Chapter 14
Clara
I run a sanitizing wipe over our side anyway—a small ritual of control—and lay out the materials in a grid that would make a drill sergeant salivate: Statistics on the left, Biology on the right, American History in the center.
Fresh index cards are squared to ninety degrees with the edge of the table.
My pen and a spare. A mechanical pencil because he refuses to bring one.
My entire setup is a declaration of order in the face of impending chaos.
A text from Zoe:
Don’t let him set terms. make him bleed for every answer.
A second from Genny follows like a seal on an envelope:
Speak clean. Cut once. Leave him bleeding.
I smile without meaning to, a brief flicker of warmth. Then I lock my screen, place the phone face down, and wait. The waiting is part of the battle. It’s where I gather my focus, steel my nerves, and remind myself what’s at stake. This isn’t about him. It’s about my future.
He arrives at 5:06. Not a step sooner.
The door slams open. Adrian doesn’t enter—he invades, six-foot-three of coiled muscle and barely contained fury.
Cold rides in on him, tin-sharp and invasive.
The fluorescent lights dim as if cowering from him.
His gray Briarcliff hoodie is pulled low, casting shadows across eyes that burn arctic blue, while his sleeves are violently shoved up forearms mapped with veins like tributaries of rage.
Sweat or ice melt glistens at his temple, catching light when he moves.
The room fills with his scent—eucalyptus and cold, medicinal and mean.
He brings the rink's chill with him, the temperature in the small alcove dropping enough to raise the hairs on my arms. No greeting.
No apology. He yanks the chair out with enough force to leave marks on the floor, then drops into it, letting the metal-on-linoleum screech saw through the silence between us.
“Babysitting hours start at five,” he says, his voice low, almost bored, but with a current of something else running underneath it. “You charge extra for overtime?”
“Only when the client’s late,” I answer, my voice just as flat. “Let’s get started.”
He sprawls back like the chair is a throne he graciously allows to exist under him. He flicks a look at the layout on the table as if it personally offended him by being orderly, a silent judgment on my desperate need for control.
“We’re starting with Stats,” I say, my voice all business as I pull a clean review packet free, the blank copy I printed for this session. “Let’s see what you actually did.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw. He reaches into his backpack without looking and sets his own battered packet on the table between us.
It doesn’t land so much as it’s discarded.
The top corner is bent, folded over on itself.
The margin is stabbed with graphite, a series of dark, angry lines.
Arrows lunge at numbers like they’re prey.
There’s a smear of ink where his hand dragged through wet lines.
The packet isn’t homework; it’s shrapnel.
I don’t make a sound. I simply pull the packet to my side of the table.
I scan the page once, twice, and the pattern is there before I can pretend it isn’t.
It’s not just messy; it’s consistently incorrect in a way that feels significant.
Sevens become ones when he recopies them from one line to the next.
A nine flips to a six. In a simple data table, he misaligns a column, loses a line of data entirely, then corrects it with an arrow that points to the wrong row.
The work isn’t lazy. It’s labored. Aggressive, even—like he tried to throttle the math into submission and the math slipped away just to spite him.
“You did these… last night?” I ask, keeping my tone perfectly neutral, clinical.
“After,” he says, his voice a wall.
“After what?”
“Noise.” The word hangs in the air, a complete sentence, a closed door. “Go on, Tutor.”
I slide the packet back toward him. “Read the first question aloud.”
His eyes lift to mine, flat and hard as slate. “You can read.”
“So can you.” I tap the line with my index finger. “Out loud. I want to hear you process it.”
A beat of tense silence. He doesn’t move. I don’t look away.
Then he leans forward, planting an elbow on the table, and the room tilts with his proximity. My breath catches, a stupid, involuntary hitch. Six inches of stolen distance that feels like a mile. His forearm plants right over the packet, like he might crush the print with weight alone.
“Maybe you’re shy,” he says, his voice a low drawl. “Want me to hold your hand while I sound out the big words?”
“That explain why you avoid them?” I keep my voice cool, refusing to take the bait. “Read it.”
His mouth cuts upward—no teeth, all threat. Then his eyes drop to the page.
