Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 111676 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 558(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 372(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111676 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 558(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 372(@300wpm)
Three tries later, I still had the wrong answer. I chucked my pencil at the notebook. “Fuck this shit.”
“Sober enough to attempt algebra today?” Jade stood in the doorway of the dining room, holding a steaming bowl.
My jaw tensed at her judgmental comment. Maybe she didn’t want to get shitfaced on the weekend, but given my current situation, I sure as hell had. “Today’s Monday. We’re in college. People drink on the weekends.” Especially when someone had their ex living in their damn house…
“Some people.”
I placed my head in my hand and picked up my pencil, trying to keep my attention on that stupid book instead of her in those damn shorts. “I need to focus.”
“You’re doing it wrong.”
No shit. I put the eraser to the paper and rubbed out the entire last equation. Jade placed her bowl of ramen on the table and leaned over my shoulder. “PEMDAS.” She placed a finger on my textbook. “Parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.”
My expression must have conveyed my confusion, because she dropped into the chair beside me, slid my notebook in front of her, and took my pencil from my hand.
“It’s the order you use when doing the equation. Like this. Order of operations…” She quickly scratched out several lines, explaining each step, and I tried like hell not to inhale the flowery scent of her body spray. “You weren’t doing the parentheses first.” She passed the work back to me, her neat, bubbly handwriting an all too familiar reminder of those damn origami notes. “I’m surprised you didn’t just get me to do this for you again.”
I stared at the numbers on the page, anxiety winding me up. If I couldn’t comprehend this crap, how the hell was I supposed to hang on for the rest of the year? “Yeah, well, I can’t get you to take tests for me.” I took the pencil from her hand and tapped it over the page. Maybe it was the slight hangover from earlier, that kiss…but something had the gravity of my situation sinking in, hard and fast. If I didn’t pull up this grade, the dream I’d had since I was a little kid, the dream I’d promised my dad I wouldn’t let slip away—the one Jade had always believed I could achieve—was as good as gone.
Fuck, between math and Jade, I felt like I was drowning. “Not that it fucking matters,” I mumbled. “I’m already suspended. Just putting off the inevitable.”
“For two weeks. You’re the best player they have.”
“That doesn’t mean shit.”
“So, reading between your ever-so-informative lines and your blatant distaste for algebra, you’re failing class, and your two-week suspension might be longer if you don’t pass?”
Laid out like that, it was even more depressing. “Yep.”
“Right.” She sighed, falling into silence for a few seconds before she tapped her finger next to the equation. “So, in any equation, you always do all the arithmetic in parentheses first.” She leaned in a little closer.
God, that body spray was going to make it hard to focus… My attention drifted from the pencil to her lips, but I quickly averted it.
“Then you do the multiplication…”
I tried to listen to her explanation, but my gaze kept gravitating to her lips, while my mind kept drifting back to that kiss, to her denying that she had blocked me.
“Try the next problem.” She passed the notebook back to me, and I wrote out the equation.
Halfway through scribbling that Chinese out, I stopped and looked at her. I shouldn’t have given a shit if she thought I’d kissed her because of Brent. But I did. Everything inside of me was screaming to keep my mouth shut, but for some reason, I couldn’t. “I didn’t know Brent was standing there when I kissed you.”
She stared at the paper, her silence making me want to shove the words right back down my throat. After way too long a pause, she let out a breath. “I’m surprised you remember.”
“I wouldn’t forget kissing you.” Those words came out before I’d thought them through.
She fell silent again.
I’d already made myself look like a dick, which was why I just let it go. “Why did you block me, Jade?”
“I told you. I didn’t.”
Bullshit. I grabbed my phone from the table, found her contact, sent Hi, then waited before I slid the phone in front of her. “Not delivered…”
She stared down at the screen, then swiped her finger over it, scrolling through the pathetic messages I had sent. Ones I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see now.
Her brows furrowed, confusion settling over her face. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”
A flicker of hope tried to rise. Hope that maybe she really hadn’t tried to cut me out.
She pulled her phone from her pocket, tapped the screen, then placed the device in front of me. “Look, it’s not blocked.”