Lab Grown Love

The smell of burnt coffee and solder clung to the air in the lab like a bad habit. I was hunched over a circuit board the size of a playing card, tweezers in one hand, a magnifying loupe screwed into my eye, when my phone buzzed itself right off the edge of the workbench.

"Damn it."

I caught it before it hit the floor. Barely. The screen lit up with a name I hadn't seen in eight months. Mom. I let it ring twice more before answering, because that's what you do when you're an only daughter with a mother who can hear hesitation through a phone line.

"Reenu. Finally." Her voice was sharp enough to cut glass. "I was starting to think you'd dropped your phone in one of those machines you're always building."

"Hi, Ma." I set the tweezers down and pulled the loupe off my eye. My right eye twitched from the sudden return to normal vision. "I was working."

"You're always working. That's the problem." A pause. I could hear the TV in the background, some Telugu serial where everyone screamed at each other. "Your father and I are coming to Hyderabad next month. For the wedding."

"What wedding?"

"Your cousin Divya's. Did you forget? I told you three months ago."

I hadn't forgotten. I'd blocked it out, the way you block out a root canal you haven't scheduled yet. Divya was twenty-four and getting married to a software engineer from Dallas. The whole family would be there. All four hundred of them.

"I'll be there," I said, because what else was I going to say?

"Good. And Reenu." The pause stretched. Danger pause. "You'll bring someone."

It wasn't a question. It was a directive, issued from the headquarters of Indian maternal operations, where a daughter showing up alone to a family wedding was a code red.

"Ma, I'm not bringing anyone. I don't have anyone."

"You're twenty-eight."

"I'm aware."

"Your father's colleague has a son. He's a doctor. Well, a dentist. But a good dentist."

"I'm not going on a blind date at my cousin's wedding."

"Then find someone yourself. You have a month." She hung up before I could argue. That was her style. Deploy, retreat, let the guilt do the heavy lifting.

I stared at my phone for a long moment. Then I looked at the lab around me, at the half-finished prototypes and the whiteboards covered in equations, and I felt the familiar comfort of a problem with clear parameters. Except this one didn't have clear parameters. This one was a mess of aunties and expectations and the specific hell of being the unmarried older cousin at a wedding where everyone would ask the same question in seventeen different ways.

I needed a date. A fake one, obviously. Someone who could play a role for a weekend, charm my mother, and then disappear back into whatever corner of Hyderabad he came from.

I didn't have anyone like that.

I had Arjun.

Arjun was the lead developer at the startup where I worked. He was also my closest friend, which was a strange thing to say about someone who once spent forty-five minutes arguing with me about whether pineapple belonged on pizza. He was brilliant. He was insufferable. He was currently standing in the doorway of my lab, holding two cups of chai and looking at me like he already knew something was wrong.

"You have that face," he said.

"What face?"

"The one you get when your mother calls." He walked in and set one cup on my desk. The chai was from the stall down the street, the one with the hand-painted sign and the owner who always gave us extra cardamom. "What happened?"

I told him. He listened, sipping his chai, his dark eyes steady on my face. When I finished, he didn't laugh. That was one of the things I liked about Arjun. He never laughed at the things that actually mattered.

"So you need a fake boyfriend," he said.

"A fake date. For one weekend."

"For a wedding where your entire extended family will be watching."

"Yes."

"And you need someone who can pretend to be your boyfriend convincingly."

"Yes."

He set his cup down. His expression was unreadable, which was rare for him. Usually I could read Arjun like a schematic.

"I'll do it," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"I'll be your fake boyfriend. For the wedding."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "You don't have to do that."

"I know."

"You'd have to take time off work."

"I have leave saved up."

"You'd have to lie to my mother."

"I'm a good liar."

That was true. He was. It was one of the things that made him a good developer, the ability to hold a complex system in his head and make it look simple. But this was different. This was my mother.

"Why?" I asked.

He shrugged, but there was something underneath it. Something he wasn't saying. "You'd do it for me."

I would. In a heartbeat. That was the thing about Arjun. We'd been through three product launches and two funding rounds and one near-disaster with a server farm in Chennai. We'd spent nights sleeping under our desks and mornings arguing about code architecture. He was the person I called when things went wrong. And apparently, he was the person who volunteered to be my fake boyfriend.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. You're hired."

He grinned, and for a second he looked like the boy I'd met three years ago, the one who'd shown up to his interview with a laptop bag held together by duct tape and proceeded to out-code everyone in the room.

"We should probably set some ground rules," he said. "What does your family expect? What's the backstory? How did we meet?"

"We met at work."

"Too boring. Your mother will ask for details. We need something with a little romance."

I raised an eyebrow. "You want to invent a meet-cute?"

"I want to be prepared. Your mother sounds like a woman who interrogates for sport."

She was. He wasn't wrong.

"Fine," I said. "We met at a coffee shop. You spilled your drink on me. I yelled at you. You asked me out to apologize. I said no. You kept asking. Eventually I said yes."

"That's not a meet-cute. That's a harassment lawsuit."

"It's realistic."

"It's terrible." He leaned against the workbench, crossing his arms. "How about this. We met at a conference. You were presenting. I was in the audience. I asked a question that made you think. We argued for an hour afterward. You gave me your number because you wanted to continue the argument. We never stopped."

I stared at him.

"That's good," I admitted.

"I know." He picked up his chai again. "We'll need to practice. Public displays of affection. Hand-holding. The way you look at someone when you're in love."

"I can act."

"You can't. I've seen you try to fake enthusiasm for the product roadmap. It's painful."

"I'm going to push you off this workbench."

"See? That's not how you talk to a boyfriend."

I threw a crumpled napkin at him. He caught it without spilling his chai.

"We'll practice," he said. "Starting tomorrow. We'll go to dinner. Somewhere nice. You'll hold my hand and pretend you don't want to kill me."

"That's going to be hard."

"You'll manage."

I looked at him, at his easy smile and his steady eyes, and I felt something shift in my chest. Something small and inconvenient that I immediately buried under a pile of logic and reason.

"Fine," I said. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow."

He left, and I sat alone in the lab with the burnt coffee smell and the half-finished circuit board. My phone buzzed again. A text from my mother.

*What's his name?*

I typed back: *Arjun.*

*Good name. Send photo.*

I didn't have a photo. I'd have to take one. Of Arjun. My fake boyfriend.

This was going to be a disaster.