Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

            “But . . .” Lamar sounds severely distressed. “This is Dr. Ward’s design.”

            “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Dr. Ward knows nothing about the angular gyrus,” I murmur distractedly.

            The ensuing silence should probably tip me off. At least, I should notice the sudden shift in the atmosphere of the lab. But I don’t and keep staring at the helmet, writing possible modifications and workarounds in my head, until a throat clears somewhere in the back of the room. That’s when I lift my eyes and see him.

            Levi.

            Standing in the entrance.

            Staring at me.

            Just staring at me. A tall, stern, snow-tipped mountain. With his expression—the one from years ago, silent and unsmiling. A veritable Mount Fuji of disdain.

            Shit.

            My cheeks burn. Of course. But of course, he just caught me trash-talking his neuroanatomy skills in front of his team like a total asshole. This is my life, after all: a flaming ball of scorching, untimely awkwardness.

            “Boris and I are in the conference room. You ready to meet?” he asks, his voice a deep, severe baritone. My heart thuds. I rack my brain for something to say in response.

            Then Guy speaks and I realize that Levi isn’t even addressing me. He is, in fact, completely ignoring me and what I just said. “Yep. We were just about to head there. Got sidetracked.”

            Levi nods once and turns around, a silent but clear order to follow him that everyone seems eager to obey. He was like that in grad school, too. Natural leader. Commanding presence. Someone whose bad side you wouldn’t want to be on.

            Enter me. A proud resident of his bad side for several years, who just renewed her housing permit with a few simple words.

            “Is that Dr. Ward?” Rocío whispers as we enter the conference room.

            “Yup.”

            “Welp. That was excellent timing, boss.”

            I wince. “What are the chances that he didn’t hear me?”

            “I don’t know. What are the chances that his personal hygiene is very poor and he has huge wax balls in his ear canal?”

            The room is already crowded. I sigh and take the first empty seat I can find, only to realize that it’s across from Levi. Awkwardness level: nuclear. I’m making better and better choices today. Cheering erupts when someone deposits two large boxes of donuts in the center of the table—NASA employees are clearly as enthused by free food as regular academics. People start calling dibs and elbowing each other, and Guy yells over the chaos, “The one in the corner, with the blue frosting, is vegan.” I shoot him a grateful smile and he winks at me. He’s such a nice guy, my almost-co-leader.

            As I wait for the crowd to disperse, I take stock of the room. Levi’s team appears to be WurstFest™ material. The well-known Meatwave. A Dicksplosion in the Testosteroven. The good old Brodeo. Aside from Rocío and I, there’s one single woman, a young blonde currently looking at her phone. My gaze is mesmerized by her perfect beach waves and the pink glitter of her nails. I have to force myself to look away.

            Eh. WurstFest™ is bad, but it’s at least a small step up from Cockcluster™, which is what Annie and I called academic meetings with only one woman in the room. I’ve been in Cockcluster™ situations countless times in grad school, and they range from unpleasantly isolating to wildly terrifying. Annie and I used to coordinate to attend meetings together—not that hard, since we were symbiotic anyway.

            Sadly, none of my male cohort ever got how awful WurstFest™ and Cockcluster™ are for women. “Grad school’s stressful for everyone,” Tim would say when I complained about my entirely male advisory committee. “You keep going on about Marie Curie—she was the only woman in all of science at the time, and she got two Nobel Prizes.”

            Of course, Dr. Curie was not the only female scientist at the time. Dr. Lise Meitner, Dr. Emmy Noether, Alice Ball, Dr. Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Leavitt, and countless others were active, doing better science with the tip of their little fingers than Tim will ever manage with his sorry ass. But Tim didn’t know that. Because, as I now know, Tim was dumb.

            “We’re ready to start.” The balding redheaded man at the head of the table claps his hands, and people scurry to their seats. I lean forward to grab my vegan donut, but my hand freezes in midair.