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He trailed off. Don’t make any big purchases in the meantime, was the strong implication.
I forced a smile.
“Sure. Thanks. Listen, I…” I swallowed. Now wasn’t the time I’d have chosen to ask for time off, but in a way it didn’t matter. I could write up the paper just as well on Nico’s desert island as I could here, and I might as well take my holiday entitlement before the contract ended. “Would now be a bad time for me to take some leave? Nico, my boyfriend, he’s been invited on this—” I stopped. I wasn’t 100 percent sure Professor Bianchi knew what a reality TV show was. The one time I’d referred to Big Brother, he’d assumed I was talking about George Orwell. And it didn’t exactly fit with the responsible in-demand professional image I was trying to project. “On a work trip,” I finished. “He’s asked me to come along. I can write the paper there; it’s probably easier than trying to fit it in around lab work.”
“Sure,” Professor Bianchi said, and his face… did I imagine a flicker of relief? “Of course. And hopefully by the time you come back I’ll have heard from the grant committee. Thanks again, Lyla, for all your work on this. I know it’s never easy coming in with disappointing results.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. And then, since the interview was plainly over, I showed myself out of his office.
I SPENT THE bus ride back to east London watching the winter rain trickle down the steamed-up windows and considering my choices. I was thirty-two. All around me friends from university were buying up houses, settling down, having kids. My mum’s jokes about grandbabies had started to become slightly pointed. But here I was, stuck in a cycle of short-term post-docs that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Once, I’d dreamed of heading up my own team, my own lab, even. Talks about the dearth of women in STEM had made it all seem so possible—funding committees were crying out for driven female scientists, we were told.
In truth though, there’d been a healthy proportion of women in my cohort, at least when I started out. My first two bosses in the lab had been women. But the funding committees didn’t look any more kindly on us than they did on the men, and as the years ground on, more and more of my colleagues had been forced out by the reality of life in academic research. Maternity leave didn’t mesh well with funding deadlines and the pressurized race to results. Babies didn’t mix with tissue cultures that needed constant tending, cell lines that had to be split at ten o’clock at night, five in the morning, endless round-the-clock work, or else they’d wither and die. And mortgage providers didn’t like the uncertainty of short-term contracts. Every time I started a new job there was a narrow window of security when I was out of the probation period, but not yet under statutory notice of redundancy—and it never seemed to be long enough to get a foot on the ladder. Combined with Nico’s feast-or-famine line of work (and there’d been precious little feasting over the two-and-a-half years we’d been together), it made for a stressful existence. And the longer I’d been in the field, the more I realized that there was a ticking clock, and not just one relating to babies. The career pyramid for science was shallow—many researchers, very few lab heads—and the competition was astonishingly fierce. If you didn’t tick certain boxes by the time you were in your thirties, you just weren’t going to make it.
Maybe it was time to throw in the towel, admit once and for all that the dreams I’d held when I left uni were never going to happen. That I was never going to be able to fund my own lab. That Professor Lyla Santiago was never going to exist, would never give the keynote address at a prestigious academic conference, or be interviewed on This Week in Virology. With every year that ticked by, it was looking increasingly likely that I’d be forever a lowly post-doc, scrabbling around for my next short-term contract. And maybe it was time to face up to that and figure out what to do.
It didn’t help that Nico was only twenty-eight, and decidedly not ready to settle down in any way. He’d barely changed from the cute, wannabe actor I’d met almost three years ago, at a friend’s “Valentine’s Day Massacre” horror-themed party for pissed-off singletons. He’d been a disturbingly sexy Freddie Krueger; I’d cheated and borrowed a lab coat from work, spattered it with some fake blood. We’d mixed Bloody Marys in the kitchen, watched Friday the 13th on my friend’s couch, shrieking and hugging each other during the jump scares, and ended up snogging in the bathroom. The next day my friend had ribbed me about pulling out of my league.
For six months I’d almost forgotten his existence, the only reminder the occasional thirst-trap photos he posted on Instagram. They were… I mean, they were easy on the eye, I had to admit it, and they made a nice break to my workday. I’d be flicking through my phone on coffee break, and there would be Nico, sweatily tousled at the gym, all crunched abs and tangled dark hair. On the bus back from the university, there he’d be again, sprawled on a beach in the Algarve, tiny swimshorts stretched across his hips, smirking up at the camera from behind mirrored shades.
