by Pares
-- From Sab's story outtake"I was, you know. In love with one once," Rodney says. "Love, you know, the real deal with the drinking and the not sleeping and the advanced degrees in Combinatorics. But I know, I mean, I've read a *lot,* and I've been around and talked to people and I've had the opportunity to --" He stops. John is in charge. Rather, they are on equal footing, because John has never been with a man before either, but that puts John in charge, because Rodney's not good with equals.
It wasn't as though Rodney went around with his IQ emblazoned on a jersey, but he'd toyed with the idea, and then he heard Farooq and Georges muttering to one another and also pointing and he heard the number '179' being used in the same sentence as 'Clifford Lantry' and Rodney actually dropped his dry-erase marker, because that fabled day had finally come, he had met his match: another 179 was in town, and Rodney fervently hoped that the town, in this case, a summer semester at MIT, was big enough for the both of them.
Clifford Lantry was maybe five nine, with gingery hair that seemed to grow straight up. He had narrow shoulders and glasses with heavy tortoise-shell frames and outsized hands that handled a laser-pointer with some grace, and his fingernails were often stained with ink-- he wrote all his equations in pen, and it was rumored that he refused to own pencils on general principle.
This was of course patently untrue, as one day, as Rodney edged toward him at a lab, Lantry's pen ran dry and he tossed it down in exasperation and looked around a little wildly, eyes lighting on Rodney's three needle-sharp pencils and tugging one right out of his slightly-sweaty hand. Lantry had already filled three pages with what looked like some really interesting stuff about permutation loops, and Rodney was so fascinated, he forgot to complain about the filching of private property.
Rodney was wildly curious about this man, his first true peer. At 19, he'd never yet met anyone who'd scored as highly on any kind of standardized test. Lantry was a few years older, working on a third doctorate, and teaching a class in Combinatorics, so Rodney browbeat an underclassmen named Linus Lam until he dropped his registration in it in favor of a class in robotics, and Rodney transferred in.
Lantry was appropriately no-nonsense in class, no flirting with the class's three women, no witty word problems or joking with the guys who sat in the front row, and Rodney approved. He hated it when professors tried to get by on charm. Lantry held office hours twice a week for questions and so forth, but Rodney never went, never having any questions. But one day he happened to be passing Lantry in the hallway and overheard him talking to a classmate, Goerrels, and Lantry was saying, "--the question about 5 positive integers such that the product of any two is one less than a square goes back to Diophantus."
"Diophantus only required rational numbers," Rodney interrupted, prodding the heel of a pink Snoball into his mouth. "He didn't restrict his domain to integers," he continued, around his mouthful of marshmallow and shredded coconut.
Lantry looked up, a puzzled look on his face.
"I mean, yeah, his results have relevance for integers, too, but-- How'd you get into combinatorics, anyway?"
Goerrels elbowed Rodney in the chest, but he ignored her, and Lantry just stood there, clicking his pen.
"Dr. Lantry, you were saying?" Goerrels had a head full of blonde curls, but the shoulders of a linebacker, and she'd already turned Rodney's sixteen invitations to keggers at Slater House down with probably a lot more hipchecking than was strictly necessary.
"I. Yes. Sorry. I can show you on the whiteboard in my office. Sorry," he said again. "Rodney, you can follow if you like. You could probably help Karen with—"
Goerrels gave him a look of open hatred, and Rodney smiled at her fondly, inexplicably reminded of his sister Jeannie at 13.
"No, no, I'm off to sit in on a defense. You two go on. Give those integers what for."
*
Next class, Rodney found himself distracted by the way Lantry was looping equations in orange dry-erase marker across the board. He was wearing a faded yellow polo shirt tucked firmly into brown corduroys, and Rodney noticed that Lantry's arms were freckled and defined, with a sort of mist of gingery hair. He'd seen Lantry jogging around campus a couple of times, and had wondered if he was one of those granola eating hippie professors that coastal schools seemed to clone by the vat, but his general quiet lack of touchy-feely-free-to-be-you-and-me in class seemed to discount that.
