Adam Carlsen

The lie was twelve hours old and had cost nothing to tell. Anh had been circling the same sentence for three weeks — that she likes Jeremy, that Jeremy went on two dates with {{user}} first, that she will not touch it — and it came out on its own in the break room: that {{user}} had a date that night. Then she said she would swing by the lab at eleven to see {{user}} come out, and waited with the face of someone who has just found the exit.

At ten fifty at night the Biology Building is another building: emergency lights, a bluish glow that makes everything look like an aquarium, the hum of the minus-eighty freezers. {{user}} has been here four hours, because there was never any date.

{{user}} shuts the laptop, steps into the corridor and swipes the keycard. At the far end, by the water fountain, there is someone — an enormous man seen from behind, black long-sleeved shirt, wavy hair that under this light looks almost blue. And thirty metres back, rounding the corner with her phone in her hand: Anh.

What happens next takes four seconds. Anh lifts her head and starts scanning. {{user}} crosses the six metres to the fountain. The man turns, far taller up close, frowning like someone who has just been interrupted.

Can I kiss you, please?

Without waiting for an answer — because what comes out of him is a snort, and at this hour a snort counts as permission — {{user}} goes up on tiptoe and kisses him. It is more collision than kiss at first, {{user}} stretched as far as toes allow toward a face much too far up.

I know perfectly well who this is. What I have no idea about is why this is happening.

Then the instant passes and the kiss becomes something else, because he inhales sharply and lowers his head a little. That is all he does, and it changes everything, because suddenly there is no need to stretch. He puts his hands on {{user}}'s waist — huge, surprisingly warm against the air conditioning — and slides them up to circle the ribcage and pull {{user}} closer. Not too much. Not too little. Exactly enough.

Then it lands like a brick: a stranger, a corridor, a stupid twelve-hour plan. {{user}} pulls back and looks for Anh with an urgency that resembles panic because it is panic. The corridor is empty in both directions, which is impossible, because she was there three seconds ago. And that is when {{user}} registers who this is: Doctor Adam Carlsen, the man who made Jeremy vomit from anxiety before his exams. Who still has a hand on {{user}}'s ribcage, and removes it the moment he notices.

The odds of this having happened are so low that the most reasonable explanation is that I fell asleep in my office.

Did you just kiss me?

No.

And it works.

Ah. All right.

He nods and turns away, faintly disoriented, toward the water fountain, which is probably where he was going in the first place. Then he stops halfway.

They said no. And I accepted it in four seconds, which is how long I take to accept any other piece of data that contradicts me.

You're sure?

...Look, it isn't what it looks like.

Fine. Right. His voice drops back to its usual register: deep, dry, with that undertow of someone about to get angry or already there. I'd like to know what's happening here.

With respect, this isn't your business.

Right. Then I'll go back to my office and start drafting my Title Nine complaint.

{{user}} exhales in relief, gets as far as agreeing, and stops mid-sentence, because the last word has arrived.

I did not assault you.

You kissed me. Without obtaining my consent.

I asked if I could kiss you! And you said yes.

Incorrect. Not a flicker of hesitation. You asked if you could kiss me, and I snorted.

He raises an eyebrow. For one very specific instant, {{user}} allows a brief fantasy about drowning a man.

I'm extremely sorry. Can we just forget this happened?

Very well. You'll receive the notification in a few days. He starts walking.

You didn't even ask my name!

Shouted at the back of a man who does not turn around to answer.

I'm confident anyone could establish it, given that you swiped a keycard to enter the lab area after hours. A pause. Good night.

Friday is two messages from Anh that go unanswered. Saturday is silence, which is worse. On Sunday Anh tells Jeremy, and Jeremy tells everyone.

At five past eleven on Monday {{user}} crosses the building toward the largest lab in the department. Two keycard swipes to get in. Adam Carlsen is at a bench at the back going over a Southern blot, and all ten heads in that room come up at once.

Could I have a word, Doctor Carlsen?

A lab is not furnished to produce echo. It sounds like the sentence bounces off the walls four times anyway. Carlsen does not react. He sets down the blot, crosses the lab without appearing to mind that his whole team is watching, and tips his chin at a side door.

This way.

He walks {{user}} into a meeting room with a glass wall, behind which ten people have just watched Adam Carlsen shut himself in a private room with a third-year.

Everyone knows.

It comes out before either of them has sat down. He looks at {{user}}, comprehending nothing at all.

Are you all right?

They walked into my lab in front of fourteen people. Something has happened.

Everyone knows. About us. That we're dating. And immediately: That we're not dating. But Anh believed it and told Jeremy, and Jeremy told the entire department.

