Page 102 of Not in Love

She shuddered. “Do it. Please.”

He shook with restraint, his vision blurry with want. Rue bucked back, and he had to grip her hip to avoid sinking inside her.

Fuck.

He wrapped his arms around her stomach, hugging her to himself as tightly as he could. He would have taken any excuse to let her go, but she was mellow in his arms, and when he buried a pained groan in her throat, she wrapped her hands around his forearm and held on to him as firmly as he held her.

Eli’s rage dissolved into soul-deep resignation. He had no right to resent her for being the best and worst thing to ever happen to him. And if his heart wasn’t going to survive her, then so be it.

He extricated himself from her slowly, not meeting her eyes as he readjusted her clothes, then his. When he was done, she leaned back against the table, a fine tremor in her hands, and met his gaze head-on.

In the hallway, people laughed and said their goodbyes.

“Eli.”

The things I want from you, Rue—you have no idea, and maybe never will.

“I’m sorry.”

He almost laughed. “For what?”

“For wanting to ask Hark instead of you. It’s just . . .” Her voice was low. “He was the safest option.”

His eyes narrowed, and she gave him one of her what don’t you get? stares.

So this was falling for someone. A ruthless expansion of the senses. The meticulous, unintentional cataloging of a person’s head tilt, the shape their hand made around a wineglass, the little tells in their gaze.

“If you think you can trust him more than you can trust me—”

“It’s because I don’t trust him.” Her lips trembled. “Whatever Hark tells me about Florence, I can choose not to believe. With you . . . once you tell me, I’m not going to be able to walk away from it.”

Eli was going to have to hurt her, and he hated that even more than anything Florence had done.

He nodded and crossed his arms again, fingers drumming against his biceps. “We were Florence’s grad students.”

Rue nodded. “It was in the deposition.”

“Minami was her postdoc. Hark and I didn’t originally come to UT to work with her, but she took us on when our mentor left unexpectedly. It was not a passing acquaintance. If she says she doesn’t remember us, it’s a deliberate lie.”

“And then Florence left you, too? And now you’re looking for revenge?”

God, he fucking wished. “Then she stole our work.”

Only a single, slow blink betrayed Rue’s surprise. “Not the fermentation tech. That was her idea.”

“The fermentation tech was Minami’s idea. Florence’s idea, the one she’d gotten millions of dollars to test, dead-ended in year one of the grant. Florence had to pivot. Hark and I needed a new lab, and no one else had the funds, the expertise, or frankly the will to take us on. Florence was barely older than us, had never had graduate mentees, but she was obviously a talented engineer. We had to choose between working with her and leaving the program. It was a no-brainer.”

“And then?”

“For two years, we worked that sometimes shitty, sometimes rewarding grad student life. You know what that’s like. A lot to be done, but the process we’d isolated was promising. Then we had a breakthrough.”

“Was Florence an active member of the research group?”

“Short answer, yes.” He thought about it. Tried to collect his opinions in shapes that were as fair as they could be. The things I do for you, Rue. “I might be biased, so you’ll have to compare and contrast with Florence’s recollection. Mine is that, intellectually, Minami was very much leading the project. Florence was a great sounding board, but was busy. We never stopped asking her for advice, but over time we transitioned to mostly reporting our progress. Her grants covered stipends and materials. She also rented off-campus lab space. Which did seem odd, but she said that renting pre-equipped labs was less expensive than buying new equipment, and the funding institute had recommended it. Fair enough, we thought. We were done with classes and didn’t need to be on campus. You know what grad school’s like after comps—no formal oversight. We ended up mostly isolated from the rest of the department. Our codependency origin story,” he added dryly. He had no clue whether Rue believed him—his fathomless, enigmatic girl.

“And when the tech was ready?”

“We had a breakthrough two years in, before the summer. By this point we were off-site students, virtually no contact with anyone at UT. We got a month off for the summer. Hark and I backpacked in Europe. Minami had just met Sul. We came back, and it all went to shit.

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