String Theory

by Ashlyn Kane

  “Well, if my parents are to be believed, meddling in their children’s love lives is one of the great pleasures of retirement.”

  Ari controlled his own smile, but barely. “Mine have not said so, but I have surmised as much.” He put the tea leaves into the pot and poured the hot water over top.

  “Well, feel free to blame everything on me not being interested.”

  “Throw you under the bus?” Ari arched an eyebrow.

  Sohrab nodded, looking coy with his hands shoved in his pockets. In another lifetime, where Ari and Jax’s orbits hadn’t collided so spectacularly, Ari would have found this man appealing. “Why not? It’s what I plan to do to you.” He grinned, and Ari chuckled softly in surprise.

  “Well, fair’s fair.”

  “Yup. Now, how about I carry those cups out there while you finish brewing?” He stepped forward to gather up the tray with the mugs, and Ari watched him go. Sohrab was going to make someone very lucky someday.

  His phone vibrated, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, he found a message from Jax. Someone ordered this from Naomi last night and she made me make it for them. Not nearly as fun as making it for you. :( A second later, a picture of a Sex with the Bartender cocktail uploaded.

  Chuckling, Ari typed back, Miss you too, and was warmed to receive a string of heart-eye emojis in return.

  The timer sounded, and Ari put his phone away to deal with his chai.

  Sohrab might be lucky someday, but he would never be as lucky as Ari.

  WHEN THE door finally shut behind Sohrab and his parents, Ari cast a reproachful look at his own. “That was so awkward.”

  “It really wasn’t,” his mother said blithely. “Sohrab is lovely, and so are his parents. It was a pleasant evening.”

  “I felt like a fattened calf at auction.” Throughout dinner his parents had expounded loudly and at length about Ari’s musical accomplishments. The only things that lessened Ari’s embarrassment were the equally obvious comments from Armin and Jaleh and the shared looks of misery with Sohrab.

  “Don’t exaggerate,” his mother said.

  “I’m not. You kept pointing out my good qualities like you were trying to get Sohrab to buy me.”

  “Now you’re just being vulgar,” his mother sniffed and bustled into the kitchen to clean up. “And so what if we were trying to sell you a bit? We’re just trying to help.”

  Ari frowned. “I know, Maman, but no one asked you to.”

  “I don’t need an invitation to help my children,” she said, hurt coloring her tone.

  Great, now she was guilting him for being upset. “Look, you know I appreciate your support, but I don’t need your help finding a boyfriend.”

  “And why not?” She scraped some leftovers into the trash and let the lid fall back down with a clatter. “You haven’t brought anyone to meet us in years.” True, but it wasn’t like Ari hadn’t been dating. He just hadn’t dated anyone long enough to attempt that hurdle. “And you should have someone who makes you happy.”

  And more guilt. “I know you’re doing it because you love me, but I didn’t ask you to. If I ever want you to play matchmaker, I’ll let you know.”

  “And what will you do in the meantime? Be miserable and alone? Run yourself ragged? You’re not a boy anymore. You’re thirty-two. It’s time that you settle down, stop jet-setting around the world, and instead take care of family.”

  Ari swallowed against the hurt clogging his throat. As if his music, the tours, his life’s work, were just a way of passing time until he found someone to occupy him. “And then what? I just stop doing what I love and sit at home waiting for my doctor husband to return to me?”

  “Ari,” his father cut in.

  Ari frowned and shook his head. “That’s not the life I want. I like the one I have.” Then he turned around and left the house. He had the sudden desperate urge to see Jax.

  FOR THE first few moments when he regained consciousness, Jax couldn’t have said what woke him. By all rights he ought to have been down for the night, after a long shift at the bar followed by a frantic but thorough shift in Ari’s bed. His eyes felt like sandpaper and his body was an overcooked noodle, but when he took a deep breath and decided to continue sleeping, the soft notes of the piano drifted in again, and he couldn’t resist.

  Quietly, he climbed out of bed and padded to the doorway, the better to observe Ari in his natural habitat.

