Chapter 8
8
OLIVIA
T he weekend was exactly what I needed.
Operation drink wine and rot my brain on trash TV with my bestie was a smashing success. After finishing the schoolwork I had to do late Friday afternoon, I had a perfect weekend of being supremely unproductive and doing nothing of value.
It was exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries from the week beforehand.
Monday’s classes pass like a breeze, and my shoulders are feeling so light that I’m whistling an easy tune as I walk into the tutoring center for my very important two-thirty session with the student-athlete.
“He’s waiting in room five for you, Olivia,” Dr. Galloway calls as I pass his office.
I shoot him a thumbs up and nod in acknowledgment.
That’s a good sign. Shows this one is taking things seriously.
So often, we have athletes sent to us on the orders of their coaches, and it’s clear they want to be anywhere else in the world but here. They act like us trying to help them pass their classes —which, you know, is the whole reason they’re supposed to be here, in college —is some horrible imposition on them.
But this student isn’t just on time, he’s early. Maybe it’s just because of the mood I’m in now, but I have a good feeling about this one.
I push open the door of tutoring room five—and the carefree, optimistic mood that’s been buoying me all day flies away in an instant, like a bird launching itself out of the way of an approaching car.
A heavy weight settles in my stomach.
My eyes are locked on the bright, baby-blue gaze of none other than Tuck McCoy.
For a beat of time, our gazes tether, Tuck’s face blank just like mine as I silently pray for a meteor to strike the tutoring center.
“Oh no,” I manage to lament. The words that escape my lips might be tiny, but they’re charged with a truckload of dismay.
Then, he laughs.
Throws his head back so that his tussled mop of sandy blonde hair bobs, opens his sharp jaw that’s covered with prickly-looking stubble, and lets out a series of fucking guffaws .
My stomach churns as I step into the room and close the door behind me. I suppress the urge to run to Dr. Galloway and demand that someone else take my place. I know he’s got his hands full making the tutoring schedule work here, and I already agreed to take on this client.
Before I knew who it was.
All I can do is accept my fate. My pitiful fate.
“Why is the universe so cruel?” I’m gazing up at the ceiling as the question passes from my lips.
Tuck’s finally finished with his guffawing. “Hey, don’t act like you’re the only one disappointed here.”
I point my gaze at him and lower my brow. “Oh?”
“Yeah, I was hoping I’d get some girl who I could convince to write all my essays for me.” He adds with a wry grin, “Something tells me that’s not going to fly with you.”
I press my lips together in distaste. “You wouldn’t really try to get someone else to do your work and pass it off as your own, would you?” I can’t say I have the highest opinion of Tuck, but I don’t think I’d have suspected that of him.
He just shrugs. “Guess we’ll never know.”
I’m not willing to let it go that easily. “How would you feel if another team cheated in hockey?”
Lines furrow into his forehead. “Huh?”
“If another team paid off the referees. Or switched their opponent’s equipment so their skates didn’t fit right. How would you feel about that? Because that’s the same thing as getting someone else to do your work for you, and getting a grade you didn’t earn.”
“That’s totally different,” he protests.
I fold my arms over my chest. “How’s it different?”
Tuck opens his mouth, but words seem to fail him. He tilts his head to the side thoughtfully, his eyes bouncing around like he’s ransacking his brain for an answer.
“Uh. Because I say so?” A dumb smile curls on his lips. I guess when you’re Tuck McCoy, that’s usually reason enough for anything.
I narrow my gaze on him. “In my opinion, attempted cheating should be punishable under the academic integrity code, just like attempted murder is a crime itself even if it doesn’t succeed.”
“Is it just me, Lockley, or did I notice a glimmer in your eyes when you said the word murder while looking at me?”
I feel the edge of my lips twitch, but I tighten my mouth to keep from smiling. I don’t want to give Tuck the satisfaction. “Don’t tempt me,” I answer.
