JAWS (Complete)

Chapter 8

“It’s too late to switch to another professor?”

“Yes. And there aren’t any other classes at times I can make.” Galliard leans forward, looking with distaste at the test Reiner has in his hands. “So can you help me with this or not?”

“I think so.” Reiner sees the way Galliard’s mouth twitches at the corner, and changes his assessment. “Yes, I can. Give me a few minutes to look this over and see what the class is doing.”

“Okay.” Galliard gets up and leaves for a moment, returning with the bowl of popcorn from the couch. He starts cramming it in his mouth, eating with a hunger that Reiner remembers from high school, when he’d been going to class, playing soccer, and working a part-time job after school. Carefully, he pushes the bowl of fruit he has on the table in Galliard’s direction, making sure to make it look like he’s just moving it out of the way. Once the fruit is in reach, Galliard grabs an apple and crunches down on it, and Reiner turns his attention to the book.

It doesn’t take him long to figure out the problem; it’s an Economics 101 textbook, basic microeconomics, and even though he hasn’t taken the class in almost ten years, it all comes flooding back. “You keep switching your numbers around.” He points at a spot on the test. “See? You switched a seven and a three here. And then it happened again over here. You’re setting up the equations right, but then you’re making math mistakes that give you the wrong result.”

“Fuck.” Galliard swallows a mouthful of fruit and popcorn before leaning forward to scowl at the paper. “I hate math.”

Reiner smiles a little. “It was never my favorite, either.”

They go through the test together, and by the time they’re done, Reiner is fairly confident Galliard recognizes his mistakes, and should be able to fix them by himself in the future. He’s also managed to eat all of Reiner’s popcorn, along with two apples and a banana from the fruit bowl.

“Do you understand it now?”

“Yeah.” Galliard flips through a few pages in the book, snorting at what he sees in the next chapter. “Some of these problems are bullshit.”

Reiner sits back, grabbing an apple of his own out of the fruit bowl. “What are you studying?”

For a moment, he’s worried that Galliard won’t answer, but he responds readily enough, his attention still snared by the textbook. “Physical therapy.”

“You want to be a physical therapist?” Reiner is charmed, both by picturing Galliard as a physical therapist and the relative ease with which he got this information.

“Yeah.” Galliard glances up, his gaze skating across Reiner’s cheekbones, before looking back at the book. “It’s like being a personal trainer, but with more science. And people who got hurt instead of just being lazy.”

Reiner bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. “Is that how you view your clients at the gym?”

“Most of them.” Another glance at Reiner, this one more appreciative, lingering on his chest. “Not all.”

Is that a compliment? Reiner will take it.

“What kind of lawyer are you?”