Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas #2) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Oh yeah. Maybe there will be some shopping. You think he’s going to call us from some D.C. mall’s Claire’s asking us which ring Mara would prefer?”

            “Oh my God, you know what? Last week I read somewhere that Costco sells engagement rings— Oh, hi, Liam.”

            Mara’s boyfriend enters the screen and comes to stand right behind her. In the past few weeks he’s become a sort of informal fourth in our calls—an occasional guest star, if you will, who mines for embarrassing grad school stories about Mara and kindly offers to murder our asshole male colleagues when we complain. Considering that our first introduction to him was Mara plotting to booby-trap his bathroom, it’s surprisingly fun to have him around.

            “Really, guys?” he asks, all frowny and dark and cross-armed. “Claire’s? Costco?”

            Hannah and I both gasp. “Costco is amazing.”

            “Yeah, Liam. What do you have against Costco?”

            He shakes his head at us, presses a kiss on the crown of Mara’s head, and exits the frame. I’m a fan, I must say.

            “Okay,” Mara says, “going back to your poor communication skills.”

            I roll my eyes.

            “Are you still angry at Erik?” Hannah asks. “Because you spent weeks being sad, and furious, and sadly furious. Even if you now know that your reasons weren’t as valid, I feel like it would still be hard to let go of that. So maybe that’s the issue here?”

            I think about Erik’s hand closing around my arm in the lobby. About the way he kept looking at me when the elevator restarted: focused, intent, like the world could spin twice as fast as normal and he still wouldn’t have cared, not if I were nearby. I don’t let myself recall the words he said, but a memory resurfaces, of us laughing and standing in his kitchen and eating Chinese leftovers, and I don’t push it down. For the first time in weeks, it’s not soaked in resentment and betrayal. Just the achy, poignant sweetness of the night we spent together. Of Erik turning up the thermostat when I said I was cold, then wrapping his large, warm hands around the soles of my feet. That feeling of being right there, on the brink of something.

            I don’t think I’m angry, not anymore.

            “It’s not that,” I say.

            “Okay. So the problem is that you don’t believe him?”

            “I . . . No. I do. I don’t think Gianna deliberately lied to me, but she didn’t have all the facts.”

            “What is it, then?”

            I swallow, trying to prod at the reason my stomach feels leaden, the reason I’ve been feeling sick with disappointment and fear ever since finding out the truth. And then it hits me. The one thing I have been actively trying not to verbalize hits me just as I say, “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

            “Why doesn’t it matter?”

            I close my eyes. Yes. That’s it. That’s why. “Because I ruined it.”

            “Ruined it, how?”

            Now that I can name it for what it is, the horrible feeling grows, acid and bitter in my throat. “He won’t be interested in me. He met me and thought that I was funny, that he had tons of things in common with me, that he really liked me, and then I . . . I acted like a totally irrational, absurd, deranged person and blocked his number and accused him of fucking corporate espionage and maybe he wants to set the record straight, maybe he hates the idea of me thinking that he’s a horrible person, but there’s no way he wants to pick up where we left off and—aaaargh.” I bury my face in my hand.

            I fucked up. I just . . . I fucked up. And now I have to live with the knowledge of it. I have to go on in a world in which no man will ever compare to Erik Nowak. No man will ever make me laugh, and make my body sing, and make my soul absolutely indignant with his outrageous opinions on Galatasaray—all at once.

            “Oh, honey.” Mara cocks her head. “You don’t know that.”

            “I do. It’s likely.”

            “That’s not the point.” Hannah leans closer to the screen till all I can see are her beautiful face and dark eyes. “Okay, so Erik now knows that you occasionally display an appalling lack of conflict-resolution initiative.”