Into My Heart

by Rosalie Ferdinand

  *****

  Moment of Inertia

  I inspected the front door of my house. It was slightly ajar. "Seems to me that Ivan Shestov does in fact know that the degree of a polynome is defined by the highest x."

  Behind me, Rafe said, "What now?"

  "Ivan Shestov likes to come to our house, mostly during the New Moon week and flush our toilets." I stepped inside and 'I-have-to-pee' danced out of my sandals. "Let's assume, if you will, that his behaviour B is a function of homesickness H. That makes B the independent variable. It takes him back to Russia, let's say, hence the H."

  "Oh. Well...good thinking."

  "Grandma won't be around today because she's got Kendo until four-thirty," I said as I hung Rafe's jacket up on the doorknob of the shoe closet. "Then she's going back to Kismet so that Myron has something pretty to look at and to get a tattoo design from Lucan. You'll get to meet her tomorrow; she says she can't wait to meet the dude who took away my 'kissing virginity' as she called it."

  Rafe's eyes darkened as he decided that pressing me up against the wall was a good idea. His expression was cocky. "Yeah I did do that, didn't I?"

  "Should I be struggling now?" I squirmed a bit and said experimentally, "Stop in the name of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law of Radiation."

  Rafe burst into laughter. "We're gonna need to work on your delivery Janie," he said and kissed me briefly in an open-mouthed, electromagnetic kind of way.

  "But I'm not pregnant," I replied after few moments, my innards squirming like the speed of a longitudinal wave as I guffawed my own weight in stones to the living room.

  "What're you giggling at?" Suril was sitting in Grandma's armchair and reading my copy of 'Applied Vector Analysis'. "You better have homework for me 'cause I'm fucking..." He abruptly trailed off when he caught sight of Rafe and flushed as much as his golden skin would allow.

  Rafe showed no outward signs of noticing Suril's bruised face, split lip and wrapped ankle that peeked out from the bottom of his cargos. "Hey man, how's it going?"

  Suril shrugged and from the way he was shifting and straightening up, I could tell that he was a bit embarrassed. No one knew he was gay except for me and Grandma. And Paulo too, I supposed, but he didn't exactly count. "I'm not gonna be getting an modelling offers any time soon but for the most part I'm doing okay."

  "You'll always be able to find work in porn," I said soothingly, perching on the side of Suril's armchair. I patted his hand in a reassuring manner. "I hear some people like to see it get rough and you're already half way to Snell's Law."

  Rafe's dark blue eyes expanded until I could've graphed them via the equation r equals sin theta. "Christ Jane, that's offensive!"

  Suril chuckled into 'Applied Vector Analysis', looking uncomfortable because it was Rafe and amused because it was Rafe. "Well you know, us ethnics are always in."

  "Just make sure everyone's wearing a condom," I advised, rubbing my bicuspids all over my index knuckle. I tasted like graphite mechanical pencil and house keys. "Because you wouldn't wanna get Chlamydia in your throat or boils up you bum."

  Rafe's face was so 'appalled Irish shoe-shiner' that Suril and I had to hoot ourselves back to grade nine Academic Math.

  "Oh Implicit Differentiation," I wheezed, bolting up. "I gotta take a dump guys."

  "See, you can have heaps more racy fun with Jane than you can have with Katrina," Suril told Rafe, grinning sheepishly.

  I hugged Suril hard because I loved him more than I loved Geometric Optics. "Especially once we factor my graphing calculator into the equation!"

  I hopscotched out of the living room, fondly thinking about Gradient Field, my latest and most beloved TI-89 Titanium graphing calculator. In the background, I half heard Rafe say something about not being able to believe that I hadn't gotten his sexy teacher dream, which I thought was the very Vertex of stupid. What did he think, that I was going to get his dreams via osmosis? Was I satellite enough to be receiving the signals of his dream life? The only sexy teacher dream I'd ever like to get would involve my Pre. Calculus teacher Mr. Khan, Gradient Field, and a heap of integrals but of course that was (taboo)22222222 because Mr. Khan was a happily married man and I was happily studying student.

  "I remember the first equation I ever graphed on you, Gradient Field," I remarked reminiscently, transferring my love for Mr. Khan to Gradient Field. "It's was 8x equals 16 – y2. The Vertex was (2,0) the Focus was (0,0) and the Directrix was x equals 4. I remember it like it was only twenty years ago."

  I got down to business in the washroom while quickly perusing my old grade eleven Addison-Wesley Chemistry textbook, which I'd always thought made some fine reading fodder whilst foofing. After skimming a few familiar pages on Neutralizations and Salts, I took a good look at myself in the mirror while I washed my hands to see what all the hype was about. I thought that it was about as obvious as a higher frequency equalling a smaller wavelength that Lucan wanted to date me because of my abundantly fertile cerebrum. Katrina, I wasn't.

