Intermediate Thermodynamics: A Romantic Comedy (Chemistry Lessons Book 2) Read online

  Intermediate Thermodynamics

  A Romantic Comedy

  Susannah Nix

  Haver Street Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, tirades, opinions, exaggerations, prevarications, and dubious facts either are the products of the author’s inscrutable imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons—living, dead, or otherwise—is entirely coincidental.

  Intermediate Thermodynamics. Copyright © 2017 by Susannah Nix

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the author.

  Haver Street Press | 448 W. 19th St., Suite 407 | Houston, TX 77008

  Edited by Julia Ganis, www.juliaedits.com

  Ebook & Print Cover Design by www.ebooklaunch.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Susannah Nix

  Chapter One

  The dryer was full of clothes.

  Goddammit.

  Esther Abbott blew her bangs off her forehead and glared at the offending clothes with her hands on her hips. She hated touching other people’s clothes. Laundry was an unpleasant enough task without having to manhandle a stranger’s grungy socks and intimate underthings. But it was either that or wait for the offender to retrieve his own laundry. As much as she disliked touching other people’s stuff, she valued her own time and convenience more.

  She plunged her hands into the dryer, grimacing. Ugh. It wasn’t even warm, which meant it had been in there for a while. At least it was dry laundry. It would be even grosser if it was wet clothes that had been left in the washing machine all day.

  Esther knew exactly who the guilty party was. The abundance of plaid shirts was a dead giveaway. There was only one person in the building who wore this much flannel.

  Jonathan Brinkerhoff.

  The guy in apartment six, right next door to her. The guy with the annoying wind chimes on his balcony that kept her awake whenever it was windy. (Spoiler alert: Los Angeles was always windy.) The guy who liked to sit on said balcony and smoke, sending noxious clouds of cigarette toxins drifting into her apartment whenever she left her balcony door open. The guy who couldn’t park his stupid Lexus between the lines of his assigned space next to Esther’s, which made parking her Prius a feat of heroic dexterity.

  Everything about Jonathan annoyed her, from the stupid knit beanies he always wore to his vintage-framed glasses and dumb scraggly beard. But she particularly hated the way he left his clothes in the laundry machines for hours at a time, as if he were the only one in the world who might need to use them. As if he didn’t live in an apartment building with eighteen units all sharing the same two machines.

  One of the other, nicer neighbors—like Mrs. Boorstein, the fifty-something accountant in twelve—might have folded Jonathan’s clothes for him and left them in neat piles on the table. But Esther wasn’t nice. Not to people who didn’t deserve it. She had no patience for incompetence or selfishness. People who broke the laundry room social contract shouldn’t get free laundry folding as a reward for their bad behavior. The dude should consider himself lucky she was only dumping his clothes on top of the dirty machine instead of straight onto the floor. And how much did she hate that she now knew what brand of underwear he wore? A lot. She hated it a lot.

  “Oh, hey, those are mine,” Jonathan said, walking in right as Esther was hugging an armful of his boxer briefs to her chest.

  Of course.

  She felt a flush of embarrassment, which made her even more irritated. It was his fault she had his underwear in her hands. If you left your laundry lying around for hours, you deserved to have strangers pawing through your underdrawers. Those were the rules of the laundry room. Everyone knew that.

  “Lemme just grab those,” Jonathan said, advancing on her.

  Esther dropped his briefs on the dryer and stepped out of the way so he could retrieve the rest of his clothes.

  “I got caught up writing and totally forgot all about these,” he explained, dropping a sock on the floor as he scooped his clothes out of the dryer. He hadn’t brought a basket with him, so he had to pile everything awkwardly in his arms. What was wrong with him? How could one person be so bad at everything? “I’ve been working on a screenplay, and when I’m in the zone I lose all track of time.”

  Esther’s molars ground together. She already knew he was a screenwriter, because he’d worked it into the conversation every single time she’d talked to him. It wasn’t as if they even talked that much. They’d had maybe a half dozen conversations, and this was the third time he’d mentioned he was a screenwriter.

  Esther was an aerospace engineer—literally a rocket scientist—but you didn’t hear her bringing it up at every opportunity with every random person she happened to interact with. Even though being a rocket scientist was way cooler than being a screenwriter. Los Angeles was crawling with screenwriters. You couldn’t spit out a wad of gum without hitting two of them.

  He wasn’t even a real screenwriter. He was in the graduate screenwriting program at UCLA—a fact he’d mentioned twice before—so he was just a student. If he’d ever sold a script or had anything produced, he for sure would have brought it up in conversation by now. Probably several times.

  “All yours,” he announced, like he was being magnanimous by not parking his laundry in the machine the rest of the day. He collected his clothes from the top of the dryer, dropping another sock in the process, and started for the door.

