crysta (not the crow one) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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enodia_ic2023-08-22 09:34 pm
beautyfull) wrote in enodia_ic2023-08-22 09:34 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Who: Crysta and Zeke
When:August 22, today!
Where: Crysta's room
What: A very productive GED study sesh
Warnings: Sexual Insinuation (nothing explicit!), Self-Flagellation (of brains; nonsexy), No human emotions allowed, Trigonometry (probably incorrect), swears
“What the fuck is a cosine?” Zeke sighs at the textbook spread out in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Crysta’s room. His eyes hurt staring at these pages, though whether it’s because of his glasses or because he hasn’t used the math part of his brain in over fifteen years is hard to tell. He’d been a shit student back when he did actually attend high school, putting more work into looking like he hadn’t just copied Eureka’s homework than actually learning, so maybe this is just how it feels to learn. Like hell.
“Do I use this?” He drops his head back against the side of Crysta’s bed, his sad puppy dog eyes hidden behind inch-thick sunglasses. “Like, tell me the truth, is this a thing I should actually know?”
Crysta peeks down from her (high off the ground,modestly queen sized because this is a smaller room than the one in her old apartment, sporting brand new sheets) bed where she’s sequestered herself to make this a productive study session. “A cosine is…wait, I forgot which one, I know it’s one of the triangle things.”
She did get a perfect score on similar material, but that was eight years ago, and she’d honestly been so depressed and checked out at the time she could hardly remember how she did it. Not that Zeke needed to know that. She smiles at his despair, and leans over the edge to poke the glasses down his nose, just to see how sad his eyes look. It’s very. She brushes a sympathetic finger across his forehead, hardly thinking about it. They’re in private. It’s not revealing at all. “Oh. Babe. Not even a little. I can promise you, though, if you learn cosine it’s just gonna be for this test. You’ll forget the second you walk out. I’m living proof.”
Zeke closes his eyes and lets out a pathetic groan. He just has to cram his brain full of four years worth of knowledge and then keep it all there long enough to prove he's worthy of a piece of paper. Totally doable! Not at all a waste of time! Doesn't make him feel even the least bit nauseous when he thinks about the months of studying ahead of him, the bureaucratic hoops he'll have to jump through to wear his Mysterious Liminal Glasses, or the eight-hour test waiting at the end of it all! It's fine, he's fine, this is all objectively fine.
"What if I just put all my energy into figuring out how to cheat?" he asks, sliding his glasses the rest of the way off his face. These sad eyes need a break. "I was always really good at that."
“Then I’ll totally help you cheat.” She promises, but puts her own microbiology text to the side for now, because it seems like this is an intellectual crisis, which she’s only even a little adept at solving when it doesn’t have anything to do with her own brain. Crysta is not very good at comfort. She is not sure how to put this into words at all. She wastes a few moments paging her fingers through his hair, because that’s easier. “But then we’ll probably get caught, and the Department of Education will throw us both into trig jail where we’ll have to learn about sines and cosines for the rest of our natural lives at knifepoint, I hear, so maybe we try the right way first.”
The feel of Crysta's fingers in his hair gives Zeke something to focus on, something to keep him here in this room instead of spiraling off into his own mind. Just focus on this. On today, right now, on learning what the fuck a cosine is, and then a sine, and then a tangent, and then—
Zeke breathes in deep, his jaw still clenched but the knot in his brain starting to relax.
"Fuck, man," he exhales and turns his eyes up toward Crysta. "I wouldn't last a second in trig jail, trading equations for favors. And you know what they do when you're all out?"
“Banish you to lit degree hell.”
She deadpans, smiling down at him. She twists a lock of hair around her finger and almost subconsciously changes it just a little, making it a little more strong and shiny, envisioning the roots strengthening, being enriched. This level of anxiety is something revolutionary for Crysta, who’s rarely seen it freely expressed in others. Certainly not herself. But she thinks she understands. The way his jaw is clenching now is how hers felt, all those years ago when she was seventeen and also trying to work out what the fuck a cosine was in the swanky hotel she was living in at the time, alone. She doesn’t want him to be alone for this, too.
“Or like, force you to do twister so you’re the human triangle? I don’t know, what.”