  I had a bony, splotchy face reminiscent of a shoe, Uniball ink on the side of my crooked nose, two small pimples on my left cheek, buggy eyes that resembled what I'd just done in the can and junky hair that had been dirty blond when I'd been very small but was now cafeteria-style pallid gravy drizzled over the poutine of my face.

  "It's a good thing no one cares how Chemical Engineers look like," I said and moonwalked to the kitchen to fix up some snacks for my two friends. It was nice having two friends, just like it was nice having two copies of 'Advances in Organometallic Chemistry', not that I would ever stop reading Suril if his bindings came loose and I spilled veggie hamburger on him.

  I poured some Coke into two glasses and put the kettle on for round two of Tetley Tea. I could hear Suril and Rafe laughing in the living room. That made me happy because it meant that Rafe really was okay with Suril being gay and Suril was comfortable with Rafe knowing about it.

  "Oh ja Ulsef, oh ja," I uttered in my best German accent. I poured some ginger molasses cookies that Grandma had won off of Agnes Wilbraham onto a plate and then garnished them with a few giant cupcakes I found sitting on the table.

  I heard Rafe say indignantly from the living room, "She never told me that."

  Suril replied, "That's because her scientifically super-saturated brain can't understand…"

  I stopped listening when I saw that Grandma, in the true tradition of T day, had left me a bakery box full of toffee tarts, a container of tzatziki, two tomatoes and a pack of Trident gum on the counter. Pleased, I stuck some of the tarts on a plate and took it, along with the cookie cupcake plate to the living room.

  "...kissing him never even occurred to her," Suril was saying as I made my grand entrance. "Hi Jane."

  "I regally incline my head," I replied, regally inclining my head. I set my plate down on the coffee table. "I got the cookies Grandma won from Food Poker the other night and some cupcakes from I dunno where."

  "I brought them over," Suril said. "They're a thank-you gift for the thoughtful, um...science magazines you and Grandma bought me."

  I beamed as I offered cookies and cupcakes to Rafe. "It was highly Biological wasn't it? That faux-Paulo fellow had the most dicktastic region I ever saw."

  Rafe sputtered and choked on a bit of his cupcake. Suril nudged me with his crutch and gave me a look that said the derivative of the bottom minus the derivative of the top all divided by the bottom squared.

  I held out the plate to Suril. "You wanna use the Quotient Rule on that faux-Paulo?"

  "That's my 'shut-up' look Community College head, not my 'I-wanna-Quotient-Rule-that-guy' look," Suril said exasperatedly.

  I flopped down onto the sofa next to Rafe and sulked. "I'm not a Community College head, that's mean."

  "Well you did mess up that Hess's Law question," Rafe suddenly spoke up, his lips twitching. "Even I know how to do that noise now."

  Suril burst out laughing. "That's inspired I say!"

  I gave Rafe a hurt look.
"Ehtu chump from that boring old play?"

  Rafe ran a hand through his hair. "How come you never bothered to tell me that Lucan said to call him if I didn't wanna date you?"

  I gave that a spot o' thought while Suril continued to hoot Thioacetamide out his ears. "That is to me what mackerel-slapping in Uzbekistan is to me."

  Rafe blinked at me and then looked at Suril.

  "Something she's never thought about before," Suril gasped, attempting to gain control of his faculties.

  I licked at the split-ends in my bangs. "Don't worry, Lucan only told me to call him after the party so that you wouldn't get your panties into a jealous bunch."

  Rafe gaped at me, seemingly too outraged to even do long division, while Suril snorted up into laughter again.

  "It's not like we have to fornicate or some such unknown variable, just because Lucan's got the wrong idea of things." I tsked around a mouthful of hairdo. "See, being a TA of Advanced Calculus and Partial Differential Equations doesn't automatically denote that one is also of an Omnipotent variety." The kettle whistled numbers in the Mach range so I vaulted off the sofa. "Oh yeah, I have Coke in glasses too."

  Behind me, Rafe huffed, "Panties?!"

  "Fornicate!" Suril hooted.

  "Oh the fraaa-gility of the male ego," I lamented in my best South Indian accent.

  I made my tea in a leisurely fashion with extended pinky for hoity-toity's sake, loaded up that nonsense, along with the Cokes, onto a tray that I'd gotten at a Garbage Sale for two pennies and the gum I'd been chewing and pranced back into the living room like I was from Meticulous Maids.

  "...genius but fucking dense," Rafe was saying around a mouthful of blue icing.

