149. Chapter 149

He’s nervous when he knocks at the door.

She’d been lovely each time he met her so far, and her text was warm and open – Of course I’ll help you out! Physics is one of my things. (Maggie says I’m a nerd, and don’t tell her I said so, but it’s pretty true.) Why don’t you come over Maggie’s apartment around 7 tonight and I’ll get you dinner and we can work together? – but he really wants to impress her, and he’s afraid that his stupid questions about his stupid physics homework will make someone as smart as Alex Danvers think he’s just another stupid kid.

So he’s nervous, but he knocks in his typical musical rhythm anyway, and Alex is grinning already as she opens the door.

“Hey you,” she greets, and pulls him into a one-armed hug. “Got pizza and salad and garlic bread and milkshakes – I figured that’s as good physics food as any, right?”

Tears sting his eyes, because other than Maggie, no grownup has ever done something like this for him. Ordered him food (so much food), interrupted their life – and he knew the FBI kept Alex plenty busy – to don an old Stanford sweatshirt and be vulnerable enough to replace her contacts with glasses, to welcome him home somewhere, to help him, to care for him, asking nothing, nothing, nothing in return, because he had nothing to offer her but the shocked smile on his face, because he doesn’t get paid until next week so he couldn’t even contribute something small like dessert.

But Alex doesn’t seem to mind that he’s come empty handed, because she’s grabbing eagerly at the textbook and notebooks he’s pulling out of his bag, and she’s flipping through them with an almost lusty grin on her face.

“Oh, we’re gonna have a lot of fun tonight, you and me, Adrian,” she tells him, and he gulps as she opens his notebook, because now is probably the moment when she discovers that he really isn’t all that smart, really isn’t all that worth being enthusiastic about, after all.

But her eyebrows arch and her lips twitch upward, and she grins at him over her shoulder as she leads him to the rug in the middle of the living room so they can spread his notebook, his worksheets, his textbook between them.

“Your notes are spectacular, Ade,” she says, and she sounds genuinely impressed, genuinely pleased, genuinely proud. His spine straightens and his heart swells.

“Maybe, but I just can’t get my head around it. How the hell can an electron be a wave and a particle at the same time?”

Alex laughs and adjusts her glasses and flips through his textbook and points to a passage about wave-particle duality. “The thing this isn’t gonna tell you is that we honest to god don’t know. But we have some theories.”

And never has he heard physics sound so interesting, never has it been so intuitive, so exciting, so exhilarating, so important.

Alex talks and Alex demonstrates and Adrian asks and Adrian scrawls notes and Alex asks and Adrian answers and Alex offers her fist and Adrian bumps it because he’s getting it, he’s really getting it.

Neither of them notice the hours ticking by as she guides him through the math, as she guides him through the realities layered underneath the math, inside the math.

Neither of them notice the increasingly messy sprawl of papers as both of them, in their enthusiasm, pick pages at random to start writing on, to start theorizing on, to start drawing an idea for the other on.

Neither of them notice Maggie’s key scraping the lock of the front door, Maggie standing silent in the threshold, taking over the scene that’s taken over her living room: her girlfriend, in nothing but basketball shorts and her slightly tattered Stanford sweater, and her glasses, god, those glasses, forehead so close to her little boy’s that they’re practically touching, pouring over a page of his physics textbook amidst a sea of scattered papers, scattered notes, scattered ideas, scattered revelations.

“Yeah, you got it, Adrian!” Alex is beaming, and Maggie swallows tears, because Adrian’s entire body is glowing with pride, with confidence, and when she takes a step closer, they look up with identical grins on their faces.

“The damn cat is both dead and alive!” Adrian informs her victoriously by way of greeting her, and Alex laughs at the quantum joke while Maggie shakes her head and mutters something happy, something content, something thrilled, about her very own family of nerds.