The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochen Page B

left willingly. And his leaving had been a blessing to his family compared to the holy mess he’d been making of their lives.
    Phil bent to pick up his spoon. “It’s okay. I don’t expect you to know what to make of that revelation any more than I do. Sometimes I just surprise myself how detached I feel and how little I care about him. I guess I feel like a bad person.”
    “Never. You are the best person I know.” She unfolded herself from the small desk and stood by his side. She wanted to put her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder, but she was afraid a student might walk in. She squeezed his shoulder instead. “Tell me more about the dinner.”
    “I’d rather not,” he said. “You came all this way to see me, and I don’t want to waste precious time talking about him. We’ve only got . . . oh, about fifteen minutes before my students come barging in, demanding to know who the hottie is.”
    “Ha.” She reached across him and lifted a silver ball from his Newton’s cradle, letting it fall against the others. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.
    “The last time you visited, Taylor Roquemore and Dominic Spain caught a glimpse of you and started a rumor that you were a supermodel.”
    “It must have been from far away,” Olive mumbled. “And still this Gina is after you?”
    She started to drift through the classroom, examining all of his toys. She had once thought that studying his apartment or closet or childhood bedroom would give her the insight she needed into his complicated and sometimes frustratingly opaque mind. But now she knew the key to understanding Phil was his classroom. Everything in the room—the posters on the walls with cheerful, motivational slogans (
Today is a great day to learn something new! Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try; it means you should just try harder. Even Einstein asked questions! Physics is Phun
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!
); the ramp with its matchbox cars; the stopwatches and balls of all kinds (golf balls, softballs, bouncy balls, volleyballs, a bowling ball); the springs, pendulums, magnets, and tuning forks; the calorimeters and voltmeters—told a story about Phil. He trusted in Newton’s three laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the electrostatic laws, gravity, the speed of light, the speed of sound. These principles followed reliable equations with reliable constants. They could be counted on time and time again. They would always do exactly what he expected them to do. The laws of physics would never fail him.
    While she’d been inspecting a prism hanging from a suction cup on one of his windows, deep in thought, he had come up behind her. He planted a soft, stealthy kiss on her collarbone and then backed away, as if nothing had happened.
    She laughed at his innocent expression. He was all but whistling with his hands clasped behind his back. “I’ve missed you,” she said, before she could stop herself.
    But he surprised her. “I’ve missed you, too. It seems like we haven’t gotten to spend much time together—like this—lately.” He looked as if he were going to say something more, but didn’t. He lifted a strand of her hair to his nose and inhaled deeply. “God, you smell good.”
    She couldn’t believe the way her body responded to his proximity. She had expected to feel guarded and hesitant around him at first. They had been separated for ten long months. Shouldn’t there be a period of readjustment? Probably it had something to do with the hormone-saturated air. And it was hard to feel tentative when he was looking at her like that. Her memory of his eyes hadn’t done them justice—they were an even more brilliant shade of green than she remembered. The yellow flecks dotting his irises looked almost golden.
    “This morning I was thinking about the way we met,” she said. “Do you remember?” The snow was coming down more heavily now; the flakes were white and fat and blotted out the gray