First released excerpt from Love and Other Unknown Variables

I'm so excited to share with you all an excerpt from LOVE AND OTHER UNKNOWN VARIABLES, coming out from Entangled Publishing October, 2014.

The footsteps bounding down the stairs can only belong to Charlotte. Becca does not bound. Becca drifts.

I run my fingers through my fine hair, still wet from my shower, willing it to look all casual messy-like. There was a bed-headed guy in one of the movies Becca and Charlotte watched over the weekend, and Charlotte kept saying she’d love to run her fingers through his mane. I’m not sure I can achieve his look, though, since my hair feels more like yellow duckling feathers.

Giving up, I grab my pencil and hunch over my notebook. I’d probably pass out and split my skull on the hardwood floor if her fingers were tangled in my hair anyway. I hate Hollywood.

“There you are,” Charlotte says, leaping from the bottom step into the kitchen.

“Me?”

Charlotte’s smile is teasing, and even though I know I’m alone in the kitchen, I glance over my shoulder to be sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

“Yes, you.” She comes closer and plops down in the chair beside me. “Becca says you’d have a compass.”

I narrow my eyes at her.

“You know. The stabby-end thing I can make perfect circles with. It’s called a compass, right?”

I nod, eyes still narrow.

Charlotte squints back at me, her face a mirrored mockery of mine. “Don’t look so skeptical. I need to borrow it.”

“For math?”

She wrinkles her nose and her bow-shaped lips pucker with the movement. “Not for math. Obviously, I’m planning on murdering someone with it.” I snort, and the sound seems to delight Charlotte, even though my ears are now volcanic. She chuckles and smacks at my shoulder. “I’m drawing something and my circles are seriously shitty.”

I erase a stray mark on the page, trying to keep my mind on the numbers before me, not the image that just flashed through my mind of me running my fingers through Charlotte’s wild curls and pulling those bow lips toward mine, teasing them open with my tongue.

Holy crap. Numbers.

Numbers = good. Hard-on in front of Charlotte = bad.

Charlotte leans closer, her shoulder pressing against mine, her perfume of sweet vanilla making the math in front of me blur. “What’re you working on so intently that you’re just going to ignore me?” My breathing has gone shallow and I may pass out when she breathes the word, “Dude,” along my neck. “What the hell is this?”

“Calculus.”

“Nuh-uh. I’ve seen calculus. I’m in calculus. This is—I don’t know what this is.”

“Really advanced calculus.”

Charlotte studies the formula I’m working with. I allow my eyes to flick toward her face for just a fraction of a second, taking in the way her brow pinches together making brackets along her forehead.

“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She smiles at me, a sunrise.

“You understand it?”

“Hell no.” She does the nose wrinkle thing again and I have to turn back to the page in front of me. “But I don’t have to get it to get it. You know?”

I shift away from her, running a sweaty palm down the thigh of my pants. “No.”

Charlotte holds one finger up, a gesture for me to wait, before she scurries up the stairs. I copy a new problem in my notebook. I could work solely on the computer, but I like the way the paper feels under my palm as I work through the numbers, finding the solutions I need. I’m a quarter of the way through when she reappears, clutching her sketchpad.

She opens it and holds it out for me. “Do you understand this?”

The page is covered with oranges, reds, greens, and yellows. It’s like smudges of each color, bleeding together in a multitude of shapes. It doesn’t look like anything at all.

“What’s to understand?”

Charlotte doesn’t respond. She simply holds the picture steady for me to study. The more I look at it, the more I can see though. Suddenly, it isn’t just colors, but fall leaves in the mountains.

“Is it leaves?”

One of her brows lifts and she tilts the page to examine it. “Perhaps.”

But when she shows it to me again, it’s no longer leaves, but fish in a pond, like the Koi in the lobby of that hotel I stayed in once. When I blink, I see Mrs. Dunwitty’s rose garden at its peak.

And suddenly, I get it.

It’s a million problems all in one, and every way I work it I get a new solution. It’s beautiful.

“May I?” I ask, reaching for the sketchpad.

She captures the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth as she considers. After handing it to me, she sits and begins fidgeting, her fingers tapping softly against the underside of the table as I turn through the pages. Without thinking, I grab her restless fingers, tangling them with mine like the colors in her sketch. Her hands relax, but her whole body goes rigid beside me.

“Sorry,” I say letting go of her hand, ignoring the stuttering of my pulse. What was I doing? I’ve spoken to this girl a handful of times and here I am trying to hold her damn hand in my kitchen.

Now that I’ve let go, she starts to wriggle again.

“Am I making you nervous?” I meant looking at her sketchbook, but the way she blinks like I’ve snapped at her makes me wonder what she thinks I could have meant.

Charlotte takes a deep breath that hitches as it travels up her spine like it’s catching on snags along the way. “I’m not used to sharing. It’s always been easiest to keep things close.”

I want to know what things she’s keeping so close. I want her to unpack them from inside herself, perhaps making room for…what? For me? This is ludicrous. I should hand her back her sketches and walk away.

I push my own notebook toward her instead. “It’s only fair.”

She chuckles and glances down at the open page. “What’s this?” Her voice is soft beside me. She’s pointing at the problem I was working on moments ago. In it, I’ve had to use the symbol for infinity, but I drew her tattoo instead. I didn’t even realize I’d done it.

“Trying to figure me out, Mr. Hanson? Think you’ll get extra credit?”

“I—” I’ve got nothing to say. I stare at the symbol I’ve drawn with the word hope bound up in its endlessness. There are many ideas in mathematics that we know are true, even if we’ll never be able to solve them. Too many. They’re the paradoxes that make math so beautiful.

Charlotte feels like that. Like a problem I’ll never really figure out, but that I know is just right for me.

She leans her shoulder into mine. “You and me, Charlie, we’re on the same team—both artists. We just work with different mediums.”

Now it’s my fingers that can’t be still. Charlotte eyes them as I drag one hand up and down the metal spiral binding of her sketchbook and simultaneously tap a rhythm against my thigh with the other hand. She reaches for the one tapping between us, clasping it lightly in her own. Without another word, she begins flipping through my notebook, her eyes skimming the formulas. I wonder what kinds of things she’s seeing in them.

I wonder what she sees in me.