The Love Hypothesis (Love Hypothesis #1)(8)

In a way, it had been love at first sight. First day of grad school. Biology cohort orientation. Olive entered the conference room, looked around, and sat in the first free seat she could find, petrified. She was the only woman in the room, virtually alone in a sea of white men who were already talking about boats, and whatever sportsball was on TV the night before, and the best routes to drive places. I have made a terrible mistake, she thought. The Guy in the bathroom was wrong. I should never have come here. I am never going to fit in.

And then a girl with curly dark hair and a pretty, round face plopped in the chair next to hers and muttered, “So much for the STEM programs’ commitment to inclusivity, am I right?” That was the moment everything changed.

They could have just been allies. As the only two non-cis-white-male students in their year, they could have found solace together when some bitching was needed and ignored each other otherwise. Olive had lots of friends like that—all of them, actually, circumstantial acquaintances whom she thought of fondly but not very often. Anh, though, had been different from the start. Maybe because they’d soon found out that they loved spending their Saturday nights eating junk food and falling asleep to rom-coms. Maybe it was the way she’d insisted on dragging Olive to every single “women in STEM” support group on campus and had wowed everyone with her bull’s-eye comments. Maybe it was that she’d opened up to Olive and explained how hard it had been for her to get where she was today. The way her older brothers had made fun of her and called her a nerd for loving math so much growing up—at an age when being a nerd was not quite considered cool. That time a physics professor asked her if she was in the wrong class on the first day of the semester. The fact that despite her grades and research experience, even her academic adviser had seemed skeptical when she’d decided to pursue STEM higher education.

Olive, whose path to grad school had been rough but not nearly as rough, was befuddled. Then enraged. And then in absolute awe when she understood the self-doubt that Anh had been able to harness into sheer fierceness.

And for some unimaginable reason, Anh seemed to like Olive just as much. When Olive’s stipend hadn’t quite stretched to the end of the month, Anh had shared her instant ramen. When Olive’s computer had crashed without backups, Anh had stayed up all night to help her rewrite her crystallography paper. When Olive had nowhere to go over the holidays, Anh would bring her friend home to Michigan and let her large family ply Olive with delicious food while rapid Vietnamese flowed around her. When Olive had felt too stupid for the program and had considered dropping out, Anh had talked her out of it.

The day Olive met Anh’s rolling eyes, a life-changing friendship was born. Slowly, they’d begun to include Malcolm and become a bit of a trio, but Anh . . . Anh was her person. Family. Olive hadn’t even thought that was possible for someone like her.

Anh rarely asked anything for herself, and even though they’d been friends for more than two years, Olive had never seen her show interest in dating anyone—until Jeremy. Pretending that she’d been on a date with Carlsen was the least Olive could do to ensure her friend’s happiness.

So she bucked up, smiled, and tried to keep her tone reasonably even while asking, “What do you mean?”

“I mean that we talk every minute of every day, and you never mentioned Carlsen before. My closest friend is supposedly seeing the superstar professor of the department, and somehow I’ve never heard of it? You know his reputation, right? Is it some kind of joke? Do you have a brain tumor? Do I have a brain tumor?”

This was what happened whenever Olive lied: she ended up having to tell even more lies to cover her first, and she was horrible at it, which meant that each lie got worse and less convincing than the previous. There was no way she could fool Anh. There was no way she could fool anybody. Anh was going to get mad, then Jeremy was going to get mad, then Malcolm, too, and then Olive was going to find herself utterly alone. The heartbreak was going to make her flunk out of grad school. She was going to lose her visa and her only source of income and move back to Canada, where it snowed all the time and people ate moose heart and—

“Hey.”

The voice, deep and even, came from somewhere behind Olive, but she didn’t need to turn to know that it was Carlsen’s. Just like she didn’t need to turn to know that the large, warm weight suddenly steadying her, a firm but barely there pressure applied to the center of her lower back, was Carlsen’s hand. About two inches above her ass.

Holy crap.

Olive twisted her neck and looked up. And up. And up. And a bit more up. She was not a short woman, but he was just big. “Oh. Um, hey.”

“Is everything okay?” He said it looking into her eyes, in a low, intimate tone. Like they were alone. Like Anh was not there. He said it in a way that should have made Olive uncomfortable but didn’t. For some inexplicable reason his presence in the room soothed her, even though until a second ago she had been freaking out. Perhaps two different types of unease neutralized each other? It sounded like a fascinating research topic. Worth pursuing. Maybe Olive should abandon biology and switch to psychology. Maybe she should excuse herself and go run a literature search. Maybe she should expire on the spot to avoid facing this crapfest of a situation she’d put herself in.

“Yes. Yes. Everything is great. Anh and I were just . . . chatting. About our weekends.”

Carlsen looked at Anh, as though realizing for the first time that she was in the room. He acknowledged her existence with one of those brief nods dudes used to greet others. His hand slid lower on Olive’s spine just as Anh’s eyes widened.