After class let out, Rodney made a beeline for Lantry's desk.
"I read your paper on Additive and Multiplicative Partitions last night." He'd been impressed, but he didn't plan to mention that.
Landry stopped gathering the papers he'd been stacking on his desk and said, "Oh. Why? It's not on the syllabus."
Rodney waved a dismissive hand, "There is such a thing as intellectual curiosity. And to be truthful I wanted to see where you stood on generating functions."
"I don't really have, um, political positions on Euler's methods." Every time he stopped talking he gave Rodney a look like Rodney had just blinked into his reality wearing a Nixon mask and a Speedo.
Rodney felt oddly off-balance. Usually people argued with him or simply walked away. He'd intimidated other professors before, although that wasn’t actually his intention here, and he was a little disappointed. He'd hoped for a bit of sparring with a man on the same level plane, at least.
He put on his best 'let's be friends' expression, the one he usually saved for people he wanted to skive lab time from, and rallied gamely. "Well then. What are your thoughts on cumulative permutation sequences?"
Lantry blinked at him, rustling his papers idly.
"I'll. I'll email my thesis to you, if you'd like." Even Rodney could see that the guy was a little white around the eyes, so he said, "Oh. Uh. Okay."
Stymied, Rodney backed away a few steps and made for the door.
*
Rodney read Lantry's thesis, and had surprisingly few nitpicks, but then Lantry had sidestepped into a little treatise on polynomio enumeration that almost had Rodney sending home to his mother for his old pentonimo set. He found himself itching to go head to head with Lantry at Tetris. But every time he approached the guy, Lantry had to be somewhere else, and honestly, what kind of masochist was this guy? How many student conferences could one man have?
Rodney found himself in his own office for the electrical engineering intro he'd been saddled with more and more, hoping to catch Lantry studentless, but as soon as his own students got wind that he could actually be found there, he got hemmed into pretending to be interested in various moronic concerns and issues with his teaching style. It was biting into his lab time, not to mention his work on the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, and he was so not here to play stupid math tricks with polyomino enumerations.
Still, Rodney was spending more and more of his precious lab time pacing the floor trying to think of things to say that might catch Lantry's interest the next time he ran into him in the break room drinking carrot juice. (Lantry had turned out to be sort of a hippie after all.) Maybe he could work in a reference to Dedekind's Problem. Or maybe he could lend him a Thompson Twins album?
He was contemplating getting Goerrels to put in a good word for him when he suddenly realized the true (and really, embarrassingly pathetic) depths of his interest in Lantry.
He didn't have time for this whole homosexual awakening crap; he had projects, deadlines, a gig with NASA when the semester was over, not to mention grading to do and classes of his own.
There just had to be a shortcut.
*
In the city, after briefly consulting with the Gilbert & Sullivan players, he found a nice crunchy bookstore and marched in to clear their shelves. He read Rubyfruit Jungle because, hey, lesbians, but skipped Coming Out to Parents: A Two-Way Survival Guide for Lesbians and Gay Men and Their Parents because that wasn't the kind of self-help he was looking for and also because there was no way in hell that he was ever having that conversation, and then skimmed Trying Hard to Hear You, something that turned out to be a YA novel about a how a summer youth theater group is shattered by the revelation that two boys in the group were gay. Quite the shocker. He didn't bother with the books on gay rights and dismissed the books on gay studies out of hand— soft sciences? Please! But in the end he found The Book of Gay Sex to be particularly edifying. And also hot.
That just left the dating part, ideally to be followed by the oral sex.
So Rodney showered and drank a beer and then drank another beer and decided against a third (because it was insanely hard to find grad students who could be bribed into buying him Labatt's Blue and besides he should probably have some to offer Lantry once he got him back to his room) and stormed into Lantry's office.