There's a terrible second where Zeke imagines falling asleep to Crysta running her fingers through his hair, wrapped up in her scent and the warmth of her touch. But it passes, wiped out by a wave of dread at what that fantasy means. He clenches his jaw even tighter and plucks at the pages of his textbook, flipping them compulsively at the corner to keep his hands supervised and on task.
"God, no, that sounds terrible," he half-laughs, his smile a little off-kilter. "They just send a note home to your parents. I don't even think it's legal to get a lit degree, why would you say that?"
She likes Zeke’s crooked smiles, the way it’s tilted and not quite right. Kissing him right now would be both distracting to him and his math, and unfortunately revealing, so she bites her own lip instead, and concentrates on the pages he’s flipping through. She ceases her touching of his hair to reach down and make him pause on something her eyes caught that talked about cosine.
“I would never make you study Shakespeare. Sorry. Cruel and unusual. A cosine is this little bitty angle right here,” She points it out on a diagram, “The adjacent angle divided by the hypotenuse. SUPER easy actually.”
Zeke slips the glasses back over his eyes and his perception of the world shifts again; words appear on the page before him, skin covers Crysta's metacarpals, the manicured nail tapping the figure of a triangle takes shape. It takes a second to adjust and refocus, squinting at the book and trying to absorb the words.
"Adjacent angle divided by the hypotenuse..." he repeats, but the words sound clumsy and foreign in his mouth. "I—okay, hang on." Zeke pats the floor to find the pen and notebook at his feet so he can scribble his own version of the diagram. At least when he's holding a pen and drawing he feels competent at something. "I ain't kidding when I say I'm dumb as shit, Eurie fuckin' carried me through high school."
A little dark cloud, unexplainable but gloomy, passes over Crysta’s face. She’s said the same thing about herself, dozens of times. It’s different to hear it from someone like Zeke, who makes beautiful things and impossible structures just casually, who is perhaps the funniest person she knows.There’s just no great way to make him see who she sees; the exact and precise cells that congeal to form the way his smile goes crooked or the way his hands craft strands bone into something otherworldly and ethereal. So instead, she thwaps his head lightly with her free hand, without explanation.
“You’re not dumb.” She insists. “Okay. You know art. This is just like. The language of shapes. It’s everything you already know, only you’re seeing the reason behind it now. It’s like…art’s bones. It’s different but it’s always been there.”
Zeke bites the inside of his lip. He doesn't have any real education in art beyond a couple classes in high school. Everything he created came from hours of sketching and erasing, building and breaking, trying and failing until something beautiful emerged. The exact angles were never considered. At least not consciously.
"Probably should've warned you ahead of time, being my friend means constant life coaching sessions." His pen keeps scratching at the paper, adding whiskers and teeth to his new triangle diagram. "And, like, I refuse to pay, so all you're getting is my company."
The little triangle creature taking form is enough to make Crysta pause, smiling at being there to watch its creation. She can’t draw at all. Neither she nor her brothers were ever allowed to be anything Zeke is so naturally; creative, vulnerable, artistic, a crier. And he’s unapologetic. It’s fascinating, from a psychological perspective, which is, she is sure, is why she likes his brain at all.
“Yes, well. Then I guess you’re lucky I’m very rich, and there’s almost never anyone else fun to hang out with.” She grins down at him, to prove this is probably benign bullying. “Cosine cat?”
Zeke adds a tail to the creature and curls it around the corner to rest on the triangle's flat edge. This is what his notes always turn into: doodles on top of barebones information, destined to be ignored as soon as he gets frustrated and gives up. It doesn't feel like a good sign.
"It's the next critter comin' in off the Riftlands to fuck us up." He looks up at Crysta and pokes her hand with the back of his pen. There's a big part of him—a big, unwieldy part of him—that wants to take her hand and kiss her wrist. Desperate for a distraction from this work and these feelings of inadequacy, Zeke wants Crysta to put her hands on his face and make all of this go away.
But he needs to focus. And that's why he can't touch her skin. Not right now. Zeke closes his eyes and inhales deeply. "Bet she'd bring in a real hot math specialist to hang out with."
