Shit.
Jax swallowed, suddenly wide-awake. He scrambled upright, the sheets pooling around his waist. “Mom. Hi.”
“Hi, he says. Like it’s good to talk to me. As though he hasn’t been dodging my calls since June.”
“I haven’t been dodging your calls.” He’d been dodging her calls since January.
His mother did not dignify that with a response, and guilt sneaked in to fill the silence until Jax couldn’t take it anymore. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“I get it, kiddo,” she said gently. “The past eighteen months haven’t been easy on any of us, you know? I just want you to talk to me.”
Ah yes. More guilt. “And say what?” Honestly, where could he even begin?
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
He took a deep breath and scrubbed a hand over his hair. He needed a haircut again. That seemed so strange, since just last year he’d gone three or four months without one. “Okay, let’s start over, I guess. We can pretend. Hi, Mom. Long time no speak. How are you?”
Whatever shortcomings his mother might have, she loved her children. Jax counted himself lucky that right now she seemed to love him enough to humor him. “Well, you know. School’s back in session, so I’m living the dream.”
This was an old, well-worn conversation between them, so he let himself relax into it. “Let me guess—the freshmen get younger every year.”
“They are like little babies,” she confirmed. “Most of them not as little as you were, though.”
Jax had been only sixteen when he started university and hadn’t hit his growth spurt until he was twenty-one, so that didn’t surprise him. “Lucky for them,” he said. “You teaching undergrads this semester?”
“Just the one session, thank God. Linear algebra.”
“At least it’s a fun one.”
“You’d be surprised how many of my students don’t think so.”
He snorted. “And you wrote the textbook for them and everything. Ungrateful.”
“They have the nerve to bitch about paying fifty bucks for the copying fees.”
Jax shook his head. They’d bitched about that when he was in undergrad too. “Some things never change, I guess.”
“I guess,” she agreed. But apparently he ought to have offered more, because she took advantage of the natural pause in conversation to say, “What about you, Jax? How’re things with you?”
And this was where things got sticky. “Oh, you know me. I’m always fine.”
“Hmm,” she said noncommittally. “That does seem to be the consensus of the comments on this video.”
Fuck. “You saw that?”
“Half the Northern Hemisphere’s seen it, kid. You really didn’t want to tell your mom you finally got internet famous?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he protested. “It was a last-minute thing. I was just having fun.”
“Sure,” she said too easily. Jax sensed a trap. “So listen. I’ve been asking around.”
Jax was immediately on high alert. He rolled out of bed and paced barefoot beneath the window. “Mom—”
“Hear me out. I know you know Western has a math PhD program. I spoke with Dr. Singh—”
“Mom!”
“Jax!” she echoed. “I’m sorry, but what do you want me to say? That it’s okay with me if you waste your talent playing second piano in a bar three nights a week?”
