Love on the Brain

ON WEEKDAYS, I usually set my alarm for seven a.m.—and then find myself snoozing it anywhere from three (“Raving success”) to eight times (“I hope a swarm of rabid locusts attacks me on my way to work, thus allowing me to find solace in the cold embrace of death”). On Monday, however, the unprecedented happens: I’m up at five forty-five, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I spit out my night retainer, run into the bathroom, and don’t even wait for the water to warm up to step under the shower.

I am that eager.

As I pour almond milk on my oatmeal, I give rad Dr. Curie the finger guns. “BLINK’s starting today,” I tell the magnet. “Send good vibes. Hold the radiations.”

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this excited. Probably because I’ve never been part of anything this exciting. I stand in front of my closet to pick out an outfit and focus on that—the sheer excitement—to avoid thinking about what happened on Friday.

To be fair, there isn’t much to think about. I only remember up until the moment I fainted. Yes, I swooned in His Wardness’s manly arms like a twentieth-century hysteric with penis envy.

It’s nothing new, really. I faint all the time: when I haven’t eaten in a while; when I see pictures of large, hairy spiders; when I stand up too quickly from a sitting position. My body’s puzzling inability to maintain minimal blood pressure in the face of normal everyday events makes me, as Reike likes to say, a syncope aficionado. Doctors are puzzled but ultimately unconcerned. I’ve long learned to dust myself off as soon as I regain consciousness and go about my business.

Friday, though, was different. I came to in a few moments—cat nowhere in sight—but my neurons must have still been misfiring because I hallucinated something that could never happen: Levi Ward bridal-carrying me to the lobby and gently laying me on one of the couches. Then I must have hallucinated some more: Levi Ward viciously tearing a new one into the engineer who’d left the cart unattended. That had to have been a fever dream, for several reasons.

First of all, Levi is terrifying, but not that terrifying. His brand is more kill-’em-with-icy-cold-indifference-and-silent-contempt than angry outbursts. Unless in our time apart he’s embraced a whole new level of terrifying, in which case . . . lovely.

Second, it’s difficult, and by “difficult” I mean impossible, to imagine him siding against a non-me party in any me-involved accident. Yes, he did save my life, but there’s a good chance he had no idea who I even was when he shoved me against the wall. This is Dr. Wardass, after all. The man who once stood for a two-hour meeting rather than take the last empty seat because it was next to me. The man who exited a game of poker he was winning because someone dealt me in. The man who hugged everyone in the lab on his last day at Pitt, and promptly switched to handshakes when it was my turn. If he caught someone stabbing me, he’d probably blame me for walking into the knife—and then take out his whetstone.

Clearly, my brain wasn’t at her best on Friday. And I could stand here, stare at my closet, and agonize over the fact that my grad school nemesis saved my life. Or I could bask in my excitement and pick an outfit.

I opt for black skinny jeans and a polka-dotted red top. I pull up my hair in braids that would make a Dutch milkmaid proud, put on red lipstick, and keep the jewelry to a relative minimum—the usual earrings, my favorite septum piercing, and my maternal grandmother’s ring on my left hand.

It’s a bit weird to wear someone else’s wedding ring, but it’s the only memento I have of my nonna, and I like to put it on when I need some good luck. Reike and I moved to Messina to be with her right after our parents died. We ended up having to move again just three years later when she passed, but out of all the short-lived homes, out of all the extended relatives, Nonna is the one who loved us the most. So Reike wears her engagement ring, and I wear her wedding band. Even-steven. I shoot a quick, uplifting tweet from my WWMD account (Happy Monday! KEEP CALM AND CURIE ON, FRIENDS) and head out.

“You excited?” I ask Rocío when I pick her up.

She stares at me darkly and says, “In France, the guillotine was used as recently as 1977.” I take it as an invitation to shut up, and I do, smiling like an idiot. I’m still smiling when we get our NASA ID pictures taken and when we later meet up with Guy for a formal tour. It’s a smile fueled by positive energy and hope. A smile that says, “I’m going to rock this project” and “Watch me stimulate your brain” and “I’m going to make neuroscience my bitch.”

A smile that falters when Guy swipes his badge to unlock yet another empty room.

