Advanced Physical Chemistry

by Susannah Nix

  As Caleb’s eyes roved over her face, she saw the same emotions she’d seen that day three weeks ago: naked longing tinged with regret.

  He cleared his throat. “Penny, I…”

  She watched his chest rise and fall, waiting for him to say whatever it was he’d come here to say. She wouldn’t be throwing herself at him today. The confidence that had emboldened her last time had drained away, replaced by a sense of resignation.

  Deep furrows sprouted across his forehead. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  That was something, anyway. A nice consolation prize.

  Her shoulders sagged as she exhaled an unsteady breath. “I don’t want to lose you either.”

  “Then ask me to stay.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. She stared. “What?”

  His eyes were unwavering and clear. “Ask me to stay.”

  A painful knot twisted in her stomach. “I can’t.” No matter how much she might want to, she could never do that to him.

  “Yes, you can.”

  She shook her head. “You have to go.”

  “What if I didn’t?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He took a step toward her. “If there was a way I could stay, would you want me to?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again, not sure what to say to that. Afraid to let herself hope there was a chance. “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter. This is your life we’re talking about. Your career.”

  Impatience flared across his face. “Just answer the question. Hypothetically, would you want me to stay?”

  Tears burned in her eyes, and she looked down to hide them from him. “Of course I would.”

  His hand closed on hers. “I’m not going to medical school.”

  The room tilted around her as she jerked her head up. “What?”

  A heart-stopping smile lit his face. “I don’t want to go, so I’m not.”

  He actually sounded serious. Penny yanked her hand out of his grasp. “You can’t do that. That’s crazy.”

  His smile slipped. “It’s done. That’s why I went home this weekend. To tell my parents I wasn’t going.”

  “Wait. That’s why you went home?” Her head spun as she tried to grasp what he was telling her. “When did you decide all this?”

  His gaze dropped to the floor and he shifted his feet. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. But I made up my mind last week.”

  “Last week? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The look he gave her was accusing. “I told you I was having regrets.”

  “I thought it was just last-minute nerves.”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me to stay. But you didn’t.” The hurt in his eyes broke her heart in two.

  She reached for his hand again, twining her fingers around his. “Of course I didn’t—I couldn’t do that to you. You think I didn’t want to?” Her voice shook with emotion. She cradled his hand in both of hers and brought it to her lips. “It would have been selfish to try to talk you out of your dream.”

  Caleb lifted his other hand to her face, skimming his fingertips over her cheek. “It was never my dream. I wanted to be talked out of it.”

  “I didn’t know that!” she said, ashamed that she’d misread him so badly. “Even if I had, I don’t think that I would have done it. I can’t be responsible for something like that. It has to be your choice.” She squeezed his hand to disguise the trembling in her own. “Please tell me you’re not doing this for me.”

  “I’m doing it for me.” He swiped his thumb under her lashes to catch the moisture collecting there. “I never wanted to be a doctor. I was only doing it to please my father. I would have been miserable.”

  She wanted to believe him. So much. But she was terrified he was making a terrible mistake for the wrong reasons. She couldn’t be the person who kept him from going to medical school after he’d worked so hard to get there.

  She sucked in a shaking breath. “What if I told you I didn’t want to see you anymore?”

  He flinched, but his eyes remained locked on hers, and his voice was steady when he spoke. “I’d be crushed, but it wouldn’t change my decision to stay. I’m not meant for med school.”

  Penny’s vision swam, blurring his beautiful face, and she let out a choking sob. “You’re really staying?”

  His arms closed around her, dragging her into the sheltering warmth of his body. His lips met hers in a tender caress that quickly intensified into a fierce, heated, shattering kiss that left her gasping and lightheaded.

  “I’m really staying,” he murmured against her lips.

  She pulled back and punched him in the arm. Hard.

  “Ow! What the hell?”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me? You could have told me before you went to your parents!”

  Caleb rubbed his arm where she’d landed her blow. “Honestly? I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I’d be able to stand up to my father. I didn’t want to say anything in case I caved under the pressure.”

  She threw herself back into his arms. “I thought you wanted to break up with me. I had no idea you were thinking of this.”

  “I’m sorry.” He lifted her chin and pressed his forehead against hers.

  “I’m sorry that you had to face your father alone.” She gripped him tighter and shoved her face into his neck, breathing in the comforting, spicy-coffee scent of his skin. “I wish I could have been there for you.”

  “You were. I just kept thinking about you, and you gave me strength.”

  “I’m so glad you’re staying,” she said to his rough cheek. “You have no idea. I tried so hard not to get attached, but I failed miserably. I’m terrible at this.”

  He smoothed his hand over her hair. “Me too.”

  “How did your dad take it?” she asked, and felt him stiffen.

  “Exactly as badly as I imagined.”

  She pulled back to study him. “Are you okay?” His eyes skated away from hers, and she reached up to touch his cheek. “Tell me.”