  "Density is a scalar property," I told Rafe as I thrust my drink tray at him. "p equals m/v where density is represented by the Greek letter Rho."

  "Thanks Janie, my life is now complete," Rafe muttered, taking a glass of Coke.

  I smiled in a polite manner, turned my wares to Suril and stage-whispered, "Seems the lad's got an aversion to density."

  Suril tipped his glass in Rafe's direction. He appeared to be amused for some reason. "Seems more like frustration to me."

  "I don't have any feelings towards density," Rafe said loudly, sounding an English trifle irritable. Suril's massive cupcake must not've agreed with him. "Why the hell would I? And I'm not a frigging lad either!"

  I took my tea mug and foomphed down next to Rafe. "Don't worry your pretty freckles off Rafe, I'll transform you from Science Dud to Science Stud just in time for January exams."

  "Now that's a movie concept." Beaming approvingly, Suril gave me a high five. "Real, what you do call it, alliterative or some crap. Who wants to see another dorky loser turns popular hottie story? I say we need more Science Dud to Stud love."

  "Or how about Jock to Mach...number?" I tittered at my own sense of witty poetry and blew at my tea mug.

  "And Mr. Holtz has the nerve to say that your poetry is stilted and underdeveloped," Suril scoffed, taking another cookie. "His undies are undeveloped if you asked me."

  "Some of us actually like dorky losers," Rafe said, smiling at me. His eyes were ginger molasses cookies soft as they analysed my features. "It'd be sad if they changed."

  "Not to mention that no one gives a precipitate how Chemical Engineers look," I added, setting down my tea mug on the coffee table. I beamed Alizarin Yellow at Rafe. "Guess what? I'm gonna show Suril the present you bought me today; I forgot all about it and I just don't know how, it was so fabtastic!"

  Suril's eyebrows shot upwards. "You got Jane a present? What for?"

  Rafe blushed the vivid colour of Cu ions reacting with a solution of K4Fe(CN)6. "I was an ass about Lucan wanting to date her," he mumbled into his Coke glass.

  "You could've just said 'sorry but I can't balance this Redox Equation'." I pulled out the Chapters bag from my schoolbag. My heart rose in volume as I peeked into it. "Rafe it's so beautiful, (thank you)3."

  "What is it?" Suril was wiping his fingers on his jeans and looking like he did whenever he was about to tackle a Free-Body Diagram Dynamics problem. "I won't get fingerprints all over it, I promise."

  I handed it over with great care, half terrified I'd drop it. "We had a substitute in Physics and I got to talking with her and her favourite undergrad course ever was Machine Dynamics and she recommended a-"

  "'Fluid Dynamics and Dynamos in Astrophysics and Geophysics'?" Suril gaped at the grey and orange cover and then gaped at Rafe. "You bought Jane 'Fluid Dynamics and Dynamos in Astrophysics and Geophysics'?"

  Rafe was still blushing. If you squinted and imagined a bit you could make purple out of his eyes and face combined. "So what?" he demanded defiantly. "It's my way of apologizing to her. Or do you have a problem with that?"

  "A density problem?" I asked into Rafe's ear and snorted up (among other things) a mouthful of giggles.

  Suril was silent for a moment, ignoring my blatant hilarity I was a bit hurt to note, before blurting out, "If you hurt her then I'll be forced to do something...gay to you."

  I got a surprise as I was migrating my dripping nose into my house keys because Rafe decided to slide his arm around my shoulder and pull me close to him. He may have been blanching under his freckles but with his clotted cream complexion it was harder than a diamond to tell. "Fair enough."

  With narrowed eyes, Suril scrutinized Rafe's arm around me while I went on to draw an Acetone molecule. Finally, he said, sounding a bit embarrassed, "I really appreciate what you're planning on doing tomorrow."

  Rafe's fingers slid down my sweater sleeve and the bruises hidden beneath. "Now I've got my own reasons for doing it. McGregor's an asshole and he deserves whatever I do to him."

  I showed my teeth up into Rafe's face. "You're the second friend I ever had."

  "On that note I think I'll crutch outta here." Suril sniggered as he downed the rest of his Coke. "You guys probably still have a lot of things to practice."

  "You don't have to leave yet," I said, stuffing my sodden keys back into my pocket. "We could tag-team up a la a linear, polar-"

  "Okay man, catch you later," Rafe interrupted. "Don't you have homework to give him Janie?"

  "You really don't want to stay?" I asked as I rounded up his homework from my schoolbag. "The last time we decided to prove Trig. Identities for fun was in the Mesolithic Era."

  Suril snorted. "Do you really think I wanna sit here watching you two make out?"

  "It's just practicing," I clarified, pulling at my lower lip. "Much in the same way one practices using Riemann Sums. Without practice, one won't end up dumped or won't understand that a definite integral is a limit of Riemann Sums."

