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“Thank you,” I told her, nudging my glasses with a knuckle.
Joy offered to make us refreshments, to which Connor declined with a shake of his head. His excuse was that we wouldn’t be tutoring long, and if we were thirsty, we could come in ourselves. With a final farewell, Connor led me through the house to the back door, propping it open so I could pass through first.
For being a house in town, the yard was huge, practically double the size of my backyard. It was fenced in, too, the chain link a little warped in some areas, but sturdy. “We’ll sit here,” Connor said, gesturing toward a white wooden picnic table set up underneath a tree. “A lot different than a closet, huh?”
“A lot less scandalous, too,” I retorted, looking up at him. In that moment, with the sun catching in his brown hair, it struck me how odd it was to see a genuine smile from him. “So, we only have one week left of tutoring, but we’re pretty far in our chapters. I think we might finish early enough for you to take a practice exam.”
“I did have a bit of trouble last night,” he confessed, dodging my eye as he withdrew a piece of paper. “I wrote everything down like we talked about, but I couldn’t figure out the Logarithmic Functions.”
Once he passed over the homework sheet for me to scan, we began our tutoring session. His error was small. “So you applied the theorem incorrectly here,” I told him, and began the process of explaining the distortion. Even in laymen’s terms, Logarithmic Functions were tricky to explain, and Connor pressed his palm to the textbook a few times for clarification. Our back and forth, though, was as smooth as I could’ve hoped for.
“Can we take a break?” Connor asked about a half hour into the session, rubbing his fingers into his eyes. “My brain’s going to explode.”
I folded my hands on top of my textbook, covering the words. “Sure.”
Connor traced one of the knots in the wooden picnic table, picking at a chip in the paint. “How often are your date nights with your boyfriend?”
The sudden question caught me totally off-guard. “What?”
“Jade and I used to do date nights two times a week last year. Mondays and Saturdays, and then games on Friday. How often do you and Alex go on dates?”
“We hang out a few times a week,” I said, unable to stop the touchiness from leaking into my voice. “We’ll work on homework together or chill on the couch at his place. We haven’t been hanging out much since I have to tutor you all the time.”
Connor tipped his head to the side. “But how often do you goout?”
Date nights with Alex where we actually went out of the house were few and far between, especially when it was just us. We went bowling every week with Rachel and Ava, but a night just Alex and Maisie time? Rare. And I so didn’t want to admit that to Connor, not when he’d bragged about his booming dating life. “Not everyone has an endless amount of money to go on dates,” I said, crossing my arms. An obviously defensive gesture, but I couldn’t help it.
He bobbed his head slowly, and then wisely backed off. “I saw Madison take you into the bathroom today at lunch. I’m assuming it had to do with a certain picture that was posted to Babble last night?”
Now it was my turn to focus on the picnic table, not making eye contact. “What makes you think that?”
“Her face might’ve been blurry, but I recognized her porch from when I dropped you off the other night.”
Of course he would’ve picked up on that. He was more observant than I’d ever given him credit for.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t expect you to be so…vicious.”
“Vicious?” I demanded, jaw dropping. I half-expected him to be joking, but he just blinked at me. “That wasn’t vicious!”
“No?”
“It—it wasn’t vicious. Besides, it wasyourfault I posted it!”
Connor pressed a finger into his chest. “Myfault?”
“Someone submitted a tip to Ava about you being in the closet with someone. She was going to post our stupid closet tryst on Babble—she’d drafted a whole article about you cheating and everything—and because I couldn’t tell her the truth, I had to come up with something.” The tirade cut short by me gasping for a breath; I hadn’t realized I’d been speaking so fast. “So, no,notvicious. It was necessary.”
Connor’s lips had slowly been slowly turning upward as I spoke, and by the time I’d finished, the grin had taken over. It made the lines around his eyes crinkle. “You did it for me, huh?”
Did it for— “I did it forme,” I said quickly, jumping to deny. “If your girlfriend found out I was the one with you in the closet, she’d—”
“Does this mean we’re becoming more friends than enemies?” Connor leaned as far back on the picnic table as he dared, letting a few locks of hair fall into his eyes. “Am I growing on you, Maisie?”
“My annoyance is growing, yes. Is our break over yet?”
He shook his head with a laugh. “Five more minutes.”
Connor tipped his head up toward the sunshine, soaking up the Vitamin D. With his throat exposed, I could see faint lines in some places, no doubt old scars from sports. Noticing his throat, though, had my eyes trailing elsewhere, over more details of him. Like how he had a freckle jaw underneath his jaw, and how along his jaw there was the faintest trace of stubble. I couldn’t help but think about Alex and his frequent razor cuts, shaving when there was no hair to get rid of. Connor, though, he must shave.
