Stuck with You
PRAISE FOR
The Love Hypothesis
Contemporary romance’s unicorn: the elusive marriage of
deeply brainy and delightfully escapist. . . .
The Love
Hypothesis has wild commercial appeal, but the quieter
secret is that there is a specic audience, made up of all the
Olives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited for
this exact book.”
New York Times bestselling author Christina
Lauren
Funny, sexy, and smart. Ali Hazelwood did a terric job withThe Love Hypothesis.”
New York Times bestselling author Mariana
Zapata
“This tackles one of my favorite tropes—Grumpy meets
Sunshine—in a fun and utterly endearing way. . . . I loved
the nods toward fandom and romance novels, and I couldn’t
put it down. Highly recommended!”
New York Times bestselling author Jessica
Clare
A beautifully written romantic comedy with a heroine you
will instantly fall in love with,
The Love Hypothesis is
destined to earn a place on your keeper shelf.”
—Elizabeth Everett, author of
A Lady’s Formula
for Love
“Smart, witty dialogue and a diverse cast of likable
secondary characters. . . . A realistic, amusing novel that
readers won’t be able to put down.”
Library Journal (starred review)
“With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose,
and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwood
convincingly navigates the fraught shoals of academia. . . .
This smart, sexy contemporary should delight a wide swath
of romance lovers.”
Publishers Weekly
Titles by Ali Hazelwood
The Love Hypothesis
LOATHE TO LOVE YOU
Under One Roof
Stuck with You
Below Zero
Stuck with You
Ali Hazelwood
JOVE
NEW YORK
A JOVE BOOK
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2022 by Ali Hazelwood Excerpt from
Love on the Brain copyright © 2021 by Ali Hazelwood
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House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9780593437827
Jove audio edition: March 2022
Jove ebook edition: June 2022
Cover illustration by lilithsaur
Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors
imagination or are used ctitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_6.0_140138093_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Praise for The Love HypothesisTitles by Ali Hazelwood
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Excerpt from Love on the BrainAbout the Author
For Marie, my fave Elizabeth Swann
Chapter 1
Present
My world comes to an end at 10:43 on a Friday night, when
the elevator lurches to a stop between the eighth and
seventh oor of the building that houses the engineering
rm where I work. The ceiling lights icker. Then go o
completely. Then, after a stretch that lasts about ve
seconds but feels like several decades, come back with the
slightly yellower tinge of the emergency bulb.Crap.
Fun fact: This is actually the second time my world came
to an end tonight. The rst was less than a minute ago.
When the elevator I’m riding stopped on the thirteenth oor,
and Erik Nowak, the last person I ever wanted to see,
appeared in all his blond, massive, Viking-like glory. He
studied me for what felt like too long, took a step inside, and
then studied me some more while I avidly inspected the tips
of my shoes.Re-crap.
It’s a slightly complicated situation. I work in New York
City, and my company, GreenFrame, rents a small oce on
the eighteenth oor of a Manhattan building. Very small. It
has to be very small, because we’re a baby rm, still
establishing ourselves in a pretty cutthroat market, and we
don’t always make a ton of money. I guess that’s what
happens when you value things like sustainability,
environmental protection, economic viability and eciency,
renewability rather than depletion, minimization of exposure
to potential hazards such as toxic materials, and . . . well, I
won’t bore you with the Wikipedia entry on green
engineering. Suce it to say, my boss, Gianna (who
coincidentally is the only other engineer working full-time at
the rm), founded GreenFrame with the aim of creating
great structures that actually make sense within their
environment, and is delightfully, crunchily hard-core about
it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always pay very well. Or well.
Or at all.
So, yeah. Like I said, a slightly complicated situation,
especially when compared with more traditional engineering
companies that don’t focus as much on conservation and
pollution control. Like ProBld. The giant rm where Erik
Nowak works. The one that takes up the whole thirteenth
oor. And the twelfth. Maybe the eleventh, too? I lost track.
So when the elevator began to slow down around the
fourteenth oor, I felt a surge of apprehension, which I
naively discarded as mere paranoia. You have nothing to
worry about, Sadie, I told myself. ProBld has tons of oces.
