The Hookup Equation: A Loveless Brothers Novel

by Noir, Roxie

  “No,” he says simply.

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  He sighs and looks down.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure what it helps. I’m not sure if it helps. I mostly told you because I needed to share it with someone and talk about what we should do or if there’s anything we can do.”

  “I wish you’d told me earlier,” I say.

  Bastien just shrugs.

  “You’re really busy,” he says. “And you and Caleb seem like you’re really happy and I didn’t want to harsh your buzz, you know?”

  “Telling me Javi’s still alive isn’t harshing my buzz,” I say, more forcefully than I mean to. “He’s my brother. I want to know.”

  Now he looks young again, lost.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “You’re right.”

  I shake my head, trying to clear my brain out.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

  I trail off, my words not quite operating at the moment.

  “We should tell Mom and Dad.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I was just being a pussy about it because —”

  I clear my throat, and Bastien rolls his eyes a little.

  “— being a coward about it —"

  “Thank you.”

  “— because I didn’t want to make things worse between them, but that’s not really my problem, is it?”

  “Nope,” I agree.

  We’re quiet for another moment, drinking our coffees. People come in and out of the coffee shop, get drinks, sit down. The baristas call names and kids run back and forth and two people hug, laugh, sit down together.

  “You find out anything else?”

  “That’s all she knew,” he says. “I think a lot of people go through there.”

  “They didn’t chat? He didn’t casually tell her that he’s been living in a car in Foggy Bottom or visiting a shelter near VCU or on the streets Downtown or something?”

  Bastien just shakes his head again.

  “Sorry, Ollie. That’s all I got.”

  “It’s good. Thank you.”

  * * *

  Me: Buy anything good today?

  Caleb: God, no. I went hiking with Levi, June, and Silas, and then when we got back Thomas fell asleep on me for nearly three hours.

  Caleb: Daniel said he must find my funk soothing.

  Me: You should bottle it as a baby sleep aid.

  Caleb: If this teaching thing ever falls through, maybe.

  I make a face and laugh quietly. I’m sitting on the couch in my parents’ den, feet on the coffee table. The TV is showing some action movie and Bastien is sitting at the other end of the couch, both of us looking at our phones.

  When I laugh, he glances over at me, then back.

  “Are you talking to your lovahhhh?” he asks, and I snort.

  “You can’t call him that.”

  “Call him what? Your lovahhhh?”

  This time he uses a funny voice, and I start laughing.

  “Lov-ahhhh. Looo-vahhhhh.”

  I throw a pillow at him, giggling almost too hard to talk.

  “Thalia,” he says, still looking at his phone. “Has taken a…”

  He looks at me, grinning.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “LOVAHHHH,” he stage-whispers, raising his eyebrows and doing jazz hands.

  I grab the pillow I threw by a corner and start beating him with it.

  “Don’t. Wake. Up. Mom. And. Dad!” I hiss, giggling, punctuating each word with a pillow smack.

  “You don’t want them to know about your —”

  I shove the pillow over his face.

  “Uhhhhwuhhhhh,” he says.

  * * *

  Telling my parents that Javier was alive and at a needle exchange in Richmond doesn’t do much for the atmosphere in the house. My mom asks Bastien a million questions that he doesn’t know the answer to — Was he okay? How did he look? Did he have a coat, did he have shoes? — and my father pretty much turns to stone while she cries.

  I think he regrets turning Javi out. It can be hard to tell, and to be honest, I’ve never been particularly close with my father. He’s not exactly the warm, fuzzy type.

  I’ve suspected more than once that my grandfather, the son of Mexican immigrants and also a military man, was abusive. I’m pretty sure that my grandmother was an alcoholic, possibly as a result of having an abusive spouse and trying to raise six children essentially on her own. They both died before I was born, so I don’t really know. I just know that my father, the eldest, didn’t grow up in a happy household and joined the Navy the second he turned eighteen so he could get out of there.

  Not that it excuses anything, but thinking about it helps me to be a little more compassionate.

  The rest of the weekend is very, very rough. I try to stick around and be there for my mom, but I don’t know how much I’m helping.

  And I can’t stop feeling guilty about my own secret. I can’t stop thinking about how much she’d disapprove, how disappointed she’d be, and she wouldn’t be completely wrong.

  Needless to say, I’m pretty relieved when my ride Natalie picks me up, and we head back to Marysburg.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Caleb

  “Why would you assign a paper to be due one week before the final?” Thalia asks. “Who does that? What educational purpose can it possibly serve? No one is doing their best work at that point. No one is really absorbing information, it’ll all just be incoherent nonsense brought on by too little sleep and too much caffeine.”

  “Sadists?” I ask, leaning back on the couch, lacing my fingers over my head. “Or maybe masochists, because then they’ll have to grade the final and also read all those papers?”

  I’ve never once assigned a paper. I had to write them occasionally in undergrad, and every single time, it made me regret taking a humanities course for ‘fun.’

