Chapter Ten
Is that how you seduce your colleagues?” I snort as Lewis pushes the door open. “ ‘Accepted without revisions’?”
He waves me inside, lifting one shoulder into a shrug. “If you think about it,” he says, toeing off his shoes, it’s kind of what real love is.”
I bend down to pull at my soggy shoestrings as he starts padding around the room. I’ve never had a scientific paper get published without being asked for a million revisions, so these three words surely hold some magic. But real love?
“I think you have to explain that one to me.”
“I mean…” He steps up next to me and fumbles with the thermostat.
“What’s more loving than telling someone you accept them the way they are?
Annoying quirks, and all? That it doesn’t matter if they hate public speaking, that they cannot figure out emojis for the life of them, that they use scientific discussions as a way to ignore their feelings? Because you love them anyway?”
While Lewis sets the kettle to boil, draws the sheer curtains in front of the smudged and darkening skyline, and dips into the closet, I’m rooted to the spot, his words on playback in my mind. He does have a point, even if I’m not willing to ever tell him that.
As I let my gaze wander around the room, I second-guess my decision to come up here.
The room is by no means small, and it’s not even really his room, just a temporary one, impersonal in the way housekeeping has no doubt tidied it up and made his bed this morning, but still.
It feels intimate, knowing that he sleeps right there.
That he was probably preparing his lecture for later this week before he left to pick me up.
There’s a thick book on the night table closest to the window whose title I cannot see, and a pair of climbing shoes pushed under the bench in front of the bed.
I cross my arms, unsure what to do about this new thing we have in common. “I didn’t know you climbed, too.”
“I do. A little top-rope, but mostly bouldering,” he says, his voice comes from behind the open bathroom door. “Helps me take my mind off things.”
Huh.
I guess that explains the callused fingertips, the corded tendons on his forearms, the sculpted chest.
Lewis steps out of the bathroom. “You do, too?”
I nod. “Only once since I’ve arrived here, though.”
“Me, too. It’s not like we’ve had tons of free time.
Here.” He places a stack of fluffy white towels into my hands, topped with a pair of maroon sweatpants and a forest green T-shirt.
“You can shower if you want to, and I’ll see if I can get a second set of towels.
These are clean, don’t worry. They changed them this morning. ”
“Don’t worry about—”
“Frances,” he interrupts and nudges me to the open bathroom door. “It’s no problem. Fake girlfriend or not, I don’t want you to get sick.”
I open my mouth to protest some more, but Lewis gives me a stern look. “How are you going to give me a ‘more of a comment than a question’ remark at my lecture on Thursday if you’re home in bed with a cold? I’ve been looking forward to this all year. Don’t let me down.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m showered, dried off, and finally warm, my hair tied into a damp braid, and my skin smelling like a forest full of pine trees.
I cuff up Lewis’s sweatpants and pull on his University of British Columbia tee, the fabric worn soft over the years.
As I catch my own eye in the mirror, I wonder how I’ve gotten here, into the bathroom and the loungewear of my academic nemesis, but the warm water has lulled me into an easy state of mind and the thought dissolves easily.
The rain hasn’t let up when I get out of the bathroom.
Lewis sits on the floor with outstretched legs, back propped against the wall opposite his bed, a mug of tea in his hands.
He gives me a lopsided smile, his eyes following me as I cross the room.
I deposit my ball of wet clothes in the laundry bag he’s laid out and retrieve the mug he left on the table for me.
“Great—”
“This is—”
We speak at the same time, and he nods for me to go on. “This feels much better, thanks. You were saying?”
He blushes. “Great shirt.”
“It is,” I say, ignoring the way my belly warms up under his attentive gaze. “Very comfortable.”
Lewis pushes to his feet, sets down his mug, and grabs a stack of clothes from the duvet as he heads toward the bathroom. “Don’t get too attached. It’s my favorite.”
The door clicks shut behind him. Under the rumbling thunder, I nurse my mug of peppermint tea and check my purse to find its contents have thankfully stayed dry.
My phone is devoid of new messages, the grant committee is still undecided, and Karo is still hiking through the phone-free wilderness of California.
What would she say about this situation?
