Page 67 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

I moved my hand through my shirts and found a light green one. Matt had called it “muy caliente” when we were at the mall and I got it on a whim. I felt tight in it, but Matt said it showed off my body.

“You talk an awful lot about Matt. Are we trying to impress him?” Sawyer asked.

Only then did I realize I was saying all of this aloud. “I, um, no. No way. We’re just friends.”

“You ramble when you’re nervous,” Sawyer diagnosed me. “Gotta keep a check on that mouth.”

I snorted, then marched into the bathroom. He’d already seen me in a towel and went way overboard with his comments. I wasn’t going to undress in front of him. Besides, I couldn’t trust my body not to betray me. My dick had already been hard once in the time Sawyer had been in my room and I was losing my patience.

When I walked out, I reached for a bowtie and suspenders to complete my look. My shirt was already buttoned up all the way, but Sawyer leaped across the room and shut the closet, nearly chopping my hand off. “Oh, no. Got a belt?” he asked.

I did.

“Brown. Good. Brown is good,” he was saying as I pulled the belt through and buckled it up. It was a thin one, not drawing too much attention to it. It wasn’t too bad, but I preferred the suspenders if I had to choose. “And no bowties until I can trust you to wear them like they’re a crown. We’re going for simple, elegant, contemporary. Leave Bill Nye the Science Guy behind.”

I met his gaze as we faced one another and shot him a glare of my own. The corners of his full lips were quivering as he squinted and scanned me. His hands reached to my neck and I held my breath. We were a foot apart and his fingers touched the top button of my shirt. He popped it like he’d done that a million times.

I swallowed way too loudly, making his exhale a soft laugh. “Another, I think.” And before I could disagree, he popped another button and tugged my shirt apart. “Much better, but you could do with a smaller size to really make your torso draw the eye.”

“While simultaneously acting like I don’t want any attention,” I said.

“Exactly. See? You’re catching on quickly.” As he spoke, I looked away. His gaze was excruciatingly thorough all the way down to my red-and-black-striped socks. “The moment the snow melts, you’re changing into ankle-height socks and rolling up your pants. Show some skin down there. Show the Victorians.”

“Hmpf.” I shifted away from him. His body was a furnace. His scent tickled my nostrils. His proximity turned my guts to steel. I was going to get hard again and I needed to abort the mission. “Right. How about we discuss physics?”

It felt like the tension between us disappeared at once. Sawyer stepped back, seeming a little smaller. “Right.”

“I thought I could show you Richard Feynman’s technique to learn anything.” Even as I spoke, his attention drifted to the rest of my room. He approached the posters and examined the planets on them.

“Uranus?” he asked, pointing at an orange and brown one.

“Um, no,” I said. I had no idea why he’d think that. “It’s just an imaginary gas giant.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Uranus is a gas giant.”

“No, it isn’t.” The moment I answered, I replayed his words in my head. “You are a child.”

He threw his head over his shoulder to face me and shared the most blissful smile you ever did see. “Hit me. Feynman something.” He plopped his ass back into my desk chair and I decided to take the spare, wooden chair from the corner, then sit next to him. Normally, it was the other way around, but I had a sense that everything would be a battle with Sawyer, so I preserved my energy.

“Richard Feynman was a physicist in the quantum and particle field. He won a Nobel prize for the diagram he had made that depicted particle processes.”

“Careful, there. You’re losing me.” Sawyer said that with such casual disregard for everything I held dear that it warranted an eye-roll.

“Anyway, he is also famous for the particular way he learned pretty much anything he wanted. Take the material you want to learn. Say, this chapter in your textbook.” I lifted the textbook for Physics 101 and opened one of the early chapters.

“Where’d you get that?” Sawyer asked.

“The library. After you ran away.” I put my finger at the top of the chapter and traced all the way through the first page, then flipped it to the second and third. It was explaining the most basic laws of nature. “Read through it. Twice if you have to.”

“Oh, buddy, I read it ten times already,” Sawyer said. “All of it.”

“Good. Then, you should be able to take a piece of paper and explain it as if you’re teaching a sixth grader,” I said. “And as you try to do that, identify the things you don’t know or understand. Then, go back to the material and read those specific parts. Take a book on them and find explanations. Look for references in the back which might point you to the right book. And when you fill one knowledge gap, identify another. Do this over and over until you understand the whole chapter and are able to teach a child. Rinse and repeat.”

He watched me and hesitated. “Is…that it?”

I shrugged. “That’s how you’ll do it with me.” I was soft spoken on that part and looked at him until something clicked in his eyes.

“Alrighty. Where do we start?” he asked.