Crysta grabs the pen from him entirely, because she can sort of see what this is devolving into. Or because her other impulse is to stab him with the pen unfairly, and kiss him in slightly elementary-Spiderman fashion. She can’t. He has to learn. And a probably innocently meant comment about a math genius from the rift has against all sense tripped her ego.
Crysta has never been smart. Everyone’s told her that. Both of her brothers are, in fact, hot math geniuses. And she’s not as smart as them. But they’d never taken the GED test, and had to learn trig in a week. No one else she knew had. She might not be a hot math specialist but she could be. Crysta frowns and hops off her bed, grabbing the book from him and placing it on her lap, mirroring his criss-cross seat so their knees are touching, but just those.
“Well until they get here, you’re just going to have to put up with me, instead.” She snaps, decisive, and flips to the page about cosines. “Pay attention. A triangle has three sides. Duh. The tilty line is the hypotenuse. The bottom one’s adjacent. The upright’s opposite. That means adjacent and opposite to angle a, where the hypotenuse and adjacent ones meet, hence like, adjacent. Are you with me?”
To tell the truth, Zeke is not with Crysta. He followed her as far as "a triangle has three sides" and then she left him in the dust. How is he supposed to know which side is which? The hypotenuse sounds familiar—that's the long one. And for one of the triangle types it's the same length as the other two sides, but how is he supposed to know which one of those is the adjacent and the opposite and—
He takes another breath. Even if he doesn't give a fuck about math and its applications in his life, he wants this. He wants to understand what Crysta is saying, wants to prove that he can actually see one (1) thing through and his brain isn't made of mush.
Also it's kind of hot when girls get stern with him, but he's not here to interrogate this emotional response.
"I'm—yeah, I'm trying, I really am." Zeke pinches the bridge of his nose and reseats his glasses. "Like, adjacent and opposite just mean to whatever angle they pick? Like, I'm not supposed to look at a triangle and know which one is the opposite and angle side?"
“Well the good news is, it’s like, either a right triangle or you’ll be creating a right angle. This is alllll about right angles, for now. So you make a little square to mark the right angle, like this,” She does that, “and the little angle on the other side that we’ve created is the cosine. And the one opposite that angle is always the opposite. So this one’s adjacent. It’s in relation to the lil cosine guy, y’know?”
She taps the paper with her pen, having triumphantly (hopefully) explained basic trigonometry. They could get into the advanced stuff later. She can’t check Zeke’s eyes for understanding, but she’s pretty sure he could use a break, for a second. “You’ve got this.” She says, fingers lighting on his kneecaps. “Like…it’s so annoying, but you’re smarter than shape math.”
This is all starting to make Zeke feel a little sick, a little panicky, a little extremely out of his depth. But if he can just keep Crysta's words in his head then maybe he doesn't even need to understand it. It's not like Zeke has any grander plans for himself, any hidden dreams of becoming a doctor or scientist or anything bigger than what he is now. All he needs to do is replicate the information once.
But Crysta's fingers on his kneecaps are a lightning rod for his attention, grabbing him before he can panic himself out of learning one (1) math. Before he can stop himself, Zeke's hand jumps to touch hers. Just a light brush along her knuckles. "I still think shape math might kill me in the night," he says, his hand floating just above hers. "But we mighta extended my life by a couple days with this."
This is not good enough for Crysta, who leans in a little, smirking, with danger in her eyes that would be better placed to socially destroy another influencer or explode someone’s kidneys. And in a way, they are. Only the kidneys is math.
“You’re gonna show those triangles who’s boss, though. Little by little. And when they come for you in your sleep, Bam” (She slaps the back of his knuckles for emphasis here,) “You’ll get a good score on the math part. We’ll just like, murder them a little every day.”
Zeke smirks at her touch and makes a grab for her hand. His face is warm and there's a light purple blush to his cheeks, which really clashes with his whole aesthetic.
"So did we kill 'em enough today, boss?" he asks and tilts his head enough to look over the edge of his sunglasses. "Did we get away with math-slaughter?"
“No.” She answers, blunt, because frankly they have only learned one thing, and her own unrelenting standards instilled in her at birth cannot abide that. But the light purple in his cheeks suits him a lot more than she’d expect, and her stomach jumps a little when he grabs her hand.