And when you say everyone.

I mean everyone. {{user}} gestures at the glass wall. Those people know. Cherie knows more than enough. And all of them think I'm dating a professor.

I see.

A rumour in this department lasts two weeks. Three, at a stretch. And the budget review is in six.

He says it so calmly that instead of settling {{user}} it makes everything worse: he does not say it is unacceptable, or that he will speak to someone, or any of the things a man informed of this is supposed to do. He goes quiet and taps his fingertips against a bicep.

How long do you think the rumour will last?

...Sorry?

It's a relevant question. And then, like a man reporting an assay result: My funding is frozen. A third of it. The department considers me a high flight risk — they won't fund the research of someone they believe is leaving. It's millions of dollars, for projects I intended to finish here.

And why do they think you're leaving?

A few weeks ago I was awarded a grant alongside a scientist at another institution who once tried to recruit me, and Stanford reads the collaboration as an indication. He hesitates. And they've made their position clear. That I haven't put down roots. No family here, not married, renting. Here the irritation shows. A relationship would be extremely useful.

And it never occurred to you to just date someone? Honestly.

Touché. He goes quiet, looking at a spot on the table. The rumour already exists. I didn't start it, you didn't want to start it, and it will go on existing for weeks whatever either of us does. He looks up. We could simply not deny it.

He has just said exactly what it sounded like he said. And something curious happens: the fear is gone. It is difficult to be afraid of a man desperate enough about his funding to consider faking a relationship.

It would be complicated to do it convincingly over a sustained period.

We'll do it well, provided we greet each other in corridors and you stop calling me Doctor Carlsen.

I don't think people who are dating limit themselves to... greeting each other.

Adam tilts his head slightly, with perfectly sincere curiosity, and asks the question that takes {{user}} completely out of the game.

What do people who are dating do?

It is so free of second meaning that it takes a moment to realise it will have to be answered for real.

God, forget it. If we're doing this, we need rules. One: this holds on campus only. In case you were planning on taking someone home at Christmas so as not to turn up alone—

Hanukkah. He shrugs. Although it's unlikely I'd observe either.

Right. I suppose that's something your fake partner ought to know.

The ghost of a smile arrives on his face, and he says nothing.

Two. This one is harder. No sex.

And Adam Carlsen goes completely still. His lips part with no sound coming out, and {{user}} has just enough time to register having struck dumb the man who strikes other people dumb.

Obviously no sex. It's a fake relationship. That is what fake means. Why does it feel like that needed saying?

...Yes. He clears his throat. Evidently.

Three: while it lasts, neither of us dates anyone else. If anyone sees either of us having a drink with somebody, the whole thing collapses on the spot.

I'm not going to date anyone.

It comes out too fast and too absolute, and they both hear it. Adam looks toward the glass, where three people from his lab stop watching all at once.

I mean it isn't a problem. Then he stands, takes two steps to the table where somebody else's laptop is sitting, and opens it anyway. Two of mine, then.

He types. A calendar appears, crammed with coloured blocks, not one white gap in three weeks.

The first is the date. This ends on the twenty-ninth of September.

Why the twenty-ninth?

Because the twenty-eighth is the department's final budget review. He does not look up. If it hasn't worked by then, it isn't going to. And if it has, it's no longer needed.

And that way neither of us has to decide when to stop. It's decided in advance. It's cleaner.

All right. And the second?

People have to see us. Regularly, not once. He scrolls. Does Wednesday at ten work? I have a twenty-minute gap. The campus Starbucks, where half the department goes at that hour.

Every Wednesday?

Until the twenty-ninth of September.

And then he does something very strange, which is to look back down and create the block right there, in front of {{user}}, repeating it week after week. Six blocks, in a calendar with no room for anything.

Thursday, the twenty-seventh of August. The Biology Department auditorium has two hundred and twenty seats, and {{user}} has spent two years coming here for seminars, training sessions, thesis defences and talks by people whose names had never come up before. It has never looked like this.

It can't be.

It can't be. Anh repeats it from the doorway.

Every seat is taken. Every one. There are people standing along the sides, people sitting on the steps of the central aisle, and two undergraduates sitting on the floor in front of the first row as though this were a concert.

I think it's compulsory for Immunology and Pharmacology. Anh cranes her neck. And I've been hearing all week in the corridors that Benton is gorgeous, so maybe it's that.

It's a seminar on early detection.

Right. And look how many people are suddenly fascinated by early detection.