They’re always expanding. Orchestrating “mergers” and
eating up smaller rms. Like the Blob. They are truly the
corrosive alien amoeboidal entity of the business, which
translates to hundreds of people working for them, which in
turn means that any one out of those hundreds of people
could be calling the elevator. Any one. There’s no way it’s
Erik Nowak.
Yeah. No.
It was Erik Nowak, all right. With his massive, colossal
presence. Erik Nowak, who spent the entirety of our ve-
oor ride staring at me with those ruthless, icy blue eyes of
his. Erik Nowak, who’s currently looking up at the
emergency light with a slight frown.
“The power’s out,” he says, an obvious statement, with
that stupidly deep voice of his. It hasn’t changed one whit
since the last time we talked. Nor since that string of
messages he left on my phone before I blocked his number.
The ones that I never bothered answering but also couldn’t
quite bring myself to delete. The ones I could not stop
myself from listening to, over and over.
And over.
It’s still a stupid voice. Stupid and insidious, rich and
precise and clipped and low, with acoustic properties all its
own. “I moved here from Denmark when I was fourteen,” he
told me at dinner when I asked him about his accent, slight,
hard to detect, but denitely there. “My younger brothers
got rid of it, but I never managed.” His face was as stern as
usual, but I could see his mouth soften, a slight uptick on
the corner that felt like a smile. As you can imagine, there
was lots of teasing growing up.”
After the night we spent together, after all that happened
between us, I felt as if I couldn’t get the way he pronounced
words out of my head. For days I constantly squirmed,
turning around because I thought I’d heard him somewhere
in my proximity. Thought that maybe he was nearby, even
though I was jogging at the park, alone in the oce, in line
at the grocery store. It just stuck to me, coated the shell of
my ears and the inside of my—
“Sadie?” Erik’s infamous voice cuts through my thoughts.
It has that tone, the one of someone who’s repeating
himself, and maybe not just for the rst time. “Does it?”
Does . . . what?” I glance up, nding him next to the
control panel. In the stark shadows of the emergency light
he’s still so . . . God. Looking at his handsome face is a
mistake. He is a mistake. “I’m sorry, I . . . What did you
say?”
Does your phone work?” he asks again, patient. Kind.
Why is he so kind? He was never supposed to be kind.
After what happened between us, I decided to torture
myself by asking around about him, and the word
kind
never came up. Not once. One of New York’s top engineers,
people would often say. Known for being as good at his job
as he is surly. No-nonsense, aloof, standosh. Though he
was never any of these things with me. Until he was, of
course.
“Um.” I sh my phone out of the back pocket of my black
tailored pants and press the home button. “No service. But
this is a Faraday cage,” I think out loud, “and the elevator
shaft is steel. No RF signal is going to be able to make a
loop and . . .” I notice the way Erik is staring at me and
abruptly shut up. Right. He’s an engineer, too. He already
knows all of this. I clear my throat. “No signal, no.”
Erik nods. “Wi-Fi should work, but it doesn’t. So maybe
this is—”
“—a building-wide power outage?”
“Maybe even the whole block.”Shit.
Shit, shit, shit. Shit.
Erik seems to be reading my mind, because he studies me
for a moment and says reassuringly, “It might be for the
best. Someone is bound to check the elevators if they know
that the power’s gone.” He pauses before adding, Although
it might take a while.” Painfully honest. As usual.
How long?”
He shrugs. “A few hours?”
A few what? A few hours? In an elevator that is smaller
than my already-minuscule bathroom? With Erik Nowak, the
broodiest of Scandinavian mountains? Erik Nowak, the man
who I . . .
No. No way.
“There must be something we can do,” I say, trying to
sound collected. I swear I’m not panicking. No more than a
lot.
“Nothing that I can think of.”
But . . . what do we do now, then?” I ask, hating how
whiny my voice is.
Erik lets his messenger bag drop to the oor with a
thump. He leans against the wall opposite mine, which
should theoretically give me some room to breathe, even
though for some physics-defying reason he still feels too
close. I watch him slide his phone in the front pocket of his
jeans and cross his arms on his chest. His eyes are cold,
unreadable, but there is a faint gleam in them that has a
shiver running down my spine.