For half a year that was it—me single, bored, head down at work, barely thinking about the handsome actor I’d groped in my friend’s bathroom. And then one day, out of the blue, I posted an Instagram photo of myself. It was uncharacteristic. My normal feed was dinners I’d cooked and funny memes about the hell of working in academia. But I’d ordered a dress online and when it turned up it was almost comically undersized, the skirt just skimming my thighs, my boobs spilling out of the top. I posted it as a funny “what I ordered / what I got” pic, but I was aware that, while I wasn’t going to keep the dress, it also wasn’t exactly unflattering. It was about as un-me as it was possible to get, but it also squeezed me in the right places, and my tits did look pretty awesome.
The first comment was from Nico—just a string of chili peppers that made me laugh.
And the second was a reply from him to his own comment. It just said “Drink?”
A drink turned into drinks, which turned into dancing, which turned into tequila slammers and drunken snogging and, eventually, a shared Uber (which Nico promised to split, but never did). Nico, it turned out, lived around the corner from me in a house share in Dalston, but that night we ended up at my place—and, well, somehow he never quite moved out.
Two and a half years later, I was older, wiser, and considerably more jaded—facing up to the realities of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world on a researcher’s salary. My rent had gone up. My pay had not. I had started to think about plan B. Maybe even plan C. But Nico was still dreaming of Tinseltown, still refusing to sell his dinner jacket in case he one day needed to attend the BAFTAs or the Grammys. Nico was still fighting, still hustling for his dreams, and most days that was part of what I liked about him—his relentless optimism, his faith that one day his ship would come in.
But on a day like today, the grayest kind of gray London day, when even the sun seemed to have given up and gone back to bed, that optimism was a little hard to take.
When I got off the bus at Hackney Wick, the rain had turned to a stinging sleet, and I realized I’d left my umbrella at the lab. I half jogged the twenty minutes from the bus-stop, trying to shield my laptop from the worst of it, then stumped wearily up the three flights to our little flat in the rafters of a Victorian terrace house. When I had first brought Nico here, we’d run up, laughing, only stopping to kiss on the landing turns. Now I was chilled to the bone, and each flight felt steeper than the last. I had to will myself up the last set to my front door, and when I finally reached the top, it took me three tries for my numb fingers to get the key in the lock.
“I’m home!” I called as I peeled off my wet coat, though the flat was so small—just a bedroom, a bathroom, and an everything-else-room—that I didn’t really need to raise my voice.
The words had hardly left my lips when Nico appeared, mobile pressed to his ear, motioning me to keep quiet.
“Of course,” he was saying, in what I thought of as his actor voice, deeper, smoother, and more assured than he would have sounded on the phone to his mum or a mate. “Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.” There was a long pause, with the person on the other side evidently saying something, and Nico nodding with an attentive expression on his tanned, handsome face that was totally wasted on the person on the other end. At last, after a short back-and-forth of goodbyes, he hung up and danced down the hallway to throw his arms around me, lifting me up and whirling me around.
“Nico!” I managed. His grip was suffocatingly strong, and in the narrow hallway my foot caught the mirror as he swung me round, making it swing dangerously against the wall. “Nico, for God’s sake, put me down!”
He set me on my feet, but I could see that my reaction hadn’t dented his mood. He was grinning all over his face, his dark eyes quite literally sparkling with excitement. That expression had always seemed like the worst kind of cliché to me—from a scientific point of view, it’s not possible for eyes to change their reflective properties because something fun has happened—but I had to admit it was the only apt description for Nico right now.
“That was Baz,” he said. “The producer of One Perfect Couple.”
“The producer of what?”
“That’s its name.” Nico flicked his fringe out of his eyes. “The show. I told you.”
“You didn’t, but okay.”
“I did. But anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I sent him some pics and he loves both of us—”
“Wait, you sent over photos of me?” I was taken aback, but Nico was barely listening.
“—and he definitely wants to set up a meeting. He said we’re exactly the kind of couple they’re looking for. They want real authenticity, not the usual Love Island types.”
“Real authenticity?” I looked down at myself—crumpled T-shirt, wet jeans, old trainers for working in the lab. “Is that code for needs a wax and to lose five pounds off her arse?”
