Ari frowned and shook his head. “That’s not the life I want. I like the one I have.” Then he turned around and left the house. He had the sudden desperate urge to see Jax.
FOR THEfirst few moments when he regained consciousness, Jax couldn’t have said what woke him. By all rights he ought to have been down for the night, after a long shift at the bar followed by a frantic but thorough shift in Ari’s bed. His eyes felt like sandpaper and his body was an overcooked noodle, but when he took a deep breath and decided to continue sleeping, the soft notes of the piano drifted in again, and he couldn’t resist.
Quietly, he climbed out of bed and padded to the doorway, the better to observe Ari in his natural habitat.
He sat at the piano, backlit by the streetlight and the moon shining in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Aside from that, the room was dark as Ari measured out careful notes, occasionally pausing and backtracking, his head tilted to the side.
It was beautiful, Jax thought—not at all conventional, halfway between a ballad and a lullaby. C, C, D, E, G, C, an experiment, a scattering of perfect chords, then the same notes out of sequence.
“C4, E4, G4, C5, G5,” Jax murmured. “One, three, five, eight, thirteen. The Fibonacci Sequence. Did someone fall down a math rabbit hole?”
Ari looked up, his features outlined in stark relief. He was gorgeous in the moonlight, the smooth line of his back highlighted in glimmering silver that also kissed his hair and limned his eyes. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay, I don’t mind.” The view was worth it. Getting to hear Ari compose was worth it.
Though Jax half expected him to get up now that he knew Jax was there, he remained at the piano, coaxing out a sweet, fanciful tune, almost hypnotic. He was working in a spiral, Jax realized with a soft smile.
“I’m impressed that you noticed,” Ari admitted. His shoulders had hunched in as though he didn’t want to be seen, but he didn’t stop playing.
Jax rescued a pair of boxers from the bedroom floor and slipped them on before joining Ari on the piano bench, their thighs pressing together. He watched Ari’s hands for a moment and then copied the tune up two octaves. Ari let him and shifted to an accompanying set of chords, incorporating complex harmonies that added a mournful undertone.
He felt like he owed Ari something of himself for letting Jax see him like this, when he was obviously at his most sensitive, his most vulnerable. He’d been having trouble writing music, and he didn’t like anyone to hear things until he was ready—but he was letting Jax.
Jax could respond in kind.
“I’m pretty good at hearing numbers, I guess,” he started. But Ari would know that much from Jax’s work at the bar and what he’d already admitted from his youth, so that didn’t really count as sharing. “Pattern recognition—that’s one of the things my mom and I used to do together when I was a kid. She’d make it a game.” He paused. “She’s a professor of mathematics and cryptology at Queen’s.”
There. That was as good a start as any.
Ari stopped playing for long enough that they both faltered, but eventually he started again and Jax followed, both of them a little slower this time. It was easier to have something else to pretend to focus on. “You don’t talk about her much.”
Jax let out a long breath. Here was his opening. His heart beat a little too fast, out of sync with their song. “Yeah, well, we haven’t exactly been on the best of terms since I chose MIT over her university for my PhD.”
To his credit, Ari only missed one transition, but the disharmony resonated unpleasantly through the room. He corrected immediately. “You have a PhD in math?”
Jax sighed. “No. That’s another point of contention. I’m ABD. All but dissertation.”
At that Ari stopped playing and turned his attention fully to Jax, who put his hands in his lap. Ari closed the keyboard cover. “Why didn’t you finish?”
Jax tried a smile, but it felt anemic, so he let it slide away. “Same reason as everybody else who was supposed to graduate in 2020. The pandemic hit and I came home.” He knew it had been the smart decision regardless of what had followed. “I always planned to go back, but I….”
After a moment of silence, Ari placed his hand on Jax’s knee. Their thighs were still touching, and now that Ari wasn’t working the piano pedals, their ankles were too. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m willing to listen.”
Jax hadn’t even talked this out with Hobbes or Sam, but the words seemed to bubble out of him. “I wanted to go back. My project is done; my advisor had verbally approved me to defend before everything….” He gestured to the room to indicatewent to absolute shit. “And then he died, in April.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It feels shitty to say, because my mom was a great single parent and I never felt like I needed a father figure, you know? She’s aromantic, she chose to raise kids alone on purpose, and she was good at it. But he was like a father to me.”
His voice cracked.
Then Ari took his hand, and everything suddenly got much harder to swallow. If he said he wassorry—
But he didn’t. “May this be your last sorrow.”
Jax blinked at the sentiment, then managed a small quirk of his lips. That must be a Persian thing. He liked it. “Thanks.” He finally managed a breath that didn’t make his lungs shake. “Anyway. I’m dealing with failing to live up to parental expectations. Not like the whole world doesn’t have PTSD right now, but how dare I bring shame on the Hall family name by failing to complete my doctorate. Like extenuating circumstances count for nothing, or all the work I did during the pandemic. Or like the highest and best thing a person can do is get a PhD in applied mathematics.”
Ari squeezed his hand. “It’s never easy to disappoint parental expectations.”
Understatement. Jax squeezed back. “Our conversations are kind of… fraught these days.” He huffed. “This is not great conversation for three a.m.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Ari stood and, still holding Jax’s hands, urged him to follow. “Some things are easier to say at three a.m.”
