Chapter Text
“I’d been thinking about you. For years. And I didn’t want to...”
She could only imagine. They’d passed each other in the hallways, been at countless research symposiums and seminars together. She hadn’t thought anything of it, but now...now she wondered what he had thought.
He’d been going on and on about this amazing girl for years, but he was concerned about being in the same department, Holden had said.
And Olive had assumed so much. She had been so wrong.
-- The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
Adam Carlsen was used to getting odd offers from faculty of competing universities, but his latest one had turned out to be much stranger than usual.
It had been an interminable day. He had gotten to the lab at 6 am only to find it full of first year graduate assistants who wouldn’t know a fruit fly from a froot loop. At midday, the vending machine in the lounge was completely out of Salt and Vinegar chips. There was no way he was going to leave his lab at the mercy of his current group of imbeciles for more than 10 minutes, so he had skipped lunch entirely.
By 3 o’clock, he had been reminded by not one but three different colleagues that attendance at that night’s convocation was “strongly encouraged,” not just for grad students but for faculty as well. Like he was an undergrad playing hooky instead of one of Stanford’s most well regarded tenured professors.
Plus, the convocation meant he had missed lifting weights this evening, which always had a detrimental effect on his mood.
And now, just as he was finally going to have a moment to himself for the first time in 14 hours, Dr. Martina Flores, visiting professor from Johns Hopkins and tonight’s guest lecturer, had found and ensnared him outside of the lecture hall before he could excuse himself.
She had been talking at him for so long that most of the lumps of faculty and students who had congregated after the talk had dissolved to go back to their labs or out for drinks or wherever people with social lives went at 8 pm on a Thursday night, and they were left standing mostly alone in a nearly deserted hallway of the biology building. Adam stared longingly out the tall rectangular windows at the lights on the quad and imagined he was outside, listening only to the sounds of traffic in the distance and feeling the dry breeze on his face.
Dr. Flores, whose perfume reminded him of endless state dinners with the wives of diplomats who would pinch his cheeks—his cheeks, the indignity—just kept yammering even as Adam gazed into the middle distance. If she didn’t pick up on his polite indifference any time soon, he would probably say something regrettable, and...
Something in Dr. Flores’ voice finally registered as Adam was mentally preparing himself to disengage from the conversation.
“...if you’d be open to discussing this further over dinner?”
“I’m sorry, what?” Adam had tuned her out somewhere between “findings have limited practical application in their current form, but with your assistance...” and “...collaboration would be an asset to both of our universities.”
Even though at one point he had actually been looking at her and not thinking about how good a kale smoothie would taste right about now, Adam took in Flores for the first time since she had walked up to him after her talk had concluded. Her cherry red sleeveless dress had seemed demure under the blazer that she had been wearing onstage. Now, it appeared to have one less button than it had when she was presenting to a collected audience of Stanford Biology faculty and students. He observed that her wavy dark hair had been loosed from its bun and spilled over her tanned shoulders. Her manicured fingers rested lightly on the elbow of his black blazer.
It dawned on Adam too late to make any difference. This wasn’t about a scientific collaboration. This was flirting.
Her dark eyebrows furrowed like she was trying to puzzle out how to approach a multiparadigm model, but her smile remained just as wide and bright. “If dinner’s out, how about coffee?”
“It’s after 8 pm and I don’t feel like taking a Unisom to fall asleep tonight, so no. No coffee.” He pressed at his temples with the fingers of his right hand.
As he ran the hand from front to back through his dark hair, he caught Holden Rodrigues looking at where he stood from the opposite end of the hall. He stared at Holden in a look that he knew Holden could definitely interpret as save me, motherfucker. Then Adam watched in frustration as Holden’s eyebrows raised and a grin lifted the corners of his mouth and he turned back to the grad student he had been talking to.
That absolute shit. Abandoning Adam in his time of need.
“Dr. Carlsen, I have a theory that you and I—” Dr. Flores began.
Adam quickly cataloged all the things that he could say that wouldn’t reflect poorly on him if they got back to the dean and settled on interrupting her, “Dr. Flores. If you’ll excuse me—”
Before he could get a half step away from her she had grabbed a fistful of the sleeve where her hand had been resting a moment before, yanking his upper body and head down to the level of her face. Adam got an unintended eyeful of her cleavage before he heard her murmur in the vicinity of his ear, “How about a quickie in my office?”
