Chapter 15: Considering It

"Cyrus, how about I tutor you?"

Audra had caught most of the math teacher’s lecture from the office doorway. She had not meant to listen, at least not at first. The hallway outside the faculty office was narrow, the door had been left partly open, and the teacher’s voice carried with the tired patience of someone who had given the same speech to too many students over too many years.

Cyrus had failed badly enough to get called in after class. His hair had been long enough to earn a comment. His silence had been heavy enough to make the teacher sigh.

Audra stepped aside with the stack of worksheets in her arms and stopped him before he could return to the classroom.

Over the past few days, she had noticed him more than she wanted to admit.

Inside class, Cyrus spent most of his time folded over his desk, sleeping through lectures with the stubborn dedication of someone trying to repay a sleep debt no human body could survive. During lunch, he usually vanished alone and came back with something from the campus store, a wrapped roll, a plain sandwich, or a sweet drink that could barely count as a meal. Over the weekend, when she and Gemma ran into him near the food trucks, he had been eating cheaper street food with a focus that made the meal seem more important than it should have been.

None of that was supposed to matter to her.

A classmate’s lunch was not her business. His sleep schedule was not her business. His math grade should not have become her business unless a teacher asked her to help. Yet Cyrus kept moving through St. Alder as if he had measured the exact amount of space a person needed in order to survive without accepting anything extra.

That kind of person was hard to ignore.

There was another reason, one Audra refused to say out loud.

Cyrus slept through most classes. He slept through review, lectures, announcements, and Owen’s increasingly serious attempts to keep him awake. Somehow, during Daphne Whitlock’s class, he usually managed to keep his head up.

Audra was not childish enough to think beauty was a virtue. She knew attention could be cheap, and she knew being stared at did not make a person important. Even so, she had lived long enough with her own face to understand what it did to people. Boys who tried to act normal around her usually became unnatural in smaller ways. They spoke too quickly, laughed at the wrong time, offered help she had not requested, or held themselves too still in an effort to seem calm.

Cyrus did none of that.

He did not blush. He did not brighten. He did not fill silence just because she was there. Most of the time, he treated her apology like a bill that had already been paid and should stop arriving in the mail.

That was unreasonable.

She was not worse than Daphne Whitlock in any way that should matter to a boy their age. Daphne was older, polished, and elegant in the way certain teachers became when they stood at the front of a room with a marker in one hand and twenty students pretending not to stare. Audra could admit that much. She could also admit, privately and with some irritation, that age should not have been enough to explain Cyrus’s behavior.

Her grades, at least, were not in question. She was at the top of their class. If Cyrus needed help, she was more than qualified to give it.

The question was whether he would accept.

Cyrus looked at her as if the offer had landed between them and started making noise.

"What do you get out of it?"

Audra lifted one hand and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. The movement was small, almost casual, though she knew perfectly well how people tended to read it.

"It can count as my apology for what happened before," she said. "I do not like owing people."

Cyrus’s expression barely changed beneath the fall of his bangs.

He wondered, not for the first time, how long she planned to keep dragging last week around like an unpaid bill. The athletic storage room incident had already passed. He had said it was fine. He had refused her lunch. He had refused her dinner. He had refused enough times that most people would have accepted the refusal and gone back to enjoying their own lives.

Audra Sloane, apparently, had a different relationship with closure.

Was she always this stubborn?

Cyrus studied her for another breath, then gave the most practical answer he could. "Can I think about it first?"

Audra’s fingers tightened slightly around the worksheets.

A different boy might have agreed before she finished speaking. Owen would probably have congratulated him on a miracle. Half the class would have treated free tutoring from Audra as if someone had handed them a prize they had not earned. Cyrus simply stood there with his messy hair, tired eyes, and unreasonable calm, asking for time as if she had offered him extra homework.

Still, he had not refused her.

"That works for me," Audra said.

Cyrus gave her a small nod and walked away.

Audra stayed in the hallway for a few seconds after he left. Afternoon light came through the tall windows at the end of the corridor, laying a warm edge over her white cuffs and the corner of the worksheets in her arms. Her mouth curved before she fully decided to smile.

Having him consider it was enough for now.

She did not believe he could keep brushing her off forever. No one stayed that unaffected without a reason, and reasons could be found. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not by forcing the matter in front of him, but she could be patient when she wanted something.

A boy passing through the hallway slowed when he saw her. His attention moved from her face to the worksheets in her arms, and he stepped forward with the nervous courage of someone who had been waiting for an excuse.

"Audra, I can carry some of those for you."

Audra turned her head, polite and distant. "Thank you, but I can handle them."

She did not wait for him to offer again.

By the time she returned to the classroom, Cyrus was already at his desk near the window. One hand propped up his cheek while he stared outside at the edge of the courtyard.

He was actually thinking about her offer.

That annoyed him more than the offer itself.

The math teacher’s lecture had not been completely wrong. Cyrus had already been away from the place he escaped for several months. The woman from before had not found him yet. If she never found him, or if she found him late enough that he had already built something solid here, then he needed more than a bed, a shift schedule, and enough cash to eat.

He needed a plan that could last longer than one paycheck.

People in this world cared about school in a way that felt excessive until he looked at the results. Grades became classes. Classes became college applications. College became work that did not depend on standing behind a bar while women watched his hands too closely. Work became money that did not come with a stranger asking about his ring or trying to touch his skin.

The lounge was good. Malcolm was good to him. The Full Moon Lounge had given him a job, a routine, and the ability to buy dinner without begging anyone for help.

None of that was easy to repeat.

