“Only because I completely agree with you,” I tell him while flicking his pouty lip affectionately.
He wrinkles his nose like it’s ticklish. “No, you don’t. You get all of this stuff.”
“I do, but I still prefer Dickens and Conan Doyle over Shakespeare,” I coo at him.
He raises an eyebrow. “Who’s Conan Doyle?”
I huff at his cuteness. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the author of Sherlock Holmes.”
Understanding lights up his eyes. “Oh. I definitely preferred those. I mean, if the stories are so important, then why can’t they modernize them a bit to make them less agonizing to read? I get the important phrases that come from this, like ‘to thine own self be true’ and ‘I must be cruel to be kind’, but why do I need to know the thees, the thuses, and the thines? It’s outdated and nonsensical. Technically, Dickens and Conan Doyle are outdated too, but at least there are enough contextual clues for the outdated words to be understandable.”
“I don’t really get it either. Honestly, I’m not a Shakespeare fan, so when I get assigned something of his, I tend to watch a movie adaptation first, then come back to the reading to make better sense of it. The movie provides contextual clues to help me decipher the material. I’m usually more of a ‘read the book before watching the adaptation’ type of person, but Shakespeare is so painfully boring, I can’t get through it without working the process backward,” I tell him.
Kingston’s eyebrows disappear into his hairline. “Isn’t that cheating or breaking some sort of smart person rule or something?”
I roll my eyes at him. “You are a smart person, too, Kingston,” I remind him with an affectionate flick to his forehead. “And it’s not like I’m pursuing literature, so as long as I get the messages and lessons we are supposed to gainfrom the material, then I think that’s all that counts. I can still read for leisure and maintain a comprehensive reading level without needing to understand the thees, the thuses, and the thines. Although the dictionary reading is handy for certain books that are worth it.”
“Like what?” he asks me with obvious skepticism in his tone.
“The Iliad and the Odyssey are two of my favorite books, but I wouldn’t understand either of them without a dictionary handy. Well, I wouldnow,since I’ve read them so many times, but I wouldn’t have the first time around. It’s easier to make concessions when you enjoy it as opposed to when you don’t. Like you enjoying old British dudes when their prose doesn’t overwhelm the ghosts and mysteries as opposed to the ones whose prose drowns the fun out.”
He bites his lower lip for a minute while he processes that. “So not liking Shakespeare doesn’t make me stupid.”
I let out a huff. “I’ve been tutoring you for a while now, Kingston, and I haven’t found anything about you that I’d call stupid.”
His lips frown a bit, and there’s a definite hesitation in his eyes. “Helps that you break the material down, and that you turned math into football,” he says, making arguments to explain away any reason why I might find him anything other than stupid.
I lean down and kiss his forehead, which he responds to by curling his hand around my head and leaning up to brush his lips against mine before I sit back up.
“With how fast you’ve picked everything up that I’ve shown you tells me you already had the knowledge; you just needed better ways to apply it. That’s not a you being stupid moment; that’s the curriculum and teachers not accommodating the concept that there are more ways to learn than just one.”
He sits up and faces me, his eyes searching mine, most likely looking for the lie. It’s sad how stupid his dad makes him feel. I’ve never known anything besides encouragement from mine, and I can’t fathom what it would feel like to be constantly made to feel less than by my own father.
There’s something vulnerable in his eyes for a moment before a gleam in them takes over, and I know what’s coming before he even says it.
This guy is perpetually horny. I was a virgin when we started dating, butyet, not even a month in, and I’d given that up to him. Not that I regret that at all, of course.
“No, Kingston, we still have studying today,” I tell him, beating him to the punch.
“But, baby,” he whines with a puppy-dog pout on his face.
I shake my head at him. “No ‘but baby’, just because I agree that the material isn’t as important as they make it out to be, there are still assignments AND grades attached to it.”
He huffs out a sardonic breath. “You know grades can be bought,” he says in a tone that’s so confident that I’m not sure if he’s teasing or serious.
“Kingston Rowland Adair, you are in no way allowed to buy grades that you are perfectly capable of earning on your own,” I scold, hoping it’s just teasing and not something he’dactuallydo.
“Okay, okay, okay,’ he says placatingly. “I was just teasing about the grades, anyway.”
“Good,” I tell him, handing him his book back.
He almost scowls at me, then drops the book back onto the bed as he crawls into my space. “I was not teasing about getting you naked, though.”
I sigh at that. It’s not like I don’t want it too, especially when he’s got his handsome face so close to mine that I can feel his breath fan across my lips.
“We still have studying to–”
“Blah, blah, blah,” he interrupts me teasingly. “I already read a passage. We can have some naked time now, and then I’ll read more later,” he barters, trailing his fingers up my arm and smiling smugly at how my skin shivers at his touch.
