The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

“What do I do?” Malcolm made a face in the rearview
mirror. “Left? Right? Ol, what do I do?”
In the back seat, Olive looked up from the car window and
shrugged. “Try right; if it’s wrong, we’ll just turn around.” She
shot Anh a quick, apologetic glance, but she and Jeremy were
too busy mock-glaring at each other to notice.
Malcolm grimaced. “We’ll be late. God, I hate these stupid
picnics.”
“We are, like”—Olive glanced at the car’s clock—“one
hour late, already. I think we can add ten minutes to that.” I
just hope there’s some food left. Her stomach had been
growling for the past two hours, and there was no way
everyone in the car hadn’t noticed.
After her argument with Adam three days ago, she’d been
tempted to just skip the picnic. Hole herself up in the lab and
continue with what she had been doing the whole weekend—
ignore the fact that she had told him to fuck off, and with very
little reason. She could use the time to work on Tom’s report,
which was proving to be trickier and more time-consuming
than she’d initially thought—probably because Olive couldn’t
forget how much was at stake and kept rerunning analyses and
agonizing over every single sentence. But she’d changed her
mind last minute, telling herself that she’d promised Adam
that they’d put on a show for the department chair. It would be
unfair of her to back out after he’d done more than his share of
the deal when it came to convincing Anh.
That was, of course, in the very unlikely case that he still
wanted anything to do with Olive.
“Don’t worry, Malcolm,” Anh said. “We’ll get there
eventually. If anyone asks, let’s just say that a mountain lion
attacked us. God, why is it so hot? I brought sunblock, by the
way. SPF thirty and fifty. No one is going anywhere before
putting it on.”