Her own words, thrown back at her. I don’t want to be your friend, she was tempted to say. Thing was, she also didn’t want to not be his friend. What she wanted was completely outside of her ability to obtain, and she needed to forget it. Scrap it from her brain.
“Yes. We are.”
“Then, as a friend, don’t force me to worry about you using public transportation late at night in a city you’re not familiar with. Biking on roads without bike lanes is bad enough,” he muttered, and she immediately felt a weight sink into her stomach. He was trying to be a good friend. He cared for her, and instead of being satisfied with what she currently had, she had to ruin it all and—and want more.
She took a deep breath. “Are you sure? That it wouldn’t bother you?” He nodded, silent.
“Okay, then. Okay.” She forced herself to smile. “Do you snore?”
He huffed out a laugh. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on. How can you not know?”
He shrugged. “I just don’t.”
“Well, that probably means you don’t. Otherwise, someone would have told you.”
“Someone?”
“A roommate.” It occurred to her that Adam was thirty-four and likely hadn’t had a roommate in about a decade. “Or a girlfriend.”
He smiled faintly and lowered his gaze. “I guess my ‘girlfriend’ will tell me after SBD, then.” He said it in a quiet, unassuming tone, clearly trying to make a joke, but Olive’s cheeks warmed, and she couldn’t quite bear to look at him anymore. Instead she picked at a thread on the sleeve of her cardigan, and searched for something to say.
“My stupid abstract.” She cleared her throat. “It was accepted as a talk.”
He met her eyes. “Faculty panel?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re
not
happy?”
“No.” She winced.
“Is it the public-speaking thing?”
He’d remembered. Of course he had. “Yeah. It will be awful.”
Adam stared at her and said nothing. Not that it would be fine, not that the talk would go smoothly, not that she was overreacting and underselling a fantastic opportunity. His calm acceptance of her anxiety had the exact opposite effect of Dr. Aslan’s enthusiasm: it relaxed her.
“When I was in my third year of grad school,” he said quietly, “my adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk.”
“Wow.” Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like, being expected to perform something so daunting with so little forewarning. At the same time, part of her marveled at Adam self-disclosing something without being asked a direct question. “Why did he do that?”
“Who knows?” He tilted his head back, staring at a spot above her head.
His tone held a trace of bitterness. “Because he had an emergency. Because he thought it’d be a formative experience. Because he could.”
Olive just bet that he could. She didn’t know Adam’s former adviser, but academia was very much an old boys’ club, where those who held the power liked to take advantage of those who didn’t without repercussions.
“Was it? A formative experience?”
He shrugged again. “As much as anything that keeps you awake in a panic for forty-eight hours straight can be.”
Olive smiled. “And how did you do?”
“I did . . .” He pressed his lips together. “Not well enough.” He was silent for a long moment, his gaze locked somewhere outside the café’s window.
“Then again, nothing was ever good enough.”
It seemed impossible that someone might look at Adam’s scientific accomplishments and find them lacking. That he could ever be anything less than the best at what he did. Was that why he was so severe in his judgment of others? Because he’d been taught to set the same impossible standards for himself?
“Do you still keep in touch with him? Your adviser, I mean.”
“He’s retired now. Tom has taken over what used to be his lab.”
It was such an uncharacteristically opaque, carefully worded answer.
Olive couldn’t help being curious. “Did you like him?”
“It’s complicated.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, looking pensive and far away. “No. No, I didn’t like him. I still don’t. He was . . .” It took him so long to continue, she almost convinced herself that he wouldn’t. But he did, staring at the late-afternoon sunlight disappearing behind the oak trees.
“Brutal. My adviser was brutal.”
She chuckled, and Adam’s eyes darted back to her face, narrow with confusion.
