“Seth.”Paxon’s tone was sharp, warning Seth.
“What?I’m cooking dinner, not meddling,” he said innocently, though his smirk betrayed him.“Now, go get set up in the living room.It’s quieter there, and the table’s clean.I’ll bring snacks later if you promise not to burn the house down.”
“You act like we’re children,” Paxon muttered.
“You act like children,” Seth said, going over to the fridge.
He wasn’t wrong.
I sighed, gathering my things and heading to the living room.Paxon followed a moment later, notebook under his arm, his footsteps a little slower but steady.
Behind us, Seth hummed some half-recognizable tune underneath his breath as he pulled out ingredients, the sound comforting and warm.It filled the space between the three of us, easing the edges of the tension I hadn’t realized I was holding.
For the first time in a while, it almost felt like the old days again.
Almost.
The living room was warm and softly lit.It was a space that somehow managed to feel alive even when it was quiet.
I dropped my bag onto the coffee table and dug out what I needed.I slowly flipped the notebook open to a half-finished page of formulas.Paxon set his things down across from me, carefully, as if the act of tutoring me required as much focus as taking a final exam.
It wasn’t like this was the first time we were here doing schoolwork together.It used to be natural that we all came to Seth’s and worked on homework together.But as things were, this was far harder to deal with than in the past.
“Okay,” he said after a second, pulling off his dark blue beanie and placing it on the floor next to him.“Where do you want to start?”
I shrugged, glancing at the neat rows of handwriting in his notebook.His writing was small and tidy, and it was even color-coded.
“I don’t really need a full review,” I admitted.“Just...to fill in what I missed.”
He leaned forward.“All right.The thing with physics is that since it all builds on each other, you have to be sure to understand everything in order to keep up.So if anything is confusing at all, let me know.”
I pulled a few papers from my folder, spreading them across the table.“I think I’m caught up through the energy unit, but I still need to finish those lab sheets, and there were two quizzes I missed when...”I trailed off, realizing how that sentence would end.When everything fell apart.
Paxon didn’t push.He just nodded again, flipping through his own notes.“Yeah, those were the energy and forces lessons.I’ll help you with the worksheets; they’re basically the same materials.Once you go through them, you can ask about making up the quizzes before the test next week.”
I blinked.“Next week?”
He smiled faintly, a ghost of amusement flickering in his eyes.“Yeah, we’ve known about it for a few weeks now.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” I said dryly.
For a second, his grin widened before he caught himself, the moment slipping away as quickly as it came.
He turned his notebook toward me, tapping a problem on the page.“Okay, so this one’s about calculating work done against gravity.Want to give it a shot?”
I stared at the equation, trying to focus on the numbers and not the fact that he was sitting close enough for me to smell the faint sweetness of his cologne.“Sure.”
He watched as I worked through the problem, the sound of my pencil scratching across the paper filling the silence.
“You’re still fast at this,” he said quietly after a moment.
I glanced up, trying to switch my thoughts from the problem before me to what he said.“You sound surprised.”
“I’m not,” he said quickly.“Just impressed you’re able to pick up on this so fast.”
I fought against a frown.“I’m a good student.I’m just...there’s just a lot going on,” I murmured, dropping my gaze to the page.
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward exactly, but it wasn’t easy, either.It carried everything we hadn’t said in months: the late-night texts that had stopped, the way we’d avoided looking at each other in crowded rooms, the fact that even now, we were pretending this was only about physics.
