Chuck barked out a laugh. “Ari was right—you are definitely entertaining, Jax.”
Jax raised his water glass to Chuck in acknowledgment.
Ari ordered dessert too, took two bites and declared it too sweet as an excuse, and slid it in front of Jax, who gave him a look that said he wasn’t fooled but also wasn’t going to look a gift gateau in the mouth.
The party broke up in the lobby, and Ari and Jax shook hands with everyone as they went their separate ways.
“I hope you’ll be making another stop in Boston for your next album tour?” Chuck inquired as Gianna and Adi waved goodbye to get into an Uber. “I’d love to get dinner again.”
“April twenty-seventh,” Jax said absently, watching the snow come down out the main doors. Then he seemed to realize he’d spoken aloud and added, “Uh, unofficially.”
Ari fought not to gape at him. The dates wouldn’t officially be released until next week. “How did you even—?”
Jax flushed. “Afra sent me your itinerary, just in case I might still be here?”
That sounded like an incomplete truth, but Ari wasn’t going to call him on it in front of Chuck. “I’ll be sure to text when the dates are confirmed,” Ari said instead.
Chuck clapped his shoulder, and then his car pulled up and he too disappeared into the night.
Now that they were alone—or at least their group had gone—Jax slid his hand into Ari’s. “So that was a much better time than the last time we did this.”
Ari laughed helplessly and leaned his head against Jax’s. “Call it a trial run?”
Jax squeezed his fingers. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” But his voice was warm and wry.
Another car pulled up at the curb, and Ari checked his phone—this one was theirs. He tugged Jax along with him into the night and bundled him into the car. “Come back to the hotel with me?”
“Hmm,” Jax said as though he were considering. “I should probably go to the lab. I want to double-check some calculations—”
Ari put a finger to his lips. He wouldn’t kiss Jax in someone else’s car—that was too much when he didn’t know the driver personally—but he met Jax’s eyes as seriously as he could.
“—which I can absolutely do in the morning. Yes, good point,” Jax finished against Ari’s fingertip.
He didn’t let go of Ari’s other hand until they were in the hotel room.
NOW THATRebecca had wrangled together his defense committee once more, with a substitute advisor in the place of her late husband, Jax really did have work to do in the lab. A day after his dinner out with Ari’s professors, he got an official defense date: February 23. And suddenly he remembered why he hadn’t dated much when he was doing his PhD.
Most of Jax’s work was in the program itself, which allowed the input of growth factors and various conditions like temperature and humidity. He’d even built in a widget that could take raw data and spit out functions that defined the variables in terms of each other so the user wouldn’t have to guesstimate. Unfortunately he couldn’t prove that it worked well without spending hours in the laboratory, carefully calibrating bacterial cultures under strict controls with the help of two other researchers, who were both thankfully studying biology and better at this type of lab work than Jax.
When he wasn’t at the lab, tweaking code, or revising sections of his thesis, he was eating or passed out in bed under every blanket in his apartment because it was frigid and Ari wasn’t around to keep him warm. On Jax’s good days, he remembered to call. On the bad days, it was nine thirty before he remembered to check his text messages.
And it was a hell of a lot easier to concentrate now that he had medication.
“What are youlisteningto, anyway?” Bokyung asked one afternoon—evening?—when she breezed into the lab to find Jax up to his eyeballs in growth medium.
“Boyfriend’s last album,” Jax answered as he cast around for the damn pipette. Where—there it was. “New one’s not out yet, but there’s too many songs with lyrics anyway. Distracting.”
Bokyung was quiet for a moment and then asked, “Your boyfriend’s a classical musician?”
Jax finished what he was doing, put the petri dish in the incubator, set it at precisely 30 degrees Centigrade, and noted the time in his log. “Uh, sort of?”
She shrugged. “Cool. I like it.”
It turned out she must mean it, because the next time Jax entered the lab, he found her listening to the same album, bobbing her head gently to the rise and fall of Ari’s violin. He snapped a picture—without any personal identifying information—and sent it to Ari with the captionthe lab is now an Ari Darvish zone.
An hour and a half later he remembered to check for a reply. Ari had writtenCareful, or Noella will try to add you to my “hype team.”
Please.As if Jax were not Ari’s number-one hype man.