“Now,” he says, gaze locked with mine, “we wait.”
It’s 10:45 on a Friday night. And for the third time in less
than ten minutes, my world crashes to an end.
Chapter 2
Three weeks ago
There are worse things in the world.
There are, without a single doubt, giant heaps of worse
things in the world. Wet socks. PMS. The
Star Wars prequels.
Oatmeal raisin cookies that masquerade as chocolate chip,
slow Wi-Fi, climate change and income inequality, dandru,
trac, the nale of
Game of Thrones, tarantulas, food-
scented soap, people who hate soccer, daylight saving time
(when it moves one hour ahead, not behind), toxic
masculinity, the unjustly short life span of guinea pigs—all
of these, just to name a small handful, are truly terrible,
dreadful, horric things. Because such is the way of the
universe: it’s full of bad, sad, upsetting, unfair, enraging
circumstances, and I should know better than to pout like a
ten-year-old who’s half an inch too short for the roller
coaster when Faye tells me from behind the counter of her
small coee shop:
“Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”
To be clear: I don’t even want a croissant. Which I know
sounds weird (everybody should
always want a croissant;
it’s a law of physics, like the Fermi paradox or Einstein’s
eld equation), but the truth is, I would gladly do withoutthis specic croissant—if this were a regular Tuesday
morning.
Unfortunately, today is pitch day. Which means that I’m
meeting with potential future GreenFrame clients. I talk to
them, tell them the hundreds of little things I can do to help
them manage large-scale sustainable building projects, and
hope they’ll decide to hire us. It’s what I’ve been doing for
about eight months, ever since I nished my Ph.D.: I try to
bring in new clients; I try to keep the ones we already have;
I try to ease Gianna’s workload, since she just had her rst
baby—who, incidentally, is three babies. Apparently, triplets
do happen. And they’re adorable, but they also wake one
another up in the middle of the night in a never-ending
spiral of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Who would have
thought? But back to the clients: GreenFrame has been
venturing dangerously close to not-quite-in-the-black
territory, and today’s pitch meeting is critical to keep the
red at bay.
Enter the croissants. And that other little problem I
happen to have: I am a little superstitious. Just a tad. Just a
little stitious. I have developed a complex system of rituals
and apotropaic gestures that need to be performed to
ensure that my pitch meetings will go as planned. I have
more years of science education than anyone ever needed,
and should probably know better than to believe that the
color of my socks is in any way predictive of my professional
success. But do I?
Nope.
Back in college, it was exactly three braids in my hair for
every single soccer game (plus two coats of L’Oréal mascara
if we were playing away) and I had to listen to Dancing
Queen and “My Immortal” before each and every nal—
strictly in that order. Thank God I managed to graduate on
time, because the emotional whiplash was starting to grind
at me.
Not that this issue of mine is something I like to admit
widely. Mostly just to Mara and Hannah, my supposed best
friends. We met during the rst year of our Ph.D.’s and have
been lumbering together through the tribulations of STEM
academia ever since. For the most part, having them in my
life has been my one true joy, but there have been less-
than-outstanding aspects of it. For instance, the fact that
during the four years we lived together they oscillated
between staging anti-superstition interventions and
pranking me by inviting stray black cats into our apartment
on every Friday the 13th. (We even ended up adopting one
for a few months, JimBob, till we noticed that the kitty in the
Missing yers all over the neighborhood suspiciously
resembled him; JimBob was, in fact, Mrs. Flupu, and we
returned her quietly, in the middle of the night. She’s been
dearly missed ever since.) Anyway, yes: I have horrible,
amazing, superstition-unsupportive BFFs. But we don’t live
together anymore. We don’t even live in the same city: Mara
is in D.C. at the EPA, and Hannah has been working for
NASA and commuting between Texas and Norway. I can
throw salt over my shoulder and frantically look around for
wood to knock on to my heart’s content.
Why,
why am I like this? I have no clue. Let’s just blame
my aggressively Italian mother.