  “You dropped some stuff,” Esther said.

  He stopped and spun around, looking helplessly from the precarious bundle of clothes in his arms to the socks on the floor. “Do you think you could, uh…?”

  She stooped to grab his socks off the floor—more ugh—and balanced them on top of the laundry he was holding.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You know you shouldn’t use fabric softener.”

  “What?”

  He indicated her bottle of fabric softener with his chin. “The waxy buildup that stuff leaves behind affects the fabric’s natural ability to absorb moisture. I use a chemical-free laundry powder that’s biodegradable and doesn’t leave a residue.”

  Unbelievable. The guy who didn’t even know basic laundry room etiquette was lecturing her about her fabric softener.

  She gave him a thin-lipped smile. “You know everything’s a chemical right? Even water. There’s no such thing as chemical free.”

  His forehead creased, making his eyebrows draw together. “I meant bad ch
emicals. Like the stuff they put in commercial cleaning products.”

  “Okay.” At this rate, Esther’s molars were going to wear down to the size of Tic Tacs. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “See ya,” Jonathan said, looking pleased with himself as he left.

  Rolling her eyes, she cleaned the lint trap on the dryer—because of course he hadn’t done it—and transferred her wet load out of the washer. She fed four quarters into the ancient machine and as it rumbled to life she set the timer on her phone for forty-five minutes. Because she was considerate of the other people she shared the laundry facilities with, and she knew how to use a damn clock.

  As she was letting herself back into her apartment upstairs, her phone started blaring “Pocketful of Sunshine,” the ringtone she’d assigned to her best friend.

  Jin-Hee Kang, known as Jinny to everyone but her Korean parents, was the only person Esther knew who actually liked to talk on the phone anymore. The rest of her friends communicated via texting or social media. Not Jinny though. She liked to chat.

  Esther kicked her apartment door closed behind her as she fished her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. Her apartment reeked of cigarette smoke again. Jonathan must have come upstairs and gone straight onto his balcony for a smoke. “Hey, what’s up?” she said into the phone as she trudged over to the balcony door and slammed it shut.

  “What are you doing today?” Jinny asked.

  It was Sunday, and the only thing Esther had on the agenda was laundry, cleaning out the cat litter box, and maybe burning through some of the TV shows stacking up on her DVR. She regarded her reflection in the glass door: the dull brown hair twisted into a messy bun, the zit forming on the tip of her long nose, the stretched-out tank top and cut-off jeans shorts that made up her laundry day uniform. “I’ve got high tea with Prince Harry and the Queen later, but I can push it if I have to.”

  “I need a pool hang. Can I come over?”

  “Sure.”

  Esther lived in the Palms neighborhood of Los Angeles, in an older courtyard building with a pool. Jinny lived nearby in Mar Vista, in a newer, bigger building that didn’t have a pool or a courtyard, so when the weather was nice she liked to come over to Esther’s and hang out. The weather was nice about eighty percent of the time in Los Angeles, which meant they spent a lot of weekends sitting by the pool in Esther’s courtyard.

  “With mimosas,” Jinny added.

  “Uh oh. What happened?” Whenever one of them was having a crappy week, they’d make up a pitcher of mimosas and sip them from champagne flutes by the pool.

  “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  Esther pulled open her fridge to take stock. “I’ve still got a bottle of champagne left over from last time.”

  “Good,” Jinny said. “I’ll be there in thirty with the OJ.”

  Chapter Two

  Jinny showed up at Esther’s apartment exactly thirty minutes later in a blue sundress and matching flip-flops, carrying a jug of Simply Orange and a box of doughnuts.

  “Oh god,” Esther said, lifting an eyebrow at the doughnuts. “Is someone dead?”

  Jinny plopped her things on Esther’s Ikea dining table. “Only my self-respect.” She was twenty-four, like Esther, but her small stature and flawless complexion made her look much younger. She was always being carded at bars and hit on by creepy guys who thought she was a high school student.

  “What does that mean?” Esther asked.

  Jinny’s lips pursed into a Cupid’s bow. “If I tell you, you have to promise not to be mad.”

  “Why would I be mad?” Esther asked with a feeling of dread.

  “I sort of kinda slept with Stuart.”

  “What?”

  Stuart was Jinny’s ex-boyfriend—her very recently ex-boyfriend. They’d only broken up a week ago, and it had been all Esther could do to refrain from throwing a party to celebrate. The guy was a grade A dick, and he’d been a dick even before he’d cheated on Jinny.

  Esther had tried to like him. She’d even managed it for a while. He was charismatic and attractive, and even if he wasn’t exactly Jinny’s intellectual equal, it was easy to see what she liked about him. At first.

