Chapter 5 Chapter 5

Blair's POv

Tuesday arrived faster than I wanted it to.

I spent most of Monday trying to convince myself this was purely transactional. Simple exchange. His endorsement, my time. Clean, finite, survivable. I repeated it like a mantra while I reorganized my notes, while I ate dinner with Aunt Linda, while I stared at the ceiling at eleven-thirty unable to sleep.

By the time I was standing outside a set of iron gates on Tuesday afternoon, the mantra had worn thin.

The house was enormous. Not in the ostentatious, gold-fixtures way of people who needed you to know they had money — more like the quiet, assured enormity of old wealth. Pale stone facade, ivy creeping along one corner, a black front door that probably cost more than Aunt Linda's monthly rent. A circular drive with a single dark car parked near the entrance.

I pressed the intercom button before I could overthink it.

A click. Then a voice I didn't recognize — older, male, with the clipped efficiency of someone paid to be efficient.

"Name?"

"Blair Manson. I'm here to see Tristan."

A pause that lasted exactly long enough to be deliberate.

"One moment."

The gate swung open.

---

A man in a dark jacket met me at the door and led me through a foyer with ceilings high enough to swallow sound. Everything was muted tones — gray stone, dark wood, cream walls. Clean and cold and impersonal, like a showroom for a life nobody actually lived in.

He brought me to a room off the main hall. Long table, bookshelves, natural light from a row of tall windows facing the garden. A study, though it had the feeling of a room that didn't get used much.

"Mr. Thompson will be down shortly," the man said, and disappeared without waiting for a response.

I set my bag on the table and pulled out my materials. The coursework Mark had emailed over on Sunday had told me everything I needed to know about the problem. Tristan wasn't failing because he was incapable. His early assessment scores from September showed someone who understood the concepts well enough. The decline was sharp, sudden, and recent — the kind of drop that came from someone who'd simply stopped trying rather than someone who never could.

That was both easier and harder to work with.

Footsteps on the staircase. Then the door opened and he walked in.

He'd come straight from practice — I could tell from the damp hair and the way he moved, like his body was still running on game energy, burning through it with nowhere to direct it. He'd changed out of his jersey into a dark pullover and track pants, and he dropped his bag onto a chair at the far end of the table without looking at me.

"You're early," he said.

"I'm exactly on time," I replied. "You're four minutes late."

He looked at me then. A long, measuring look that I'd already learned to meet without flinching.

"Fine." He pulled out the chair at the end and sat. "Where do we start?"

I placed a single sheet of paper in front of him. Three columns — chemistry, literature, calculus — with a clean breakdown of where his marks had collapsed and why.

"Here," I said. "Start by telling me which of these three makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge."

Something almost flickered at the corner of his mouth. He controlled it fast.

"Calculus," he said.

"Figures. Your chem marks only started dropping when the coursework went organic. Your lit essays are actually structured — you just stopped finishing them halfway through. But your calculus work looks like someone else sat the early tests."

He was quiet for a moment. "I had a tutor last year."

"And this year?"

He said nothing.

Right. Moving on.

I sat down across from him and opened my notebook. "Okay. We're doing calculus first because it'll take longest to rebuild, and we're not pretending you remember the fundamentals when you clearly don't. We go back to the foundation. No shortcuts."

He looked at the worksheet I slid across. His expression didn't change, but I watched his jaw tighten fractionally.

"These are Year Ten problems."

"Yes."

"I'm in Year Thirteen."

"I know where you are," I said. "I also know where your marks are. So unless your pride is more important than your eligibility, pick up the pen."

The silence stretched. Outside, wind moved through the garden hedges, a low sound against the window glass. Somewhere deeper in the house, a clock ticked.

He picked up the pen.

---

The first hour was almost tolerable.

He worked through the calculus problems with the grim focus of someone who found the material beneath him but refused to make errors. He got most of them right. The ones he didn't, he caught himself before I could point them out, which told me his instincts were still intact — he just hadn't been using them.

We moved through limits, then derivatives, and I made him explain each step out loud rather than just writing the answer. He resisted that at first.

"I don't need to narrate it," he said. "I can just do it."

"Narrating it is how I find out where the logic breaks," I said. "And it's how you stop yourself from skipping steps on the exam when you're under pressure."

He gave me the look — the one that probably made most people immediately reconsider whatever they'd just said.

I looked back at him and waited.

He started explaining his working out loud.

By the time we moved to chemistry, the atmosphere in the room had shifted to something less openly hostile and more like a wary ceasefire. He knew the organic chemistry better than his marks suggested. The problem was his notation — he'd developed a shorthand that made sense internally but didn't translate correctly onto the assessment paper.