Down by the stage, Doctor Moss is talking to Tom and testing the microphone. Halfway up the room, in row eleven, there is one empty seat. One, in the entire auditorium. Directly beside a man of six foot four who has been looking at the door since {{user}} walked through it.

Ah. Anh says.

No.

It's the only one left.

I said no.

I'll stand. I love standing. It's excellent for the back. And she gives {{user}} a shove between the shoulder blades that has very little subtlety about it.

The central aisle, going down, is about eighteen metres. It takes an eternity to cross, partly because there are four people sitting on the steps to step around, and partly because from row six onward something very specific and very unpleasant becomes noticeable: people are turning around. Not much. Just enough. A postdoc from Pharmacology elbows another one. Somebody from {{user}}'s own cohort leans over to say something to a neighbour without looking away.

And in row eleven, Adam Carlsen uncrosses his arms.

Hello.

Hello.

His voice is normal. His face is normal. Everything is perfectly normal. {{user}} edges into the row, reaches the seat, sits down, and does not fit.

That is the problem, and it was not visible from the door: the seat is free, yes, but the man beside it does not fit in his own. He never has. Adam Carlsen's shoulders take up his seat and a third of the next one, his arm has nowhere to go, and his knees reach the back of the row in front. Which leaves {{user}} a quarter of a chair, half a body out in the aisle, and an armrest digging into somewhere nothing should be digging into.

Adam sees it immediately.

This isn't going to work.

I'm fine. A reasonable impression of calm.

Half of you is suspended in mid-air.

I'm fine.

The talk is an hour and fifteen.

Then he does something {{user}} is going to remember for a long time, which is to look for two seconds toward the back of the room — at the two hundred and twenty seats, at the people standing along the sides, at the two sitting on the floor — and then look back. And lower his voice.

Fourteen people are watching us. I counted.

...You counted them?

Fifteen, now.

Sixteen.

And it'll be more as soon as somebody notices half of you is hanging out of the row.

Adam.

It's logical.

Adam, don't—

It's the solution with the fewest variables.

He taps his open palm against his thigh, twice, with the same expression he would use to point out an error in a graph. The room is going dark. Down below, Doctor Moss has taken the microphone and begun reading out Tom Benton's introduction, the doctorate at Vanderbilt, the postdoc at Harvard, the pioneering work in imaging.

{{user}} sits down.

The first discovery is that he is hot. Under all that black clothing there is a body throwing off heat like a radiator, and after eleven hours in a building air-conditioned to nineteen degrees, that is obscenely pleasant. The second is that he is solid. Everywhere. There is not one square centimetre of this man that gives.

And the third is the hand.

He puts it on {{user}}'s waist. Without asking, without warning, without the slightest hesitation — but slowly, leaving more than enough time for anyone to move away. Open. Enormous. Anchoring. And then he does not move it at all.

If you move it, it stops being sitting with your partner at a seminar.

If you move it, it becomes something else.

Don't move it.

Two seats over, somebody snorts. {{user}} turns just enough to find a man of about thirty-five, extremely handsome, ankles crossed over the back of the seat in front and a phone in his hand.

Holden Rodrigues. He says, without looking up from the screen. Friend of this one for thirty years. Charmed.

Twenty-eight. Adam says.

Thirty.

On the screen a row of coloured sweets collapses with a chime.

I'm three levels ahead of my niece, and she's nine and has all the time in the world, so for me this is a question of honour.

Tom's talk is good. Objectively good: the data are solid, the slides are clean, and at some point in the session there are two results that bear directly on what {{user}} is working on. {{user}} will find that out tonight, reading the paper, because nothing whatsoever is getting through in here.

What is happening in here is arithmetic. How much weight is actually being carried and how much is being carried for dignity. At what precise point in this hour and fifteen a leg is going to fall asleep. And whether the pulse being felt somewhere is {{user}}'s own or his.

And about the fifteen people. Sixteen.

Half an hour in, Adam's phone vibrates in his pocket. {{user}} feels it. Obviously {{user}} feels it, given where that pocket is. Adam goes very still for a second. Then he reaches across with his free arm, takes out the phone, reads, locks it and puts it away without the other hand moving a millimetre. Two seats over, Holden laughs quietly without looking up from his game.

At fifty minutes, {{user}} shifts. Only slightly. Just enough to reposition a leg that has been complaining for a while.

And Adam inhales. Short, through the nose, almost inaudible. The hand at the waist closes for an instant — the fingers, only the fingers, half a second — before opening again and settling exactly where it was.

Neither of them says anything.

An hour and fifteen. Twenty-five minutes left. And then there's a picnic on Saturday, and then there's a Wednesday, and then another one.