This weird blurring of battle lines between Lewis and me that is not quite collegiate anymore, but too fresh to be considered friendly?
Behind the bathroom door, the shower stops running and minutes later, Lewis pads out.
“We should talk,” he says as he towels off his hair.
From my cross-legged position on his bed, I grant myself a look at him.
Just one, even if it’s a long one. Hair damp and curling against the nape of his neck and feet bare, he’s wearing black sweatpants and a sleeveless sports shirt that shows off the full glory of his shoulders.
Suddenly feeling parched, I drain the rest of my tea in one scalding gulp. “What do you want to talk about?” I ask.
He clears his throat. “Us.”
Anxiety zips through me. Did he notice the way I just looked at him? At his hair, his eyes, his arms? I’m grasping for some smart comment to deflect, play the ball back into his court and watch him flush, when I note the serious set of his eyebrows.
“It’s true what Brady said.” He presses his lips together. “About my advisor. About not crediting you on that paper.”
“Ah,” I exhale, relieved. Lewis is talking about us as in colleagues. As in, the giant clusterfuck our communication has been thus far. The revelation that maybe he didn’t mean for things to go this way.
He sits down on the far edge of the bed and I watch the cream duvet ripple under his weight. “That paper, four years ago… I should’ve handled that whole situation differently.”
“You should’ve,” I agree.
“I wanted to include you, but the professor I was working with needed it out quickly, for an important grant he was preparing. And you know, more coauthors mean longer delays to get the paper out, since everyone whose name is on it gets time to read, comment, and needs to give their approval. All of that takes time—time my advisor convinced me we didn’t have.
” Lewis sighs. “I should’ve fought harder.
I suspected it the moment I submitted the paper, but then it got so much traction even before it was officially published, and I knew.
It shouldn’t have mattered what he said and wanted, I should’ve put you in regardless. But by then it was too late.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I wanted to get in touch and tell you how sorry I was, but everything I typed out seemed so callous. No matter what, no matter how I tried to make up for it in other ways, I had still made the wrong decision to go ahead with the publication, and I couldn’t change anything about it.
” He pinches the bridge of his nose. Like back at the restaurant, the guilt is etched into his upturned eyebrows.
“So let me tell you now, Frances. I’m so sorry. ”
It’s an apology I didn’t ever think I’d get. It doesn’t make it okay what he did, but his serious tone loosens something in me. A knot, right between my shoulders, one that has been tightening for the past four years.
The falling rain outside and our quiet breaths are the only sounds in the room as I loop back through his words. “Hang on,” I finally say, hugging my legs to my chest, “you think dissecting my each and every turn of scientific thought is a way to make up for what you did?”
“I don’t. But I do like to understand you and your experiments, which is why I like to ask questions and discuss with you,” he states, as if it were as simple as that.
“But you scrutinize my work. Publicly. All. The. Time.”
“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Because it makes others more aware of your work.”
“Because your name is on it? That’s how you were ‘helping’ me?” I ask, offended by how patronizing he sounds.
“No.” Lewis gulps. “It’s not about my name at all. You know people reshare each other’s work all the time, because it helps get more reads and more citations down the line. That’s what I was doing this for. I think your work is brilliant. It’s worth sharing, so that’s what I did.”
I scrunch my eyebrows together as I flip back through the last years, my memories reshaping with this new perspective.
“It felt like you were singling me out. You seemed so nice to everyone else on social media, reposting and participating in all these mentoring events, but with me you went in deep, like you really wanted to show everyone how inadequate I was.”
“I went in deep, Frances, because I wanted to learn from you,” he clarifies.
“All of these questions, the scrutiny, they were a way to figure out what you really meant, to understand the step-by-step of it. Plus, if I’d only reshared you wouldn’t have replied.
This way, you did. This way, at least I got to talk to you. ”
“What about that review on my last paper? Back in the restaurant, you said—”
“That wasn’t me,” he finishes my sentence.
“But…” I trail off in disbelief. “You like to criticize me for the implications I draw from my results. And there were so many points about putting in references to your papers that it could only come from you. I was trying to figure out what I’d done to you, why this one felt more like a personal attack than your usual reviews. ”