Silas laughs behind him alongside Karina, so I bend down to Sebastian’s level. With my hand extended toward him, I answer.
“Yes, I do. I’m Amalia. Lovely to meet you, Seb.”
“How much?” he asks, and I bite my lower lip without meaning to while my eyes find the man who quiets my loudest thoughts.
“One thousand percent.”
Sebastian’s eyes go wide, and he places his hand in mine.
“Wooow, that’s a lot,” he tells me in an awed tone. “Sebastian Dean Vaughn,encantadoto meet you!” he says in the most adorable Colombian accent I have ever heard in my life.
After that he runs inside, where he immediately starts calling for us to come see what he managed to build on his latest robot.
Karina goes ahead of us, and I barely make it to the entrance hall before Silas turns me toward him. With his lips no more than half an inch from mine, he says,
“Only one thousand percent? Looks like I still have work to do.” Then his mouth takes over mine, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it. His hand comes up to cup my jaw, tilting it exactly where he wants me, and I forget for a second where we are, so I try to reason with him.
“Baby, as much—” a kiss, “—as I love—” another kiss, “—to kiss you...they are in the other—” kiss, “—room.”
I know my cheeks are tomato red.
“Fuck, I love to see you blush. But I’m still not ok with that percentage.”
How do I explain to him that I don’t have a formula, a calculation, or an algorithm that could honestly reflect the way my heart expands when I see him?
That he’s the only person beside whom my mind goes quiet, the only one who makes my fears kneel simply by the way he looks at me every day, as though I invented fire.
He gives me a peck on the cheek, and then we follow Sebastian’s voice into the next room where he explains how the engine he built works.
Something in my rational mind tells me there is no degree or textbook that teaches you this: how much you should treasure the small moments when everyone you care about in this world is in the same room, safe and laughing.
¡Te extraño miles, tío chulo!
One Year Later
“These figures aren’t right!” whispers the guy beside me, agitated, and without meaning to, I roll my eyes.
Dario is my friend and probably the best student in this statistics class — after me — and sometimes I wonder how, after all these months, he still doubts what we’re doing.
“I’ve already checked them twice. The data is correct.”
I don’t tell him that last night I tested the algorithm five times, against five separate data sets, and every single one produced the same type of results.
“You’re sure?”
“More than sure,” I answer, already slightly irritated.
There was a time when a question like his would have sent me spiraling into anxiety. Not anymore. I work every day at reminding myself that my mind does good work and that this constant doubt only puts a completely absurd kind of pressure on me.
There are days when I manage it, and days that go less well, but the advantage of living with someone who reminds you every single day what a brilliant mind you have is that you start to believe it. At least a little.
For nine months I’ve been living with Silas in a penthouse overlooking the river, with an entire cabinet in the kitchen dedicated to my hot chocolate. We even have a kitten named Chulito.
It took me exactly one minute and fifteen seconds to convince Silas to bring him home the evening we found him in the park near the university. He was dirty and frightened, but what drew me to him was his fur, colored in different shades of brown, gray, and white. He was perfect.
The noise in the classroom reminds me that we need to submit this project, and the professor comes to our laptop to review our results.
“Everything looks excellent,” he says, and before I can stop myself, I’m grinning like an idiot at my classmate. His cortisol levels are probably four times the healthy limit right now.
