HYPOTHESIS: Adam Carlsen and I have absolutely nothing in common, and having coffee with him will be twice as painful as a root canal. Without anesthesia.
Olive arrived to the first fake-dating Wednesday late and in the foulest of moods, after a morning spent growling at her cheap, knockoff reagents for not dissolving, then not precipitating, then not sonicating, then not being enough for her to run her entire assay.
She paused outside the coffee shop’s door and took a deep breath. She needed a better lab if she wanted to produce decent science. Better equipment. Better reagents. Better bacteria cultures. Better everything. Next week, when Tom Benton arrived, she had to be on top of her game. She needed to prepare her spiel, not waste time on a coffee she didn’t particularly want, with a person she most definitely didn’t want to talk to, halfway through her experimental protocol.
Ugh.
When she stepped inside the café, Adam was already there, wearing a black Henley that looked like it was ideated, designed, and produced specifically with the upper half of his body in mind. Olive was momentarily bemused, not so much that his clothes fit him well, but that she’d noticed what someone was wearing to begin with. It was not like her. She’d been seeing Adam traipse around the biology building for the better part of two years, after all, not to mention that in the past couple of weeks they’d spoken an inordinate amount of times. They had even kissed, if one counted what had happened on The Night as a proper kiss. It was dizzying and a little unsettling, the realization that sank into her as they got in line to order their coffee.
Adam Carlsen was handsome.
Adam Carlsen, with his long nose and wavy hair, with his full lips and angular face that shouldn’t have fit together but somehow did, was really, really, really handsome. Olive had no clue why it hadn’t registered before, or why what made her realize it was him putting on a plain black shirt.
She willed herself to stare ahead at the drink menu instead of his chest. In the coffee shop, there were a total of three biology grad students, one pharmacology postdoc, and one undergraduate research assistant eyeing them. Perfect.
“So. How are you?” she asked, because it was the thing to do.
“Fine. You?”
“Fine.”
It occurred to Olive that maybe she hadn’t thought this through as thoroughly as she should have. Because being seen together might have been their goal, but standing next to each other in silence was not going to fool anyone into thinking that they were blissfully dating. And Adam was . . . well. He seemed unlikely to initiate any kind of conversation.
“So.” Olive shifted her weight to the balls of her feet a couple of times. “What’s your favorite color?”
He looked at her, confused. “What?”
“Your favorite color.”
“My favorite color?”
“Yep.”
There was a crease between his eyes. “I—don’t know?”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“They’re colors. They’re all the same.”
“There must be one you like most.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Red?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yellow? Vomit green?”
His eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking?”
Olive shrugged. “It feels like something I should know.”
“Why?”
“Because. If someone tries to figure out whether we’re really dating, it might be one of the first questions they ask. Top five, for sure.”
He studied her for a few seconds. “Does that seem like a likely scenario to you?”
“About as likely as me fake-dating you.”
He nodded, as if conceding her point. “Okay. Black, I guess.”
She snorted. “Figures.”
“What’s wrong with black?” He frowned.
“It’s not even a color. It’s no colors, technically.”
“It’s better than vomit green.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Of course it is.”
“Yeah, well. It suits your scion-of-darkness personality.”
“What does that even—”
“Good morning.” The barista smiled at them cheerfully. “What will you have today?”
Olive smiled back, gesturing at Adam to order first.
“Coffee.” He darted a glance at her before adding, sheepishly, “Black.”
She had to duck her head to hide her smile, but when she glanced at him again, the corner of his mouth was curved upward. Which, she reluctantly admitted to herself, was not a bad look for him. She ignored it and ordered the most fatty, sugary thing on the drink menu, asking for extra whipped cream. She was wondering if she should try to make up for it by buying an apple, too, or if she should just lean into it and top it off with a cookie, when Adam took a credit card out of his wallet and held it to the cashier.
“Oh, no. No, no, no. No.” Olive put her hand in front of his and lowered her voice. “You can’t pay for my stuff.”
He blinked. “I can’t?”
“That’s not the kind of fake relationship we’re having.”
He looked surprised. “It isn’t?”
