Blondie stares up at me for a moment, rolling her teeth over her bottom lip. After what she did to me earlier, those delicious lips will undoubtedly feature in all my future dreams. “Can I ask…” She hesitates as if considering her next words carefully, then finally says, “Why was Past Damian so intent on no girlfriends?”
When I don’t immediately answer, Blondie sits up and turns so we’re now lying stomach to stomach. Resting on my chest, she props her chin on the back of her arm while the fingers of her other hand trace feather-light circles across my shoulder.
I want to blame the shiver that wracks my body on her wandering touch, but I know that’s not the cause. It’s this final sliver of truth I’ve been hiding from these last four years. Although it’s difficult to voice, I’m ready to face it—Ineedto faceit if I’m ever going to truly move on. And I want to move on, Iwantto be free of this pain I allowed to eat me up for so long. To do so, I just have to say it and hope to god that it really will be like that saying: that the truth will set me free.
“When my abuelo,and then Jamie, died, it left a gaping hole in my life,” I explain, and I can see the weight of my words reflected back at me in Blondie’s softening gaze. “I was desperate to fill it, but too scared to let anyone in, certain it would end badly and I would be forced to go through the pain of losing someone I loved all over again. So, I substituted the emotional connection Ineededwith empty physical ones. To protect myself, I kept everything and everyone at a safe distance. No friends—not real ones I actually like, anyway, which was easy enough since people only ever looked at me and saw my family’s money. No girlfriends. Just parties and sex. And absolutely no Repeats. Until you.” I flash a small smile at this gorgeous, smart, incredible woman, who blushes scarlet at my profession. “So much of my life, so much of who I was before…was until you. Until I met someone who made the risk worth it, and reminded me how it feels to live.”
Blondie’s breath catches when I stroke a hand along the length of her naked arm, then, interlacing our fingers, I slowly pull our joined hands to my lips and place a tender kiss on her knuckles.
“What I was doing before wasn’t living. Shit, I wasn’t even surviving. I wasdrowning, and you pulled me out.” I shift my other hand to her face and trail the pad of my thumb across her bottom lip, which quavers at my touch. “You not only saved me, but you made me want to re-examine my life. What I want to do with it. Who I want to be. And I think I finally found that answer.”
I spend the next several minutes telling Blondie about my abuelo, about the dream I was raised on, and the hope I have toturn that dream into a reality. Her eyes brighten with quiet pride when I tell her I want to use my name and family’s wealth for good, and when I eventually tell her how I plan on taking that first step—about my proposal to convince the board at Hallazgo to implement a program that would aid families struggling to afford life-saving medication and care—that admiration in her gaze becomes silvered with tears.
But as much as I want this, as much as I believe in it, I can’t ignore the shadow hanging over it all—the threat that I might not even be allowed to work for Hallazgo. That the means to instill real change might be taken away from me, no longer mine to inherit. I’ve spent four years purposely destroying my life; my grades had already dipped from dealing with the loss of my abuelo, but after Jamie, I ended up nearly failing my senior year and only graduated high school at all due to “extenuating circumstances” and a sizable donation from my parents. I wouldn’t have even gotten into Conwick if my dad hadn’t bought my way in, and I proceeded to float by doing the bare minimum since and fucking up everything in my path. I think my parents assumed I would grow out of it, out of this “phase” they refused to acknowledge for what it really was: grief. And when I didn’t…well, they made their feelings clear: step out of line again and they’ll cut me off, not just financially, not just from the family, but from the company my abuelo built. It doesn’t matter that I’m their son. If they don’t approve of the man I’m becoming, they won’t let me be a part of their empire. And without their backing, I don’t know if I’ll even get the chance to pitch my proposal, let alone make it happen.
Still, Blondie’s approval means more than I can put into words, and for the moment, it’s enough to quiet those fears.
“Damian, that’s…” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what to say except I think it’s an amazing idea.”
