Chapter Twenty-One #2
The day I got the grant rejection I would’ve agreed with her, but over the past days, Lewis and the conference have reignited my passion for my research.
They’ve reminded me that the pure exploration that’s at the core of science has a stronger pull than the comfort of a home.
Moving to a different continent is the price I have to pay for getting to figure out how the universe works, even if it’s only a tiny, minuscule cog of it.
I sink onto the stairs leading up to Low Memorial Library, the stone warm under my thighs, thinking about how much my life has changed in a little over a week.
The grant rejection, my growing feelings for Lewis.
Both open up questions for the future I didn’t have before.
“I want to go back to how it was. I didn’t feel lonely until I got here,” I admit.
“It’s like I noticed that something is missing.
Some… connection. Someone else. But what’s the point, really, to yearn for something like that.
It’s not going to happen for me,” I continue, knowing deep down that it’s not just someone I’m missing. It’s him.
I can hear her shrug in the rustle of her hair against the phone. “It’s only human to want that.”
“But isn’t that scary? What about being your own person and all that?”
“Franzi,” Karo says. “Are you telling me I’m not my own person because I’ve been with Lennart for twelve years?
Because we’re married now?” She doesn’t sound offended, but her stern question pulls things into focus.
“You can be your own person and have goals in your life and in your career and still want to share them with someone else. And let me tell you, it doesn’t matter if you live on different continents or just down the road from each other, if you’re in the same career or do something vastly different—fitting two lives together always requires some tinkering and a lot of communication. ”
I sit in silence, pondering her words. The South Lawn spreads out in front of me, a carpet of bright green grass banked by the stone colonnade of Butler Library, and I watch the crowds of students wander between classes.
It’s silly, really. I know enough examples of people who lead the lives they want, not alone, but together with another person.
And yet, in my mind, success and love are the opposite sides of a coin, two things that are mutually exclusive.
“It’s up to you,” Karo says after a while, her voice quiet. “But when you talk about Lewis, something in you appears that I haven’t seen in a long time. So if he’s worth it—and it sounds like he is—maybe you can figure out the rest.”
I do not tell Lewis. Every successful conversation with a professor or fellow postdoc on potential openings in other labs pushes me one step further from telling him how I feel.
I’m an interview away from getting any of these positions, but the reality is that all are farther away from Lewis than I am now.
And no matter where I’ll end up, the fact remains that he’s a colleague.
But as Lewis and I scour the campus for the notebook between lectures, seminars, and poster sessions, I’m starting to wonder if him being a colleague and the potential of a long-distance relationship truly have to be the barriers I’m making them out to be.
Even as I’m worried about being found out, having him at my side makes me feel lighter.
With everything that’s going on, we work well as a team: We stick together and try to look normal and manage each other’s stress.
On Tuesday evening, we finally take a break to unwind at the bouldering gym, and then head back to my studio, where I make dairy-free grilled cheese sandwiches as he peppers me with questions about the computational model I used in my last paper.
We eat out on the fire escape and as he takes the first bite, Lewis groans with delight.
Later that night, when we’re tangled up in my bedsheets, I get him to make that noise again.
The next day, we’re back to morning lectures, but with lab work scheduled for the afternoon, Lewis and I decide to get work done in the library instead.
Brady finds us right as we’re about to leave.
“You lovebirds off to skip school?” she chirps.
Lewis huffs out a laugh, holding the door open for her while she catches up with us. The dense heat from outside pushes against my back.
“We’re going to the library if you want to join?” I offer, but she shakes her head.
“I’m meeting a student who wants to do a summer internship with me. But I wanted to give you this.” Unceremoniously, she drops Lewis’s notebook into his palm. I try to tamp down any reaction, but Lewis’s eyes widen in shock.
“Vivienne told me Jacob found it in the lecture hall, and nobody knew whose it was,” Brady goes on, unaware of the jolt in my nerves.
Fuck. It passed through all of their hands?
Next to me, Lewis clears his throat. “Thanks… Brady.”
