Chapter 16 #2
“That love is real even if you can’t trap it in a petri dish. That it exists independent of your brain chemistry. That it’s…something more.”
I lean my head back against the sofa, studying her. “Define ‘more.’”
“I don’t know. Choice, maybe. Commitment. The decision to keep showing up even when the chemicals wear off.”
“That’s behavioral. I can measure that.”
“But can you measure why someone makes that choice when it’s the hardest thing in the world to do?”
I pause. The academic in me wants to cite evolutionary altruism, but looking at her, the words feel thin. “Not precisely, no.”
“Then there it is.” She looks triumphant, like she’s just cracked the code. “Love exists in the gaps. In the spaces in between. It’s the stuff you can’t measure.”
I stay quiet for a moment, then add, “You could argue that about anything, though. Free will. Consciousness. Just because we don’t have the instruments yet doesn’t mean it’s not just physical processes at work.”
“Or,” she counters, “just because something comes from physical processes doesn’t mean that’s all it is. Music is just sound waves, but that doesn’t make Beethoven’s Ninth any less beautiful. Paintings are just pigment and canvas, but that doesn’t make Van Gogh’s art meaningless.”
“Fair point.”
“So why can’t love be the same thing? Yes, it’s chemicals and neurons and evolutionary biology. But it’s also more than that. It’s the meaning we make from it.”
I look at her. “You’re more of a romantic than I thought.”
“Maybe.” She shrugs. “Or maybe I just think love is worth defending.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think it’s such a tragedy?”
The question catches me off guard. I stall, taking another sip of the wine. “I don’t think it’s a tragedy.”
“Yes, you do. I can hear it every time you talk about it. You talk like it’s a specimen. Something to be dissected and explained away so it can’t hurt you.”
She’s not wrong.
I set my glass down. “Love is…Romeo and Juliet. Orpheus and Eurydice. Anna Karenina. It’s beautiful and it’s devastating and it usually ends with someone dead or destroyed.”
“That’s literature, Leo. Not real life.”
“Literature reflects real life. We tell those stories because they’re true. Love makes people irrational. It makes them sacrifice things they shouldn’t sacrifice. It blinds them to reality.”
“Or,” Annie says, her voice soft but firm, “it gives them hope. It makes them better. Elizabeth Bennet becomes less prejudiced because of Darcy. Jane Eyre finds herself because of Rochester—not in spite of him, but through him. Jo March learns that love doesn’t mean losing yourself, it means finding someone who sees all of you and loves you anyway. ”
I start to argue but she keeps going.
“Love makes people braver,” she says, and her voice has this delicious, honeyed weight to it that makes me want to record it and play it back on a loop.
“It makes them kinder. It gives them something to fight for when everything else is falling apart. Yeah, sometimes it ends badly. Sometimes people get hurt. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. ”
“Doesn’t it?” I ask, and my own voice sounds shaky, like a paper doll in the path of a hurricane.
“No.” She’s looking at me with this fierce certainty. “The fact that something can hurt you doesn’t make it worthless. It’s exactly what makes it precious. If it couldn’t hurt you, it wouldn’t matter, would it?”
She leans in just a fraction. “You’re so afraid of how something ends that you’re missing the middle, Leo.
The good stuff. Falling asleep next to someone, waking up to them.
Dancing in kitchens. Inside jokes. Kissing them just because you can, just because they’re there.
How they leave their socks everywhere and it drives you crazy but you know you’d miss it if they stopped.
It’s the messy, stupid, perfect stuff that makes the ending worth surviving.
It’s the part where you actually get to be happy, even if it’s temporary. ”
Her fingers tracing the rim of her wine glass. “Love can end badly. But the possibility of pain is the price we pay for the magic. And I think you know that it’s worth it. You’re just too scared to say it out loud.”
I don’t have a comeback for that. The room is silent, save for the distant, muffled sound of a taxi hitting a pothole outside.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say quietly.
“Maybe?”
