lessons the instructors had presented in their lectures, working through examples to illustrate the material, and answering questions on the homework.
While there had been isolated moments when she felt like she’d connected with some of the students or helped them reach a breakthrough in the material, she’d also experienced a lot of frustration, boredom, and impatience—both on her own behalf and coming from her students. Maybe she should have tried harder to engage them, but as a grad student she’d been spread thin between her two discussion sections, office hours, and student math center shifts on top of twelve units of graduate coursework per quarter, not to mention the research and work on her dissertation that had been her top priority.
At the beginning of this semester, she’d struggled to find her feet, lacking confidence in her teaching abilities. Ideally, her postdoc fellowship would have been where she’d honed those skills as she took on more mentoring and teaching responsibilities alongside her research. Instead, she’d been thrown straight into the fire.
And it turned out she’d done okay. Better than okay. For the first time, Mia allowed herself to sit with the idea that she was good at teaching.
Turning in her arms, Josh stroked his hands up Mia’s back. “I wish I’d had a math prof like you. And not just because it’s sexy as hell when you talk about sliceness invariants and diffeo-whatevers.”
“Diffeomorphic traces,” she murmured, thrown off-balance. “You think it’s sexy when I talk about math?”
He gave a shrug, his lips curving. “You like it when I talk about cheese. I like it when you talk about math.”
How was he even real? Never, ever would she have believed a man like this existed in the world. A man this gorgeous and sexy who made cheese and got turned on when she talked about math? Ridiculous. It was like he’d been conjured into existence by her deepest desires.
Mia pressed her face into his neck, inhaling his clean, earthy scent deep into her lungs. She slid her hands under his blue plaid shirt and smoothed her palms over the firm planes of his stomach, luxuriating in the feel of his warm skin. “So you’d get turned on if I started talking about Seifert matrices?”
Josh grunted. “Get turned on? Shit, I’m already hard.” His arms tightened around her, pulling her against him to demonstrate the truth of his words.
Heat flooded her body, pooling low in her abdomen, and she felt her lips tug into a smile. “For any known knot, the Seifert algorithm produces an orientable surface with only one boundary component, such that the boundary component is the knot in question.”
Squeezing her ass, he let out a thready laugh that sounded like he was having trouble getting enough oxygen.
“The signature of a diagonal matrix is the number of positive entries minus the number of negative entries.” Her hands worked his shirt open—god bless the snaps on western-style work shirts—and she pushed it off his shoulders.
His tongue slid across his lower lip as he watched her, his eyes going from brown to nearly black.
She pressed an open-mouth kiss to his chest. “Two diagonal matrices are congruent if and only if they have the same number of positive, negative, and zero entries.”
When she sank to her knees he sucked in a shuddering breath. His hands curled into her hair, but they didn’t tug, although they spasmed briefly as she began to unbutton his pants.
After that, her mouth was too busy to talk about math anymore.
Chapter Fifteen
Early the next morning, as the rooster crowed the start of a new day, Josh drove Mia home. She took her notes with her and hung them up on the walls of her own small apartment before heading to campus for her first Monday class.
For the rest of that week, Mia spent every free minute working on her proof. She didn’t see Josh at all, although they texted every day. Working in her cramped office between classes and office hours, and at home late into the night every night, she successfully constructed a trace sibling for her knot and began testing it against invariants.
By Friday, she had her solution. She’d found an invariant that showed her new knot wasn’t smoothly slice, thereby proving the original knot wasn’t either. After double-checking her calculations, she wrote up a summary of her breakthrough and emailed it to her former advisor at UCLA.