But back to this Tuesday morning: the crux of my problem,
you see, is that back in the winter, before my most
successful client pitch to date, I got a bit peckish. So I
popped into Faye’s hole-in-the-wall coee shop, and instead
of just asking for the usual—punishingly black coee: no
sugar, no cream, just the bitter oblivion of darkness—I
tacked a croissant on to my order. It was just as good as the
coee (i.e., simultaneously stale and undercooked; taste
hovering between starch and salmonella) and, to my eternal
dismay, was promptly followed by me bagging the most
lucrative contract GreenFrame had seen in its young history.
Gianna was over the moon. And so was I, until my half-
Italian brain started forming a million little connections
between the croissant from hell and my big professional
win. You know where this is going: yes, I now desperately
feel that I must eat one of Faye’s croissants before every
single pitch meeting, otherwise the unthinkable will happen.
And no, I have no idea how to react to her kind but
denitive, “Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”
Did I say that there are worse things in the world? I lied.
This is a disaster. My career is over. Are those sirens in the
distance?
“I see.” I bite into my lower lip, order it to un-pout itself,
and force myself to smile. After all, it’s not Faye’s fault if my
mom drilled into my baby neurons that walking under the
stairs is a surere way to a lifetime of despair. I go to
therapy for that. Or I will. At some point. Are you, um,
making more?”
She looks at the display case. “I’ve got muns left.
Blueberry. Lemon glaze.”
Oh. That actually sounds good. But. “No croissants,
though?”
And I can make you a bagel. Cinnamon? Blueberry?
Plain?”
“Is that a no on the croissants?”
Faye cocks her head with a pleased expression. “You really
like my croissants, don’t you?”
Do I? “They’re so, um.” I clutch the strap of my fake-
leather messenger bag. “Unique.”
“Well, unfortunately I just gave the last one to Erik over
there.” Faye points to her left, toward the very end of the
counter, but I barely glance at Erik-over-there—
tall man,
broad shoulders, wears suit, boring—too busy cursing my
own timing. I should
not have spent twenty minutes tickling
the majestic beauty of Ozzy’s little guinea pig tush. I am
now rightfully paying for my mistakes, and Faye is giving me
an assessing stare. “I’ll toast you a bagel. You’re too skinny
to skip breakfast. Eat more and you might grow a little
taller, too.”
I doubt I’ll manage to nally push past ve feet at the ripe
old age of twenty-seven, but who’s to say. Just to recap,” I
say, in one last pleading, whiny attempt at salvaging my
professional future, you’re
not making more croissants
today?”
Faye’s eyes narrow. Honey, you might like my croissants
a little
too much—”
Here.”
The voice—not Faye’s—is deep and pitched low, coming
from somewhere above my head. But I barely pay it any
attention because I’m too busy staring at the croissant that
has miraculously appeared in front of my eyes. It’s still
whole, set on top of a napkin, a few stray akes of dough
slowly crumbling o its top. I’ve had Faye’s croissants
before, and I know that what they lack in taste they make
up for in size. They are very, very large.
Even when delivered by a very, very large hand.
I blink at it for several seconds, wondering if this is a
superstition-induced mirage. Then I slowly turn around to
look at the man who deposited the croissant on the counter.
He’s already gone. Half out of the door, and all I get is a
brief impression of broad shoulders and light hair.
“What—?” I blink at Faye, pointing at the man. “What . . .
?”
“I guess Erik decided you should have the last croissant.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “Wouldn’t look a gift croissant in the mouth if
I were you.”Gift croissant.
I shrug myself out of my stupor, toss a ve-dollar bill in
the tip jar, and run out of the café. Hey!” I call. The man is
about twenty steps ahead of me. Well, twenty steps with my
tiny legs. Might be less than ve with his own. Hey, could
you wait a . . . ?”
He doesn’t stop, so I clutch my croissant and hurry after
him. I channel my best Former Soccer Scholarship Kid self
and dodge a lady walking her dog, then her dog, then two
teenagers making out on the sidewalk. I catch up right
around the corner, when I come to a halt in front of him.
Hey.” I grin up. And up and up and up. He’s taller than I
calculated. And I’m more winded than I’d like. I need to work
out more. “Thank you
so much! You really didn’t have to . .
.” I fall silent. For no real reason other than because of how
striking he looks. He is just so . . .