If Malcolm had been someone else, Cyrus might not have been hired. If the customers had been rougher, he might not have lasted. If one of the women who looked at him from across the counter stopped respecting the story about the ring and decided to act like Isolde, then the job that bought his freedom could become the place where it ended.

Beautiful women were not theoretical trouble to him. Strange women were not rare in his life. He had met enough of both to keep suspicion in the same mental pocket as his keys.

Humans were supposed to be weaker than the woman he had run from. That should have made them easier to manage. It did not make them harmless. Weak people still had cars, phones, locks, social rules, police reports, and the confidence that came from believing the world would take their side.

Cyrus tapped one finger against the edge of his desk.

School was different. School was boring, structured, and full of rules he did not fully understand, which made it frustrating. It also made it useful. No one thought a student was strange for sitting in class. No one asked for a tragic backstory when he opened a notebook. If he did well enough, he could use the system without drawing the kind of attention his face brought at night.

Math, however, had decided to become his personal enemy.

The red fourteen on his test had been honest in a cruel way. He could read well enough. He remembered things when he had time to study them. Literature, history, and anything built from words could be handled with effort. Math looked at him like a locked door with no visible keyhole.

Cyrus had never liked locked things.

A burst of noise pulled him out of his thoughts.

Near the front of the classroom, several students had gathered around Audra as she sorted the worksheets. Owen stood in the middle of the small crowd, calling names with unnecessary seriousness while another student helped pass papers down the rows. The classroom had the restless energy that always came before the next bell, half social hour and half panic over whatever assignment had just appeared.

Audra handled the attention the way she handled most things, with a calm face and enough distance that no one could call her rude. Gemma sat nearby, amused by the whole process, occasionally pointing Owen toward the right desk when he nearly handed the wrong paper to the wrong person.

The warning bell rang from the hallway speakers.

Owen came down the aisle with a few worksheets left in his hand. He stopped at the desk in front of Cyrus first.

"Here you go, Faye."

"Thanks, Owen."

Faye Larkin took the paper and slipped it into her binder without looking up for long.

Owen moved to Cyrus’s desk and handed him the next worksheet. "You were staring out the window for a while. What were you thinking about?"

Cyrus looked at the paper, then at Owen.

Instead of answering, he asked, "Do you know what you want to do after school?"

Owen blinked at him. "That is a serious question for a worksheet delivery."

"I need a reference."

Owen leaned one hip against the empty space beside Cyrus’s desk and gave the question more thought than Cyrus expected. He was not brilliant in the terrifying way some top students were brilliant, but he was sincere. Cyrus had started to trust that sincerity in small, controlled amounts.

"I guess I want to start something of my own eventually," Owen said. "A business, probably."

"What kind of business?"

"I have not gotten that far." Owen looked far too pleased with this incomplete plan. "I just know I would like to be my own boss and make money while doing less work."

Cyrus gave him a long, silent look.

Owen’s confidence lasted for about two seconds before he added, "I know it does not work that way at the beginning. My dad says the sitting-around part only happens after you spend years making yourself miserable."

"That sounds less attractive."

"It really does when he explains it." Owen shrugged. "If it fails, I can probably work with my family for a while. They have a company, and they keep saying I should learn how it runs."

Cyrus remembered Owen walking into The Full Moon Lounge in that fitted suit, with his hair styled like he had copied a business magazine and lost the fight halfway through. The suit had not been borrowed. It had fit too well, even if the hair had looked like a separate decision made by a much less qualified person.

So Owen came from money.

That explained several things, including how someone could spend too much on an online almost-girlfriend and still survive the financial injury. Owen was not stupid, exactly. He was trusting in a way that became expensive when aimed at the wrong person.

Cyrus decided not to explain that diagnosis.

Owen noticed the silence and took half a step back. "Why are you looking at me like I just confessed to a crime?"

"You look more normal than I expected."

"I am pretty sure that was not a compliment."

"It was neutral."

"That makes it worse somehow," Owen said, though he did not sound offended. "Nobody asked before. It is not something I bring up in class."

Cyrus accepted that with a small movement of his hand.

Owen studied him for another second, probably waiting for the real reason behind the question. When Cyrus did not provide one, Owen returned to his seat before the teacher arrived.

Cyrus looked down at the worksheet on his desk.

High school would not last forever. He was already past the beginning. If he kept sleeping through the parts he did not understand, time would keep moving without asking whether he was ready. The woman from before had already taken enough of his life. Helping her take the future by neglecting it would be ridiculous.

College sounded distant. It sounded expensive. It sounded like forms, tests, applications, interviews, and people asking questions he did not want to answer. It also sounded like another place where a person could belong on paper before anyone thought to question him.

A student could be invisible in a classroom.

A bartender could not always be invisible behind a counter.

Cyrus lifted his eyes toward Audra.

She stood across the room, turning away from the last cluster of students. For a brief stretch of silence, her attention landed on him with the precision of a hand finding a door handle in the dark.

He could not read what she wanted.

That should have been a reason to refuse.

Still, her offer did not carry the feeling he knew best. There was no obvious hunger in it, no heavy claim, no smile that treated his refusal as a temporary mistake. Audra looked curious, proud, and slightly too pleased with herself. Those were problems, but they were not the same problem as the woman with the ring.

She wanted to settle her apology. He wanted that apology to end.

If tutoring gave him better grades, less teacher attention, and a clean way to close the matter, then accepting was not the worst choice available.

Cyrus lowered his gaze to the worksheet and smoothed the corner with one finger.

He could consider it seriously.

More than anything, he wanted that apology to finally stop following him.