“No, I—” Lewis starts.
“Oh. My. Fucking. Golgi.” Brady shoots out of her chair, her eyes wide and pinballing between Lewis and me.
Right. Brady.
I forgot she didn’t know about our charade. Two weeks of painstaking care to make this relationship seem real so Lewis’s and my reputation wouldn’t suffer and I just spelled it out for her.Fake dating.
Brady cannot know. It doesn’t matter that the Sawyer’s is over and Lewis and I are, too—it could still mean the end of our careers. I wait for a rush of nerves but, after everything that has happened this evening, I can’t bring myself to care anymore.
Brady’s voice is shrill when she cries, “I was right. Iknewthere was something fishy going on, like how Lewis never mentioned you were together until this trip and I barely saw you at our hotel, and never in the mornings… And how excited you were to meet Professor Alderkamp, as if you wouldn’t have had any other opportunity to meet her, even though Lewis has been in touch with her for so long. It was all… Right. There.”
Brady pauses, her gaze frantically jumping between us. “But you guys were also so cute together and looked so happy. Like, Lewis lit up like a Christmas tree every time you were around, and I wasn’t sure— I thought nobody would ever fake date in real life! Oh no, I said something about the two of you having ajust one bedsituation, didn’t I?” She clamps her hands over her mouth. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she adds, squinting at Lewis.
He juts out his chin. “Brady,” he says without averting his eyes from me, “I’ll see you at the hotel later, okay? I’ll explain, but please. Not a word to anyone.”
“I’d never.” She sounds appalled as she gathers up her tote bag and empty glass. After she pulls me in for a hug and says her goodbyes, she mimics zipping her mouth shut before she trudges away.
“Do you want to sit down?” Lewis offers cautiously as he motions toward the chairs.
I shake my head. “I’m not staying. I just want answers.”
He nods, slowly. “I guess I should start from the beginning. I met Rosanna when she was visiting for a talk at the institute in Berlin last summer.” He hooks his fingers into his collar and lifts it away from the nape of his neck, as if to grant himself a little extra space to breathe. “At first, she only wanted me to be her postdoc since her current electrophysiologist was leaving. But we started brainstorming from there, realizing we could merge the focus of our research in a much bigger way. To study memory in a multi-methods approach. I pushed to include MRI and computational modeling. I was thinking of you and everything I’d learned from your papers.” His somber tone brightens with excitement about the project, but only for a beat. “So we wrote the grant together, Rosanna and I, and I thought maybe, in the unlikely case we won it, I could contact you. To see if you wanted to handle a part of the project.”
He holds my gaze and I swallow thickly. It’s scary how much our dreams of the future are aligned, how similar we are in our goals. Some twisted part of me melts because he wrote me into his grant, because he thought my research was valid, useful, necessary.
But it also makes me sick, getting pushed into somebody else’s grand scheme like this—again.
“And yet I had to find out about the grant from Rosanna. So what happened?” I prompt, crossing my arms.
“The Sawyer’s happened. Our plane ride happened. You happened. You sat down next to me on the plane, and I honestly forgot about the grant because there was no space for it.” He bites his lip and his voice goes quieter when he adds, “There was only you, and how much I wanted to be around you. And by the time I heard the news, I was already in so deep. Everything I said these last days is true, Frances. I care a lot about you. I just didn’t know what to do.”
“You care about me, so much that you were planning to keep this a secret?” I push down all the unwanted feelings his words trigger and focus on his betrayal instead. “How long have you known?”
He lowers his eyes. “Sunday night.”
“Sunday?” I press out. The donuts, the weekend in the Catskills—they weren’t a lie. But everything after?
“You were there when I unlinked my emails from my phone. I didn’t check my inbox until after we got back to the city.” He’s looking at me now, lets me see the trouble stirring in the blue of his eyes. His hands lift for a moment, but then he sinks them into the pockets of his jeans.
“So, your notebook going missing was a really convenient distraction to keep us focused on something else until the end of the Sawyer’s,” I observe. “Did you think you could keep the grant a secret until we were back home? Were you ever going to tell me, or did you plan to ignore it like you did four years ago?”
“No, I…” Lewis frowns. “I wouldn’t do something like that on purpose. I really did lose the notebook. You know I was desperate to get it back. I didn’t want it to mess up either of our careers.”
“Whatever the deal with the notebook was, the fact still stands: You decided to keep the grant a secret.”
“Only until I knew what was going to happen with us. I was going to tell you, Frances, you have to believe me. I thought I could figure out some kind of solution before it messed anything up…” He gulps. “And we weren’t sure what was going to happen after the Sawyer’s anyway. What’s the use of talking about this grant if I was only going to get a few more days with you?” He presses his lips together. “I’m sorry for how it happened—for not telling you when I know I should have.”
“Regardless of what was or wasn’t going to happen to us after the Sawyer’s, how did you think you could solve this?” I ask him, words brimming with hurt. “Did you think I’d leave to some faraway lab and you’d hire someone else? Or were you going to sit me down and offer me the position? None of these options sound like a good solution to me. And what about letting me drive and just wanting to be along for the ride?”
“Frances, you have to understand. I was terrified of messing things up. When it comes to you, I don’t know what to do.” His voice is gritty as he presses his index finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose, and when he lowers his hand again, the half-moon dents of his fingernails are imprinted into his skin. “I’veneverfelt this way before. Attraction, sure. Appreciation, maybe comfort, too. But not this endless wonder. Like I’m a kid again, going to bed after the best possible day, but scared to fall asleep because I don’t want it to end. That’s what it feels like when I’m around you.”
The space behind my ribs feels raw, exposed. Lewis admitting his feelings for me hurts just as much as the explanation of his lies. I hug myself tighter, trying to minimize the area of impact.
Lewis leans forward and catches my gaze. “If you’d think about it—think what we could achieve together. Scientifically. And with our lives. At the end of the year, we could already be living in the same city if, you know, you decide to take the job.”
I shake my head, his suggestion like a punch out of nowhere. How can he still think there’s a good outcome for both of us in this situation? “Have you been listening at all?” I blurt out. “You know I won’t. I’m not going to depend on you. This is my job and my career, and I won’t take handouts.”
“But isn’t it different this time? It’s a lab you’ve dreamed of working with, a professor you know you get along with—who you’ve been wanting to work with, no less. You’d be responsible for your work package of the grant. I wouldn’t be your boss, just your colleague, really. You’d still be in the driver’s seat.”
