Adam groaned deep in his chest. But she was the one who closed the space between them, who deepened the kiss, who combed her hands into his hair, short nails scraping against his scalp. She was the one who pulled him even closer, and he was the one who pushed her back against the wall and moaned into her mouth.
It was frightening. Frightening, how good this felt. How easy it would be to never stop. To let time stretch and unbend, forget about everything else, and simply stay in this moment forever.
But Adam pulled back first, holding her eyes as he tried to collect himself.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” Olive asked, with a small, wistful smile.
She wasn’t herself sure what she was referring to. Maybe his arms around her. Maybe this last kiss. Maybe everything else. The sunscreen, his ridiculous answers on his favorite color, the quiet conversations late at night
. . . all of it had been so very good.
“It was.” Adam’s voice sounded too deep to be his own. When he pressed his lips against her forehead one last time, she felt her love for him swell fuller than a river in flood.
“I think I should leave,” she told him gently, without looking at him. He let her go wordlessly, so she did.
When she heard the click of the door closing behind her, it was like falling from a great height.
Chapter Nineteen
Olive spent the following day in the hotel, sleeping, crying, and doing the very thing that had gotten her into this mess to begin with: lying. She told Malcolm and Anh that she’d be busy with friends from college for the entire
day, pulled the blackout curtains together, and then buried herself in her bed.
Which, technically, was Adam’s bed.
She didn’t let herself think about the situation too much. Something inside her—her heart, very possibly—was broken in several large pieces, not shattered as much as neatly snapped in half, and then in half again. All she could do was sit down amid the debris of her feelings and wallow. Sleeping through most of the day helped dull the pain a great deal. Numb, she was rapidly starting to realize, was good.
She lied the day after, too. Feigned a last-minute request from Dr. Aslan when asked to join her friends at the conference or on excursions around Boston, and then took a deep, fortifying breath. She drew the curtains open, forced her blood to start flowing again (with fifty crunches, fifty jumping jacks, and fifty push-ups, though she cheated on the last by going on her knees), then showered and brushed her teeth for the first time in thirty-six hours.
It wasn’t easy. Seeing Adam’s Biology Ninja T-shirt in the mirror made her tear up, but she reminded herself that she’d made her choice. She’d decided to put Adam’s well-being first, and she didn’t regret it. But she’d be damned if she let Tom Fucking Benton take credit for a project she had worked on for years. A project that meant the world to her. Maybe her life was nothing but a little sob story, but it was her little sob story.
Her heart may be broken, but her brain was doing just fine.
Adam had said that the reason most professors hadn’t bothered to reply, perhaps even read her email, was that she was a student. So she followed his advice: she emailed Dr. Aslan and asked her to introduce Olive to all the researchers she’d previously contacted, plus the two people who’d been on her panel and had shown interest in her work. Dr. Aslan was close to retirement, and had more or less given up on producing science, but she was still a full professor at Stanford. It had to mean something.
Then Olive googled extensively about research ethics, plagiarism, and theft of ideas. The issue was a little murky, given that Olive had—quite recklessly, she now realized—described all her protocols in detail in her report for Tom. But once she began examining the situation with a clearer
head, she decided that it wasn’t as dire as she’d initially thought. The report she’d written, after all, was well-structured and thorough. With a few tweaks she could turn it into a scholarly publication. It would hopefully go quickly through peer review, and the findings would be credited under her name.
What she decided to focus on was that despite all his insults and rude comments, Tom, one of the top cancer researchers in the United States, had expressed interest in stealing her research ideas. She took it as a very, very backhanded compliment.
She spent the next several hours carefully avoiding thoughts of Adam and instead researching other potential scientists who might be able to support her the following year. It was a long shot, but she had to try. When someone knocked on her door, it was already the middle of the afternoon, and she’d added three new names to her list. She quickly put on clothes to answer, expecting housekeeping. When Anh and Malcolm stormed inside, she cursed herself for never checking the peephole. She truly deserved to be axed by a serial killer.
“Okay,” Anh said, throwing herself onto Olive’s still-made bed, “you have two sentences to convince me that I shouldn’t be mad at you for forgetting to ask how my outreach event went.”
“Shit!” Olive covered her mouth with her hand. “I am so sorry. How did it go?”
“Perfect.” Anh’s eyes were shiny with happiness. “We had such great attendance and everyone loved it. We’re thinking of making this a yearly thing, and formally establishing an organization. Peer-to-peer mentoring!
Hear this: every grad is assigned two undergrads. Once they get into grad school, they mentor two more undergrads each. And in ten years we take over the entire damn world.”
Olive looked at her, speechless. “This is . . . you’re amazing.”
“I am, aren’t I? Okay, now’s your turn to grovel. Aaand, go.”
Olive opened her mouth, but for a long time nothing really came out. “I don’t really have an excuse. I was just busy with . . . something Dr. Aslan asked me to finish.”
“This is ridiculous. You are in Boston. You should be out there in an Irish pub pretending you love the Red Sox and eating Dunkies, not doing work.
For your boss.”
“We’re technically here for a work conference,” Olive pointed out.
“Conference shmonference.” Malcolm joined Anh on the bed.
“Can we please go out, the three of us?” Anh begged. “Let’s do the Freedom Trail. With ice cream. And beer.”
“Where’s Jeremy?”
“Presenting his poster. And I’m bored.” Anh’s grin was impish.
Olive was not in the mood for socializing, or beer, or freedom trails, but at some point she was going to have to learn to productively navigate society with a broken heart.
She smiled and said, “Let me check my email, and then we can go.” She had, inexplicably, accumulated about fifteen messages in the thirty minutes since she’d last checked, only one of which wasn’t spam.
