Chapter 4 The First Session

Author's POV

"You're late," Gabriella said, not looking up from her book.

"I don't do ‘on time,'" Ethan said, dropping his hockey bag on the floor like it belonged there. "Get used to it."

She had been sitting in the small study room for twenty minutes, watching the clock, getting angrier with every second she waited. Twenty minutes. He hadn't even said sorry.

"I have somewhere to be after this," she said, finally looking up. "So if you could actually try, that would help both of us."

Ethan dropped into the chair opposite from her, his hair still wet from practice, his jacket smelling like the rink. He looked at the textbook on the table like it was something dangerous.

"What is this," he said, "algebra? I did this in ninth grade."

"Then it should be easy for you," Gabriella said, sliding the book closer to him. "Open to page forty."

He didn't move.

"Ethan."

"I heard you." He leaned back in his chair instead, pulling out his phone. "I'm just deciding if I care."

Gabriella's fingers tightened around her pen. "You do realize why we're both here, right? You lose your spot on the team. I lose my scholarship. Neither one of us gets to just not care."

"Relax, Walker." He didn't even look up from his screen. "It's one session."

"It's the first of a lot of sessions," she said. "Unless you want to fail on purpose."

He glanced up at that, just for a second, then went right back to his phone without replying to what she just said to him.

For the next fifteen minutes, that was how it went. She explained a problem. He scrolled through his phone. She asked him a question. He gave a one-word answer, or rather a one word reply. Or no answer at all. Twice she caught him laughing at something on his screen that had nothing to do with math.

By the third time, something inside her snapped.

"Put the phone down," she said, her voice sharper than she meant it to be.

Ethan looked up, surprised. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me." She shut her own book with a loud smack. "Put it down, or I am walking out of this room right now."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me."

He studied her face like he was trying to figure out if she was bluffing. She wasn't. Not even a little.

"Fine," he said slowly, setting the phone face-down on the table. "Happy?"

"Not even close." Gabriella leaned forward, her voice shaking now, but not from fear. From frustration that had been building since yesterday morning, since the slap, since the notice on her phone, since all of it. "You think this is a joke. You think showing up late and staring at your phone is normal, because nothing ever has consequences for you. But some of us don't get that. Some of us have two jobs and a father who is sick at home waiting for dinner, and I still showed up here on time, because I don't get to mess this up. So no, I didn't ask for this arrangement any more than you did. But I am trying. And if you are not going to try too, then I will walk out that door right now. She was pointing to the door.”and let you lose your spot on the team. Your choice."

The room went quiet.

Ethan sat completely still, quite, staring at her like she had said something he had never heard before, not in those exact words. Something in his face changed, just slightly. Like a wall had cracked, just for a second.

"You have two jobs?" he asked, quieter than before.

"That's not the point."

"It kind of is." He rubbed the back of his neck, looking almost, almost, guilty. "I didn't know that."

"You didn't ask," Gabriella said. "Nobody like you ever does."

He didn't argue with that. For a long moment, he just looked at her, and she looked right back, refusing to be the one who looked away first.

"Fine," he said finally. "Page forty. Let's do this."

She blinked, caught off guard. "Wait, really?"

"Don't make me say it twice," he muttered, pulling the textbook toward him. "And don't get used to it."

"Wouldn't dream of it," she said, but something in her chest loosened, just a little, surprised he had actually listened.

They worked through the next problem together. He got it wrong the first time. Then wrong again. But the third time, he got it right, and for half a second, he almost looked proud of himself, before he caught himself and wiped the look off his face like it had never been there.

"See," Gabriella said. "Not that hard."

"Don't push it, Walker."

But there was something different in his voice now. Not as sharp. Almost, if she wasn't wrong, a little bit warm.

By the end of the session, he had finished four problems on his own, no phone, no complaints. When the clock hit the hour, Gabriella packed up her books, her mind already racing ahead to her shift at the diner and the medicine she still needed to pick up for her father.

"Same time tomorrow," she said, standing up.

She walked out of the study room, her bag over her shoulder, already thinking about everything she still had to do that evening. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, expecting a message from her father or from Emma.

It was a number she didn't know.

She stopped walking and opened it.

‘Heard you're tutoring Ethan now. Careful who you get close to.’

Gabriella's stomach dropped. She read it again, her thumb hovering over the screen.

Who sent this?

Was it a joke? Some jealous girl from the crowd yesterday? Or was it something else, something that knew more about her than a stranger should?

She looked over her shoulder, down the empty hallway, suddenly aware of how quiet the school had gotten.

Nobody was there.

But somebody had sent that message. And somebody, somewhere, was watching.