“Hi, I’m Brendon. Mr. Lewis said you were looking for a math tutor. You still need one?”
Crystal Harris looked up from her algebra one textbook into eyes dark as night framed by long lashes. Her eyes travelled over golden-brown skin, full lips, and a muscular physique. She gulped, her fourteen-year-old hormones cataloguing every facial feature of the teenage god in front of her.
“Hello? Do you still need help?” the god asked, snapping Crystal out of her daze.
“Um, yeah? I mean, yes, I need help. I’m Crystal,” she whispered, lifting a trembling hand to offer a handshake.
Brendon smiled and shook her hand, and a tingle ran up Crystal’s spine, goosebumps breaking out over her skin.
“Nice to meet you, Crystal. What are you struggling with? Is it algebra in general, or something specific?” Brendon asked, sitting down beside her at the small table she had commandeered in the school’s library.
Crystal stared at Brendon, unable to believe he was sitting next to her. Brendon Marks was a junior and the star running back on their school’s football team. He and her sister Amethyst were in the same grade and had some of the same classes.
Clearing her throat, Crystal took a deep breath. “It’s everything. I hate math, and I’ve always struggled with it. Then they added letters to the numbers, and now nothing makes sense.”
Brendon chuckled. “Yeah, if you’re not a math person, the letters, as you called them, can be confusing. They’re actually just symbols that represent the unknown number, or variables. Show me what you’re working on.”
Crystal’s brow furrowed and she glanced at the clock behind the checkout desk. “Don’t you have practice? Why are you here? I mean, I’m thankful for the help, but I’m confused…”
Brendon shrugged. “Coach is making us tutor freshmen as part of the team’s community involvement, and since I’m good at math, I chose to volunteer to do algebra tutoring. This is our study hour before practice, so here I am.”
Crystal’s shoulders sank and she looked down at her lap. “So you’re only doing this because you have to. Got it,” she said, gritting her teeth. She picked up her pencil and focused on the math page in front of her, ignoring Brendon.
“Hey, I mean, yeah, I’m doing this for football, but I genuinely want to help. What’s the problem?” he asked.
Crystal looked over at him, ignoring the flutter her heart made at how good he looked. “The ‘problem’ is I don’t want pity help. I don’t want you to feel obligated to help me. If you’re going to help me, do it because you want to, not because your coach made you. I don’t want someone who, at the first opportunity, will bounce the moment football season is over, leaving me in the lurch. No thank you.” She turned away from him.
Crystal groaned. Why oh why must math be so hard?! The letters, or variables, as Brendon called them, seemed to glare at her the harder she looked at the problem. Taking a deep breath, she wrote the problem on her paper and tried to remember how to solve for x and y.
“First, you want to isolate the x. Let me show you,” Brendon said, taking the pencil out of her hand.
Crystal rolled her eyes and snatched the pencil back. “Don’t do me any favors. Like I said, I need someone who wants to tutor me and will stick around.”
“Look, can we start over? I’m sorry if it seemed like I’m only here because I have to be, and I promise, I won’t disappear once football season is over. So what do you say?” he asked, bumping her shoulder.
Crystal studied him, not saying a word. Could she trust him? She glanced at the problem on her paper and scowled. What choice did she have? Either she got help in math or she failed, and failure in her house was not accepted.
“Promise?” she asked.
He looked her in the eyes and nodded. Then, he took the pencil back from her. “Yeah, and I don’t break promises, they mean a lot to me,” he said. “Now, back to what I was telling you.” Brendon bent over the paper and proceeded to show her how to solve for x and y.
The hour passed by fast, and before he left for practice they exchanged numbers and agreed to a tutoring schedule on Mondays through Fridays. Crystal was impressed. Not only did Brendon know math, but he was fun to talk to and didn’t treat her like a dumb freshman. A lot of the upperclassmen treated the “fish,” as they called freshmen, like pimple-faced social pariahs. Brendon was cool and he didn’t make her feel dumb.
Her sister Amethyst walked up to her table, her blue and yellow cheer duffel hanging from her shoulder. “Hey sis, you ready to go? Coach cancelled cheer practice today.”
“Yeah, let me pack up,” Crystal said, standing. She quickly gathered her books and stuffed them into her pink and grey backpack.
“How did you do on that algebra quiz today? You know Daddy will not be pleased if you don’t have at least a B,” Amethyst said as they made their way out of the library.
Crystal rolled her eyes. Amethyst was such a goody two-shoes, it was annoying. She got straight A’s in school, was on the varsity cheer squad, in National Honors Society, and was the secretary of the student government association. In a word, she was perfect. She never put a foot wrong. Then there was her. She wasn’t a straight A and B student, and her only extracurricular activity was restructuring and piecing together bomb outfits from the hand-me-downs she got from her three older sisters, and turning them into units to put on her forbidden Instagram and Pinterest accounts.
Her parents did not like social media and had forbidden her and Amethyst from getting accounts. Luckily, Jade, one of her older sisters, had helped her set up and hide hers.
“I got a C, but…I also have a tutor now, so that should take some of the steam out of Dad’s disappointment,” Crystal said, opening Amethyst’s car, a ten-year-old champagne Intrepid.
“Really? Who’s the tutor?” Amethyst started the car.
Crystal smiled, remembering dark eyes, a deep voice, and a cute face. “Brendon. Brendon Marks,” she said on a sigh, ignoring the heat from Amethyst’s look that she felt on the side of her face.
For the rest of the ride, Crystal looked out the window, not seeing the trees and houses that zipped by. Instead, she relived the moment Brendon’s hand touched hers when he took her pencil out of her grasp. A small smile crept over her face. She was looking forward to tomorrow’s tutoring session.