“Like the science,” I prompt.
He looks at me, eyes dark. Even though we’re sitting more than an arm’s length apart, it feels too close, and despite the waning heat, the back of my neck suddenly burns. I swallow heavily and his eyes dart to my throat. My heartbeat staggers into a slow, deepthud.
“Yes, like the science,” he echoes. “For example.”
His sentence sounds unfinished, as if he’s about to add something else. But he just keeps studying me while his thumb draws electrifying circles over the knuckle of my index finger; tiny ones that make me wonder whether he’s even aware of it. I don’t know if it’s this or his confession or his eyes locked on mine, but I don’t like how this shift between us feels like he’s reaching into me. Getting me to relax around him, to trust him again.
Earth to Frances. This is Dr. North. The one who asked you to redo a month’s worth of data modeling to get your paper “remotely publishable.”
Remember?
This is nothing but a collegiate relationship, I remind myself, a pact to keep my integrity intact. It’s only natural that he becomes real with me, because I can only pretend to be his girlfriend if I know him well enough. This is practice.
A subway rumbles by underfoot, telling us that the perturbation in the network is resolved. “Well now that that’ssettled, maybe we can wrap this up.” I pull my hand out of his grip.
Head dipped forward, he looks at his hand and, after a beat, says, “Sure.” Once he gets to his feet, he slings his backpack over one shoulder and holds tightly onto the strap.
I get up, too, and shift my weight to the foot that is still blister-free. “I guess I’ll take the subway.”
He nods quietly. “My hotel’s just a couple of blocks from here. But I’ll walk you to the station.”
I’m about to protest, but he’s already started toward the subway entrance. As we walk, the awkwardness builds and presses into the space between us like New York’s heavy humidity. Then we reach the turnstiles and it’s time to part ways, and something makes my brain short-circuit. Like my body is one step deeper into this fake relationship than the rest of me.
I push up to my tiptoes and kiss Lewis on the cheek.
It’s chaste, not even a real kiss, just the slide of cheek against cheek.
His hand comes up to tighten on my waist, and for a flash of a second, he holds me in place.
Then, finally, my brain catches on. “Look, you didn’t even flinch,” I say, a little too brightly. “I think we’re good for tomorrow.”
As I wait on the platform, loosen and retie my hair, and check my phone for the pending grant application, it’s the stubble of his jaw against my cheek that I can’t get out of my mind.
Its soft scratch slips into my dreams later that night.
Chapter Nine
About every week or so of my life since I started grad school, in a sober moment when I discover that a participant has moved too much in the MRI scanner for the data to be useful, or when inefficient code burns my RAM, or when a grant proposal I’ve worked on for the better part of six months gets rejected, I contemplate leaving academia and opening a coffee shop or a plant nursery or a sourdough bakery. Except, I have virtually no skills outside of this insular profession of mine, which makes me wonder whether going to grad school and scraping by on a diet of coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches was such a good idea, because what has it really taught me?
Except now.
Because, as I discover, it has taught me (and Lewis, I suppose) one thing, which is deconstructing complex problems into tinier, manageable bites. Case in point: the potential disbelief in our relationship of Jacob, Vivienne, Brady, and other colleagues caused by the abhorrent performance of our fake relationship at yesterday’s dinner. But the plan that we hatched last night seems to be working.
Several pairs of scrutinizing eyes follow us when we enter the lecture hall in the morning, but as Lewis drapes his arm over the back of my seat, they become interested in other things. While the keynote speaker sets up his slides on spatial memory in bats, I steal some of Lewis’s takeaway coffee, just to satisfy the last skeptics, but I doubt anybody’s still looking. Which works out in my favor, because I grimace hard when I discover Lewis likes his coffee unpalatable (read: black and without sugar), and then it’s up to my inhibitory neurons to keep me from spitting it back out. In the five-minute break of the lecture, as my sleep deprivation catches up with me and momentarily makes my eyes droopy, Lewis startles me awake when he runs a warm finger under the lanyard around my neck. He tugs gently until my head meets his shoulder, where I spend the next five minutes pretending to be asleep as my whole body is lit up with his proximity.
After the lecture, we’re practically old news. Give nerds an interesting piece of information—Did you know that bats are pollinators, and we rely on them for fruits like bananas and mangoes?—and you’ll divert their attention in no time. Whether it’s on purpose or because everyone constantly wants to talk to him, Jacob keeps his distance. Which gives me a break from sifting through the constant change of direction my feelings take when I learn something new about his relationship with Vivienne. I didn’t lie to Karo when I said I was over him, and our reunion wasn’t half as bad as I expected, but his presence has a nasty way of making me question everything: my science, my worth, my decisions, my aspirations.
Just before lunch, Vivienne joins me in line for the bathroom.
“Did you get home okay last night?”
“We ended up walking a good bit, but it was nice,” I respond. “I forgot how much I missed the city. Minus the rats, of course.”
“And the questionable smells,” Vivienne adds as we inch forward in line. “I know what you mean. For the year that I was still in Paris and would only visit every now and then, I missed New York in this visceral way.”
Interesting. Jacob must’ve changed his mind on long-distance sometime after our breakup.
“Speaking of, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Vivienne goes on. “If you miss New York, you can always come back. They’re looking for lecturers in the psychology department right now, and maybe a pure teaching position is not what you or Lewis want, but I know how hard postdoc-ing can be, and to get a permanent contract… Anyway.” She motions to the cubicle that has freed up.
