I clap my hands together. “What do you think, should we try out some code?”
“Do you have a moment?”
Lewis leans against the side of the instructor’s desk, where I’m getting out of my chair and packing up my bag in a very determined attempt to keep calm and not hope too hard that he might’ve changed his mind. With the workshop over, chattering voices and shuffling students have replaced the sounds of scraping mouse wheels and key taps of the past two hours.
“Sure,” I answer, and slide my water bottle into my bag. I’m going for nonchalant, but then I realize that this is it—the moment that decides how the rest of the Sawyer’s, and my career, is going to go. The bottle falls with an ungraciousthunk.
Lewis glances down at where his fingers are drumming a rhythm into the tabletop next to my laptop. “Your desktop is a mess,” he notes.
I continue closing the open applications on my laptop, before snapping it shut. “Are you here to criticize my work style or did you actually want to talk to me about something?”
“Vivienne asked if we had any food allergies or preferences. For tonight’s dinner.”
I don’t have any allergies, but as my boyfriend, he would know that I’m a vegetarian. But he’s just a colleague, and who knows what he told Vivienne. While I contemplate whether I’d eat meat to keep up the ruse, I peer at him, but his face betrays a whole lot of nothing.
I bite my lip. “What did you say to her?”
“No fish or meat for you.” Relief untangles right between my shoulder blades. When I don’t say anything, his eyes search over my face. “Right?”
Does that mean what I think it means? He could’ve told Vivienne to ask me herself if he really wanted out of this scheme.
I wave goodbye to the last students leaving the room before turning back to him. “How did you know?”
“Your meal on the plane.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s observant, not when it’s literally part of our job. But so far, he’s only ever used his attention to detail to point out my shortcomings, not to learn more about me. I busy myself with packing up my laptop and zipping my bag shut, hoping he won’t see the heat climbing to my cheeks.
“You didn’t tell Vivienne I lied,” I state, keeping my voice even. After our conversation this morning, I didn’t think he’d turn around at all, never mind so quickly. “What made you change your mind? You said you wouldn’t lie for me.”
“I said I wasn’t sure if I could,” he corrects with a glint in his eyes, but he keeps his reasons for agreeing to himself. “And that I needed some time to think,” he adds, crossing the room to shut the door. Then he pulls something out of his back pocket: a small journalist’s notepad with the stub of a pencil tucked into the metal loops at the top.
Perched against the door, he crosses his legs in front of him. I stare at his long fingers as he removes the pencil and flips through the pages. “You brought notes?”
“They help me think,” he says distractedly.
“What else is in there? A running list of arguments against fMRI research? Quotes from my papers that you found offense with?” I deepen my voice in imitation of his. “How do you know that your effects are not driven by blood vasculature artifacts? Maybe you’re just measuring the throbbing of a big-ass vein.”
He snorts. “I don’t generally tend to think about bigthrobbing veins, but no. It’s more for personal stuff, decisions, mind maps. Things I need to see laid out on the page.”
“Really? You journal?”
“Yes.” He sighs. “Essentially, I journal.” Finally at the page he was looking for, he glances up, as if to check if I’m listening. “I’ll be your boyfriend—fakeboyfriend—under a few conditions.”
Air rushes out of my lungs. I haven’t been able to breathe this deeply since I arrived here. “Thank you, thank—”
“First,” he goes on, eyes shifting between his notes and me. “No espionage about projects we’re working on. Or any upcoming papers.”
I grimace at him. Funny request, since he was the one who piggybacked off of me with that paper four years ago, and not the other way around. I force myself to relax my jaw. He’s building a bridge here, and I don’t want to burn it down.
“Good luck finding anything.” I try to sound jovial. “You just said it yourself, my computer is a mess.”
He bites the inside of his cheek.
“Fine,” I say. “Consider it done. Though I’m still allowed to complain about past projects of yours, right?”
He ignores me. “Second, and this one worries me a bit more. We’ll need to exclude each other as potential reviewers from all future papers.” A sigh escapes him. “Even if it’s fake, we’ll have a conflict of interest, since supposedly we’ll have a close social relationship that precludes an unbiased opinion.”
“Did you just quote the reviewer guidelines?”
