School Job

Between her and her tutor

"You're holding the pencil too tight; you're going to snap the lead," Nicolás said, leaning back in his chair.He wasn't looking at the notebook, but at the way Violet's knuckles had turned white. 

The living room of the house felt too large, the kind of space that swallowed sound, filled with expensive minimalist furniture and the lingering scent of expensive tobacco. It was a house designed for people who were never actually there, leaving the two of them alone in a vacuum of silence, save for the rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock that seemed to be counting down the seconds of Violet's failure.

Violet shifted her glasses up the bridge of her nose, her light brown hair falling forward like a curtain to hide her face. She stared at the algebra problem, the numbers blurring into a chaotic soup of variables and exponents. 

For her, math wasn't a language; it was a wall. Every time she tried to climb it, the memory of her parents shouting in the kitchen back home echoed in her head, a mental noise that made it impossible to hold onto a single formula. She had spent three months of her part-time wages to afford this tutoring, and the school had paired her with the one person who seemed most unlikely to care.

Nicolás was the kind of student who treated the school handbook like a suggestion. He had olive skin and black hair that always looked like he'd just rolled out of bed, and a tattoo of a coiled serpent peeked out from beneath the sleeve of his button-down shirt. He was the top of the class, but he spent most of his time hiding in the stairwells smoking cigarettes. 

The administration had forced him into this tutor role as a form of community service—a punishment for his general defiance—but as he watched her struggle, a different kind of intent flickered in his dark eyes.

"Let's try the second equation," Nicolás murmured, his voice dropping an octave. "The one with the quadratic. If you get it right, we take a break. If you don't..." 

He didn't finish the sentence, but he leaned in closer, the heat radiating off his chest.

Violet bit her lip, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She focused on the page, trying to remember the steps he had just shown her, but the proximity was overwhelming. She could smell the faint, sharp scent of cloves and leather. 

With shaking hands, she scribbled out the solution, her logic slipping just slightly at the final step—a simple sign error, a positive where a negative should have been. She paused, knowing she'd made a mistake, but she didn't have the confidence to erase it.

Nicolás didn't look at the paper. He looked at her. "Wrong," he whispered.Before she could apologize, his hand moved with a sudden, fluid precision. 

He didn't reach for the pencil; instead, his palm slid beneath the loose fabric of her shirt, his fingers curling firmly around her breast. Violet gasped, her back arching instinctively, the sensation of his warm skin against hers sending a jolt of electricity straight to her core. She had never been touched like this—not with this kind of intentional, possessive confidence.

The gasp died in her throat, replaced by a sharp, frantic intake of breath that sounded like a sob. Violet froze, her glasses slipping slightly down her nose as she stared wide-eyed at the algebra notebook, though the numbers had completely vanished from her mind. 

The contrast was jarring: the sterile, cold silence of the oversized living room and the searing heat of Nicolás's palm. He didn't pull away; instead, he squeezed, his thumb brushing over the peak of her breast through the thin fabric, grounding her in the sudden, overwhelming reality of his touch.

"You're shaking," he noted, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the small space between them. He didn't sound mocking; he sounded curious, as if he were observing a chemical reaction in a lab.With a slow, deliberate movement, he shifted his weight, sliding his other hand down the length of her thigh. The friction of his rough palm against her skirt made her stomach flip. Violet felt a wave of heat crash over her, a dizzying mixture of fear and an intense, budding curiosity.