“Did you . . . Did you just kiss me?” He sounded puzzled, and maybe a little out of breath. His lips were full and plump and . . . God. Kissed. There was simply no way Olive could get away with denying what she had just done.
Still, it was worth a try.
“Nope.”
Surprisingly, it seemed to work.
“Ah. Okay, then.” Carlsen nodded and turned around, looking vaguely disoriented. He took a couple of steps down the hallway, reached the water fountain—maybe where he’d been headed in the first place.
Olive was starting to believe that she might actually be off the hook when he halted and turned back with a skeptical expression. “Are you sure?”
Dammit.
“I—” She buried her face in her hands. “It’s not the way it looks.”
“Okay. I . . . Okay,” he repeated slowly. His voice was deep and low and sounded a lot like he was on his way to getting mad. Like maybe he was already mad. “What’s going on here?”
There was simply no way to explain this. Any normal person would have found Olive’s situation odd, but Adam Carlsen, who obviously considered empathy a bug and not a feature of humanity, could never understand. She let her hands fall to her sides and took a deep breath.
“I . . . listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but this is really none of your business.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then he nodded. “Yes. Of course.” He must be getting back into his usual groove, because his tone had lost some of its surprise and was back to normal—dry. Laconic. “I’ll just go back to my office and begin to work on my Title IX complaint.”
Olive exhaled in relief. “Yeah. That would be great, since— Wait. Your what?”
He cocked his head. “Title IX is a federal law that protects against sexual misconduct within academic settings—”
“I know what Title IX is.”
“I see. So you willfully chose to disregard it.”
“I— What? No. No, I didn’t!”
He shrugged. “I must be mistaken, then. Someone else must have assaulted me.”
“Assault—I didn’t ‘assault’ you.”
“You did kiss me.”
“But not really.”
“Without first securing my consent.”
“I asked if I could kiss you!”
“And then did so without waiting for my response.”
“What? You said yes.”
“Excuse me?”
She frowned. “I asked if I could kiss you, and you said yes.”
“Incorrect. You asked if you could kiss me and I snorted.”
“I’m pretty sure I heard you said yes.”
He lifted one eyebrow, and for a minute Olive let herself daydream of drowning someone. Dr. Carlsen. Herself. Both sounded like great options.
“Listen, I’m really sorry. It was a weird situation. Can we just forget that this happened?”
He studied her for a long moment, his angular face serious and something else, something that she couldn’t quite decipher because she was too busy noticing all over again how damn towering and broad he was. Just massive.
Olive had always been slight, just this side of too slender, but girls who are five eight rarely felt diminutive. At least until they found themselves standing next to Adam Carlsen. She’d known that he was tall, of course, from seeing him around the department or walking across campus, from sharing the elevator with him, but they’d never interacted. Never been this close.
Except for a second ago, Olive. When you almost put your tongue in his
—
“Is there something wrong?” He sounded almost concerned.
“What? No. No, there isn’t.”
“Because,” he continued calmly, “kissing a stranger at midnight in a science lab might be a sign that there is.”
“There isn’t.”
Carlsen nodded, thoughtful. “Very well. Expect mail in the next few days, then.” He began to walk past her, and she turned to yell after him.
