“How the turntables,” Adam murmured. Olive reached out to pinch him on the side, but he stopped her with a hand around her wrist.
Evil, she mouthed at him. He just smiled, evilly, studying Malcolm and Holden a little too gleefully.
“Come on. It’s not even comparable,” Holden was saying. “Olive and Adam have been together for years. We met less than a week ago.”
“They have not,” Malcolm corrected him, wagging a finger. Adam’s hand was still curled around her wrist. “They started dating, like, a month before we did.”
“No,” Holden insisted. “Adam was into her for ages. He probably secretly studied her eating habits and compiled seventeen databases and built machine-learning algorithms to predict her culinary preferences—”
Olive burst into laughter. “He did not.” She took a sip of water, still smiling. “We only just started hanging out. At the beginning of the fall semester.”
“Yes, but you knew each other from earlier.” Holden was frowning. “You two met the year before you started your Ph.D. here, when you came for your interview, and he’s been pining after you ever since.”
Olive shook her head and laughed, turning to Adam to share her amusement. Except that Adam was staring at her already, and he did not look amused. He looked . . . something else. Worried maybe, or apologetic, or resigned. Panicky? And just like that, the restaurant was silent. The pitter-patter of rain on the windows, people’s chatter, the clinking of silverware—it all receded; the floor tilted, shook a little, and the AC was just this side of too cold. At some point, Adam’s fingers had let go of her wrist.
Olive thought back to the bathroom incident. To burning eyes and wet cheeks, the smell of reagent and clean, male skin. The blur of a large, dark figure standing in front of her with his deep, reassuring, amused voice. The panic of being twenty-three and alone and having no idea what she should be doing, where she should be going, what the right choice was.
Is mine a good enough reason to go to grad school?
It’s the best one.
All of a sudden, things had seemed simple enough.
It had been Adam, after all. Olive had been right.
What she hadn’t been right about was whether he remembered her.
“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Adam was still holding her gaze. “I guess he has.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
HYPOTHESIS: When given a choice between A （telling a lie） and B （telling the truth）， I will inevitably end up selecting . . .
No. Not this time.
Olive had no doubt that Holden’s tales were highly embellished and the result of years of comedy workshopping, but she still couldn’t help laughing harder than ever before.
“And I’m awakened by this waterfall pouring down on me—”
Adam rolled his eyes. “It was a drop.”
“And I’m asking myself why it’s raining inside the cabin, when I realize that it’s coming from the top bunk and that Adam, who was, like, thirteen at the time—”
“Six. I was six, and you were seven.”
“Had pissed the bed, and the piss was seeping through the mattress and onto me.”
Olive’s hands flew up to cover her mouth, not quite succeeding at hiding her amusement—just like she’d failed when Holden had recounted that a dalmatian puppy had once bitten Adam’s ass through his jeans, or that he’d been voted “Most likely to make people cry” in his senior yearbook.
At least Adam didn’t act embarrassed, and not nearly as upset as he’d seemed after Holden had talked about him pining after her. Which explained . . . so many things.