Which reminds me that I haven’t even updated her on our fake dating agremeent yet. I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to her call when she’s back from the first hike of her honeymoon, or if I’m dreading the concern she’ll no doubt express. It was her suggestion to fake date, but a growing physical attraction to my fake boyfriend is something she’d definitely considermessy.
“My parents can think whatever they want. I don’t care,” Lewis murmurs. “But yeah, it’s not ideal for Ben and Ada. It’ll make things easier, though. We just have to be really good.”
“Why are you even taking me?” I ask. “I’m not having second thoughts, but seriously, couldn’t you just go on your own?”
“You’re foreign and new and my father is polite to the people he doesn’t know,” he says. “Image conscious. He won’t make a scene. And since the whole thing is going to go down on a cruise, it’s not like I can escape whenever I want.”
I stop walking. “Hold up, what?”
A few steps ahead of me, Lewis turns around and clenches his jaw. “Yeah. We have to be at a pier downtown by seven thirty, from there the boat will cruise up the Hudson.” He sighs. “I don’t want to make this about myself, but it very much feels like someone deliberately chose a location I could not leave whenever I want to. Anyway, if you’re afraid of boats, too, we can cancel?”
“Too?” I ask.
He tilts his head. “You don’t like planes.”
I swallow. “Boats are fine. So, I’m basically there to hang on to your arm and look pretty?”
“You’re there to keep me sane.” Lewis motions to a miraculously empty table in an alcove between two shelves. Behindit, a window stretches to the ceiling and lets in the pearly afternoon light. “But if you want to make my father uncomfortable, you could tell him how you’ve been renting for your whole life.”
“Or that I’ve been putting all my money into a savings account?”
He snorts. “Good one.”
I pull out the chair across from where Lewis unpacks his laptop and notebook. While I go through my inbox (zero grant updates), Lewis falls into an impressive rhythm of smacking keys on his keyboard and ticking off items in his notebook that, upside down, I can’t decipher.
“Is that why your emails are like that?” I wonder, opening the first in a string of messages one of my master’s students has sent me.
The rapid-fire key tapping stops. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh… you know,” I mutter, skimming through the wall of text in which the student spirals into borderline desperation over messing up a line of code and having to redo all her analyses.
Lewis clears his throat. “I don’t?”
I close the email and find him looking at me over the edge of his laptop. “You come across a little cold in emails, messages… take your pick. But that’s not news to you, is it?”
He frowns at me, then his screen, and I consider myself dismissed when he starts typing again. But halfway through reading the riveting tale of how my student fixed her code and thinksIt’s okay now??? You’re not gonna fail me for this, right?!, my inbox dings with a new email.
Dear Dr. Frances Silberstein,
In clearing up misunderstandings between Silberstein et North, I feel like I owe you another explanation. You may have noticed how easily I get wrapped up in discussions about science. Looking at the data, my short way in written communication is likely a side effect of this excitement, and this can be narrowed down to three causal pathways:
1) I was very focused on condensing my observations and notes as precisely and compact as possible and,
2) I was often pressed for time between teaching classes and testing patients, but too eager to hear your thoughts to wait until I was back at my office, so I disregarded common etiquette and just fired them out.
3) I’m a bit of a texting grump.
I’m sorry for the disrespect this may have caused and the impression this may have left.
Kind regards,
Theodore Lewis North, PhD
His email is silly, formatted like a response letter to a paper submission, yet something like excitement races across my chest as I reread his words about me.
“Better?” he asks from the other side of the table.
“Better,” I agree, bumping my knee into his leg. “Though if you compliment my brain one more time, it might go to my head.”