  “He said I wasn’t his son anymore and I wasn’t welcome in his house.”

  “Oh my God. He didn’t mean it, did he?” It horrified her to imagine a parent could be so cold to their child. Especially when that child was as wonderful as Caleb.

  He took a shaky breath. “It’s not the first time he’s said something like that. It’ll probably blow over eventually.” His jaw tightened. “Maybe. I don’t even care. It’s my life. If he’s not willing to let me live it the way I want to, I don’t need him.”

  “He’s your father.”

  “Not much of one.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She didn’t say anything. She never does.”

  Penny pressed her palm against Caleb’s cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

  His eyes closed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does. They’re your family.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about them right now.” She opened her mouth to argue but he cut her off. “I will talk about it, I promise. I just don’t want to think about them right now.” He touched a curl at her temple. “I only want to think about you.”

  Penny pressed her mouth against his and felt some of his tension melt away as their tongues tangled in a tender, slow kiss.

  “Penelope.” His voice was rough with emotion. “I have to tell you something.”

  She stilled. “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “Oh.” She exhaled a relieved laugh. “I love you too.”

  A heartrending smile lit his eyes. “You do?”

  “Yes!” She clasped his face and kissed him again and again, bursting with happiness. “I’ve been trying to hide it, because I didn’t want to freak you out.”

  Caleb gazed intently at her mouth as his fingertips skimmed her lower lip. “I’ve loved you for months. I loved you even before—when you u
sed to come in here and try to talk to me.”

  “I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t talk to me.” She nipped his earlobe in gentle retribution.

  “I was afraid to let myself get close to you, because I knew I couldn’t have you.”

  All this time, she’d been trying so hard not to get too attached to him—it had never occurred to her that he might already be attached to her. “You were trying to protect yourself. And then I basically forced myself on you and tried to treat you like a cheap fling. It must have been awful.”

  His smile turned into a smirk. “It wasn’t all bad.”

  Their mouths met again in a series of greedy, exuberant kisses as they floated on an engulfing wave of bliss. She was intensely aware of him—his temperature, his density, the gravity of his emotions, the potential energy sparking off his skin.

  “Not to cut short this romantic moment,” he murmured huskily in her ear, “but we should probably go.”

  Penny’s consciousness lurched back to their present location, and the fact that it provided only the illusion of privacy. “Right. Someone might walk in.”

  He brushed a kiss against her jaw. “I was thinking more that we should go let your friends know you’re all right before they storm in here and string me up by my balls.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.” She paused, smiling. “Unless you deserved it.”

  “I’ll have to try not to deserve it, then.”

  She took his face in her hands, gazing into the amber depths of his eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “As long as I have you, everything else will be okay.”

  She believed him. No misgivings. No regrets.

  “You have me,” she said. “For as long as you want me.”

  His perfectly proportioned face broke into a double-rainbow smile. “How about forever?”

  She grinned back at him, feeling lighter than air. “Forever sounds perfect.”

  Epilogue

  Several Months Later

  “Would you rather have a cake that’s velvety and moist or one that’s light and airy?”

  At the sound of her voice, Caleb looks up from the pathophysiology textbook he’s reading at the dining table. He’s back in school to get a degree in occupational therapy—a career that appeals to him far more than being an MD ever did.

  Penny leans against the kitchen counter, looking beautiful in sweatpants with her curly hair pulled into a loose bun. It’s his birthday today, and she’s baking him a cake. He can’t even remember the last time he had a cake on his birthday. Elementary school, maybe, when they were living in San Antonio.

  He considers her question and finds he has no preference, other than the fact that he likes the sound of the word velvety on her lips.

  “Both?” he ventures.

  It’s the wrong answer, he discovers when she lets out an adorable little huff of vexation. “They’re mutually exclusive,” Penny says, absently waving a measuring cup as she speaks. “Creaming the butter and sugar together creates air bubbles that are expanded by gases from the leavening agents, producing a taller, light-textured cake. Alternatively, you can use the two-stage method to blend the butter and dry ingredients together, which allows the fats to coat the proteins, preventing gluten development for a tender, melt-in-your-mouth cake.”

  Somewhere in the middle of this impromptu lesson on the chemistry of cake baking, Caleb decides he’s going to marry this woman.

  The sudden intensity of his resolve leaves him a little breathless.

  He’s loved her for a long time. For months, he loved her from afar, silently and without hope. He learned to live with the ache of it the way you live with a broken rib: trying not to breathe too deep or move too fast.

  But now, improbably, she is standing in the kitchen of the apartment they share, it is his birthday, and he doesn’t have to pretend anymore. He is going to spend the rest of his life with her.

  Penny lifts her eyebrows, obviously waiting for him to speak.

  His mouth opens. “Huh?” he says eloquently.

  She shakes her head fondly, and a strand of hair breaks loose and falls across her forehead. “Did you hear anything I said?”