  "You got your work cut out for you," Suril said to Rafe, which was indeed a fact; I'd noted that the average student, typically, needed to work quite hard to maintain an average in the high 90's.

  "Like I haven't noticed," Rafe muttered, sighing.

  I gave him another cupcake and said, "The Angle of Reflection equals the Angle of Incidence," to make him feel better.

  "Thanks again man," Suril said as I helped him stand up and get his crutches sorted out. "Good luck with tomorrow."

  "Like I need luck to take down that fucker," Rafe said disdainfully. "I'm Italian…and don't even say it Janie."

  "I wasn't going to say that you're more Irish chappie than Italian stallion," I said, following Suril out of the living room as Rafe muttered under his breath in Italian behind me.

  "He likes you, you know," Suril said softly as I knelt down to help his get his one sneaker on. "The way he looks at you is all mushy. Kinda like Mom's oven-cooked ringra."

  I looked up at Suril and we both sniggered. Ringa meant eggplant in Gujarati and there was always hilarity to be had when someone mentioned a ringra. It reminded me of a hula hoop and, on occasion, the structure of a Constitutional Isomer of Cyclohexane.

  "Maybe Agnes Wilbraham's cookies are disrupting his bowels," I suggested, tittering into my sleeve. Which tu
rned out to be a wise decision because I got mucus all over it from snorting. I wiped my sleeve on the bottom of my sandal, which was a tribute to the Earth dirt anyhow and then took my sweater off, careful to keep Suril from seeing my bruised arm.

  He prodded his left crutch into my leg. "Was I or was I not right about Lucan liking you?"

  "All you said was that he might want to kiss me because I'm smart, sweet, funny and cute. You never said anything about him wanting to date me."

  "Well why would you wanna date someone if you didn't like them?"

  I thought that made some sense.

  Suril smirked as we left the house and walked/crutched down the front steps. "QED, dumbo. Just listen to what Rafe has to say with an open mind okay? It's not everyday that nerds like us can catch a ripped stud like Rafe Moretti."

  I did a head shake and hopped over a linear marchathon of ants. "Sometimes I just don't know from where your outlandish theories procreate."

  I walked Suril across the street and handed over his homework to Mr. Shah, who was on his hands and knees, examining his lawn at eye level with Suril's fossil of a magnifying glass.

  "If it wasn't so much sunny than I could use the torch," Mr. Shah said, squinting.

  There was a bit of a rumpus when he realized that he'd been frying an ant with the magnifying glass.

  "Aray bapray what am I doing? Suril bring out the hosiery!"

  Suril and I sniggered.

  Rafe was looking at the picture frames that sat on the mantel when I came back.

  "So what's going on here exactly?"

  I peered at the picture in question. "That's Halloween when I was in grade seven. Grandma's some transvestite from 'Rocky Horror' as she calls it and I'm a Dinitrogen Tetroxide molecule."

  Rafe burst out laughing. "That explains a lot! You make one helluva cute molecule, you know that?"

  I preened and beamed like Mr. Shah's 'torch'. "Well I did try to fart as much as I could because everyone knows that Oxides of Nitrogen are major air pollutants."

  "That pretty...insightful of you." Rafe studied another picture, still laughing. This one was of my Mom and Dad, holding hands and beaming as they posed in front of their first car. "You look a lot like your Mom you know. You have her smile."

  I lapped at my wrist. "I also have my Dad's poopy eyes."

  "They're not that poopy." Rafe led me back to the sofa. "Come on, I wanna to talk to you."

  "Rafe, I promise you that you'll get a one hundred on your Chemistry test." I took up my tea mug and had a sip. It was existing at a steady –23 degrees Celsius. "Or else int. sin x dx doesn't equal –cos x plus C."

  "Uh huh." Rafe finished off his Coke and shifted so that he was facing me. His expression was serious. "I probably should've told you all this at school or in the car but I really just wanted to sit down with you in private and properly explain myself so that you'd understand. Plus I didn't wanna have to worry about Katrina popping up and interrupting me."

  "Katrinaphobia is a rampant quandary plaguing the school environment," I agreed, helping myself to a toffee tart. "You want one?"

  Rafe shook his head and shifted around some more. He was looking like he didn't know how to use the Spectrophotometric Method to determine the Equilibrium Constant of a coloured species in Equilibrium. "When you came up to me on Tuesday, I thought you were weird and gross and messed up and kinda cool for what you decided to do for Shah. You're honestly like no one I've ever met before. You're always saying all this random science stuff that I never understand and you're on a totally different plane of thought than the rest of us and you don't give a shit what anyone thinks about you and you're just so different from all the girls I hang out with and date. I know people who act all tough and say that they don't give a shit what everyone else thinks of them but on some level they really do. You really don't."

