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“You need to see how it applies to real life,” he says, leaning back in his chair and removing his glasses long enough to rub the bridge of his nose. “Let’s say you move to Germany—”
“That’s not real life.”
“—and you’re having some friends over, and you want to make your favorite—do you have a dessert or something you like to make?”
“What if I don’t cook?”
His eyes flash. They’re more green than brown today. “Let’s pretend.”
“Fine,” I say. “Brownies. Mom’s recipe. Best ever.”
“Okay, Mom’s brownies. But all the measurements are in cups and English units—”
“Isn’t it strange how we still use English units and the English don’t?”
“—and your fully furnished flat only has a metric cooking scale. How are you going to measure?”
“Beats me. Guess I’ll have to buy some strudel.”
“No. You absolutely have to make your mom’s brownies because you’ve bragged so much about them to your new friends.”
With a voice completely deadpan, his dry humor is easy to miss, but I’ve spent enough hours with him now that I can see it peeking through at times. I wonder what his belly laugh sounds like—those smile lines insist that he has one—and what it would take to coax it out of him.
“So you google the conversion factor”—he pulls out his phone and has it in less than three seconds—“and you find that one cup of flour weighs one hundred fifty grams.”
“But it’s way more humid in Europe. What if the flour weighs more there because of increased water content? How do I take that into account? Also, more flour is required at higher altitude. So wouldn’t I have to decrease it if Mom bakes at 5,800 feet and I’m baking near sea level?”
He tips his head in that rather charming way, though I’m pretty sure he’s annoyed. “Did you ever consider going into STEM?”
“Pardon?”
“Science, technology—maybe not engineering or mathematics, but chemistry? Biology?”
I shake my head. “Too much math, but I’ve always loved the concepts. I was an English major for a while, before I changed to rec-man.”
“Huh.” His eyes narrow, and I prepare to deflect when he asks why I switched.
Everyone changes majors. It’s common enough to be unremarkable, though mine was anything but. Maybe I’m paranoid after Aaron’s nosy peer review, expecting Noah to press me for details.
But he doesn’t.
Unpleasant memories slink back under my floorboards as he returns to math.
“Those are valid considerations, about the flour. But let’s assume you’re living near the Alps, so the altitude and climate are similar enough that we can just focus on the calculation. Agreed?”
“I don’t know. You know what happens when you assume things.”
His mouth quirks up a millimeter before he repeats sternly, “Agreed?”
I sigh my resignation.
“How many cups of flour in your mom’s brownies?”
“I don’t remember.”
The muscles in his square jaw bunch, making the shadow of his stubble more apparent. “Okay, let’s assume... I don’t know... six cups.”
I stifle a smirk and tuck a stray curl behind my ear. “There you go, assuming again. That’s way too much. I don’t have that many friends in Germany.”