  He sat at the piano, backlit by the streetlight and the moon shining in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Aside from that, the room was dark as Ari measured out careful notes, occasionally pausing and backtracking, his head tilted to the side.

  It was beautiful, Jax thought—not at all conventional, halfway between a ballad and a lullaby. C, C, D, E, G, C, an experiment, a scattering of perfect chords, then the same notes out of sequence.

  “C4, E4, G4, C5, G5,” Jax murmured. “One, three, five, eight, thirteen. The Fibonacci Sequence. Did someone fall down a math rabbit hole?”

  Ari looked up, his features outlined in stark relief. He was gorgeous in the moonlight, the smooth line of his back highlighted in glimmering silver that also kissed his hair and limned his eyes. “Did I wake you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s okay, I don’t mind.” The view was worth it. Getting to hear Ari compose was worth it.

  Though Jax half expected him to get up now that he knew Jax was there, he remained at the piano, coaxing out a sweet, fanciful tune, almost hypnotic. He was working in a spiral, Jax realized with a soft smile.

  “I’m impressed that you noticed,” Ari admitted. His shoulders had hunched in as though he didn’t want to be seen, but he didn’t stop playing.

  Jax rescued a pair of boxers from the bedroom floor and slipped them on before joining Ari on the piano bench, their thighs pressing together. He watched Ari’s hands for a moment and then copied the tune up two octaves. Ari let him and shifted to an accompanying set of chords, incorporating complex harmonies that added a mournful undertone.

  He felt like he owed Ari something of himself for letting Jax see him like this, when he was obviously at his most sensitive, his most vulnerable. He’d been having trouble writing music, and he didn’t like anyone to hear things until he was ready—but he was letting Jax.

  Jax could respond in kind.

  “I’m pretty good at hearing numbers, I guess,” he started. But Ari would know that much from Jax’s work at the bar and what he’d already admitted from his youth, so that didn’t really count as sharing. “Pattern recognition—that’s one of the things my mom and I used to do together when I was a kid. She’d make it a game.” He paused. “She’s a professor of mathematics and cryptology at Queen’s.”

  There. That was as good a start as any.

  Ari stopped playing for long enough that they both faltered, but eventually he started again and Jax followed, both of them a little slower this time. It was easier to have something else to pretend to focus on. “You don’t talk about her much.”

  Jax let out a long breath. Here was his opening. His heart beat a little too fast, out of sync with their song. “Yeah, well, we haven’t exactly been on the best of terms since I chose MIT over her university for my PhD.”

  To his credit, Ari only missed one transition, but the disharmony resonated unpleasantly through the room. He corrected immediately. “You have a PhD in math?”

  Jax sighed. “No. That’s another point of contention. I’m ABD. All but dissertation.”

  At that Ari stopped playing and turned his attention fully to Jax, who put his hands in his lap. Ari closed the keyboard cover. “Why didn’t you finish?”

  Jax tried a smile, but it felt anemic, so he let it slide away. “Same reason as everybody else who was supposed to graduate in 2020. The pandemic hit and I came home.” He knew it had been the smart decision regardless of what had followed. “I always planned to go back, but I….”

  After a moment of silence, Ari placed his hand on Jax’s knee. Their thighs were still touc
hing, and now that Ari wasn’t working the piano pedals, their ankles were too. “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m willing to listen.”

  Jax hadn’t even talked this out with Hobbes or Sam, but the words seemed to bubble out of him. “I wanted to go back. My project is done; my advisor had verbally approved me to defend before everything….” He gestured to the room to indicate went to absolute shit. “And then he died, in April.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It feels shitty to say, because my mom was a great single parent and I never felt like I needed a father figure, you know? She’s aromantic, she chose to raise kids alone on purpose, and she was good at it. But he was like a father to me.”

  His voice cracked.

  Then Ari took his hand, and everything suddenly got much harder to swallow. If he said he was sorry—

  But he didn’t. “May this be your last sorrow.”

