Deep End(45)

Right. His cocaptains. I move closer, stopping when I notice a photo, pinned with a magnet on the upper edge of the bench. “Is that you?”

He follows my gaze to the boy with the windblown hair. There are three other men in the picture, all tall and strong-limbed, wrapping long arms around each other’s shoulders. “Yeah.”

“And the others?”

“My brothers.”

I grin and push on my toes to study it. Lukas’s siblings seem to be very similar to him in height, size, and bone structure, with occasional exceptions. Dark, long hair. A blond beard. A rounder face and fuller upper lip. Lines carved deep around a strong nose.

He is, undoubtedly, the most handsome.

I am, undoubtedly, biased.

“You have three?”

“Yup.”

“All older?”

“Quite a bit.”

“How much?”

“The second youngest is Jan, born eleven years before me. I was a surprise baby.”

“Do you get along? Do you miss them?” I don’t know why I want to gobble up crumbs of Lukas-related information. He seems willing to oblige, though.

“They’re great. And annoying, although there’s a range. Jan and I are closest—he’s the one who got me into swimming. We travel together often. Oskar, the eldest, thinks that I’m still a minor. Gives me a bedtime when I stay at his house. His kids are cute, though, so I forgive him. And Leif . . . Leif once convinced me that I had Dutch elm disease.” He shakes his head when I laugh. “I do miss them, but when I’m with them, I sometimes contemplate violence.”

“Isn’t that what being siblings is about?” Not that I would know. “How come you get your own bench as an undergrad? ”

“I’ve been working with Olive for a while. Plus, she recently started out her lab, so she doesn’t have many grads.”

“Are you planning on working with her past graduation?” A thought hits me. “Did you apply for Stanford Med?”

He nods. “It’s where I hope to end up.”

“Interview?”

Another nod, but an Olympic medalist with a high MCAT score and computational biology experience? It’s a given. Thank god I don’t know his GPA, or I’d have to chug down a bottle of mercury.

“When?”

“Back in August.”

“Did you wear a suit?”

“And a fucking tie.” I laugh, and he seems to enjoy that. “Figuring out what to wear was more labor-intensive than putting on a tech suit.”

“Aww. Did you get a coach to help you?”

He fights a smile. “That’s a lot of cackling from someone who’ll go through the same process—in heels.”

“First of all, not cackling. More like gentle chortling. Second . . . how did it go?”

“I don’t know.” He notices my skeptical gaze and shrugs. “Worrying is pointless. I’ll either get in, or I won’t.”

I wish I could be as at peace as he about . . . anything, really. “And if you stay, you’ll want to keep on working with Dr. Smith?”

“If she’ll have me. I like her style. She’s hands-off, but involved. Trusts us to get shit done.”

“And I bet you hate being micromanaged.”

“You have no idea.” He cocks his head and studies me. “I bet you would, too. In the lab.”

The subtext—but not everywhere else—is loud, but it leads us into a warm patch of silence. And after that . . .

I’m not sure how it happens. Maybe he’s the one pulling me between his thighs. Maybe I step into him. All I know is that I’m in his arms, my face buried in him, his hand splayed wide on my lower back, a soothing caress above my shirt.

He inhales deeply, purposefully—looking for something he’s already familiar with, revisiting a beaten path. His skin is sandalwood. Sun. Grass. The faintest trace of chlorine. Where were you today? What did you do?

“You read the list?” he asks against the shell of my ear.

I nod into his chest. His palm slides up, to the top of my spine, a slab of heat and touch, until his thumb finds the pulse at the base of my neck, wipes back and forth over it. “Good girl.”

I close my eyes. Dissolve into the gratification of knowing that I’ve done something right. The simple pleasure of pleasing someone.

Maybe I’m fucked up. A victim of the sexist power structures that society has imposed on me. If being praised by some guy I barely know gets me going this fast, I must have internalized the same patriarchal shit that I despise outside of the bedroom. Or maybe I just am, and should stop beating myself up about this.

“Anything you want to say about that?”

I think about it in earnest, but it’s like Lukas said: there is nothing he wants that I don’t want more.

“Can you just . . .” I free my arms from between our bodies and loop them around his waist. It might be the most intimate hug I’ve ever been part of.

“Just what?”

I swallow. “I just want to be told what to do. For once.”

His fingers slide through the hair at my temple. He pulls back my head. Catches my eyes. “Will you do what I ask, then?”

I nod eagerly, feeling the slight remodeling of the energy in the lab, an empty heat inside me. A new us. This—it’s not who we are when he tells me about his med school applications, when we discuss deep learning, when we wave at each other from across the pool. This is him and me, yes, but a variation on our theme.