Page 33 - The Love Hypothesis

Olive with delicious food while rapid Vietnamese flowed around her. When

Olive had felt too stupid for the program and had considered dropping out,
Anh had talked her out of it.
The day Olive met Anh’s rolling eyes, a life-changing friendship was

born. Slowly, they’d begun to include Malcolm and become a bit of a trio,
but Anh . . . Anh was her person. Family. Olive hadn’t even thought that

was possible for someone like her.
Anh rarely asked anything for herself, and even though they’d been

friends for more than two years, Olive had never seen her show interest in
dating anyone—until Jeremy. Pretending that she’d been on a date with

Carlsen was the least Olive could do to ensure her friend’s happiness.
So she bucked up, smiled, and tried to keep her tone reasonably even
while asking, “What do you mean?”

“I mean that we talk every minute of every day, and you never
mentioned Carlsen before. My closest friend is supposedly seeing the

superstar professor of the department, and somehow I’ve never heard of it?
You know his reputation, right? Is it some kind of joke? Do you have a

brain tumor? Do I have a brain tumor?”
This was what happened whenever Olive lied: she ended up having to

tell even more lies to cover her first, and she was horrible at it, which meant
that each lie got worse and less convincing than the previous. There was no
way she could fool Anh. There was no way she could fool anybody. Anh

was going to get mad, then Jeremy was going to get mad, then Malcolm,
too, and then Olive was going to find herself utterly alone. The heartbreak

was going to make her flunk out of grad school. She was going to lose her
visa and her only source of income and move back to Canada, where it

snowed all the time and people ate moose heart and—
“Hey.”

The voice, deep and even, came from somewhere behind Olive, but she
didn’t need to turn to know that it was Carlsen’s. Just like she didn’t need to
turn to know that the large, warm weight suddenly steadying her, a firm but

barely there pressure applied to the center of her lower back, was Carlsen’s
hand. About two inches above her ass.