“But?” Jax asked hopefully.
Ari kissed him quickly. “But I’m certain there’s another short-term rental availablesomewherein the city. Perhaps closer to the conservatory. I’m sure I could get access to a practice room in exchange for a few guest lectures.”
“Yeah?” Jax shifted closer, until Ari had no choice but to roll onto his back. Jax moved with him, half lying on his chest.
Ari traced a thumb over Jax’s lips. “Yes.”
Jax sighed and leaned his face into Ari’s palm. “I can’t believe it took us this long to make up. We could’ve had another whole month together.” He shook his head. “And you said your mom was the one who convinced you to come?”
Ari felt a pang. There was so much they had to talk about. “Well, actually, it’s a funny story.”
“Uh-oh, serious talk.” Jax kissed his thumb and then sat up and gathered the sheets in his lap. His skin immediately pebbled into goose bumps, and he grimaced and reached over the side of the bed for his sweatshirt. He pulled it on, then grabbed Ari’s too. “Maybe we should move to the couch.”
“I’ll make tea,” Ari agreed.
They settled on the sofa, which was a hideous worn brown velvet, though free at least of any stains and surprisingly comfortable. Jax spread one of the blankets over their laps, and they sat facing each other, their legs entwined.
“All right,” Jax said, tucking his feet under Ari’s leg and cupping his mug under his chin. “Start at the beginning.”
“Would that be the furious fight with my mother where I blamed her for my own spinelessness, the phone call you took at the grocery store that I somehow thought meant you were seeing someone else already, or theotherparental bombshell—”
“Whoa, I can see I should have gotten a bottle of something stronger than milk at the corner store.”
Ari acknowledged that with a tilt of his head and sipped his tea. “Well, the fight was self-explanatory. The phone call… whydoyou call your mother Christine?”
“’Cause it’s her name?” Jax said wryly. “Wait, you thought I was dating my mom?”
“In my defense, I’d never seen her, and you never mentioned her name. And who calls their mom by their first name?”
Jax smirked over the rim of his mug. “Got in the habit in undergrad. Every time I went to see my mom on campus, I’d get these looks if I asked if people had seen Professor Hall. She mostly teaches grad students, so everyone thought I was about to get eaten. One day someone asked if I was there to see Christine and I realized that was what her students called her. What a revelation. Moms have first names? So every time I was on campus, I’d call her that. She thought it was funny.”
If she was anything like Jax, Ari supposed she would. “I should have talked to you before that, but afterward….”
“You thought I got over you that quickly?” Jax seemed a little hurt, but not as much as Ari had expected.
Ari lifted a shoulder sheepishly. “You did mention that you fall in love at the drop of a hat.”
Jax accepted this with a wobbly nod. “That’s fair.” He dropped his gaze to his mug, then lifted it again and smiled slightly. “Though maybe not anymore.”
Ari went warm all the way through, despite the draft. “Perhaps just one more time.”
Jax nudged his thigh. “Yeah. That sounds nice.” He put his tea on the coffee table. “You mentioned another parental bombshell? Dare I ask?”
Well, that was a mood-killer. “I’ll tell you.” Ari put down his tea as well and held his hands out for Jax. “But first you have to come here.”
His mother’s surgery had gone according to plan, and she was recovering well, but that didn’t mean reality wasn’t easier to face with Jax’s weight a solid, warm comfort against his chest.
GETTING BACKinto the swing of going to school—even if he didn’t technically have classes—took some getting used to. Ari’s presence didn’t help. Although he’d rented a hotel room while he looked for a longer-term solution, it had been so long since Jax dated someone and went to school at the same time that it didn’t feel like goingbackto school so much as starting a wholenewchapter.
Thank God for ADHD meds, because he already felt like he was writing three different parts of the same book all at once without knowing how anything ended.
Since Ari couldn’t stay in Boston past January, Jax found a new drive to work hard and get his defense scheduled as early as possible. Unfortunately MIT was like every other college around—a big, slow bureaucracy with lots of paperwork to fill out. Jax hated forms.
But the potential of leaving Boston behindwithAri was an excellent carrot, so when the department administration asked him to come down to get some things taken care of, Jax didn’t argue. Instead he put on his big-boy pants—actual jeans instead of sweats—and headed down to the college.
The woman heading up the mathematics department’s admin was an unfamiliar face, and she seemed immune to Jax’s charm. Then again, he probably wasn’t the only good-looking young person trying to flirt his way through this maze of forms and applications.
“I understand that I need to fill out form 35-B before I can schedule the next bit, but the form wants to know information I don’t have yet.”
