Page 58 of Deep End

I smile. “Is it over? Emotional support duties, I mean.”

“I hope so. Kyle and Nate took a couple of meetings today.”

Right. His cocaptains. I move closer, stopping when I notice aphoto, pinned with a magnet on the upper edge of the bench. “Is that you?”

He follows my gaze to the boy with the windblown hair. There are three other men in the picture, all tall and strong-limbed, wrapping long arms around each other’s shoulders. “Yeah.”

“And the others?”

“My brothers.”

I grin and push on my toes to study it. Lukas’s siblings seem to be very similar to him in height, size, and bone structure, with occasional exceptions. Dark, long hair. A blond beard. A rounder face and fuller upper lip. Lines carved deep around a strong nose.

He is, undoubtedly, the most handsome.

I am, undoubtedly, biased.

“You have three?”

“Yup.”

“All older?”

“Quite a bit.”

“How much?”

“The second youngest is Jan, born eleven years before me. I was a surprise baby.”

“Do you get along? Do you miss them?” I don’t know why I want to gobble up crumbs of Lukas-related information. He seems willing to oblige, though.

“They’re great. And annoying, although there’s a range. Jan and I are closest—he’s the one who got me into swimming. We travel together often. Oskar, the eldest, thinks that I’m still a minor. Gives me a bedtime when I stay at his house. His kids are cute, though, so I forgive him. And Leif . . . Leif once convinced me that I had Dutch elm disease.” He shakes his head when I laugh. “I do miss them, but when I’m with them, I sometimes contemplate violence.”

“Isn’t that what being siblings is about?” Not that I would know. “How come you get your own bench as an undergrad?”

“I’ve been working with Olive for a while. Plus, she recently started out her lab, so she doesn’t have many grads.”

“Are you planning on working with her past graduation?” A thought hits me. “Did you apply for Stanford Med?”

He nods. “It’s where I hope to end up.”

“Interview?”

Another nod, but an Olympic medalist with a high MCAT score and computational biology experience? It’s a given. Thank god I don’t know his GPA, or I’d have to chug down a bottle of mercury.

“When?”

“Back in August.”

“Did you wear a suit?”

“And a fucking tie.” I laugh, and he seems to enjoy that. “Figuring out what to wear was more labor-intensive than putting on a tech suit.”

“Aww. Did you get a coach to help you?”

He fights a smile. “That’s a lot of cackling from someone who’ll go through the same process—inheels.”

“First of all, not cackling. More like gentle chortling. Second . . . how did it go?”

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