Jax slammed his laptop shut and went outside to aggressively murder some dandelions.
Two days later Jax opened his program and began rereading every single line of code. If he was going to defend this sucker, he needed to know it as well as when he had written it. And apparently he needed to be able to defend his decision not to change it even before his defense.
The work was slow going.
Jax loved math, loved the way it spoke to him, the simplicity of some numbers, the complexity of others. Math had been a way of coping with or escaping from most of the difficulties of his life. Hell, half the work he’d done during the pandemic had been done during late-night panicked sprees as he attempted to stop his brain from thinking about how the data and statistics could—did—affect him personally.
But the project didn’t provide any comfort, not when he heard Grayling’s voice in his head as he reviewed every line, his soft tones as he calmly questioned Jax’s decisions so Jax would be forced to carefully and thoroughly reason them out, the pride in his face whenever Jax answered a question so completely Grayling couldn’t think of anything else to ask. Reading the program hurt, and Jax’s eyes burned and twitched until he was tempted to throw his laptop in the Thames.
When it got to be too much, Jax found vegetables to massacre in the kitchen instead and made pots of soup or pasta.
Hobbes found him grating a carrot with such force one afternoon that he snapped, “Careful. I don’t fancy eating grated you in my dinner.”
“You should be so lucky to get a piece of me,” Jax snarled back, but he flung down the carrot anyway because he needed his hands intact if he was going to be slicing lemons in a few hours.
Hobbes raised his hands in surrender and backed up a single step. Jax noted the dark circles under his eyes. They were working him too hard at the hospital again. “Whoa, hey. What did the carrot ever do to you?”
“The carrot is just a metaphor.” He picked it up from the floor and tossed it into the Garburetor.
There was a pause as Hobbes eased himself into a kitchen chair, watching Jax closely. “Yeah, I got that,” he said finally. “And all the other elaborate healthy meals you’ve made in the middle of the day this week—I’m assuming those were also metaphorical?”
“Those weredelicious,” Jax corrected, pulling the final carrot from the bag and peeling it with extreme prejudice. Though with Hobbes to vent to, his frustration was waning. “And they weren’t so much a metaphor as a productive distraction.” Jax had spent too much of his life thinking Hobbes might die, and when he got out of the hospital, he was weak. Jax had gotten used to cooking for him, partly because Hobbes couldn’t do it himself and partly because Jax hadn’t had anything else to distract him. Then Hobbes went back to work. And Jax wasn’t an idiot; he knew doctors ate too much takeout, but he still maintained that if Hobbes hadn’t wanted Jax to worry about his cholesterol, he shouldn’t have left his bloodwork results piled in with Jax’s sheet music.
“All right, I’ll bite,” Hobbes said easily. “A delicious, productive distraction from what?”
Jax put down the grater again, debating.
Aside from Hobbes and those contacts at MIT, he hadn’t told anyone he planned to go back to school. He carried the weight of enough expectations. The decision to return to Cambridge had opened a sucking stomach wound, and Jax was walking around with both hands pressed over it to keep from bleeding out. He couldn’t let anyone look at it in case they made it worse.
But Hobbes already knew, and he deserved to know what had prompted his roommate to turn into Neurotic Jax, with whom he’d have to live for the next six weeks while Jax obsessed over his work. It wouldn’t be fair to leave him in the dark.
“Jax?” Hobbes prompted.
Well, now or never. Jax cleared his throat and met his eyes. “I’ve been going over my thesis program.”
“Ah.” Hobbes nodded, and Jax could see him get lost in his head for a moment as he ran through a replay of Jax’s actions and attitude over the past few days. “Yeah, that tracks.”
Jax swallowed. “I need to do it if I’m going to go back and finish. But it’s… hard. It keeps bringing up unpleasant memories. Well, actually, most of the memories are good, except that then I remember Grayling is dead and I’m a failure—”
“Jax—”
“Yeah, I know, blah blah, not my fault, whatever.” He huffed. “The good news is the freezer is full?”
“As long as you’re not going to make seven kinds of cookies again.” Hobbes patted his stomach. “I’m still working off the last ones.”
“No cookies,” Jax promised. Maybe zucchini bread. Banana muffins? “Actually, speaking of stuffing myself—”
“Please don’t.”
Jax stuck out his tongue. “I wanted to let you know Ari and I have adateon Monday. So you’re on your own for dinner.”
“Yeah? Nice, kid. No sweat, though. I was going to go to Naomi and Kayla’s. They’re having that thing for Naomi’s birthday.”
“Oh, yeah, the potluck. Naomi mentioned it.”
“So, a date… I take it this is serious?”
Oooh, he didn’t like how Hobbes asking that made him feel. Like he was talking to a parental figure, but it was also Hobbes, the best friend he had a weirdly codependent relationship with and who until recently he’d sometimes thought about naked. Jax never had daddy issues before Grayling died. Just one more way Covid had screwed him over. “Cautiously optimistic yes?”
