Paint You Wings // Ashton Irwin [au]

Thirty-three

Emilia's POV

Right after my last class, Ashton and I go straight over to his house so that I can finally have my study session with Luke. As much as I need the help, I'm not looking forward to studying more than I already do for trig—well at least try to. Why do I even need math? It's not like I'm going to pursue a career that involves it. It's a waste of time in my opinion. Stupid math.

Luke, Ashton, and I go into the dining room that is never used in their house and put everything that I need on the table: textbook, calculator, notebook paper—lots of it, rulers, erasers, and pencils. Just looking at the supplies is giving me a headache.

"Are you ready to get started?" Luke asks with excitement, while taking a seat on the wooden chair and cracking my trigonometry textbook open.

"No," I whine and pull the chair out from under the table with force, causing a loud screech against the tile flooring before I take a seat and slouch.

The two boys laugh at my childish behavior and I wave them both the middle finger. Mother Nature still hasn't left, but my bitchy attitude has lessened quite a bit since yesterday and I'm much more tolerable.

"Well, too bad," Luke says, and Ashton pulls up a chair next to me and sits down.

Since Ash is also pretty good with math, Luke thought it would be a good idea to have him help me as well and act as a positive reinforcement. I'm going to need it if I'm going to be cramming a semester's worth of information into my brain.

"Do you at least know the basic formulas?" Luke asks. "You should have memorized them since you have to use them throughout the entire course."

I click on the top of my mechanical pencil, making the lead slowly come out before pushing it back in. "I know of the formulas, but if you ask me to write them down and explain how to use each one, you'd have better luck finding a needle in a haystack," I say with a straight face. If he's seen my quiz grades and has looked over them, then he should know that I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Ashton and Luke sigh simultaneously and shake their heads in shame with a smile adorning their faces.

"I'll make you a formula sheet," Ashton insists, taking the textbook from Luke and sifting through the pages and jotting down each formula on a sheet of paper with a black marker. When I look at the paper after he is finished, all I can think is that his penmanship is better than mine. The lines and curves of each letter and number are like a typed font while mine look like italicized scribbles.

Luke instructs me to look over the formula sheet that Ashton so generously created for me and in twenty minutes he is going to quiz me over all of them as practice for memorizing them. I just left school an hour ago and now he wants me to take more tests? I agreed for Luke to tutor me, not torture me.

Luke leaves the table, leaving me and Ash to sit together while he goes to his room to gather some of his old notebooks from previous math classes that he has taken over the years, which for some reason he likes to keep.

I hold the paper in front of me and scan the page of formulas and as I am trying to study, Ashton lightly kicks my foot with his. I ignore him, but when he kicks me again, I glance over the paper and glare at him. He smirks.

"What?" I ask in a hushed tone.

He shrugs, still keeping that smirk on his face. "Nothing," he says.

I roll my eyes and continue to attempt to memorize the paper until Ashton squeezes my thigh. "You're distracting me," I say with a hint of annoyance. He knows damn well that I am still on my period and that he is a distraction to me, especially when it comes to my academics, so I know that he's irritating me on purpose for his own enjoyment.