“Yes, you did something bad. But what’s more important is that you realized and changed your ways and made up for it. Saying sorry doesn’t fix your mistake, but it shows that you’re willing to learn and change. It shows that you care. At least it did to me,” I finish, heart beating fast at my own admission.
In the silence that follows, the lines on Lewis’s face even out as his shoulders soften, but they quickly pinch together again.
“What—”
A burning smell hits my nose. “Shit!” I sprint around the kitchen island and turn off the gas, as Lewis reaches around me and swirls the saucepan for the oat milk to cool. Although he looks considerably less troubled than a moment ago, the vulnerability is still plain on his face. He probably doesn’t open up like this often. I think of the fraught relationship with his parents, the estrangement from his brother.What’s more loving than telling someone you accept them the way they are?Does he ever have someone look out for him?
“Hey, why don’t you go and sit down.” I give his shoulder a gentle nudge. “Let me finish this, okay?”
“Okay.” He sets down the saucepan with a tired smile, but before he turns away, his palm finds my waist and he kisses the top of my head. “Thank you,” he murmurs into my hair.
After I finish preparing the hot chocolate, I join Lewis, who sits with his legs sprawled out and his right arm resting on the back of the couch.
“Do you want to tell me what’s keeping you up?” he asks softly when he takes his steaming mug from me, like he’s desperate to turn the focus away from him and restore the balance of shared secrets. And after he let me in so deep, I’m a lot less scared of being honest with him.
I tuck myself into the corner opposite him and cradle the hot chocolate between my hands. “All of this,” I say, motioningat him, us, “reminds me of Jacob and how things between us broke.” I gulp. “I already told you what he said to me when we broke up, but I think I should tell you the full story.”
Lewis takes a sip and nods, so I go on.
I tell him about Jacob successfully winning a huge grant right before I graduated—the grant I’d helped him polish while frantically writing my thesis. How I fought for his dream along with mine and never realized how much of myself I was giving him. The rough awakening when I understood that Jacob mistook my support for lack of a dream of my own and thought that all I wanted was to help him fulfill his career. When he sneered at me for wanting to follow the questions that burned in my mind.
“I didn’t want to be hiset al.My name tacked on to his for the rest of my career,” I tell Lewis. “He was so focused on himself and what’s worse, I sort of get his ambition, now. How single-minded he was. It’s hard to get a professorship, even harder to get there so young, and it takes a lot out of you. I really wish I would’ve been that focused on myself, too. And I was trying to, after I left New York, but you know how lonely academia can be, especially if you have to adjust to a new city, a new culture, every few years. So, I loved it when you and I started emailing and discussing, because finally, again, someone got me. I felt less lonely knowing you were out there.”
When I’m done talking, my mug is empty and my legs are stretched out on the couch. Lewis picks up the foot closest to his thigh and places it on his leg. His expression is tight with anger, but I’m not sure who it’s directed at, himself or Jacob. “Until I published that paper…” he murmurs.
“Until you published that paper,” I repeat. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad. I just want to give you context for why what you did hit me extra hard.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sighs, shoulders slumping forward. “Ilet myself be convinced so easily by my advisor back then. I didn’t know how much certain publications can shape the rest of our career. When he told me to take you off the list because having fewer coauthors would get the paper out quicker, I did. I thought it was more important to bring the science forward as quickly as possible. I wanted to list it in my next grant application and there was that wish to spite my father, too. All flimsy excuses, really. They don’t make it any less wrong.”
“They don’t,” I confirm. “But honestly? I’m not mad anymore. I just wish we could’ve spared ourselves the years of constant fighting. I wish I had known you weren’t out to get me.”
“Frances,” he interrupts, his brows inching together, “it has never been about that, or getting your research up to my standards, or attaching my name to it. Your research is insanely good, period. Whenever you publish a new paper, sometimes it takes me days to fully trace your steps because they’re so inventive.” He sits up straight before he continues, “Your research is sosogood. The questions you dare to ask, they push me to do better, every day. And they spark some of my own, so I add my comments and give my suggestions and hope you see some merit in them, too. But you don’t need me to be the best.”
I shake my head, the words already out before I can reconsider. “The funny thing is, I think I do need you to be my best,” I admit, staring down at my hands and the sludge of melted marshmallows at the bottom of my mug. “I’m humbled and inspired by anything you put out there. Whatever I work on, I know you’re there to perceive it. If my curiosity is my drive, you’re the one riding shotgun.”
When I lift my head, Lewis stares back at me, wide-eyed and with a spark in the blue of his eyes that makes my heart stutter. His presence is a constant undercurrent of electricity. Addicting and confusing and alarming. After admitting to himhow much he has shaped my work from afar, it’s even clearer to me why I can’t let myself give in to these feelings now.
“So that is why I’m spiraling tonight. The last time I dated a colleague, I let him take the driver’s seat. And that’s not a mistake I want to make again.”
Lewis nods slowly as he runs his thumb down the arch of my foot and up again. It soothes the knot in my stomach that has twisted tight with the memories of Jacob and my conflicting thoughts about Lewis. We lapse into a silence that is permeated by the hoot of an owl, somewhere beyond the darkened window front.
“So where does all of this leave us?” Lewis asks after a while. “I’m not sure how to go from here.”
“Me, either. I haven’t got a clue,” I acknowledge, my chest clenching around feelings that should feel new and exciting.
Lewis rubs the bridge of his nose. “Okay, let’s remember the one thing we’re both good at.”
I huff. “I guess you don’t mean stomaching bad conference coffee. But how is science going to help us with this?”
“Breaking down a complex problem into its simple parts,” Lewis points out, and something about him bringing science into this conversation makes it feel like he’s spanning up a safety net for us to walk over. “I like you, but that makes me nervous.”
His admission shouldn’t come as a surprise, not when all of his actions and touches have been showing me how much he cares, but still, his words spill warmth through my body and give me the courage to tell him the truth.
“I do, too,” I whisper. “And I like spending time with you. But you’re also a colleague, and there’s still the fact that I don’t know where the future will take me. I might be living halfway across the world in three months, with no perspective of where I’ll end up long term.”
“We have another week at the Sawyer’s left to go,” Lewis adds.
I swallow past the emotions that have gathered in my throat. “Maybe that should be it, then. Just one week.”
