String Theory

by Ashlyn Kane

  He took another deep breath and then returned to his sister and intern, reseated at the table, pretending they had no idea what was going on at the door.

  Ari took his seat.

  And then noticed the music playing through the thousand-dollar speaker system—a violin begging for forgiveness and a piano demanding an apology.

  Well, fuck.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  JAX RETURNED to the house and pulled his mother’s car into the garage. With Hobbes and Naomi visiting Hobbes’s parents for the holiday, there was no point parking outside.

  He expected his mother would be there, especially without a vehicle, but a note on the kitchen table informed him she’d gone for a walk to appreciate the mild weather. Jax supposed it was milder than Kingston, at least, and no Cambridge either, but the idea of hoofing it through calf-high snowdrifts didn’t appeal to him.

  Unfortunately his mother’s absence left him alone with his thoughts. Sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree, he took out his phone.

  He’d unfollowed Ari’s social media accounts after the breakup. Coming across him while he was innocently scrolling through Instagram was a lousy way to start a day or end one. But now he found himself searching for the account again.

  He couldn’t get that song out of his head. Hell, either of those songs.

  He wasn’t an idiot, at least not most of the time. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out artists drew inspiration from real life.

  So Jax was feeling… things about Ari writing music about him.

  That was what he’d done, wasn’t it? He’d written a song about his feelings for Jax. Possibly more than one song. Jax felt a little stupid for not noticing earlier, considering the number of nights Ari crawled out of bed after leaving Jax a pile of nerveless goo and went to make love to his piano instead. And Jax—okay, maybe Jax was an idiot, because it had never occurred to him that Ari, his boyfriend who was a professional musician, would write songs about him.

  What kind of fresh hell was this going to be? Would he be innocently grocery shopping, minding his own business, and then wham, all of a sudden, over the store’s radio would come the inescapable reminder that Ari used to have feelings for him, but now he didn’t?

  Worse—shit—what if someone requested one of his songs at the Rock? What if someone requested one of Ari’s songs at the Rock while Jax was playing and Ari was in attendance? That was, like, a special Inception-level cross-section of Jax’s nightmares.

  Of course, Ari probably wouldn’t come to the Rock anymore.

  After next week, Jax wouldn’t be going to the Rock anymore either.

  One of the good things to come out of his mother’s visit was that their reconciliation had included Jax’s admission that he wanted to go back to MIT to defend his thesis, once he’d saved up the money. When he tried to turn down his mother’s offer of a loan, she threatened to give him the money for Christmas instead, and he was forced to accept a loan as the lesser of two evils. With her help, he’d even be able to rent a place that wasn’t a complete shithole. He didn’t have to be in Boston long. He’d already submitted the work to Grayling’s successor for evaluation. He was just waiting on the committee to decide on an official date.

  It was for the best. He needed to close that chapter of his life. But he didn’t want to close this one—his friendship with Hobbes, with his coworkers at the bar, being Uncle Jax. But he didn’t want to do a postdoc, so continuing in academia was out. He was no longer certain he wanted to work at a think tank either.

  And—

  And all of that went right out of his head when he got to Ari’s Instagram, because there was new content there. Jax scrolled until he found the first post he hadn’t seen—an image of the track listing on the back of the album—and clicked on it.

  The background image was a geometric black and white—a smooth, sinuous soft-focus parabolic curve that looked like nothing so much as an artistic ass shot. At least, that was how it struck Jax, though of course it wasn’t. He suspected it was computer-generated.

  Alice, said the track listing. 1.618. First Sight. September 27. Push/Pull. Solo.

  Jax’s face went hot. Wait a minute. September 27 was the day they first… wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to check a calendar to make sure.

  He was pretty certain he’d know if he ever heard the song. Shaking himself, he scrolled past the rest of the image and over to the description.

  String Theory. Coming March 17.

  Jax put his hand to his mouth.

  There were a few more pictures. Ari in the studio, handsome and serious with his chin on the chinrest of his electric violin, his eyes closed, obviously lost in the music. A few of the musicians he recorded with—two more with Aiden Lindell and one with a sweet-looking blond girl named Maxi Greene.

  As Jax had hoped—dreaded—there were a few videos with song clips.

  The first was a clip of Aiden Lindell singing a few bars of “Alice”—the song that had been playing when Jax knocked on Ari’s door today. At first Jax had thought it was a coincidence when he heard the name, but as he stood waiting for Ari, the song spun out a story about the Cheshire Cat guiding Alice, seeing the world for what it was and loving it for its infinite complexities. And Jax had just known on a level he couldn’t fully explain that he was the cat in question. He’d wanted to break down in Ari’s doorway, demand that Ari tell him everything.

  But then the song had changed to something angry and volatile, and Jax realized “Alice” must have been composed weeks ago. It didn’t mean Ari still felt the same.

  The “Push/Pull” post had a snippet of intense dialogue between the piano and the violin. It was electric and left chills down his spine—an argument in song.

  “Solo” made his lip tremble. There was no violin in this piece, just a piano, and it sounded sad.

  So Ari had basically written him an entire album, every song either about Jax or their relationship. And he hadn’t told Jax. Why? What did it mean?

