Rocket Science

by K. M. Neuhold

  Rocket Science

  By K.M. Neuhold

  Dedication

  To the incredible and talented Z.B.Heller. I swear I was channeling you during a few scenes in this story. Your strength and resilience is an inspiration and I love you to pieces.

  Synopsis

  Relationships aren’t rocket science. If they were, I might stand a chance of figuring one out.

  Elijah

  Saying I’ve had a crush on my best friend’s older brother, Pax, most of my life is like saying the big bang was just an explosion. It’s true, but I’m not sure that quite captures the essence of its true enormity.

  I know he’s only hanging out with me because I’m new in town, and getting my PhD doesn’t leave me with much time to make friends. And even if it did, my strength is mathematics, not friend-making. What I don’t understand is why he kissed me…why he seems to want to keep kissing me. I don’t think my advanced physics knowledge is going to help me figure this one out. But I think for once I’m okay with not knowing, as long as Pax and I don’t know together.

  Pax

  He’s still the awkward Nerdlet I remember…he’s also probably the cutest, most tempting man I’ve laid eyes on. I know I should keep my hands off him, but this thing between us is like a force of nature. I want to be his first everything. He says we’re nothing more than atoms crashing into each other. I’m no scientist, but I don’t think either of us are braced for the explosion.

  **** Rocket Science is a stand-alone MM romance featuring an inexperienced nerd, a cocky player, and a satisfying HEA

  Copyright

  Rocket Science© 2019 by K.M.Neuhold

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Natasha Snow

  Editor: Editing By Rebecca

  Chapter 1

  Pax

  Ice clinks against the sides of my glass as I lift it to my lips. My eyes slowly scan the bar, taking in all of my options and doing a quick mental calculation of exactly how much effort each man would take to get into my bed based on a number of factors I discovered and tested during my college years. Some of my friends told me I was wasting my genius on matters of my dick, but I honestly can’t think of a better use for my brain than this.

  I catch the eye of a twink a few feet away—petite, a little too petite for my taste if I’m being honest, although nothing the generous curve of his ass doesn’t make up for. He holds eye contact as he rolls his straw between his teeth, assessing me the same way I was just assessing him. His gaze lingers on my arms, my dress shirt rolled up past my forearms, showing off the colorful ink normally hidden beneath.

  I throw back the last of my drink and prepare to approach what seems to be a sure thing, when my phone buzzes in my pocket. I consider ignoring it since there’s a good chance it’s my boss, and he can suck my dick if he thinks I’m taking a call from him after nine on a Friday night.

  But on the off chance that it’s someone other than my jagoff of a boss, I reach into my pocket to check. My brother’s name lights up the screen, and I try for a second to fathom why Theo would be calling me. Not that we don’t get along, but most of our interactions are limited to birthday texts and catching up at the holidays, maybe tagging each other in the occasional meme on social media. For the life of me, I can’t remember the last time we spoke on the phone, if ever.

  My heart beats a little faster, worst case scenarios filling my mind as I hit the accept button and lift the phone to my ear.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask immediately.

  “Uh…yeah.” He doesn’t sound particularly sure about that, but since he doesn’t seem to be panicking in any way, I assume everyone we know is alive and not in any sort of mortal peril.

  “Good. What’s up, bro?”

  “I sort of have a favor to ask,” he hedges, and my interest perks.

  “Oh, yeah? Hit me.”

  “You remember Elijah?” he asks, and I chuckle, reaching for the fresh drink the bartender places in front of me.

  “Of course, I remember little Einstein,” I answer, images of the knobby kneed, bespectacled nerd my brother called his best friend through most of his childhood fill my mind. With our age difference, I left for college when Theo was only ten, so I can’t say I knew much about his life or his friends, but I always got a kick out of Einstein.

  “He’s not little; he’s twenty-three.”

  I give a low whistle. “Where does the time go?” I ask rhetorically. “Please tell me he’s still all knees and elbows with a head too big for the rest of his body?”

  I swear I can hear my brother rolling his eyes through the phone. “Sure, why not,” he responds, tone dripping with sarcasm.

  “What’s the favor?”

  “He just moved out to Pasadena, he’s in the PhD program at CalTech.”

  I whistle for a second time. “Damn, good for him.”

  “Yeah, the thing is…” he pauses and sighs, clearly weighing his words. I give him time, glancing over at my potential conquest again, only to find him hanging all over some other man. C’est la vie.

  “What is the thing, T?” I prompt when I grow impatient.

  “He’s not the greatest socially. It was fine during undergrad because we were in New York together, but I’m worried that since he doesn’t know anyone out there in California, he’s going to become a hermit. He’ll never go anywhere except for campus and his tiny little studio apartment, and he’ll die of loneliness.”

  “Die of loneliness, huh?” I respond dryly. My brother always was a bit of a drama queen from what I could tell.

  “Don’t scoff. Social belonging is on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Social interaction is important just like food and shelter.”

