But as Lewis and I scour the campus for the notebook between lectures, seminars, and poster sessions, I’m starting to wonder if him being a colleague and the potential of a long-distance relationship truly have to be the barriers I’m making them out to be. Even as I’m worried about being found out, having him at my side makes me feel lighter. With everything that’s going on, we work well as a team: We stick together and try to look normal and manage each other’s stress. On Tuesday evening, we finally take a break to unwind at the bouldering gym, and then head back to my studio, where I make dairy-free grilled cheese sandwiches as he peppers me with questions about the computational model I used in my last paper. We eat out on the fire escape and as he takes the first bite, Lewis groans with delight. Later that night, when we’re tangled up in my bedsheets, I get him to make that noise again. The next day, we’re back to morning lectures, but with lab work scheduledfor the afternoon, Lewis and I decide to get work done in the library instead.
Brady finds us right as we’re about to leave.
“You lovebirds off to skip school?” she chirps.
Lewis huffs out a laugh, holding the door open for her while she catches up with us. The dense heat from outside pushes against my back.
“We’re going to the library if you want to join?” I offer, but she shakes her head.
“I’m meeting a student who wants to do a summer internship with me. But I wanted to give you this.” Unceremoniously, she drops Lewis’s notebook into his palm. I try to tamp down any reaction, but Lewis’s eyes widen in shock.
“Vivienne told me Jacob found it in the lecture hall, and nobody knew whose it was,” Brady goes on, unaware of the jolt in my nerves.
Fuck. It passed throughallof their hands?
Next to me, Lewis clears his throat. “Thanks… Brady.”
“I recognized it when Vivienne and I had to check something for our project. It was on her desk.” She playfully swats at his chest. “Remember how I used to joke that someone stealing your notebook of big, bright ideas would be your origin story?” She laughs and adds, with a wink, “I guess we’re lucky he didn’t turn into the Hulk.” Then she turns on her heel, and heads back toward the staircase.
“I guess it’s safe to say Brady doesn’t know,” I point out when she’s out of earshot, “seeing as she recognized the notebook?”
Lewis’s eyes slide to mine, and for a moment we stare at each other, still frozen in the doorway. “Let’s hope the fact that it was just lying there means that Jacob and Vivienne didn’t open it, either.” He flicks through the notebook back to that first page of our pact.Conditions for fake dating, it says on top, and my anxiety spins higher.
The next pages are worse.Game plan for fake dating. Lewis’s and Frances’s weekends together.Neat and organized as Lewis is, he put a heading on every page, leaving an obviously incriminating paper trail.Frances’s pet peeves. Frances’s quirks.
My heart beats faster at spotting those last pages. We didn’t come up with those together.
Blushing, Lewis snaps the notebook shut. “If they didn’t know whose notebook it was, they can’t have leafed through it very far,” he points out. “It says both our names on these pages.”
“You’re right. They probably didn’t even open it, so we should be in the clear.” I swallow down the burst of nerves the last minutes have triggered. “But still, I don’t think I feel like working anymore.”
With lab-based classes keeping everyone occupied this afternoon, I have a break from networking, but instead of heading to the library, like we’d first planned, we decide to go to the beach to escape the humid soup Manhattan turns into at this time of year. The promise of distance from the Sawyer’s is strong enough to make us brace the long subway ride to Rockaway Beach.
“Would you mind if Ben came?” Lewis asks when we’re back at the studio and I’m rolling up a towel to stuff into a cloth bag. Hip against the kitchen counter and legs crossed in front of him, he twirls his phone between his hands.
“Not at all. What about you, though?”
The twirling stops and he tilts his head. “I’d like for him to come.” He starts texting and as I walk to the bathroom to search for my swimsuit, Lewis calls, “He’ll pick us up.”
A half hour later, Ben waves at us from the driver’s seat of a convertible that has the roof pulled up. Ada sits on the passenger seat, holding an oversize reusable coffee cup.
“Work meetings ended early,” she explains, leaning out of the window to pull Lewis, then me, in for a hug. “Alice is witha friend. I figured I’d take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the afternoon with my two brothers.”
Ben tips up his sunglasses, revealing eyes that are just like Lewis’s except for the current glee in them, and proudly slaps the roof of the car. “Graduation present from Dad,” he boasts. I don’t have to look at Lewis to know that this will make him shift his jaw, but he keeps quiet as he slides in behind me.
Ben doesn’t stop talking as he drives and when we reach Rockaway Beach, we’ve already gotten all the updates on his European summer tour (sponsored by his parents before he starts working at North Star Investments), the video game he’s currently obsessed with, and theWiredpodcast episode he listened to last night.
“Is Berlin not on your itinerary then?” I ask him.
Ben hoots when Ada points out a free parking spot and maneuvers the car into the narrow gap.
“Just for a couple of hours when I change trains. Dad said there wasn’t much to it,” he replies as we’re getting out of the car. “Gave me some advice on where to go and what to avoid.”
Lewis puts an arm around my shoulders. “And, of course, we always do what Father says,” he quips.
“Teddy!” Ada snaps.
Ben pulls his aviators off his nose and hangs them in the V of his polo, then lifts an eyebrow at his brother, the gesture eerily similar to Lewis’s when he challenges some scientific point of mine. “I’m not doing what Dad says.Hewanted me to fly between cities because who’d want to sit on trains. But for the itinerary, yeah, I did listen to him. It’s not like I could’ve asked you when I was planning the trip.” His tone is level as he says this, more a statement than an accusation, but I feel the jolt of tension in Lewis’s body.
