Chapter 12
12
”I never meant to fall in love with you.”
Ah. Words every woman dreams of hearing.
I sip my expensive wine in an expensive glass at an expensive table in an expensive restaurant. This is foreign territory for me.
Maybe I should have insisted on having this conversation in the lab.
I shake my head and laugh at myself. Hearing Peter say those words would not be easier in any location.
It’s not that I didn’t know our whole relationship was a lie already. He just…never said it to my face so succinctly—without room for misinterpretation—before.
“Thank you,” I say in lieu of having a planned reply to words I never expected to hear. I’m 99% certain even YouTube doesn’t have a social skills training video to cover this particular situation.
“Shit. No. That’s not—” Peter scrubs his hands over his face, his elbows jostling the table. The fine china, silverware, and crystal echo his frustration. He blows out a breath before staring at his empty plate. “I’m messing this up already.”
I pull a breadstick from the basket between us and chew on it with a nervous energy that demands some socially appropriate outlet. After swallowing to give myself time to think of an adequate response, I say, “It was already messed up. I’m not entirely certain anything you say now can make it worse.”
He lifts his gaze to me beneath his eyelashes. “I’m sorry.”
I wash down the driest bread of all dry breads with another gulp of even drier wine. I’m definitely cursed. A genius who turns even the fanciest foods to ash in her mouth.
The guy sitting across from me with his now slightly disheveled hair, beautiful kaleidoscope eyes behind sexy glasses, and the body that makes other women stare won’t be kissing me to break the spell either.
“You don’t need to apologize,” I insist on a whisper. “I wanted to hear your explanation. I brought this on myself.”
“No.” His gaze bores into me directly for the first time tonight, that single word more confident than anything he’s uttered since he held the front door open for me at the restaurant. “You didn’t.”
I frown as I stare at him.
All around us, happy couples dine in an intimate, dimly lit atmosphere with brocade curtains and cushioned chairs. Lovely wines and longing glances. Snow falls silently outside, framed by majestically large windows that offer a full view of the nearby mountains.
I’m tired of feeling so ugly inside while pretending to feel nothing at all. If I’m going to keep this job even after my investigation concludes, then I need to put the past behind me. For good.
“Tell me what happened. Please start at the beginning.”
He shakes his head then sips his wine. Miraculously, all the while frowning. “I don’t know about the beginning to be honest with you. I wasn’t included at first. I can’t even tell you who started the bet. ”
For some inexplicable reason, I’d never assumed that Peter was the ringleader. Merely the winner.
“You know how it was,” he explains with a somewhat helpless gesture of his upturned palms. “People came and went all the time. New students, graduates, dropouts. I happened to walk into the wrong place at the right time and caught them talking about it. It was happenstance rather than purposeful involvement.”
I don’t know why hearing that makes me feel worse. Perhaps it’s realizing that all the pain—and all the joy—I’ve experienced over the past few years hasn’t been within my control. I had even less self-government than I realized. I glance around again at the other much happier couples who smile and hold hands and obviously flirt with each other. Are they in control of their destinies? If not here, then at their jobs? With their families? Their pets? Anything?
It’s a potential vortex of helplessness that I’d rather not fall into in public. I predict that I’ll either end up truly numb from the full realization or sitting on the floor sobbing in a pathetic show of human weakness.
Neither of those options sound particularly appealing.
“Anyway,” Peter says after another rough swallow of expensive wine. “It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to go directly to the dean of engineering with the information.”
“Why didn’t you?” If I’d overheard a similar bet being made among the female students, I’d have gone to the dean with what I knew.
“I had the foresight to realize that if I did that, then they’d just take their disgusting game underground. To lower heights, as it were.”
I snort at the oxymoron.
A faint smile tugs up the corner of his mouth. “I realized to make them the losers, I had to play the game. ”
I replay that statement several times in my head. “Why do you phrase it that way? Didn’t you want to be the winner?”
“Not particularly,” he admits. After a lengthy pause, he continues. “I was focused on my classes, on fitting the next Tetris block of my life into place. I’d love to sit here and tell you my actions were for romantic reasons, but they started from a place of altruism.”
Oddly, I respect that. Likely because it isn’t a lie. Or because knowing he never loved me in the first place proves my hypothesis.
“I knew what they were doing was wrong. I didn’t want to beat them at their own game as much I wanted them to lose at it.” He frowns. “I wanted to teach them a lesson.”
“So, you did want to be the winner,” I point out. Literally. With my half-eaten breadstick held in mid-air toward him.
He frowns. “I don’t get your meaning.”
