“Um.” My eyes are glued to the stacks of donuts, their bright, happy colors unfastening the knot at the center of my chest. “I’m going to need some time to decide.”
Lewis hunches over to nudge my shoulder with his. He points to a free set of metal stools midway down the room. “Have a seat,” he tells me, “I’ll order for us.”
I wander over to the stools and sink onto the pink pleather cushion, hooking my feet up and swiveling from side to side. With each half-turn, the words of rejection from the email crash back into my mind. Thewe are sorry to inform you, theno support in funding.
“Hey.” Lewis drops two greasy brown paper bags on the Formica countertop and pushes one closer to me. “Eat these, it’ll make you feel better.”
I peek into the bag. “What’s this?”
“A bit of everything.” He slides up next to me, and his aftershave melds with the sugary smell. I want to turn my head and follow his scent, press my nose into the hollow of his neck, but instead I watch his long finger as he points at the donuts one by one. “Boston cream, apple fritter, old-fashioned, and salted caramel.”
As he pulls back, I inhale another whiff of sugar and pinch a bit of the glaze off one donut, savoring how its sweet saltiness melts on my tongue. Lewis’s gaze follows my movement with intense eyes, intense and soft, and entirely confusing. How can he look at me like that and then reject me?
“Go on,” he says, still observing me. “I want to see if I’m right about what you like.”
As we dig into our bags, Lewis doesn’t make any conversation but lets me stew over my thoughts in silence. I’m in the middle of my last donut when I start crying. It’s the ugly kind, the wheezing, shoulders-shaking, tears-running-down-my-face kind, and it hits right when I’m eating the only donut thatdoesn’t have a nicely solid topping. My heavy breaths disperse the powdered sugar, sending the white dust flying up in a cloud from where it floats down onto my face, and my fingers, and Lewis’s shirt. My sneeze turns the scene into a full-on sugar blizzard.
Tears at full force now, I drop the half-moon of my donut back into the bag, and my instinct to cover my eyes with my hands smudges up the lenses of my glasses. Cramps twist in my chest, hack away at my breath, and push more tears from my eyes.
“What do they put into these things?” I sob. “I wanted to drown my feelings, not drowninthem.”
“Titanium dioxide—you know what, never mind.” Lewis offers me a napkin in his right hand and the open palm of his left hand. I take the napkin and stare at him questioningly, until he plucks my glasses off my nose and starts polishing them.
As I wipe the sludge of tears and dissolving sugar off my face, I release a few more sobs behind the protection of the rough napkin. “You have to stop cleaning my glasses for me,” I protest.
With a shrug he hands my glasses back. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” His gentle tone threatens my tear ducts once more.
I drop my gross napkin onto the glittering counter. “Why are you being so nice to me?” Taking care of my messy outbreaks is most definitely not part of our fake dating agreement.
“Because I care,” he says. “Tell me what’s going on.” The simplicity of his words and his gently commanding tone are a flashback to when we first met on the plane, and again, something about his level of calm and control soothes the flood of emotions I’m bombarded with.
“You were right earlier. It’s the grant. I got the email outside the bar, after I finished talking to Karo.” The curious tiltof his head and the unwavering attention of his eyes make it easier to open up to him. “I’ve applied for grants enough times to know we get rejected all the time. I swear I’m not usually this bad. But with this one, I had my hopes set so high.” I glance up at him. “The grant was good, really. It was strong. With a clear vision, a good hook.”
He lifts a corner of his mouth. “Frances,Idon’t need convincing. I’m sure it was good.”
“It’s just… My funding is running out and the lab I’m working in has no money to hire me for longer, so this grant was my last shot at staying put. At not having to move again. And it’s a big grant, too, one that would’ve finally given me the chance to level up, away from the grind of postdoc life and into a position where I have more freedom to shape my own projects and supervise students to work on my questions, too. I thought I could finally make a difference…”
I feel his eyes on the side of my face; his focus fully on me while my gaze jumps through the café, because it’s too much if he sees into me while I open up to him like this.
“Frances. You’re already making a difference,” he tells me. Before I can ask what he means, he continues, “But I get you. It’s tiring to have to move from one lab to another, where you constantly have to figure out how you can work on your own questions while also keeping your advisor happy.”
Lewis’s words are such an accurate description of what I’m feeling it’s as if he has plucked them right out of the downward spiral of my thoughts. Unless you’re lucky and your research interests overlap with the lab you’re hired in, securing your own funding is the only way to ensure you can work on your own questions, and not somebody else’s. My current postdoc advisor has been pretty laissez-faire and left me to work on my own projects, when in previous labs, my boss’s research came first. In the first years out of grad school I still had so much to learn, soI was fine balancing my work around someone else’s but now, looking for open postdoc positions on predefined projects feels like a step back.
I might have to leave all of my questions unanswered and that’s the part that pains me most. That the thoughts scribbled on Post-its and in my Notes app will remain just that: letters on paper, characters on a screen.
Ideas turning into dead ends.
Who’s going to tackle all those questions, if not me? Who is going to care enough? And how many times will I have to uproot my life until I finally get to take them out of the drawer again?
“It’s funny, you know,” I continue wistfully. “Years ago, when I was in undergrad, and our professors would introduce themselves, they’d name all these universities at which they had worked. All these cities. Doing scienceandtraveling around the world? It seemed like the perfect life.”
Lewis hums in agreement.
“But now? When I think about my last five years, I get exhausted,” I admit. “I hate the thought of doing all the packing and meeting new people in a new city again, knowing that I won’t stay there. I’d hoped I’d be able to settle down somewhere. Not the ‘having a family’ kind of settling down, but you know.”
“The ‘plant perennials on your balcony and paint your living-room wall green’ kind of settling down?” he asks, and I stare at him, puzzled. “Like your sister?”
“Right. Yes. Well.” I swallow thickly, some new emotion lodged in my throat because he listened and remembers. He listens and remembers and notices a lot, actually, and that’s starting to matter more to me than what he did four years ago. “Maybe not green. But there’s this fancy outdoor pool around the corner of my apartment that has a waitlist of a year, and I never signed up for it because I didn’t know how long I’dstay around. I go to the community indoor pool, which is fine, but you know… It’s nowhere near as nice and farther away. Doesn’t have a sauna. I know it’s silly but…”
