I shoot him a questioning look. “I’m pretty good with names, but I don’t remember a Lewis.”
A corner of his mouth ticks down. “I also didn’t remember a Frances. Lewis is my middle name and what my friends call me. But I publish under my first and last name.”
Because he’s clearly stalling now, I narrow my eyes at him. “Well, what’s your name?”
Lewis clears his throat, and just then, Murphy throws me his finest curveball. “You probably know me under the name Theodore L. North, and I’m afraid I may have just submitted a comment discussing your recent paper on detecting neural replay with fMRI.”
Chapter Two
A laugh bubbles out of me. “You’re kidding, right?”
He frowns. “Why would I be kidding?”
“You have to be.”
I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s the only explanation I can reach for in this moment. Because there is no way that I just poured my heart out to my academic rival, all while holding his hand. How long has he known for? From the moment I sat down? Was all the gentle care and distraction a farce to coax out my insecurities? I know how methodical he is, so it’s not far-fetched to think he’d come up with a complicated plan to sniff out my weaknesses like this. Less far-fetched than the alternative, more logical explanation: that I got asked to help a random stranger and ended up next to my academic nemesis on theonetransatlantic flight where I’m not knocked out into slow-wave sleep, only for turbulence to hit and push me into a panic spiral that made me overshare.
What are the odds, really? Or maybe, Murphy was onto something.
I feel exposed, unexpectedly naked, like when your T-shirtrides up while taking off your jumper and suddenly, you’re showing off your threadbare bra. No matter how fast you pull your shirt back down, the image will be etched into everyone’s mind. Even if it’s only a short glimpse, they’ll know that you should have gone bra shopping a long time ago, that your belly button looks weird, and that you have a little birthmark right under your left boob.
My job struggles, my not-quite-broken-but-bruised heart. All there, on a silver platter.
And as if that’s not enough, I’ll have to sit next to Dr. Theodore North for the next—I want to wail when I see the clock on the in-flight entertainment screen—seven hours. I want to gather up all of the secrets I spilled and stuff them back into the dusty closet of my brain.
See, I want to shout at Karo.This is why we keep that door firmly closed. This is why we don’t open up.
Dr. Theodore Lewis Know-It-All North, or, as he likes to call himself on social media, @theoretically, studies human memory with rare invasive recordings directly from the human brain. I’d kill for the data he has—and he knows it. Once upon a time, freshly out of grad school, I thought we could build a collaboration, exchange hypotheses on our experiments and eventually build up big-scale projects, but he popped the bubble of that dream a long time ago. Since then, all he’s ever done is drone on about the inadequacy of my scientific work and make my life difficult.
Fuck. Fuck squared. Fuck to the power of three.
This is a disaster.
Our thoughts seem to be tracking opposing patterns, because he holds his hand out to me. The one that’s been my stress ball for the past thirty minutes. “I’m not kidding. But it’s nice to finally meet you—”
“Do you know,” I push through gritted teeth, “how manyfucking months you shaved off my life with that revision process you put me through?”
I press my fingers against my forehead. As if on cue, the nervous twitch that has haunted my eyebrow for the last three months is back. Although we’ve been at each other’s throats about our work for the past four years, his most recent review of my research took it a step too far. Not only was it hypercritical of every last detail, but also filled to the brim with snide remarks, like he truly wanted to tear me down.
Lewis drops his hand and with it, his pretense of friendliness. A challenging gleam enters his eyes. “How do you know it was me? Peer reviews are anonymous.”
“Oh please. ‘Before resubmission I would advise a more thorough understanding of the references mentioned,’?” I quote him. “?‘Particularly North et al.,Science, and North and Chaudhury,PLOS Biology.’ Those comments were reeking of you.”
Unfazed, he opens his laptop. “It’s generally advisable to know your sources,” he notes. It drives me mad that he’s not admitting to writing the review, especially because this one was so much harsher than all the ones he wrote for my previous papers.
“I know my sources well, thank you very much,” I retort. “You were just begging me to cite you some more.”
“Knowing you, that reviewer probably improved your paper. You have a tendency to exaggerate the implications of your findings, which only undermines your research.”
“Are you calling me flashy again?”
“No.” A corner of his mouth turns down, as if he’s tasted something sour. “But you don’t need to sell your results like that.”
Heat shoots up my torso and burns over my collarbone all the way to my cheeks. “That’s how scientific publishing works!” He ignores me as he navigates through the files on his laptop.“Nobody cares about your meticulously designed experiments if you don’t have a story to tell.”
Eyes firmly fixed on the screen, he juts out his jaw. “If you want to tell stories, maybe you should write a book.”
“Well, good luck with your abstract then,” I snap.
