Love and the Laws of Motion Read online

  “California? You lived in California?”

  “Yeah. That’s where I headed after—” He caught himself right before he veered into something too personal to share. “I headed out there after DeWitt.”

  “Were you working for one of those tech giants?”

  “Nah. I told you, the corporate scene isn’t for me, I don’t care if they have an onsite acupuncturist and free catered lunches, or whatever. I worked with those guys occasionally, jobbing in for a specific project, but I was always more interested in the start-ups, figuring out something brand new. That’s a lot more fun.”

  “I suppose it was hard, though, being out there.”

  “Why would it be hard?” Actually, his years in California had seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, a blur of freelance gigs and fun. One day, he looked up and seven years had gone by.

  “Well, your family is here.”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “That was not why I moved back. I haven’t even seen them since I moved to California.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Seriously? Not once in all those years?”

  “Not once.”

  “But they’re so close—”

  Nope, not having this conversation. “I came back to New York for a long weekend,” he explained, cutting her off. “Just hanging with a friend. We were in this bar in Williamsburg and I met Poppy. Never went back.”

  “You moved back here for her?”

  “I can work anywhere, so why not? I didn’t have much to keep me in California.” He pulled open the fridge and retrieved a Lagunitas. “You want something else to drink? Soda? Water? One of these green smoothie things Poppy likes? I don’t know what’s in them, but she swears they’ll burn off ten pounds in a week.”

  “Water, please. How can Poppy lose ten pounds? There’s hardly any of her there as it is.”

  Nick chuckled as he passed her a bottle of water. Livie could be surprisingly funny. “Trust me, in Poppy’s world, you can always lose ten more pounds. She’s a model. They think differently about that stuff.”

  “Wow, she’s a model. Not that it’s surprising. She’s very pretty.”

  “I happen to agree,” he said, grinning at Livie, who looked down, fiddling with the cap of her water bottle. Her hair was so long and thick you couldn’t see her face behind it when she hid herself like that. He suspected she did it on purpose, to hide what she was thinking, and Livie thought a lot.

  On the surface, she was another socially awkward genius. He’d certainly been around enough of those growing up. But every now and then, he’d catch a look in her eyes and realize she was noting everything happening around her, even if she didn’t comment on it. Sometimes he’d catch her watching him that way and he’d suddenly feel like she could see every one of his secrets and fears as clear as day. That was not a comfortable sensation.

  The way she’d grabbed onto his family issues just now—how did she sniff that out? He didn’t mention his family to anyone, not even Poppy. He shouldn’t have snapped at her like that. She was just being kind, worrying because he was on his own.

  He’d never met anyone so solidly nice before in his life. It was a novelty. Even her crazy sense of honor was growing on him. In his experience, the world was full of truly shitty human beings. As for himself, he’d always thought he was fairly morally neutral. Not the best person alive, but by no means the worst—certainly better than a lot of the borderline sociopath tech geniuses he knew back in Palo Alto. But that was before he met Livie. She made him feel like he lurked down in the worst muck of humanity. Who knows? Maybe she was right, and he did.

  As disconcerting as her ethics and mind reading could be, he still liked hanging out with her. She was easy to be around. Smart enough to keep up with his own zigzagging train of thought, while still coming up with the odd observation or comment that would surprise him or make him see something in a new way. In Nick’s life, very few people had proved any sort of intellectual challenge to him. It was criminal that she was being wasted at a place like Adams University.

  “So you’re smart.”

  “Um. Thank you? I guess?”

  “No, more than usual. Smart even by Ivy League standards.”

  “Um...yes?”

  “Why Adams? You could have gone anywhere.”

  “Dr. Finch was here.”

  “You came to Adams for her?”

  “During my senior year of undergrad, I saw her give a lecture about her black hole theory. After that, there was nothing else I wanted to study, and nobody else I wanted to work with, so I came to Adams. Plus it’s in Brooklyn, so I can live at home.”

  Nick let out a huff of laughter. “You live at home?”

  He could almost see her prickle with defensiveness. “Sure. It’s cheaper.”

  “You moved away for undergrad, though, right?”

  “I went to Columbia. I commuted.”

  “You’ve seriously lived at home your whole life?”

  More prickling. “I like it. My sisters live at home, too.”

  “How many sisters?”

  “Two. And they’re my best friends. So yeah, I like living at home. I know that’s lame.”

  Ah, hell, he’d pushed too much and pissed her off. “No, it’s not. Sorry, Livie, I can be a dick sometimes. It’s great that you’re close to your family. You’re a much nicer person than me.”

  “You’re nice,” she said. “When you want to be.”

  He chuckled softly. “No, I’m really not.”

  “Cyberspace Robin Hood, remember?”

  “You’re the one who took down an international ring of black hat hackers with a politely worded email. I think that makes you a superhero of niceness.”