  Turns out that I like reading books, but writing papers and analyzing them feels like someone pounding nails into my brain. What’s the whale symbolize in Moby Dick? I don’t know, a whale?

  “It’s monstrous,” Thalia says, also leaning back, looking up at me. “And stupid. And dumb.”

  “So you’re not staying over?” I ask, even though I already know the answer from her brief tirade.

  “I can’t,” she sighs. “I gotta go back and finish this dumb thing, it’s due by eight a.m. And I still have to write four more pages and a conclusion, and then put together my bibliography because Callahan is a maniac about bibliographies.”

  Then she curls into me, one knee over my thigh, her head on my shoulder, and I wrap an arm around her smooth, bare skin.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  We’re both naked on my couch because we didn’t make it upstairs this time. Forty-five minutes ago she texted me and asked me what I was doing, and fifteen minutes after that she was on my doorstep.

  Then, in short order, she was naked and I was naked, on the couch, her knees on my shoulders and I was wearing a condom that she’d magically produced from somewhere, and she was breathing hard, both hands on my thighs, and then I carefully, slowly slid inside her and she moaned.

  She didn’t last long. I didn’t last long.

  I’m starting to think that Thalia might be a sex fiend, and I’m okay with it.

  “Better you than me,” I tease, and she laughs.

  * * *

  When she comes over the next night, the first thing she does after she comes in the door is hand me a neatly written, numbered list.

  “These your demands?” I tease, before I actually read it.

  Thalia just laughs.

  “Sort of,” she says, and then my eyebrows go up as I actually read the list.

  1. Cowgirl

  2. Missionary

  3. Doggy

  4. Froggy

  5. Plow

  6. Wheelbarrow

  7. Reverse Cowgirl

 
8. Pretzel

  9. Piledriver

  10. Side-lying

  “Tell me more about how you’re a shy, innocent virgin,” I say.

  “I never claimed the first two, and I got over the third,” she laughs. “I did some research during a study break and you know how I like lists. And goals. And achievements. And achieving goals.”

  “And fucking me silly,” I say, still scanning the list, and she laughs. “Is there a Powerpoint? I don’t know what all of these even are, and if I try to Google them you know I’ll just get porn.”

  “You have to start using Safe Search,” she says.

  “That only works sometimes,” I tell her. “If you’re searching, I don’t know, best corkscrew it’ll work but there’s no such thing as a Safe Search when you’re trying to look up doggy style.”

  “I thought you’d know that one,” she teases.

  We’re still standing in my front hallway as she takes off her coat, puts her bag down, then runs her fingers through her hair, shaking it out.

  “Want to help me figure it out?” I ask, grinning, and I pull her to me.

  “Duh,” she says, laughing. “That’s the point of the list.”

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, I essentially become Thalia’s late-night booty call. It’s the end of the semester and then finals, not to mention the last few grad school applications are due, and she’s completely swamped with work.

  I’m not mad. There are far worse things in life than Thalia coming over for sex and then either leaving or falling asleep in my bed.

  Far worse.

  We do talk. She tells me about how Bastien found Javier, sort of. I admit that Levi and Seth both know about us. We talk about our families and Thanksgiving and the upcoming Christmas break, about whether we should wait until she graduates to tell our families, or whether we can do it once she’s no longer my student.

  Though I could still get fired once that happens. The Virginia State University guidelines are very clear, but once I’m no longer grading her homework it just becomes wrong and ethically questionable, not Wrong and Unethical.

  Speaking of Wrong and Unethical (and an affront to professors everywhere, and a perverse man who gets off on having power over her, and unambiguously corrupt), I’m still getting the emails. Every other day, like clockwork. In a twisted way I’m starting to look forward to them. They’re at least creative.

  I keep Thalia’s list on the bedside table, along with a pencil, so we can cross things off and also make programming notes as appropriate.

  For example, on the line next to #9, Piledriver is the single word no. Next to #8, Pretzel, it says actually impossible; #7, Reverse Cowgirl, not nearly as good as regular cowgirl, and the line next to #6, Wheelbarrow, just reads who comes up with these?

  But she likes when I put her legs over my shoulders and take her slow and hard and deep, which turns out to be #5, Plow. When we try #3, Doggy, she fucks me back so hard that I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself, but she doesn’t. She just whimpers my name and then comes, clenching around me so tight it almost hurts.

  She likes the variation on #1, Cowgirl in my office chair when she takes me all in one stroke and then rocks back and forth while I’m buried inside her. She likes #4, Froggy, which we try by accident when she collapses onto her elbows during Doggy and then buries her face in the mattress, moaning. She likes #10, Side-lying, in the morning when we’re both half-awake and don’t want to get up yet.

  * * *

  The day before the calculus final, she comes over in the afternoon and brings sandwiches. She texts first, but she’s got a key, so she just comes in to find me grading papers at the kitchen table.

  “Any of those mine?” she asks.

  “Why, are you offering a bribe?” I ask.

  “I brought sandwiches.”

