She squeezed my hand. “She will. I promise you, she will. Just be yourself.”
I nodded before I pulled my hand away. “I’ll see you later, baby.”
She grabbed my arm and pulled me back to her, pressing a kiss to my lips before she let me leave.
I kissed her back, feeling a sudden wave of peace, a gentleness that calmed my uneasy heart. My eyes closed and my hand cupped her face, indifferent to Ronnie in front. “See you soon.”I sat at the dining table with my elbows on the surface, staring at the painting on the wall, my heartbeat slow but the anxiety potent in my veins. My eyes stared without blinking, playing out all the different scenarios in my head. I had a classroom full of students, but they were adults, and I’d never tutored someone one-on-one before.
There was so much riding on this, to top it off.
I felt like I was about to launch a rocket, and I had to hold my breath and hope it didn’t explode.
A knock sounded on the door.
Fuck, here we go. No turning back now. I sighed as I left the table and crossed the room to answer the door.
They stood there together, Lizzie at her mother’s side, her brown hair slicked back into a ponytail. She wore a sweater and jeans with sneakers, a beautiful young girl who would someday drive men crazy the way her mother drove me crazy. Their likeness was undeniable, and since Lizzie was almost as tall as Emerson, they would soon look like sisters, the way my father and I looked like brothers.
I just stared at her—at a loss for words.
Emerson smiled as she walked inside, her daughter coming with her. “Thank you for offering to tutor my daughter, Derek. I really appreciate it.” She closed the door because she knew I would just leave it open.
My heart rate increased as I looked at Lizzie.
She was going to hate me.
Lizzie started to look uncomfortable, like she thought I hated her too.
I cleared my throat. “I don’t mind at all…happy to.” I turned to Emerson, sick to my stomach, weak, terrified…a fucking mess.
“Take a seat at the table, Lizzie.” She placed her hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be back to pick you up in an hour.”
“Alright.” Lizzie walked to the table, her big backpack covering her back.
“And be good,” Emerson said. “Derek is doing us a great favor.”
“Okay, Mom.” Lizzie barely suppressed her attitude as she pulled out a chair and put the backpack down.
I turned back to Emerson.
Her eyes softened as she looked at me, and she placed her hand on my arm to tell me that it would be okay, that everything would be fine. “I’ll see you soon.” She squeezed me before she walked out.
I turned back to the table and stared at Lizzie’s ponytail, releasing a loud sigh before I approached the table.
She unzipped her bag and pulled out her textbook and notebook.
I pushed my stuff to the side, rigid and uncomfortable, unsure what I should say to her first.
She opened the textbook to the right chapter. “Look, I’m not smart at all. So, don’t expect this to go anywhere.”
My eyes narrowed as I looked at her, surprised she had such low confidence when her mother was a titan. “I think that’s a harsh thing to say…not smart at all. And it’s incredibly inaccurate.”
She pulled out a pencil from the small pocket in her bag then looked at me.
“No one is an expert in everything.” I grabbed her worksheet and pulled it closer to me. “And no one is incapable of becoming an expert in anything they want to be an expert in.”
She continued to look at me with her observant blue eyes. “Well, I know you’re, like, a super genius, and I’m nothing like that.”
“Trust me, I’m not a super genius.” I looked at the first problem on the page, which had been marked in red ink everywhere because her teacher butchered her errors instead of writing out what she should have done instead. How was she supposed to learn if they failed to teach? I would never do that for my own students because, as graduate students, they were expected to be perfect on their own, but a seventh grader was different.
“Don’t you build spaceships and stuff?”
“I guess rockets and rovers are spaceships.” I read through the problem before I turned it back to her. “First of all, your teacher seems like an asshole.”
Her eyebrows rose high up her face like she couldn’t believe what I said.
Fuck, I forgot I couldn’t talk that way to a child. It hadn’t taken me long to fuck up. “Sorry…”
She chuckled. “He is an asshole, so don’t be sorry.”
“Don’t tell your mom I said that.”
She grinned. “Deal.”I didn’t even use the textbook.
The information in textbooks hadn’t been updated in decades, and the only reason they produced new editions was to make money. It was fucking disgusting. Lizzie and I worked on our own, using the problems Lizzie had been assigned.