Page 55 - The Love Hypothesis

Chapter Three

HYPOTHESIS: A private conversation with Adam Carlsen will become 150
percent more awkward after the word “sex” is uttered. By me.

Three days later, Olive found herself standing in front of Adam’s office.
She’d never been there before, but she had no problem finding it. The
student scurrying out with misty eyes and a terrified expression was a dead

giveaway, not to mention that Adam’s door was the only one in the hallway
completely devoid of pictures of kids, pets, or significant others. Not even a

copy of his article that had made the cover of Nature Methods, which she
knew about from looking him up on Google Scholar the previous day. Just

dark brown wood and a metal plaque that read: Adam J. Carlsen, Ph.D.
Maybe the J stood for “Jackass.”

Olive had felt a bit like a creep the night before, scrolling down his
faculty web page and going through his list of ten million publications and
research grants, staring at a picture of him clearly taken in the middle of a

hiking trip and not by Stanford’s official photographer. Still, she’d quickly
quashed the feeling, telling herself that a thorough academic background

check was only logical before embarking on a fake-dating relationship.
She took a deep breath before knocking and then another between
Adam’s “Come in” and the moment she finally managed to force herself to

open the door. When she entered the office, he didn’t immediately look up
and continued typing on his iMac. “My office hours were over five minutes

ago, so—”
“It’s me.”