“And here’s where the transcranial magnetic stimulation device will be,” he says—just another variation of the same sentence I’ve heard over. And over. And over.

“Here is where the electroencephalography lab will be.”

“Here you’ll do participant intake once the Review Board approves the project.”

“Here will be the testing room you asked for.”

Just a lot of rooms that will be, but aren’t yet. Even though communications between NASA and NIH indicated that everything needed to carry out the study would be here when I started.

I try to keep on smiling. It’s hopefully just a delay. Besides, when Dr. Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, she didn’t even have a proper lab, and did all of her research out of a converted shed. Science, I tell myself in my inner Jeff Goldblum voice, finds a way.

Then Guy opens the last room and says, “And here’s the office you two will share. Your computer should arrive soon.” That is when my smile turns into a frown.

It’s nice, the office. Large and bright, with refreshingly not-rusted-through desks and chairs that will provide just the right amount of lumbar support. And yet.

First of all, it’s as distant from the engineering labs as possible. I’m not kidding: if someone grabbed a protractor and solved for x (i.e., the point that’s farthest from Levi’s office), they’d find that x = my desk. So much for interdisciplinary workspaces and collaborative layouts. But that’s almost secondary, because . . .

“Did you say computer? Singular?” Rocío looks horrified. “Like . . . one?”

Guy nods. “The one you put on your list.”

“We need, like, ten computers for the type of data processing we do,” she points out. “We’re talking multivariate statistics. Independent component analysis. Multidimensional scaling and recursive partitioning. Six sigma—”

“So you need more?”

“At the very least, buy us an abacus.”

Guy blinks, confused. “. . . A what?”

“We put five computers on our list,” I interject with a side look at Rocío. “We will need all of them.”

“Okay.” He nods, taking out his phone. “I’ll make a note to tell Levi. We’re heading to meet him right now. Follow me.”

My heartbeat accelerates—probably because the last time I saw Levi my brain confabulated that he was carrying me An Officer and a Gentleman–style, and the previous came on the tail of a year of him treating me like I’m a tax auditor. I’m nervously playing with my grandmother’s ring and wondering what disaster of galactic proportions this next meeting has in store for me, when something catches my eye through the glass wall.

Guy notices. “Want a sneak peek at the helmet prototype?” he asks.

My eyes widen. “Is that what’s in there?”

He nods and smiles. “Just the shell for now, but I can show you.”

“That would be amazing,” I gasp. Embarrassing, how breathless I sound when I get excited. I need to follow through with my Couch-to-5K plans.

The lab is much larger than I expected—dozens of benches, machines I’ve never seen before pressed against the wall, and several researchers at various stations. I feel a frisson of resentment—how come Levi’s lab, unlike mine, is fully stocked?—but it quiets down the instant I see it.

It.

BLINK is a complex, delicate, high-stakes project, but its mission is straightforward enough: to use what is known about magnetic stimulation of the brain (my jam) to engineer special helmets (Levi’s expertise) that will reduce the “attentional blinks” of astronauts—those little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once. It’s the culmination of decades of gathering knowledge, of engineers perfecting wireless stimulation technology on one side and neuroscientists mapping the brain on the other. Now, here we are.

Neuroscience and engineering, sitting in a very expensive tree called BLINK, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

It’s hard to communicate how groundbreaking this is—two separate slices of abstract research bridging the gap between academia and the real world. For any scientist, the prospect would be exhilarating. For me, after the mild shitshow my career has put up in the past couple of years, it’s a dream come true.

All the more now that I’m standing in front of tangible proof of said dream’s existence.

“That’s the . . . ?”

“Yep.”

Rocío murmurs, “Wow,” and for once doesn’t even sound like a sullen Lovecraftian teenager. I’d tease her about it, but I can’t focus on anything but the helmet prototype. Guy is saying something about design and stage of development, but I tune him out and step closer. I knew that it’d be made from a combination of Kevlar and carbon fiber cloth, that the visor would carry thermal and eye-tracking capabilities, that the structure would be streamlined to host new functionalities. What I did not know was how stunning it would look. A breathtaking piece of hardware, designed to house the software I’ve been hired to create.

It’s beautiful. It’s sleek. It’s . . .

Wrong.

