In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

grinning ear to ear over on the sofa. Yeah, just like back home with
mama mia. Espresso thimbles were stashed around somewhere, but
Penny just grabbed the two tea two mugs and the honey jar. They'd
have to forgo the lemon peel.
He'd stacked the printouts in a neat pile at the edge of the table
to make room for the coffee. When she put had everything down he
pointed back with his thumb at the two curled postcards on the white
wall behind him.
"Who are these dudes?"
"Those dudes, are one dude, Pythagoras of Samos, the
mathematician and philosopher, maybe you've heard of him?"
"Oh yes, that dude," he smirked, stirring his coffee, then raised
his eyes to ceiling and recited, "La place du hypotenuse d'un triangle
d'angle droit est égale à la somme des carrés des deux autres cotés."
"'The square of the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal
to the sum of the squares of the other two sides'. That's pretty good,
but you said it in French, I thought you were Italian."
"I went to school in Paris, first with the Jesuits, yes? Then at the
Lycée Henri IV, it is specialist for the letters. Louis le Grand is for the
maths, so you would go there, no? But also I learned the maths very
good at Henri IV. My mother lived in Paris for the modeling, but we
would go to Rome for holiday, Christmas, New Year, like that, but I
missed the skiing always, real drag" he rambled, his eyes wandering
around the room in a kind of dreamy disbelief. Penny poured her
second dose of coffee.
Poor baby, well, that explained the French, and the manners.
And he could rattle off the theorem like he'd memorized it yesterday.
Jesuits! the Inquisition for dust and disorder, that explained the
neatness. She sipped her coffee, felt it surge through her veins, through
her brain as if the top of her head would pop off. Didn't seem to faze
him. Funny they weren't more psychotic, those Euros.
She had to admit it, plastic or not, he sure was handsome, in a
manicured Euro rich guy way. More like a statue than a store dummy.
So that's what they looked like alive and not carved out of Parian
marble. When he wasn't grimacing, his face was almost artificially
symmetrical. He was a whole lot younger than Ula, who could have
been his mother except there was no resemblance whatsoever.
Probably from his training, she figured, he had a funny way of
holding his head, always up high as if by a string or high strength
magnet from the ceiling, even when he tossed the hair out of his eyes,
18