Her kindness takes me aback. I’ve encountered enough backstabbing colleagues that my “Thank you,” doesn’t come out right away. After her interest in Lewis’s and my relationship at the dinner yesterday, I wasn’t sure if she had some ulterior motive, but the more time I spend around her, the more I believe she actually wants us to be friends. Plus, it’s an upside that she included Lewis in her suggestion.
Operationhappy and successful relationshipseems to be back under control.
Until the end of lunch. Lewis and I are hanging out at one of the bistro tables with Brady and Peter, who is distractedly scrolling through his phone. When Lewis leaves on a hunt for the little pieces of individually wrapped chocolate they put out for dessert, Brady sets down her napkin, brushes a few stray crumbs off her Peter Pan–collared blouse, rights her glasses with her index finger, and scrunches up her nose. “Funny that I haven’t run into you at our hotel yet.”
Friends, welcome to science. If you solve one problem, another one pops up right away.
“What are the odds.” I laugh nervously.
She stares into her empty teacup. “Yeah, it’s strange. I even saw him arrive on Saturday, but you weren’t with him,” she notes. My heart starts racing, but I cling to the fact that her voice is neutral, as if she’s listing curious observations, rather than exposing a major flaw of our plan.
Peter glances up from his phone. “I got in a little later that evening,” I quickly reply. “Still had to wrap up wedding stuff. With my sister.”
They both nod, satisfied. While Brady pulls the pamphlet with the Sawyer’s program from her tote bag and leafs through it, my jaw clenches so hard it could start a career as a nutcracker. Lewis returns and opens his hand to let the chocolate rain over the table, but doesn’t notice my glare.
“Oh, great! Loot!” Brady calls and snatches up a piece of chocolate.
I bite down my annoyance until Peter excuses himself to go to the bathroom and Brady gets approached by a student.
As I trail Lewis to the coffee machine he finally notices my gritted teeth. “What now?” he asks as he sets a cup under the nozzle of the dispenser.
“Tell me why you didn’t mention”—I cross my arms in front of my body—“that whatever hotel you’re staying in, Brady is, too?”
He stares at his coffee, fingers pressing the dispenser button. Confusion blooms on his face. “What about it?”
“Didn’t it cross your mind that it’s maybe a bit obvious she never sees me there, even though, you know, we’re supposedly staying there? Together? As a couple?”
He picks up his cup and fully turns to me, his body closer than I’d anticipated. Almost as close as in that dream I had last night. After waking up tightly wound this morning, I’ve tried to push it out of my mind, because who has a sex dream about someone after holding hands for entirely unromantic reasons?A colleague, who I have hated for four years, no less? But the sensations come slamming back now, how heavy his breath was in my ear as he moved over me.
I palm Lewis’s hip before he can take a step back to colleague-appropriate distance. The warmth of his body radiates through his shirt, and it does nothing to shut up my hormonal, deranged brain.
But Brady potentially uncovering our charade does. “Well?” I probe.
Lewis peers at me over the top of his cup. “Do you have plans tonight?”
With Karo still unreachable on her backcountry hike, I’d planned to pick up a poke bowl, open a bottle of wine, go to bed early, and compulsively check my emails for updates on my grant application, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Nothing,” I say and shrug. “Why, do you have something in mind?”
And this is how I end up having dinner with Dr. Theodore Lewis North at a romantic Italian restaurant outside the hotel he and Brady are staying in. With its gingham-cloth-covered tables, exposed brick walls, and bottles of wine stacked under the ceiling, it has the perfect setup for a magical first date. Sconces on the walls bask the space in a soft glow, and the white candlesticks and small tables create an intimate environment, drawing in the patrons to converse in a gentle murmur.
Except this is no actual date, and there’s nothing magical about it. Lewis has been off since picking me up from the subway stop at Seventy-Second Street. It’s hard to believe now that I even felt a tiny bit happy to see him when I spotted him waiting for me in the shade. That feeling vanished rapidly ashe only acknowledged me with a nod and then, as we crossed Broadway, pushed up his sunglasses and roped me into a discussion.
Ever since, we’ve been arguing about the activity-silent versus persistent-firing models of working memory.
This behavior shouldn’t come as a surprise from someone who neither bothered to credit me in that paper nor reached out to me afterward, nor cares for salutations or sign-offs in his emails, and has made it his life’s goal to question every and any of my scientific convictions. But then yesterday’s dinner happened, and our walk after, and I thought things might’ve changed. That, even though we haven’t addressed the elephant in the room, aka the root of my mistrust for him, we’d look out for each other, if only to avoid suspicions about our dating arrangement.
I engage in his discussion as we wait for our table, but it’s half-hearted on my side. When we finally hit a lull in our argument, I look around the restaurant. The waiters are dressed in black slacks and white shirts. It’s a getup entirely too warm for the humidity outside, but more appropriate to the heavily air-conditioned interior of the restaurant than my short-sleeved off-shoulder blouse. Goosebumps prickle up my arms and down my back. I pull my hair from its knot at the back of my neck and let it fan out over my shoulders, hoping that the weight will provide some warmth.
“This is cozy,” I say, hoping to get Lewis out of whatever mood he’s been in, and into fake-date mode. We’re here to make sure Brady sees us having a wonderfully romantic evening. So far, it has been anything but that.
Lewis peels his gaze off my bare shoulder, only to turn it to my lips. It lingers there long enough that I worry some of the peanut butter pretzels I inhaled before leaving the apartment have gotten stuck between my teeth. Then he finally meets myeyes and shuts down my attempt at small talk with a simple, hesitant, “It’s okay.”
“Look,” I tell him, “I get that all this wasn’t part of the plan. That maybe you wanted to have a quiet night at home with your thoughts of why I’m using the worst possible neuroimaging method, but we started this whole thing together, so now we have to see it through. Otherwise—”
“Frances,” he interrupts, voice low. “That’sdefinitelynot what I think about you. And I’m not annoyed about spending the evening with you.”
“Then why are you so cranky?”
