That evening, Korum got home around eight o’clock. Mia was already back at his place and frantically working on her paper.
He entered her study room and came up to kiss her. “Hey there, looks like somebody is hard at work,” he teased, brushing his lips briefly against her cheek.
Mia gave him a little frown. “Yeah, I have to finish this paper tonight. I have this and my Child Psychology paper due Thursday, and I’m not done with even one of them.”
“Sounds terrible,” Korum said, the slight curve of his lips giving away his amusement.
“It is!” said Mia, her frown getting worse. Couldn’t he see she was stressed? He didn’t have to laugh at her just because her worries seemed minor to him.
“Do you want some help with it?” he asked, causing Mia to give him an incredulous look.
“Help with my papers?” Was he serious?
“Isn’t that what you’re stressing about?” He didn’t look like he was joking.
“Uh . . .” Mia was speechless. Finally finding her tongue, she mumbled, “That’s okay, thanks . . . I should be able to handle it.”
Stifling a grin, she imagined turning in a paper on the effects of environmental factors in early childhood development – written from the perspective of a two-thousand-year-old extraterrestrial. The look on Professor Dunkin’s face would be priceless.
“I can write in English, you know,” said Korum, apparently offended by her reluctance.
Mia smiled with some condescension. “Of course you can.” This was the strangest conversation ever. “But there’s more to writing an academic paper than just knowing the language. You have to have read all these books and attended the lectures . . .” She gestured toward the big pile of paper books sitting at the corner of her desk.
“So,” said Korum, shrugging nonchalantly, “I can read the books right now.”
Mia gave him a dumbfounded look. “There’s about ten of them . . .” She swallowed to get rid of the sudden dryness in her throat. “H-How fast do you read?”
“Pretty fast,” he said. “I also have what you would call a photographic memory, so I don’t need to read the material more than once.”
Mia stared at him in shock. “So you can read all these books in a matter of hours?”
He nodded. “I would probably need about two hours to finish them all.”
That was incredible. “Is that normal for your kind?” Mia asked, still digesting that shocking tidbit.
“Some of us have that ability naturally, while others choose to enhance it with technology to keep up. I was born this way.”
Mia could feel her heart rate picking up. She’d known that he was very smart, of course, and John had told her that Korum was one of the best designers among the K. She just hadn’t expected him to have what amounted to superhuman intelligence.
“I probably seem really stupid to you then,” Mia said quietly, “given how long it takes me to do all this –”
He sighed. “No, Mia, of course not. Just because you’re lacking certain abilities doesn’t mean you’re not smart.”
Yeah, right. “What else can you do?” asked Mia, realizing how little she still knew about her alien lover.
He shrugged. “I can probably do some math in my head that you would need a calculator for.”
This was fascinating and scary at the same time. “What’s 10,456 times 6,345?” she asked, simultaneously reaching for her phone to check the answer.
“66,343,320.”
That was exactly right. And he’d given her the answer before she even had time to input the numbers into the calculator on her phone. Mia swallowed again.
“So do you want my help with the paper or not?” Korum was beginning to look impatient.
Mia shook her head. “Uh, no – that’s all right, thanks. I’m sure you could write a great paper – probably better than me – but I still have to do this myself.”
“Okay, sure, whatever you want,” he said, shaking his head at her stubbornness. “Are you hungry? Do you want me to make something?”