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“You know, when I met you, I thought you were such a sweet boy.”
Biting my lip, I tried not to make too much of a spectacle of myself. But I didn’t try very hard. His touch was too perfect. And I was too needy. Endlessly, gloriously needy. Loving him and wanting him, wanting him and loving him, curled into an infinite spiral in the nautilus shell of my heart.
“You’re still a sweet boy,” Adam added. “It’s just you’re also this.”
“A s-scallywag?”
“Among other things.”
“Many things,” I admitted, already half-lost.
He angled his wrist slightly, his palm pressing against me. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to let you come in my car.”
“You won’t?” I knew the answer to this as well.
“Have I ever?”
I shook my head.
“But I might keep you like this all the way to the Chirk.”
My head fell back against the headrest, my spine dissolving into mercury and moonlight. “Please don’t.”
“Would you like that, petal?”
I thought about continuing to pretend I wouldn’t. But—as much as I adored being overwhelmed sometimes—I didn’t quite have the resolve for it today. I wanted to melt for him like butter over a hot crumpet. “Yes, please. But…” My eyelashes fluttered, helpless and pleasure heavy “…tell me about the prisoners.”
“You want to hear about probabilities right now?”
“I want to hear you.”
“All right.” Adam’s hand left me to settle on the wheel. He would come back, I knew, but for now I enjoyed the deep, warm ache of waiting for him. “By adopting a strategy, the probability of success becomes the probability of the strategy working rather than the probability of each individual prisoner independently finding their number multiplied together—which gets bloody small bloody fast.”
The road straightened. Adam drew my hand out from where I’d hidden it and placed it where his had been only moments ago.
“You be good now,” he told me.
I was good. I was sosogood.
“Going back to the scenario when there’s only two prisoners, we already know that randomly gives us twenty-five percent chance of success. There are four possible strategies we can adopt: Either we both choose box one, or we both choose box two; or you choose one, I choose two; or you choose two, I choose one. In the first two strategies our chance of success is zero because webothneed to find our number—”
“Zero isn’t better than twenty-five percent,” I pointed out dreamily.
Adam laughed. “Well-spotted. But, as we’ve established, the strategy that involves ensuring each of us picks a different number has a fifty percent chance of success, so the strategy offers us a better probability of a successful outcome than random choice can.”
“And when there are a hundred prisoners?”
“Same principle.” His voice caught in his throat, his knuckles whitening where he gripped the wheel. “God, you look beautiful right now, Edwin. Sometimes I wonder what right thing I did that brought you into my life.”
Beautiful, from the Latin, or the middle English, or the Old Frenchbiauté: une promesse de bonheur. “You came to help Oxford deal with a flood.”
“I still can’t believe you even glanced at me twice.”
“You were the only thing I saw. You’re the only thing I’ve seen since.”
Adam swallowed another rough sound. “With a hundred prisoners, the only difference is fiddlier maths. What it boils down to is all the boxes are in loops and if you follow the numbers in each box it’ll get you back to the number where you started. You all succeed if there’s no loop longer than fifty. And the chance of that is about thirty percent.”
“Loops?”