"You're losing marks on method, not knowledge," I told him. "Your examiners can't read your mind. They need to see every step written out, properly formatted."

"That's inefficient."

"It's the system you're being graded in. Work within it or keep failing." I paused. "Your choice."

Another silence.

"Show me," he said.

So I did. I walked him through the correct notation, had him redo two of the sample questions the proper way, and watched him work with the methodical intensity of someone who, once he'd accepted the rules, refused to do anything less than execute them perfectly.

It was unexpectedly easy to teach him. Not because he was cooperative — he wasn't, particularly. But because he was precise. He didn't guess. He didn't rush. When he didn't understand something, he said so directly without the embarrassed deflection I usually got from students who were more worried about appearing capable than actually becoming it.

I found that oddly easier to work with than agreeableness.

At the ninety-minute mark, I closed my notebook and started stacking the papers.

He looked up. "We still have thirty minutes."

"We're doing literature next and your brain needs a break before we switch registers. Ten minutes."

He sat back. Set the pen down. And for the first time since I'd arrived, seemed to not immediately have somewhere to direct his attention. His eyes moved around the room briefly, then landed back on me.

"You've done this before," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Tutoring? Yes."

"At your last school?"

I kept stacking papers, keeping my movements even. "I tutored to pay for things. It's not complicated."

He was quiet in that way that meant he was processing rather than disengaging.

"You're good at it," he said. Simply. Like he was reporting a fact.

I glanced up. He wasn't doing anything with the statement — no edge to it, no maneuvering. Just observation.

"Thanks," I said, which felt strange and insufficient and was apparently all I had.

I looked back down at my notes.

The silence that followed wasn't comfortable exactly. But it wasn't sharp either. It was something in between that I didn't have a clean word for — the silence of two people who'd agreed, however reluctantly, to occupy the same space.

"You didn't tell your aunt why you were coming here," he said after a moment.

I looked up again. "How would you know that?"

"She called the school this morning. Asked the admin office to confirm it was a legitimate tutoring arrangement."

Something tightened in my chest. Of course she did. "She's cautious."

"She's smart." He said it without irony. "What did you tell her?"

"That I was tutoring a student for a school program." I met his eyes steadily. "Which is true enough."

He held my gaze. For a moment I thought he was going to say something — something real, maybe, or something that would break the functional distance we'd established. But then he looked away, toward the window.

"Literature," he said.

"We still have eight minutes."

"I'd rather work."

I looked at him for a second. Then I opened my notebook back up.

"Fine. Your last essay — the Gatsby one. You stopped halfway through your third argument. Why?"

A long pause.

"I ran out of things to say."

"No, you didn't." I turned the essay printout toward him. "Look at what you wrote. This argument about Gatsby's self-invention being fundamentally fraudulent — that's actually interesting. You stopped because you hit the interesting part and didn't know what to do with it."

He looked at the page. Something moved through his expression that was harder to categorize than irritation or dismissal.

"People don't usually want the interesting part," he said quietly. "They want the safe reading."

"I want the interesting part," I said. "And more importantly, so does your examiner, if you frame it correctly." I picked up the pen and circled the unfinished paragraph. "You had a real argument forming here. We're finishing it."

He looked at the circled paragraph for a moment.

Then he reached across and took the pen from my hand — not aggressively, just decisively — and wrote three words in the margin.

Fraud requires audience.

I stared at it.

"That's your thesis," I said.

"I know," he said.

"It's good."

He didn't respond, but something in his posture shifted almost imperceptibly — a fraction of tension releasing that I suspected he didn't realize I'd noticed.

We worked through the rest of the session without the grinding friction of the first hour. It wasn't warmth exactly. But it was something functional that I hadn't been sure we were capable of, and I was honest enough with myself to acknowledge that.

At six on the dot, I packed up my bag and stood.

"Thursday," I said. "Same time. I'll send you the prep work by tomorrow morning so you can look at it before practice."

He nodded, still looking at the essay.

"Tristan."

He looked up.

"The Gatsby argument. Write the rest of it tonight while it's still fresh. Don't second-guess the reading. Just write."

He held my gaze for a moment.

"Okay," he said.

I left him sitting at the long table in that cold, beautiful room, pen in hand, the essay spread in front of him like something he was finally deciding to take seriously.

The iron gate swung shut behind me with a clean, heavy sound.

I walked back to the bus stop with my bag over my shoulder and the evening air pressing cold against my still-tender cheek, running through everything I'd need to prepare for Thursday.

I told myself that was all I was thinking about.

I almost believed it.