The Love Hypothesis

Olive felt a sudden surge of gratitude toward Tom. Not only was he going to rescue her project, but he was the reason Adam was still around. The reason she’d gotten the opportunity to know him. “It must be nice to be excited about work again.”

“It is. Academia takes a lot from you and gives back very little. It’s hard to stick around without a good reason to do so.”

She nodded absentmindedly, thinking that the words sounded familiar. Not just the content, but the delivery, too. Not surprising, though: it was exactly what The Guy in the bathroom had told her all those years ago. Academia’s a lot of bucks for very little bang. What matters is whether your reason to be in academia is good enough.

Suddenly, something clicked in her brain.

The deep voice. The blurry dark hair. The crisp, precise way of talking. Could The Guy in the bathroom and Adam be . . .

No. Impossible. The Guy was a student—though, had he explicitly said so? No. No, what he’d said was This is my lab’s bathroom and that he’d been there for six years, and he hadn’t answered when she’d asked about his dissertation timeline, and—

Impossible. Improbable. Inconceivable.

Just like everything else about Adam and Olive.

Oh God. What if they’d really met years ago? He probably didn’t remember, anyway. Surely. Olive had been no one. Still was no one. She thought about asking him, but why? He had no idea that a five-minute conversation with him had been the exact push Olive needed. That she’d thought about him for years.

Olive remembered her last words to him—Maybe I’ll see you next year—and oh, if only she’d known. She felt a surge of something warm and soft in the squishy part of herself that she guarded most carefully. She looked at Adam, and it swelled even larger, even stronger, even hotter.

You, she thought. You. You are just the most—

The worst—

The best—

Olive laughed, shaking her head.

“What?” he asked, puzzled.

“Nothing.” She grinned at him. “Nothing. Hey, you know what? You and I should go get coffee. To celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Everything! Your grant. My year at Harvard. How great our fake dating is going.”

It was probably unfair of her to ask, since they were not due for fake-dating coffee until tomorrow. But the previous Wednesday had lasted just a few short minutes, and since Friday night, there had been about thirty times when Olive had to forcibly remove her phone from her hands to avoid texting him things he couldn’t possibly care about. He didn’t need to know that he was right and the problem with her Western blot had been the antibody. There was no way he’d have answered her if on Saturday at 10:00 p.m., when she’d been dying to know if he was in his office, she had sent that Hey, what are you up to? message that she’d written and deleted twice. And she was glad she’d ended up chickening out of forwarding him that Onion article on sun-safety tips.

It was probably unfair of her to ask, and yet today was a momentous day, and she found herself wanting to celebrate. With him.

He bit the inside of his cheek, looking pensive. “Would it be actual coffee, or chamomile tea?”

“Depends. Will you go all moody on me?”

“I will if you get pumpkin stuff.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have no taste.” Her phone pinged with a reminder. “Oh, we should go to Fluchella, too. Before coffee.”

A vertical line appeared between his brows. “I’m afraid to ask what that is.”

“Fluchella,” Olive repeated, though it was clearly not helpful, judging from how the line bisecting his forehead deepened. “Mass flu vaccination for faculty, staff, and students. At no charge.”

Adam made a face. “It’s called Fluchella?”

“Yep, like the festival. Coachella?”

Adam was clearly not familiar.

“Don’t you get university emails about this stuff? There’ve been at least five.”