“Nope.” She shook her head. “I would never fake-date a dude who thinks that he has to pay for my coffee just because he’s a dude.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “I doubt a language exists in which the thing you just ordered could be referred to as ‘coffee.’ ”
“Hey—”
“And it’s not about me being a ‘dude’ ”—the word came out a touch pained—“but about you still being a grad student. And your yearly income.”
For a moment she hesitated, wondering if she should be offended. Was Adam being his well-known ass self? Was he patronizing her? Did he think she was poor? Then she remembered that she was, in fact, poor, and that he probably made five times as much as her. She shrugged, adding a chocolate chip cookie, a banana, and a pack of gum to her coffee. To his credit, Adam said nothing and paid the resulting $21.39 without batting an eye.
While they were waiting for their drinks, Olive’s mind began drifting off to her project and to whether she could convince Dr. Aslan to buy her better reagents soon. She looked distractedly around the coffee shop, finding that even though the research assistant, the postdoc, and one of the students were gone, two grads (one of whom serendipitously happened to work in Anh’s lab) were still sitting at a table by the door, glancing toward them every few minutes. Excellent.
She leaned her hip against the counter and looked up at Adam. Thank God this thing was only going to be ten minutes a week, or she’d develop a permanent crick in her neck.
“Where were you born?” she asked.
“Is this another one of your green card marriage interview questions?”
She giggled. He smiled in response, as if pleased to have made her laugh. Though it was certainly for some other reason.
“Netherlands. The Hague.”
“Oh.”
He leaned against the counter, too, directly in front of her. “Why ‘oh’?”
“I don’t know.” Olive shrugged. “I think I expected . . . New York? Or maybe Kansas?”
He shook his head. “My mother used to be a US ambassador to the Netherlands.”
“Wow.” Weird, to imagine that Adam had a mother. A family. That before being tall and scary and infamous, he’d been a kid. Maybe he spoke Dutch. Maybe he had smoked herring for breakfast on the reg. Maybe his mother had wanted him to follow in her footsteps and become a diplomat, but his shiny personality had emerged and she’d given up on that dream. Olive found herself acutely eager to know more about his upbringing, which was . . . weird. Very weird.
“Here you go.” Their drinks appeared on the counter. Olive told herself that the way the blond barista was obviously checking out Adam as he turned to retrieve a lid for his cup was none of her business. She also reminded herself that as curious as she was about his diplomat mother, how many languages he spoke, and whether he liked tulips, it was information that went well beyond their arrangement.
People had seen them together. They were going to go back to their labs and tell improbable tales of Dr. Adam Carlsen and the random, unremarkable student they’d spotted him with. Time for Olive to go back to her science.
She cleared her throat. “Well. This was fun.”
He looked up from his cup, surprised. “Is fake-dating Wednesday over?”
“Yep. Great job, team, now hit the showers. You’re free until next week.” Olive stabbed her straw into her drink and took a sip, feeling the sugar explode in her mouth. Whatever she’d ordered, it was disgustingly good. She was probably developing diabetes as she spoke. “I’ll see you—”
“Where were you born?” Adam asked before she could leave.
Oh. They were doing this, then. He was probably just trying to be polite, and Olive sighed inwardly, thinking longingly of her lab bench. “Toronto.”
“Right. You’re Canadian,” he said, like he’d already known.
“Yep.”
“When did you move here?”
“Eight years ago. For college.”
He nodded, as if storing up the information. “Why the US? Canada has excellent schools.”
“I got a full ride.” It was true. If not the whole truth.
He fidgeted with the cardboard cup holder. “Do you go back a lot?”
“Not really, no.” Olive licked some whipped cream off her straw. She was puzzled when he immediately looked away from her.
“Do you plan to move back home once you graduate?”
She tensed. “Not if I can help it.” She had lots of painful memories in Canada, and her only family, the people she wanted nearby, were Anh and Malcolm, both US citizens. Olive and Anh had even made a pact that if Olive was ever on the verge of losing her visa, Anh would marry her. In hindsight, this entire fake-dating business with Adam was going to be great practice for when Olive leveled up and started defrauding the Department of Homeland Security in earnest.
Adam nodded, taking a sip of his coffee. “Favorite color?”
Olive opened her mouth to tell him her favorite color, which was so much better than his, and . . . “Dammit.”
