Page 101 of The Girlfriend Agreement (Conwick U #1)

En tus brazos encontré mi lugar seguro - In your arms I found my safe place

Translation: Home is where the heart is…and my heart is with you.

I wake up the next morning feeling like a new man, sated, mentally at ease (a welcome development), and above all, happy .

Truly, honestly, so beyond fucking happy for the first time since Jamie was alive.

It’s like I’ve been given a new lease on life overnight, like I have something to live for now.

A purpose. And what makes it even better is knowing Blondie will be a part of it, beside me every step of the way.

Now that all the drama with my parents is settled, and Blondie and I are stepping into our winning era, there’s just one last thing to do.

A bucket list set us down this path, and so it only seems fitting that a bucket list is how I mark the start of the next chapter.

Except, this time, there’s only one item on my list. One box I want to check.

1. Tell Blondie I love her.

She might be my girlfriend now, but I plan on locking this shit down eventually, and besides, this confession is long overdue. After last night, especially, it feels like something heavy and unspoken between us. Something that needs to be brought out into the open.

No time like the present, I encourage myself.

With a quick mental pep talk, I draw in a deep breath, shaking off the lingering haze of sleep, then roll over, ready to pull Blondie into my arms and make damn sure she knows how I feel.

“You know, I could get used to—” I start to say, but my hand finds only air where her body should be.

My eyes blink open, and for a long, confused moment, I stare at the empty bed beside me. The blankets and pillow are rumpled, molded by the frame of her figure from where she fell asleep, but my gorgeous golden goddess herself is nowhere to be seen.

“Dornan?” I call, sitting up and scanning my surroundings as much as I can from the vantage point of my mattress, but I don’t get a response.

I blindly reach for my phone on my bedside table to see if she called or left a message, and to check the time, but it’s not there. “Shit,” I mutter, remembering it was in my coat pocket when we tumbled in here last night, so it’s probably somewhere on the floor.

That’s what you get for not investing in a clock, my conscience scoffs, but I ignore it, glancing instead at my wrist. Luckily, my smart watch still has some juice in it, though another expletive slips past my lips when I register the time.

It’s already nine-thirty, and seeing as it’s a Monday, and Blondie has a terrifying, masochistic tendency to choose morning classes, she must be in a lecture right now.

Adorable, math-loving nerd that she is, she doesn’t like to skip, not unless she’s taking her mom to chemo, so I’m not at all surprised she left.

Still, part of me wishes she had woken me up to say goodbye, while on the flip side, I completely understand why she didn’t.

I am a master of temptation, after all, and she likely feared she wouldn’t have had the strength to leave me if I had urged her back into bed.

And I probably would have, though I like to think I would have ultimately taken the high road, and convinced her to go to class, even if Damian Jr. would’ve been very displeased with that decision.

As for me, I had been planning on returning to my own classes today after missing most of last week, but it’s definitely too late to get to my Laws & Patents lecture and have any hope of slipping in unnoticed.

Welp, looks like I’ll be skipping again.

Oh, well. One more day off won’t hurt anyone.

It’s early enough in the semester to not really matter, and after the events of this past weekend, I’m sure my parents will understand.

I bark out a laugh. That’s one sentence I never thought I’d say to myself, but then…

I also never really believed I would ever allow myself to fall in love.

And yet, here I am—loved up and obsessed with my girl like my boy Eddie in Twilight and, even more shockingly, on somewhat good terms with my parents again.

If it was still December, I’d call it a Christmas miracle.

While I now don’t have anywhere I have to be until this afternoon, I’m too jittery to lie in bed any longer—not when there are confessions of love that need professing to a certain grouchy genius.

So, I kick off the blanket, ready to jump in the shower and start my day, when my gaze catches on the bedside table—not the one I usually use, but the table on Blondie’s side of the bed.

On it, folded in half, is a white piece of paper with the words SOLVE ME written in black pen.

Curious, I scoot across the mattress, and grab the note Blondie left me as I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, but when I unfold it, I’m only met with confusion.

“The fuck?” I mutter, taking in the complex equation scribbled along the top of the page.

