Chapter 3
We reach the neat procession of heavy mahogany doors, each crowned with a bronze nameplate. I rap on Dr. Kymbert’s and listen for the papery shuffle or the clickity-clack of her keyboard. Nothing. I give it a beat and try again. Still nothing—just the building’s hum.
I turn and, for reasons known only to him, Holden hasn’t left. He’s angled against the wall like it was designed to fit his back.
“Um, do you know what her office hours are? I kind of skipped the step of looking at them before coming here.”
“You came here without checking if she was available?”
I narrow my eyes because, yes, that is precisely what I just said. “Do you know?”
He sighs, fishes his phone from his back pocket, unlocks, and scrolls through what looks like his inbox. “She’s usually in, but she sent an email this morning—last-minute meetings. You’re in the thread.”
Right. Three hours of sleep and Maya’s calamari threat apparently overrode my remaining executive function.
“Shoot.” I worry at my lower lip, running contingencies: hunt down Kai for his input, draft a clean email to Dr. Kymbert, try again later, stare at a wall until my neurons stop buzzing.
“Are you willing to reconsider my offer?”
His… what? I look up, eyes a little wider than dignity prefers. “Uh?”
“My offer to help you with whatever it is you came to ask.”
“Oh.” So I’m about to play with voltage—agree to more minutes in his orbit—because the alternative is letting a thousand questions gnaw through my frontal lobe. “Um, I don’t want to bother you.”
“I’m your TA.” From that extra foot he has on me, his expression goes uncompromising.
“Okay. Sure.” Because he saved my scone and, inconveniently, my face—and because I’m not above admitting he might actually help, even if I still plan to take it to Dr. Kymbert later.
He heads for the far end of the corridor, where the plaques shift from bronze to silver. I’m obvious about staring.
“Bronze is for tenure, but silver is for the rest of us,” he says, tapping the plate where he stops. HOLDEN WILKES, MSc.
My jaw does a small, undignified drop. “You have a plate with your name on it? Like… this is your official office?”
He gives me a look like I’ve sprouted a second head. “Yes?” He steps one door over and taps the neighbor’s placard. “So does he, as a marine engineer.” THEO ANDERSON, MSc, in matching silver.
“Do all TAs have them?”
“No.” He returns to his door, key already in hand. “Theo and I put in more hours than most. We have since our master’s.”
The lock turns. He walks in and leaves the door open for me. I’m still trying to assimilate the information he just gave me when I step into the room.
It’s not big, but it’s… disarmingly warm.
A solid wood desk sits center; papers in disciplined stacks along the front edge, a monitor at the right corner, a globe at the left with the Pacific worn shiny under a thumb.
The chair opposite is wood with a blue-green cushion that looks inexplicably soft.
One wall is floor-to-ceiling shelves, spines running from fisheries to oceanography to zoology; the other is maps: Coriolis winds, major currents, last year’s El Nino hot spots pinned with neat tacks.
The room smells faintly of paper and pine and whatever coffee he drinks that’s probably too strong for me.
I don’t know how to explain it except to say: this space is completely, infuriatingly him—ordered and exact, but with just enough softness to be dangerous.
Oblivious to nothing, it seems, he catches me inventorying the shelves. A full row of marine biology texts—annotated, dog-eared, expensive. Better than mine by several orders of magnitude.
“I told you I’m well equipped to help you,” he says, without looking up.
I hate that he might be right, and I hate even more that he sounds pleased about it. “Why do you have so much marine biology knowledge if you’re an oceanographer?”
“I started my master’s in marine biology,” he replies, flicking his laptop open. “Switched directions about halfway through.”
“Why?”
He wakes the computer, leans back, arms crossed. “Tell me what your question is. For your thesis.”
Right. We’re not on a share-your-backstory basis. Noted. I pull out my phone and my notes, cue a clip from last week, and turn the screen his way.
“Okay—Damon. You remember Damon?”
Holden lifts his gaze with what I’ve come to consider his trademark expression: equal parts boredom, skepticism, and quiet despair.
“Yes,” he says dryly. “Hard to forget the only octopus on the island with a name.”
I roll my eyes. “Right. So, he’s always shown preferences for R1 in blue and L1 in yellow when he’s playing with blocks.” I point to the two anterior arms working the Batman set. “Even at feed, he’ll initiate with those, or R2 and L2.”