  “I got distracted somewhere in the middle.”

  She brushes the flyaway curl out of her face with the back of her hand. “Where exactly did I lose you?”

  “When you said the word creaming.”

  He watches the blush spread up from her chest and into her cheeks. He adores that blush. Making it appear is one of his top five joys in life.

  Penny’s full, pink lips press together as her eyes sparkle with amusement. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Not me,” he says. “I’m as corrigible as they come.”

  He’s never proposed before, although he and his last girlfriend had negotiated an informal understanding. She would follow him when he went to medical school, and in return, one day, he would make her a doctor’s wife. It wasn’t something he wanted so much as something that was expected. Marriage, like medical school, felt like an obligation. A trap that was closing around him.

  It was a relief when Heather called things off just after Christmas. He’s not sure he would have had the courage to do it himself—but he should have.

  He’d already taken notice of Penny by then. He noticed her on his very first day of work at Antidote. How could he not? With her sunny demeanor and warm, friendly manner, the whole place seemed to get a thousand watts lighter as soon as she walked into it.

  Everything about her was bright: her red hair, her floral dresses, her brightly colored lips and nails. He’d been living in the black and white part of The Wizard of Oz, and Penny was in full Technicolor. But his fate was truly sealed the moment she smiled. The first time he saw her lush lips curve, pinking the apples of her cheeks and making her hazel eyes shine, he was a goner.

  He never used to be someone to believe in love at first sight, but he has no other explanation for it. Something in her spoke to something in him, from the very moment she walked into his life.

  But he had a girlfriend. A plan that had already been laid out for him. Commitments.

  He tried to ignore the unsettling new feelings Penny awoke in him. He tried to ignore her, because it was too difficult to do anything else. She represented all the things in his life he wanted but couldn’t have. Passion. Self-determination. Hope.

  He started volunteering to work doubles on Mondays when he knew she came for her knitting club, so he’d be able to see her twice in one day. He couldn’t help himself. The dopamine rush he got around her was the only time he felt alive.

  Now he gets to feel that rush every minute of every day. How did he ever get so lucky?

  He watches Penny now as she turns her attention back to her baking, frowning over her food scale. “I feel like a chocolate cake should err on the side of density,” she decides as she reaches for the cocoa powder.

  She insisted on baking a cake for his birthday. He told her it wasn’t necessary, but secretly he’s pleased. It feels like he’s had to take care of himself his whole life, so he’s still getting used to having someone in his life who wants to take care of him. He will never, ever take it for granted.

  His parents aren’t exactly shining role models for marriage and family. Caleb grew up watching his father suck the joy out of every life around him while his mother performed her role with the glassy-eyed cheerfulness of a marionette. He and his brothers were raised in an emotional wasteland where empathy was nonexistent, weakness was met with cruelty, and affection was a sham. His two brothers leaned in, adopting The Colonel’s twisted ideas of masculinity and honor as they clamored for paternal approval.

  Caleb never took to the indoctrination. Whether because he was the eldest, or because he’d just been born that way, he was more sensitive than his brothers, and more stubborn—to his father’s perpetual disappointment. To protect himself, Caleb grew extra-thick armor and retreated so far behind his walls that he forgot the way out.


  Until Penny walked into his life and dismantled them brick by brick.

  It’s still a little scary, letting himself be vulnerable. He’s a work in progress. But he’s learning, slowly, that he can expose his underbelly without being punished. That there is comfort and kindness in the world and that—improbably—he is deserving of it. That this is what unconditional love is like.

  He wants the whole package now: marriage, kids, pets, a house with a white picket fence, and family vacations to Disney World. Whatever will make Penny happy, he wants to give it to her.

  She looks up at him, and a little line appears between her brows. “What do you think about adding Guinness to the batter?”

  “I think that sounds amazing.”

  She takes a can out of the fridge and pops the top. When she’s done measuring out the quantity she needs, she waves the half-empty can at him. “You want to finish it?”

  He’s supposed to be studying, but what the hell? It’s his birthday, and his best friend is baking him a cake.

  He gets up from the table and wanders into their small kitchen to accept the beer. Takes a long drink as he leans back against the counter, watching Penny combine the last of the ingredients.

  She fits the bowl into the stand mixer and flips it on. A loud mechanical whir fills the air. When she’s sure it’s mixing to her satisfaction, she turns back around and regards him from the opposite end of the kitchen. Her eyes narrow. “What?”

  “What?” His fingers clench around the beer can and the metal lets out a small pop.

  “You keep looking at me funny.”

  His defenses are so worn down, he’s forgotten how to put his game face on. He takes another drink of beer. “Funny how?”

  “Like you have a secret.” Her eyes narrow farther.

  He sets the beer down and goes to stand in front of her, crowding her against the counter. “Not me.” He kisses the tip of her nose as his hands settle on her hips. “I’m an open book.” It’s a small lie, but one he hopes he can be forgiven for.