  Jax blinked at the sentiment, then managed a small quirk of his lips. That must be a Persian thing. He liked it. “Thanks.” He finally managed a breath that didn’t make his lungs shake. “Anyway. I’m dealing with failing to live up to parental expectations. Not like the whole world doesn’t have PTSD right now, but how dare I bring shame on the Hall family name by failing to complete my doctorate. Like extenuating circumstances count for nothing, or all the work I did during the pandemic. Or like the highest and best thing a person can do is get a PhD in applied mathematics.”

  Ari squeezed his hand. “It’s never easy to disappoint parental expectations.”

  Understatement. Jax squeezed back. “Our conversations are kind of… fraught these days.” He huffed. “This is not great conversation for three a.m.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Ari stood and, still holding Jax’s hands, urged him to follow. “Some things are easier to say at three a.m.”

  The understanding and compassion in his gaze were too sweet, too much. Jax pressed forward and kissed him, deep and quiet as the night. Slowly, Ari guided him back to bed, not breaking the kiss until they settled back on the mattress. They rolled into each other and arranged their heads on the same pillow. They kissed some more, but it never turned heated. Not that Jax wanted it to.

  He fell back to sleep between one kiss and the next, Ari’s arm around him grounding him as he drifted away.

  Chapter Twelve

  ARI PUT the last touches on his recording of the latest song—working title “Golden Ratio”—sent it off to Noella, and stretched. He hated the computer side of composing.

  A glance at the clock told him it was almost noon. Afra would be there any minute.

  He contemplated the contents of his fridge and wondered if Afra would want a beer. It seemed like a beer kind of lunch.

  Afra arrived with sushi and headed straight for the couch and coffee table. She said yes to the beer.

  “What happened?” she asked once she was comfortably curled up with food in her lap and her drink within reach.

  “They set me up. They brought over this doctor Baba knows.”

  “They didn’t!” Afra’s eyebrows flew up.

  “They did.” He stabbed at a tuna roll. “It was awful. They invited his parents too. And then everyone sat around and pretended like both sets of parents weren’t trying to sell us to each other.”

  “Oh my God.” She pressed a hand to her cheek and shook her head. “Tell me he wasn’t terrible.”

  Ari groaned. “No, at least he wasn’t that. I might have actually been interested if I’d met him elsewhere and, you know, two months ago.”

  Afra smiled. “Yes, there is that.”

  “He was pretty understanding about that too.” He shoved the tuna roll into his mouth and chewed.

  Afra sipped her beer and watched him. “What did they think would happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Ari did not wail. “It’s not like I’d ever want to date some guy they brought home for me, even if Jax weren’t an issue. And a doctor? Seriously? It’s not like we’d have time to see each other. Our careers are totally incompatible.”

  “True.” Afra shook her head. “Considering you never even liked it when someone else picked your ice cream flavor for you, I’m not sure why they thought you’d let them pick your boyfriend.”

  Ari groaned and chewed another bite aggressively. “Then, when I told them how, how… not cool the whole thing was, I got another lecture about being old and single.” He pulled a face. The tune was wearing thin. Afra was lucky to have largely avoided that lecture, since she met Ben in her midtwenties, but she’d had to endure years of “So, grandchildren?” instead. He wasn’t sure he’d trade.

  “Like most people aren’t getting married in their thirties these days.”

  “Right? But even if they weren’t, even if I wanted to stay single for the rest of my days, that’s up to me.”

  “Hear, hear,” Afra cheered and lifted her glass.

  Ari’s mouth turned down, and he looked at his plate of rice and fish. “She said I needed to get a husband so I’d stop touring.”

  Afra sat up straighter. “She did not.”

  “Apparently all these years I’ve just been… killing time, waiting for a doctor to make me his househusband.”

  “Ari, you know I’m sure she didn’t—” Ari gave her a look. “Okay, maybe she did mean it about the touring, but she probably doesn’t expect you to never play or work again. Just….” Afra shrugged.