  I swallowed a mouthful of toffee tart. "Well why would I? Grandma says that life is too short to fret about what every piddler and diddler farting around the plaza thinks."

  "What I'm trying to say is like you," Rafe said softly, his spiky lashes fluttering as he scanned my face. "A lot. And not just because you're my tutor."

  I licked at my hair and got flaky toffee all over it. "You said that I've become your friend remember? You said it in the hallway yesterday. I wouldn't be your friend if you didn't like me. I mean, you can't join the Alpha-Carboxyl group of one Amino Acid with the Alpha-Amino group of another without a Peptide Bond."

  Rafe caught hold of my chin and tilted my face towards him. "Janie."

  I blinked in his face. "Only Grandma calls me that."

  He leaned closer to me, curving his fingers around the side of my face. "Do you want me to stop?"

  "Negative cosecant squared x," I murmured, feeling as light-headed and tingle-infested as I had when I'd received a perfect score on the Canadian Mathematics Competition's Grade Eleven Hypatia Contest. "(d/dx) cot x equals."

  "I was jealous," he whispered. He was so close to me that I could've graphed all his freckles into a scatter plot. "That's why I got pissed at you at lunch."

  "I know. From a psychological standpoint, it's perfectly understandable."

  Rafe let go of me, leaving behind the warm press of his fingers against my skin. He looked wary. "What is?"

  "Your jealousy." I drank some more cold tea and goosebumps erupted all over my bare arms. I rubbed them against the back of the sofa to generate friction... "...where uk is the coefficient of kinetic friction."

  "Janie focus."

  I patted his arm with my tea mug. "It's really not as bad as you think. Sure Lucan might have a googolplex of 'skanky chicks hounding him' as you put it and all you have is Katrina with no girlfriend options after her but in time I'm sure that you'll have an equal, if not an exceeding, amount of skanky chicks hounding you too. You're a good enough looking fellow...certainly you're much more adorable and freckly than Lucan but he's got you beat in the tattoo and goatee division so I say it all ends in a Keq, if you catch my meaning."

  Rafe stared at me, his In ion eyes wide and searching mine. "You actually think...Holy Christ, how's a genius like you come up with all these shitass theories?"

  "My theories aren't shitass." Hurt, I drank my entire mug of tea and said around a mouthful of chattering molars, "I understand the Psychology of teenage boys better than you think. I'm not trying to hurt your feelings or be mean but since you-"

  Rafe's warm hand covered my mouth and stuffed all my words back down into my larynx. His hand smelled like ginger molasses cookies. "How's this for a theory Ms. Einstein...I'm pissed, not because I think you're not good enough for Lucan but because I like you. I'm jealous, not because Lucan's got tons of skanks and I don't, but because I like you. My 'Ra molecules are attracted to your Ja molecules' as you put it and I like you. Not as a tutor or a friend or some chick who's gonna help me break up with Katrina but like a guy likes a girl...physically and sexually and mentally and...uh mathematically. Get it now Janie?" His palm was caressing my lips, his fingers gently stroking my cheek. "I want you and I'm jealous that Lucan does too."

  I sneezed.

  We stared at each other for a nanosecond.

  "Oh Decarboxylation," I said, simultaneously moping Rafe's damp hand on my jeans and my nose on my tea mug. "Sorry so slushy."

  "I'll live." Fortunately Rafe didn't seem angry, just an atom stunned. He took his hand from my wrist but still kept up with scrubbing it all over my jeans. "So? What do you think?"

  Rafe was now wiping his hand on the inside of my leg. It didn't seem like he knew how to do it because he was wiping really softly and he was making me wiggly and tickly and how would he ever get proboscis paste off his hand in such a flimsy, caressing manner? "I think that's the weirdest thing I ever heard of."

  Rafe's hand froze on my inner thigh.

  "The weirdest thing," he repeated slowly.

  "C equals 3R."

  Phenol Red was creeping up onto his freckly face. "Some guy from Russia comes in to
flush your toilet regularly, you got a Grandma who steals other people's porn, gives your gay best friend porn...which you look at, takes fucking Kendo lessons, is getting a tattoo from my brother, dresses up like a tranny on Halloween and what I said to you is weird? This coming from the girl who's always got bits of her body in her mouth, has Letter food days, rubs that stupid rock all over her joints, quotes the dumbest, most senseless proverbs I've ever heard, wrote to me with make-up on garbage in code...and you're saying that me liking you is the weirdest thing you've ever heard?"

  "Yes."

  Rafe gawked at me and then started to laugh so hysterically it was like someone had told him that it was possible for Cu(II) ions to dissolve in water.

