Chapter Two
A laugh bubbles out of me. “You’re kidding, right?”
He frowns. “Why would I be kidding?”
“You have to be.”
I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s the only explanation I can reach for in this moment.
Because there is no way that I just poured my heart out to my academic rival, all while holding his hand.
How long has he known for? From the moment I sat down?
Was all the gentle care and distraction a farce to coax out my insecurities?
I know how methodical he is, so it’s not far-fetched to think he’d come up with a complicated plan to sniff out my weaknesses like this.
Less far-fetched than the alternative, more logical explanation: that I got asked to help a random stranger and ended up next to my academic nemesis on the one transatlantic flight where I’m not knocked out into slow-wave sleep, only for turbulence to hit and push me into a panic spiral that made me overshare.
What are the odds, really? Or maybe, Murphy was onto something.
I feel exposed, unexpectedly naked, like when your T-shirt rides up while taking off your jumper and suddenly, you’re showing off your threadbare bra.
No matter how fast you pull your shirt back down, the image will be etched into everyone’s mind.
Even if it’s only a short glimpse, they’ll know that you should have gone bra shopping a long time ago, that your belly button looks weird, and that you have a little birthmark right under your left boob.
My job struggles, my not-quite-broken-but-bruised heart. All there, on a silver platter.
And as if that’s not enough, I’ll have to sit next to Dr. Theodore North for the next—I want to wail when I see the clock on the in-flight entertainment screen—seven hours. I want to gather up all of the secrets I spilled and stuff them back into the dusty closet of my brain.
See, I want to shout at Karo. This is why we keep that door firmly closed. This is why we don’t open up.
Dr. Theodore Lewis Know-It-All North, or, as he likes to call himself on social media, @theoretically, studies human memory with rare invasive recordings directly from the human brain.
I’d kill for the data he has—and he knows it.
Once upon a time, freshly out of grad school, I thought we could build a collaboration, exchange hypotheses on our experiments and eventually build up big-scale projects, but he popped the bubble of that dream a long time ago.
Since then, all he’s ever done is drone on about the inadequacy of my scientific work and make my life difficult.
Fuck. Fuck squared. Fuck to the power of three.
This is a disaster.
Our thoughts seem to be tracking opposing patterns, because he holds his hand out to me. The one that’s been my stress ball for the past thirty minutes. “I’m not kidding. But it’s nice to finally meet you—”
“Do you know,” I push through gritted teeth, “how many fucking months you shaved off my life with that revision process you put me through?”
I press my fingers against my forehead. As if on cue, the nervous twitch that has haunted my eyebrow for the last three months is back.
Although we’ve been at each other’s throats about our work for the past four years, his most recent review of my research took it a step too far.
Not only was it hypercritical of every last detail, but also filled to the brim with snide remarks, like he truly wanted to tear me down.
Lewis drops his hand and with it, his pretense of friendliness. A challenging gleam enters his eyes. “How do you know it was me? Peer reviews are anonymous.”
“Oh please. ‘Before resubmission I would advise a more thorough understanding of the references mentioned,’ ” I quote him. “ ‘Particularly North et al., Science, and North and Chaudhury, PLOS Biology.’ Those comments were reeking of you.”
Unfazed, he opens his laptop. “It’s generally advisable to know your sources,” he notes. It drives me mad that he’s not admitting to writing the review, especially because this one was so much harsher than all the ones he wrote for my previous papers.
“I know my sources well, thank you very much,” I retort. “You were just begging me to cite you some more.”
“Knowing you, that reviewer probably improved your paper. You have a tendency to exaggerate the implications of your findings, which only undermines your research.”
“Are you calling me flashy again?”
“No.” A corner of his mouth turns down, as if he’s tasted something sour. “But you don’t need to sell your results like that.”
Heat shoots up my torso and burns over my collarbone all the way to my cheeks. “That’s how scientific publishing works!” He ignores me as he navigates through the files on his laptop. “Nobody cares about your meticulously designed experiments if you don’t have a story to tell.”