It’s all wrong.

I frown, peering closer at the pattern of holes in the inner shell. “Are these for the neurostimulation output?”

The engineer working at the helmet station gives me a confused look. “This is Dr. Königswasser, Lamar,” Guy explains. “The neuroscientist from NIH.”

“The one who fainted?”

I knew this would haunt me, because it always does. My nickname in high school was Smelling Salts Bee. Damn my useless autonomic nervous system. “The one and only.” I smile. “Is this the final placement for the output holes?”

“Should be. Why?”

I lean closer. “It won’t work.” A brief silence follows, and I study the rest of the grid.

“Why do you say that?” Guy asks.

“They’re too close—the holes, I mean. It looks like you used the International 10–20 system, which is great to record brain data, but for neurostimulation . . .” I bite into my lip. “Here, for instance. This area will stimulate the angular gyrus, right?”

“Maybe? Let me just check. . . .” Lamar scrambles to look at a chart, but I don’t need confirmation. The brain is the one place where I never get lost. “Upper part—stimulation at the right frequency will get you increased awareness. Which is exactly what we want, right? But stimulation of the lower part can cause hallucinations. People experiencing a shadow following them, feeling as though they’re in two places at the same time, stuff like that. Think of the consequences if someone was in space while that happened.” I tap the inner shell with my fingernail. “The outputs will need to be farther apart.”

“But . . .” Lamar sounds severely distressed. “This is Dr. Ward’s design.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure Dr. Ward knows nothing about the angular gyrus,” I murmur distractedly.

The ensuing silence should probably tip me off. At least, I should notice the sudden shift in the atmosphere of the lab. But I don’t and keep staring at the helmet, writing possible modifications and workarounds in my head, until a throat clears somewhere in the back of the room. That’s when I lift my eyes and see him.

Levi.

Standing in the entrance.

Staring at me.

Just staring at me. A tall, stern, snow-tipped mountain. With his expression—the one from years ago, silent and unsmiling. A veritable Mount Fuji of disdain.

Shit.

My cheeks burn. Of course. But of course, he just caught me trash-talking his neuroanatomy skills in front of his team like a total asshole. This is my life, after all: a flaming ball of scorching, untimely awkwardness.

“Boris and I are in the conference room. You ready to meet?” he asks, his voice a deep, severe baritone. My heart thuds. I rack my brain for something to say in response.

Then Guy speaks and I realize that Levi isn’t even addressing me. He is, in fact, completely ignoring me and what I just said. “Yep. We were just about to head there. Got sidetracked.”

Levi nods once and turns around, a silent but clear order to follow him that everyone seems eager to obey. He was like that in grad school, too. Natural leader. Commanding presence. Someone whose bad side you wouldn’t want to be on.

Enter me. A proud resident of his bad side for several years, who just renewed her housing permit with a few simple words.

“Is that Dr. Ward?” Rocío whispers as we enter the conference room.

“Yup.”

“Welp. That was excellent timing, boss.”

I wince. “What are the chances that he didn’t hear me?”

“I don’t know. What are the chances that his personal hygiene is very poor and he has huge wax balls in his ear canal?”

The room is already crowded. I sigh and take the first empty seat I can find, only to realize that it’s across from Levi. Awkwardness level: nuclear. I’m making better and better choices today. Cheering erupts when someone deposits two large boxes of donuts in the center of the table—NASA employees are clearly as enthused by free food as regular academics. People start calling dibs and elbowing each other, and Guy yells over the chaos, “The one in the corner, with the blue frosting, is vegan.” I shoot him a grateful smile and he winks at me. He’s such a nice guy, my almost-co-leader.

As I wait for the crowd to disperse, I take stock of the room. Levi’s team appears to be WurstFest™ material. The well-known Meatwave. A Dicksplosion in the Testosteroven. The good old Brodeo. Aside from Rocío and I, there’s one single woman, a young blonde currently looking at her phone. My gaze is mesmerized by her perfect beach waves and the pink glitter of her nails. I have to force myself to look away.

