Page 79 of Conspiracies and Chemistry

A sour taste formed on my tongue. Despite his ownership of a large portion of the company’s shares, Oliver deferred to Maya like she was his professor and he was some shivering undergrad.

“Walk with me now,” she said. “West is waiting.” She turned and marched down the hallway.

Oliver’s face was pale, but he steeled his jaw. “It’s fine. We knew eventually?—”

“It’s not fine,” I growled. “This is the opposite of fine.” Without a backward glance at him or Sadie, I followed the CEO.

As she’d said, West was already in her office. He lounged on her sofa, one ankle crossed over his other knee. A sheaf of papers lay on the coffee table in front of him.

At Red Rover, our HR policies had been lax. Common sense, I’d called them. I’d taken the stance that we were all adults, so why make rules? That was why it looked so incriminating when I ignored the ethical boundaries I should have obeyed. Of course Discovery Diagnostics had a policy. And papers. Maybe that was my employment contract that I’d blithely signed so many months ago. Maybe it had a morality clause I’d missed because I’d never intended to sleep with the chief scientist.

Oliver closed the door with a soft snick. Maya planted her sensible heels on the carpet and propped her fists on her hips like a superhero with justice on her side. All she needed was a cape. “Well? Is it true what they’re saying on social media?”

“Social media?” My brain was so staticky I hadn’t questioned how Sadie had found out.

At the same time, Oliver said, “It’s true. And there’s nothing wrong with it. Right, West?”

“Wait,” I said. “You meaneveryoneknows?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Oliver said. “We did nothing wrong.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” I said. “Whether or not it’s against company policy, it’s the perception. I…” My lungs shriveled, and my breath left me.

In a moment, Oliver was at my side, his arm around me. “I’ve got you.”

If he hadn’t been the only thing keeping me upright, I’d have stepped away to put some much-needed distance between us. But because all my hard parts had temporarily dissolved, I leaned on the man I’d called my boyfriend all weekend.

Shit. The weekend. Someone who’d seen us at the spa had outed us. And I had one guess who.

“You mean the perception that you engaged in a highly inappropriate affair with a much younger man?” Maya finished my sentence.

I met her gaze, and understanding zipped along it. I’d fucked up, and she was calling me on it.

“Hold on,” West said, gesturing at the papers. He was the only one of us sitting. “Tessa and Oliver both report to you. There’s no policy that forbids relationships between equals.”

“I was the one who initiated it,” Oliver said. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.”

“Like Tessa said, it’s the optics,” Maya said. “She should know better.”

That sliced right through me, and the pain, like a diamond blade, sharpened everything soft inside me. “I should have.” I stepped out of Oliver’s hold and stood tall and straight.

Oliver looked like a kicked puppy. For a second, I regretted saying I should have resisted our attraction, that I could have, but I couldn’t worry about that now, not while everything we’d worked for hung in the balance.

“It’s okay,” West said. “I’ve got some papers for you both to sign and then we’ll be good.”

Good? Not even close. Before my lungs could empty out again, I said, “I’ll review the papers in my office. Are we done here?”

Before anyone could respond, I snatched the papers from the table and fled.

33

Contraindication

Contraindication:A circumstance that makes a treatment more risky or inadvisable for an individual.

OLIVER

Back in the lab, everything had a kind of haze to it. It wasn’t as bad as the day after Simon died, when my eyes—everyone’s eyes—had been smeared with tears, and my limbs were too heavy to move, but my stomach had the same hollow feeling. Why was I trying to work, or pretending to, when what I needed was to go to Tessa’s office and hug her, or talk to her, or hold her hand, whatever she needed to bring the color back to her cheeks?

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