The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Adam Carlsen and I have absolutely nothing in
HYPOTHESIS:
and having coffee with him will be twice as painful as
common,
Chapter Four
a root canal. Without anesthesia.
Olive arrived to the first fake-dating Wednesday late and in the
foulest of moods, after a morning spent growling at her cheap,
knockoff reagents for not dissolving, then not precipitating,
then not sonicating, then not being enough for her to run her
entire assay.
She paused outside the coffee shop’s door and took a deep
breath. She needed a better lab if she wanted to produce decent
science. Better equipment. Better reagents. Better bacteria
cultures. Better everything. Next week, when Tom Benton
arrived, she had to be on top of her game. She needed to
prepare her spiel, not waste time on a coffee she didn’t
particularly want, with a person she most definitely didn’t
want to talk to, halfway through her experimental protocol.
Ugh.
When she stepped inside the café, Adam was already there,
wearing a black Henley that looked like it was ideated,
designed, and produced specifically with the upper half of his
body in mind. Olive was momentarily bemused, not so much
that his clothes fit him well, but that she’d noticed what
someone was wearing to begin with. It was not like her. She’d
been seeing Adam traipse around the biology building for the
better part of two years, after all, not to mention that in the
past couple of weeks they’d spoken an inordinate amount of
times. They had even kissed, if one counted what had
happened on The Night as a proper kiss. It was dizzying and a