“Hi,” Julia said, making her voice a little lower and throatier, affecting a shy look in her eye that Dave knew perfectly well was meant to be seductive. “This one’s called Solve for X, or Why Mathematicians Must be Good at Sex.”
A few chuckles spread across the room, but Julia didn’t drop the act. She lowered her head, hanging on to the mic stand like a rock star, her pink hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain waiting to be pulled up. Someone shifted out of his line of sight, and Dave turned to see Marroney put a hand to his forehead to hide his face.
“There’s something about the slope of his”—Julia paused with a smile—“cosine that drives me to irrational equations. There’s something about how he can recite pi to forty digits that makes my...heart swell exponentially. If X is the point where two lines meet, let my tangent and his intersect and repeat.” Someone in the crowd let out a whoop. Dave sipped from his coffee, unable to hide his smile. “I plotted him on my graph, and he touches all my quadrants.”
A few more shouts let out, and one of the judges was nodding. Julia pulled the microphone from its stand and started speaking louder, not even giving the audience time to react before moving on to the next line.
“We’ll never be apart but he still calls me his x-axis because I’m always horizontal. When he’s near, I’m not multiplying or subtracting or dividing, I’m just picturing us with no added variables. I must be his prime number because there’s only room for him inside my equation.”
The crowd was starting to buzz. Even the soft clink of dishes being put in the kitchen had quieted down. Just a week or so ago, Dave would probably have felt humiliated that Julia could muster up a whole poem full of math sex puns aimed at Marroney when she had never felt as much as a pulse in his direction. But tonight, with Gretchen taking up his thoughts, Dave felt only pride at Julia’s cleverness. There was a certain letting go within him, like something inside his chest was literally relaxing its grip. It was time to appreciate everything about Julia without fretting about what she couldn’t provide.
Apparently, Marroney didn’t feel the same way. As Julia continued her performance, Marroney leaned over to whisper something to the redheaded woman sitting next to him, then grabbed his blazer off the back of his chair and squeezed past the people in his row, his cheeks a bright shade of red.
“And if—” She stopped as soon as she saw him leaving the coffee shop, and immediately her shtick fell away. She dropped the microphone to her side and bit her bottom lip. “Dammit,” she said. Then she shrugged and tucked the microphone back into its stand.
As she hopped off the stage, the crowd, confused at the abrupt ending, broke out into scattered applause. “Get that look off your face, David O’Neal Macbeth. He’ll be mine in the end.”
“You know what, Julia, I don’t doubt it. He’d be a fool not to take the opportunity.”
Julia laughed, then grabbed her Ecuadorean bag from the back of the chair she’d been sitting in. “When you say it like that, it actually sounds gross.” Julia slung her bag over her shoulder. “I know it’s a weeknight but you wanna have a sleepover? Feeling pretty good right now.”
“Always.”
“Actually gonna Skype with my mom, too. You can say hi.”