“You should go.” She attempted a smile, but it felt wobbly. “Finish your surgeries.”
He didn’t break eye contact. “I care. Anh cares—Anh would have chosen you over Jeremy. And you care, too. We all care about one another, and I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
Olive didn’t bother answering and used her sleeve to dry her cheek. Adam was different, and what Olive wanted from him was different, but she couldn’t—didn’t want to articulate it. Not now. “I won’t tell him.”
“Ol.”
“No,” she said, firm. With her tears gone, she felt marginally better. Maybe she was not who she had thought, but she could fake it. She could pretend, even to herself. “I’m not going to tell him. It’s a horrible idea.”
“Ol.”
“How would that conversation even work? How would I phrase it? What are the right words?”
“Actually you should probably—”
“Do I tell him that I’m into him? That I think about him all the time? That I have a huge crush on him? That—”
“Olive.”
In the end, what tipped her off was not Malcolm’s words, or his panicky expression, or the fact that he was clearly looking at a spot somewhere above her shoulders. In the end, Anh chose that exact moment to text her, which drew Olive’s eyes to the numbers on the screen.
10:00 a.m.
It was ten. On a Wednesday morning. And Olive was currently sitting in the campus Starbucks, the very same Starbucks where she had spent her Wednesday mornings for the past few weeks. She whirled around and—
She wasn’t even surprised to find Adam. Standing behind her. Close enough that unless both his eardrums had ruptured since the last time they’d talked, he must have heard every single word that came out of Olive’s mouth.
She wished she could expire on the spot. She wished she could crawl outside her body and this café, melt in a pool of sweat, and seep between the tiles on the floor, just vanish into thin air. But all these things were currently beyond her skill set, so she fixed a weak smile on her face and looked up at Adam.
Chapter Eleven
HYPOTHESIS: Whenever I lie, things will get worse by a factor of 743.
“Did you . . . did you hear that?” she blurted out.
Malcolm hurried to clear the table of his stuff, muttering tightly, “I was just about to go.”
Olive barely noticed, busy watching Adam slide the chair back to sit across from her.
Shit.
“Yes,” he said, bland and even, and Olive felt like she was about to disintegrate into a million tiny pieces, here, in this exact spot. She wanted him to take it back. Wanted him to say “No, heard what?” She wanted to go back to earlier this morning and rewind it all, this horrible mess of a day. Not look at the texts on her phone, not let Anh walk in on her mooning over her fake boyfriend, not pour her heart out to Malcolm in the worst possible place.
Adam couldn’t know. He simply couldn’t. He’d think that Olive had kissed him on purpose, that she’d masterminded this whole fiasco, that she’d manipulated him into this situation. He’d feel compelled to break up with her well before he could reap any benefits from their arrangement. And he would hate her.
The prospect was terrifying, so she said the one thing she could think of.
“It wasn’t about you.”
The lie rolled off her tongue like a mudslide: unpremeditated, quick, and bound to leave a huge mess behind.