Two Negatives
Title: Two Negatives
Pairing: Adam Ross/Jennifer Angell
Rating: FRC
Disclaimer: All characters belong to CBS. I am not making any money off this.
A/N: Short/Silly/Fluff. I was bored. And today was a snow day!
Summary: Everybody knows that a negative times a negative equals a positive. What everybody doesn't know is that real life can be similar to a math equation.
Two Negatives
Everybody knows that a negative times a negative equals a positive. What everybody doesn't know is that real life can be similar to a math equation.
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Adam Ross was not the lucky kind of guy. He was too scientific to believe in Friday the Thirteenth, broken mirrors, black cats, and seeing the bride on the wedding day. He didn't give a crap about living on the first floor of his apartment building, having been born on the first day of the month, or being the proud owner of a so-black-you'd-think-she's-blue cat appropriately named Joker.
But he did notice some things, when his head wasn't stuck in a book. Breaking a neighbor's window on his very first (and last) homer, accidentally switching the bulk-sized bottle of food coloring for bulk-sized bottle of shampoo. Catching chicken pox the day before his senior prom. The list ran on and on.
The consequences, some big, some small, were always borne with quiet acceptance on the outside with steaming fury coursing through his veins inside. Fury from saving up his minuscule allowance for months to pay for that window, watching the entire grocery store snicker at him as he bought dirty blond hair dye with a head full of neon green hair, and having to call his first ever date to cancel it had to go somewhere. It went into his passion - lab science.
Adam figured, if you're stuck in a lab all day, how hard will it be to mess up? He carried the very large and very full bucket through the doors of the locker room, and speed-walked his way in the direction of his locker, not knowing how clueless he had been.
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Jennifer Angell wasn't the most coordinated person in the world. Her parents first noticed it when she was in Kindergarten and couldn't do a proper somersault. It was dismissed first as regular for a child of her age, that their little Angel would grow out of it sometime soon. She didn't. It got worse. Diagnosed with poor vision in the third grade, Jen's startling ability to trip on everything was finally explained, and the acquisition of the coke-bottle glasses improved her sense of balance.
They came with three prices attached: the actual money paid to the optician, the ridicule of her peers, and the glasses amazing ability to fall off and lose themselves. Graded basketball games turned into fast-paced missile ducking with the ultimate target being her glasses. English was public humiliation, having to explain to the teacher and the prying ears of students why she couldn't read Act I, Scene 3 of Julius Caesar in front of the class - because "I, I dropped my glasses when I came through and I couldn't find them."
"Surely you can at least try, Jennifer."
"I, I can't, sir. I'm - almost - legally blind." Standing there listening to her entire Advanced Sophomore English class crawl around on their hands and knees, and hearing the snide comments as Will Sparks finally placed them in her outstretched arms a full five minutes later.
This had all changed after the purchasing of contacts the summer before her Freshman year in college. Minor problems with klutziness still occurred when the contacts would slip off into the corner of her eyes and in the nightly search for the bed when Jen removed the saviors in the bathroom right before going to sleep. Her job as a detective for the NYPD would have been nightmarish without the contacts, but there wasn't anything to worry about anymore, she thought as she walked through the rows of lockers with an open bottle of contact cleanser in one hand and the itchy offender on the tip of her index finger. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Contact was inevitable; lack of luck and lack of coordination and sight were not a good combination. Jen ran straight into Adam's chest, knocking the bucket high into the air and spraying the contents all over the lockers, bench, and their sprawling bodies. Her Kontacts Kleanser spun like a football and landed with surprising precision in the trash can. Adam watched in horror as the tiny dome-shaped contact dropped from Jen's index finger to the mess below.
He tried to speak first, but the words 'sorry', 'excuse me', and 'oops' left his head and all he could do is gape. Detective Jennifer Angell calmly wiped away the stickiness from her eyes and looked around herself, sizing up the situation. Red was everywhere. High velocity blood spatter on the lockers, bench, and themselves. She looked like she had been shot, sitting in a pool of what could have passed for very thick blood. The only thing that was wrong with the picture of homicide was that she was laughing as hard as she possibly could.
Jen caught sight of the label on the bucket and the confused look on the lab rat's face, and laughed harder. She tried to stand up, but slid down further, getting her clothes even dirtier and making her laugh harder. His look evolved from confusion to mirth, and he too started to smile, then threw his head back and howled.
Her fit ended first, and she managed to force out, "Didn't know ketchup came in a bucket," before intentionally sliding down onto her back and continuing until there were tears in her eyes. He recovered, then stood up carefully and scooped her up into his arms and plopped her down onto the bench.
"I buy everything in bulk.It's cheaper." he said as seriously as possible, then sat up with a start as she poked him in the side. "What the frick, Detective?"
"I don't have any extra clothes here. And I lost one of my contacts. And the janitor's gonna be really mad at us."
They looked each other up and down and Adam sighed. "I live a few blocks away from here." They squelched out of the locker room together and through a long hallway, passing Mac and rendering him, for once in his life, speechless.