by Ashlyn Kane
“I see.” He cocked his head and took Jax in fully. “I had hoped, if you forgave me, that you might be willing to join me again tonight.”
The thought of another night in that comfortable bed with Ari curled up nearby was so tempting, but….
“As much as I’d like to get acquainted some more,” Jax said slowly, “I’m kind of exhausted. Another side effect, unfortunately. I’ll probably be asleep within the hour.” Just thinking about bed made him yawn.
“That is understandable. Would you like a ride home?”
Jax had picked his bike up on his way home from Ari’s, but he hadn’t taken it to work today. It didn’t take a genius to realize that scatterbrainedness and motorcycles should not mix. “A ride would be great.”
Ari gathered his notebook and headphones and slid everything into his messenger bag. He finger-combed his loose, riotous curls away from his face. For a second, Jax nearly threw the plan out the window and asked Ari to take him home for another kind of ride. But his chemical-induced exhaustion was no joke, and Jax wasn’t exactly in the mood after a day spent spiraling.
That didn’t mean he wouldn’t feel differently after a full night’s rest.
“Hey, Ari?”
“Yes?”
“How about you treat me to brunch tomorrow, by way of apology.” A soft slow smile was curling Ari’s lips. “At your place.”
“For you,” Ari said with that wonderful fond look in his eyes, “that can definitely be arranged.”
Chapter Eight
ARI HADN’T expected Jax to be so upset with him. He didn’t have experience sleeping with someone who didn’t feel romantic attachment, but he supposed ignoring text messages was rude no matter the circumstances.
But he’d finished off the first three songs now, at least, and rerecorded them for Noella. Which meant that when he dropped Jax off—with the world’s most awkward nonkiss good night because Ari couldn’t figure out if it was inappropriate—he didn’t need to go straight home to compose.
He needed to go to the twenty-four-hour grocery to shop for brunch.
Fresh fruit was a must. He debated champagne for mimosas, but Jax couldn’t drink alcohol before dinnertime, so he nixed that idea and bought fresh-squeezed orange juice—and the nicest loaf of bread he could find, farm-fresh eggs, the softest, freshest prosciutto, heavy cream for whipping, real vanilla, maple syrup, feta, cucumber, parsley, orange blossom jam…. Was he going overboard? This was an apology brunch, not a romantic one.
Shit.
On the other hand, if he bought enough food, he could justify Jax staying for dinner too, and then they could have champagne.
He woke up at quarter to seven, wide awake, and his brain was already in the kitchen thinking about which fruit he should cut up first when he realized his phone had woken him.
The text was from Jax.
I’m so sorry! I guess it’s my turn to be a dick. I have to cancel brunch.
Ari’s heart sank. A second text came in.
I’m really super sorry, and I would never cancel without the best of reasons! Sister needs help with the kid, though.
Tucking his hurt away, Ari wrote back That is understandable. Brunch can wait. Besides, it would be the height of hypocrisy to complain.
Ugh! But *I* don’t want to. :(
His lips quirked. Knowing Jax had been looking forward to today as much as he had soothed his disappointment.
Me neither. But brunch will still be here after you have helped your sister.
Good.
Ari waited for more—Jax was rarely taciturn—but after a few minutes of silence, Ari put his phone back on the nightstand and rolled over for a few more winks.
When he woke again, it was almost nine and his phone was vibrating on the nightstand once again.
Breakfast with my new date isn’t nearly as enjoyable.
I should hope not.
He dropped his phone and headed for the shower. Several minutes later, clean and hungry, he brought his phone to the kitchen. He was nibbling on some of the fruit he’d bought the night before when he checked his phone again.
At least she’s entertaining, Jax had written and then shared a series of pictures—a Caucasian toddler sitting at a kitchen table with her face smeared in a combination of crumbs and berry juice, the same toddler sitting in Jax’s lap for a selfie, her fluffy golden hair and bright blue eyes a match to Jax’s own. This is Alice.