“You’re probably right.”
She smiles. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Excruciating, actually.”
She laughs, then nudges me with her elbow. “Maybe you need to be the one to take Eileen’s advice, Leo.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Which part? Because if it’s table-dancing in a mini-skirt, I have a reputation at Columbia to uphold. The Board of Trustees is remarkably old-fashioned about leg hair.”
She’s grinning now. It’s a grin that could make you forget your own name. “God, I would pay so much money to see that. Like, a gross, obscene amount of money.”
I laugh. “How much are we talking?”
“At least a hundred bucks. Two hundred if you commit to the bit.”
He whistles. “Who knew Annie was a big baller over here? I’ll keep it in my back pocket for the next faculty mixer.”
“I mean the other part,” she says, her voice dropping, going softer.
“The part about not being afraid of everything. About being bolder. Taking the risk of being ridiculous.” She pauses, swirling the final half-inch of Chateauneuf-du-Pape in her glass.
“Embracing the idea that maybe science doesn’t have to explain the magic for the magic to be real.
That you can just feel something and know it’s good without needing a lab report to prove it. ”
I look at her again. Her hair is a beautiful disaster, strands falling out of the knot and framing her face in dark, messy loops.
Her sweater has fallen off her shoulder, revealing the elegant curve of her collarbone.
She’s watching me with those eyes—mossy green and honeyed gold—and every logical, prefrontal-cortex-driven part of my brain is screaming that this is a catastrophe in the making.
But fuck it. She’s right. I want to be bold and I want to be brave.
I want to be hers.
I reach out, my hand cupping the side of her face. Her skin is warm, soft. And then I kiss her.
She makes this tiny, sharp sound of surprise—a soft gasp that I catch and pull into my own mouth.
I swallow it whole, drawing her closer until the space between us disappears.
Her hair is like silk between my fingers.
Her lips are soft, and they taste like the wine we’ve spent the night disappearing into, mixed with something sweet—vanilla, maybe, from the chapstick she’s always digging for in her pockets.
For half a second I think she might pull back. That I’ve miscalculated, misread everything, that this is where it all falls apart. But she doesn’t.
She leans into me, her hand fisting in my shirt, and she kisses me back.
Her mouth opens under mine and suddenly it’s more—her tongue against mine, a question that turns into a demand.
I angle her head, deepening the kiss, and she lets out this small, broken sound in the back of her throat that vibrates right through my chest. My other hand finds her waist, pulling her flush against me, and she comes willingly, shifting until she’s practically in my lap.
She tastes like every risk I’ve been too afraid to take, like hope I didn’t know I still had.
Her teeth catch my bottom lip—just a graze, just enough to make me groan—and then she pulls back just an inch. Her forehead rests against mine. Her breath is hitching, her chest rising and falling against my ribs.
“Leo,” she whispers. It’s not a protest. It’s not a “stop.” It’s just my name, sounding like a prayer in a room where I’d declared there were none.
“Yeah?” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Because my brain has officially stopped functioning and all I can think about is the way she feels against me, the way she tastes, the way I want to keep kissing her until the sun comes up and possibly after that, too.
Her eyes are dark, her pupils blown so wide that the hazel irises are just a thin ring. “That was…um…”
“Bold?”
“Ridiculous,” she finishes, but she’s grinning.
“You’re the one who told me to be more ridiculous. I’m just a dedicated student.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
She’s still holding my shirt, her fingers twisted in the fabric as if she’s afraid I’ll evaporate if she lets go. I’m still holding her face, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw.
“We should probably talk about this,” she murmurs, though she hasn’t moved an inch away.
“Probably.”
“You’re my boss.”
“I’m aware.”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“The worst,” I agree.
But I’m already kissing her again, and she’s already kissing me back, and somewhere in the rational part of my brain, I know this changes every single thing about my life. I know that tomorrow morning, when Emma wakes up and the sun is hitting the floorboards, the world is going to look different.
But for once, I just don’t care.