So she grabs it back, fingers wrapping around his wrist. She’s not wearing her glasses but she does think she can see the cells there, the purple blood that flows through him, visible through the veins in his cheeks and his hands. It’s something she could get lost in, if she let herself. Crysta pretends to consider for a long moment. “We’re doing more. Later. But you’ve definitely like. Stabbed the triangles enough to bleed. For now.”
"Oh thank fuck, my eyes are killing me." Zeke shakes his sunglasses the rest of the way off his nose and into his lap. Much better than letting go of Crysta's hand, in case she decides in the next twelve seconds that she does not in fact want him touching her anymore and this is his last chance. "Doesn't mean you gotta slow your roll. I'm happy to provide moral support for a biology babe."
She makes another mental note to maybe ask before pushing in the future, but she doesn’t take it back now. She instead just shakes her head, because now that she remembers eyes as a possible obstacle, the space behind her own eyes also throbs with the telltale evidence she’s been reading too long.
It’s better to tug him towards her by the wrist, but just a little. An excusable motion, if in the last twelve seconds he’s decided he does not want to touch her anymore. This is probably, it strikes her, like some of those high school memories neither of them had ever had. Locked in a bedroom, spending time with some boy who needs your study help but then you get distracted. There’s a sort of vague nostalgia from a time that never was. “I’ve read about cells so much I could probably like, puke. Study break?”
"Mm, you really know how to get a guy going." Zeke follows the pull of her hand and he leans in, close enough to breathe her in. His free hand traces the shape of her jaw, fingers brushing along skin he can no longer see. "Thanks."
“Oh if you like that. Wait til I start talking about prokaryotes.” Crysta whispers, breathy, into his ear just for fun. She closes her eyes against his touch, to test what it might be like in his brain, but she can’t even see bones, and she is impatient. She opens them again, guiding his hand joined in hers to her back, to feel his fingers on one vertebra at a time. She starts to lean in to kiss him, but the thanks is confusing. She hasn’t done anything. She braces against it, her voice tight with just a little too much defense, lest somewhere in his words there’s a rejection or a mockery. Thank you can be used like that.
“...I mean it’s my study break too, so.”
Zeke isn't super perceptive on his best days with all his senses firing properly, but he hears something in Crysta's voice. It makes him pause, the hand on her jaw stopping just below her ear.
"I mean it." He looks down, unable to even pretend to make eye contact with the bridge of Crysta's nose while being sincere. "Like, thanks for not making me feel like a fuckin' idiot or whatever." He puts his forehead against hers, his thumb brushing the edges of her earlobe. It's more than that, but now feels like the wrong time to thank Crysta for smacking him when he calls himself stupid and pushing him when he whines, and for believing in him when he truly does feel like giving up. It would kind of mess up the flow right now.
"And for makin' math hot again," Zeke says instead. "I'm gonna have the weirdest fuckin' wet dreams now."
Crysta freezes when he comes so close, and touches her so gently. It’s warm, and soft, nothing she can accept on a normal day. She raises a hand to the side of his face, to mirror what she feels on her own. A brush of her thumb against his cheekbone. The press of her lips to the corner of his mouth, all very tentative, like she’s afraid she’s doing it wrong, or that it will all blow up. She can’t trust that it won’t, entirely, so she just mirrors his cues, since he’s the one tutoring her in this, a softer language than she’d ever spoken before.
“You’re not an idiot.” She punctuates that, a point she suspects she will be making a lot in the future with a closed-mouth kiss, firm and not inviting any questions. She pauses, then, her lips smiling against his own. “...And like. Honestly? As long as I look hot in them, that’d be a really good sign, I feel like I read somewhere that dreaming about something means you’ve mastered it.”
"You're beautiful in all of them." Zeke kisses her, a quick brush of his lips against hers, his fingers combing into her hair. Not for the first time he wishes he could really see her and look into her eyes, but for now he can feel his way across her face. He can kiss her top lip and the slope of her jaw and appreciate the smell of her skin. "And you wouldn't believe the things I've mastered."
When:August 22, today!
