Page 25 of A Series of Rooms
“Yourbook,” Jonah corrected, swinging his legs off the side of the bed. “Can I help?”
Liam raised an eyebrow, looking at him in a way that Jonah couldn’t quite decipher. “Really?” He shrugged when Jonah nodded. “Sure, have at it.” He plucked the worksheet closest to his bent knee from the pile, handing it across the gap between the beds.
Jonah leaned over and took it, bringing it closer to inspect. He scanned over the loopy scrawl of Liam’s pencil marks, mentally trying to work through the problem. He couldn’t help but smile at the sheer number of smudged eraser marks and scribbled out numbers that littered the page, as well as the distracted doodles he had done off in the margins. After a moment of deliberation, he looked up at Liam, whose hair was tousled and unruly from the stress.
“You kind of suck at this,”Jonah said.
Liam’s mouth popped open in feigned offense. “I was very transparent about my shortcomings. You don’t have to rub it in.”
“I’m mostly kidding,” Jonah said with a smirk.
“Mostly,” Liam echoed. He rubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes. “Honestly, maybe I should just bomb the exams. At the very least, it will serve as an ‘I told you so’ to my advisor, and maybe I’ll be able to take myMath for Idiotsclass next semester as God intended.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Jonah said. “You actually were close on a couple of these, you just missed a step, and it threw off the rest of your work. Here. Can I borrow your pencil?”
“Please,” Liam insisted, clicking his mechanical pencil up a couple notches before handing it over.
Without thinking about it, Jonah sank down next to him on the bed, propping his leg up to supply a writing surface.
He scribbled his additions alongside Liam’s work as he talked him through the equation, small, jagged streaks of graphite stark against the smooth, curvy penmanship. It was kind of amazing, even to him, that he was able to slip into the process like an old sweater after all this time, the feel of a rapidly scratching pencil as right as rain between his fingers.
Numbers had always made sense to him. He couldn’t deny the tiny thrill he felt at the realization that this part of him hadn’t withered completely with time, the way so many others had.
When he finished, after plugging in the answer to check his work, Jonah breathed a long exhale and circled the new number, flashing it toward Liam with a smile.
“See how I got that?”
“I absolutely did not.”
Jonah’s mouth quirked, and he got to work on the next problem.
Somehow, inexplicably, the distance between them shrank little by little over the course of an hour. By the end, they were side by side against the headboard, the knees of their pajama pants brushing just slightly as they balanced the notebook between them. At some point, Liam had retrieved the leftovers from Jonah’s dinner from the mini fridge, rewarding himself with a cold fry every time he got a question right on his own.
That became a game within itself, as Liam, desperate for any short distraction from the math, challenged Jonah to try and toss them into his mouth. They usually missed, and one time he’d thrown it a bit too aggressively, resulting in a retching gag as the fry harpooned the back of Liam’s throat, but that only made them laugh harder.
It was the most like his age Jonah had felt in a long time.
CHAPTER 9
Liam
“Hot date tonight?”
Liam was counting out his cash tips just outside the back entrance when Kim stepped out for her smoke break.
“What?” he said, folding the bills into a thick stack. It was busy, even by Friday standards, and a couple of big tippers had ensured a half-decent dinner for him and Jonah tonight. Maybe they could try someplace new. He found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he had some way of texting him directly.
“Don’t ‘what’me,” she said, shielding her lighter against the cold wind. “I see you’re all dolled up.”
He shot her a dry look. “We’re wearing the same uniform.”
“Mhm.” She smiled around the cigarette between her teeth, giving him a once-over. “And the clean shave?”
“I don’t like scruff.”
“And the sudden interest in hair gel?”
“It’s mousse,” he shot back. “Aren’t you the one who told me I should learn how to work with my natural curls?”