Tuck lets out a low whistle. “Getting with a girl who likes it rough is hot as it is. But getting with a girl who literally wants to murder you? Shit, that must be …”
I turn around and reach for the door handle. “Alright, if you just want to goof around, I guess you really don’t need help with your essays that much.”
“Wait!” he exclaims. The trace of urgency is enough to still my movement towards to door and turn back to face him. “I really do need help. And … I know I’m lucky getting you as a tutor. I’ve heard other athletes who’ve been sent to tutoring and assigned to you say that you’re a miracle worker. Stay. I’ll behave. Promise.”
There’s a strange fuzzy feeling in my stomach, reaching up to my chest where it grows warm. I try to search for any sarcasm in Tuck’s words, any hint that he’s pulling my leg, but there doesn’t seem to be any. He seems genuine.
“Fine,” I accept.
I pull out a chair next to him and try to think of him not as the obnoxious, cocky hockey star who’s been trying to get in my pants for the last four months, but as just another tutoring client who needs help.
“So, first of all. In your opinion, what do you think your biggest problem is when it comes to essays?”
“Getting bad grades,” he answers.
I clamp down on my instinct to say something snarky in response. That’s what I’d do if I were still thinking of him as a hockey jerk. But I’m thinking of him as a tutee in need.
“Okay,” I reply, evenly. “Why do you think you tend to get bad grades on your essays?”
I’ve found that this is an important question to get pupils to understand. It’s important for students to be able to accurately identify exactly what their difficulties and weaknesses are, so they can be effective in improving them.
“I wish I fucking knew,” he says, his exasperation evident. “This last essay I turned in, I thought I did good. I thought I made a good argument, good points. Then it’s a fucking sixty-two percent when I got it back!”
“Do you have the essay with you?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s right here.” His book bag sits in between our two chairs, and when he angles his body to reach down and unzip it, his knee brushes against mine.
At the tiny contact, sparks erupt and dance up my leg, settling between my thighs where they awaken a warm, buzzing feeling. My core goes taut. I take a deep, steadying breath through my nose, trying not to let my thighs clench.
“Here it is,” he says, pulling out his essay. He lays it on the desk in front of us. “And look at how helpful my professor’s comments are.”
He points at the red ink underneath the grade of sixty-two sitting at the top of the front page: Totally disorganized , is all it says.
I’m not surprised by that when I look at the heading Tuck typed to the upper-right and see that his professor is Martinello.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “That’s definitely some Martinello-style feedback.” Some college professors want to do all they can to help their students succeed; some think that college is supposed to be a more independent experience than that and take a sink-or-swim approach to their students. Martinello falls squarely in the latter category.
“Let me skim through it,” I say. I’m not doing a deep reading, trying to look for every possible stylistic error or minor weakness in any of his arguments. First, I just want to get a sense of the general outline and organization of the essay.
Once I’ve skimmed through it, I can only come to one conclusion. “Okay. Martinello’s comment wasn’t helpful, but it wasn’t wrong, either.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“This essay is all over the place. Look, you first bring up this point in the second paragraph,” I point to it, “then you totally forget about it and ramble about three different ideas for the next two paragraphs. Then you finally come back to your first point later in the essay, before coming back to, like, half the points you made between then and now and fleshing them out more.”
“But the arguments were good, right?” he asks.
“Actually, they are,” I say, a bit caught off guard by the realization as I flip between pages. “But you need to make one point at a time. And you don’t really have a conclusion … actually, your conclusion seems to be in the third to last paragraph. Your last two paragraphs are just elaborating on other minor points you made earlier in the essay.”
“But isn’t it the argument that counts? The logic? If I make a relevant point and defend it well, isn’t that what’s important?”
“That is important, but it’s not everything. Without proper organization, it can be hard or even impossible to follow what you’re trying to say. It’s like, imagine you’re writing a letter to someone, but your handwriting is so bad literally no one can read it. It doesn’t really matter what the letter says, does it? How you present your ideas is important, too.”