I don’t even know what kind of math this is supposed to be, but it’s like something out of a nightmare, and I have no clue how I’m meant to solve it.

There are fractions, square roots, those little numbers floating above other larger numbers that I can’t remember the name of.

Shit, there are so many letters written down, it’s like half the alphabet is involved.

I took some foundational math classes for my biotech minor my first two years at Conwick, but I’m rusty at best, and besides, my focus is more on the patents, business strategy, and entrepreneurship side of things rather than the science end of pharmaceuticals, so I don’t have much need for math.

My future work at Hallazgo certainly won’t involve solving for x . Or in this case, i . Or u . Or e .

My eyes start to cross the longer I stare at the equation, willing it to solve itself. Blondie has either massively overestimated my ability to do math, or she’s really testing me.

An idea pings into my brain, and with the paper in hand, I run into the kitchen where I last left my computer.

I don’t even realize I’m still naked until I slide bare-assed onto the cold seat, but my need to decode Blondie’s message is stronger than my need for boxer briefs, even if Damian Jr. and his two friends are shivering in disapproval.

Opening the laptop, I pull up the browser, and I’m about to type the equation into Google to get the internet to solve it for me when my fingers freeze over the keyboard.

How the hell do you type this? I definitely don’t see a square root option among the symbols printed above the numbers you access by using the shift key, and fuck knows how you type in the tiny digits whose name still eludes me.

“Fuck it,” I mutter, closing my laptop.

I give myself five minutes. That’s it. Five minutes to shower, brush my teeth, put on clothes, and make myself presentable to the world before I’m racing out of my room with the note clutched in my fist. The tutoring sessions at the library tend to primarily be in the evenings, but CASS is open all day to students, so surely, someone must be around who can help me make sense of this.

I glare down at the page in my hand as I quicken my pace, frowning.

Yeah. Universal language, my ass.

I’m yanking open the door to the library less than ten minutes later, and I don’t pause to catch my breath before throwing myself at the CASS reception desk.

The man sitting there—another senior, possibly, though I don’t recognize him—gives me a startled look when I blurt out, “Hi, sorry, are you a tutor here? Math, specifically.”

He blinks blue eyes at me behind large, rounded glasses that remind me of Blondie. “Well, I’m technically the academic support coordinator,” he says, “but I do also tutor on occasion. Is there something you need help with?”

I whip out the folded page, and slam it down on the desk in front of him. “Yeah, this. I have no idea how to solve it.”

The man seems surprised, but adjusts his glasses and reaches for the slip of paper.

I don’t miss the way his gaze lingers on the words SOLVE ME , or the way his brows draw together when he unfolds it.

Fuck. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do it?

His eyes skim back and forth for a moment before snapping up to look at me again.

“Is this homework or something?” he asks.

“Or something,” I mutter, unsure what else to tell him.

He shrugs. “All right, go get a chair and come sit down, and we’ll take a look.”

Relief surges through me as I run to the nearest table and grab a chair like I’m being timed, and if I don’t do it quick enough I’ll be eliminated from the most intense game of musical chairs to ever exist. The guy at the CASS desk watches me with raised brows, his expression bemused, but he makes no comment when I plop the seat down beside him.

“Okay,” he begins, flattening and attempting to smooth out the paper, which I had crumpled a bit on the journey here.

When it’s the best it’s going to get, he grabs a pencil and taps it against the first fraction in the equation.

“So, in this part, the natural logarithm and the exponential function are inverses of each other. In other words, applying the logarithm to an exponential function essentially cancels out the exponential, leaving you with the exponent itself, which in this case is 2 i . Following so far?”

I stare blankly down at the page with a newfound appreciation for Blondie’s wonderful brain.

Is this the kind of math she had to do for our proposal?

Math she was doing effortlessly in her head in a matter of seconds ?

If so, she’s not just a genius, she’s a fucking wizard.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked up and found little cartoon question marks bobbing over my head.

“Uh…sure,” I manage after a moment, but to absolutely no one’s surprise, I don’t sound convincing.

My dude gives me a dubious look, but I nod for him to continue.