She hesitated and then made her way to the couch. She distrustfully accepted the small bag and took a seat next to him. “Thanks, I guess.”
He nodded, taking a sip of his drink. She tried not to stare at his throat as he tipped his head back, averting her eyes to her knees.
“Should you be having caffeine at”—Olive glanced at the clock—“ten twenty-seven p.m.?” Come to think of it, he shouldn’t be having caffeine at all, given his baseline shiny personality. And yet the two of them got coffee together every Wednesday. Olive was nothing but an enabler.
“I doubt I’ll be sleeping much, anyway.”
“Why?”
“I need to run a set of last-minute analyses for a grant due on Sunday night.”
“Oh.” She leaned back, finding a more comfortable position. “I thought you had minions for that.”
“As it turns out, asking your grads to pull an all-nighter for you is frowned upon by HR.”
“What a travesty.”
“Truly. What about you?”
“Tom’s report.” She sighed. “I’m supposed to send it to him tomorrow and there’s a section that I just don’t . . .” She sighed again. “I’m rerunning a few analyses, just to make sure that everything is perfect, but the equipment I’m working with is not exactly . . . ugh.”
“Have you told Aysegul?”
Aysegul, he’d said. Naturally. Because Adam was a colleague of Dr. Aslan, not her grad, and it made sense that he’d think of her as Aysegul. It wasn’t the first time he’d called her that; it wasn’t even the first time Olive had noticed. It was just hard to reconcile, when they were sitting alone and talking quietly, that Adam was faculty and Olive was very much not. Worlds apart, really.
“I did, but there’s no money to get anything better. She’s a great mentor, but . . . last year her husband got sick and she decided to retire early, and sometimes it feels like she’s stopped caring.” Olive rubbed her temple. She could feel a headache coming up and had a long night ahead of her. “Are you going to tell her I told you that?”
“Of course.”
She groaned. “Don’t.”
“Might also tell her about the kisses you’ve been extorting, and the fake-dating scheme you roped me into, and above all about the sunscreen—”
“Oh God.” Olive hid her face in her knees, arms coming up to wrap around her head. “God. The sunscreen.”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded muffled from down here. “Yeah, that was . . .”
“Awkward?” she offered, sitting back straight with a grimace. Adam was looking elsewhere. She was probably imagining it, the way he was flushing.
He cleared his throat. “Among other things.”
“Yep.” It had been other things, too. A lot of things that she was not going to mention, because her other things were sure to not be his other things. His other things were probably “terrible” and “harrowing” and “invasive.” While hers . . .
“Is the sunscreen going in the Title IX complaint?”
His mouth twitched. “Right on the first page. Nonconsensual sunblock application.”
“Oh, come on. I saved you from basal cell carcinoma.”
“Groped under SPF pretense.”
She swatted him with her Twix, and he ducked a bit to avoid her, amused. “Hey, you want half of this? Since I fully plan to eat what’s left of your chips.”
“Nah.”