om,” she repeated. Her stomach twisted, leaden.
“I would have dropped out of my Ph.D. program if it hadn’t been for them. Our adviser was well-known in the field for being a sadist. Like I am, I suppose.” His mouth curled into a bitter smile. “I was aware of his reputation before starting my Ph.D. Thing is, he was also brilliant. The very best. And I thought . . . I thought that I could take it, whatever he’d dish out at me, and that it would be worth it. I thought it would be a matter of sacrifice and discipline and hard work.” There was a strain to Adam’s voice, as though the topic was not one he was used to discussing.
Olive tried to be gentle when she asked, “And it wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “The opposite, in a way.”
“The opposite of discipline and hard work?”
“We worked hard, all right. But discipline . . . discipline would presume specifically laid-out expectations. Ideal codes of behavior are defined, and a failure to adhere to them is addressed in a productive way. That’s what I thought, at least. What I still think. You said that I’m brutal with my grads, and maybe you’re right—”
“Adam, I—”
“But what I try to do is set goals for them and help them achieve them. If I realize that they’re not doing what we have mutually agreed needs to be done, I tell them what’s wrong and what they must change. I don’t baby them, I don’t hide criticism in praises, I don’t believe in that Oreo cookie feedback crap, and if they find me terrifying or antagonizing because of it, so be it.” He took a deep breath. “But I also don’t ever make it about them. It’s always about the work. Sometimes it’s well done, other times it’s not, and if it’s not . . . work can be redone. It can improve. I don’t want them to tie their self-worth to what they produce.” He paused, and he looked—no, he felt faraway. Like these were things he gave a great deal of thought to, like he wanted this for his students. “I hate how self-important this all sounds, but science is serious business, and . . . it’s my duty as a scientist, I believe.”
“I . . .” All of a sudden, the air in the hotel room was cold. I’m the one who told him, she thought, feeling her stomach flip. I’m the one who told him repeatedly that he’s terrifying and antagonizing, and that all his students hate him. “And your adviser didn’t?”
“I never quite understood what he thought. What I do know now, years later, is that he was abusive. A lot of terrible things happened under his watch—scientists were not given credit for their ideas or authorship of papers they deserved. People were publicly belittled for making mistakes that would be normal for experienced researchers—let alone trainees. Expectations were stellar, but never fully defined. Impossible deadlines were set arbitrarily, out of the blue, and grads were punished for not meeting them. Ph.D. students were constantly assigned to the same tasks, then pitted against each other and asked to compete, for my adviser’s amusement. Once he put Holden and me on the same research project and told us that whoever obtained publishable results first would receive funding for the following semester.”
She tried to imagine how it would feel, if Dr. Aslan openly promoted a competitive environment between Olive and her cohorts. But no—Adam and Holden had been close friends their whole lives, so the situation wasn’t comparable. It would have been like being told that to receive a salary next semester, Olive would need to outscience Anh. “What did you do?”
He ran a hand through his hair, and a strand fell on his forehead. “We paired up. We figured that we had complementary skills—a pharmacology expert can achieve more with the help of a computational biologist, and vice versa. And we were right. We ran a really good study. It was exhausting, but also elating, staying up all hours to figure out how to fix our protocols. Knowing that we were the first to discover something.” For a moment, he seemed to enjoy the memory. But then he pressed his lips together, rolling his jaw. “And at the end of the semester, when we presented our findings to our adviser, he told us that we’d both be without funding, because by collaborating we hadn’t followed his guidelines. We spent the following spring teaching six sections of Introduction to Biology per week—on top of lab work. Holden and I were living together. I swear that I once heard him mumble ‘mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell’ in his sleep.”
“But . . . you gave your adviser what he wanted.”
Adam shook his head. “He wanted a power play. And in the end he got it: he punished us for not dancing to his tune and published the findings we brought to him without acknowledging our role in obtaining them.”
“I . . .” Her fingers fisted in the loose fabric of her borrowed T-shirt. “Adam, I’m so sorry I ever compared you to him. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay.” He smiled at her, tight but reassuring.
