🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Love on the Brain yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Okay so, one sided enemies-to-lovers set inside a NASA lab, with a purple-haired neuroscientist heroine who literally asks herself “What Would Marie Curie Do?” every time life gets hard? And then Ali Hazelwood throws in the layer that our two enemies have been accidentally pen pals on social media this whole time, each venting to the other about the person they hate/love, without knowing they’re talking to each other. I mean. COME ON. The setup for this one is delightful, and the slow unraveling of every misunderstanding is where this book really shines.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Bee, BLINK, and the World’s Worst Co-Lead Situation
Bee Königswasser is a neuroengineering researcher who navigates literally everything in life by asking herself what Marie Curie would do, and she gets tapped by NASA to lead Project BLINK, a helmet designed to stimulate the brain. Dream job. Except it comes with a catch: she’s co-leading it with Levi Ward, her nemesis from grad school, the guy who, rumour has it, absolutely despises her.
The backstory is that in grad school, a mutual friend tried to corner Levi into complimenting Bee, and he just… didn’t say anything. Rumors spread, and then it came out that when Bee got engaged to her ex Tim, Levi told Tim he could “do way better.” So the entire grad school cohort concluded Levi hated her, and Bee fully believes it. What she doesn’t know, and what we slowly piece together, is that Tim is a massive liar who had his own reasons for keeping Levi as far away from Bee as possible.
The Sabotage Spiral
From the moment Bee arrives at NASA, everything goes wrong in the most infuriating, cascading way. No computers. Key cards that don’t work. Meetings nobody tells her about. Her NIH boss Trevor is already threatening her job over deliverables she literally cannot make happen because she has zero equipment, and every time she asks who’s responsible, the finger points back to Levi. She’s emailed him endlessly and gotten zero responses, so she’s fully convinced he’s sabotaging her on purpose.
She eventually discovers Levi canceled the computer order, which feels like confirmation of everything she suspected, and she storms into his office demanding answers. Except Levi tells her he has answered every single one of her emails.
The Eavesdropping Scene That Changes Everything
Bee marches to confront Boris, Levi’s director, about the whole mess, and on her way there she overhears Levi already inside, telling Boris to give Bee the equipment she needs, to get her included in meetings, to let her do her job. He’s been fighting for her behind the scenes this whole time. Boris then explains the real problem: NASA and NIH are locked in a political fight over patent rights, and the director wants to push BLINK to next year’s budget review. Levi catches Bee eavesdropping, pulls her aside, and instead of being annoyed, they actually start working together to figure out how to save the project.
The Marie Curie Account and the Pen Pal Problem
Throughout all of this, Bee runs a social media account called “What Would Marie Curie Do?” where scientists share their professional struggles, and she’s been chatting regularly with a user called Schmakademics, Schmak for short, who she considers a genuine friend. Schmak has been telling her for years that he’s hopelessly in love with a coworker he thinks is married. Bee is very invested in his situation.
What neither of them has figured out yet is that they’re talking to each other. Bee is posting as “Marie,” Levi is Schmak, and the woman Levi has been in love with for years is Bee herself. He even thought she was still engaged to Tim, which is why he kept telling Schmak that this woman was married. The dramatic irony of them venting to each other about their work situation while falling for each other on social media is one of the best parts of this whole book.
The Graveyard Incident
At some point, Bee takes a solo run and, being Bee, ends up wandering into a graveyard to read grave markers for absolutely no logical reason she can explain, the sun goes down, the gate locks, and her phone is nearly dead. She has to call Levi to come rescue her. He shows up with a ladder like it’s the most normal thing in the world, drives her back to her place, except she lost her keys somewhere among the graves, so he takes her back to his house instead. Bee has been convinced Levi is married with a child because of a photo she’d seen, and she’s quietly panicking about meeting his wife the entire drive. But there’s no wife. The woman and kid in the photo are his dead best friend’s family, and Levi has been helping look after them ever since. One major misunderstanding, cleared.
The Conference, the Brunch, and Everything Tim Did
Boris sends Bee and Levi to a conference to scope out Meg Tech, their competitor, who turns out to be further along in development than expected. They run into Sam, their old grad school advisor, who insists on a brunch the next morning with former students. Annie and Tim are there. Yes, that Annie, Bee’s former best friend who slept with her fiancé, and yes, that Tim, who cheated on Bee with multiple women, convinced her to take him back, and then was also sleeping with Annie.
Levi spends the entire brunch subtly threatening Tim and defending Bee, and he realizes sitting there that literally everyone in their grad school cohort thought he hated her, because Tim had constructed it that way. Annie pulls Bee aside separately and, in tears, tells her she was jealous of Bee and that the affair with Tim only lasted a week. They don’t fully reconcile but leave the door open. And Levi tells Bee afterward that Tim had specifically lied to him back in grad school, telling him that Bee knew Levi was interested in her and found it uncomfortable, which is why Levi stayed away all those years. Tim told that lie on purpose to keep Levi out of the picture. He really was just a manipulative, cheating disaster of a human.
The Part Where They Finally Get Together
After the conference, Bee and Levi kiss and start fooling around, and then Levi gets a mysterious call and disappears for a few days. When he comes back he goes straight to her, and they sleep together. Around this same time they have a successful test run on the BLINK helmet and Boris is thrilled, so thrilled he immediately schedules a big demonstration for all the NASA higher-ups, even though Bee thinks it’s too soon. Boris also offers her a permanent position at NASA.
