She had seen, and she understood in a way many people never could. He hadn't run into this before. He understood the formulas, the numbers, the equations. Perhaps he even understood the chemical reaction, the scientific cause. But she had seen in his eyes that he couldn't figure out how it all fit together, couldn't figure out the reason behind it.
She was the opposite. She didn't know about the science of it all, didn't know how the chemicals changed the numbers, didn't understand all that. But the real reason, the connections between it all...she could understand that.
It was a matter of perception, she supposed. When she tried to look at it with a greater point of view, as though she were a wiser being on the outside, looking at herself and at him, it became clear that the whole situation was very ironic. He was the one who knew what he was doing, the clever one, the one who had seen much more than she would ever see, and he was clueless, lost, trying and failing to come up with a formula, blundering around in the dark and somehow managing to fly blind without hitting any obstacles. Meanwhile, she, the one who hadn't lived for a tenth as long as he had, for a twentieth, a thirtieth, the one who always got into sticky situations because she didn't know what was happening, who was not much smarter now than she had been the day she'd met him and who had never been very wise...she knew what she was doing.
It was funny, in a way. When he felt like it, he was like a walking, talking hybrid of dictionary-with-a-million-languages and encyclopedia of the universe. He knew so much more than she did. If she'd given him a word for it, he would have understood what it meant. But what it was—that needed so much more than a dictionary to understand. She didn't quite understand it herself, and that made her feel better. It was almost frightening to think that in this position, she might be smarter than he was.
But at some level he wasn't aware of, beyond the thinking and trying to find that single, clean equation to explain everything, he understood, and she knew he did. It was in the way he grinned at her, the way he was happy when she was happy, the way when she was sad he tried everything he could to make it better. He didn't really know what he was doing, but he had the right idea. Sometimes.
She understood what was completely beyond him. The light in his eyes when she came into the room, the way he became more energetic than he already was, the way his too-fast-for-his-own-good mouth went into speed mode as he laughed at the silly, stupid joke she'd made. He understood the formulas, the chemistry; she understood only that it was not something that could be captured by science. No matter how hard he looked, if he searched the whole universe, he couldn't find what he was looking for unless he stopped and looked to himself for the answer.
He would never understand that there was no equation for love.