Lewis frowns down at the keyboard, and I watch him inhale once, twice, while the fissures slowly crack through my heart.
It’s okay, I remind myself.We survived worse. Jacob, all the rejections, that brutal night in New York. We’ll survive this, too.
“I got invited for this lecture, and I thought maybe youwere behind it, but I wasn’t sure. I gave myself an ultimatum then. Promised myself I’d accept this invitation and that I’d sort through…” Lewis swallows, his gaze still cast down. “Everything. How to reconnect with Ben. My feelings for you. How to tell you how sorry I am.”
One hand cups the back of his neck as he smiles wistfully. “But in the end, it was one endless wait. I admired you ever since I first came across one of your papers in grad school, and I was attracted to you the moment you sat down next to me on the plane. I knew you were never just a distraction. I think the coin dropped when we were at the graduation party, and the person I was looking for in the crowd wasn’t my dad so I could avoid him, or Ben to figure out how to talk to him.”
Lewis finally looks at me then. “It was you,” he breathes out. “It was you, but I was too scared to recognize it.”
My gut untwists slowly, tentatively.
“It’s that eerie feeling you get when you plan out an experiment and list your hypotheses,” Lewis continues, “and everything turns out right as you predicted. It never happens. You know it doesn’t. So when everything falls into place—against all odds—you question yourself. You go and look for the error in your data, the bug in your code, the fault in your logic. You question yourself until you go mad. You try to find what you did wrong because there’s no way that something this special can be this clear and simple. And yet.”
A blush spreads over his cheeks. “That’s how I felt about you. Feel about you,” he adds, and it’s that sentence that brings the swirl of my emotions to a standstill.
I am here and Lewis is here, and his gaze is filled with something that manages to be enormous and intense and tender all at once.
“Falling in love felt like an inevitability, but everything after? It’s hard for me. I’ve been talking to Ben a lot, when he visitedme. My therapist. My sister. And I’ve been thinking about what I told you that first evening we had dinner. That love is accepting someone without revisions. Maybe it’s something I wished for all along, but now I know it’s bullshit. Because we change, all the time, and relationships require communication and compromise and change. You can love someone, all their marvelous and flawed sides, but sometimes you also need them to change their stubborn ways, even if it’s just by an inch. Because lifeisa fucking peer-review process. You mess up, and you’re lucky if someone tells you and invites you to do better the next time.That’slove. Because it’s the way you build things that last.
“So that’s what I came here to tell you, really. It’s all I could think of doing.” He huffs out in exasperation. “Do you know how hard it is to respect you and leave you alone but also not let you go? To show you that there’s space for you in my life, that I want to fold mine around yours? It’s impossible. An unsolvable problem, really. So I thought I’d do the only thing I knew how, which is talk about brain waves and memory tasks first and see if you’d show up. I needed to be here as loudly and quietly as possible.”
Lewis switches to a new slide in his PowerPoint, this one with a paragraph of text.
While North and Silberstein has its issues, I can see the effort put into this collaboration. Although the origin of this work might go against standards of scientific integrity, I recognize the potential it holds and, moving forward, I’d like to make a few suggestions on how these strengths can be pulled to the forefront. These changes are substantial enough to warrant a major revision, but I’m convinced that they can be tackled.
My eyes fly over the words. Lewis isn’t here to tell me that we end here, or that we ended in New York. He’s not here by accident. He’s here for me.
Understanding takes hold and dominoes through my body, quieting my heart and soothing my stomach. I’m still free-falling, but now he’s falling with me, holding my hand.
“Did you—” I start, and need to steady my voice. “Did you write me a revision letter?”
“I did.”
I lean my hip against the side of a chair, crossing my arms in front of my chest.
Lewis’s eyes track over my face, the blush on his cheeks deepening, as though he’s overcome by the same excitement I am. “You cannot imagine how much I missed seeing you squint at me like that. There’s something you don’t agree with. What is it?”
“Why does your name come first? In our collaboration?”
He shrugs. “Alphabetical order, I guess?” Pulling out his notebook from an inside pocket of his blazer, he scribbles something onto the page. “I’m adding it to the list of revision points.” After setting down the pad, he taps the keyboard again, revealing a numbered list. “Here are all the ones I already came up with, starting off with number 1. I’m sorry. So sorry for not telling you about the grant. Historically, when I’ve been honest with people, they didn’t stay around through the tough parts, so I was scared to pop that bubble we had. I didn’t want to lose you. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m sorry for not telling you about it.”
Lewis falls silent, giving me time to read.
1) I will always tell you how sorry I am for the times I’ve hurt you, starting with keeping the grant from you and for pulling a Jacob on you. From now on, I’ll tell you about complicated things as they come up.
2) I promise we’ll figure out a way wherever you end up. At a distance or right here, I’m happy if you’ll have me.
a) We might have to fine-tune our communication a little bit.
3) I will hide all your contact lenses so you need to wear your glasses, and I’ll make sure you see clearly with them.