“I want to make a difference.” And I think that’s what my abuelo and Jamie would want, too. They wouldn’t want me to waste my life wallowing in sadness and self-destructive despair. They’d want me tolive. To be a positive force in this world…and use what I’ve learned from their loss to leave a mark, even if it took so much heartache to get here. “The only thing is,” I say after a beat, “I know my dad and the board will never go for it if I can’t make the program profitable in some way to Hallazgo, and while I have some ideas on how to do that, I’m not a numbers guy. I can use a calculator like the best of them, but this is going to take something special, like a math genius, to make this proposal foolproof.”
Blondie’s lips press into a coy little smirk. “Did you have someone in mind?”
I beam, and she bursts into the most hard-on-inducing giggle fit when I roll her onto her back and tickle her.
“What do you say, Blondie?” I ask, punctuating the words with open-mouthed kisses to her neck, collarbone, and chest. Resting my chin between her ample breasts, I peek up at her with a smile full of so much affection and love it seems to spill out of me. “Want to change the world together?”
She considers me with a pensive hum. “Like Batman and Robin?”
“I mean, I’m definitely Bruce Wayne in this situation with the handsome looks and butt loads of money, but you”—I drag my lips along her sternum, then rise until I’m hovering over her—“are certainly no Robin.”
She arches a brow. “Yeah? Who am I, then?”
“Superman,” I answer. “Obviously.”
“Superman?” she parrots.
“Mmhmm. You have that whole Clark Kent thing going on with those glasses. It’sverysexy.”
Her face scrunches up in confusion, and she wrinkles her nose, jostling said glasses. “I thought Clark Kent was the nerd, and Superman was the sexy one?”
“Oh, he is,” I say, brushing a rogue curl from her forehead. “But lucky for you, I dig nerds. Speaking of”—I sit up, looking around the general vicinity—“where’s that cute ‘I love pi’ T-shirt of yours? I’ve hadwaytoo many sex dreams about it, and I want to see if the dream lives up to reality.”
She giggles again. “You’re incorrigible,” she scolds, shifting upright and pushing me back against the sofa to straddle me.
I shrug and lean back to admire the view, my fingers languidly caressing the sides of her naked body. “I don’t know what that means, but I’ll take your word for it. Now, kiss me, Blondie. I’m dying over here.”
Although she rolls her eyes, she obliges.
Pi is a paradox: irrational yet unavoidable. Kind of like falling in love with someone you once thought you hated.
December
The next month is a whirlwind. Between classes and studying for finals before Christmas break, almost every available moment is spent with Damian working on his proposal. Some nights, we chip away at it in his dorm room, sprawled side by side on his bed like two research goblins—him on his laptop scouring public data, industry reports, and economic papers, and me half buried in spreadsheets and numbers—only breaking to occasionally frisk each other or caffeinate. I alternate between perfecting an affordability formula—one that doesn’t just look at a person’s income, but takes into account variables like debt, existing medical expenses, dependents, and cost-of-livingadjustments to determine what they canactuallyafford—and a price elasticity model that balances affordability for patients with long-term sustainability for the company, ensuring that Hallazgo remains profitable while allowing the initiative to grow and help the people who need it.
A few nights into our collaboration, I realized that Damian was watching me work, his eyes focused on the way I moved through the numbers with ease. When I met his gaze, I saw something in it—a sort of unbridled curiosity, like he was trying to figure me out. At first, I dismissed it, chalking his reaction up to the usual skepticism people always show when they witness me solving complex equations so quickly. But then I glimpsed that look on his face again—the question in his eyes, like he wanted to understand—and without him saying a word, I found myself explaining the way my brain works. I told him how numbers and formulas aren’t just numbers to me—they’re colors and physical shapes in the world, like math-based art only I can see.
And that’s when it occurred to me…Damian wasn’t surprised by my answer. He didn’t ask follow-up questions or even blink at my explanation. He merely smiled as I spoke and nodded, as if he already understood on some level, and I was just filling in the blanks.