God, they were cute. He tapped to enlarge the photo. Jax was smiling at the baby, ignoring the camera, while she was reaching for it, clearly eager to play with the toy. A few old friends had complained about their kids’ desire to play with the phone, and it looked like Alice was no different.
Alice. Huh. What a coincidence.
Ari looked at the adorable chubby face. The sizzling, popping sensation of creative inspiration bubbled in the back of his brain. He crossed the room in quick strides, searching for his notebook. He needed to make some adjustments to his lyrics.
JAX WOKE up early, deliberately took his pill when his phone chimed, and was contemplating the best outfit for a booty-call-slash-brunch-date when his phone rang.
“Hi, George. What’s up?”
“Are you doing anything today? I mean, I know you’re working later, but what about right now?”
There was a tinge of desperation to his voice, and Jax bit his tongue. “Why? What’s going on?”
“Sam’s at work, all sorts of new employee stuff, and I was meant to be taking it easy today so I could watch Alice. We don’t have a day care yet.” He huffed.
“And?”
“And someone fucked up—at my work, I mean. Royally. And the client is baying for blood, and my boss needs me on it, only it’s several hours of work and I can’t—”
“Say no more. Do you want me at yours or to bring her here?”
“Jax, you’re a life saver,” George said eagerly. “Normally our place would be easier, but there are boxes everywhere…. Calvin won’t mind you having a kid at home all day?”
“George, if you didn’t figure out that Hobbes won’t mind a kid, then I don’t know what to tell you.”
He laughed. “Good point. Okay, give me a few to pack her up and I’ll be there soon. Like, thirty minutes?”
“Do you need me to come get her?”
“Your bike doesn’t exactly have room for a car seat, not to mention the several bags a toddler comes with.”
He had a point. “See you in thirty, then,” Jax laughed and hung up.
Only now he had to cancel on Ari. Fuck. Last night, Jax’s dream self got plowed into the mattress with his ankles around his ears, but it looked like his waking self would have to keep waiting.
He texted Ari and was careful to make the message sound appropriately apologetic and disappointed. Then he went to the kitchen to find breakfast for himself and a baby.
George looked ready to kiss him when Jax accepted Alice and her bags. “I can’t thank you enough. Normally I might tell him to deal without me, but they’re a bit nervous about me having moved so far away, even though it was their decision to go remote permanently.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. That’s what brothers-in-law are for. It’s why you moved so close, right?” They’d found a temporary rental not ten minutes away and were searching for something more permanent.
“Exactly. Okay, be good for your uncle Jax and I’ll see you at the end of the day. One of us will be back to pick her up as soon as we can.”
Jax squeezed his precious niece and pressed his face to her downy head. “Like I said, don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’ll be back before my shift at seven. Now go—make money and wow your bosses. Say bye-bye to Daddy, Alice!”
She lifted a chubby hand and waved at George as he backed away and then dashed to his car.
Jax shut the front door and then stared at Alice. “Alone at last,” he said as it dawned on him that he was indeed alone with his niece for the very first time and it had been years sin
ce he last took a babysitting job. “Well, today should be interesting,” Jax told Alice. She nodded seriously. “Do you like strawberries?”
She clapped. “S’awberries!”
“Let’s go find some, then.”
At least she wasn’t afraid of him. Otherwise it’d be a really long day.
George had texted a tentative schedule—when he could expect her to be hungry, when she’d want a nap. One of the texts was just a poop emoji followed by 10:30. Alice beat the clock by three minutes.
“Your dad is kind of scary good at this,” Jax told her while he changed her diaper on the living room table. One good thing about living with a doctor—they always had plenty of bleach wipes to disinfect the furniture.
“Good,” Alice agreed. Then she attempted to kick him in the face.