“I’m...sorry?” Adam sputtered. Clearly he had not heard what he had thought he just heard. Not in a public hallway in the biology building. Not from Martina Flores, who, while undoubtedly attractive, had at least ten years and one ASCB award on him.
Her full lips brushed his ear. “Think about it,” she murmured before releasing his arm and sauntering away.
Adam stood in the hall and blinked rapidly at Flores’ retreating form. He was dumbfounded. His original plan, the one that she had thwarted, had been to run upstairs to his office and grab his gym bag after the talk. He would lift until the burn made him forget about all of the incompetents he was mentoring.
But now he could not go to get his gym bag from his office, which was only three doors down from Dr. Flores’. He could not possibly go to his office, because then she might see him and think he was intentionally trying to run into her, and then...
Oh god.
This really was the worst day ever.
***
“I am so close to locking my door when it’s not office hours.” Adam didn’t look up from his collection of three desktop monitors at the person standing in the doorway to his office.
Dr. Holden Rodrigues closed the door behind him and heaved his body into the seat across from Adam’s desk. It was an ancient swivel chair, with decayed foam padding that no longer protected the sitter from any of the seat’s plastic protrusions. Adam had been offered a new chair for several years running, but he was attached to this one. He preferred to keep his office guests as uncomfortable as possible.
“I heard you last night. This is the third date you’ve turned down this semester. Dr. Flores is an eight, man. What are you thinking?”
I’m thinking I’m going to have to avoid her for the next three months.
To be fair, Holden was right about Flores being attractive. Last night, Adam had watched her ass in her fitted red skirt as she walked away from him. All things relative, it was a good ass. Empirically asstastic. Adam remembered the cupid’s bow of her mouth against his ear. Her soft breath on his cheek. How her brown eyes had been bright and flirtatious behind her tortoiseshell glasses. And he felt...
He felt nothing.
“She forms unprofessional attachments to her lab mice,” Adam sniffed.
“I’m pretty sure she only names them for her YouTube videos.”
“Case in point. She makes YouTube videos! That’s not science. Does she think she’s Walt Disney?”
“Walt Disney was not a bad looking dude in his time. That mustache...” Holden mused.
Christ. If Adam had to hear about how Holden would bang young Walt Disney...
“She offered to fuck me. In her office!” Adam blurted loudly.
Holden’s eyes widened, then he grimaced and shifted his weight as the chair creaked beneath him. But he didn’t say anything. Of course he would choose right now of all times to hold his tongue.
Adam was about to stand up and start pacing. Instead, he drummed his fingers on the wood grain to get out his nervous energy. Then he raked his hair back from his forehead.
“Who starts out with dinner, downgrades to coffee, and then thinks, what the hell, I’ve already struck out twice, I’m going to go down swinging by switching to full on sex?” Adam asked.
“I mean, you could be on a cleanse...”
“How many times have I told you, I’m not on a cleanse, you just have shit taste in restaurants!” Adam was almost yelling again. His nostrils flared and he bounced his leg rapidly beneath his desk. The nerve of that woman. The nerve of Stanford, for ensuring she would be here for this entire semester, tormenting him with her internet-famous lab mice and casual approach towards intercourse.
“Whoa, whoa. Hey,” Holden said reassuringly. “Do you need to go for a run or something? I’m sensing a hair trigger, here.”
With that, Adam deflated. “No. It was just. Unexpected. Unwelcome. Unprofessional.”
“Undoubtedly,” Holden agreed with a grin. “Do I have to give you the ‘to some members of society, Adam Carlsen is seen as attractive and desirable’ speech again?”
Adam huffed out a breath.
“I know you don’t like it, but as your oldest friend, I am required to inform you of the fact periodically.” Holden’s teasing demeanor softened. “Seriously, man. You know and I know you’re not the kind of guy who’s gonna have random sex in your office, but there’s a spectrum between fucking on university grounds and actually going out for a drink with a female for once in your adult life. Why the ongoing asceticism?”
“I’m not an ascetic. Just because I’m not spending my miniscule amount of free time swiping right on Tinder doesn’t mean...” Adam sighed. Holden’s arms were crossed and he was staring at Adam with a face that would make an undergrad cry. He was not getting out of this one. Maybe he would get out of it for one night, but there would always be other Dr. Floreses. Other interrogations. Holden was a rat terrier. He would keep his teeth in Adam until he drew blood.
“Fine. There’s...someone.” Adam confessed. The corner of his mouth quirked upward involuntarily in a smile. Traitor.