He gave her a knowing look. “Difficult, isn’t it?”
“There are so many good ones.”
“Yup.”
“I’m going to go with blue. Light blue. No, wait!”
“Mmm.”
“Let’s say white. Okay, white.”
He clucked his tongue. “You know, I don’t think I can accept that. White’s not really a color. More like all colors put together—”
Olive pinched him on the fleshy part of his forearm.
“Ow,” he said, clearly not in pain. With a sly smile, he waved goodbye and turned away, heading for the biology building.
“Hey, Adam?” she called after him.
He paused and looked back at her.
“Thanks for buying me three days’ worth of food.”
He hesitated and then nodded, once. That thing he was doing with his mouth—he was definitely smiling down at her. A little begrudgingly, but still.
“My pleasure, Olive.”
Today, 2:40 p.m.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project
Olive,
I’ll be flying in on Tuesday afternoon. How about we meet on Wednesday around 3:00 p.m. in Aysegul Aslan’s lab? My collaborator can point me in its direction.
TB
Sent from my iPhone
OLIVE WAS LATE for her second fake-dating Wednesday, too, but for different reasons—all Tom Benton related.
First, she’d overslept after staying up late the previous night rehearsing how she was going to sell him her project. She’d repeated her spiel so many times that Malcolm had started finishing her sentences, and then, at 1:00 a.m., he’d hurled a nectarine at her and begged her to go practice in her room. Which she had, until 3:00 a.m.
Then, in the morning, she’d realized that her usual lab outfit (leggings, ratty 5K T-shirt, and very, very messy bun) would probably not communicate “valuable future colleague” to Dr. Benton, and spent an excessive amount of time looking for something appropriate. Dress for success and all that.
Finally, it occurred to her that she had no idea what Dr. Benton—arguably the most important person in her life at the moment, and yes, she was aware of how sad that sounded but decided not to dwell on it—even looked like. She looked him up on her phone and found out that he was somewhere in his late thirties, blond with blue eyes, and had very straight, very white teeth. When she arrived at the campus Starbucks, Olive was whispering to his Harvard headshot, “Please, let me come work in your lab.” Then she noticed Adam.
It was an uncharacteristically cloudy day. Still August, but it almost felt like late fall. Olive glanced at him, and she immediately knew that he was in the nastiest of moods. That rumor of him throwing a petri dish against a wall because his experiment hadn’t worked out, or because the electron microscope needed repairs, or because something equally inconsequential had happened came to mind. She considered ducking under the table.
It’s okay, she told herself. This is worth it. Things with Anh were back to normal. Better than normal: she and Jeremy were officially dating, and last weekend Anh had showed up to beers-and-s’mores night wearing leggings and an oversize MIT sweater she’d clearly borrowed from him. When Olive had eaten lunch with the two of them the other day, it hadn’t even felt awkward. Plus, the first-, second-, and even third-year grads were too scared of Adam Carlsen’s “girlfriend” to steal Olive’s pipettes, which meant that she didn’t have to stuff them in her backpack and take them home for the weekend anymore. And she was getting some grade A free food out of this. She could take Adam Carlsen—yes, even this pitch-black-mood Adam Carlsen. For ten minutes a week, at the very least.
“Hey.” She smiled. He responded with a look that exuded moodiness and existential angst. Olive took a fortifying breath. “How are you?”
“Fine.” His tone was clipped, his expression tenser than usual. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and jeans, looking more like a wood-chopping lumberjack than a scholar pondering the mysteries of computational biology. She couldn’t help noticing the muscles and wondered again if he had his clothes custom-made. His hair was still a bit long but shorter than the previous week. It seemed a little surreal that she and Adam Carlsen were at a point where she was able to keep track of both his moods and his haircuts.
“Ready to get coffee?” she chirped.
He nodded distractedly, barely looking at her. On a table in the back, a fifth-year was glancing at them while pretending to clean the monitor of his laptop.
“Sorry if I was late. I just—”
“It’s fine.”
“Did you have a good week?”
“Fine.”
Okay. “Um . . . did you do anything fun last weekend?”
“I worked.”
