Quantum Equations
The eraser squeaks against the whiteboard, a high-pitched protest that I completely ignore in favor of my humming. I’m somewhere around the third chorus of an early 2000s pop anthem playing from my clipped-on speaker, my hips swaying rhythmically inside a sunshine-yellow sundress that hits just above my knees.
“Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world…” I belt out softly to myself, adding a triumphant flourish of bright pink dry-erase marker across the porcelain board.
My handwriting is notoriously chaotic, slanted, energetic, and sprawling and mirrors the way my brain actually operates. Right now, the board is an absolute crime scene of string theory equations, Calabi-Yau manifolds, and ten-dimensional spacetime calculations that are making my graduate teaching assistant look like he swallowed a lemon.
“Harper,” Leo sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stares at the board. He’s brilliant, really, but he approaches theoretical physics like it’s a funeral. “You skipped step four. You completely bridged the topological defect without proving the boundary conditions.”
I spin around on my heel, a bright, bubbly smile plastered across my face. I tap the marker against my chin, my long brown curls bouncing over my shoulders. My curves press against the floral-printed colorful fabric of the dress, a stark contrast to the sterile, gray-toned walls of the Boston University physics lounge.
“Step four is pedestrian, Leo!” I say, my voice ringing out with enthusiastic musicality. “Why waste chalk—or marker, technically—on things the universe already solved for us? The math wants to connect. You just have to seduce the variables, not bully them.”
Leo groans, muttering something about unorthodox methodologies and the Nobel committee’s potential aneurysm, but before he can debate me further, the heavy oak doors of the lounge swing open.
The room’s temperature drops instantly. Or at least, it feels that way.
In walks my older brother, Julian, wearing his usual captain’s expression which happens to be a mix of fierce intensity and permanent exhaustion from carrying the Boston Blades on his broad back. But Julian isn’t the one who commands my attention, no matter how hard I pretend otherwise.
Trailing a half-step behind him is Beckett Scott.
Beckett is six-foot-five inches of pure, unadulterated ice hockey menace. As the Blades’ primary enforcer, his job description essentially boils down to breaking up fights, checking opponents through Plexiglass, and looking terrifying enough to deter anyone from touching his teammates. He’s built like a brick fortress, with broad shoulders that strain the seams of his black crewneck sweater, dark hair that falls carelessly across his forehead, and ice-blue eyes that could freeze a glass of water from across the room.
To the rest of the world, Beckett is a brooding, silent storm. He communicates mostly in nods, death glares, and the occasional monosyllabic grunt. Except when he looks at me.
The exact millisecond Beckett steps into the lounge, his broad shoulders relax just a fraction. Those lethal ice-blue eyes lock onto mine, and the dark, brooding storm completely vanishes, replaced by a sudden, electric intensity that makes my breath hitch in my throat. It’s a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth and a flash of raw, unfiltered adoration that only I ever seem to catch.
He’s been doing it for two years. Two years since he joined the team and met me at one of the games. Two solid years of secretly melting whenever I walk into a room, while I pretend I’m entirely immune to the way he completely destabilizes my equilibrium.
“God, it smells like chalk dust and madness in here,” Julian announces, dropping a gym bag onto the worn leather sofa with a heavy thud. He rakes a hand through his damp post-practice hair. “Hey, squirt. Are you still occupying university property, or do you actually sleep sometimes?”
“Sleep is a social construct invented by people who can’t hack multidimensional mathematics, Jules,” I reply cheerfully, sashaying away from the whiteboard and wiping a smudge of pink marker from my cheek with the back of my hand. “And I’ll have you know my brilliance is federally funded, so technically, I own this building.”
Julian rolls his eyes, a fond, brotherly smile breaking through his fatigue. “Right. Well, keep your quantum bullshit quiet for ten minutes because Beckett needs ice for his knuckles, and we’re crashing your couch.”
Beckett doesn’t say a word. He never does when Julian’s around. He just walks further into the room, his towering frame instantly making the spacious faculty lounge feel suffocatingly small. He smells like melted ice, cedarwood body wash, and a faint hint of pre-game liniment. As he passes my desk, his gaze drops momentarily to my legs before snapping back up to my eyes, hot and heavy.
A tiny, traitorous shiver dances down my spine. I force my brightest, sassiest grin onto my face to cover the sudden, frantic stutter of my pulse.