  “Well, at least we know the buttload of money you shelled out for that psychology degree was worth it.”

  “Pax, I’m being serious.”

  “Okay, what do you want me to do about it?” I ask with a sigh, leaning my weight against the bar, the desire to pick up some strange for the night slowly fading.

  “I want you to hang out with him a little, just to get him out of his apartment. You don’t have to be his babysitter forever, introduce him to some people so I’ll know he isn’t completely alone out there.”

  There’s a hint of desperation in Theo’s voice that keeps me from brushing him off completely. Spending my time with a gangly, socially awkward, nerd is not near the top of my list. But Theo’s right, it’s not like I need to become besties with the guy, we can meet up for drinks, maybe I can introduce him to a few acquaintances, no big deal.

  “Fine, text me his number,” I agree.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I owe you one, big time.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” I tease.

  We hang up, and my phone vibrates a few seconds later with a text from Theo with the phone number. I save it in my phone as Einstein and return my attention to the hunt.

  Elijah

  I pop a piece of popcorn into my mouth and let it melt on my tongue for a few seconds, soaking up the buttery, salty flavor before chewing and swallowing. I reach for another piece, careful not to knock any of my snack onto my stack of notes and textbooks open on the table. Page after page of calculations are spread out in front of me, and the last thing I need is to get them all covered in popcorn grease. I wipe my hand on my
jeans and reach for my pencil to continue working.

  A pleasant feeling of peace and pride settles over me as the equation starts to come together, the calculation for a satellite’s orbit emerging. There’s a reason numbers have always made more sense to me than people do. Numbers are simple: they always do what you expect them to do. It’s what drew me to aerospace engineering, the ability to see a problem and find a solution using known mathematical principles of physics is amazing. Plus, rockets.

  People, on the other hand, rarely do what I expect. They say things that are different than what they mean, they laugh and tease, they lie. People don’t make sense the way physics and numbers do; they don’t even try to.

  I glance over at the model rocket on my dresser, squished in beside my bed, in the corner of the room. It was a present from my best friend, Theo, before I left New York. Theo doesn’t make sense either, but I like him anyway. He’s kind and funny, even if he always had a bad habit of forcing me to leave the house and be around other people I didn’t like all that much.

  A slightly tight, uncomfortable feeling settles in my chest that I’m sure is somehow associated with thinking about my very best friend thousands of miles away. It was inevitable that we would have to part ways, I knew that early on, but I never expected to miss him when it happened. I suppose over the years, he wormed his way further under my skin than I expected.

  As if summoned by my thoughts, my phone lights up from its place on top of my fluid mechanics textbook, Theo’s name across the screen.

  “Hello,” I answer.

  “Hey!” he responds with so much enthusiasm I have to pull my phone from my ear to prevent being deafened. I switch to speaker phone and set it back on top of my textbook. “How’d the move go? Did you get all settled in? Are you ready to start your classes next week?”

  “Move went smoothly. My place is roughly the size of a shoebox so I’m pretty much tripping over all my stuff. But I have a table to study at and a bed to sleep on, so that’s all I really need. And, yes, I’m very excited for classes to start. I’ve already begun reading the textbooks, and I’m unwinding with a few calculations tonight.”

  Theo snorts a laugh on the other end of the phone, and I feel myself bristle a little. I know sitting at home on a Friday night calculating lift, thrust, and drag isn’t most people’s idea of a fun night, but for me it is. Some people do sudoku, some like to do craft projects, I like to solve equations. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.

  “Have you explored the neighborhood at all? Checked out any of the local bars or anything?”

  “Why would I do that?” I ask, my attention slipping from the conversation as it veers in a direction I’m less than interested in entertaining.

  “You’re so close to campus, I bet if you went to a bar, you’d run into other students there,” Theo suggests, his tone holding the implication that something like what he’s describing would somehow be a desirable outcome.

  “Then what?” I already know the answer. I’d make small talk, pretend to be interested in where they lived before they came to California and how much they can’t stand their roommates, or whatever it is college students like to talk about. They’d pretend to be interested too, asking me all sorts of questions I have no desire to answer before politely making up an excuse to walk away so they could laugh with their friends about me.

  “Then you’d make a friend,” he says with a hint of sadness in his voice, like it’s paining him to have to explain this to me.

  “I already have a friend,” I point out.

  “We have an entire country between us,” he argues.

  “That doesn’t diminish our friendship.” Emotional bonds are strange that way. Unlike physical forces, they are in no way impacted by the distance between the two objects—or people as the case may be. It’s fascinating when you think about it.

  Theo sighs, and I hear a rustling on his end of the phone; I assume he’s making himself more comfortable.

  “I called Pax,” he says, and my heart finds its way into my throat, my stomach fluttering violently at the mere mention of Theo’s older brother, Paxton.