They got in line to order, and it was all Olive could do to stop herself from sighing. “Weather’s been nice, right? Not too hot.”
He grunted in response.
It was starting to be a bit much. There was a limit to what Olive would do for this fake-dating relationship—even for a free mango Frappuccino. She sighed. “Is it because of the haircut?”
That got his attention. Adam looked down at her, a vertical line deep between his eyebrows. “What?”
“The mood. Is it because of the haircut?”
“What mood?”
Olive gestured broadly toward him. “This. The bad mood you’re in.”
“I’m not in a bad mood.”
She snorted—though that was probably not the right term for what she just did. It was too loud and derisive, more like a laugh. A snaugh.
“What?” He frowned, unappreciative of her snaugh.
“Come on.”
“What?”
“You ooze moodiness.”
“I do not.” He sounded indignant, which struck her as oddly endearing.
“You so do. I saw that face, and I immediately knew.”
“You did not.”
“I did. I do. But it’s fine, you’re allowed to be in a bad mood.”
It was their turn, so she took a step forward and smiled at the cashier.
“Good morning. I’ll have a pumpkin spice latte. And that cream cheese danish over there. Yep, that one, thank you. And”—she pointed at Adam with her thumb—“he’ll have chamomile tea. No sugar,” she added cheerfully. She immediately took a few steps to the side, hoping to avoid damage in case Adam decided to throw a petri dish at her. She was surprised when he calmly handed his credit card to the boy behind the counter. Really, he wasn’t as bad as they made him out to be.
“I hate tea,” he said. “And chamomile.”
Olive beamed up at him. “That is unfortunate.”
“You smart-ass.”
He stared straight ahead, but she was almost certain that he was about to crack a smile. There was a lot to be said about him but not that he didn’t have a sense of humor.
“So . . . not the haircut?”
“Mm? Ah, no. It was a weird length. Getting in my way while I was running.”
Oh. So he was a runner. Like Olive. “Okay. Great. Because it doesn’t look bad.”
It looks good. As in, really good. You were probably one of the most handsome men I’d ever talked to last week, but now you look even better. Not that I care about these things. I don’t care at all. I rarely notice guys, and I’m not sure why I’m noticing you, or your hair, or your clothes, or how tall and broad you are. I really don’t get it. I never care. Usually. Ugh.
“I . . .” He seemed flustered for a second, his lips moving without making a sound as he looked for an appropriate response. Then, out of the blue, he said, “I talked with the department chair this morning. He’s still refusing to release my research funds.”
“Oh.” She cocked her head. “I thought they weren’t due to decide until the end of September.”
“They aren’t. This was an informal meeting, but the topic came up. He said that he’s still monitoring the situation.”
“I see.” She waited for him to continue. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, she asked, “Monitoring . . . how?”
“Unclear.” He was clenching his jaw.
“I’m sorry.” She felt for him. She really did. If there was something she could empathize with, it was scientific studies coming to an abrupt halt because of a lack of resources. “Does that mean that you can’t continue your research?”
“I have other grants.”
“So . . . the problem is that you cannot start new studies?”
“I can. I had to rearrange different pots, but I should be able to afford to start new lines of research, too.”
Uh? “I see.” She cleared her throat. “So . . . let me recap. It sounds like Stanford froze your funds based on rumors, which I agree is a crappy move. But it also sounds like for now you can afford to do what you were planning, so . . . it’s not the end of the world?”
Adam gave her an affronted glare, suddenly looking even more cross.
Oh, boy. “Don’t get me wrong, I understand the principle of the matter, and I’d be mad, too. But you have, how many other grants? Actually, don’t answer that. I’m not sure I want to know.”
He probably had fifteen. He also had tenure, and dozens of publications, and there were all those honors listed on his website. Not to mention that she’d read on his CV that he had one patent. Olive, on the other hand, had cheap knockoff reagents and old pipettes that regularly got stolen. She tried not to dwell on how much further ahead than her he was in his career, but it was unforgettable, how good he was at what he did. How annoyingly good.
“My point is, this is not an insurmountable problem. And we’re actively working on it. We’re in this together, showing people that you’re going to stay here forever because of your amazing girlfriend.”