  Was it meant to be a surprise? A secret forever? Surely Ari hadn’t thought Jax would never notice.

  Jax didn’t know whether to be grateful or not that “September 27” wasn’t sampled on Instagram. He wasn’t sure he was ready to listen to Ari describe their sex life with a violin.

  His mother found him on the couch, watching the “Alice” clip on loop.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jax jumped and stared at his mother for a long moment, then finally admitted, “Listening to a clip from Ari’s new album.”

  “Jax….”

  “It’s called ‘Alice.’”

  “Oh,” she said. For a moment she looked too taken aback to say anything else. Then she shook herself and said, “Right. Turn that off—it’s not helping—and come help me make cookies. We have a lot of baking that needs doing before we go see your sister tomorrow.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jax said with a mock salute, and she threw one of her cold gloves at his face.

  Laughing, Jax set his phone on the coffee table, lobbed the glove back at her, and ducked into the kitchen to escape retribution.

  “CHRISTMAS” DINNER was a strange one that year, not that these dinners didn’t always strike Ari as odd. He’d never had a Christmas with a Christian family, but he was pretty sure that the TV-inspired mashup his family did wouldn’t feel authentic to most Canadian families.

  Still, this year was weirder than normal, since they’d decided to delay until the twenty-eighth in order to invite Theo after his return from his family home. He’d expressed an interest in experiencing Persian family life, even if he didn’t know his own ethnic heritage exactly—“23AndMe is terrifying,” he once said apropos of nothing before diving back into his textbook—though Ari found it hilarious that his first full Persian family dinner was a holiday no one else celebrated.

  Ari was the last one there again, once more by design. Afra had asked for some time to prepare their parents for the news that she and Ben had started the ado
ption process. By now, though, she’d had plenty of opportunity.

  Ari could tell as soon as he went inside that no one had tried to cook the North American classics this year, for which he was grateful. He’d never forget the turkey dinner debacle of ’04. The poor bird had been black on the outside and raw on the inside. In its place, his father appeared to have cooked every Persian holiday food known to God and man.

  Whatever their other shortcomings, his parents welcomed Theo with open arms, and though, as Ari had surmised, there was no turkey, it seemed they were simply trying to stuff Theo instead.

  After dinner his mother took him aside. “Ari… I’d like to talk to you privately.”

  He’d eaten too much to fight her on it.

  When the door to her study closed behind him, she reached for his hands, but when he didn’t reach back, she stepped away and clasped hers in front of her. A flicker of hurt showed on her face, but it quickly disappeared under her usual put-together mask.

  Ari put his own hands in his pockets in order to avoid the urge to fidget. “What did you want to talk about?” He glanced behind him at the door. It felt strange to be closed in a room with her. They were a tight-knit family; they didn’t often keep secrets.

  Or at least, until recently he’d thought they didn’t.

  She sighed and gestured to her desk, but instead of sitting behind it as she had when he was a child, she sat in one of the two armchairs on the opposite side.

  Ari was thankful, a moment later, that she waited until he was sitting down to say, “I owe you an apology.”

  He was so taken aback he couldn’t form words. In his entire life, his mother had never apologized for anything. It took him a moment to manage, “Oh?”

  She broke his gaze, her hands still twisted together in her lap so tightly that the brown skin was turning pale. But she took a deep breath and persevered, once again meeting his eyes. “One of the most important parts of raising a child is making decisions that are in the child’s best interest. It’s part of why we moved to Canada in the first place, because we knew we wanted our children to have more choices than we did. It’s part of why Afra gave her baby up for adoption when he was born.” She let out another long breath. “And it’s a very difficult habit to break when our children grow up enough to make their own decisions about what’s best for them.”

  It was more of an apology than Ari had ever hoped for, but it didn’t explain everything to his satisfaction. Honestly, now he had more questions. “I don’t understand why it’s so important to you that I stay in London. You always said you wanted me to be happy. You supported my dream of playing music professionally. You didn’t think, when I went to college in Boston, that I’d come home and sign up with the London Symphonia?” The London orchestra didn’t have the budget or the schedule of a larger orchestra, and most of the members taught or performed with several groups in order to support themselves.

  Before she could answer, he added in frustration, “And I don’t see why it’s so important that I marry a doctor, Maman.” I wish you could have loved Jax as much as I do.

  And he wished he’d behaved differently. He wished he’d told Jax how he felt when he had the chance. Maybe then they could have salvaged things.

  She took a deep breath. “Lately I have been letting my own fears guide me.” Ari frowned. “My prognosis is good, but I have breast cancer.”

  He felt dizzy. “What?”

  “There are two lumps. The surgeon will remove them, and after some additional therapy, probably radiation, I should be absolutely fine. You’re not losing me yet.” He could hardly reconcile the words coming out of her mouth with the smooth composure of her voice and face.

  “You’re sure?” His throat felt tight. This conversation barely felt real.

  “As sure as a medical professional can be about this.” Her tone reminded him that medicine did not deal in certainties. “My prognosis is excellent. It was caught in a routine checkup, nice and early. They will do a lumpectomy, and I should be around for years to come.”