“Hmm,” Tuck hums, actually sounding thoughtful.
“What did you do before you started to actually write this essay?” I ask.
Tuck turns to me with a quizzical look. “You mean, what did I do that day? Well, I went to the gym. Beat Lane in a bench press competition,” at that, he throws up both his arms and flexes them, making his dense, round biceps bulge. I feel like Tuck really enjoys flexing. “Then we went to the bar and …”
“I don’t mean that,” I say, rolling my eyes at Tuck narrating an entire day of his life. “I mean what did you do to prepare for the essay? Did you make an outline?”
“Outline?” The word falls from his lips like he doesn’t even know the meaning.
“Did you do any planning at all? Or did you just open up a Word document and start typing away?”
Tuck nods his head slowly. “Yeah. The last one.”
I click my tongue. “That would be your problem, then.”
“So you’re telling me when I write an essay, not only do I have to write the essay itself, I have to write, like … a pre-essay ?”
“It’s not that onerous to …”
“ Onerous ,” Tuck repeats the word, his brow leaping sarcastically. “That’s a word of the day for you.”
“It’s not that difficult to make an outline,” I rephrase with a slight bite to my words. I run down some basic outlining strategies with Tuck, and then give him an assignment: I want him to read through the essay he just scored a sixty-two on, identify all the specific points and arguments he made, and then create an outline for how he should have organized them to be more coherent.
He ruffles through his book bag. “Shit. You have a pencil or something?” he asks.
I fish one out of my own book bag and hold it out to him. When he grabs it, our fingers brush together, and an electric thrill travels from the point of contact, racing up my arm and expanding in my chest. I curse my traitorous nipples for tightening into hard nubs under my shirt.
To Tuck’s credit, he really puts effort into what I ask him to do. He hunches over the paper in front of him, the posture accentuating how big and broad his back is as his thick slab of muscles strain against the shirt.
As he glances between his outline and the pages of his essay, the tip of his tongue peeks out from the crease of his lips.
A chill dances up my spine as my eyes latch onto it. My nipples tighten again, so much they ache this time, as the very unwelcome thought of Tuck’s pink, wet tongue swirling around them intrudes into my mind.
An involuntary shiver rattles through me, noticeable enough to draw Tuck’s gaze.
“So cold in here,” I quickly say to cover it up, drawing my arms against my chest. “They really need to turn the heat up.”
Tuck shrugs, pulling his attention back to his outline. “Seems hot in here to me.”
I can’t tell if he’s making a casual observation or messing with me. I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. First time for everything, I guess.
When he finishes the outline, he slides it over the table to me. I look it over.
I’m impressed. I review it with him and provide some advice for how he could improve it, what kind of details he should add so that the task of writing the essay could be halfway done before he even types the first sentence.
“Damn, Lockley,” he muses, “there really might be something to this outline idea.”
A small chuckle vibrates in my throat. “Glad I could convince you. You have another essay due soon?”
“Yeah. Middle of next week.”
“Alright. We have another session on Thursday. How about you come to that one with a preliminary outline already made. Then we’ll look it over, tweak it if needed, and then after that session you’ll be ready to start writing it.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Sounds good.”
When we’re getting up to leave, he catches me off guard by saying, “Sorry, by the way.”
“Hm?” I ask.
“About that argument we had. When I was driving you home last week.” His features twist, like the memory is actually weighing on him. “I was insensitive. And a jerk. I don’t have any right to judge your decisions like I did.”
I feel numb with surprise. Tuck sounds … sincere? Like this is something that’s been genuinely bothering him, something that’s been on his mind since it happened.
I nod. “Apology accepted.”
I don’t think much of the words, but when I say them, a broad, beaming smile splits on Tuck’s face. The expression lights up the luminous blue orbs of his eyes. “See you Thursday?”
“See you Thursday,” I reply, turning towards the door.
As I step out of the tutoring room with Tuck right behind me, I’m not dreading Thursday nearly as much as I expected I would be half an hour ago.