“‘Given two inde—’” He stops abruptly, clears his throat, and runs the word again faster, barreling through it. “‘Independent events, A and B—’”
I hear it. I see it. It’s not the stumble itself—it’s the shift.
The subtle bracing before a multi-syllable word.
He rushes when the words get longer, clipping the syllables together like they’re obstacles he needs to clear.
Articles and prepositions—the small connective tissue of a sentence—vanish altogether, skipped like they don’t matter.
But when he hits the numbers—the percentages, the ratios, the mathematical notation—his tone hardens, becomes steadier, more precise.
He lands those clean, then trips again the moment the sentence switches back to text.
He finishes the paragraph and throws the pencil down on the table like a gauntlet. “Happy?”
“No.” I slide the notebook toward him and watch his hand hesitate for a fraction of a second before he grips the pencil again. “Do it.”
He starts, and I let him. I watch the way his eyes track the page, how they jump back a line and then overshoot forward, as if he’s lost his place.
He writes the initial fraction wrong, pauses, and corrects it—but the denominator he copies isn’t the one on the page in front of him.
A small, almost imperceptible tick starts in his jaw when he notices the mistake.
He erases too hard, leaving a bald, gray spot on the paper, then rewrites the number with his grip so tight I can see the white of his knuckles.
Graphite snaps; dust freckles his knuckles.
He doesn’t say a word. He just grinds through it, his frustration a palpable force in the small room.
“Stop,” I say quietly, when he crosses a seven like a one again. I reach forward with my pen and circle it. “You just transposed that.”
“I fixed it,” he snaps, his voice low and dangerous.
“You did, after you missed it. That’s wasted time.”
His eyes cut up to meet mine, blue knives holding until the room forgets to hum. “You here to grade my handwriting or teach me math?”
“Both, apparently.”
He goes still. Not stiff. Not braced. Still—like a blade laid on the table between us. His fingers flex, just once, on the pencil, as if he’s imagining how it would feel to snap it in half.
“What problem,” he says, his voice dangerously low.
I look from the angry, shredded page back to his face.
The pieces don’t fit. I’ve seen him on the ice—the precision, the almost supernatural ability to read angles and predict plays in a fraction of a second.
His mind is clearly not slow. But this… this is different.
It’s a consistent, baffling pattern of self-sabotage.
He doesn’t just make mistakes; he makes the same kind of mistakes.
The numbers move. The words slip. He sees a seven and writes a one.
It’s not laziness. It’s something else, a glitch in the wiring that he’s spent his entire life trying to hide with force and speed.
And a hot, unexpected wave of anger washes over me—not at him, but for him. For the little boy who was probably told he was lazy when he was just trying to keep the words from swimming away.
“The one you cover with jokes and speed,” I answer, my voice just as low. “You’re not failing because you can’t think. You’re failing because you’re burning energy in the wrong places. Covering mistakes instead of solving them. That’s a losing strategy.”
His jaw works, a slow, grinding motion. I haven’t accused him of being stupid; I’ve accused his method of being stupid.
For a guy like him, maybe that’s worse. He can’t deny flipping a number or missing a line, because the evidence is right there on the mangled page.
His silence presses down, a physical weight trying to crush the air from my lungs.
“And you’ve got a better one?” he asks, his voice laced with a dangerous, mocking challenge.
“I’m observing what’s in front of me,” I counter calmly. “And what I see isn’t working.”
“Try observing this,” he says, and pushes the History book toward me with two fingers. He rotates the page to face me, knuckles anchoring the edge—permission disguised as pressure. “Give me the lecture. I’ll memorize it. You can put gold stars in your planner and pat yourself on the head.”
“You don’t need gold stars,” I say, my voice softer now, shifting tactics. “You need a new approach.”
“I need a passing grade,” he snaps, the control in his voice finally cracking.
“Those are related.”
He laughs—one sharp, ugly breath that’s more pain than humor. “Sure. Save the public service for people who didn’t ask to be here. I’m not your project.”
My spine goes colder. “You’re not. You’re a paid appointment. And I don’t like wasting time.”