  I shrugged, said, "What the Folic Acid," and had a hysterical laugh too.

  And then, I didn't catch how exactly, Rafe wasn't laughing anymore because his mouth had ended up mashed on top of mine. He kissed me in a way he hadn't before - roughly and urgently and so deeply that it felt as though he was lapping all down my esophagus. He pushed me into the sofa, his body engulfing mine. I clung to him. My heart throbbed with such an intensity that I was certain it was going to leave an imprint against his chest. His tongue slid over mine and around my teeth, marking me and then slipped out to curl over my gasping mouth. He nibbled at my lower lip and murmured incoherent things that left me squirming against him even though I couldn't make any sense of his words.

  I supposed I didn't need to ask Rafe if we looked like that couple kissing at my locker had looked...we seemed to be just as wriggly and jammed up against each other as they had been.

  It was a bit impressive, kinda.

  Rafe's hands were at my waist, shoving my t-shirt up over my stomach as he licked over my jaw line and behind my ear. His breath splashed over my searing, itching skin and made my stomach react and smoulder like steel wool dipped in Cl gas.

  "Aldehydes are...oxidized by molecular Oxygen and Hydrogen Peroxide," I choked out. I gasped as he scraped his incisors down my neck.

  "Cut the science crap Janie," Rafe mumbled against my skin. His fingers were skimming all over my stomach, making me shake and shiver and I didn't know whether I was hot or cold or even how to find how much money you'd save in a RRSP account vs. a regular savings account. My system had been in Equilibrium and now Rafe was injecting heat and chills and force and pressure into me and I didn't know whether my molecules ought to be shifting to the right or the left or increasing or decreasing...and I'd always known these things! How could he do such strange psychological things to me? "We're studying Anatomy now and I'm gonna quiz you after this."

  "I never studied...Anatomy like before," I managed to say, arching up against his body so that his fingers would end up compressed between us and stop moving. My heart couldn't take much more of this static otherwise it'd surely implode and Grandma would never be able to get the stains off the sofa; she'd always hated the Dry Cleaners. Something about a Korean guy, those gelatinous potato noodles and Grandpa's old seersucker suit.

  Rafe raised his head and kissed me hard, his tongue thrusting against mine. "See this is how I like you," he growled, sliding his hands around me to grab my arse and pull me up hard against him.

  "This is too psychological for me," I moaned, turning my scarlet face into the sofa cushion. I was trying not to squirm because Rafe was really against me and he was shifting and pressing and there was a volatile explosion happening inside my intestines much like K reacting with water. "I feel funny to the power of 8."

  "God you smell good." He nuzzled the side of my neck, his spiky hair tickling my jaw. My eyes fell shut. "Sorta sexy."

  "I take the bath every night." I wriggled in his groping hands, feeling hot and shivery and breathless. Centrifugal force was making my brain go elliptical. No one had ever touched me like this and made my body feel like it was too large for my epidermis. "Whether I need it or not."

  "Mmmm." Rafe was nibbling his way across my collarbone. My fingers dug into his shoulders as he ground his body into mine. I gasped into the sofa cushions, feeling so much so thoroughly that I was supersaturated with it. "Tell me you aren't attracted to me now."

  "I'm not attracted to you now," I forced out, my chest heaving hard against his.

  "What?" My eyes snapped open at the sudden change in Rafe's voice. His eyes were the exact, dark colour of KmnO4 and they were all that I could see.

  "You said to say it," I whispered hazily, unable to help myself from reaching up to touch his cheek. It was softer than his Mom's focaccia bread. "I think you're squashing my bronchial tubings because I'm not breathing too stellar."

  Smirking, Rafe leaned down to kiss me again. He caught my lower lip between his teeth, tugging at it and making me make funny, breathy noises. He gave my tongue a good licking before pulling me up with him so that I was half sitting on his lap. "Better?"

  "If you do that at the party then I'll die the death of seven veils." I touched my lips, still feeling Rafe's wet warmth. "I really forgot to struggle this time. I can't help it, you make my insides all squirmy and my brain cells shifty."

  Rafe brushed tangles of hair from my overheated face. "Well? Once the party's over do you wanna go out with me? Be my girlfriend?"

  Astonished, I jerked away from him with too much momentum – which I'd easily be able to further develop a la p equals mv – and fell off the sofa. "Girlfriend?" I squawked, horrified. "How do you mean girlfriend?"

  Rafe frowned down at me with blood-infused lips. It seemed very equidistant that his mouth had just been evaluating all over mine instants ago. "Janie, I just told you how much I like you and then I made out with you and believe me, I wasn't thinking about the stupid party at all. How can you be surprised that I want you to be my girlfriend?"

