Page 29 of Grin and Bear It

Knox stiffened when I said that. It was just a slight movement, but when I saw it, my mind started whirring.He doesn’t believe that, I thought.He did before but…I looked past him to Nash, to all of his uncles, willing them to see that and I wondered if they did. Lin clutched at the back of my couch like it was threatening to get out of control and Tyson just watched as if helpless before a terrible natural disaster. But Cole? His brows furrowed even more and that concerned me.

“Maybe this work is important, maybe it's not,” I said, “but, getting your teachers off your back would make life simpler, yeah?” Mads nodded slowly. “You know you can always come to my classroom and get some help. I’d be much happier doing that than having you lug tools for your uncles while they work on my pipes.”

“So, you could tutor the boys?” Nash seemed to come alive at that idea.

“Ahh, I was thinking they could come see me at school,” I replied with a polite smile.

“But you could, right?” Nash was like a horse with a bit in his teeth. “You’re a teacher.”

“An English and history teacher,” I replied. “The boys know I’m no help when it comes to maths.”

“We’ve got maths covered,” Tyson said with a wink. “Wannabe electricians need to ace their maths tests.”

Knox looked up at his uncle warily.

“You’ve got a house that needs work and the boys need help.” What the fuck was the deal with Nash? I wondered. He seemed so intent on this idea of tutoring. “We could do a trade.”

“It’d be a whole lot cheaper and less time-consuming to use one of the local tutoring services,” I told him. “I can recommend—”

“No, Miss.” Maddox ignored the dirty look his brother gave him and appealed straight to me. “I’m sick of getting in trouble all the time.” Was that for Knox’s benefit, or mine? “I want… I just want to get things back on track. You can help us, right?”

I’d need to fill out paperwork and notify the school and even then they’d probably take issue with the situation. It had conflict of interest written all over it, but as Maddox looked at me hopefully, I found myself sighing, and then focussing on the other half of the deal.

“Knox?”

He was my way to opt out, to give me a means to quietly, politely reject this deal. When he straightened up, I thought I’d got it.

“Fine,” he bit off.

Well, shit.

“So you’re in?” Nash asked me. “You help the boys and we’ll fix the house, yeah?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I replied with a smile. “Let's focus on the plumbing first. You can do me up a quote, so that if things don’t work out with helping the boys, I know how much I need to pay.”

I wasn’t giving the men what they wanted. I could see that in their expressions, but hey, too bad, I wasn’t here for them. I looked at the two boys.

“Do you guys have your bags here?” They both nodded. “Well, why don’t you grab them and then we can try and work out what might be the best plan of attack.”

As the boysfiled out I turned to the uncles then, waiting to see that the twins had gone before I spoke.

“You’ve got a couple of kids who are really hurting there.”

“Kids that are failing school,” Cole growled. He shot Lin a dark look. “I told you they weren’t bringing their homework home.”

“Well, I checked their bags and there was nothing in there,” the big blond man replied.

“Most of the kids' work is circulated and submitted via an app. Parents are given a login…” I stopped mid-spiel. “But you wouldn’t have that.” I grabbed my phone and wrote myself a note. “I’ll get the admin ladies to sort that out for you.”

“So if they don’t get all their work in this semester then what?” Tyson asked. “They have to repeat Year 10?”

“No, we don’t really do that anymore except for special circumstances. The main thing is to get those good habits back. It sounds like their mum was a big part of their lives and she was very involved in their schooling? She seemed lovely from the emails she sent me.”

“Sharney…” Nash choked up, then blinked. “She was an amazing mum. She had the whole sl— group working like a well-oiled machine.”

“Right, because she had multiple partners.”

I was trying to sound cool, blasé, like it was no big thing because, academically it wasn’t. It was just my boring little middle-class mind that was blown by the idea. I wondered at how cool their parents must be, for one son to be in a relationship with a woman with multiple partners while the other son was in a gay relationship with more than one man. My mum would’ve lost her shit at two.

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