I shrug. “If you wanted to teach them a lesson, then you wanted to be above them in some manner. You already believed you were. Even if you didn’t necessarily want the monetary prize, you wanted to be the winner in a different sense.”
He gazes at me with a steady yet weighted heat behind his eyes. “As time went on, I wanted to be the winner in every way.”
My shoulders creep up with increasing anxiety. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. Go back to the day that you first found out about the bet.”
“Of course. What else would you like to know? In how much detail?”
“All of it,” I insist, desperate for a finite end to this most torturous period of my life. “Leave nothing unsaid.”
He heaves a dramatic sigh. Like he’s being greatly inconvenienced. Finally, he murmurs, “I don’t understand what hurting you will accomplish. ”
“You’ve already hurt me. The least you can give me now is full knowledge of the situation. And closure.”
He nods, frowning at the plate in front of him. “It was toward the end of your second year. We were gearing up for finals in the classes we TA’d for. I was spending more time at office hours, tutoring undergrads, than I was on my own term papers. I was frustrated and convinced that I’d never get my PhD because I was being used as cheap labor for the same professors who were holding my qualifiers hostage.”
I nod, empathizing with his memories of that time.
“I wish I could remember why I walked into the TA lounge,” he murmurs, staring out the window at the increasingly heavy snowfall. “In hindsight, that seems like such a momentous day in my life. It frustrates me to no end that I can’t recall every detail easily. I guess it’s because I wasn’t aware that day would change me forever as I was living it.”
I feel no empathy for that statement. I’d love to escape my hyperawareness for even a single day, regardless of its impact on my future.
He shakes his head subtly before bringing his gaze back to me. “In the lounge, I heard a very heated, very explicit debate about the status of your virginity.”
I blink at him several times in rapid succession. I never assumed anyone else gave me so much thought. Until Peter. A ball of nausea forms in my gut at the realization that I haven’t been ignored as much as I wanted. I’d much rather be ignored than only thought of in unsavory ways.
“I was immediately angry,” Peter says with vehemence. “No one was talking about their own sexual status. They certainly weren’t arguing over whether they believed me to be a virgin or not. It wasn’t fair. You were naturally more brilliant than the rest of us combined.”
“You were jealous?” I ask incredulously .
“I was.” He nods. “I had to bust my ass, studying for hours, to attain even a fraction of your understanding of complex theories. For the first few years, I wagered a silent competition with you. It was my goal to just answer a question before you. Once. Even once would have been enough for me.”
Ironically—or not—that might be the most erotic thing anyone’s ever said to me. I would have greatly enjoyed an overt competition with him. Before Peter, I always assumed I was more sapiosexual than anything. It wasn’t this man’s sudden muscles that attracted me to him. It was always his brilliant brain. He also unlocked a key of physical pleasure that I didn’t know I’d been missing out on.
He doesn’t seem to notice me squirming in my seat to relieve the empty ache between my thighs. Rather, he continues to gain steam as he remembers out loud. His sudden bark of laughter feels like a lightning bolt to my already throbbing clit. “At first, I actually had this wild fantasy that I could absorb some of your genius through osmosis. If I could just get close enough to you, your brilliance would rub off on me. Oh, I wanted to win all right. I was just playing an entirely different game than they were.”
Cancel the arousal. Cue the righteous indignation.
“Genius isn’t a gift. It’s a curse.”
He shakes his head, his eyes reflecting the candlelight from the center of our table. “Anything is what we make of it. Schrodinger’s cat, right? I fell into you on accident. Simultaneously, all the little dominoes that led me to you were fate.”
I shake my head, rejecting that theory even though I rationally know it’s been proven by mathematicians and theoretical physicists far more brilliant than me. “No. You sought me out because you wanted to prove yourself for multiple reasons. It actually had very little to do with me.”
“Untrue,” he argues with a smile as he lifts his wine glass to his lips. “You sought me out first. If you hadn’t been the first person in our cohort to try to befriend me, then maybe I wouldn’t have given a damn that the rest of the guys in our department were betting on who could bed you first.”
I’m instantly transported back to the night I think of often. The department mixer. The ostentatious displays of financial and academic affluence. The golden boys of the PhD program in the center of charmed, enthralled professors. The jealousy I felt toward them. The sense of a kindred spirit floating along the edges of the social action.
“Are you trying to tell me that it’s my fault you engaged in that despicable bet?” I grind out.
Peter’s smile softens around the edges. “No. I’m saying it’s your fault that you made me care enough to engage.”
“You didn’t,” I insist, my memory crystal clear, unlike his nebulous ones. “You bolted. You ran away from me without so much as a response to my confession.”
He laughs a little, returning his gaze to his empty plate. “I’d never been approached by a beautiful woman before. I had no idea how to react.”
