The Love Hypothesis

by Ali Hazelwood

“A girl like you. Who figured out so early in her academic career that fucking well-known, successful scholars is how to get ahead. You fucked Adam, didn’t you? We both know you’re going to fuck me for the same reas—” Olive slammed the spacebar, immediately stopping the replay of the recording.

“I recognize it,” Anh said, coming to sit next to her. “I recognize the voice. From that talk we went to.” She paused, searching Olive’s eyes. “That was Tom Benton, wasn’t it?” “What the—” Malcolm stood. There was real alarm blooming in his voice. Anger, too. “Ol, why do you have a recording of Tom Benton saying shit like that? What happened?”

“But I saw you kiss him! In the biology building parking lot!” “Only because you forced me to—” “But you sat on his lap!” “Once again, you forced me to—not the coolest moment in our friendship, by the way—” “But you put sunscreen on him! In front of at least one hundred people!” “Only because someone put me up to it. Do you sense a pattern?”

“If only there were a way to find out what Adam would prefer,” Malcolm said. Olive sniffled in response. “Yeah.” “If only there were someone who knows Adam very well that we might ask,” Malcolm said, louder this time. “Yeah,” Anh repeated, “that would be great. But there isn’t, so—” “If only there were someone in this room who recently started dating Adam’s closest friend of nearly three decades,” Malcolm near-yelled, full of passive-aggressive indignity, and Anh and Olive exchanged a wide-eyed look. “Holden!”

“It was him,” Adam whispered. His voice was low, barely a whisper, deceptively calm. His eyes, unreadable. “It was Tom. The reason you were crying.” Olive could only nod.

Adam exploded so fast, she didn’t even see him move. One moment he stood in front of her, and the next he was pinning Tom against the wall.

“I’m going to kill you,” he gritted out, little more than a growl. “If you say another word about the woman I love, if you look at her, if you even think about her—I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“I am going to take care of this,” he told her. There was something determined, earnest in his eyes. Olive had never felt safer, or more loved. “And then I’ll come find you, and I’ll take care of you.”

Holden fist-pumped, and then frowned. “Why veto on burgers?” “Because,” he said, holding Olive’s eyes, “burgers taste like foot.”

“Come on. It’s not even comparable,” Holden was saying. “Olive and Adam have been together for years. We met less than a week ago.”

“Adam was into her for ages. He probably secretly studied her eating habits and compiled seventeen databases and built machine-learning algorithms to predict her culinary preferences—” Olive burst into laughter. “He did not.” She took a sip of water, still smiling. “We only just started hanging out. At the beginning of the fall semester.” “Yes, but you knew each other from earlier.” Holden was frowning. “You two met the year before you started your Ph.D. here, when you came for your interview, and he’s been pining after you ever since.”

enough. It had been Adam, after all. Olive had been right. What she hadn’t been right about was whether he remembered her. “Yes,” she said. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Adam was still holding her gaze. “I guess he has.”

“You weren’t the only one who remembered, by the way.” He glanced at her. “Remembered what?” “Our meeting. The one in the bathroom, when I came to interview.”

“Because you introduced yourself like we’d never met before.” She thought maybe he was flushing a little. Maybe not. Maybe it was impossible to tell, in the starless sky and the faint yellow lights. “And I’d been…I’d been thinking about you. For years. And I didn’t want to…”

“Sweetheart,” he murmured. “What is the second thing?” She was still crying, but she’d never been happier. So she said it, probably in the worst accent he’d ever heard. “Ik hou van jou, Adam.”

She smiles at him, happy, hopeful, beautiful, and says, “Hey.” Adam smiles, too, and thinks, This is it. He thinks, I love you. He thinks, Maybe, one day, you’ll even let me tell you. And he says, “Hey.”