Chapter Sixteen
I realize my mistake when our mouths meet.
Sure, there’s the fact that it’s an ungracious kiss, that my glasses get in the way of Lewis’s nose and the metal digs into my temple.
But what’s worse is that he freezes—literally freezes with his lips stock-still against mine.
It’s mortifying. I must’ve imagined the way his gaze snagged on my mouth and how he swayed in my direction.
Those compliments? Probably just a way to cheer me up.
That rant? A way to show empathy.
Because we’re friends. Or, well. Were. For a very short amount of time. Because whatever nonsense I just did doesn’t seem conducive to any kind of friendship. All these years of studying brains and yet I keep reading him all wrong.
“Oh my god,” I blurt out, breaking away from him.
“Frances.” Lewis’s hands fly to the nape of my neck before I can put more distance between us.
“I thought—” I start, but then falter because clearly, I thought wrong. “Never mind. I’m sorry.”
Lewis rests his forehead against mine, fingers tangling into my hair. “Hey,” he whispers, breath fanning over my cheek. “I’m sorry. It’s not—”
“Not me?” I push out a laugh. “Right.”
When he draws in a breath, the movement shifts his chest against mine and reminds me how close we are.
Then he steps back and places a kiss on the top of my head.
It’s the kindest of letdowns, but another rejection nonetheless, and the back of my throat burns with how they’ve been piling up over this past half hour.
“We should head back inside,” Lewis says against my hair and swipes his thumb over the edge of my jaw, up to my cheeks that are aflame with humiliation.
“I’ll buy you a drink later and then you can rant about science all you want.
I promise.” His lips bend into a not-quite-smile. “But let’s wrap up this evening first.”
For the next hour, I answer more questions, all while Lewis keeps checking in on me, glancing over with soft eyes and curved lips.
Every time he does, something inside my chest glows.
All the rejections tonight, including his, should make me feel far from glowing, but still, inexplicably, I do.
In under a week he’s turned from the person I could not stand to be around to the one whose presence makes me feel better, and once that realization takes hold, the glow hardens into a tense ball of nerves.
The Q and A was scheduled to last until 10 p.m., and soon after, the first students leave the bar. Lewis and I say our goodbyes, and he guides me to the exit. “You promised me a drink,” I protest once we’re outside in the sticky heat.
“Unless you want the students to eavesdrop, I’d suggest we go somewhere else for that drink.”
Halfway back to the next L stop, I slow as I spot a dive bar across the street, but Lewis keeps walking. “I have a better idea,” he says enigmatically. “Trust me on this?”
My confusion only grows the deeper we rattle down the tunnels and under the East River.
Lewis keeps his eyes on me, brows curved into lines of worry, but instead of looking back at him, I take in the Friday night crowd; the group of girls in glittering miniskirts, the two guys blasting hip-hop on a portable speaker, and the woman finishing her cat-eye with a hand so steady a surgeon would kill for it.
When we reach Union Square, Lewis pulls me out of the subway, up the steps, across the street, and down Broadway.
We pass the shuttered doors of the Strand, the red flag of the book store flapping above us in the nightly breeze.
The courtyard of an old church interrupts the tall buildings looming over us, and I still have no clue where we’re going.
“Are you taking me to NYU? To vandalize some lab or something?”
“Don’t get any ideas.” Lewis shakes his head, stopping in front of a lit-up shop on the ground floor of a high-rise. In the window, a neon sign blinks Donut worry in pink cursive. The first o is a doodle of a donut. “Here we are.”
“Donuts?” I wonder. “How is this better than a drink?”
Lewis holds the door open and waves me in. “Wait and see.”
Inside, I’m hit by the sweet scent of butter and sugar.
The shop is pink and bright, with a checkered floor, and a bar counter stretching down the long, narrow space.
Behind the counter, shelves carry trays of donuts in a plethora of options: powdered, glazed, covered in chocolate, or topped with a dollop of cream.
A few couples and some lone patrons sit on the stools lining the length of the counter.
“Um.” My eyes are glued to the stacks of donuts, their bright, happy colors unfastening the knot at the center of my chest. “I’m going to need some time to decide.”