Holden nods and leans in to study the movement. I lean back to keep the very male, very distracting scent of him from derailing my focus.
“If you swipe to the next video—” He does, his large hand tapping my phone. “Here. That’s him yesterday.”
He watches in silence, brows drawing in slightly. I catch the flare in his eyes—just a flicker, but unmistakable.
“He switched arms,” he says.
“Yes. Green is one of his locomotive arms. And red is usually his ‘high-arousal’ limb—probing, tossing, testing boundaries.” I do not volunteer that red occasionally punches the glass aggressively, which is why I dyed it that color.
The video ends. Holden taps the screen once to replay, then pushes the phone gently back toward me and leans into his chair again. “That’s unusual.”
“Right?” My voice jumps, and before I can stop myself, my arms go up in a full gesture of exasperation.
“Sorry—I just—I spent the entire night going through common logs, trying to isolate a trigger. I didn’t introduce anything new yesterday.
No environmental changes. No food variations. Not even a shift in water parameters.”
I pass him the notes—three pages of hypotheses scribbled in ink that’s already smudging. He takes them without comment and scans them quickly, his expression unreadable. I watch his eyes move across the page and suddenly wish I’d written neater. Or been more concise. Or less obviously unhinged.
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
Just keeps reading.
“So what did you land on?” He says after a while.
“Um… I’m not sure.” I hate how small that sounds. “Most plausible is some kind of lateralization test run—trying a different controller just to see. I just don’t know what would’ve sparked it.”
He tilts his head, thinking. “Has he ever shown anything similar? Novelty-seeking?”
“I mean… no, not really. He likes his routine. But—”
“Walk me through your thought process.”
Right. I have mentioned my brain is not yet ready for public interpretation, yes? This is where I lose all credibility.
I launch anyway. Damon might be testing novelty thresholds.
Or nursing micro-irritation on a few suckers.
Or shifting because of context—my position, a light angle, tiny changes in his den.
Or because octopuses do, occasionally, perform behaviors that are just for show.
The words hit the air at an auctioneer’s pace that could rival Eminem or NoClue; variables, maybes, discarded branches. My hands do the full choreography.
“Coralie.”
Too late to stop me now. Data keeps spilling; my fingers are conducting a symphony only I can hear. Who allowed me in academia?
“Coralie.” He reaches across the desk—and with startling gentleness but absolute confidence, closes one large hand around both of my wrists. Yeah, that does the trick. Whatever momentum I had is gone—redirected, effortlessly, by the certainty in his grip.
“That’s me,” I say, because apparently the one neuron not short-circuiting under his palm is in charge of introductions.
He chuckles, low enough to raise a rash of goosebumps along my arms. “Yes, that’s you.” He doesn’t let go. His eyes don’t leave mine. For a treacherous second I think about chocolate and how his irides look like it.
“Slow down,” he says, and his gaze drops to my mouth before returning. “You ramble when you’re nervous.”
“I… do not.” Do I? Somewhere, a chorus of everyone I’ve ever met is nodding.
“You do.” His grip gentles, a fraction. “And you’ll give yourself carpal tunnel if you keep moving at that tempo.”
“I—you—what?” Oh, goody. A brain aneurysm. “It’s not that bad.”
He releases my wrists and lifts a brow. “Go on. At a speed I can understand, yeah?”
My skin still hums where his fingers were. My mouth is somehow both dry and unhelpfully ready to drool. Do I need an ambulance? Should I fake a medical emergency? No. Focus.
This is what I meant by conflicting signals. I’m here for science, for Damon’s quick mind and the chance to meet it halfway. And Holden has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t think I’m there yet. So why, exactly, does my body behave like this in his vicinity?
When I don’t pick the thread back up, he does.
“Listen. Cephalopods are clean models for short-term memory,” he says, tone sharp but not dismissive, “but the nervous system is distributed. There isn’t a single central hub, so mapping their cognition onto early vertebrate evolution gets messy fast. I’m not saying you don’t have a thesis.
” His gaze flicks to the half-open notebook on his desk—the margins full of my messy, looping handwriting and tiny, hastily scribbled octopus doodles.
“I’m saying you might have one if you track the oral intramuscular nerve cords instead of the axial cord. ”
Holy. He might be right. Why didn’t I go there first? And how, might I ask, did he? Is it possible that he’s my new Blythe? Minus the Jolly Rancher jar?