His easily offered confession unsettles me. In that moment, he’d seen me as a beautiful woman. He also obviously didn’t notice my awkward bumbling at small talk imbued with a deep, personal confession. I have no idea what to make of that. Nothing about his perspective of that night matches my black-and-white perception. He’s all shades of gray from my point of view. He’s the cat, and I’m Schrodinger. Desperately trying to make sense of the nonsensical.
I’m not brilliant enough to solve this equation alone.
“Go on,” I whisper. “What happened after you walked in to hear them talking about me?”
He sighs, his smile turning upside down as he shifts back into concrete details rather than romantic remembrances. “I realized they weren’t simply arguing their opinions on the matter. They were outlining their methods for how to prove the hypothesis. I also recognized I’d been excluded for whatever reason. They didn’t necessarily clam up and hide their discussion from me as I poured a cup of coffee. They didn’t engage me in the conversation either. I began asking leading questions that I hoped wouldn’t show all my cards about what I really thought. After gaining their trust, I played my hand. They never offered. I had to literally ante up. I told them I wanted in on the bet.”
His analogies frustrate me, but he’s baited the trap exquisitely, nonetheless.
I’m on the proverbial edge of my seat, awaiting the next tidbit of juicy information. “What happened then?”
His frown deepens. “They laughed at me.”
I frown, too. “What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly that.” He gazes at me steadily. “They laughed. A few of them tried to talk me out of it. They were all convinced I shouldn’t pony up the buy-in that I couldn’t nearly afford when I was guaranteed to fail.”
I suck in a sharp breath. I’d never considered that he was the long odds to win.
For me, he was always the front-runner.
If I’m being fully truthful, he was the only runner.
An only slightly more horrifying thought occurs to me. “Is that why you suddenly popped all those muscles my third year? Because you thought that would put you ahead of the curve?”
He has the decency—or the fantastic acting skills—to appear ashamed. Pink-tinged cheeks, averted gaze, thin lips. “I was trying to…” He coughs uncomfortably. “Hedge my bets.”
I’m insulted! Followed quickly by ashamed.
“You thought so little of me,” I murmur, similarly casting my gaze away from his fantastic muscles.
So. I’m just an animal after all. A highly complex animal, but still biologically predisposed with the same ingrained instincts for natural selection as much as anyone else. If I’ve said it a thousand times, I’ll say it a thousand and one—being a genius doesn’t make anyone special.
“I…” He scratches the back of his neck. “…researched. Instead of swooping in with the stereotypical techniques the others were employing, I gambled by playing the long game. I made note of the type of guys who caught your eye. What topics of discussion piqued your interest. Your personal likes and dislikes.”
It’s further proof that I’m not so special to hear my personality boiled down to a simple pros and cons list for someone else to study.
“Wait a minute,” I blurt, fresh embarrassment blossoming in my brain. “Did I…openly ogle people?”
He winces as if he knows how much this fact shames me. “No. If someone wasn’t paying close attention, they’d probably never notice. Your glances were fleeting at best.”
When my expression remains frozen in abject disgust, he supplies, “If it makes you feel any better, according to my notes, you also have a thing for women with flat chests.”
I scoff. “That thing would be called envy .”
He squints at me with genuine confusion. “Why?”
I gesture toward my buxom breasts. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to navigate the predominantly male STEM fields with these things? Also, they’re an unavoidable annoyance for me. They constantly get in my way.”
He stares at my chest as he contemplates my admission. Finally, he nods. A single, resolute movement. “I can appreciate that. Inconvenient, uncontrollable erections also get in my way and annoy me.”
We subtly shake our heads at each other as our server approaches the table with our dinners. This is a highly socially inappropriate—however brutally honest—topic of conversation for such an elegant atmosphere.
In any other circumstance, our mutual, silent signaling to each other might be amusing.
The conversation obviously pauses as our orders are delivered. Me—the chicken alfredo. Him—the lasagna. As much as some things have changed, others remain the same. He prefers red sauces while I favor white.
It’s mind boggling to me that I never knew he was involved in a bet to deflower me for the duration of our relationship. I also wasn’t aware that he drank himself stupid so regularly during undergrad that he almost didn’t receive his bachelor’s degree on time. I had no idea how jealous he was of me. Or that he wasn’t as secretly self-assured as he is outwardly now.
How much else don’t I know about this man that I believed to know in the most intimate sense?
“You said you didn’t mean to fall in love with me,” I remind him after too many heartbeats of silence stretch between us. “How did that happen then? What changed?”