Where: Crysta's room
What: A very productive GED study sesh
Warnings: Sexual Insinuation (nothing explicit!), Self-Flagellation (of brains; nonsexy), No human emotions allowed, Trigonometry (probably incorrect), swears
“What the fuck is a cosine?” Zeke sighs at the textbook spread out in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Crysta’s room. His eyes hurt staring at these pages, though whether it’s because of his glasses or because he hasn’t used the math part of his brain in over fifteen years is hard to tell. He’d been a shit student back when he did actually attend high school, putting more work into looking like he hadn’t just copied Eureka’s homework than actually learning, so maybe this is just how it feels to learn. Like hell.
“Do I use this?” He drops his head back against the side of Crysta’s bed, his sad puppy dog eyes hidden behind inch-thick sunglasses. “Like, tell me the truth, is this a thing I should actually know?”
Crysta peeks down from her (high off the ground,modestly queen sized because this is a smaller room than the one in her old apartment, sporting brand new sheets) bed where she’s sequestered herself to make this a productive study session. “A cosine is…wait, I forgot which one, I know it’s one of the triangle things.”
She did get a perfect score on similar material, but that was eight years ago, and she’d honestly been so depressed and checked out at the time she could hardly remember how she did it. Not that Zeke needed to know that. She smiles at his despair, and leans over the edge to poke the glasses down his nose, just to see how sad his eyes look. It’s very. She brushes a sympathetic finger across his forehead, hardly thinking about it. They’re in private. It’s not revealing at all. “Oh. Babe. Not even a little. I can promise you, though, if you learn cosine it’s just gonna be for this test. You’ll forget the second you walk out. I’m living proof.”
Zeke closes his eyes and lets out a pathetic groan. He just has to cram his brain full of four years worth of knowledge and then keep it all there long enough to prove he's worthy of a piece of paper. Totally doable! Not at all a waste of time! Doesn't make him feel even the least bit nauseous when he thinks about the months of studying ahead of him, the bureaucratic hoops he'll have to jump through to wear his Mysterious Liminal Glasses, or the eight-hour test waiting at the end of it all! It's fine, he's fine, this is all objectively fine.
"What if I just put all my energy into figuring out how to cheat?" he asks, sliding his glasses the rest of the way off his face. These sad eyes need a break. "I was always really good at that."
“Then I’ll totally help you cheat.” She promises, but puts her own microbiology text to the side for now, because it seems like this is an intellectual crisis, which she’s only even a little adept at solving when it doesn’t have anything to do with her own brain. Crysta is not very good at comfort. She is not sure how to put this into words at all. She wastes a few moments paging her fingers through his hair, because that’s easier. “But then we’ll probably get caught, and the Department of Education will throw us both into trig jail where we’ll have to learn about sines and cosines for the rest of our natural lives at knifepoint, I hear, so maybe we try the right way first.”
The feel of Crysta's fingers in his hair gives Zeke something to focus on, something to keep him here in this room instead of spiraling off into his own mind. Just focus on this. On today, right now, on learning what the fuck a cosine is, and then a sine, and then a tangent, and then—
Zeke breathes in deep, his jaw still clenched but the knot in his brain starting to relax.
"Fuck, man," he exhales and turns his eyes up toward Crysta. "I wouldn't last a second in trig jail, trading equations for favors. And you know what they do when you're all out?"
“Banish you to lit degree hell.”
She deadpans, smiling down at him. She twists a lock of hair around her finger and almost subconsciously changes it just a little, making it a little more strong and shiny, envisioning the roots strengthening, being enriched. This level of anxiety is something revolutionary for Crysta, who’s rarely seen it freely expressed in others. Certainly not herself. But she thinks she understands. The way his jaw is clenching now is how hers felt, all those years ago when she was seventeen and also trying to work out what the fuck a cosine was in the swanky hotel she was living in at the time, alone. She doesn’t want him to be alone for this, too.
“Or like, force you to do twister so you’re the human triangle? I don’t know, what.”
There's a terrible second where Zeke imagines falling asleep to Crysta running her fingers through his hair, wrapped up in her scent and the warmth of her touch. But it passes, wiped out by a wave of dread at what that fantasy means. He clenches his jaw even tighter and plucks at the pages of his textbook, flipping them compulsively at the corner to keep his hands supervised and on task.