Eyes firmly fixed on the screen, he juts out his jaw. “If you want to tell stories, maybe you should write a book.”
“Well, good luck with your abstract then,” I snap.
Scratch my earlier evaluation of him. He’s prickly, and much worse in person. I cross my arms in front of my chest, bumping my elbow into his side.
“How are things going? Are we making any progress here?” At the quippy tone, our heads whip around. The flight attendant is back, waving a paper flyer in Lewis’s direction. “I thought you might need the info for the in-flight Wi-Fi.”
“It’s going swimmingly. Thank you so much.” He beams at her, and in the blink of an eye, friendly Lewis is back.
“We’re going to serve the food soon. Do you maybe want yours later? After your deadline?”
Once he’s assured her that yes, he’ll let her know if he has a problem logging into the Wi-Fi, and yes, we would be grateful if they’d serve our food last, the flight attendant flutters her fingers at him and walks away.
“If you need someone to type for you, she’d probably be happy to help,” I comment as soon as she’s out of earshot.
He throws me an icy look. “I’ll be okay,” he says and turns to his laptop, lowering the contrast all the way down so I can’t make out anything on the screen.
Pulling on my headphones, I navigate through the in-flight entertainment system and settle on a movie about a linguist saving the world from an alien invasion.
But my focus drifts to Lewis’s movements.
So this is what he looked like while typing out snide remarks about my choice of statistical test. Shoulders a little hunched, mouth tucked up like he’s fully aware of his own ingenuity.
Even his stupid hair, and that wayward curl in his forehead, is a major flex.
After being confronted with the finished products of this laser focus for so many years, it’s strange to see him in action.
His fingers bounce off the keys, hitting the space bar with a little flourish that sends a spike of anger down my nerves.
“Shouldn’t you be deleting words, not adding them?” I ask him drily, but he ignores me.
As I watch him, I get mad all over again.
At him, at myself, and how naive I’d been, four years ago, when I mistook our email exchange as a discussion between like-minded colleagues and didn’t understand it for what it really was: a competitor looking out for himself, grabbing for those valuable publications that would increase his chances for future grants and eventually a professorship.
I should’ve known better—it wasn’t the first time this happened to me, after all.
The cooped-up space of the airplane is like a catalyzer for my anger and humiliation, and my nerve endings feel jittery, my face hot.
I jump up, eager to not let it overwhelm me. “Can you let me through?”
Lewis drags his thumb over his trackpad before he closes his laptop and gets up.
Slowly.
I swear this man breathes to provoke me.
Once I make it into the microscopic bathroom of the airplane, I splash my face with cold water.
I’m not sure if it’s the unflattering light in here or my tiredness, but I look washed-out.
Frizzy white-blond hair in tight curls that would corkscrew down to my elbows if it weren’t piled into a messy bun atop my head, gray eyes underlined by deep circles, and a tiny muscle in my left eyebrow that spasms every so often.
Without my morning touch of mascara, my lashes are practically invisible, and my cheeks have lost their usual rosiness, leaving my face as pale as the rest of my body.
I look like the ghost of a mad scientist—if mad scientists were ever portrayed as female, that is.
As I stand there, a wobble underfoot has me grip the sink and reminds me of how far away I am from my tried and tested methods to calm my nerves.
Some laps at the community pool, a few sets at the climbing gym.
When I get this frazzled, anything that makes me feel the edges of my body helps, but up here, with Lewis out there, the Sawyer’s ahead, and the reunion with Jacob looming, I need to steel my nerves some other way.
I take deep breaths and try to focus on the reason I’m on this plane in the first place.
The Sawyer’s Summer Seminars is a yearly event spanning all the scientific topics under the rainbow.
It’s organized by scientists for scientists, and with talks that are at the forefront of the field and networking events that bring together researchers across all generations, it’s the type of academic gathering leading researchers look forward to even after decades of attending conferences—at least that’s what the website says.
There seems to be a grain of truth to it: I’ve seen colleagues return from previous installments not only with an enviable gleam of inspiration in their eyes, but also newly formed collaborations or invitations to job interviews.