  Ari nodded. It wasn’t like he didn’t understand that his parents were getting older and worrying about how much time they had left to see Ari happy, but it didn’t make the judgment any easier to deal with. He’d wanted to tell Jax about it, but he didn’t want to take Jax’s moment, to make him feel overrun. And explaining why his parents thought he was single would take more than a few lines of explanation. Despite Jax’s issues with his mother, Ari wasn’t sure Jax would understand how intense his parents could be. It wouldn’t be out of character for them to show up at the bar to meet Jax should Ari fail to introduce him soon enough.

  “I don’t know why I’m trying to defend them,” Afra huffed. “I know they love us, but you can’t just expect your kids to want what you want, to fit into the boxes you give them. That’s not how kids work—it’s not how people work!” She took an agitated gulp of beer. “And the more you push them to fill those roles, the more they either bend and contort themselves to fit in and lie and make themselves unhappy, or the more they rebel and—” She pressed a hand over her eyes.

  When she didn’t continue, Ari prompted gently, “Afra?”

  “Or the more they do both—rebel just for the sake of having something of their own, and then when they hit trouble, they hide the consequences and lie just to avoid disappointing my parents.” Her mouth trembled, and Ari felt on the edge of something important.

  My parents?

  This wasn’t like her. Normally she was sharp, sunny, not prone to outbursts of emotion. He knew she was likely still reeling from the aftereffects of IVF, both hormonal and emotional, the second of which had only been confirmed a failure two weeks previous. But something told him this went deeper than that.

  He licked his lips and stalled for time. “It… it sounds like you’re speaking from experience.”

  What had she done? He tried to think back to when she was a teenager. That was when children rebelled, wasn’t it? He would’ve been what? Eight? Twelve at most during that stage of her life. Had she ever been in trouble? Had she come home late? He didn’t remember.

  She laughed, but it was a brittle, humorless thing. “Yeah, you could say that.” She set the beer bottle down, empty. It thunked on the table with resounding finality.

  Ari decided to tread carefully. “Do you… want to talk about it?”

  “I have been, sort of.” She took a deep breath and blotted her face with one of the clean sushi napkins. “Though I guess you didn’t know it at the time.”

  Ari had no idea what she was talking about. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she echoed. “I’m going to have to do better
than that, I know.” She tapped her nails on the arm of the couch, biting both lips. “I had a boyfriend in high school.”

  Ari wanted to make a smart comment—what a rebel she’d been, dating a boy at the age girls generally dated boys, when their parents had had no strict rules against it—but it didn’t seem like something he should tease about right then. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Yeah, well. Maman and Baba didn’t know. He wasn’t exactly someone they’d approve of. He didn’t take enough academic courses, and he wasn’t going to go to university. You know what they would have said.”

  “That he wasn’t a good long-term investment, emotionally,” Ari surmised. “He had no ambition. He would not be able to support a family.”

  She flashed him a quick, mirthless smile. “Wow, it’s almost like we grew up in the same house. But yeah, that’s exactly what they would have said. And I know, because they said it anyway, even though they had no idea I was seeing him.”

  Ari winced.

  “And you know what the funny thing is? He got a great job after graduation, working with Hydro One. Now he’s got a wife and two kids and, like, seven dogs. Guess he showed them.”

  Ari still didn’t know where this was going. “So he was your boyfriend…?”

  “Yeah, he was. And I… I was dating him in part because I knew it’d piss Maman and Baba off, because their expectations made me so angry I could scream. I thought, you know, we moved to Canada so we could have more freedom, not so we could recreate the expectations of Iran in another country. Which is way harsher than they deserved, but I was a teenager. But also… he made me laugh. He was kind, in a goofy way. He didn’t care that I was smarter than he was, which let me tell you, that is rare. A lot of the guys I dated after were really sensitive about that.”

  That, at least, was one dating pitfall Ari had managed to avoid by being male. “I apologize on behalf of my gender.”

  “Thank you, I accept.” This smile had a little more emotion behind it. “Anyway. We broke up right before I left for university, and I was… heartbroken. But I couldn’t come to Maman and Baba about it, because they didn’t know I’d even been seeing anyone.”