Page 14 of Gingers Can Do Maths

“Roisin?”

“Will it fuck up the lint filter? At Hortace we do our own laundry. Have I removed the lint filter since the last cycle? I’m the only one that does it.”

“Roisin!”

Her eyes snap to mine, her jaw clamping shut.

“Do those little snaps of pain help you to refocus?”

She nods. “It brings me back to reality at least. Even if I still can’t figure out the answer.”

So she likes little snaps of pain?

Noted.

“So distractions are an issue,” I say, scribbling the word onto my notepad. “We’ll have to work on that. No matter what you need to stay focused.”

“When I lose focus, I feel like it’s the beginning of the end.”

“Like the start to your drowning?”

She nods again, slower this time as if surprised I still remember her simile.

As I slide back from my chair and cross over to the other side of the table she suddenly looks shy, which is crazy given the fact that she’s topless.

I didn’t think I’d get so close to her so soon either, but I can’t stand to stay away despite my petty bitterness over how things ended between us.

If only she knew how badly I’d lapsed in our three years apart. Stalking her social media. Sneaking onto Hortace’s campus. Taking sips from her water bottle just because her lips had been wrapped around it too. Climbing into her single bed where she was dead asleep. Watching her for hours and whispering dream motivations into her ears which sometimes paid off. Smelling her second pillow which she used to treat bouts of insomnia by riding it until she couldn’t climax anymore and sleep overtook her.

And those are just the milder points.

But it’s different in the sunlight and now that she’s awake, and within arms reach, I can finally cross the one boundary I couldn’t before. Touch her. I have to see the way she reacts to me now that she finally knows I’m right here.

I’ve always been right here.

Her spine stiffens, her breasts leaving the table as she straightens the moment I bend over her shoulder to see the tablet.

Immediately I’m overcome with nostalgia as her hair tickles my cheek and temple, as her signature scent drifts through my nostrils and strangles my brain.

Her eyes roll up to glance at me, her long eyelashes pressing against her upper lids. Damn, from this angle, she looks like she’s almost pleading with me.For me. I can almost envision her on her knees but facing me, her small hands gripping me tight.

“You still don’t understand what a negative exponent is,” I say, struggling to concentrate myself. “You keep making the coefficient negative too. It’s the inverse.”

“Inverse,” she mumbles to herself, tapping the stylus against her palm. “Got it. Inverse.”

I scan the rest of the test problems and quickly find a pattern.

“You solved three-fourths of the problems correctly,” I say and immediately her face lights up. “But the quarter that you got wrong is a bit puzzling.”

“Why?”

“Because you got previous problems that use the same formula right. It’s like you second-guess yourself and then confuse the rules. Like here, you got the multiplication right, but on the next problem, you swapped the rule for multiplying and dividing negative numbers, with the rule for adding and subtracting negative numbers. It was going so well and then—”

“I started to second guess. It became hard. I started to drown. Then I drowned,” she sighs, dropping the stylus and rubbing her hands over her face.

“But this is good.”

She looks up at me again, tilting her head so far back, that I can see her glorious breasts with their nipples still pointed at the chair I’d vacated.

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