By nap time—eleven—Jax was ready to sack out with her. He put her down for a nap in the middle of his bed, pillows piled on either side so she couldn’t roll off, closed the curtains to make it at least sort of dark, and crept back toward the door. But as he was closing it behind him, something got caught underneath, and he stopped to pick it up.
Dear Mr. Hall,
Pursuant to our email of September 3….
Jax bit back a curse and crumpled the paper in his fist. Then, in a fit of uncharacteristic rage-induced determination, he went back into the bedroom, dug under his desk for his school laptop, and crept out again. If this was the universe sending him a sign, fine. It could maybe take a lesson in subtlety—Jax didn’t need to be babysitting his niece to be reminded that he had adult responsibilities—but fine. He needed to confront reality. Message received.
The laptop hadn’t been powered on in months, and it took half an hour to run a bunch of updates before he could do anything. In honesty, it didn’t have much software to update—just the antivirus and the operating system, a web browser, and the two programs Jax had written, which took up most of the memory.
It still had Excel, though, and he pulled that up, along with his bank account information. It was time to take a look at the facts.
Fact one: He’d been ready to defend for more than a year. His thesis was based on a computer program that modeled population growth and decay within biological systems. Grayling, his advisor, had pronounced it ready to defend in March of 2020, just before the world imploded, when Jax had been conscripted as his assistant on a modeling project for the Massachusetts Department of Health.
Fact two: He’d already paid thousands of dollars to not finish his PhD, because if he withdrew completely, it would cost him forty grand to go back and finish, even if all he had to do was sit in front of the committee.
Fact three: Jax didn’t pay a lot in rent, but he also didn’t make enough money to justify continuing to spend thousands of dollars in “nonresident graduate tuition” per term.
It wasn’t sustainable. He knew it wasn’t. He could’ve done the math on this when he was ten. If you factored in scholarships, he’d spent more money not going to MIT than he had actually attending four years of classes.
The problem was that the idea of returning to Cambridge, walking through the Simons Building, knowing his advisor wouldn’t be there… sucked.
Also, he needed, like, thirteen thousand dollars.
Grimly, Jax opened Excel and began entering numbers—expenses, estimated income, assets. He might not be able to do anything right now, but he at least needed to know what he didn’t know—a bottom line, a final figure, a stretch goal.
Twenty minutes later he blew out a long breath and closed his laptop, ready for a different kind of distraction.
Hopefully Alice would wake up soon.
ARI SPENT the majority of Thursday fussing with “Alice,” until it became less wonderland and more psychedelic musings. He moved the piano melody down an octave and transposed it to a minor key. Then he took a pen to the lyrics.
It seemed so obvious now that Jax wasn’t some innocent who’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a nonsense world. No, Jax was the grinning Cheshire Cat—an outsider who understood the illogic of the world but didn’t belong to it. Not really. He was holding too much of himself back.
Ari wanted to see beyond the grin, but he had the suspicion that if he tried, the whole of Jax would slip away bit by bit, just as the cat did in the book.
When he’d reworked it to his satisfaction, he sat down to rerecord, first the piano and then the violin. He even took video of the violin part so Noella would have something to post to Instagram. In a separate file, he recorded the vocals too, even though he hated his own singing voice, and packaged the whole thing off for Noella.
Got them, her reply email read three minutes later. I want to share these with Bill and Yaron, and they’re going to want to talk about them. Tomorrow good for you?
Tomorrow said like that, with no given time, likely meant he’d be in video meetings all day. He winced, but his album was already behind schedule, so he didn’t have much room for complaint. Fine, he wrote back.
Then he pried himself off his piano bench to get some exercise, since he was going to be sedentary all day tomorrow.
HE TURNED out to be right about the meetings.
“Stop fucking around with ‘Alice,’” Noella told him right away. “It’s done.”
Ari blinked. She’d never been so satisfied with one of his tracks that quickly. “Okay?”