"God, no, that sounds terrible," he half-laughs, his smile a little off-kilter. "They just send a note home to your parents. I don't even think it's legal to get a lit degree, why would you say that?"
She likes Zeke’s crooked smiles, the way it’s tilted and not quite right. Kissing him right now would be both distracting to him and his math, and unfortunately revealing, so she bites her own lip instead, and concentrates on the pages he’s flipping through. She ceases her touching of his hair to reach down and make him pause on something her eyes caught that talked about cosine.
“I would never make you study Shakespeare. Sorry. Cruel and unusual. A cosine is this little bitty angle right here,” She points it out on a diagram, “The adjacent angle divided by the hypotenuse. SUPER easy actually.”
Zeke slips the glasses back over his eyes and his perception of the world shifts again; words appear on the page before him, skin covers Crysta's metacarpals, the manicured nail tapping the figure of a triangle takes shape. It takes a second to adjust and refocus, squinting at the book and trying to absorb the words.
"Adjacent angle divided by the hypotenuse..." he repeats, but the words sound clumsy and foreign in his mouth. "I—okay, hang on." Zeke pats the floor to find the pen and notebook at his feet so he can scribble his own version of the diagram. At least when he's holding a pen and drawing he feels competent at something. "I ain't kidding when I say I'm dumb as shit, Eurie fuckin' carried me through high school."
A little dark cloud, unexplainable but gloomy, passes over Crysta’s face. She’s said the same thing about herself, dozens of times. It’s different to hear it from someone like Zeke, who makes beautiful things and impossible structures just casually, who is perhaps the funniest person she knows.There’s just no great way to make him see who she sees; the exact and precise cells that congeal to form the way his smile goes crooked or the way his hands craft strands bone into something otherworldly and ethereal. So instead, she thwaps his head lightly with her free hand, without explanation.
“You’re not dumb.” She insists. “Okay. You know art. This is just like. The language of shapes. It’s everything you already know, only you’re seeing the reason behind it now. It’s like…art’s bones. It’s different but it’s always been there.”
Zeke bites the inside of his lip. He doesn't have any real education in art beyond a couple classes in high school. Everything he created came from hours of sketching and erasing, building and breaking, trying and failing until something beautiful emerged. The exact angles were never considered. At least not consciously.
"Probably should've warned you ahead of time, being my friend means constant life coaching sessions." His pen keeps scratching at the paper, adding whiskers and teeth to his new triangle diagram. "And, like, I refuse to pay, so all you're getting is my company."
The little triangle creature taking form is enough to make Crysta pause, smiling at being there to watch its creation. She can’t draw at all. Neither she nor her brothers were ever allowed to be anything Zeke is so naturally; creative, vulnerable, artistic, a crier. And he’s unapologetic. It’s fascinating, from a psychological perspective, which is, she is sure, is why she likes his brain at all.
“Yes, well. Then I guess you’re lucky I’m very rich, and there’s almost never anyone else fun to hang out with.” She grins down at him, to prove this is probably benign bullying. “Cosine cat?”
Zeke adds a tail to the creature and curls it around the corner to rest on the triangle's flat edge. This is what his notes always turn into: doodles on top of barebones information, destined to be ignored as soon as he gets frustrated and gives up. It doesn't feel like a good sign.
"It's the next critter comin' in off the Riftlands to fuck us up." He looks up at Crysta and pokes her hand with the back of his pen. There's a big part of him—a big, unwieldy part of him—that wants to take her hand and kiss her wrist. Desperate for a distraction from this work and these feelings of inadequacy, Zeke wants Crysta to put her hands on his face and make all of this go away.
But he needs to focus. And that's why he can't touch her skin. Not right now. Zeke closes his eyes and inhales deeply. "Bet she'd bring in a real hot math specialist to hang out with."
Crysta grabs the pen from him entirely, because she can sort of see what this is devolving into. Or because her other impulse is to stab him with the pen unfairly, and kiss him in slightly elementary-Spiderman fashion. She can’t. He has to learn. And a probably innocently meant comment about a math genius from the rift has against all sense tripped her ego.
