Not wanting to bring down our happy mood, I give him a smile. “Besides, I’m used to my little powder puff now. And just think—” I give his hard side a nudge with my elbow. “I’d never have seen you crammed into it if Dad had gotten it right.”
Gray laughs before ducking his head a bit. “Oh yeah, sure, that’s worth all the pain.”
“You know it, baby.”
His blue eyes flash with humor and slide over me before returning to the road. “And we might not have met.”
Something swells between us, warm and tender. It gets me all sentimental, the very thought of not knowing Gray making me weepy. Or maybe I’m overtired.
Gray clears his throat. “Where am I taking you?”
“City Diner.”
When he raises a brow in surprise, I give him a look that must be bordering on feral. “I’m craving a heaping bucket of crispy fried chicken with a side of biscuits like you wouldn’t believe.”
“And she eats,” he says to the car. “A girl after my own heart.”
“Just drive, Cupcake.”
“Easy now, Special Sauce, I’ll get you your chicken.” He’s grinning as he rolls down the window and turns up the radio once more. Wind whips through my hair and music pumps through the speakers. Happiness floods my veins, as light and fizzy as champagne. It’s good to be home.
* * *
When I graduated high school I knew exactly where I was going. Off to Sarah Lawrence to soak up college life. The prospect excited me so much I was packing my trunks while still wearing my graduation cap and gown. All through college, I kept my head down, nose to the grindstone, and finished a year early for my efforts.
Now college is over, and I feel adrift. The friends I made have been flung to the four winds, all of them taking that next step in their lives. It’s a lonely business graduating. So lonely that I understand why many people automatically enroll in grad school to feel that sense of camaraderie once more. But I need an academic break for now. And I’m no longer lonely. I’m here with Gray, who seems to fill up the space around him—literally, because he’s freaking huge, but also with his energy, like he’s his own solar system, a swirling vortex of planets and stars and suns.
He’s comfortably slouched in the booth where we’re sitting, his long arm draped over the back of the seat. Sunlight glints in his dark blond hair, and there’s a small smile playing on his lips.
“What?” I ask before taking another bite of fried chicken. A moan might have slipped free. I’ve been craving real fried chicken for ages, crispy, golden, juicy, tasty. In short, heaven.
Gray full-on smiles. “Just like watching you enjoy the hell out of that chicken.”
“You make that sound illicit.”
He chuckles. “You’re making it look illicit.”
I’m about to tell him to piss off, in the nicest possible way of course, when he pushes his sleeves up to his elbows and something on his inner forearm catches my eye.
“Hey, what’s this?” I grab his wrist and gently turn it to fully see the tattoos gracing his skin from wrist to inner elbow. They’re mathematic symbols done in indigo ink.
Gray stiffens a bit, taking a sharp breath. But he lets it out easily and answers with a light voice. “That one there”—he gestures with his chin to the bit I’m tracing with my fingertips at his wrist—“is called Euler’s Identity.” His blue eyes meet mine. “How well do you know mathematics?”
I grimace. “I got up to calculus because it was a major requirement. But I passed on sheer will and short term memory devices. You might as well be speaking in tongues with this stuff.”
Gray gives me a quick, understanding smile. “Okay, then in the shortest sense, mathematicians often refer to Euler’s Identity as the most beautiful mathematical equation in the world because of its elegant simplicity and because it links what we call the five fundamental constants, or fields, of mathematics.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” I stroke a finger along the equation, then trail up to another tattoo—a long number sequence full of fractions and letters and a bunch of things that look like gobbledygook to me. “And this?”
“Ah, that’s a basic proof for Euler’s Formula.” He eyes me with amusement. “I could explain it but—”
“That’s okay,” I say quickly, and he chuckles. Slowly I stroke the tattoos. They’re well done, the script elegant, almost feminine in some way. And though the proofs and equations are thrown down in a haphazard fashion, there’s a surety to them, as if the whole thing was written free-flow without pause. “I didn’t know you were into math.”
Gray’s skin prickles, the fine golden hairs on his forearm lifting as I reach his inner elbow. “It’s just something that comes easily to me,” he says with a shrug. “For my mom too. She could have gone into any field—physics, engineering. But she loved history and theoretical study so she ended being a math historian. Euler was an eighteenth-century mathematician and physicist, a genius. Mom kind of had a thing for him.”
I grin. “That’s cute.”
Gray leans closer to me. Our heads nearly touch as both of us look at his tattoos. His voice is almost a whisper it’s so soft. “She, uh… She died.”
My breath slows. “When?” The idea of him hurting over the loss of his mom, and me not being there for him, makes my stomach hollow out.
“When I was sixteen. Breast cancer.” His throat works on a swallow. “She was in a lot of pain toward the end. I’d sit with her, hold her hand.”