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“What do you like on your sandwich?Mustard? Mayo?”
He’d basically cleared out the deli, pounds of different meats and cheeses and rolls, and was standing at the counter building what looked like joke sandwiches, just piling on everything like Riggs and I used to do the summer we worked at Sub-Cuisine, making number nines with extra everything as soon as we flipped the sign to closed. Until the next time they did inventory and we got fired.
“Yeah. Anything. Whatever. It’s all good,” I told him, backing away a little. Pizza was one thing, I guess. And maybe I let him give me candy and snacks and bacon. But a sandwich the size of two meals when I knew how much all that deli shit cost? That was like him trying to hand me cash or something. Uncomfortable after I’d just done all that work to accept piles of stuff from him, and I think he got that.
“Okay. Here, you can put these on the fridge,” he told me, sliding a flat cardboard package along the counter toward me. Two of them, actually, stacked on each other.
I picked them up and flipped them over, and they were refrigerator magnets— the bright colored kind for kids that looked like the alphabet. “Magnets?”
“I saw them at the checkout. They’ll help you with your chemistry.”
“Yeah, more like you’re a slut for impulse items,” I muttered. “You’re a goddamn shopaholic.” But I was already peeling the cardboard backing off, dumping them onto the counter and mixing them around.
He laughed. “You’re not wrong. Open them up, smart ass, stick them on there.”
I transferred them over a handful at a time, loading up the freezer and sliding some down to the front of the fridge. They made a pleasing kind of smooth vibration under my fingers as I slid them around, just randomly at first, and then sorting the colors together and then pulling in a B and then an E, spelling out BEAST across the freezer because why not, getting all the letters straight and evenly spaced because his neurotic shit was rubbing off on me, I guess, and then jumbling them up again because what was I, a fucking middle school kid drawing hearts on a notebook.
“What’s this one?” Caleb asked me, his heavy voice falling across me a second before his heavy shadow did and he reached over my shoulder to the jumble of letters, sliding an N and an E together.
I snorted, wondering if he’d seen his name before I wrecked it. “Time and place for homework, don’t you think?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Time is here, place is here. All week long.”
“What’s this one?” I asked him, spelling FUCK across the freezer in neon plastic, feeling like a total delinquent when I did it.
“Fluoride, Uranium, Carbon, Potassium,” he told me, straightening each letter as he touched it, and I laughed.
“Oxygen, Fluoride, Fluoride,” I said, adding OFF underneath the FUCK and then laughing again, at myself this time for being a goddamn science nerd, and scattering all the letters.
“Look at you, so smart,” he whispered, turning it into a growl as he wrapped an arm around me from behind, pulling me up against him. It was such a weird mix of turn ons, and I did not expect being called smart to work for me, but man it really did. So did the tight hold and his breath ghosting the side of my neck as he snugged up against me, just being so goddamnboyfriendyagain. “This one,” he repeated, pointing to the N and the E.
“Neon. You really think this is going to help me? You really think any of these tricks are going to help me?”
“I think they already are. And the more ways we can show this stuff to your brain, the more potential there is for it to latch onto a way it likes.”
“Okay, but are you actually going toteachme anything?”
“What’s this one?” he said, taking the E away and only leaving the N.
“Nitrogen.”
“And this one?” He added an A to the end.
“Sodium.”
“And this?” He pulled away the N and added a G.
“Sil…ver?” I fumbled halfway through, not totally sure, but mostly sure, even though I didn’t knowhowI knew that.
“Right. See, it’s turning into instinct. Can you feel it?”
My shoulders shivered a little, and I wasn’t sure if I really did feel it or if I felt him being excited, but I felt something. “I don’t know. Maybe. Those are still easy ones, though. I can pronounce them,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. You won’t have to pronounce them on the test though. You just have to recognize them. You just have to be able to jog your memory. It might not feel like I’m teaching you anything, but I promise I am. I promise you’ll pass this test. But, yeah. We’re gonna evolve past just games this week if that makes you feel better.” He reached out and spelled GO SHARKS across the freezer. “You’ll be playing that game on Friday, and I’ll be watching you bend over in that uniform and rooting you on.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sunday was a fluke, I guess, because even after passing out so hard I barely remembered going to bed, I still woke up Monday morning scrambling like my body didn’t realize I wasn’t sleeping in a broken down twin with monsters underneath.
