Olive winced. “When you put it like that, perhaps it wasn’t my best moment.”

“Perhaps.”

“But it wasn’t my worst, either! I’m pretty sure Anh saw us. Now she’ll think that I was on a date with you and she’ll hopefully feel free to go out with Jeremy and—” She shook her head. “Listen. I’m so, so sorry about the kiss.”

“Are you?”

“Please, don’t report me. I really thought I heard you say yes. I promise I didn’t mean to . . .”

Suddenly, the enormity of what she had just done fully dawned on her. She had just kissed a random guy, a guy who happened to be the most notoriously unpleasant faculty member in the biology department. She’d misunderstood a snort for consent, she’d basically attacked him in the hallway, and now he was staring at her in that odd, pensive way, so large and focused and close to her, and . . .

Shit.

Maybe it was the late night. Maybe it was that her last coffee had been sixteen hours ago. Maybe it was Adam Carlsen looking down at her, like that. All of a sudden, this entire situation was just too much.

“Actually, you’re absolutely right. And I am so sorry. If you felt in any way harassed by me, you really should report me, because it’s only fair. It was a horrible thing to do, though I really didn’t want to . . . Not that my intentions matter; it’s more like your perception of . . .”

Crap, crap, crap.

“I’m going to leave now, okay? Thank you, and . . . I am so, so, so sorry.” Olive spun around on her heels and ran away down the hallway.

“Olive,” she heard him call after her. “Olive, wait—”

She didn’t stop. She sprinted down the stairs to the first floor and then out the building and across the pathways of the sparsely lit Stanford campus, running past a girl walking her dog and a group of students laughing in front of the library. She continued until she was standing in front of her apartment’s door, stopping only to unlock it, making a beeline for her room in the hope of avoiding her roommate and whoever he might have brought home tonight.

It wasn’t until she slumped on her bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars glued to her ceiling, that she realized she had neglected to check on her lab mice. She had also left her laptop on her bench and her sweatshirt somewhere in the lab, and she had completely forgotten to stop at the store and buy the coffee she’d promised Malcolm she’d get for tomorrow morning.

Shit. What a disaster of a day.

It never occurred to Olive that Dr. Adam Carlsen—known ass—had called her by her name.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Two

Olive Smith was a rising third-year Ph.D. student in one of the best biology departments in the country, one that housed more than one hundred grads and what often felt like several million majoring undergrads. She had no idea what the exact number of faculty was, but judging from the mailboxes in the copy room she’d say that a safe guess was: too many. Therefore, she reasoned that if she’d never had the misfortune of interacting with Adam Carlsen in the two years before The Night (it had been only a handful of days since the kissing incident, but Olive already knew that she’d think of last Friday as The Night for the rest of her life), it was entirely possible that she might be able to finish grad school without crossing paths with him ever again. In fact, she was fairly sure that not only did Adam Carlsen have no idea who she was, but he also had no desire to learn—and had probably already forgotten all about what happened.

Unless, of course, she was catastrophically wrong and he did end up filing a Title IX lawsuit. In which case she supposed that she would see him again, when she pleaded guilty in federal court.

Olive figured that she could waste her time fretting about legal fees, or she could focus on what were more pressing issues. Like the approximately five hundred slides she had to prepare for the neurobiology class that she was slated to TA in the fall semester, which was starting in less than two weeks. Or the note Malcolm had left this morning, telling her he’d seen a cockroach scurry under the credenza even though their apartment was already full of traps. Or the most crucial one: the fact that her research project had reached a critical point and she desperately needed to find a bigger, significantly richer lab to carry out her experiment. Otherwise, what could very well become a groundbreaking, clinically relevant study might end up languishing on a handful of petri dishes stacked in the crisper drawer of her fridge.

Olive opened her laptop with half a mind to google “Organs one can live without” and “How much cash for them” but got sidetracked by the twenty new emails she’d received while busy with her lab animals. They were almost exclusively from predatory journals, Nigerian prince wannabes, and one glitter company whose newsletter she’d signed up for six years ago to get a free tube of lipstick. Olive quickly marked them as read, eager to go back to her experiments, and then noticed that one message was actually a reply to something she had sent. A reply from . . . Holy crap. Holy crap.

She clicked on it so hard she almost sprained her pointer finger.

Today, 3:15 p.m.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Re: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project

Olive,

Your project sounds good. I’ll be visiting Stanford in about two weeks. Why don’t we chat then?

Cheers,

TB

Tom Benton, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Biological Sciences, Harvard University

Her heart skipped a beat. Then it started galloping. Then it slowed down to a crawl. And then she felt her blood pulsate in her eyelids, which couldn’t be healthy, but— Yes. Yes! She had a taker. Almost. Probably? Maybe. Definitely maybe. Tom Benton had said “good.” He had said that it sounded “good.” It had to be a “good” sign, right?

She frowned, scrolling down to reread the email she’d sent him several weeks earlier.

July 7, 8:19 a.m.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project

Dr. Benton,

My name is Olive Smith, and I am a Ph.D. student in the biology department of Stanford University. My research focuses on pancreatic cancer, in particular on finding noninvasive, affordable detection tools that could lead to early treatment and increase survival rates. I have been working on blood biomarkers, with promising results. (You can read about my preliminary work in the peer-reviewed paper I have attached. I have also submitted more recent, unpublished findings to this year’s Society for Biological Discovery conference; acceptance is pending but see the attached abstract.) The next step would be to carry out additional studies to determine the feasibility of my test kit.