Eh. WurstFest™ is bad, but it’s at least a small step up from Cockcluster™, which is what Annie and I called academic meetings with only one woman in the room. I’ve been in Cockcluster™ situations countless times in grad school, and they range from unpleasantly isolating to wildly terrifying. Annie and I used to coordinate to attend meetings together—not that hard, since we were symbiotic anyway.

Sadly, none of my male cohort ever got how awful WurstFest™ and Cockcluster™ are for women. “Grad school’s stressful for everyone,” Tim would say when I complained about my entirely male advisory committee. “You keep going on about Marie Curie—she was the only woman in all of science at the time, and she got two Nobel Prizes.”

Of course, Dr. Curie was not the only female scientist at the time. Dr. Lise Meitner, Dr. Emmy Noether, Alice Ball, Dr. Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Leavitt, and countless others were active, doing better science with the tip of their little fingers than Tim will ever manage with his sorry ass. But Tim didn’t know that. Because, as I now know, Tim was dumb.

“We’re ready to start.” The balding redheaded man at the head of the table claps his hands, and people scurry to their seats. I lean forward to grab my vegan donut, but my hand freezes in midair.

It’s not there anymore. I inspect the box several times, but there’s only cinnamon left. Then I lift my eyes and I see it: blue frosting disappearing behind Levi’s teeth as he takes a bite. A bite of my damn donut. There are dozens of alternatives, but behold: The Wardass chose the one I could eat. What kind of careless, inconsiderate boob steals the single available option from a starving, needy vegan?

“I am Dr. Boris Covington,” the redhead starts. He looks like an exhausted, disheveled ginger hard-boiled egg. Like he ran here for this meeting, but there are five stacks of paperwork on his desk waiting for him. “I’m in charge of overseeing all research projects here in the Discovery Institute—which makes me your boss.” Everyone laughs, with a few good-natured boos. The engineering team seems to be a rowdy bunch. “You guys already know that—with the notable exception of Dr. Königswasser and Ms. Cortoreal, who are here to make sure we don’t fail at one of our most ambitious projects yet. Levi’s going to be their point of contact, but, everyone, please make them feel welcome.” Everyone claps—except for Levi, who is busy finishing his (my) donut. What an absolute dingus. “Now let’s pretend that I gave an impressive speech and move on to everyone’s favorite activity: icebreakers.” Almost everyone groans, but I think I’m a fan of Boris. He seems much better than my NIH boss. For instance, he’s been speaking for one whole minute and hasn’t said anything overtly offensive. “I want your name, job, and . . . let’s do favorite movie.” More groans. “Hush, children. Levi, you start.”

Everyone in the room turns to him, but he takes his sweet time swallowing my donut. I stare at his throat, and an odd mix of phantom sensations hits me. His thigh pushing between mine. Being pressed into the wall. The woodsy smell at the base of his—

Wait. What?

“Levi Ward, head engineer. And . . .” He licks some sugar off his bottom lip. “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Oh—are you kidding me? First he steals my donut, and now my favorite movie?

“Kaylee Jackson,” the blonde picks up. “I’m project manager for BLINK, and Legally Blonde.” She talks a bit like she could be one of Elle Woods’s sorority sisters, which makes me like her instinctively. But Rocío tenses beside me. When I glance at her, her brows are furrowed.

Weird.

There are at least thirty people in the room, and the icebreakers get old very soon. I try to pay attention, but Lamar Evans and Mark Costello start fighting over whether Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is better than Vol. 1, and I feel a weird prickle in the center of my forehead.

When I turn, Levi’s staring hard at me, his eyes full of that something that I seem to awaken in him. I’m a bit resentful about the donut, not to mention that he still hasn’t answered my email, but I remind myself of what Boris just said: he’s my main collaborator. So I play nice and give him a cautious, slow-to-unfurl smile that I hope communicates Sorry about the angular gyrus jab, and I hope we’ll work well together, and Hey, thank you for saving my life!

He breaks eye contact without smiling back and takes a sip of his coffee. God, I hate him so—

“Bee.” Rocío elbows me. “It’s your turn.”

“Oh, um, right. Sorry. Bee Königswasser, head of neuroscience. And . . .” I hesitate. “Empire Strikes Back.” With the corner of my eye I see Levi’s fist clench on the table. Crap. I should have just said Avatar.