  “Good.” He might be mad at her, but he couldn’t imagine losing her.

  Now the smoothness on her face disappeared, replaced with tight lines at the corners of her mouth, her forehead, her eyes. “But cancer has a way of putting things into perspective, or maybe warping it. I suddenly felt very old and very worried about what I would and wouldn’t live to see. I wanted you to be comfortably established, to know that even if I wasn’t here, you would have someone to love and to love you. To look after you.” Was that why she’d wanted him to marry a doctor? “But I lost perspective about what was important on that front.”

  That was putting it mildly, but it felt like it would be rude to point that out. “Thank you for telling me. When are you…?”

  “The surgery is set for January third.”

  “Oh.” So soon? Was that a bad sign?

  “I should have told you weeks ago, but I didn’t want you to worry.”

  Ari gave her a look. “So you decided to be weird instead?”

  She made a gesture that Ari interpreted as mea culpa. This was truly the strangest family dinner in history. “I deserve that. Afra read me the riot act when I told her. You can rest easy, though—your Jax did worse.”

  Hearing her say his name, suggesting that she’d talked to him, blindsided him almost as badly as the word cancer. “Jax?”

  “Hm.” She smoothed her pants and avoided his gaze. “Yes. I went to that bar.”

  “You went to the Rock?” Was the bar still standing?

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Honestly?” She lifted her gaze and shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure, except I wanted to see him how you saw him. He was very charming on that stage. And as good-looking as ever,” she added somewhat slyly. It didn’t feel like a dig this time.

  “Maman,” he warned.

  “I didn’t intend to talk to him, but, well, I accidentally sat down next to Christine and got talking.”

  “Christine?” Jax’s new… girlfriend? Lover? Paramour?

  “You can imagine how I felt when she said she was his mother.”

  Ari choked. “His mother?”

  “Yes?”

  “I never knew her name,” Ari managed to strangle out, reeling.

  “It was an awkward conversation, given the things I’d said to Jax’s face and vice versa.” She let out a sharp laugh, and Ari stared at her. “You know, I think I like him. He told me we had a lot in common. We’re both awful people who love you. Well, actually he used the word dicks.”

  “Love?” He didn’t know where to start. Jax hadn’t started dating someone else? Jax had talked to his mother? And called her a dick?

  And that was them, for lack of a better term, making up?

  “Well, of course, dear. No one can sing a love song like that if they don’t mean it.” She rose. “When you’re both ready, I’d like to retry that first meeting.”

  Stunned, Ari watched her leave. He had no idea what to do with all of this information, except maybe to get in his car and go see Jax right now and ask to talk.

  Only, he had a family dinner to get through, and he couldn’t just leave. Afra would never forgive him.

  Tomorrow he would call Jax and ask to meet him, and then they could have a proper conversation.

  Tomorrow he could get his life back on track.

  ARI’S PLAN had only two kinks—Jax was not answering his damned phone; every call went straight to voicemail, and he didn’t know where Jax lived.

  The first issue, the thought that Jax might be ignoring his calls, was disheartening but did not dissuade him. Even if Jax really was done with him, Ari needed to know for certain.

  The second was a bigger hurdle. Because if Jax was ignoring him and not simply busy, Ari couldn’t even leave him a note if he didn’t know where to find him.

  Well, he knew of one place, but showing up to Jax’s work would be a dick move. Even Ari knew that.

  Which l
eft Ari with only one recourse, aside from morally dubious ones involving private investigators—Naomi.

  “Ari, to what do I owe the phone call so early on a weekday morning.” She did not sound pleased.

  “Hello, Naomi. I’m sorry for disturbing you, but you’re probably the only person who can help me with this.”

  “You’re lucky my practice isn’t opening till next week,” she grumped. Perhaps Calvin was rubbing off on her. “What do you want?”

  “I need to speak with Jax, but he’s not answering his phone, and I don’t know his address.”

  “And you didn’t think that was a hint to stay away?”

  He blew out a breath. Of course he had. “Yes. But I need to speak to him anyway. I owe him a lot.”

  “What are you going to say to him when you see him that you can’t tell his voicemail?”

  He winced. That was a good point. But he was coming full circle with the “bad at words” thing.

  Maybe that was a sign this was a time for feelings. “That I’m sorry.” He swallowed hard and forced himself to say the next bit. “That I love him. And I want to try again, if he does.”

  “Good,” she said with no small amount of satisfaction. “Though your timing sucks. He just left for Boston.”

  He blinked, taken aback. “Boston?”

  “Yeah, apparently he’s got to actually be at MIT if he wants to convince them to give him a PhD.”

  Ari hadn’t even known he was thinking of going back. “Do you know how long he’ll be gone?”

  “No, but he doesn’t either. Depends on his advisory committee, but Jax thought probably a couple months. Maybe the whole semester.”

  Ari couldn’t wait that long. He’d be on tour before the semester ended. “Do you know his address in Boston?”

  Naomi stayed silent for a long moment. “I do not.”

  Ari closed his eyes. If Jax kept refusing his phone calls…. He thought about flying to Boston anyway, haunting the MIT math department. He’d probably get arrested for being a creep, and he’d deserve it.