  I tap my pen on the table, like I’m considering.

  “What kind?”

  “Turkey, brie, and arugula on baguette,” she says. “And I brought two cookies from Mason’s. Regular size, not face-size.”

  She puts them on the counter, then leans against it, watching me while I sit there, thinking.

  “Do you hate brie or something?” she finally asks, puzzled.

  “No,” I admit. “I’m trying to think of a good way to offer you my meaty baguette but I don’t think there is one.”

  Thalia laughs, her eyes crinkling.

  “I brought lunch because I’m starting to feel like I’m using you for sex,” she says. “Shouldn’t we be having deep conversations about life and meaning and the universe or at least what movies we’ve seen?”

  “What movies have you seen?”

  “I haven’t seen any movies, I’ve been studying,” she admits.

  “How about books?” I tease, leaning back, crossing my ankle over my knee, still tapping the pen on the table.

  “I’ve been plowing through this really great read called Principles and Theories of Cognitive Neuroscience,” she says. “It’s a real page turner. Ask me anything about the amygdala.”

  “What is it?”

  “Part of your brain.”

  “Thanks,” I deadpan.

  “It has to do with emotional response. Mostly fear and aggression. We think it’s very involved in PTSD emotional responses, though also maybe not, because the brain is very complex and sometimes it feels like no one knows anything about it and we may as well be diagnosing mental disorders based on what lumps people have on their skulls,” she says.

  “You need a study break,” I say.

  “Are you turning down my offer of scintillating conversation over lunch?” she says.

  “Never,” I say, still tapping my pen. “I’m just offering a stress-relieving appetizer.”

  “Of a meat baguette?”

  “I already regret saying that out loud.”

  Thalia walks over to me and I sit up straighter, uncross my legs and she straddles me, resting her arms on my shoulders.

  “You should, because it was pretty bad,” she teases, then gently takes my glasses by the arms, carefully places them on the table. “There. One more day.”

  “Probably two,” I admit, my hands already cupping her ass as she rolls her hips toward me, my cock stiffening. “The class officially ends when final grades are in.”

  “I’m not leaving for Norfolk until Monday,” she says. “We get a whole weekend when you’re not my professor.”

  I grasp her hips harder, rock her against me, my thumbs on the soft skin of her belly, and even though yesterday we tried some variations on #2, Missionary, I already want her again with a fervor that surprises me.

  Can you get addicted to a person? I think I might be.

  “Want to go on a real date?” I ask. “Somewhere outside town. Saturday night. Somewhere no one knows us.”

  “Do we still know how to act in public?” she asks, her fingertips already on my chest, rocking forward along the length of my cock.

  “Did we ever?” I ask, and she laughs.

  * * *

  I don’t see her the day of the calculus final except at the test itself. It’s not in our usual classroom, but rather, in an auditorium with the two other sections of honors calculus, the students spaced far enough apart that there’s no way they can cheat off of each other.

  Well, that’s the idea, at least, but they’re honors students. Most would never cheat, but the few who would are probably smart enough to come up with ways around being seated far from someone else.

  When Thalia comes in, she glances at me briefly, sitting in the front with the other two Honors Calculus instructors. She nods and I nod back, the exact same way I’ve nodded to my other students today, then go back to grading the finals from my Differential Equations class.

  The final starts at eight in the morning, and they’ve got until eleven to finish it, but Thalia’s gone by ten, presumably to the library to finish her Research Methods final paper, which is due at 11:59:59pm tomorrow, the last day of finals. />
  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Caleb

  I haven’t checked grades this often since I was a college senior myself and wondering what I got on my Introduction to Knot Theory final. I submitted them by noon Friday, and at 6:30, they still haven’t gone up.

  I’d say it usually doesn’t take this long for grades to be posted after I submit them, but I have no idea. Even though I’ve taught for years as a grad student, I’ve never really cared when the students got their grades before. I never had much of a reason to.

  Briefly, I turn in my office chair and look through my window, lean a little to the right until I can see Thalia, still at her carrel. I can’t quite see what she’s doing from here, but she looks studious.

  I turn back to my desk, where a stack of end-of-semester paperwork is waiting for me. I grab my headphones, put on a podcast, and get to it.

  * * *

  An hour later, my phone dings and I grab it instantly, grateful for the distraction from Building Form 59B, which is for requesting special permission to use a seminar room in the Mathematics Department for next semester’s graduate student seminar, rather than a classroom with shaky desks and a window that doesn’t quite close all the way.

  I don’t know why the permission is special. Aren’t seminar rooms for seminars?

  Thalia: Only an A, not an A+?

  Me: You didn’t earn an A+.

  Me: You got two C’s on quizzes and I don’t even want to talk about the question on the final about asymptotic limits.

  Thalia: Thank God, I don’t either.

  I turn around and look at her, still at her carrel, through my window and hers. She waves, and I wave back.

  Thalia: Do you feel better now?

  Me: About?

  Thalia: Me.

  Thalia: Now that I’m not your student any more.