  Then Esther had begun to notice little things that set her teeth on edge. Like the habit he had of resting his hand on the back of Jinny’s neck and steering her around in front of him. It was trivial, but it rubbed Esther the wrong way. Like Jinny was a pet he was parading around. Then she started to notice how he was always asking Jinny to get him things—another drink, something to eat, the phone he’d left in the next room—but never reciprocated. And how often he talked over Jinny, and the way he’d put her down subtly with backhanded compliments he always passed off as jokes.

  The first time Esther saw him tell Jinny to lighten up after she got annoyed by one of his little “jokes” at her expense, Esther knew. Stuart was Bad News.

  Maybe he wasn’t abusive—yet—but the potential was there. He had all the makings.

  The only fight she and Jinny had ever had was a few months ago when Esther had told her what she thought of Stuart. That he was a narcissistic, emotionally abusive asshole who would end up hurting her if she didn’t get the hell away from him.

  To say it hadn’t gone over well would be an understatement. Jinny had told Esther to mind her own fucking business and refused to speak to her for an entire week. The fight had only ended when Esther apologized and promised to be nicer to Stuart. It had seriously rankled to do it, but what other option did she have? Abandon Jinny to that asshole? You couldn’t tell people things they didn’t want to hear. Jinny had been too infatuated to see what kind of man he really was.

  Until she’d found out he was cheating on her with one of the women he worked with. Esther had been proud of how quickly and decisively Jinny had kicked him to the curb. Only, apparently it wasn’t so decisive after all.

  Jinny shook her head. “I knew you’d be mad.”

  Esther took a breath and did her best to sound calm and supportive. “I’m not mad. But I do have questions. Number one: how do you sort of sleep with someone?”

  Jinny’s eyes skated away, embarrassed. “You regular-sleep with them and then kind of regret it after but not totally.”

  This was bad. Very, very bad. “But he cheated on you. I thought you were done with him?”

  “I was. I mean, I am. I definitely am. Done with him. For good.” She bobbed her head, trying to seem convincing. Unconvincingly.

  “Except for the part where you slept with him.”

  Jinny turned away to examine the doughnuts. “Yeah, except for that part.”

  “So again I ask, what happened?”

  Jinny sighed as she picked up a chocolate-glazed. “You know how he’s been texting me?”

  Esther scowled. “I told you you should have gotten a restraining order.”

  “He was being all sweet and apologetic!” Jinny said around a mouthful of doughnut.

  “You didn’t fall for that, did you?” Of course she had; she always fell for that. Stuart had played her like a bass guitar.

  “No! I was very firm with him. But then last night his texts started getting all sexy, and we may have ended up sexting a little bit—”

  Esther squeezed her eyes shut. “Gross.”

  “And it got me all worked up—”

  “Double gross.”

  “And then he showed up at my door and—”

  “Okay, fine, I get the gist. No need for further details.” Like a bass guitar. Stuart was a parasite. He’d always find a way to attach himself to his host.

  Jinny stuffed the rest of her doughnut in her mouth and went to the fridge for the champagne. “Look, he can be really convincing, okay? It’s hard to say no to him.”

  “But you’re going to say no the next time, right?” Esther said as she got down two champagne flutes.

  “Absolutely. Grab the OJ.” Jinny shouldered the tote she kept packed with pool-day essentials—towel, sunglasses, sunscreen, and
trashy magazines—and picked up the box of doughnuts.

  Esther perched her sunglasses on top of her head and carried the OJ and champagne flutes out of the apartment. “If you take him back, he’ll cheat on you again. Once a cheater, always a cheater.”

  Jinny followed with the champagne and doughnuts. “I know.”

  Esther regarded her with a healthy dose of skepticism. Jinny was a recidivist. She’d keep going back to Stuart every time she felt lonely. If someone else didn’t come along to distract her—fast—she might very well give in and take Stuart back for real. She’d done it before, with her last boyfriend. That one had taken three tries to shake, and he hadn’t been nearly as beguiling as Stuart.

  “How did you leave things with him?” Esther asked as they clomped down the stairs.

  Like a lot of the older buildings in the neighborhood, the apartments were all on the second floor, arranged in a rectangle around a central courtyard. Underneath the apartments were the laundry room, mailboxes, storage, and off-street resident parking. The courtyard was by far the nicest part of Esther’s building—thanks entirely to the efforts of Mrs. Boorstein, who liked to garden and kept the beds full of attractive flowers and vegetation at no cost to their cheapskate landlord.

  “I made it clear it was just a one-time thing,” Jinny said as they emerged into the courtyard.

  Sunlight reflected off the surface of the pool, which was a cloudy aquamarine color today. They never actually got in the water, because the last person who’d swum in it had come down with an ear infection. Even if the two things weren’t related, Esther wasn’t taking any chances.