Crysta has never been smart. Everyone’s told her that. Both of her brothers are, in fact, hot math geniuses. And she’s not as smart as them. But they’d never taken the GED test, and had to learn trig in a week. No one else she knew had. She might not be a hot math specialist but she could be. Crysta frowns and hops off her bed, grabbing the book from him and placing it on her lap, mirroring his criss-cross seat so their knees are touching, but just those.
“Well until they get here, you’re just going to have to put up with me, instead.” She snaps, decisive, and flips to the page about cosines. “Pay attention. A triangle has three sides. Duh. The tilty line is the hypotenuse. The bottom one’s adjacent. The upright’s opposite. That means adjacent and opposite to angle a, where the hypotenuse and adjacent ones meet, hence like, adjacent. Are you with me?”
To tell the truth, Zeke is not with Crysta. He followed her as far as "a triangle has three sides" and then she left him in the dust. How is he supposed to know which side is which? The hypotenuse sounds familiar—that's the long one. And for one of the triangle types it's the same length as the other two sides, but how is he supposed to know which one of those is the adjacent and the opposite and—
He takes another breath. Even if he doesn't give a fuck about math and its applications in his life, he wants this. He wants to understand what Crysta is saying, wants to prove that he can actually see one (1) thing through and his brain isn't made of mush.
Also it's kind of hot when girls get stern with him, but he's not here to interrogate this emotional response.
"I'm—yeah, I'm trying, I really am." Zeke pinches the bridge of his nose and reseats his glasses. "Like, adjacent and opposite just mean to whatever angle they pick? Like, I'm not supposed to look at a triangle and know which one is the opposite and angle side?"
“Well the good news is, it’s like, either a right triangle or you’ll be creating a right angle. This is alllll about right angles, for now. So you make a little square to mark the right angle, like this,” She does that, “and the little angle on the other side that we’ve created is the cosine. And the one opposite that angle is always the opposite. So this one’s adjacent. It’s in relation to the lil cosine guy, y’know?”
She taps the paper with her pen, having triumphantly (hopefully) explained basic trigonometry. They could get into the advanced stuff later. She can’t check Zeke’s eyes for understanding, but she’s pretty sure he could use a break, for a second. “You’ve got this.” She says, fingers lighting on his kneecaps. “Like…it’s so annoying, but you’re smarter than shape math.”
This is all starting to make Zeke feel a little sick, a little panicky, a little extremely out of his depth. But if he can just keep Crysta's words in his head then maybe he doesn't even need to understand it. It's not like Zeke has any grander plans for himself, any hidden dreams of becoming a doctor or scientist or anything bigger than what he is now. All he needs to do is replicate the information once.
But Crysta's fingers on his kneecaps are a lightning rod for his attention, grabbing him before he can panic himself out of learning one (1) math. Before he can stop himself, Zeke's hand jumps to touch hers. Just a light brush along her knuckles. "I still think shape math might kill me in the night," he says, his hand floating just above hers. "But we mighta extended my life by a couple days with this."
This is not good enough for Crysta, who leans in a little, smirking, with danger in her eyes that would be better placed to socially destroy another influencer or explode someone’s kidneys. And in a way, they are. Only the kidneys is math.
“You’re gonna show those triangles who’s boss, though. Little by little. And when they come for you in your sleep, Bam” (She slaps the back of his knuckles for emphasis here,) “You’ll get a good score on the math part. We’ll just like, murder them a little every day.”
Zeke smirks at her touch and makes a grab for her hand. His face is warm and there's a light purple blush to his cheeks, which really clashes with his whole aesthetic.
"So did we kill 'em enough today, boss?" he asks and tilts his head enough to look over the edge of his sunglasses. "Did we get away with math-slaughter?"
“No.” She answers, blunt, because frankly they have only learned one thing, and her own unrelenting standards instilled in her at birth cannot abide that. But the light purple in his cheeks suits him a lot more than she’d expect, and her stomach jumps a little when he grabs her hand.
