Page 91 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

Noah shifted so that he now lay on his side and the phone was in his hand, resting on the pillow. The wall with the Christmas lights along the bookshelf was just behind him. “Good. That could have been awkward. I either overthink or don’t think at all.”

“Mm, that’s all great, but let’s go back to you imagining me naked. Is that a common phenomenon? Do you go to lectures to learn about particles and fantasize about me?” I teased him, my voice dripping in seductiveness.

Noah turned a shade redder and rolled his eyes, fixing his black-framed glasses with the back of his hand. I’d warned him not to do it like that and it bothered me that I had. He was adorable when he did it so mindlessly. “Actually,” he said, a little strangled. “Believe it or not, I don’t walk around all day imagining you in all sorts of unholy situations.” He bit his lip against a rising smirk, then shook his head. In a low voice, he murmured: “I save that for my evenings.”

I laughed, my voice rising by an octave, and my heart stumbled. As if someone pulled at my limbs, I suddenly felt a little more stretched and taut. “And it’s evening right now. Ergo…”

“Wow. That is a correct use of ‘ergo.’ Well done, Sawyer.” His eyebrows did a little dance above his eyes.

“I love it when you’re a smartass,” I husked. “Talk clever to me.”

Noah snorted, but it did little to cover up that sensational glow that came over his face when he was getting horny. “Shut up.”

“Give me a fun fact, Noah,” I pleaded, voice as slutty as I could make it.

He rose to the bait, although his flat expression told me he was well aware of being baited. “Well, in 2004, astronomers discovered a star now known as Lucy. It’s a white dwarf. That means it spent its nuclear fuel. Er, stars can either grow so big that they ultimately collapse and turn into black holes or slowly wink out. Lucy’s the latter. What’s odd about Lucy is that she is essentially a gigantic diamond. Carbon and oxygen in her core crystalized over billions of years, basically forming a diamond that is ten billion trillion trillion carats in size.”

I gaped. How the hell did he even have that piece of information inside his head? “Someday, when a guy kneels and offers you a diamond ring, you’re gonna be horribly disappointed.”

Noah chuckled and I had a feeling he found the idea of someone proposing to him ridiculous, rather than finding my joke humorous. “Right.”

We gazed at each other for a short while, silence undisturbed. “Give me another one,” I said, making it sound dirty solely with the inflection and tone of my voice.

Noah sighed and obliged. “Did you know our galaxy is being pulled toward a mysterious region of space? We’re not alone. Countless other galaxies are moving in that direction. The stars and dust of the Milky Way don’t let us see what’s there, but we call it the ‘Great Attractor.’ Nobody knows what it really is. It’s a gravitational force we can’t explain, but it’s pulling us in.”

My eyes widened in horror. “What do you think it is?”

He shrugged. “If I knew, I’d have a Nobel Prize by now.” He thought about it for a moment, then turned very still and serious. The ominous look he gave me made me think of something apocalyptic. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a Sawyer-like playboy, who galaxies just can’t resist. They’re all just falling head over heels.”

“Ha-ha. That’s so funny. Watch me choke on tears of laughter.” I rolled my eyes at being teased so mercilessly, then watched him smirk on my screen.

We talked for a little while longer, then I released him so he could go to sleep. My exam results were still not in and I was slowly going mad over it. The feeling that lived permanently in my heart was of doom and gloom. We’d done so much and I achieved so little. I knew, deep down, that my days were numbered. None of this was going to matter soon enough. I’d be away from the Titans, from Noah, from Northwood. Not that one exam would bring on Judgment Day, but it would be the first crack in the poorly constructed wall. And it would all go downhill from there.

But, as I forced myself to eat a little, finding the food tasted like paper napkins compared to the richness all my senses experienced while I’d been on the phone, I understood one thing for certain. I missed Noah.

Chapter Ten

NOAH

Soon after Sawyer returned from his Chicago trip, I grew to detest most workdays. Our study dates, which were very much about studying and not nearly as much about dating, became a Wednesday evening event, as rare as Halley’s comet. But Saturdays were something else entirely.

Each late afternoon, I would find a text message on my screen, requesting — not asking — that I show up at this place or that after my last tutoring session of the day. So was the case for the following four Saturdays, each ending in increasingly more creative lessons behind locked doors. And Sawyer would feather me with kisses each Sunday morning as if he had something to prove. As if there was nothing else he would rather be doing. Then, he would leave, and I would swoon on my own for a while before getting the room ready for the first student’s visit.

One such Saturday, when early spring rain trapped us inside my room, Sawyer spun around in my chair like he was five years old and cocked his head to the side. “Why don’t you do those competitions anymore?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. It had been a week since we’d last been together, and competitions in physics were the very last thing I wanted to talk about. I had too many other ideas of how to pass the time. Sawyer was wearing a black, short-sleeved T-shirt, sliding down in my chair until the edge of it dragged up and revealed his inked stomach. It was enough to make me drool and more than enough to obliterate all my other thoughts.

“You’re tutoring all these students to win the prizes you could take for yourself,” Sawyer said.

I shrugged. “It pays well.”

He was rubbing his chin in thought, his other hand on the bare stripe of his stomach, feeling his skin. “I’m sure winning would pay better. In the long run.”

“I already caught the big fish.” My voice gave away nothing, but maybe that in itself gave away plenty. Sawyer narrowed his half-moon eyes at me and shook his head a little. I sighed. “I was fourteen when I won the Olympiad. That’s like a child actor becoming famous for their first big screen role. There’s no topping it. It just makes the rest of your life…meh.”

“Meh?” Sawyer asked, incredulous.

“Meh,” I insisted. “Firstly, it gets increasingly harder to win another. Secondly…” I really didn’t want to talk about this. I exhaled and rolled my eyes. If only he would take his top off or something. But he watched me intently as if I were talking about the world’s most important things. “Mom and Dad decided that because I was a prodigy, the Olympiad was now the baseline of success. ‘If he can win that at fourteen, he can surely get hired at CERN by eighteen.’ Or, ‘He could get an honorary degree years earlier.’ That sort of bullshit. The pressure was…I dunno, too much. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to focus on astrophysics instead of something more practical and experimental. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to study on my own terms. They always wanted more, but I couldn’t outdo what I’d already done.” I shuddered. Bitterness filled me to bursting, and I pulled my knees up to my chin, pressing my back harder against the wall and letting my feet dig into the mattress. “It’s like if you won a jackpot and everyone started nagging you to win another jackpot month after month. But you can’t. It doesn’t work like that. But you can’t prove it to them, so you’re just permanently a one-trick pony. A single-use wonder. A…a…” I sighed. “A failure.”