Fortunately Noella had plenty of experience with artists and knew what he needed to hear. “Look, is it your typical blockbuster track? No. Is it going to be the emotional powerhouse behind the album? No. It’s introspective and kind of thinky, which, let’s face it, is your milieu. And I know I’m always harping on you to inject some emotion, but it’s also beautiful the way it is. Do you have a vocal artist in mind for it? With the caveat that Leonard Cohen is not an option.”
She reminded him of that every time he wrote a song that came off as weird and kind of fucked-up. “Bon Iver, maybe?” he hazarded, and she hummed, so she must not have thought it was the worst idea.
He had a grand total of twenty-three minutes between the first call with Noella and the subsequent call with her, Bill, and Yaron.
So of course his phone rang right in the middle of it.
“Hey,” Jax said, and Ari could hear the grin through the phone, even if it sounded like it might be fading away. “What’re you up to today? Got time for that rain check?”
Ari sighed. “I’ve been on conference calls all morning, and I have”—he checked the clock on the microwave, remembered the microwave was in the process of reheating his lunch, then looked at the oven instead—“eleven minutes before the next one.”
“Take that as a no,” Jax sighed.
“We could do dinner instead?” Ari suggested. “If you’re not okay with french toast after 6:00 p.m., we could go out somewhere.” Even though he’d rather have quick access to a bed.
“Breakfast foods are all-day foods, but I work at seven. Picked up an extra shift.” Well, crap. “What about tomorrow?”
“I’m free all day.”
“Not anymore.”
JAX SHUFFLED out of his bedroom and stifled a yawn. Picking up extra shifts at the bar might be good for the bank account and his Finally Acquiring the PhD—a plan that he was basically approaching from the side because he wasn’t ready to face it head-on—but his body was not a fan and now insisted on afternoon naps. He passed out only an hour or two after his call with Ari.
At least Murph had been relieved when Jax approached him looking for more hours.
“To be honest, b’y, you’re pulling in enough business these days that we need more staff almost every night. I’d rather give more work to my people than start advertising for new folk.” He pulled his phone from his pocket to look up the schedule. “Did you want to work every night?”
Jax did. The sooner he scraped up the money, the sooner he could put the PhD and everything that came with it behind him.
In the meantime he had Hobbes to deal with. “Again?�
� he asked when Jax announced he was on his way to work.
So Jax was probably going to have to tell him the truth, sooner rather than later, because the way things were going, he wasn’t ever going to see him unless he came to the bar.
He let himself mull it over in the back of his mind as he worked his shift, thinking of what to say. But when he got home just after midnight, the lights were still on and Hobbes was sitting in the living room, eating one of the rare cookies that hadn’t made its way to the doctors’ lounge at the hospital.
“Hey,” Jax said quietly as he closed the door behind him and locked it. “You’re still up.”
“I don’t know what I’ve ever done to make you think I turn into a pumpkin at midnight.” A glass of brandy sat on the table next to him, and a mug of tea steamed on the coffee table, obviously for Jax. “Come sit down for a sec?”
Hobbes was less than a decade older than he was, but sometimes his dad vibe was too much. But maybe that was just because Jax hadn’t ever had one. Either way, Jax dutifully climbed the stairs and took the seat opposite him on the couch. “What’s up?”
Wordlessly, Hobbes held up a crumpled piece of paper.
Ah. That. Jax vaguely remembered leaving that in the kitchen. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” Hobbes said, tone laced with any number of complex emotions—anger, humor, exasperation, grief. “Seems like someone’s been getting hate mail from his would-be alma mater. You want to tell me about that?”
“Not really.”
Hobbes closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Kid—”
“Give me a break. I’m seven years younger than you.”
“Yeah, the same age as my little sister. Who will always be a kid.” He huffed. “Jax. Just tell me what’s going on.”
Fuck it. Jax’s eyes felt like sandpaper, and he wanted to go to bed so that it could be tomorrow already. “I’m going to finish it, okay? Next semester. I’m going to go back to Cambridge and defend and just… close the chapter. Move on.”