“Holden? Of me?”
“Of your work. And your research.”
“Oh.” She had no idea what to say to that. When did you talk about me? And why? “Oh,” she repeated uselessly.
She wasn’t sure why now, in this very moment, but the possible ramifications of their arrangement on Adam’s life hit her in full for the first time. They had agreed to fake-date because they both had something to gain from it, but it occurred to her that Adam also had significantly more to lose. Out of all the people she loved, Olive was only lying to one, Anh, and that was absolutely unavoidable. She could not care less about other students’ opinions. Adam, though . . . he was lying on a daily basis to his colleagues and his friends. His grads interacted with him every day believing that he was dating one of their peers. Did they think him lecherous? Had his relationship with Olive changed their perception of him? And what about other faculty members in the department, or in adjacent programs? Just because dating a grad student was allowed, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t frowned upon. And what if Adam met—or had already met—someone he actually liked? When they’d struck their deal, he’d said he wasn’t going to date, but that had been weeks ago. Olive herself had been convinced that she’d never be interested in dating anyone at the time—and didn’t that make her want to laugh now, in a remarkably unfunny way? Not to mention that she alone was benefitting from their arrangement. Anh and Jeremy had bought her lie, but Adam’s research funds were still frozen.
And yet, he was still helping her despite all of this. And Olive was repaying his kindness by getting ideas and developing feelings that were sure to make him feel uncomfortable.
“Do you want to get coffee?”
Olive looked up from her hands. “No.” She cleared her throat against the burning sensation lodged behind her sternum. The idea of coffee made her nauseous. “I think I need to go back to the lab.”
She bent down to retrieve her backpack, meaning to stand and leave immediately, but halfway through, a thought swept over her, and she found herself staring at him. He was sitting across from her with a concerned expression, a slight frown creasing his brow.
She attempted a smile. “We are friends, right?”
His frown deepened. “Friends?”
“Yes. You and I.”
He studied for a long moment. Something new passed through his face, stark and a little sad. Too fleeting to interpret. “Yes, Olive.”
She nodded, unsure as to whether she should be feeling relieved. This was not how she’d thought today would go, and there was a strange pressure behind her eyelids, which had her sliding her arms through the straps of her backpack that much quicker. She waved him goodbye with a tremulous smile, and she’d have already been out of this damn Starbucks, if he hadn’t said with that voice of his: “Olive.”
She paused right in front of his chair and looked down at him. It was so odd, to be the taller one for once.
“This might be inappropriate, but . . .” His jaw shifted, and he closed his eyes for a second. As if to collect his thoughts. “Olive. You are really . . . You are extraordinary, and I cannot imagine that if you told Jeremy how you feel he wouldn’t . . .” He trailed off and then nodded. A punctuation of sorts, as his words and the way he’d said them brought her that much closer to tears.
He thought it was Jeremy. Adam thought Olive had been in love with Jeremy when they’d begun their arrangement—he thought she was still in love with him. Because she’d just told a half-assed lie that she was too afraid to take back and—
It was going to happen. She was going to cry, and what she wanted most in the world was to not do it in front of Adam.
“I’ll see you next week, okay?” She didn’t wait for his response and walked briskly toward the exit, her shoulder bumping into someone she should have apologized to. Once she was outside, she took a deep breath and marched to the biology building, trying to empty her mind, forcing herself to think about the section she was slated to TA later today, the fellowship application she’d promised Dr. Aslan she’d send by tomorrow, the fact that Anh’s sister would be in town next weekend and had made plans to cook Vietnamese food for everyone.
A chilly wind weaved through the leaves of the campus trees, pushing Olive’s sweater against her body. She hugged herself and didn’t look back to the café. Fall had finally begun.
Chapter Twelve
HYPOTHESIS: If I am bad at doing activity A, my chances of being asked to engage in activity A will rise exponentially.
Campus felt strangely empty with Adam gone, even on days in which she likely wouldn’t have met him anyway. It didn’t make much sense: Stanford was most definitely not empty, but teeming with loud, annoying undergrads on their way to and from class. Olive’s life, too, was full: her mice were old enough for the behavioral assays to be run, she’d finally gotten revisions for a paper she’d submitted months earlier, and she had to start making concrete plans for her move to Boston next year; the class she was TA’ing had a test coming up, and undergrads magically began to pop by during office hours, looking panicky and asking questions that were invariably answered in the first three lines of the syllabus.
Malcolm spent a couple of days trying to convince Olive to tell Adam the truth, and then became—thankfully—too discouraged by her stubbornness and too busy trying to meditate away his own dating drama to insist. He did bake several batches of butterscotch cookies, though, patently lying that he was “not rewarding your self-destructive behaviors, Olive, but just perfecting my recipe.” Olive ate them all, and hugged him from behind while he sprinkled sea salt on top of the last batch.
On Saturday, Anh came over for beer and s’mores, and she and Olive daydreamed about leaving academia and finding industry jobs that paid a proper salary and acknowledged the existence of free time.
“We could, like, sleep in on Sunday mornings. Instead of having to check on our mice at six a.m.”
“Yeah.” Anh sighed wistfully. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was running in the background, but neither of them was paying attention. “We could buy real ketchup instead of stealing packets from Burger King. And order that wireless vacuum cleaner I saw on TV.”
Olive giggled drunkenly and turned to her side, making the bed squeak. “Seriously? A vacuum cleaner?”
“A wireless one. It’s the shit, Ol.”
“That is . . .”
“What?”