Page 51 of Naz & Roz

She should.

“Let’s go to your place,” she said suddenly, pushing away from him and heading for where he’d parked his car—not the bike this time—at the very end of the driveway. Naz knew better than to try and get a closer spot to the house. No one could ever leave when their vehicle was crowded by everyone else’s. “We can go there, right?”

He was still watching her walk away. “Is that where you want to go? There’s not much to see at my place. We can go anywhere, Roz.”

“Why not?”

Yeah … why not?

“So, what do you think?” Naz asked.

Roz leaned in his bedroom doorway, and peeked at the space in there. He wasn’t a big decorator, and he didn’t plan on living here forever, so he hadn’t put in much effort other than furniture, and a few things on the wall. The only thing that really meant anything to him inside the apartment was the Baby Grand piano in the living room that his grandfather, Calisto, had passed onto him when he first moved into the place. He certainly wasn’t at Roz’s level of talent when it came to the piano, but he knew a song or two and the scales.

Good enough for him.

“It’s cute,” she said.

Naz scoffed. “Cute?”

She shot him a sweet smile over her shoulder. “It feels very much like a bachelor lives here.”

His lips split with a smirk. “I’m not really a bachelor now, though, am I? I have you.”

Roz winked as she spun in the bedroom doorway. “Yeah, you still are even with me.”

“Ah, I see.”

“What is that above your bed, anyway?”

Naz didn’t even have to look in the bedroom to know what she was talking about. The equation above his bed had been left unfinished, and the large six-foot by three-foot whiteboard was only half filled with numbers and symbols. Ready for him to get back to it whenever he felt the need.

“Time,” he said. “It’s time.”

“Above your bed?”

Naz shrugged. “I’ve always had a whiteboard above my bed. I do my best thinking first thing in the morning, or right before I go to sleep. I need it close to translate what’s in my head as it comes to me.”

“And what’s on that board—”

“Is an equation—or the formula for an equation—about time, yeah.”

Roz peeked back over her shoulder. “How so?”

“It’s an equation for the idea that if time was on a constant loop, one that doesn’t end, then it would be more like an oval shape instead of the traditional infinity symbol most people think of when we think about infinite time.”

“Why?”

He chuckled, and shoved his hands in his pockets. Why she wanted to know, he didn’t understand. It was just a boring theory in his head that hadn’t left him alone from the time he was sixteen. He’d finally decided to put it to paper even if he had dropped out of college, and left physics behind.

“Because with the idea of it being the traditional shape, at some point, time has to meet again. There’s a point where it crosses over, and we know by the fact no one has ever recorded it happening … time has never crossed over again. Instead, like an oval, we have long stretches of time that seem to mirror past events. They aren’t exactly the same, but they feel very similar. People have moments of—”

“Deja vu,” Roz interjected, smiling a little.

“Yeah, like that. So, I just thought if I could work out the math for this theory, then maybe it would be a new way to look at it.”

“And that’s all you plan to do with it? Just work out the math, and look at it?”

Naz’s tongue peeked out to touch his upper lip as he laughed. “Yeah, babe. Sometimes my head is full of so much shit that I just … have to get it out somehow. And that’s one way I do it.”