“No,” Eliot said, over and over as she talked. “No, no, no. Brynn, no. This isn’t your fault, not ever.”
“But I—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. Listen. You did nothing wrong.”
“If something had happened…” Brynn’s voice trailed off into an awful silence during which Eliot felt the adrenaline of anger rush through him.
“You’re going to be okay,” Eliot said. “That’s all that matters.”
“Yes. Okay.” Brynn closed her eyes, her brows furrowed, and Eliot couldn’t bring himself to imagine what nightmares must be going through her mind.
Silence filled the bedroom, and Eliot thought Brynn might have dozed off. But when he rose from the bed, her eyes snapped open.
“Eliot? Can you bring me my math stuff? So I can do the problem?”
“You really want to work on math?” Eliot raised his eyebrows.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “It will take my mind off of everything.”
“Then we can work together,” he said. “I’ll bring your notebook.”
“Eliot?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you staying?”
He leaned over and caressed her forehead, his hand pressing back her hair.
“So that I can keep working with such a brilliant mathematician.”
“No. Really.”
Eliot considered the question. He hadn’t thought about it, but the second he knew Brynn was in danger, it was like a switch had flipped in his mind. Nothing else mattered. Nothing but her. Any obstacle between them was only an illusion, something put there by the world to make him lose sight of what he cared about. In the middle of the night, he had known that he would not be able to leave her side until he was sure she would be okay without him. And even then…
“Really?” he asked.
“Really.”
The gate was down, his past worries forgotten. All that mattered was Brynn, right now. She looked up at him expectantly.
“I’m staying because I love you.”
Brynn’s mouth dropped open slightly, her pink lips parted in disbelief.
“I’ll get you that notebook,” Eliot said. He stood and left before she could say a word.
He loved me.
It wasn’t a dream anymore, not another fantasy I had imagined in my head. He said that he loved me, and meant it. Air stopped moving through my chest; I had forgotten how to breathe.
He came back with a notebook I took carefully in my hand. His eyes were kind, and despite the horror of the past day I trusted him to keep me safe. He looked at me as though he expected me to say something, but I turned my head down to the mathematics. I did not want to break the delicate bond that had stretched out between us by talking about it too much. In any case, I did not know what to say.
We worked for an hour, and then he fixed me breakfast. As I waited for him to return, my chest tightened with fright and did not relax until he came back into the room. I could not eat very much, only a bit of bread and honey. The honey tasted sickeningly sweet in my mouth, and I gulped down water to relieve the stickiness of it.
Tucked under Eliot’s arm was a record; he placed it on the old-fashioned player in the corner of the room.
“I thought we could use some inspiration,” Eliot said. I closed my eyes and heard the familiar strains of the Gymnopedie amplified in the air.
“Do you want to take a break?” Eliot sat next to me, moving my half-eaten plate to the nightstand.
“No,” I said. “I mean, maybe just for a minute.” I put my hand over his, praying that I was not too presumptuous. My heart soared when his fingers twined themselves into mine. We rested, listening to the dissonant chords, the elongated coda, the resolution in the last few phrases.
“Brynn.”
“I love you too,” I said, turning my eyes down to my notebook. My heart twisted inside my chest. I had never allowed myself to hope, but Eliot was here and real and not at all a fantasy.
“Are you reading that out of your notes?”
“Sure am,” I said, chuckling lightly. “Right under the section on equivalence relations.”
“Is love an equivalence relation?” Eliot put on his serious lecturer’s voice, and I could not help but laugh.
“You tell me.”
“What does it mean to be an equivalence relation?” Eliot asked me, leading me on.
“It must be symmetric, transitive, and reflexive.”
“Let’s take the first one. If love has the symmetric property…” His silence hung purposefully, and I swallowed at his meaning.
“If I love you, then you love me.”
Eliot’s lips turned up into a sly smile.
“Not always true, but it is in this case. Carry on. The transitive property.”