The Love Hypothesis

“Oh, I’m not crying. Well, I sort of am, but it’s just tears, you know?”

“I do not.”

She sighed, slumping against the tiled wall. “It’s my contacts. They expired some time ago, and they were never that great to begin with. They messed up my eyes

. I’ve taken them off, but . . .” She shrugged. Hopefully in his direction. “It takes a while, before they get better.”

“You put in expired contacts?” He sounded personally offended.

“Just a little expired.”

“What’s ‘a little’?”

“I don’t know. A few years?”

“What?” His consonants were sharp and precise. Crisp. Pleasant.

“Only just a couple, I think.”

“Just a couple of years?”

“It’s okay. Expiration dates are for the weak.”

A sharp sound—some kind of snort. “Expiration dates are so I don’t find you weeping in the corner of my bathroom.”

Unless this dude was Mr. Stanford himself, he really needed to stop calling this his bathroom.

“It’s fine.” She waved a hand. She’d have rolled her eyes, if they hadn’t been on fire. “The burning usually lasts only a few minutes.”

“You mean you’ve done this before?”

She frowned. “Done what?”

“Put in expired contacts.”

“Of course. Contacts are not cheap.”

“Neither are eyes.”

Humph. Good point. “Hey, have we met? Maybe last night, at the recruitment dinner with prospective Ph.D. students?”

“No.”

“You weren’t there?”

“Not really my scene.”

“But the free food?”

“Not worth the small talk.”

Maybe he was on a diet, because what kind of Ph.D. student said that? And Olive was sure that he was a Ph.D. student—the haughty, condescending tone was a dead giveaway. All Ph.D. students were like that: thinking they were better than everyone else just because they had the dubious privilege of slaughtering fruit flies in the name of science for ninety cents an hour. In the grim, dark hellscape of academia, graduate students were the lowliest of creatures and therefore had to convince themselves that they were the best. Olive was no clinical psychologist, but it seemed like a pretty textbook defense mechanism.

“Are you interviewing for a spot in the program?” he asked.

“Yup. For next year’s biology cohort.” God, her eyes were burning. “What about you?” she asked, pressing her palms into them.

“Me?”