"I want my pencil back."
Lantry gave him his characteristic blank look.
"What?"
"My pencil. In Lab Three six weeks ago. You took it."
Lantry looked around at his desk, which was littered with articles ripped out of journals and many slightly chewed ballpoints.
"I'm sorry, Rodney. I don't think I have any pencils. I could. I suppose I could give you some money?"
Money! Rodney was suddenly a gigolo, and Christ, couldn't Lantry see that the last thing Rodney wanted was a goddamned pencil?
Taking a deep breath, Rodney walked around Lantry's desk, and he could see Lantry's big knuckles whiten as he gripped the arms of his chair, and he found time to be charmed by Lantry's freckles and fine-grained skin and his slightly adorable, slightly receding chin. Here, at least, was a partner worthy of him, and if he was wasting himself in combinatorics, well maybe Rodney could woo him over to physics, with persistence and blowjobs.
He bent over and clamped his hands on Lantry's shoulders, and dropped his head and found Lantry's— Clifford's— Cliff's maybe—mouth with his own. It was not the most spectacular kiss he'd ever had, that title still went to Evie Dunbarton, god, she'd been a wildcat, but it was certainly singular, his first time kissing a man, a man he admired, possibly even loved. It wasn't every day you ran into a guy who could imagine 5 distinct integers a,b,c,d,e such that each of the ten pairwise products was a shy square, and who knew how to express the square (abcde)^2 as a product of 5 distinct shy squares in twelve distinct ways.
After what he judged to be a suitable romantic interval, Rodney let Clifford go.
Clifford's freckles were standing starkly against his skin.
"Rodney. Rodney, I—"
"Yeah, that was quite a kiss." That statement was met with ringing silence, and Clifford merely gawped at him from his leather chair. "So." Rodney cleared his throat, determined not to be nervous. If he was gay, he was gay, and he could totally do this. "Do you want to go get a coffee? I mean, not from the breakroom, obviously. Or we could get some wheatgrass or whatever it is you eat." Rodney was feeling magnanimous, having successfully made the first move, and he'd been rather pleased with the slight abrading tug of the scant whiskers just springing up under Clifford's soft lower lip. Licking his own lips, he grinned and offered Clifford a hand up.
"Shall we?"
"I think we should— I think you should sit down. Rodney. Please."
"Have it your way," Rodney said, and pulled a sprung-looking roller chair in front of Clifford's desk.
"Rodney. Dr. McKay. I want you to know that I have admired your work in quantum chaos theory, and that I read two of your papers on dark matter, and that I— I am not a homosexual." He paused and swallowed audibly, and Rodney could see that his hands were shaking. Distracted by the slow rolling of his own stomach, he tried to find something else to focus on—the play of light on the glass paperweight on Clifford's—Dr. Lantry's-- desk was doing nicely. "And. And while your attentions are certainly flattering, even if I were inclined that way, technically, R-rodney, you are a student in my class, and I feel that would not go over well with the deans."
"Right. Of course you're right. I don't know what I was thinking," Rodney wanted to say suavely, but instead he just jerked to his feet, face flaming, and rushed out of Lantry's office.
He didn't bother going back to class; he bullied notes out of Goerrels and had her ask for an extra copy of the final, which was granted to him without comment, and used the class time to bring his Survey maps up to par.
Every now and again he'd see Lantry jogging on the common, and Rodney would try to talk himself out of ever having any interest in him at all, but he finally had to admit that he found Lantry's thighs appealing and The Joy of Gay Sex had not stopped being hot, despite the fact that guys in it were almost disturbingly hairy, and Rodney had not a few jerk-off sessions that featured Clifford's big hands folding around his dick and so he decided against closing the door on experimentation with men in the future.
He would, however, write off Clifford Lantry, although he could hardly be blamed; his brain had been clouded by the man's indecently sexy math skills, after all.
END