It was not okay. Yes, Adam could be direct, painfully so. Stubborn and blunt and uncompromising. Not always kind, but never devious, or malicious. Quite the opposite: he was honest to a fault, and required from others the same discipline he clearly imposed on himself. As much as his grads complained about his harsh feedback or the long hours of work they were asked to put in the lab, they all recognized that he was a hands-on mentor without being a micromanager. Most of them graduated with several publications and moved on to excellent academic jobs.
“You didn’t know.”
“Still, I . . .” She bit her lip, feeling guilty. Feeling defeated. Feeling angry at Adam’s adviser and at Tom for treating academia like their own personal playground. At herself, for not knowing what to do about it. “Why did no one report him?”
He closed his eyes briefly. “Because he was short-listed for a Nobel Prize. Twice. Because he had powerful friends in high places, and we thought no one would believe us. Because he could make or break careers. Because we felt that there was no real system in place to ask for help.” There was a sour set to his jaw, and he was not looking at her anymore. It was so surreal, the idea of Adam Carlsen feeling powerless. And yet, his eyes told another story. “We were terrified, and probably somewhere deep down we were convinced that we’d signed up for it and we deserved it. That we were failures who would never amount to anything.”
Her heart hurt for him. For herself. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He shook his head again, and his expression somewhat cleared. “When he told me that I was a failure, I thought he was right. I was ready to give up on the one thing I cared about because of it. And Tom and Holden—they had their own issues with our adviser, of course. Everyone did. But they helped me. For some reason my adviser always seemed to know when something wrong was happening with my studies, but Tom mediated a lot between us. He took lots of crap so I wouldn’t have to. He was a favorite of my adviser’s and interceded to make the lab less like a battle zone.”
Adam talking about Tom as though he were a hero made her nauseous, but she remained silent. This wasn’t about her.
“And Holden . . . Holden stole my law school applications and made paper planes out of them. He was removed enough from what was happening to me that he could help me see things objectively. Just like I am removed from what happened to you today.” His eyes were on her, now. There was a light in them that she didn’t understand. “You are not mediocre, Olive. You were not invited to speak because people think that you are my girlfriend—there is no such thing, since SBD’s abstracts go through a blind review process. I would know, because I’ve been roped into reviewing them in the past. And the work you presented is important, rigorous, and brilliant.” He took a deep breath. His shoulders rose and fell in time with the thudding of her heart. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”
Maybe it was the words, or maybe the tone. Maybe it was the way he’d just told her something about himself, or how he’d taken her hand earlier and saved her from her misery. Her knight in black armor. Maybe it was none of it, maybe it was all of it, maybe it was always going to happen. Still—it didn’t matter. Suddenly, it just didn’t matter, the why of it, the how. The after. All Olive cared about was that she wanted to, right now, and that seemed enough to make it all right.
It was all so slow: the step forward she took to come to stand between his knees, the rise of her hand to his face, the way her fingers cupped his jaw. Slow enough that he could have stopped her, he could have pulled out of reach, he could have said something—and he did not. He simply looked up at her, his eyes a clear, liquid brown, and Olive’s heart at once jumped and quieted when he tilted his head and leaned into her palm.
It didn’t surprise her, how soft his skin was beneath the night stubble, how much warmer than hers. And when she bent, for once taller than him, the shape of his lips under hers was like an old song, familiar and easy. It wasn’t their first kiss, after all. Though, it was different. Calm and tentative and precious, Adam’s hand light on her waist as he tilted his chin up to her, eager and pressing, like this was something he’d thought of—like he’d been wanting it, too. It wasn’t their first kiss, but it was the first kiss that was theirs, and Olive savored it for long moments. The texture, the smell, the closeness. The slight hitch in Adam’s breath, the odd pauses, the way their lips had to work a little before finding the right angles and some form of coordination.
See? She wanted to say, triumphant. To whom, she wasn’t sure. See? It was always going to be like this. Olive grinned into his lips. And Adam—
Adam was already shaking his head when she pulled back, like a no had been waiting in his mouth all along, even as he returned her kiss. His fingers closed tight around her wrist, drawing her hand away from his face. “This is not a good idea.”
Her smile faded. He was right. He was completely right. He was also wrong. “Why?”