Lewis hunches over to nudge my shoulder with his. He points to a free set of metal stools midway down the room. “Have a seat,” he tells me, “I’ll order for us.”
I wander over to the stools and sink onto the pink pleather cushion, hooking my feet up and swiveling from side to side. With each half-turn, the words of rejection from the email crash back into my mind. The we are sorry to inform you, the no support in funding.
“Hey.” Lewis drops two greasy brown paper bags on the Formica countertop and pushes one closer to me. “Eat these, it’ll make you feel better.”
I peek into the bag. “What’s this?”
“A bit of everything.” He slides up next to me, and his aftershave melds with the sugary smell.
I want to turn my head and follow his scent, press my nose into the hollow of his neck, but instead I watch his long finger as he points at the donuts one by one.
“Boston cream, apple fritter, old-fashioned, and salted caramel.”
As he pulls back, I inhale another whiff of sugar and pinch a bit of the glaze off one donut, savoring how its sweet saltiness melts on my tongue. Lewis’s gaze follows my movement with intense eyes, intense and soft, and entirely confusing. How can he look at me like that and then reject me?
“Go on,” he says, still observing me. “I want to see if I’m right about what you like.”
As we dig into our bags, Lewis doesn’t make any conversation but lets me stew over my thoughts in silence.
I’m in the middle of my last donut when I start crying.
It’s the ugly kind, the wheezing, shoulders-shaking, tears-running-down-my-face kind, and it hits right when I’m eating the only donut that doesn’t have a nicely solid topping.
My heavy breaths disperse the powdered sugar, sending the white dust flying up in a cloud from where it floats down onto my face, and my fingers, and Lewis’s shirt.
My sneeze turns the scene into a full-on sugar blizzard.
Tears at full force now, I drop the half-moon of my donut back into the bag, and my instinct to cover my eyes with my hands smudges up the lenses of my glasses. Cramps twist in my chest, hack away at my breath, and push more tears from my eyes.
“What do they put into these things?” I sob. “I wanted to drown my feelings, not drown in them.”
“Titanium dioxide—you know what, never mind.” Lewis offers me a napkin in his right hand and the open palm of his left hand. I take the napkin and stare at him questioningly, until he plucks my glasses off my nose and starts polishing them.
As I wipe the sludge of tears and dissolving sugar off my face, I release a few more sobs behind the protection of the rough napkin. “You have to stop cleaning my glasses for me,” I protest.
With a shrug he hands my glasses back. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” His gentle tone threatens my tear ducts once more.
I drop my gross napkin onto the glittering counter. “Why are you being so nice to me?” Taking care of my messy outbreaks is most definitely not part of our fake dating agreement.
“Because I care,” he says. “Tell me what’s going on.” The simplicity of his words and his gently commanding tone are a flashback to when we first met on the plane, and again, something about his level of calm and control soothes the flood of emotions I’m bombarded with.
“You were right earlier. It’s the grant.
I got the email outside the bar, after I finished talking to Karo.
” The curious tilt of his head and the unwavering attention of his eyes make it easier to open up to him.
“I’ve applied for grants enough times to know we get rejected all the time.
I swear I’m not usually this bad. But with this one, I had my hopes set so high.
” I glance up at him. “The grant was good, really. It was strong. With a clear vision, a good hook.”
He lifts a corner of his mouth. “Frances, I don’t need convincing. I’m sure it was good.”
“It’s just… My funding is running out and the lab I’m working in has no money to hire me for longer, so this grant was my last shot at staying put.
At not having to move again. And it’s a big grant, too, one that would’ve finally given me the chance to level up, away from the grind of postdoc life and into a position where I have more freedom to shape my own projects and supervise students to work on my questions, too.
I thought I could finally make a difference… ”
I feel his eyes on the side of my face; his focus fully on me while my gaze jumps through the café, because it’s too much if he sees into me while I open up to him like this.
“Frances. You’re already making a difference,” he tells me. Before I can ask what he means, he continues, “But I get you. It’s tiring to have to move from one lab to another, where you constantly have to figure out how you can work on your own questions while also keeping your advisor happy.”