“Oh, look,” I say, leaning against the edge of my desk and crossing my arms under my chest, pushing my natural curves into sharp, undeniable relief. “The team’s official battering ram has graced us with his presence. Did you punch another opposing forward’s face today, Beckett, or did you actually use your words like a big boy?”
Leo winces, clearly terrified. You don’t talk to Beckett Scott that way unless you have a death wish. The entire league knows that crossing Beckett means a one-way ticket to the penalty box and a bruised jaw.
Beckett stops dead in his tracks. He towers over me, his massive chest rising and falling beneath his sweater. The silence stretches between us, thick and charged with a current that has nothing to do with physics.
His jaw tightens, a muscle ticking in his cheek. Then, a slow, devastatingly rare smirk ghosts across his lips like it always does just for me.
“Third period,” Beckett’s voice is a low, gravelly rumble that vibrates right through the wooden floorboards and straight into my marrow. “Their defenseman tried to check Julian. I reminded him why that was a poor life choice.”
“He threw the guy clear over the timekeeper’s bench,” Julian supplies proudly from the sofa, already digging through his phone. “It was a masterpiece. Though the league office is going to fine me for laughing.”
“You’re a menace to society, both of you,” I declare, though my voice lacks its usual theatrical bite because Beckett has taken two slow, deliberate steps closer to my desk.
He’s standing so close now that I can see the tiny gold flecks trapped in the striking blue of his irises. I have to tilt my head way back to meet his gaze, hyper-aware of the vast physical disparity between us. At five-foot-three, I am short enough to practically walk underneath his outstretched arm, a pocket-sized ball of sunshine trapped in the shadow of a mountain. And yet, Beckett looks at me like I am the one holding all the power in the universe.
His gaze drops to the pink marker still clutched in my hand, then wanders slowly back up, tracing the line of my collarbone, lingering over the curve of my waist where the yellow sundress nips in tightly, and finally locking back onto my eyes. It’s an evaluation. A silent, reverent worship disguised as a casual glance.
“You’ve got pink on your face,” Beckett murmurs, his voice dropping an octave, rich with a private intimacy that makes Leo awkwardly clear his throat and turn back to his laptop.
I reach up, my fingers brushing my cheek. “Oh. Is it bad?”
“It’s...” Beckett pauses, his eyes darkening as he looks down at me with an intensity that feels like a physical touch. “It suits you.”
My heart does a violent, illegal flip inside my chest. Calm down, Harper, I scold myself. He’s your brother’s best friend. He’s the team enforcer. He’s strictly off-limits, bulletproof, and totally uninterested in a curvy, overly talkative theoretical physicist who treats string theory like a rom-com.
Except the way his chest heaves when he looks at me says something entirely different.
“Well,” I say, clapping my hands together with a little too much theatrical brightness, breaking the spell before I do something reckless like reach out and tangle my fingers in the hem of his sweater. “Since you boys are clearly just here to freeload off my microwave and ruin my academic sanctuary, I have a department meeting in twenty minutes where I am going to convince a bunch of stodgy, tweed-wearing fifty-year-old men that my research tour is worth funding.”
Julian scoffs from the couch. “Good luck with that, squirt. Old Man Henderson thinks math is a fad invented by the Greeks. He’s probably going to tell you to go bake cookies.”
“If Henderson tells me to bake cookies, I will derive an algebraic proof demonstrating that his brain functions on fewer dimensions than a piece of string,” I retort, tossing my curls over my shoulder even as I regret saying that after looking at their clueless faces.
I grab my leather satchel, sliding past Beckett. As I brush against his side, his massive body instinctively shifts to block my path just enough to let me feel the solid heat radiating from him. A large, calloused hand—the same hand he uses to drop heavyweights on the ice—flinches as if it desperately wants to reach out.
“Don’t let them rattle you, Harper,” Beckett says quietly, his gaze burning into the side of my face.
I pause, looking up at him through my lashes. There’s a fierce, unyielding protection in his voice, but underneath it lies something deeper, heavy, desperate, and entirely hidden from my brother.
“They won’t,” I whisper back with a cheeky wink. “I have numbers on my side. And besides... I like a challenge.”
I turn on my heel and stride out of the lounge, my hips swaying, blissfully unaware that the very man watching me walk away is about to completely upend my neatly calculated universe.