  For most of my childhood, he’d been little more than Theo’s largely absent older brother. Being eight years older than us, he barely noticed our existence and vice versa. When he went off to college, it hardly registered. That is until the summer when I was thirteen.

  Most of my peers had begun putting all their energy into fawning over members of the opposite sex. Boys gathered to whisper about which girls wore the shortest skirts and whose bra they’d like to get under, and the girls giggled and flirted right back. Theo was the exception, confessing to me in a whisper one weekend during a sleepover that he thought he might like boys. I was the outlier, it seemed, finding no interest in members of either sex at the time. I was far more consumed with ways to improve the design of the model rockets I’d gotten at the hobby shop so they could go higher, fly farther.

  Then it happened, Pax came home from college for the summer.

  The first time I really noticed him he was mowing the lawn…shirtless. I’d stood dumbfounded on the side of the house, my pants becoming tight as I stared at the way his muscles bunched and moved, each trickle of sweat sliding down his bare torso. I remember smiling with relief, glad to finally have an answer to where my interest lay. Maybe I was simply a slightly late bloomer, or maybe it was that the scrawny, pimply boys my own age couldn’t hope to compete with the perfection of a twenty-one-year-old college boy.

  I watched him a lot that summer, stoking my growing crush with furtive glances and late-night fantasies about what it would be like if he were to notice me in the same way I was noticing him. When he came out to his parents near the end of the summer, my crush reached its peak. I was sure one day I would know what it felt like to touch Pax, kiss him, be noticed by him.

  But then he left for his final semester of college, moving to California for work after graduation, and I hadn’t seen him since.

  “Why’d you call your brother?” I ask, shaking myself out of my ill-timed walk down memory lane.

  “I gave him your number, told him you two should hang out since you live in the same city.”

  “You what?” I nearly shriek, standing from my chair so quickly that it topples backward and lands with a loud bang against the floor. My glasses start to fog up from the heat of my face, so I take them off to wipe them on my shirt. “God, Theo that’s so embarrassing. Why would you do that?”

  I can only imagine what Pax must be thinking, his younger brother calling and begging him to take pity on his pathetic, socially awkward best friend. Is there a hole somewhere I can crawl into and die? Because that would be absolute perfection right about now.

  “Because I’m worried about you,” Theo says. “You have a lot in common.”

  “Like what?” I challenge.

  “Um…he’s really smart.”

  “He’s a salesman,” I point out. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a salesman, but it clearly demonstrates that Theo’s confident, stupidly handsome older brother continues to have the kind of social skills I could only ever dream of.

  “So? I’m sure there’s a ton you two could talk about. If he calls, go out with him for one drink. If it’s horrible and awkward, I won’t mention it again.”

  “It’s already horrible and awkward,” I complain, finally righting my chair and sinking back into it. “I don’t think I can even answer if he calls, it’ll be too embarrassing. I can feel myself turning all red and squirmy just thinking about it,” I confess with a shudder.

  “Pax is a nice guy. I bet you two would have fun hanging out,” he insists. “Please give it a chance, for me?”

  I swear I can hear Theo’s puppy dog eyes through the phone. If it wasn’t for the fact that I owe him immensely for every time he stood up to a bully for me in high school and all the times he made me feel less alone, I would outright refuse. But I can’t.

  “Fine,” I agree with a sigh
. “If he even calls.”

  “He’ll call,” he says confidently. “Now, I’ve gotta run, enjoy your equations.”

  “Always,” I assure him.

  Chapter 2

  Pax

  I drop my briefcase on the floor as soon as I step through the front door of my apartment, kicking off my shoes carelessly and collapsing onto my overstuffed couch with a groan. It feels damn good to be home after a week traveling, selling security software to every tech company I can manage to score a meeting with. There’s a certain thrill in selling, but at the end of a long week, my own apartment feels like heaven.

  I loved this place the minute I laid eyes on it with its open concept, the spacious kitchen giving way to the living room, the exposed brick walls, the floor to ceiling windows in the bedroom. And, it’s more than enough space for a hopeless bachelor like me.

  A week has passed since my brother called and babysitting his Nerdlet friend has been the furthest thing on my mind. But it’s a Friday night, which means after a much-needed shower and nap, my dick is going to lead me to the nearest bar to find someone bury myself inside and let all the stress of the week melt away. If I’m going out anyway, I might as well kill two birds with one stone: invite Einstein out for one drink and then send him on his way so I can enjoy the rest of my night.

  I pull out my phone and type out a quick text.

  Pax: Let’s grab a drink. Meet me at Twisted Cherry downtown at 9

  A response doesn’t come immediately, so I heave myself up off the couch and make my way to the bathroom to take a shower, desperate to get the gritty feeling of travel off my skin.

  By the time I get out of the shower, my phone is blinking with an unread message. I take my time drying off with a towel and wrapping it around my waist before picking my phone up off the sink ledge and checking the message.

  Einstein: I’m sorry, but I’m fairly certain you have the wrong number.