Once the meeting is over, Kaylee comes to speak to Rocío. “Ms. Cortoreal. May I call you Rocío? I need your signature on this document.” She smiles sweetly and holds out a pen, which Rocío doesn’t accept. Instead she freezes, staring at Kaylee with her mouth open for several seconds. I have to elbow her in the ribs to get her to defrost. Interesting.

“You’re left-handed,” Kaylee says while Rocío signs. “Me too. Lefties power, right?”

Rocío doesn’t look up. “Left-handed people are more prone to migraines, allergies, sleep deprivation, alcoholism, and on average live three years less than right-handed people.”

“Oh.” Kaylee’s eyes widen. “I, um, didn’t . . .”

I’d love to stay and witness more prime Valley Girl and Goth interaction, but Levi’s stepping out of the room. As much as I loathe the idea, we’ll need to talk at some point, so I run after him. When I reach him, I’m pitifully out of breath. “Levi, wait up!”

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.”

“I hope you’re not mad. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“I’m not mad.”

I stare up at his face. He doesn’t seem mad. Then again, he also doesn’t seem not mad. He just seems like the old Levi: quietly intense, unreadable, not at all fond of me.

“Good. Great.” My eyes fall to his large bicep, and then to his fist. He is clenching it again. Guess Dr. Wardass still dislikes me. Whatever. His problem. Maybe I have a bad aura. It doesn’t matter—I’m here to get a job done, and I will. I square my shoulders. “Guy gave me a tour earlier. I noticed that none of our equipment’s here yet. What’s the ETA for that?”

His lips press together. “We are working on it. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Okay. My RA and I can’t get anything done until our computers arrive, so the earlier the better.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” he repeats tersely.

“Cool. When can we meet to discuss BLINK?”

“Email me with times that work for you.”

“They all do. I don’t have a schedule until my equipment arrives, so—”

“Please, email me.” His tone, patient and firm, screams I’m an adult dealing with a difficult child, so I don’t insist further.

“Okay. Will do.” I nod, half-heartedly wave my goodbye, and turn to walk away.

I can’t wait to work with this guy for three months. I love being treated like I’m a piece of belly button lint instead of a valuable asset to a team. That’s why I got a Ph.D. in neuroscience: to achieve nuisance status and be patronized by the Wardasses of the world. Lucky me for—

“There’s one more thing,” he says. I turn back and tilt my head. His expression is as closed off as usual, and—why the hell is the feel of his thigh in my brain again? Not now, intrusive thoughts.

“The Discovery Building has a dress code.”

His words don’t land immediately. Then they do, and I look down to my clothes. He can’t possibly mean me, can he? I’m wearing jeans and a blouse. He is wearing jeans and a Houston Marathon T-shirt. (God, he’s probably one of those obnoxious people who post their workout stats on social media.)

“Yes?” I prompt him, hoping he’ll explain himself.

“Piercings, certain hair colors, certain . . . types of makeup are unacceptable.” I see his eyes fall on one of the braids draped over my shoulder and then drift upward to a spot above my head. As though he can’t bear to look at me longer than a split second. As though my sight, my existence, offends him. “I’ll make sure Kaylee sends you the handbook.”

“. . . Unacceptable?”

“Correct.”

“And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”

“Please, make sure you follow the dress code.”

I want to kick him in the shins. Or maybe punch him. No—what I really want is to grab his chin and force him to stare at what he clearly considers my ugly, offensive face some more. Instead I put my hands on my hips and smile. “That’s interesting.” I keep my tone pleasant enough. Because I am a pleasant person, dammit. “Because half of your team are wearing sweats or shorts, have visible tattoos, and Aaron, I believe is his name, has a gauge in his ear. It makes me wonder if maybe there’s a gendered double standard at play here.”

He closes his eyes, as though trying to collect himself. As though staving off a wave of anger. Anger at what? My piercings? My hair? My corporeal form? “Just make sure you follow the dress code.”

I cannot believe this chucklefuck. “Are you serious?”

He nods. All of a sudden I am too mad to be in his presence. “Very well. I’ll make an effort to look acceptable from now on.”

I whirl around and walk back to the conference room. If my shoulder brushes his torso on my way there, I am too busy not kneeing him in the nuts to apologize.