  She lifted her head to look at him, her large dark eyes lighting up, and a brilliant smile spreading across her face. A revelation made itself known in Nick’s brain. Livie was pretty. Very pretty. How had he missed that up until now? Those large, glittering dark eyes, that dazzling smile...they were surprisingly potent. It was like she hid them inside, along with most of what she was thinking and feeling. But when she unleashed it all...well, the effect was kind of a punch in the chest.

  Suddenly—inexplicably—uncomfortable, Nick did what he always did when he felt out of his depth—he retreated back into his work.

  “Okay, let’s get back to our Hubble problem. How do we teach it to speak a language that doesn’t exist yet?”

  The sound of a key turning in the front door lock cut off Livie’s response. Poppy came in, a clutch of shopping bags slung over one arm. Some part of him was still disbelieving every time he laid eyes on her. She was gorgeous, and sophisticated, and she was with him. Girls like Poppy and guys like him—it didn’t add up. Sure, he’d dated pretty girls in the past, but Poppy was in a league of her own. And here she was, in all her stunning glory, coming home to him every night, wearing his ring on her finger. Nick’s sixteen-year-old self would never have believed it. He might be fucked up in a million ways, but he must be doing something right to have landed a girl like Poppy.

  “Hey, you,” he said with a grin.

  Poppy dropped her shopping bags inside the door and drifted across the room that long-legged natural grace of hers. Poppy didn’t walk, she glided, like a feather drifting on a current of air.

  “Hi.” She rested a hand on his shoulder and leaned in to brush a kiss across his cheek with the easy elegance of a girl who’d spent her entire life surrounded by money and sophistication. He’d never known anyone as effortlessly classy as her.

  Her eyes slid to Livie. “Hello again. Libby, right?”

  “Livie,” she corrected.

  “Are you two still working? Nick, don’t forget, we have Klaus’s party tonight.”

  “Ah, geez, is that tonight?” He had forgotten, and was now internally groaning at the reminder. The last thing he wanted
was to spend the night with that Eurotrash poser and his vapid friends. But Poppy would sulk for days if he even hinted at not going, and it really wasn’t worth the drama.

  She toyed with the zipper on his hoodie. “And please change into something a bit smarter?”

  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Nick protested.

  “You’ll look like you’re working the door.”

  “The guy working the door is probably more interesting than half the people inside.”

  “Just because you don’t find them interesting doesn’t mean no one does. I do.”

  * * *

  Livie silently watched them bantering—or were they arguing? It was hard to tell—and she wondered what it was that had made them fall in love with each other. Their lives seemed a little mismatched, Poppy’s centered on the fashion world and clubs, and Nick’s existing largely online. But they were engaged. There had to be something there connecting them, outside of physical attraction.

  Even there, they seemed a little at odds. Poppy’s beauty was the kind you usually only saw in magazines, with her luminous, pale skin, ice-blue eyes, and flawless features. She had that kind of grace that made her look good no matter what she was wearing. Her shapeless light blue sundress should have looked like a piece of used Kleenex, but instead hung elegantly from her narrow shoulders and skimmed her angular body at all the perfect places. The hem brushed her upper thighs, leaving what looked like three full feet of her long thin legs exposed. And her hair. Poppy’s hair was like something out of a shampoo commercial, a long, satiny golden-blond sheet, seemingly impervious to NYC’s early September heat and humidity.

  Nick was handsome, but in a much more real-life sort of way. Taken individually, his features were a little uneven, his eyes a bit too close together, his nose not perfectly straight. But there was a perpetual animation to his face that drew you in. It was like you could see his brilliant mind busily at work in his dark eyes.

  He was in good shape, but he wasn’t some ripped bodybuilder. Certain parts of him were oddly arresting, though. The sleeves of his black hoodie—the one Poppy was displeased with—were pushed up, and there was something about his smooth, tanned skin and the flex of the muscles in his forearms... Never in her life had Livie noticed a man’s forearms. She’d certainly never found anybody’s forearms sexy. How could forearms even be sexy? They seemed like a distinctly unsexual body part. And maybe that was true of every other man on the planet, but Nick’s forearms were impossible to ignore. Nick definitely had sexy forearms.

  And there she went again, having all kinds of wrong thoughts about him when he was standing five feet away with his fiancée. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t figure out what drew them together, because they had been. The ring on Poppy’s finger proved it. She needed to get out of here and keep her mind on the work, where it belonged.

  “I’d better get going,” she said.

  “Hey,” Nick protested. “We’re getting to the good parts now.”

  “You have plans—”

  “Oh, don’t break up the fun on my account,” Poppy protested. “Klaus’s party won’t start for hours. But Nick, please don’t get lost in that computer all afternoon. You were going to add those new portfolio shots to my website for me.”

  “Ah, hell, I forgot. I’ll get it done today. Promise.”

  Poppy looked to Livie and winked conspiratorially. “Honestly, he’s impossible.”

  She didn’t seem to be looking for a response from Livie, so Livie didn’t give one.

  “That won’t take me long. We still have time to work,” Nick said to her.

  “No, I really do need to go. I have quizzes to grade for my class.”

  “Livie’s getting a PhD in astronomy,” Nick said to Poppy.