  "How could I give your blabbings the appropriate amount of thought when your tongue was busy graphing hyperbolic functions inside my mouth?" More heat was flooding onto my face at the thought of me being Rafe's girlfriend. The very idea of it seemed more outlandish than Dalton's assumption that gas particles are close together.

  "Blabbings?" Rafe looked beyond offended. "I tell you how much I like you and you think I'm blabbing? Fuck, if you're not interested in me then say so."

  "Well Suril told me that you ought to like a person before you date them but he never said anything about girlfriends and boyfriends." I crawled back onto the sofa. "However, if we crudely let A equals B and B equals C than A must, therefore equal C, understand? I should like you before I be your girlfriend and Katrina won't believe that because why would I be your girlfriend if I didn't want you to kiss me?"

  Rafe narrowed his eyes. "Christ Janie, can't you gimme a straight answer? Why does every fucking thing have to come back to Katrina?"

  I raked my incisors down my wrist "Because she wants to marry you and call your children Severn and Astra and she can be mean to me. She put ham in my sandwich once knowing that I don't eat meat."

  "Who cares about Katrina? Yeah she's got a cruel streak, we know." Rafe's fingers curved around the back of my neck. He yanked me close to him so that only centimetres separated our faces. "Answers now, alright? Do you like me back? Would you wanna date me and be my girlfriend or this just a tutoring-practicing thing?"

  I blushed the colour of a Br solution. I thought about how nice Rafe always made me feel about myself and how it would be if I got to see him every day and frequent his house and have him frequent mine and tutor him whenever I wanted to and have him kiss my mouth. I remembered how he'd bought me 'Fluid Dynamics and Dynamos in Astrophysics and Geophysics' and said I was brave and didn't mind too much that I'd accidentally sprayed strawberry strudel on him and sneezed in his hand. "Maybe."

  He didn't let go of me. "Just maybe?"

  "Maybe more than maybe," I shyly admitted, looking at the freckles on his nose. They were sweet. I thought Rafe was sweet. "But I'm very terrified of Katrina and I can't help that. I know you don't like hearing it but she puts my entire system in a state of paralysis. I have a high
ly resilient case of Katrinaphobia you know."

  "Believe me, I know." He skimmed his knuckles down my cheek. "I'll make sure she stays away from you, okay? I'll figure something out before the party, I promise."

  I sighed in relief. "Isoprene is emitted by plants in response to heat stress."

  Rafe smirked and said, practically against my mouth, "So what do you emit in response to heat stress?"

  "Sneezes," I said and tried not to giggle in his face. Things always got a bit soggy when I had a laugh.

  "Lucky for me," he murmured and nipped at my bottom lip.

  It was so nice when Rafe kissed me and did funny things to my tongue with his tongue that I nearly forgot, again, to struggle. But I was determined, as Katrina on my mind and the party was tomorrow. I jerked my head away after one quick lick of Rafe's tongue, cried, "By Einstein's Postulates of Special Relativity you mustn't!" and shoved at his chest while squirming, which was the normal kind of squirming and not the funny squirming against Rafe that made my stomach turn into fluttery piles of AlBr3.

  Rafe had the utterly shocked expression of someone who'd just realized that yes, Acid Anhydrides do indeed react with Alcohols to give one mol of Ester and one mol of Carboxylic Acid. He hastily let go of me. "Did I hurt you?"

  I curved my mouth at him. He was such an adorable, thoughtful chimney sweep. "I was practicing. I think I emoted pretty good, don't you? Next time maybe I can thump your shoulder some. Don't be scared, I never thumped anyone before."

  Understanding smeared onto Rafe's clotted cream complexion. "Oh. Shit yeah, I forgot about that. I thought I bit your tongue without knowing it or something."

  "I like kissing you but I can't show it," I said sagely, making parabolas on the inside of my hair with my tongue. "Such is the craft of a true thespian."

  Rafe looked interested. "You like kissing me?"

  "As much as I like evaluating integrals, yes."

  "Well I've been told I'm a really hot kisser," Rafe bragged, pulling me close to him. "The ladies love me."

  "Well I've been told that I'm a really hot tutor...in my imagination." I crossed my eyes up at Rafe for something different. "The equations love me. Hey, when are we going to study for your Chemistry test? There's some tinglings happening inside my fingers that tell me I need to be doing homework."

  Rafe kissed my neck and made me feel squashy inside. "You sure that's what they're telling you?"

  "What else could itchy-scratchy fingers mean?" I tried to catch my breath; Rafe kept stealing it away and converting it into CO2. "My flame for Chemistry burns the characteristic blue-green of Barium atoms absorbing energy."