So she grabs it back, fingers wrapping around his wrist. She’s not wearing her glasses but she does think she can see the cells there, the purple blood that flows through him, visible through the veins in his cheeks and his hands. It’s something she could get lost in, if she let herself. Crysta pretends to consider for a long moment. “We’re doing more. Later. But you’ve definitely like. Stabbed the triangles enough to bleed. For now.”
"Oh thank fuck, my eyes are killing me." Zeke shakes his sunglasses the rest of the way off his nose and into his lap. Much better than letting go of Crysta's hand, in case she decides in the next twelve seconds that she does not in fact want him touching her anymore and this is his last chance. "Doesn't mean you gotta slow your roll. I'm happy to provide moral support for a biology babe."
She makes another mental note to maybe ask before pushing in the future, but she doesn’t take it back now. She instead just shakes her head, because now that she remembers eyes as a possible obstacle, the space behind her own eyes also throbs with the telltale evidence she’s been reading too long.
It’s better to tug him towards her by the wrist, but just a little. An excusable motion, if in the last twelve seconds he’s decided he does not want to touch her anymore. This is probably, it strikes her, like some of those high school memories neither of them had ever had. Locked in a bedroom, spending time with some boy who needs your study help but then you get distracted. There’s a sort of vague nostalgia from a time that never was. “I’ve read about cells so much I could probably like, puke. Study break?”
"Mm, you really know how to get a guy going." Zeke follows the pull of her hand and he leans in, close enough to breathe her in. His free hand traces the shape of her jaw, fingers brushing along skin he can no longer see. "Thanks."
“Oh if you like that. Wait til I start talking about prokaryotes.” Crysta whispers, breathy, into his ear just for fun. She closes her eyes against his touch, to test what it might be like in his brain, but she can’t even see bones, and she is impatient. She opens them again, guiding his hand joined in hers to her back, to feel his fingers on one vertebra at a time. She starts to lean in to kiss him, but the thanks is confusing. She hasn’t done anything. She braces against it, her voice tight with just a little too much defense, lest somewhere in his words there’s a rejection or a mockery. Thank you can be used like that.
“...I mean it’s my study break too, so.”
Zeke isn't super perceptive on his best days with all his senses firing properly, but he hears something in Crysta's voice. It makes him pause, the hand on her jaw stopping just below her ear.
"I mean it." He looks down, unable to even pretend to make eye contact with the bridge of Crysta's nose while being sincere. "Like, thanks for not making me feel like a fuckin' idiot or whatever." He puts his forehead against hers, his thumb brushing the edges of her earlobe. It's more than that, but now feels like the wrong time to thank Crysta for smacking him when he calls himself stupid and pushing him when he whines, and for believing in him when he truly does feel like giving up. It would kind of mess up the flow right now.
"And for makin' math hot again," Zeke says instead. "I'm gonna have the weirdest fuckin' wet dreams now."
Crysta freezes when he comes so close, and touches her so gently. It’s warm, and soft, nothing she can accept on a normal day. She raises a hand to the side of his face, to mirror what she feels on her own. A brush of her thumb against his cheekbone. The press of her lips to the corner of his mouth, all very tentative, like she’s afraid she’s doing it wrong, or that it will all blow up. She can’t trust that it won’t, entirely, so she just mirrors his cues, since he’s the one tutoring her in this, a softer language than she’d ever spoken before.
“You’re not an idiot.” She punctuates that, a point she suspects she will be making a lot in the future with a closed-mouth kiss, firm and not inviting any questions. She pauses, then, her lips smiling against his own. “...And like. Honestly? As long as I look hot in them, that’d be a really good sign, I feel like I read somewhere that dreaming about something means you’ve mastered it.”
"You're beautiful in all of them." Zeke kisses her, a quick brush of his lips against hers, his fingers combing into her hair. Not for the first time he wishes he could really see her and look into her eyes, but for now he can feel his way across her face. He can kiss her top lip and the slope of her jaw and appreciate the smell of her skin. "And you wouldn't believe the things I've mastered."
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I really loved this line: “Neither she nor her brothers were ever allowed to be anything Zeke is so naturally; creative, vulnerable, artistic, a crier. And he’s unapologetic. It’s fascinating, from a psychological perspective, which is, she is sure, is why she likes his brain at all.”
Made me go, “Aha! 💡”
They’re very sweet.
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