  “Really? Another genius like Nick?”

  “I don’t think anybody is as smart as Nick.” He absorbed her teasing with a shrug and a smile.

  “Too true. I don’t even understand what he’s talking about half the time.” Poppy laughed self-deprecatingly, and Nick squeezed her hand.

  Livie reached for her messenger bag, still hanging on the back of one of the chairs lining the kitchen island. As she started packing it up, Nick reached out and touched her arm. She shifted away as subtly as possible.

  “I’ll text you,” he said. “We can do some more work later this week.”

  “Sure. Just let me know when.”

  “Brush up on your Klingon in the meantime.”

  “What?”

  “The nonexistent language we have to teach Hubble? Never mind. It was a joke.”

  Now his smile was full-blown, and Livie couldn’t help but return it, even though she had no idea what Klingon was.

  “I guess I’ll see you soon.”

  “Guess you will.” He grinned.

  And for a minute, it felt like every stern lecture she’d been giving herself about her stupid crush seemed utterly in vain, because his smile made her heart beat hard enough to explode. Maybe she’d be over it by the next time she saw him. It was very unlikely, but she would choose to live in hope.

  Chapter Eight

  It was Wednesday before Nick wanted to get together again, and not until early evening. He’d texted her at four p.m. promising to spring for the pizza if she was willing to work through dinner. He said he felt inspired and wanted to work while his juices were flowing. What did inspiration or juices have to do with science? And why did it have to happen with no warning? She almost wished she was busy, just so he’d plan better next time.

  When the elevator opened into the little vestibule outside his door, she immediately knew something was wrong. The door was partially ajar, for one. And through it, she could hear Nick talking. No, not talking—shouting. And then she heard Poppy’s voice, too, high and tense.

  “Jesus, Poppy, I said I can’t go out tonight. It’s hardly cause for World War Three.”

  “Can’t or won’t, Nick?”

  “I have plans. I’m busy.”

  “That science thing you’re working on with that girl, Libby? Just reschedule. For me.”

  “It’s Livie,” he snapped. “And leave her out of this. It’s between you and me.”

  “Exactly! Surely you can blow off work this once and come out with me to my friend’s party.”

  “You’ve dragged me out to your stupid parties three nights this week.”

  “Oh, my friends are stupid now, are they?”

  “Quit putting words in my mouth. That’s not what I said.”

  “But it’s what you meant! You hate my friends!”

  Livie leaned back against the elevator doors. They were fighting. And it sounded bad. This was not something she should be witness to.

  “This has nothing to do with your friends.”

  “You hate spending time with me.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re my fiancée.”

  “Exactly. But I have to fight to get you to look up from your bloody computer screen.”

  “Because I love my work.”

  “And I love mine. It would be nice if you’d take an interest in it now and then.”

  “It’s not like you’re desperate to hear me talk coding over dinner, Poppy.”

  “See, that’s exactly it.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “What do we really have in common, Nick?”

  Livie heard him scoff in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. Tell me one thing you like about me. Besides the way I look.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m not sure I can answer it either.”

  There was a loaded moment of silence. This was definitely something she shouldn’t be hearing. Livie spun around, desperate to escape, but the elevator had already gone back down. She was trapped in the vestibule un
til it returned. She stabbed the button repeatedly, like somehow that would make the elevator understand it was an emergency.

  Inside the apartment, Nick spoke again. “What are you saying, Poppy?”

  “Look, Nick, I don’t think we’re all that compatible. Not in any of the ways that matter.”

  “Fashion industry parties? That’s what matters?”

  “That is a huge part of my life. The way yours is your computer. We’re just too different.”

  “You liked that I was different.”

  “But our lives don’t mesh.”

  “We’ve been meshing for a year.”

  “And now I can see the truth. We don’t work. Not in the long term.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” Nick’s voice rang hollowly through the apartment.

  No no no no, she didn’t want to hear this. She shouldn’t be here, but there was no escape. The elevator was coming back up, but stopping at nearly every floor.

  Poppy’s sigh was so heavy, Livie could hear it out in the vestibule.

  “I don’t know what we were thinking, getting engaged. This isn’t going to work.”

  “Poppy, you don’t mean that—”

  “I do. We’re finished, Nick. I think it’s for the best. Here.”

  There was a pregnant silence from inside the apartment. Then Nick muttered an oath and something metal pinged off something hard. The ring, she realized. Poppy had given Nick back her engagement ring. Then there was a metallic ping—like a ring being thrown across the room, maybe.

  “Go ahead and keep it,” Nick snapped. “I know how much you wanted it.”

  Livie looked up frantically at the lighted floor numbers. It was on twelve. Two more floors to go. Oh, please hurry!

  “I think you should go, Nick.”

  “You couldn’t pay me to stay, Poppy.”

  Livie cringed, making herself as small as possible as the front door abruptly jerked open. But she forgot all her own discomfort the second she saw the look on Nick’s face. He looked utterly wrecked.

  “Livie,” he muttered roughly. He didn’t even seem surprised or shocked to see her there.