“Actually, we saw some bears, but from far away,” she adds before I can let out a gasp. “It was amazing, really.” She sounds high on fresh air and endorphins from all the hiking. “Listen, Franzi, I wanted to ask you something.”
A dark shape exits the bar, and when it steps into the cone of streetlight in front of me, I recognize it as Lewis. “Everything okay?” he murmurs. “I missed you in there.”
“Give me a second,” I tell my sister at the same time as I nod at him. “All good. I’m talking to Karo, but I’ll be back in a second.”
“Alright. I’ll see you inside.” He squeezes my shoulder, and something uncurls at the base of my stomach. Without thinking, I lift my fingers and graze the back of his hand in a gesture that feels intimate, just right. That is, until his eyes snag on the point of contact.
Maybe this is a little too much for friends who are helping each other out.
Confusingly, his eyebrows slot into a frown at the same time as the corner of his mouth flicks up. When he returns to the bar, I’m left behind with a thudding heart and the realization that while my attraction to him is growing by the day, I really have no idea what he’s feeling or thinking. A concerned fake boyfriend may have come outside to check on hisgirlfriend, but the shoulder squeeze? The warmth in his eyes? That lopsided smile and the fact that he told me he missed me?
“Hmm.” Karo’s voice crackles through my phone speaker. “Sounds like more interesting things than science are happening at that summer school of yours.”
“I— Well. Yeah…”
“I see,” Karo purrs.
“No, no,” I tell her. “That was Lewis. Dr. North. He was just—”
“TheDr. North?” Karo cries.
“Ye—”
“Hold on, is he the one you had to convince to fake date you?”
“Karo—”
“And he let himself be convinced?”
I think that she’s done then, but she still doesn’t let me get in a word.
“I thought we hated him!”
“We did,” I agree, “but it turns out there’s a little more to the story than I thought.”
After a beat, she teases, “I told you that know-it-alls were your type.”
“Stop it,” I grumble. I kick a pebble out of the way and watch it skip down the sidewalk. “It’s not like that. He’s helping me out.”
“Helping you out, but missing you, too. O-kay,” she says, lingering on the vowels in a way that lets me know she doesn’t believe me at all.
“Listen, there’s something I did want to tell you. I talked to the professor from Amsterdam.”
“Oh! How did it go?”
And so I tell her about the successful conversation with Rosanna Alderkamp that made me hopeful I could collaborate with her using the money from the grant I’ve applied for.
“I know I’m getting ahead of myself.” I sigh. “We didn’t talk for long, and in the bathroom, of all places, but still. I’ve been wanting to work with her for so long… and she was so kind.” Which is probably what excited me the most. Smartness is a given among academics, but not everyone chooses to be kind.
After we hang up and before going back to meet the others, I check my inbox. It’s become such an automatic thing by now. Swipe left, tap on the little icon at the bottom of the screen. I delete the usual three spam emails and one reply-all from a department-wide email.
But there’s one more email sitting in my inbox: the response to my grant application.
The thing I’ve been agonizing over and anxiously expecting. My last shot at securing more funding before mine runs out in under three months. My hope for stability so I can finally plan my research long-term. The one thing I need to work out if I want to avoid packing my bags again to look for a new lab somewhere else in this world.
The Dutch Young Investigators Starting Grant.
The subject-line doesn’t reveal any decision, and I tap on it so hard that my phone almost tumbles out of my hands. The message opens to a short text and an attached PDF. I read through everything, the attachment, then the text again.
