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“Food?”

“I told you I ate.”

“You told me you had a granola bar, that’s not food.” I grin at him. “I’m going to buy you a muffin. If you don’t want it, it will sit there and judge you for making me spend my money on you.”

He considers that. “Fine, blueberry. If they have it. If they don’t, nothing.”

Progress.

I leave him at the table and head to the counter to order. My gaze keeps drifting back to him. He looks slightly uncomfortable, and I nibble on my lower lip, wondering if this was a bad idea. I want him to be comfortable around me. We have to live together for the next nine months.

He doesn’t seem to look at me once. But his eyes do go to the door every so often as though the whole campus might choose now to come get coffee. I balance the tray and head back to him. Sliding it onto the table, I sit across from him.

“Blueberry, you were in luck,” I say and slide the muffin on a napkin over to him. “I went with Strawberry cream, it’s my favorite. And of course the pumpkin spice latte Eli got me hooked on last year. Eli is the goalie on my team.”

He nods and takes a sip of his tea. It goes silent, and he glances around like he’s going to escape.

“So,” I say quickly. “What’s your major?”

“Biochemistry,” he replies, settling into his seat a little more.

“Ah, explains why you’re taking Roger’s class.” I take a bite off the top of my muffin as he unwraps his. And I watch in fascination as he uses a plastic knife and cuts it into fourths before picking up a piece. “The text book stuff makes my eyes cross.”

“I like systems and equations,” he says. Then, like the sentence unlocked a door he did not mean to open, he keeps going. “It’s the overlap. Chemistry wants the mechanism. Biology wants the organism. Biochemistry is the part in the middle where a pathway is just a series of reactions you can write down. Enzyme kinetics. Binding constants. Why a protein folds one way and not another. You can take something that looks alive and messy and reduce it until it behaves. Not all the way. People who say you can are lying. But enough that the unknown has rules. That’s why Analytical Chemistry is easy. You’re quantifying a system that already wants to be quantified. Physics is the same idea with more math. If Professor Rogers actually teaches the derivations instead of using the Scantron the whole class, it might even be⁠—”

He stops. I wait.

“Might even be what?”

“Fun.”

I stare at him. His ears turn pink. He’s still holding a fourth of the muffin in his hand.

“Sorry. That was a lot.” He sets the piece down and clears his throat. “You asked for my major, not a seminar. What’s yours?”

I realize I have been smiling at him the whole time like an idiot.

“Don’t apologize. That was the most words you’ve said to me since I destroyed your experiment.” I lean back and shrug. “Forensic science. I want to work in a lab and visit crime scenes. It’s fascinating."

Quinn finally starts to relax. As if we are on equal ground now that he knows I’m going for a degree in science, too.

“Unknowns,” he says.

“Yeah.”

He picks up a slice of his muffin and takes a bite. Crumbs fall onto his shirt, and he brushes them off. He nods at my chest. “That explains your shirt.”

I look down at my shirt, besides science themed, I’m not sure how it explains anything. “My shirt is awesome,” I say a little defensively.

He smiles a little and pushes his glasses up his nose. “It is.”

SEVEN

QUINN

Daniel follows me out of the coffee shop.

Not follows, exactly. He walks beside me, then half a step behind when the sidewalk narrows, then beside me again, as though he has decided he has to stay by me. It’s similar to a puppy that has been told to heel and is very proud of itself for almost doing it.