Short Story: Square Root
Feb. 15th, 2012 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribblemynameSQUARE ROOT
Liana Mir
Summary: Ten minutes to midnight, and there was a girl in their dorm room. Flash fiction of the Alliance
Author’s Note: This is an adapted work, for those of you who might recognize it.
“The square root of seventy-three,” Shelley repeated sharply with a glare.
Ruego Dominguez glanced up wearily from his pillow at the glowing red numbers of his alarm clock. Ten minutes to midnight, and there was a girl in their dorm room. Never mind the curfew, the rules, or the primal need for sleep—Shelley Huntington had moved in on Gideon’s bed with her stacks of textbooks and her fierce glares for Gideon with the stated goal of teaching the most mathematically challenged student at their entire school—who just happened to also be Ruego’s roommate—how to manually extract a square root.
Naturally, Gideon was doing rather poorly, which was not at all helped by the fact that the two were lying practically entangled on his bed and Gideon’s interest was clearly more on nuzzling Shelley’s neck or playing with her hair than doing homework.
“Stop that,” Shelley snapped.
Gideon shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Shelley growled.
He kissed her cheek, and she glared at him again.
“Can I file a complaint for sexual harassment or something?” Ruego demanded.
Shelley’s head came up with an entirely perplexed expression on her face. “Huh?”
“I am being exposed to sexual attention I do not want to see,” Ruego insisted.
Shelley and Gideon exchanged looks.
Shelley answered slowly. “I’m pretty sure I’m the one being ‘sexually harassed,’ and um…I’m pretty sure…”—she was blushing and suddenly Ruego realized this was not going to be good—”the attentions have to be unwanted to be harassment.”
His jaw dropped. All that bluster—the glares, the biting comments, the smacks upside Gideon Thompson’s smug head—were fake? “I just want to go to sleep!”
Shelley looked at Gideon. “Is he always like this?”
Gideon chuckled. “Much, much worse.”
Ruego’s mouth dropped open again.
“Right,” Shelley replied, all business. “Now the square root of seventy-three. Let’s start with the square root of seven…”
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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.
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Date: 2012-02-16 06:28 pm (UTC)