Jax's Little Obsession

Chapter 10

Maya’s Pov

The campus feels louder than I expect, not with noise exactly, but with money. I notice it in the cars parked outside, in the designer bags swinging off shoulders, in the way people walk like they already own every room they enter. I clutch my bag a little tighter and try to remind myself that I belong here just as much as anyone else, even if my clothes are borrowed and my last name means nothing to these people.

Everywhere I turn, someone whispers Jax’s name. I hear it from a group of girls near the fountain, from two boys walking past me with their heads bent together, from a professor talking to another professor near the entrance. It seems like there is not a single person here who does not know exactly who he is.

“Maya!”

I turn and see Ava hurrying toward me, relief written all over her face like she just spotted a life raft in the middle of the ocean. I remember her vaguely from the day of the race, one of the few people who spoke to me like a normal person instead of staring like I was some strange creature that wandered onto the wrong campus.

“Thank god,” she says, grabbing my arm. “I do not know a single person here. Please tell me you have engineering first period too.”

“I do,” I say, and for the first time all morning, some of the tension in my shoulders loosens.

We walk into the classroom together, and it is nothing like I expect. Rows of desks curve around a huge screen at the front, and the walls are covered with diagrams of engines and machines I actually recognize. This, at least, feels familiar. This feels like something I understand.

The professor, a tall man with graying hair and sharp eyes, writes a complicated problem on the board, something involving torque and load distribution on an uneven surface. Around me, students start groaning and flipping through notebooks, clearly struggling with the numbers.

I stare at the problem, and something clicks in my head almost immediately. It does not look like a textbook problem to me. It looks like the kind of problem I used to solve on my father’s garage floor, back when a motorcycle needed to run perfectly or someone was not getting to the hospital in time.

I raise my hand before I can stop myself.

“Yes?” the professor says, clearly surprised that anyone is volunteering this early into a problem that has half the room stuck.

“You do not need the full formula,” I say, standing up slightly so I can see the board better. “If you treat the load like it is shifting weight instead of a fixed point, the same way a bike shifts weight going around a curve, the whole equation gets simpler. You balance it the way you would balance a bike leaning into a turn, not the way you would balance something sitting still.”

The room goes quiet. The professor stares at the board for a moment, then walks up and starts recalculating using what I just said. His eyebrows lift higher and higher as the numbers actually work out cleaner than the method he originally planned to teach.

“That is…” he pauses, looking at me like he is seeing me for the first time. “That is a remarkably efficient way to approach this. Where did you learn this method?”

I feel every eye in the room turn toward me, and for a second my chest tightens with the urge to shrink down in my seat. But then I think about my father’s workshop, about the hours I spent covered in oil and grease, fixing machines that had to work because there was no money for a replacement if they failed.

“I learned it fixing machines that could not afford to fail,” I say simply. “When you cannot buy a new part, you learn to understand exactly how the old one works instead.”

The professor nods slowly, something like respect settling into his expression. “Excellent work, Miss Reyes. Truly excellent.”

I sit back down, my heart still pounding, and I catch Jax watching me from across the room. He does not say anything, does not smile, does not do anything dramatic, but his eyes stay on me a moment longer than they need to, and something about the way he is looking at me makes my skin feel warm.

Ava leans over and whispers, “That was actually amazing. I did not understand a single word of what you just said, but it sounded amazing.”

I laugh quietly, some of the nervous energy finally draining out of me.

Not everyone looks impressed, though. A few seats over, a girl with perfectly styled hair and cold eyes stares at me like I just did something personally offensive to her. I do not know her name yet, but the way she watches the professor’s reaction to my answer, jaw tight and eyes narrowed, tells me everything I need to know about how she feels about someone like me getting attention in her classroom.

After class ends, she catches up to me in the hallway, falling into step beside me like we are old friends, even though her tone says otherwise.

“Impressive little display in there,” she says, her voice sweet in a way that does not match her eyes. “I am Briar, by the way. You must be Jax’s newest project.”

“I have heard that phrase before,” I say evenly. “It was not true then either.”

“Sure,” she says, smiling in a way that does not reach her eyes at all. “Look, I am sure fixing motorcycles is very impressive wherever you come from, but this is not that world. Being clever in a classroom does not mean you belong here. People like you never really do.”

“People like me,” I repeat, keeping my voice calm even though something hot flares in my chest. “You mean people who actually understand how things work instead of just paying someone else to fix them?”

Her smile falters slightly, just for a second, before she forces it back into place. “We will see how long that attitude lasts,” she says, before turning and walking away, her heels clicking sharply against the floor.

Ava watches her go, wrinkling her nose. “She is delightful,” she says sarcastically.

“She is something,” I agree.

Across the hallway, I notice Jax leaning against the wall, watching the whole exchange with an unreadable expression. When our eyes meet, he does not say anything, but there is something in the way he looks at me, something that feels a lot like quiet approval mixed with something warmer I am not ready to name.

I do not know what it means yet, this feeling growing between us that started as hostility and is slowly turning into something else entirely. But standing here in a hallway full of people who think I do not belong, with Jax watching me like I am the only interesting thing in the entire building, I realize I am starting to care what he thinks a little more than I probably should.