Olive pointed to herself with a flourish, and his glare followed her hand. Clearly he was not a fan of rationalizing and working through his emotions.
“Or, you could stay mad, and we could go to your lab and throw test tubes full of toxic reagents at each other until the pain of third-degree burns overrides your shitty mood? Sounds like fun, no?”
He looked away and rolled his eyes, but she could see it in the curve of his cheeks that he was amused. Likely against his will. “You are such a smart-ass.”
“Maybe, but I’m not the one who grunted when I asked how your week was.”
“I did not grunt. And you ordered me chamomile tea.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome.”
They were quiet for a few moments as she chewed through the first bite of her Danish. Once she’d swallowed she said, “I’m sorry about your funds.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry about the mood.”
Oh. “It’s okay. You’re famous for that.”
“I am?”
“Yep. It’s kind of your thing.”
“Is that so?”
“Mmm.”
His mouth twitched. “Maybe I wanted to spare you.”
Olive smiled, because it was actually a nice thing to say. And he was not a nice person, but he was very kind to her most of the time—if not always. He was almost smiling back, staring down at her in a way that she couldn’t quite interpret but that made her think weird thoughts, until the barista deposited their drinks on the counter. He suddenly looked like he was about to retch.
“Adam? Are you okay?”
He stared at her cup and took a step back. “The smell of that thing.”
Olive inhaled deeply. Heaven. “You hate pumpkin spice latte?”
He wrinkled his nose, moving even farther away. “Gross.”
“How can you hate it? It’s the best thing your country has produced in the past century.”
“Please, stand back. The stench.”
“Hey. If I have to choose between you and pumpkin spice latte, maybe we should rethink our arrangement.”
He eyed her cup like it contained radioactive waste. “Maybe we should.”
He held the door open for her as they exited the coffee shop, taking care not to come too close to her drink. Outside it was starting to drizzle. Students were hastily packing up their laptops and notebooks from the patio tables to head to class or move to the library. Olive had been in love with the rain since as far back as she could remember. She inhaled deeply and filled her lungs with petrichor, stopping with Adam under the canopy. He took a sip of his chamomile tea, and it made her smile.
“Hey,” she said, “I have an idea. Are you going to the fall biosciences picnic?”
He nodded. “I have to. I’m on the biology department’s social-and-networking committee.”
She laughed out loud. “No way.”
“Yep.”
“Did you actually sign up for it?”
“It’s service. I was forced to rotate into the position.”
“Ah. That sounds . . . fun.” She winced sympathetically, almost laughing again at his appalled expression. “Well, I’m going, too. Dr. Aslan makes us all go, says it promotes bonding among lab mates. Do you make your grads go?”
“No. I have other, more productive ways of making my grads miserable.”
She chuckled. He was funny, in that weird, dark way of his. “I bet you do. Well, here’s my idea: we should hang when we’re there. In front of the department chair—since he’s ‘monitoring.’ I’ll bat my eyelashes at you; he’ll see that we’re basically one step away from marriage. Then he’ll make a quick phone call and a truck will drive up and unload your research funds in cash right there in front of—”
“Hey, man!”
A blond man approached Adam. Olive fell silent as Adam turned to smile at him and exchanged a handshake—a close bros handshake. She blinked, wondering if she was seeing things, and took a sip of her latte.
“I thought you’d sleep in,” Adam was saying.
“The time difference screwed me up. I figured I might as well come to campus and get to work. Something to eat, too. You have no food, man.”
“There are apples in the kitchen.”
“Right. No food.”
Olive took a step back, ready to excuse herself, when the blond man turned his attention to her. He looked eerily familiar, even though she was certain she had never met him before.
“And who’s this?” he asked curiously. His eyes were a very piercing blue.
“This is Olive,” Adam said. There was a beat after her name, in which he should have probably specified how he knew Olive. He did not, and she really couldn’t blame him for not wanting to feed their fake-dating crap to someone who was clearly a good friend. She just kept her smile in place and let Adam continue. “Olive, this is my collaborator—”
“Dude.” The man pretended to bristle. “Introduce me as your friend.”
Adam rolled his eyes, clearly amused. “Olive, this is my friend and collaborator. Dr. Tom Benton.”
