I whip out the folded page, and slam it down on the desk in front of him. “Yeah, this. I have no idea how to solve it.”
The man seems surprised, but adjusts his glasses and reaches for the slip of paper. I don’t miss the way his gaze lingers on the wordsSOLVE ME, or the way his brows draw together when he unfolds it. Fuck. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do it? His eyes skim back and forth for a moment before snapping up to look at me again. “Is this homework or something?” he asks.
“Or something,” I mutter, unsure what else to tell him.
He shrugs. “All right, go get a chair and come sit down, and we’ll take a look.”
Relief surges through me as I run to the nearest table and grab a chair like I’m being timed, and if I don’t do it quick enough I’ll be eliminated from the most intense game of musical chairs to ever exist. The guy at the CASS desk watches me with raised brows, his expression bemused, but he makes no comment when I plop the seat down beside him.
“Okay,” he begins, flattening and attempting to smooth out the paper, which I had crumpled a bit on the journey here. When it’s the best it’s going to get, he grabs a pencil and taps it against the first fraction in the equation. “So, in this part, the natural logarithm and the exponential function are inverses of each other. In other words, applying the logarithm to an exponential function essentially cancels out the exponential, leaving you with the exponent itself, which in this case is 2i. Following so far?”
I stare blankly down at the page with a newfound appreciation for Blondie’s wonderful brain. Is this the kind of math she had to do for our proposal? Math she was doing effortlessly in her head in a matter ofseconds? If so, she’s not just a genius, she’s a fucking wizard. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked up and found little cartoon question marks bobbing over my head.
“Uh…sure,” I manage after a moment, but to absolutely no one’s surprise, I don’t sound convincing.
My dude gives me a dubious look, but I nod for him to continue.
Clearing his throat, he looks back down at the page. “Now, over here, since the cosine of zero is one, this part simplifies to two because we’re adding this one to it here.” He taps the equation with the end of his pencil where it says + 1 next to what I’m guessing is the cosine he mentioned.
I bob my head. “Okay, that kind of makes sense.” I think.
“Then the square root of 9usquared over here is 3u, so if we rewrite the equation…” Underneath Blondie’s handwriting, he scribbles a new set of numbers and letters across the wrinkled paper, then leans back and points his hands at the page, making ata-dagesture. “See? Not so scary looking anymore. And now that we’ve gotten rid of the logarithm, the square root, and the cosine, we’re just working with basic algebra.”
This is supposed to be basic?I muse, but I don’t bother to say that out loud.
“So, let’s start with simplifying this first fraction. We can combine the terms that have the same variables, and once we do that, what do you notice about the numerator and denominator?”
I glare down at the page as if it has personally wronged me. Fucking hell, I hated fractions in school. What’s the rule with them again? Something about common denominators? No, that doesn’t apply here. This is just a single fraction…
I frown, certain steam must be coming out of my ears from how hard the wheels in my brain are turning. I swear, Blondie is lucky I love her because if this had come from anyone else, I would’ve thrown it in the trash before I even left my room.
Think, Damian. Do it for Dornan. What do you see?
I narrow my eyes at the equation.
“They both have a two?” I guess.
The man gives me an encouraging smile. “Right! So, we can cancel that two out, leaving us withi+ufor the first fraction. Then for this next fraction, we want to isolate it on one side, then use common denominators to simplify.”
Common denominators! I knew I remembered something from math! Thankfully, though, my guy doesn’t ask me to do any of the calculations myself, determined to hold my hand through it, which I’m incredibly grateful for. Still, I follow along intently,attempting to understand just in case I glean something from the numbers that will give me a clue as to what Blondie is trying to tell me.
“Now, we multiply everything by four to get rid of the fractions, and then you rearrange to combine like variables until you’re at a point where you can solve fori,” he explains, rewriting an even more simplified version of the equation underneath the others. “Once we do that, we…”
It takes me a second to realize the man has gone silent, and I peek over at him, sucking in a deep, calming breath to quash the unease in my chest. Is he going to say the equation’s impossible? Or that it means nothing and Blondie was just fucking with me?
I’m about to prod him when he huffs out a laugh. “Oh, I see what they did there. Cute.”
Cute?
“What?” I ask, confused.
The man scrawls something at the bottom of the page, then turns to look at me, placing his pencil down. “Who gave this to you?” he asks.
I hesitate, somewhat perturbed by the amused smirk on his lips. Why does he want to know? Did Blondie just come up with the solution for world hunger using math or something? Spilled some big government secret? Does the simplified equation resemble a dick?
“My girlfriend…why?” I drag out the words.
Mr. Academic Coordinator lets out another soft laugh. “It looks like she’s trying to tell you something.”
