He knits his brow. “Why?”
“Your lecture,” I clarify, and Lewis’s expression tightens, one hand coming up to fiddle with his cuff links again. Remembering his revelation that he’s shy in front of crowds, I ask, “Do you want to go through it?”
“Here?”
“Why not.” I shrug. “We still have some time to kill until we’re back at the pier, right?”
Lewis nods darkly, throwing a glance at his phone. “Just under an hour.”
“Right, then we have plenty of time. You can tell me your outline, what you’re unsure about. Or just…” I trail off when he pulls his notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Of course he brought it along.
“I’m okay once I get to the part about my research,” he says, “but I’m not sure my intro will help the students make sense of it. I want them to be able to understand itandgive them the tools to critique it.”
For the next twenty minutes, Lewis shares his lecture with me, seemingly having memorized the whole thing. As the wind flaps through the pages of his notebook, I give him pointers on things he can skip (a long-winded timeline of electroencephalography research that would fit into a History of Psychology class) and the ones he should expand on. Lewis takes notes and then murmurs the newly workshopped text to himself.
“It’s funny to think that only a week ago, I was at my parents’ place, with all the chaos of last-minute wedding preparations,” I muse when he slips his notebook back into his jacket. “And in the middle of it all, I was trying to finish the slides for my lecture and interactive code for the workshop.”
He laughs. Not that dry kind he gave his parents, but a mellow one, its warmth trickling down my spine.
“And now I’m standing here,” I continue, “playing make-believe with my annoying reviewer, at his brother’s graduation party, working on his lecture.”
“He wasn’t so bad, was he?” He pushes his hair back, mouth relaxed and eyes twinkling.
With the newfound knowledge that he wasn’t, in fact, the mean reviewer, I find myself smiling when I say, “Yeah, turns out he’s actually a somewhat decent human being.”
There it is again, that smooth rumble of a laugh. “Decent enough to ask me to fake date you for two weeks.” Lewis crosses his arms in front of his chest and takes a measuring lookat me. “What was it that made you fall in fake love with me? My horrible abstract-writing skills?”
“I figured you couldn’t be that bad when you held my hand through a panic attack,” I admit, surprised at my own honesty.
I wait for him to remind me that I technically maimed his hand, but he just hums softly in agreement. “What madeyouchange your mind, though?” I ask. “To agree to fake date me?”
“Well.” Lewis stares at our feet. When he taps the tip of his shoes against mine, I realize that we’ve slowly inched toward each other. “I’m responsible for stalling your career in one way, so once you explained how detrimental it could be if anybody found out about us, I knew I needed to help. I meant what I said yesterday, Frances.” He pauses to finally look back up at me, and the glimmering skyline reflects in his eyes. “It’s never been about tearing you down. I want to see you succeed. Plus, it meant squabbling with you from less distance, so…”
Once again, his true intentions grate against the image I’ve constructed of him over the past four years. “And here we are, not even bickering anymore,” I say with a smile, resting my arms on the railing next to him. The air is gritty on our cheeks, the slosh of the water loud in our ears, and, for the first time since arriving in New York, my thoughts aren’t rushing elsewhere. They’re anchored here, as we watch the matrices of half lit-up skyscrapers glide past and talk about everything and nothing. The places we’ve lived, the most outrageous excuses our students have come up with, the niche knowledge Lewis has acquired aboutThe Witcherafter reading Brady’s fan fic for so many years.
I feel at peace, until we round the tip of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge comes back into view in all her lit-up glory. Until Lewis lifts a corner of his mouth and mutters, “I like us more like this.”
I look up at him as my heart balloons with hope, thoughI know it shouldn’t. It should stick close to the ground, and to get it back there, I pinprick it with the reality of the situation. Lewis and I have a pact with an end date, he’s a colleague, we live in different countries. He was talking about us as allies. Teammates, collaborators, maybe friends. Nothing more. I have to keep reminding myself of this as we fall silent and look out at the water.
As the boat docks at the pier, the vibration of the motor stops underfoot. “Can I take you out for that slice of pizza now?” Lewis asks and hooks a thumb over his shoulder.
An ambulance howls down the FDR and I wait for the sound to pass. “Please,” I say, though I had completely forgotten I was hungry. Because all I can think about is that I like us more like this, too.
Maybe a little too much.
Chapter Fourteen
Lewis makes us stop at his favorite pizza place in Hell’s Kitchen on the way back uptown, one of those hole-in-the-wall places that are cash and standing-room only. Even under the stark, fluorescent light, with his tie flapping open around his neck, Lewis looks a million times more at ease than back on the boat. We eat our slices crowding around a tiny sliver of the bar table, his a marinara and mine with vodka sauce, and then he takes me back home, offering a softly spoken “Thank you for coming today” when he says goodbye at my door.
And my heart does that weird buoyant thing again.
Which it shouldn’t. Because while our history goes over four years back, I’ve only really known him for five days, and for most of those, I thought we despised each other. But his apology yesterday flipped everything around, and I can’t stop thinking about how good he felt pressed against my body in the library, how well his hand fit on the small of my back, and how, even though he already answered so many of them today, I have a million more questions I want to ask him.
I don’t want to think so much about him, and yet it feelslike my brain is starting to dedicate an entire lobe to him. I try to remind myself that it’s natural. The kiss predictably triggered a cascade of biological processes, including a heavy dose of hormones, and they’re the real reason for why my feelings for Lewis are amplified.
It was biology that caused those glitches on the boat today, where I felt like my neurons fired a little harder, just for him.
Upstairs, I peel my dress off, hang it on the shower rack, wipe off my makeup and slather on moisturizer, all while oddly specific details about Lewis loop through my mind. The dimple in his chin, the freckles on the bridge of his nose that have multiplied since Saturday, the top two buttons of his shirts that he always leaves unbuttoned and, worst of all, the parsing look in his eyes in the library before he moved in to kiss me.