“I recognized it when Vivienne and I had to check something for our project. It was on her desk.” She playfully swats at his chest. “Remember how I used to joke that someone stealing your notebook of big, bright ideas would be your origin story?” She laughs and adds, with a wink, “I guess we’re lucky he didn’t turn into the Hulk.
” Then she turns on her heel, and heads back toward the staircase.
“I guess it’s safe to say Brady doesn’t know,” I point out when she’s out of earshot, “seeing as she recognized the notebook?”
Lewis’s eyes slide to mine, and for a moment we stare at each other, still frozen in the doorway.
“Let’s hope the fact that it was just lying there means that Jacob and Vivienne didn’t open it, either.
” He flicks through the notebook back to that first page of our pact.
Conditions for fake dating, it says on top, and my anxiety spins higher.
The next pages are worse. Game plan for fake dating. Lewis’s and Frances’s weekends together. Neat and organized as Lewis is, he put a heading on every page, leaving an obviously incriminating paper trail. Frances’s pet peeves. Frances’s quirks.
My heart beats faster at spotting those last pages. We didn’t come up with those together.
Blushing, Lewis snaps the notebook shut. “If they didn’t know whose notebook it was, they can’t have leafed through it very far,” he points out. “It says both our names on these pages.”
“You’re right. They probably didn’t even open it, so we should be in the clear.” I swallow down the burst of nerves the last minutes have triggered. “But still, I don’t think I feel like working anymore.”
With lab-based classes keeping everyone occupied this afternoon, I have a break from networking, but instead of heading to the library, like we’d first planned, we decide to go to the beach to escape the humid soup Manhattan turns into at this time of year.
The promise of distance from the Sawyer’s is strong enough to make us brace the long subway ride to Rockaway Beach.
“Would you mind if Ben came?” Lewis asks when we’re back at the studio and I’m rolling up a towel to stuff into a cloth bag. Hip against the kitchen counter and legs crossed in front of him, he twirls his phone between his hands.
“Not at all. What about you, though?”
The twirling stops and he tilts his head. “I’d like for him to come.” He starts texting and as I walk to the bathroom to search for my swimsuit, Lewis calls, “He’ll pick us up.”
A half hour later, Ben waves at us from the driver’s seat of a convertible that has the roof pulled up. Ada sits on the passenger seat, holding an oversize reusable coffee cup.
“Work meetings ended early,” she explains, leaning out of the window to pull Lewis, then me, in for a hug. “Alice is with a friend. I figured I’d take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the afternoon with my two brothers.”
Ben tips up his sunglasses, revealing eyes that are just like Lewis’s except for the current glee in them, and proudly slaps the roof of the car.
“Graduation present from Dad,” he boasts.
I don’t have to look at Lewis to know that this will make him shift his jaw, but he keeps quiet as he slides in behind me.
Ben doesn’t stop talking as he drives and when we reach Rockaway Beach, we’ve already gotten all the updates on his European summer tour (sponsored by his parents before he starts working at North Star Investments), the video game he’s currently obsessed with, and the Wired podcast episode he listened to last night.
“Is Berlin not on your itinerary then?” I ask him.
Ben hoots when Ada points out a free parking spot and maneuvers the car into the narrow gap.
“Just for a couple of hours when I change trains. Dad said there wasn’t much to it,” he replies as we’re getting out of the car. “Gave me some advice on where to go and what to avoid.”
Lewis puts an arm around my shoulders. “And, of course, we always do what Father says,” he quips.
“Teddy!” Ada snaps.
Ben pulls his aviators off his nose and hangs them in the V of his polo, then lifts an eyebrow at his brother, the gesture eerily similar to Lewis’s when he challenges some scientific point of mine.
“I’m not doing what Dad says. He wanted me to fly between cities because who’d want to sit on trains.
But for the itinerary, yeah, I did listen to him.
It’s not like I could’ve asked you when I was planning the trip.
” His tone is level as he says this, more a statement than an accusation, but I feel the jolt of tension in Lewis’s body.
The two brothers stare at each other quietly, until Ada nudges Ben to carry the cooler, then rolls her eyes at me.