Chapter Ten

 

This nerd had balls of steel, I'd give her that.

She had threatened my football career.

My. Actual. Fucking. Football. Career.

I sat on the edge of my bed, stared at the ceiling and breathed through my nose because the only other alternative was putting my angry fist through the wall, and I'd promised Martin that I would try.

I'd said those exact words three years ago after the last massive fight with my father, sitting on the edge of my brother's bed while Martin looked up at me with those eyes that trusted me more than I deserved. I'll try, buddy. I promise.

I was trying. I was sitting here trying to be calm instead of going back downstairs and flipping that entire dining room table and dragging that bratty girl out by her hair, and that was trying.

The thing making it worse, the thing sitting on top of the anger like salt on an injury and stopping me from doing what I actually wanted, was the mother situation.

Because if Lena reported me, my mother would do what she always did when something got too big for her to handle: hand it straight to my father. Gift wrapped, full explanation included.

And my father would handle it with violence, leading to another big fight where both of us would leave everything around us in utter ruin, including Martin.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes.

I was not letting that happen. My brother didn't deserve it. He deserved a peaceful home, at the very least.

Then there was the other problem.

The one I'd been sitting here for ten minutes trying to get rid of and failing. My dick was hard. My body had decided that Lena Hartwell stumbling backwards into my chest was enough reason to lose its mind completely.

It was the most embarrassing and infuriating thing that had happened to me in recent memory, and that list was not short.

I'd dropped her on purpose. Mostly because she deserved it, partly because another two seconds of her warm and startled against me, and my hard-on would have been impossible to hide, and then I would have had to move to another country to start a new life away from her.

I stood up, but my dick was still hard between my legs.

Fucking hell. It must be as broken as my brain was if it was getting up for that nerd.

I sat back down and thought hard about my father's voice, calling me a disappointment and a failure, and how it felt every time he said those words to me.

The terrified look on Martin's face, hidden behind a door, as he watched us fight.

That did it.

I got up, shut the door behind me, and went downstairs.

She was at the table when I walked in. Textbooks open, papers in those neat colour-coded piles, head down, biting her lip the way she often did when she was concentrating, which I definitely had not noticed and definitely was not noticing right now.

Fuck no.

Then she reached up and put on her reading glasses.

Giant wire frames that sat low on her nose and made her eyes look enormous, and her mouth look—

I walked shoulder-first directly into the doorframe, too distracted to see straight.

She looked up at the sound and sat up straighter when she saw me. I glared at her, pulled out the chair across from her, and dropped into it.

"Thank you for coming down," she said.

I said nothing. Crossed my arms and stared at a fixed point above her head, doing my best not to look at her.

"I know you don't want to be here."

"Good. So get the fuck out then."

"But we're going to make the best of it." She pulled a fresh sheet forward, sighing heavily. "I want to start with a general picture of where you are across your subjects. It's not a test, there's no grade—"

"No."

She looked up. "Sorry?"

"No," I said again. "I'm not sitting here while you work out how stupid I am and write it all down in your little notes."

Confusion moved across her face. "That's not what this is."

"Then what is it?"

"It's so I understand how to help you. Different people learn differently, so I need to know how you—"

"My brain works fine."

"Your GPA—"

"My GPA is none of your business."

"Your mother made it my business." She set her pen down. "Jace. Please. I get that you don't want to be here, but—"

"Brilliant. We agree." I pushed my chair back. "I'll go."

"You'll stay." Those eyes behind those glasses didn't move from my face. "You will stay here, with me, and you'll cooperate. Or I make a call."

"You keep saying that like it actually scares me."

"Does it not?"

I stared at her, and she stared right back. Didn't flinch, didn't look away, didn't do any of the things people normally did when I looked at them like I would rip their heads off... and eat it.

"You can lead a horse to water," I said, "but you can't make it drink."

I'd meant it as a getting the last word in. As in, go ahead, do your worst, call whoever you want, I am the horse, and I will die of thirst at this river before I give you one thing you're looking for.

She smiled.

A nice, genuine, perfect fucking smile that was there and gone before she could pull it back, and it did lit up her face, totally transforming it until it was no longer plain and was instead breathtakingly beautiful.

What the fuck?

"We can start there, actually," she said, sitting forward, her voice becoming lighter, as if I'd just given her an opportunity she hadn't expected.

"What you just said is an idiomatic expression, meaning it describes something true without being literally true. You're not a horse, and there's no river, but everyone understands exactly what you mean only if they have context."

She pushed the glasses up and smiled brightly again, blinding me almost. "Figurative language is one of the areas your English teacher flagged. So if that's where you want to start, that actually works perfectly."

She kept talking. Going on and on excitedly. The idiot nerd was obviously in her element.

I caught maybe the first two minutes. Something about the difference between proverbs and idioms and metaphors, and why any of that shit mattered.

And then, somewhere around minute three, her voice faded into nothing because I couldn't process her words anymore.

I was too busy watching her face and hating myself for it while she had absolutely no idea.

The way her hands moved gracefully when she was explaining something she clearly enjoyed, while I couldn't give a single shit about it.

How she pushed those glasses up every few seconds with her pinky finger, like she'd done it ten thousand times before.

The way she leaned forward slightly when she got to the part she really wanted to land, closing the distance between us, forgetting to be afraid of me like everyone else was.

And she didn't seem to be pretending at all. She just actually cared about figurative language and all the other bullshit, about whether I understood, and I couldn't remember the last time someone from school had looked at me like that.

Wanting nothing from me. Not sex or goals or popularity or favours.

I looked down at the table.

Then lower.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I was hard again, and this time it was worse, actually. She'd smiled at me and pushed her glasses up and leaned forward, and my body had apparently decided that was plenty to work with.

She was still talking. Still completely unaware.

This, I thought, with exhausted, furious resignation, is an actual problem.

A massive, proverb-quoting, colour-coding, glasses-wearing, hard-on-inducing problem sitting three feet away from me, explaining whatever the hell she was going on about, with absolutely no idea about her effect on me.

And I had no idea what the fuck to do about that.