Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

            I might be reading too much into the way his spine goes rigid, but something about how he stops reminds me of an inmate getting caught by the guards just a step away from breaking out of prison. He turns around slowly, hulking but surprisingly graceful, all black and green and that strange, intense face.

            It was actually a thing, back in grad school. Something to debate while waiting for participants to show up and analyses to run: Is Levi actually handsome? Or is he just six four and built like the Colossus of Rhodes? There were plenty of opinions going around. Annie, for instance, was very much in camp “Ten out of ten, would have a torrid affair with.” And I’d tell her Ew, yikes, and laugh, and call her a traitor. Which . . . yeah. Turned out to be accurate, but for completely different reasons.

            In hindsight, I’m not sure why I used to be so shocked about his fan club. It’s not so outlandish that a serious, taciturn man who has several Nature Neuroscience publications and looks like he could bench-press the entire faculty body in either hand would be considered attractive.

            Not that I ever did. Or ever will.

            In fact, I’m absolutely not thinking again about his thigh pushing between my legs.

            “Hey.” I smile tentatively. He doesn’t answer, so I continue, “Thank you for the other day.” Still no answer. So I continue some more. “I wasn’t, you know . . . standing in front of that cart for shits and giggles.” I need to stop twisting my grandmother’s ring. Stat. “There was a cat, so—”

            “A cat?”

            “Yeah. A calico. A kitten. Mostly white, with orange and black spots on the ears. She had the cutest little . . .” I notice his skeptical look. “For real. There was a cat.”

            “Inside the building?”

            “Yes.” I frown. “She jumped on the cart. Made the boxes fall.”

            He nods, clearly unconvinced. Fantastic—now he thinks I’m making up the cat.

            Wait. Am I making up the cat? Did I hallucinate it? Did I—

            “Can I help you with anything?”

            “Oh.” I scratch the back of my head. “No. I just wanted to, ah, tell you how excited I am to collaborate again.” He doesn’t immediately reply, and a terrible thought occurs to me: Levi doesn’t remember me. He has no idea who I am. “Um, we used to be in the same lab at Pitt. I was a first-year when you graduated. We didn’t overlap long, but . . .”

            His jaw tenses, then immediately relaxes. “I remember,” he says.

            “Oh, good.” It’s a relief. My grad school archnemesis forgetting about me would be a bit humiliating. “I thought you might not, so—”

            “I have a functioning hippocampus.” He looks away and adds, a little gruffly, “I thought you’d be at Vanderbilt. With Schreiber.”

            I’m surprised he knows about that. When I made plans to go work in Schreiber’s lab, the best of the best in my field, Levi had long moved on from Pitt. The point is, of course, moot, because after all the happenings of two years ago happened, I ended up scrambling to find another position. But I don’t like to think about that time. So I say, “Nope,” keeping my tone neutral to avoid baring my throat to the hyena. “I’m at NIH. Under Trevor Slate. But he’s great, too.” He really isn’t. And not just because he enjoys reminding me that women have smaller brains than men.

            “How’s Tim?”

            Now—that’s a mean question. I know for a fact that Tim and Levi have ongoing collaborations. They even hosted a panel together at the main conference in our field last year, which means that Levi knows that Tim and I called off our wedding. Plus, he must be aware of what Tim did to me. For the simple reason that everyone knows what Tim did to me. Lab mates, faculty members, janitors, the lady who manned the sandwich station in the Pitt cafeteria—they all knew. Long before I did.

            I make myself smile. “Good. He’s good.” I doubt it’s a lie. People like Tim always land on their feet, after all. Unlike people like me, who fall on their metaphorical asses, break their tailbones, and spend years paying off the medical bills. “Hey, what I said earlier, about the angular gyrus . . . I didn’t mean to be rude. I wasn’t thinking.”

            “It’s okay.”