  Rafe did a licky thing behind my ear that made me shudder. "It's really hard to say no to you, you know that?"

  "Chemistry ahoy!" Beaming and wheezing, I grabbed Rafe's schoolbag from the floor and thrust it into his chest. "Did you get to work on that Calorimetry worksheet yet?"

  Rafe sighed as he dug out his binder. "I had trouble with that last Freon Refrigerator question."

  I was highly impressed. "You did the rest of that sheet and got all the right answers?"

  "Well I read over the notes you gave me and the book and I did what I could. How do you think I got rid of Katrina last night?"

  "I knew you had it in you!" I patted the spiky top of his head because, in spite of having him all down my mouth, he still was a little fresh-faced Irish laddie. "By the molar mass of Ytterbium, this is the best news I've heard all day."

  Rafe arched an eyebrow in surprise. "Really? I didn't think you were bothered."

  "I hide my emotions well," I said as I pulled out my pencil case from my schoolbag. "If you hadn't done the assignment I certainly would've been a vector disappointed but it's not like the pain would've stretched into positive infinity. I would've found a way to carry on for example."

  "...you're talking about homework?"

  "Quark Flavour Strange," I agreed, frowning. "What Flavour are you? Charmed maybe?"

  "Yeah, why not?" Rafe sighed some more and rubbed at his temple like he couldn't solve his Mechanism. "And here I was thinking that you might be jealous because Katrina was over last night."

  "Why would I be jealous?" Didn't Rafe understand that an ideal fluid is incompressible and lacks viscosity, and its flow is steady and irrotational? "She's still your girlfriend. It's true, I don't got good boobs like hers but I manage okay, mostly because I'm not a La Senza bra model."

  "Forget I said anything." Rafe flipped through his binder, his face carefully blank. "How about you show me how to do that stupid Freon question now? The answer I got wasn't anyway near the answer Mrs. Iverson gave us."

  "Gladly my child, gladly!" I bounced eagerly as I skimmed the question and examined what Rafe had done. My hands were shaking in excitement; how I loved imparting the wisdom of Chemistry upon the common masses. I smiled at Rafe and held my mechanical pencil tightly so that I wouldn't pinch his adorable, chalky cheek. "You've set up your equation correctly; it says that Freon is going from 20 degrees to freezing, meaning that a phase change is occurring so you have to add the Heat of Fusion equation to your Q equals-"

  "What about Lucan?" Rafe interrupted abruptly.

  I picked at my gums with my mechanical pencil. "Well I'm sure that he'd agree with how you've set up-"

  "He wants to date you, probably make you his girlfriend too." Rafe wasn't looking at me but rather was studying his Chemistry textbook intently. "What if he wants to kiss you like how I kiss you? Would you want him more than me?"

  I blushed so hard that it felt as though a phase change was occurring on my face...20 degrees to boiling in a pekosecond. This all was very Science Fiction-esque, two nice looking fellows liking me within the span of a few days. And Rafe, if he was to be believe, was actually jealous because he wanted me. Oh sin theta equals v/vs. It was like being jealous because your older brother had a case of Gippy Tummy. Not that I was as exotic as Gippy Tummy but I was on par with jock itch at least.

  Of course stranger things than a guy like Rafe deciding that he wanted a girl like me for a girlfriend had happened before, a Black Hole for example...which really was a kind of a strange and beautiful event; a star collapsing onto itself. "The Gravitational Force near a Black Hole is so strong that light can't even escape it."

  "For fuck sakes Janie," Rafe ground out, exasperated.

  "Oh Na sorry." With a face that was surely in early stages of vaporization...mHv Rafe would've been able to tell me since he now seemed to know what he was doing...I shifted a bit closer to Rafe. I did a very daring and bold thing, namely I took his hand in mine, which was still a bit shaky but that could've easily been calculated to being excited by Freon freezing. "You were nice to Suril today and didn't make him feel ashamed of himself. You're always nice to me too and I never feel like a nerdy loser when I'm with you. I like Lucan a lot because he understands all the things I say and because he's a TA and he's very wonderful and makes my brain go funny but I could never imagine kissing him...mostly because we never did that but I just like when you do it and I don't want to do it with anyone except you. You make my stomach go all funny and you're going to mash up Conner for me and Suril tomorrow because my arms are like Shredded Wheat and for that I'll like you for as long as the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is...2.2 x 10 to the 22 metres away, in case you were wondering."

  Rafe kissed me hard and made the inside of my mouth taste like his tongue.

  "Now teach me some Chemistry woman," he growled against my lips and made me feel all wriggly again.

  At the forward rate of all this wiggling action, I had to wonder if I'd been a Lubricus Terrestris at some point in one of my past lives.