Page 23 of Never Broken

I collapsed like a corpse into bed after drafting my paper, working on autopilot, knowing that if I stopped for even a second to reflect on what had just happened, I’d have no hope of accomplishing anything ever again.

I was ninety percent convinced he wouldn’t come back.

Actually, I was at least half-convinced that the whole afternoon had been a dream. It was only when I pulled back a leaf of my notebook the following morning and glimpsed the strange, spiky, foreign male handwriting left on my study notes—and felt my heart do somersaults when I did—that convinced me it hadn’t been a dream.

But when three rolled around, I couldn’t pretend a part of me wasn’t relieved he hadn’t shown. Sure, it was just tutoring. But in actuality, it was a runaway train careening straight off a cliff. I knew it. Did he know it? And why was I eventhinkingabout whether he knew it? For the last time, he wasn’t supposed to know anything, andIwasn’t supposed to care.

Andthiswas exactly why I was in such deep fucking trouble.

But that didn’t mean I hadn’t still spent twenty minutes staring into my closetjust in case, only to come up with nothing more inspired than a yellow sundress. Then again, none of the “bold fall fashion trends” I’d seen in the magazines that year seemed appropriate for this particular situation.

When the knock came, I toppled over the desk chair in shock. But when I opened the door to find him leaning patiently on the frame, he gave me a knowing smile, polite enough not to ask about the noise.

He kept coming.

If the housekeeper—or even worse, my parents—had grown suspicious about why he and the maid had swapped cleaning duties, they hadn’t spoken up. Most likely, nobody cared as long as the work was getting done. In reality, he and I always split the cleaning, and to my amazement, I was actually kind ofenjoyingit. I knew it was absurd, but even graduating with a near-perfect GPA and being honored for Best Hair in the senior yearbook hadn’t engendered the same kind of absurd pride as having scrubbed my own toilet spotless.

The tutoring was the real gauntlet I was running.

As my midterm approached, he insisted we couldn’t waste a second getting down to business, and I agreed, even though there was nothing I’d like better than to wastemanysecondson him—to ask more, to know more. I just wantedmore. But he seemingly had no more interest in telling me—not surprising, given that my responses the first time had been so stupid and clumsy it was a miracle he’d ever come back.

But he did come back, to drill me over and over again on substitutions and eliminations and rearrangements so ruthlessly and precisely that I sometimes forgot he’d been awake for ten hours already. He was exacting, he was strict, he was simplyunfair. What had that professordoneto him, anyway?

I looked down at his hands. Oh.

“You’re a sadist,” I sputtered, throwing my pencil down the fifth time I’d got a problem correct, and he made me walk him back through the steps and explainwhyit was correct. And they were always thehardestproblems, too—ones he should becongratulatingme for solving, not busying himself finding new ways to torture me with.

Exasperating, infuriating, impossible boy.

“What?” He flashed me an innocent smirk. “This isn’t pain. It’s fun.”

“Yeah, foryou,” I burst out. “That’s the goddamndefinitionof a sadist.”

“Hey, I promise, when we’re done here, you’re not only going to be able todoo-chem, you’re going tolikeit.”

“Impossible.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Wanna bet?”

“What are the stakes?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, laughed, and slyly turned back to the textbook. “I already won.”

Thenerve. I would have whacked him on the arm, but with him, it wouldn’tbea whack on the arm. It would be a touch, it would be forbidden, and it wouldmeansomething. So I didn’t.

Still, amid this body-and-soul torture, I progressed, which was frankly remarkable given that I couldn’t tear my eyes awayfromhim—his shimmering forelock of hair flipped carelessly over to one side, his veined biceps under his thin, always-clinging T-shirts; his raw, rough, scarred but somehow still inexplicably perfect hand curled around my expensive pens; his body heat radiating inches away from me; him, him,him—for more than a few seconds at a time to even remember where we were, orwhatwe were, or that every second we were together felt like the second I might decide to throw my life away forever. And yes, somehow, amid it all, I waslearningo-chem.

Miraculous boy.

On Thursday, though—just before I was about to open my desk drawer to suggest we share something I really, really shouldn’t have bought—he became human again.

He yawned. Then he yawned again, and his long eyelashes started to cast even longer shadows on his face. Then it wasallyawns. He was trying to stay alert, I could tell, but I was irritated. Seriously, how could he be tired this early?Mymind and body still felt completely awake and abuzz because of course they did. Look what I was sitting across from.

But he couldn’t shake it. It was dragging him down like an invisible tide.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” I bit my lip, thinking of Erica Muller’s lecture from a few weeks ago, about how much sleep slaves were supposed to get versus how much they actually got. But surely that didn’t apply to?—

“Let’s see,” he said thoughtfully, dropping the pencil and leaning back in the chair. Story time again. “My day started at five, where I was told I had to help the gardener clear and chop up fallen tree branches that blew in from the neighbor’s yard, followed by the valet informing me that your dad had decided that all three of his cars needed washing, waxing, and buffing. By then it was almost dinner, which ended up being late because the valve in the dishwasher was fucked and nobody noticed, so themaid and I had to spend an hour mopping water off the kitchen and pantry floor before it soaked into the cabinets and got mold everywhere. And then I was told to repair it, which required ordering parts from the hardware store, but they sent the wrong ones, so I have to wait and work on thatagaintoday. And that’s all on top of my regular duties, which I can’t go to bed without finishing, so I didn’t get started on them until four and finished at around two.” As if on cue, he yawned again, body unfurling in the wicker chair, stretching one long, sculpted arm over his head. Fuck, I hated when he did that because of course it made the hem of his T-shirt rise minutely to reveal a tiny sliver ofthose abs. Those abs I’d give a kidney to see in all their glory. So byhate, I meantlove, naturally. “So, three hours?”

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