The Love Hypothesis (Love Hypothesis #1)(35)
Olive opened her mouth to—to do what, precisely? To defend Adam? He was a dick. She had seen him be a dick. In full action. Maybe not recently, and maybe not to her, but if she’d wanted to count on her fingers the number of acquaintances who’d ended up in tears because of him, well . . . She would need both her hands, and then her toes. Maybe borrow some of Chase’s, too.
“Did he say why, at least? What you have to change?”
“Everything. He wants me to change my control condition and add another one, which is going to make the project ten times more time-consuming. And the way he said it, his air of superiority—he is so arrogant.”
Well. It was no news, really. Olive scratched her temple, trying not to sigh. “It sucks. I’m sorry,” she repeated once more, at a loss for anything better and genuinely feeling for Greg.
“Yeah, well.” He stood and walked around his bench, coming to a stop in front of Olive. “You should be.”
She froze. Surely she must have misheard. “Excuse me?”
“You’re his girlfriend.”
“I . . .” Really am not. But. Even if she had been. “Greg, I’m only dating him. I am not him. How would I have anything to do with—”
“You’re fine with all of this. With him acting like that—like an asshole on a power trip. You don’t give a shit about the way he treats everyone in the program, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to stomach being with him.”
At his tone, she took a step back.
Chase lifted his hands in a peacekeeping gesture, coming to stand between them. “Hey, now. Let’s not—”
“I’m not the one who failed you, Greg.”
“Maybe. But you don’t care that half of the department lives in terror of your boyfriend, either.”
Olive felt anger bubbling up. “That is not true. I am able to separate my professional relationships and my personal feelings for him—”
“Because you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself.”
“That is unfair. What am I supposed to do?”
“Get him to stop failing people.”
“Get him—” Olive sputtered. “Greg, how is this a rational response for you to have about Adam’s failing you—”
“Ah. Adam, is it?”
She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Adam. What should I call my boyfriend to better please you? Professor Carlsen?”
“If you were a half-decent ally to any of the grads in the department, you would just dump your fucking boyfriend.”
“How— Do you even realize how little sense you are . . .”
No reason to finish her sentence, since Greg was storming out of the lab and slamming the door behind him, clearly uninterested in anything Olive might have wanted to add. She ran a hand down her face, unsettled by what had just happened.
“He’s not . . . he doesn’t really mean it. Not about you, at least,” Chase said while scratching his head. A nice reminder that he’d been standing there, in the room, for the entirety of this conversation. Front-row seat. It was going to take maybe fifteen minutes before everyone in the program knew about it. “Greg needs to graduate in the spring with his wife. So that they can find postdocs together. They don’t want to live apart, you know.”
She nodded—she hadn’t known, but she could imagine. Some of her anger dissipated. “Yeah, well.” Being horrible to me isn’t going to make his thesis work go any faster, she didn’t add.
Chase sighed. “It’s not personal. But you have to understand that it’s weird for us. Because Carlsen . . . Maybe he wasn’t on any of your committees, but you must know the kind of guy he is, right?”
She was unsure how to respond.
“And now you guys are dating, and . . .” Chase shrugged with a nervous smile. “It shouldn’t be a matter of taking sides, but sometimes it can feel like it, you know?”
Chase’s words lingered for the rest of the day. Olive thought about them as she ran her mice through her experimental protocols, and then later while she tried to figure out what to do with those two outliers that made her findings tricky to interpret. She mulled it over while biking home, hot wind warming her cheeks and ruffling her hair, and while eating two slices of the saddest pizza ever. Malcolm had been on a health kick for weeks now (something about cultivating his gut microbiome) and refused to admit that cauliflower crust did not taste good.
Among her friends, Malcolm and Jeremy had had unpleasant dealings with Adam in the past, but after the initial shock they didn’t seem to hold Olive’s relationship with him against her. She hadn’t concerned herself too much with the feelings of other grads. She had always been a bit of a loner, and focusing on the opinion of people she barely interacted with seemed like a wasteful use of time and energy. Still, maybe there was a glimmer of truth in what Greg had said. Adam had been anything but a jerk to Olive, but did accepting his help while he acted horribly toward her fellow grads make her a bad person?
Olive lay on her unmade bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. It had been more than two years since she’d borrowed Malcolm’s stepladder and carefully stuck them on the ceiling; the glue was starting to give out, and the large comet in the corner by the window was going to fall off any day. Without letting herself think it through too much, she rolled out of bed and rummaged inside the pockets of her discarded jeans until she found her cell phone.