Rather than appropriate shame, a soft, shimmering joy blooms in his eyes. “It was the winter of your third year. Bitterly cold, windy, dark all the damn time. Everyone moved around campus like a bunch of depressed, sluggish bears that weren’t allowed to hibernate.”
I cough-laugh at his accurate description. I’ve often lamented the fact that humans haven’t evolved to hibernate through the most inhospitable months of the year.
“It was the first snow of the season, and everyone else was extra annoyed about having to dodge piles of black slush on the sidewalks, if they were shoveled and salted at all.” He smiles, his eyes glassy as the memory obviously replays in his mind. “And then I saw you. You were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, completely oblivious to the glares you received for being in anyone’s way. Your face was turned up toward the sky. Snowflakes melted on your cheeks the second they touched your warm skin. I have never in my life wanted to be a snowflake until that moment. You had a delighted smile on your face, then suddenly, you let out a burst of even more delighted laughter.” He shakes his head as if to clear the memories, but a smile doesn’t leave his mouth as he stares at a seemingly random point in the distance. “You were the smartest person I’d ever met. Things I had to work my ass off to understand came so effortlessly to you.”
He returns his gaze to me. “You noticed every tiny little thing that most people either ignored or didn’t pick up on at all. You could have been the most egotistical, jaded, overwhelmed person in the world, but you weren’t. When you saw the smallest ray of sunshine peeking through the clouds, you’d talk about the angle, and the statistical analysis of the current weather system, but you also showed so much wonder and appreciation. I wanted to be just like you. I wanted to get close enough to you to absorb everything that’s so damn magical about you and steal a tiny piece of it for myself.”
I nod. He’s already admitted as much. “Because you were jealous. You wanted to absorb my intelligence through osmosis.”
He doesn’t frown at me. He smiles. “Not in that moment. As I watched you dance and laugh and twirl in the snow, I wanted what you were experiencing for myself. I wanted to live it with you. The wonder, the awe, the joy that you found in the smallest thing. I wanted to learn how to notice all the little details that you do, but more importantly—I wanted you to show me how to appreciate them with all the delight of an innocent child instead of the overworked, under-rested, jaded man I’d become.”
“It didn’t work,” I point out, sad that I wasn’t the magical cure for all his perceived flaws. “You’re more jaded than ever. Your employees call you an exacting asshole. ”
He frowns, which proves their claims. “I’ve spent the past year not knowing what I had done to drive you away. It had to be some catastrophic failure. Maybe it was willful ignorance that I never even considered you might have found out about the bet. I applied for this position on a whim, never imagining I’d get it. When I did, I threw myself into it. I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice. I couldn’t fathom failing at something else that mattered to me.”
He shakes his head, his lips neither frowning nor smiling. Only sadness displays on his face.
Unshed tears sting my eyes. I’m vaguely aware that neither of us have touched our dinners. Though it’s physically impossible, the air around us feels weighted and…sad.
Everything just feels so sad.
I swipe a rogue tear from my cheek. This is neither the time nor the place to cry. “I can’t make you whole. Not when you tore me in half that day with your betrayal.”
He nods, the impasse between us so much wider than the span of a table in a romantic restaurant.
I push my fork around on my plate, staring at my fettucine like it holds the answers to his theoretical problem.
Ever so slowly, in miniscule increments, Peter slides his hand across the table until he flips, holding his open palm toward me.
“Take my hand,” he murmurs.
Even knowing all the reasons I shouldn’t, I can’t resist.
His warm skin envelops mine.
“Tell me you don’t feel that. Tell me you don’t still feel that.”
I can’t. I don’t want to lie. Not like he did to me.
I glance away.
“The moment you walked into my building,” he whispers. “I felt it all over again. Like no time had passed at all. And in that moment, I realized why I’ve been stuck in this miserable limbo. ”
“Why?” I rasp, my voice a ghost of a whisper. I’m only barely holding it together.
“Because ever since that day in the snow—years ago—I exist on two planes. Where I am. And where you are.”
I shake my head and pull my hand from his grasp, my heart stuttering in my chest like a feeble, unreliable organ. It’s why I started collecting little hearts in the first place. Because I’ve learned not to trust mine. “We’re both here now. It doesn’t seem to have helped you at all.”
“No,” he admits. “We’re in the same time and space, but we still exist on two different planes.”
We do. Only I’m the one with the secret this time.
“What did you do with your winnings? How much money did you get?”
He blows out a breath before another sad, faint smile tips the corners of his lips. “About five grand. I bought us cruise tickets to celebrate our graduation.”
I laugh to cover up a very unladylike sniffle. “You were going to take us on a tropical vacation?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t think you were ready for an engagement ring yet.”
I blink at Peter.
His words imply he was ready to buy one.