Levi takes her out for supper where they slowly untangle years of misunderstandings, and Bee walks away from that dinner convinced they’re just hooking up. Levi clearly thinks they’re in a relationship. He tells her she should just move in with him, which is about as clear a signal as a man can give, and yet. She also meets his best friend’s wife and daughter, and learns his best friend died in a climbing accident, which is why he’s been helping them. The parents visit is a disaster; they’re awful to Levi, Bee stands up for him, and it does not go over well.
The Cat (An Important Thread)
Faylaset is the mysterious cat who showed up on Bee’s very first day in the lab, knocked equipment off a shelf that would have landed directly on her head, and triggered the moment Levi physically pushed her out of the way. The cat pops up randomly throughout the whole book, except nobody else has ever seen it. Levi thinks Bee is imagining things. She’s been leaving vent covers off and putting food out for it. The cat is absolutely real, as it turns out, and Levi himself actually has a cat of his own. He’s just been convinced the lab cat doesn’t exist this whole time. It’s quietly funny every single time it comes up.
The Villain Reveal and the Demonstration That Goes Sideways
Someone has hacked Bee’s Marie Curie social media account and is impersonating her, offering to change her professional position on a major issue for money. That’s bad enough. But the bigger catastrophe is the big demonstration itself, where Guy, the NASA astronaut who has been their main point of contact and the chosen test subject, has a seizure and gets rushed to hospital. Boris immediately declares BLINK is finished. Trevor swoops in to say it can be salvaged but Bee is being replaced, because someone has to take the fall and she was the lead researcher in the room. She accepts accountability even though none of this is her fault.
She’s packing up to leave when Levi arrives, sees the half-filled suitcase, and everything spills out. He tells her they are more than just hookup buddies, that he’s in love with her, that he knows she loves him too. He wants her to fight for them. She won’t. He leaves.
Then Bee, heartbroken and packing to go, decides to message Schmak to tell him he should stop associating with her Marie Curie account for his own protection. While going through his feed, she sees a photo of his cat, and she recognizes it. Every piece clicks into place. Schmak is Levi. The woman Schmak has been in love with for years, the coworker he thought was married, is her. He’s been telling her exactly how he felt, under a different name, for years, and she’s only just realizing it now.
Levi also left her a video before he walked out: a compilation of Faylaset moving through the lab, proof that the cat is real after all. While watching it, Bee notices that at 2 AM a light comes on in her office and someone walks in, and another night her computer screen shows Twitter open, something she would never log into on a work machine.
She tries to reach Levi and can’t so she sends him an email and tells him something is up. She goes to the office, investigates and finds her Instagram saved on the lab computer, then pulls the server logs for Guy’s brain data from the demonstration: those files were modified overnight, under her credentials. Someone had been accessing her computer, framing her, and that person caused Guy’s seizure deliberately. And then Guy walks in — he is supposed to be in the hospital.
He admits everything, completely calm about it. He’s been in her email for a long time, intercepting Levi’s messages so they never reached her, keeping them at war with each other on purpose. His reason: the BLINK prototype was originally built jointly by Guy and Levi’s best friend, the same man who died in the climbing accident. After his friend died, Guy’s contributions were erased from the project’s records. Then Levi joined out of guilt over the accident, and in Guy’s mind, his dead collaborator’s work got credited to someone else entirely. He tweaked his own test protocol, took caffeine pills to make himself extra reactive, and caused his own seizure to blow up the project and frame Bee. He also hacked her social media after finding out that Levi had lied to him about Bee being married.
Then he pulls out a gun. He’s going to make her jump off the roof and make it look intentional.
Faylaset attacks him. Because of course she does. Bee runs, hears a crash behind her, turns around, and Levi is there wrestling Guy to the floor. He gets the gun away, pins Guy down, and tells Bee she should probably step back and sit down, because he knows she’s about to pass out and he can’t catch her while he’s restraining Guy until the police arrive. She ends up hospitalized for two days from the fainting, and when she comes around properly, she and Levi make up.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 / 5 — Open door. There are explicit scenes in this one, and they deliver. This is a full romance, not a thriller with heat sprinkled in, so the steam shows up consistently throughout. If you’ve read Ali Hazelwood before, you know what to expect. If not: it’s spicy but not overwhelming, and the slow burn earns every scene.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The epilogue gives us exactly what we wanted: Bee is working at NASA full-time, she and Levi eloped in a secret ceremony with a proper celebration planned for that summer, and she finally finishes that 5K they’d been training for together. It’s a soft, sweet landing for a book that spent most of its time being chaotic in the best possible way.
Would I Reread It?
No. It was a great listen, but not one I’d go back to.
Who Is This For
If you love enemies-to-lovers with a comedic voice, nerdy heroines who are disasters in the best way, and the kind of slow burn that has technically been burning for seven years before either person admits it, this one is for you. The thriller twist with Guy feels a little out of left field for what is otherwise a pretty cozy rom-com vibe, but if you’re already a fan of Ali Hazelwood’s writing style, you’ll feel right at home here.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Standalone | Genre: Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
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