My mouth hangs open once more; I no longer care. This is what I came for. The urge to bolt to Damon’s tank and start tests wrestles, one to one, with the urge to cross the desk and hug Holden for handing me the key. I grip my knees and breathe until I can choose neither.
I spend the next few minutes getting it down—his suggestion first, then the branches it opens—filling a margin with a tidy trial grid, variables to hold constant, a short list for “rule out” and another for “test next.” The jolt of energy is immediate; for the first time in twenty-four hours my head feels aligned with my hands. This is big.
He stands, scans a shelf, and returns with two heavy monographs on octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. Cloth hardbacks, edges softened by use, a few colored flags peeking from the tops. My jaw drops again. I should consult.
“These are great,” he says. “If you haven’t read them already, you can borrow them.”
“Why?”
His brows knit.
I mentally facepalm. “I mean—why are you being so nice all of a sudden?”
I watch everything tighten—shoulders, jaw, the line of his mouth—as if he’s swallowing the first answer and choosing the correct one.
“I’m your TA,” he says, even, for the second time today.
“I have books that might help you. Now, will you take them?” He nudges them closer and pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed for a beat.
I slide them to my side. I’ve read one; the other has lived on my list for years and has always been either out of budget or missing from every library near me. “Thank you.”
He nods without looking up.
Perfect. He hands me exactly what I need and I manage to make it sound like suspicion, or like I’m not grateful. And then I wonder why he thinks I’m difficult.
As if confirming my thoughts, he reminds me—gently but unmistakably—that he has work to do. I thank him and step out with my watered-down coffee in one hand and the tomes he loaned me in the other.
My head is still buzzing—from his nearness, from the way the ideas finally locked into place—when a familiar voice floats around the bend of the hall.
“I know that, Jessica. But he’s smart. Like, freakishly smart. So I’m playing it smart too, okay?”
I don’t need confirmation, but the long, tanned legs in impossible heels and the black hair yanked into a tight ponytail make it official: Summer.
“Like, he literally turned down a fully funded postdoc at MIT because the lab’s models didn’t account for small-scale turbulence.
Or something like that. Who does that?” She laughs, a bright, cutting sound that would make a hyena take notes.
“It’s so nerdy it’s almost annoying, but he’s hot so who cares. ”
Her eyes narrow the instant she clocks me standing at Holden’s door. “I gotta go. Kiss kiss, bye.” She ends the call, plants a hand on her hip, and gifts me a smile that is all enamel and warning. “Fish girl.”
“Hi.” I consider three options: retreat back into Holden’s office, jump out the window, or fake my own death. We’re on the first floor, so the window is technically OSHA-compliant. Jackass has done worse with fewer safety measures.
“You’re visiting my boyfriend, again?”
“I… this is my first time here,” I say, which is both true and useless. “I was actually just leaving.”
“Yeah, you were.” She smiles like the Cheshire cat and does not look away as she steps forward.
I move aside to let her pass just as the door swings open on a very serious Holden. “Who are you talking t—” He cuts off when his gaze lands on Summer. She slips between us and sets a perfectly manicured hand on his chest.
“Hey, baby.” His eyes flare at the pet name, then flick to mine, searching for—what, exactly? I nod a goodbye once more and take off down the hall. I am not staying for a live demonstration of PDA starring my TA.
On the walk back to my dorm, something tightens under my ribs. I’m chalking it up to too much input in too few minutes—office, ideas, books, Summer. It has absolutely nothing to do with her beautiful fingers on his very sculpted chest, because why would I care?
I make it to my room and drop the textbooks, my bag, and what’s left of my dignity in a single heap on the floor before I plop onto the bed. The air is quiet and cool; the central AC hums like a metronome. There’s a note on my nightstand.
I love you. You suck for keeping me up, but I promise I won’t bring dead squids to the room.
Maya’s handwriting is as hilarious as her note, and I smile because, somehow, she’s always been exactly what I needed from the moment I rolled a suitcase into this place.
I let that thought sit beside the jolt of my newly revived thesis plan, and the two of them pull a real smile out of me.
I hug my pillow, close my eyes, and breathe until my pulse stops auditioning for percussion. Then I let the missed sleep find me.