Twenty-five minutes.

When the lights come up the hand withdraws before {{user}} has time to stand. Adam gets to his feet, tugs the hem of his shirt straight, and looks toward the stage as though he has spent an hour and a quarter deeply absorbed in the cohort comparison.

Good talk. He says.

You didn't take in a word of it. Holden says, pocketing the phone.

I took in all of it.

What was slide twenty-two about?

Sensitivity and specificity in retrospective cohorts.

A pause.

...All right, so you did.

Anh appears from the central aisle wearing a face {{user}} knows very well and that has never once meant anything good. She says nothing until they are outside in the lobby, with Adam ten metres away talking to Doctor Moss. Then she hooks an arm through {{user}}'s and lowers her voice.

Look. I know you're about to go into it's-not-what-it-looks-like mode—

I haven't said anything.

You were going to. Anh glances over her shoulder. But I need you to know one thing, because I don't think you can see it properly from down there.

Anh—

That man did not look at the stage once during the entire talk.

Friday, the twenty-fifth of September, the second day of the conference. Room C holds eighty chairs and sixty-odd are occupied, which should not be happening at three fifteen on a Friday with four competing sessions. The proposal was accepted in July, and not as a poster: as a talk.

The first slide comes up in a violent green, because the projector in this room is from another century. And then, while the chair reads the introduction, the door at the back opens.

{{user}} looks up out of habit and stops with the clicker half pressed. It is not possible for Adam Carlsen to be in that doorway: at three fifteen he has the funding roundtable, the reason they flew him to Boston, which he has spent two days saying he cannot skip. And yet there he is, finding a seat in the back row. He sits, folds his arms, and does not move for twenty minutes.

There are three questions at the end, and the one that matters comes from the woman from Kyoto: why that marker and not another. {{user}} has the answer, gives all of it, and she nods and writes in a notebook.

From the back row, Adam does not raise his hand once.

No need. There's nothing to correct.

In the hotel lobby, at twenty past seven:

You skipped the roundtable.

Yes.

Adam. There were four institute directors.

Three. He presses the lift button. One cancelled.

That isn't the point!

He does that thing he does lately, looking away just before speaking, as though the sentence comes out better without an audience.

What are they going to say? He shrugs. That I wanted to spend an hour with my partner?

The doors open. {{user}}'s brain has stopped.

There are two beds in the room, two white duvets, a nightstand with a telephone nobody will ever use. The department party is on the ground floor and neither of them goes down. What there is instead is a long hour of two people silently solving problems nobody has named. Adam sets his bag beside the bed on the right and never goes near the other one. {{user}} says I'm going to shower and he says yes two seconds late, looking at a phone that has not vibrated. And then there is what to do with your hands in a twenty-two square metre room with another person four steps away, which he solves standing: the window, the dresser, the desk chair. At some point the minibar opens and closes again without anything coming out of it.

When {{user}} comes out with wet hair, Adam has given in and is sitting on the edge of the left-hand bed — the one that is not his, which neither of them will mention — elbows on his knees.

{{user}} crosses and stops a metre in front of him.

You did well this afternoon.

It comes out with no preamble, and it takes two seconds to realise it needed more.

The last question. The one from Kyoto. A pause. She asks everyone that, and almost nobody answers it. You did.

Say goodnight. Turn off the light. Tomorrow you get on a plane and this ends on the twenty-ninth, as planned.

But {{user}} has crossed that metre without a sound, and is pushing the hair off his forehead with fingers still cold from the water. That gesture, which means nothing, takes down ten years of internal architecture.

You don't like being touched. You hate it, in fact. Do you remember who you were before your life became a montage of every time this person touched you because they had to?

Adam does not move. He has spent three years trained not to move.

{{user}} takes the last step, ending up between his knees — taller than him for once, since he is still sitting — and runs a hand from his temple down until the fingers close around his jaw. So slowly that he could have stopped it. He does not. What he does is tilt his head and rest it in that palm.

One second. Give me one second of this and then I'll stand up.

And when {{user}} bends down, he lifts his chin.

It is not the first kiss. But it is the first that belongs to both of them, with nobody watching, with nothing to be gained from it. Adam puts a hand on {{user}}'s waist — almost shy — and kisses back with an urgency strange in a man who has allowed himself nothing in three years.

{{user}} smiles against his lips. And he is already shaking his head — probably he was doing it while he kissed back, as though that no had been waiting in his mouth the whole time. He takes {{user}}'s wrist, firmly, and removes the hand from his face.

That isn't a good idea.

The smile goes out.

Why?

{{user}}.

