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—
OLIVE WAS LATE for her second fake-dating Wednesday, too, but for different reasons—all Tom Benton related.
First, she’d overslept after staying up late the previous night rehearsing how she was going to sell him her project. She’d repeated her spiel so many times that Malcolm had started finishing her sentences, and then, at 1:00 a.m., he’d hurled a nectarine at her and begged her to go practice in her room. Which she had, until 3:00 a.m.
Then, in the morning, she’d realized that her usual lab outfit (leggings, ratty 5K T-shirt, and very, very messy bun) would probably not communicate “valuable future colleague” to Dr. Benton, and spent an excessive amount of time looking for something appropriate. Dress for success and all that.
Finally, it occurred to her that she had no idea what Dr. Benton—arguably the most important person in her life at the moment, and yes, she was aware of how sad that sounded but decided not to dwell on it—even looked like. She looked him up on her phone and found out that he was somewhere in his late thirties, blond with blue eyes, and had very straight, very white teeth. When she arrived at the campus Starbucks, Olive was whispering to his Harvard headshot, “Please, let me come work in your lab.” Then she noticed Adam.
It was an uncharacteristically cloudy day. Still August, but it almost felt like late fall. Olive glanced at him, and she immediately knew that he was in the nastiest of moods. That rumor of him throwing a petri dish against a wall because his experiment hadn’t worked out, or because the electron microscope needed repairs, or because something equally inconsequential had happened came to mind. She considered ducking under the table.
It’s okay, she told herself. This is worth it. Things with Anh were back to normal. Better than normal: she and Jeremy were officially dating, and last weekend Anh had showed up to beers-and-s’mores night wearing leggings and an oversize MIT sweater she’d clearly borrowed from him. When Olive had eaten lunch with the two of them the other day, it hadn’t even felt awkward. Plus, the first-, second-, and even third-year grads were too scared of Adam Carlsen’s “girlfriend” to steal Olive’s pipettes, which meant that she didn’t have to stuff them in her backpack and take them home for the weekend anymore. And she was getting some grade A free food out of this. She could take Adam Carlsen—yes, even this pitch-black-mood Adam Carlsen. For ten minutes a week, at the very least.
“Hey.” She smiled. He responded with a look that exuded moodiness and existential angst. Olive took a fortifying breath. “How are you?”
“Fine.” His tone was clipped, his expression tenser than usual. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and jeans, looking more like a wood-chopping lumberjack than a scholar pondering the mysteries of computational biology. She couldn’t help noticing the muscles and wondered again if he had his clothes custom-made. His hair was still a bit long but shorter than the previous week. It seemed a little surreal that she and Adam Carlsen were at a point where she was able to keep track of both his moods and his haircuts.
“Ready to get coffee?” she chirped.
He nodded distractedly, barely looking at her. On a table in the back, a fifth-year was glancing at them while pretending to clean the monitor of his laptop.
“Sorry if I was late. I just—”
“It’s fine.”
“Did you have a good week?”
“Fine.”
Okay. “Um . . . did you do anything fun last weekend?”
“I worked.”
They got in line to order, and it was all Olive could do to stop herself from sighing. “Weather’s been nice, right? Not too hot.”
He grunted in response.
It was starting to be a bit much. There was a limit to what Olive would do for this fake-dating relationship—even for a free mango Frappuccino. She sighed. “Is it because of the haircut?”
That got his attention. Adam looked down at her, a vertical line deep between his eyebrows. “What?”
“The mood. Is it because of the haircut?”
“What mood?”
Olive gestured broadly toward him. “This. The bad mood you’re in.”
“I’m not in a bad mood.”
She snorted—though that was probably not the right term for what she just did. It was too loud and derisive, more like a laugh. A snaugh.
“What?” He frowned, unappreciative of her snaugh.
“Come on.”
“What?”
“You ooze moodiness.”
