Not in Love by Ali Hazelwood

Yes. No? What the fuck did he know? He’d barely paid attention to her before she’d been shoved into his life. “This feels like a trick question, and I don’t plan to engage with it.”

“Seems kind of puritanical of you, someone whose entire download history is hiking trail maps, solitaire, and sex-forward dating apps.”

His eyebrow rose. “Hark doesn’t do relationships, either.”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to marry him. I just want to—”

“Do not say it.”

“—use his beautiful, former rower’s body.”

“She fucking said it,” he mumbled. “Can you please not put in my head images that a therapist will have me reenact with dolls five years down the line?”

“But it’s so fun.”

“Listen, you are legally free to engage in orgies with people four times your age, but—”

“‘But don’t expect me to facilitate any of that,’ I know, I know.” She sighed. “How was the date last night?”

“It was . . .” God, it was so messed up that the only thing he could think of saying was, “Good.”

Because it was true. Being with Rue, even just to talk, had been good. Wasn’t that incredibly fucking pitiful?

“Will you see her again?”

He thought about the following day. “Maybe.” He bent his head to focus on his food, then on Maya’s recounting of her computational physics class, then on Tiny’s soft snores rising up from his feet. And told himself that if he couldn’t avoid Rue Siebert, he should at least try to think about her a little less.





7





NOT A CONDITION FOR ANYTHING





RUE

Meals were always tricky business for me, but none more than breakfast on days in which I planned to be in the lab for several hours. I couldn’t skip eating, not if I wanted to avoid feeling like I’d pass out around midday. And yet, those days also tended to start very early in the morning, which meant a significant risk of oversleeping. Which meant no time for a sit-down meal.

Which meant a lot of fucking misery.

A normal person would have bought a snack at the vending machine or packed a sandwich. But I wasn’t normal, not when it came to food: eating quickly, eating standing up, eating on the go, it all triggered some of my most cavernous anxieties. And I would have taken the hunger over those any day.

To eat I needed time and quiet. I needed to stare at my meal and know, feel, that more food would be waiting for me after the bite I’d just swallowed was gone. My issues were deep-rooted, multilayered, and impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t grown up hiding expired Twinkies in secret spots, who hadn’t discovered fresh produce only well into her teens, who hadn’t fought with a sibling over the last stale cracker.

Not that I’d ever really tried. Tisha already knew, my therapist had pried out my history piecemeal over years, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else caring about me enough to want to listen. After all, I hadn’t been food insecure in over ten years, and I should have been over this shit.

Though clearly I was not.

That morning, I fucked up on a staggering number of levels: woke up late after a fitful night of sleep, let the hot shower boil my skin for far too long, went downstairs without my car keys, and finally met Samantha from quality assurance in the parking lot, who wanted to know if, in my opinion as “Florence’s favorite,” we were all soon going to be living in a tent below the underpass, like a big happy family. Eating was the last thing on my mind, and when I stepped into the lab I’d booked, I was twelve minutes late.

And he was there.

Parked on a stool.

Loose jointed and relaxed as he waited for me.

We regarded each other with equally masked expressions. Neither of us bothered to say hi or, god forbid, How are you? We just stared and stared and stared in the deathly early morning quiet, until his eyes began roaming over me, and his pupils got larger, and my skin began to tingle.

I wasn’t proud of the way I’d acted the day before—not because he hadn’t deserved to be called out on whatever Harkness was up to, but because I hated losing control. The world was a constant, full-on maelstrom, and my emotions were the one thing I could govern. Eli Killgore looked like the kind of person who’d love to take that away from me.

“Why?” I asked plainly. Diplomacy was past us.

“I’d like to hear about the work you do.” His voice was deep, more gravelly than yesterday. Not a morning person, either.

“Did you clear this meeting with Florence?”

His jaw tightened. “I did not.”

“In that case—”

“Your general counsel did, though.”

It was my turn to tense. “I’m about to start an experiment that will need constant monitoring. Your timing is not ideal.”

“What’s the experiment?”

I bit into my lower lip, and immediately regretted it when his eyes darkened. It felt dangerous, the two of us alone in the same room. Again.

“I’ve created a new type of protective layer for fruit and vegetables. It’s an invisible substance that I put around produce. Then I measure whether it extends the shelf life of that produce in different types of situations.”