Page 197 - The Love Hypothesis

He shrugged. “I just don’t.”

“Well, that probably means you don’t. Otherwise, someone would have
told you.”
“Someone?”

“A roommate.” It occurred to her that Adam was thirty-four and likely
hadn’t had a roommate in about a decade. “Or a girlfriend.”

He smiled faintly and lowered his gaze. “I guess my ‘girlfriend’ will tell
me after SBD, then.” He said it in a quiet, unassuming tone, clearly trying

to make a joke, but Olive’s cheeks warmed, and she couldn’t quite bear to
look at him anymore. Instead she picked at a thread on the sleeve of her

cardigan, and searched for something to say.
“My stupid abstract.” She cleared her throat. “It was accepted as a talk.”
He met her eyes. “Faculty panel?”

“Yeah.”
“You’re not happy?”

“No.” She winced.
“Is it the public-speaking thing?”

He’d remembered. Of course he had. “Yeah. It will be awful.”
Adam stared at her and said nothing. Not that it would be fine, not that

the talk would go smoothly, not that she was overreacting and underselling
a fantastic opportunity. His calm acceptance of her anxiety had the exact
opposite effect of Dr. Aslan’s enthusiasm: it relaxed her.

“When I was in my third year of grad school,” he said quietly, “my
adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only

two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk.”
“Wow.” Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like, being

expected to perform something so daunting with so little forewarning. At
the same time, part of her marveled at Adam self-disclosing something

without being asked a direct question. “Why did he do that?”
“Who knows?” He tilted his head back, staring at a spot above her head.
His tone held a trace of bitterness. “Because he had an emergency. Because

he thought it’d be a formative experience. Because he could.”