Another shake of the head. Then he touches his fingers to his lips, as though he needs to feel what just happened to confirm that it did.

This is... no.

Why not?

Adam rubs his eyes. He is still holding that wrist, and does not seem aware of it, nor that his thumb is stroking the pulse there, up and down, without stopping.

It isn't what we came here for.

That doesn't mean—

You're not thinking clearly. He swallows. You've had a horrible day. And you've been drinking. And—

I had two beers. Hours ago.

You're a third-year. Tonight you're sleeping here because of me. And even if that weren't true, the power I hold over you turns this very easily into something coercive that—

No—

{{user}} laughs.

I don't feel under any pressure at all, I—

THERE IS SOMEBODY ELSE AND WE BOTH KNOW WHO!

He spits it, with a violence unlike anything that has come out of that mouth in two years.

Good work. Magnificent. Remind them that the person who matters to them is downstairs with their best friend. As if you didn't know exactly how that feels.

Silence. Three floors down, somebody turns the music up.

That isn't true anymore.

Said quietly. Without arguing it, without raising the tone, with the wrist still caught in his hand.

And I think you know that.

Adam does not answer.

Answer them. It's the only thing they've said all night that you could use, and the only thing you don't dare touch.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. And then something he had not accounted for happens: {{user}}'s face changes. Not into anger. Into the face of someone who has just understood something.

All right. And the voice comes out flat, with nothing inside it. Then all right.

He looks up. What?

That's it, isn't it. You don't want to. {{user}} shrugs, and does it badly, because the voice comes out wrong. You could have just said so. You didn't need the speech about power or the beers. I'm not attracted to you would have covered it.

No. No, no, no. Anything but that.

Adam stands without letting go of that wrist, which forces {{user}} to follow the movement upward, and the entire room changes scale.

You have no idea what I want.

Adam—

No. None.

He runs his thumb along the inside of that wrist one more time, where the pulse has been giving both of them away. Then he opens the hand with his fingers, slowly, like someone handling something breakable, and holds it in the air between them.

If I show you what I'm carrying right now, there's no undoing it. Not tomorrow, not on the twenty-ninth, not ever. A pause. So I'm going to ask once, and after that we can't go back.

Say it. Say it and let whatever happens happen.

Do you want to?

{{user}} answers by closing the fingers he has just opened and laying that hand flat on his chest, over a heart going like it has spent twenty minutes running uphill.

Out loud. He says, his voice in pieces. I need you to say it out loud.

I want to.

Adam puts both hands on {{user}}'s face and stays there a full second, as though still hunting for the point at which this becomes a mistake. He does not find it. And then he lowers his head.

He kisses like a man who has not eaten in years. One hand open at the nape, closing in the hair just enough to hold; the other going down to the waist and staying, fingers spread, covering more than a hand should cover. And the weight of a body twice the size leaning forward until {{user}} has to step back, and back, until the wall decides for both of them. He puts a thigh between {{user}}'s, braces a forearm above that head, and eases off — enough for the kiss to become something slower, asking permission with his body instead of words.

Sorry.

He says it against that mouth, without moving a millimetre.

I don't forgive you for anything.

Good.

His shirt ends up on the floor, and only then is it possible to see what has been under all that black. {{user}} runs nails up that chest and Adam makes a sound through his nose that is not entirely human.

Again.

And then, for the first time since he started, he stops. Not from doubt. From method. He puts his mouth on {{user}}'s neck, lips first and teeth after, and waits. Listens. Counts {{user}}'s breathing the way you count beats on a trace, thumb in the hollow of the throat to feel every swallow.

Here?

The noise that comes out of {{user}} is not a word, and it cuts off short against his shoulder.

I told you. Out loud.

...Yes.

Thank you.

And he bites. Just enough to leave a mark tomorrow.

This is what I'm going to do for the next several hours: find every place that produces that sound and go back to it. And then remember all of them.

Pay attention, sweetheart.

It escaped. He never says that. He has probably never said it in his life, and he does not intend to take it back.

I spent a decade convinced this didn't interest me. Ten years, with evidence, and a perfectly reasonable conclusion drawn from it. And the sample was badly selected.

Adam—

I know. And he is already bending down.

No, seriously, my legs aren't—

I know that too.

He hooks a forearm underneath and lifts {{user}} off the floor with no visible effort, crossing the room without giving the corner of the nightstand the slightest importance. The bed takes both of them and creaks once, outraged. He holds himself on a forearm, breathing hard, then rests his forehead against {{user}}'s.

And even now — even like this, even with everything — he stops one last time.

Tell me how far.