“Okay, I’m clearing my schedule for the rest of the afternoon. Tell me everything. Where did you meet her?”
“My bathroom.”
"That is..." Holden marveled. "After 20 years, you'd think I'd have a handle on your sense of humor, but you still manage to surprise me."
"I'm serious. Last fall, I found this—" Amazingly beautiful and refreshingly direct girl."—interloper crying in my lab bathroom. We talked. I thought she was cool."
She had talked to him like he wasn’t Dr. Adam Carlsen, destroyer of research careers and blight on grad students. But she hadn't treated him like Stanford's golden boy either. Because she honestly didn’t know who you were, you idiot.
But that was exactly it. He really hadn't realized how draining it was being Adam Carlsen until that day in the bathroom. Just how much everyone else in his life wanted from him. Expected of him. Connections. Grant funds. For nearly every single person he had met in his adult life, Adam was a transaction, not a human being.
Talking to her felt...different.
I couldn't get her out of my head for weeks and was seriously considering running interference with the admissions department.
"Then I saw her on campus at the start of the semester, and..." Adam shrugged.
I figured I’d see her again and she’d turn out to disappoint me, just like half of the incoming cohort always does.
He had been wrong about that. The disappointing part.
"And you've been sneaking around behind my back ever since," Holden admonished.
"Not sneaking. We haven't... I haven't talked to her. Not since last fall."
“Lame, Carlsen. You have way more game than that."
"I really, really don't."
"Says the guy who's been turning down women left and right as they throw themselves at you. Seriously. When are you planning to ask her out?”
“She’s.” Adam paused and worried his lower lip between his teeth for a moment. “A student. A first year student."
“So? I date students.”
“In your department?”
A slow grin spread across Holden’s face. “Well, I wouldn’t call what happened at Biosims last year a date, but...”
Adam rolled his eyes. “Are you at all concerned with Title IX complaints?”
“No, I’m concerned about multi-drug-resistant bacteria. I’m concerned about the decline in participation for our in vivo studies. I’m concerned,” he continued and leaned in, resting his forearm on Adam’s desk and inclining his head, “that if you stay single, you are going to keep showing up at my house on New Year’s Eve, all sad and drunk, and cockblocking me.”
“You are going to hold that over me until we are ninety and in a rest home, aren’t you?”
“You are going to be in a rest home. I am going to be on my third husband, a theoretical physicist who is 45 years my junior. We’ll be living large on our private self-sustaining orbital station while you are stuck drinking recycled wastewater and working on a project to resurrect the giant panda.”
“I don't know what kind of water you think you'll be drinking in space, but I'm pretty sure even future California will still have you beat,” said Adam drily.
“Climate change is real," Holden shook his head mournfully. "Seriously. Why not go for this girl?”
“It would be inappropriate.”
“Like you’ve ever been concerned with what’s appropriate. So what are you going to do, sit on the sidelines for the next five years until she graduates and gets a job at a different university that’s not—” he made air quotes with his fingers, “a ‘conflict of interest’ and it’s acceptable to ask her out?”
Adam narrowed his dark eyes and stared Holden down. Obviously. It was exactly what he was going to do. The biology world was small and insular. Everyone ran in the same circles, no matter which side of the country you wound up on.
Incestuous was the word that came to him unbidden and made his chest flash hot.
There would be conferences, and symposiums, and awards banquets and—his mind was spinning—science-type gatherings. There were plenty of opportunities for something to happen. He would stay here at Stanford for as long as Olive—of course her name had to remind him of something salty and mouthwateringly cravable—was here. Maybe as she was approaching her final thesis defense, he could introduce himself and—.
Well, he hadn’t figured every detail out yet, but he had almost five years to do it. That was basically 25 generations, in mouse time. An eternity.
He could definitely go without sex for—he briefly calculated the sum since his last encounter in his head—twelve years, give or take. For this girl, he could.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t even really know her.” Adam tried to make his voice light. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
“So get to know her.” Holden made the “ok” sign with one hand and poked his index finger through the circle between his thumb and forefinger.
“Ugh. Grow up. This conversation is over,” Adam said, standing up from his desk. Holden was a phenomenal researcher on the other side of thirty, but sometimes when he and Adam were alone together Holden acted exactly like he had when he was fifteen.
As he strode past Holden to leave, he heard, “Are you at least gonna tell me her name?”
Adam stopped in his tracks. "Olive." It was the first time he’d ever said the girl’s name out loud. He felt his stomach drop. Then he walked out of his office alone.