverages.” He traced the corner of his iPad, a small smile playing on his lips. “Send me your slides.”
“My slides?”
“For your talk. I’ll take a look at them.”
Olive tried not to gape at him. “Oh—you . . . I’m not your grad. You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“You really don’t have to—”
“I want to,” he said, voice pitched low and even as he looked into her eyes, and Olive had to avert her gaze because something felt too tight in her chest.
“Okay.” She finally managed to snap out the loose thread on her sleeve. “How likely is it that your feedback will cause me to cry under the shower?”
“That depends on the quality of your slides.”
She smiled. “Don’t feel like you have to hold back.”
“Believe me, I don’t.”
“Good. Great.” She sighed, but it was reassuring, knowing that he was going to be checking her work. “Will you come to my talk?” she heard herself ask, and was as surprised by the request as Adam seemed to be.
“I . . . Do you want me to?”
No. No, it’s going to be horrible, and humiliating, and probably a disaster, and you’re going to see me at my worst and weakest. It’s probably best if you lock yourself into the bathroom for the entire duration of the panel. Just so you don’t accidentally wander in and see me making a fool of myself.
And yet. Just the idea of having him there, sitting in the audience, made the prospect seem like less of an ordeal. He was not her adviser, and he wasn’t going to be able to do much if she got inundated by a barrage of impossible questions, or if the projector stopped working halfway through the talk. But maybe that wasn’t what she needed from him.
It hit her then what was so special about Adam. That no matter his reputation, or how rocky their first meeting, since the very beginning, Olive had felt that he was on her side. Over and over, and in ways that she could never have anticipated, he had made her feel unjudged. Less alone.
She exhaled slowly. The realization should have been rattling, but it had an oddly calming effect. “Yes,” she told him, thinking that this might very well turn out to be all right. She might never have what she wanted from Adam, but for now at least, he was in her life. That was going to have to be enough.
“I will, then.”
She leaned forward. “Will you ask a long-winded, leading question that will cause me to ramble incoherently and lose the respect of my peers, thus forever undermining my place in the field of biology?”
“Possibly.” He was smiling. “Should I buy you that disgusting”—Adam gestured toward the register—“pumpkin sludge now?”
She grinned. “Oh, yes. I mean, if you want to.”
“I’d rather buy you anything else.”
“Too bad.” Olive jumped to her feet and headed for the counter, tugging at his sleeve and forcing him to stand with her. Adam followed meekly, mumbling something about black coffee that Olive chose to ignore.
Enough, she repeated to herself. What you have now, it will have to be enough.
Chapter Fourteen
HYPOTHESIS: This conference will be the worst thing to ever happen to my professional career, general well-being, and sense of sanity.
There were two beds in the hotel room.
Two double beds to be precise, and as she stared at them, Olive felt her shoulders sag with relief and had to resist the urge to fist-pump. Take that, you stupid rom-coms. She may have fallen for the dude she’d begun to fake-date like some born-yesterday fool, but at least she wouldn’t be sharing a bed with him any time soon. Given her disastrous past couple of weeks, she’d really, really needed the win.
There were a number of little clues that Adam had slept on the bed closest to the entrance—a book on the bedside table in a language that looked like German, a thumb drive and the same iPad she’d seen him carry around on several occasions, an iPhone charger dangling from the power outlet. A suitcase tucked by the foot of the bed, black and expensive-looking. Unlike Olive’s, it probably hadn’t been fished out of the Walmart bargain bin.
“I guess this is mine, then,” she murmured, sitting on the bed closest to the window and bouncing a few times to test the firmness of the mattress. It was a nice ro
om. Not ridiculously fancy, but Olive was suddenly grateful for the way Adam had snorted and looked at her like she was crazy when she’d offered to pay for half of it. At least the place was wide enough that they weren’t going to have to brush up against each other every time they moved around. Staying in here with him wouldn’t feel like a singularly sadistic version of seven minutes in heaven.
Not that they’d be together much. She was going to give her talk in a couple of hours—ugh—then go to the department’s social and hang out with her friends until . . . well, as long as she feasibly could. Odds were that Adam already had tons of meetings scheduled, and maybe they wouldn’t even see each other. Olive would be asleep when he came back tonight, and tomorrow morning one of them would pretend not to wake up while the other got ready. It was going to be fine. Harmless. At the very least, not make things worse than they currently were.
Olive’s usual conference outfit was black jeans and her least-frayed cardigan, but a few days ago Anh had mentioned that the ensemble might be too casual for a talk. After sighing for hours Olive had decided to bring the black wrap dress she’d bought on sale before interviewing for grad school and black pumps borrowed from Anh’s sister. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as soon as she slipped into the bathroom to put on the dress, she realized that it must have shrunk the last time she washed it. It didn’t quite hit her knees anymore, not by a couple of inches. She groaned and snapped a picture for Anh and Malcolm, who texted her, respectively, Still conference appropriate and a fire emoji. Olive prayed that Anh was right as she combed the waves in her hair and fought against dried-out mascara—her fault for buying makeup at the dollar store, clearly.
She had just got out of the bathroom, rehearsing her talk under her breath, when the door opened and someone—Adam, of course it was Adam—entered the room. He was holding his key card and typing something in his phone, but stopped as soon as he looked up and noticed Olive. His mouth opened, and—
That was it. It just stayed open.
“Hey.” Olive forced her face into a smile. Her heart was doing something weird in her chest. Beating a little too quickly. She should probably have it checked as soon as she got back home. One could never be too careful about cardiovascular health. “Hi.”
The Love Hypothesis Page 20