Four Of A Kind - Chapter 129: [3.31] My Ears Don’t Lie

Chapter 129: [3.31] My Ears Don’t Lie

“So,” she said, clearly done with the quiet after forty-five seconds. “Someone else, huh?”

I kept my eyes on the road. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“You literally just said it. Five minutes ago.”

“You might have misheard.”

“I have excellent hearing. It’s one of my best qualities.”

“Along with your exceptional modesty.”

She poked my arm. “Answer the question, scholarship boy.”

“What question? I don’t recall a question.”

“You said you had your eye on someone. Who.”

I checked my mirrors. Changed lanes. “Nobody you know.”

“I know everyone,” she said flatly.

“Debatable.”

“Isaiah.” My name came out in a warning tone that I’d learned meant she was approximately thirty seconds from throwing something.

“Cassidy,” I said back, equally pleasant.

She stared at the side of my face. I could feel it. The specific quality of her attention when she was deciding whether to be aggressive or clever, usually landing on whatever option would inflict the most psychological damage.

“If I had to guess,” she started.

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Too bad.” She tucked her feet up on the seat, which I’d technically asked her not to do, and shifted to face me. “It’s Mira.”

I looked at her briefly, then back at the road. “It’s not Mira.”

“You hesitated.”

“I was checking my mirror.”

“Your ears went red.”

“It’s warm in here. I have the heat on.”

“Your ears don’t go red from the heat, they go red when you’re lying, which you do with your face even though you think you don’t.” She sounded professionally satisfied. “I’ve been paying attention.”

That was, actually, more than a little concerning.

“You’ve been studying how I look when I lie?” I asked.

“Observation is a survival skill in this family.” She took another sip of tea. “So if it’s not Mira, who is it?”

“I already told you. You have to earn that information.”

“The bet.”

“The bet.”

She was quiet for a moment, and I could feel her recalibrating. The Cassidy I’d met at the beginning of September would have escalated here, shoved harder, found the nearest available blunt object, metaphorical or literal. This Cassidy leaned back in the seat and looked at the road ahead with an expression I was still learning to read.

It wasn’t her game face. It wasn’t her armor face. It was something in between.

“Okay,” she said.

I blinked. “Okay?”

“Okay. The bet.” She straightened slightly. “I’m going to win it, so the answer’s coming anyway. Might as well let you have your little dramatic moment.”

The confidence in her voice was a different kind from the bravado I’d seen in September. That had been noise. A wall. This was something more settled, the specific confidence of someone who had solved problems they’d previously thought were unsolvable and now believed she could solve the next one.

My fault, probably. I had made this my problem.

Troublesome.

“Ready to study when we get back?” I asked.

“Were you ever going to ask if I wasn’t?” She turned her tea cup in her hands, running her thumb along the seam. “You’re going to make me do the practice sheet from last week again, aren’t you.”

“I’m going to make you do a new one. With quadratics.”

A groan that contained genuine suffering. “I hate quadratics.”

“You hated basic distribution two weeks ago. Now you do it in your sleep.”

She didn’t argue with that, which told me she knew it was true.

“What if I still mess up the formula?” she asked, and the question came out smaller than the rest. An actual question, not a challenge.

“Then you circle where you messed up, figure out why, and try again.” I shrugged. “The formula doesn’t care about your feelings. It just runs the same every time. You learn the pattern and the pattern does the work.”

Cassidy looked at me sideways. “That’s almost profound.”

“Don’t tell Felix. He’ll make me put it on a motivational poster.”

She laughed. Quiet, short, unpracticed, the kind she sometimes forgot to swallow. The afternoon light was doing something to her hair, picking up the red in it, the black streaks catching less of the gold. She looked her age for once, like a seventeen-year-old on her way home from school with a bubble tea, rather than whatever heavily armored version she usually deployed.

I looked back at the road before I could notice anything else.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“You’re going to regardless.”

“Accurate.” A pause. “Why do you actually bother? With the tutoring. Beyond the contract.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” She turned her cup again. “You could do the minimum. Show up, go through the motions, cover your performance clause. I’d still be failing, you’d still be getting paid.” She paused. “But you learned how my brain works. You built those graph paper things. You changed the whole system instead of blaming me for not fitting the system.”

I thought about that for a moment.

“Because doing the minimum is more work in the long run,” I said.

“That’s not the real reason.”

“It’s part of it.”

She poked my arm again, lighter this time. “What’s the other part.”

I was quiet for a beat. The traffic thinned as we got further from the city, the road opening up. I watched the trees pass.

“When I was twelve,” I said, “there was a teacher who told me I wasn’t college material. Didn’t have the right background. Wasn’t the right kind of student.” I said it without particular weight. Just fact. “She was wrong, obviously. But I believed her for about six months, which is six months I’ll never get back.”

Cassidy said nothing.

“Nobody did the thing where they said, you’re not broken, you just need a different approach.” I glanced over. “So when I see someone who’s clearly not broken and everyone’s treating them like they are, I find it hard not to do something about it.”

Cassidy was looking at me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her face before. Not quite the soft version she sometimes let slip. Something sharper than that, and more careful, the way you look at something fragile you weren’t expecting.

“That might be the most personal thing you’ve ever told me,” she said.

“Don’t make it weird.”

“Too late.” But she said it softly.

We drove for a while. The manor gates came into view after another ten minutes, the wrought iron against the early evening sky.

“For the record,” Cassidy said as I signaled the turn, “I’m still going to win the bet.”

“I’d be disappointed if you weren’t trying.”

“And when I do, you’re going to tell me who you’ve got your eye on. Full disclosure. No edits.”

“Terms accepted.”

She nodded once, business concluded. Then she finished the last of her passionfruit tea and looked at the manor gates with something that was almost contentment.

“I want to get a 90 on the practice quiz,” she said.

“Monday.”

“Monday,” she agreed.

The guard waved us through. I parked near the front steps and cut the engine.

Cassidy grabbed her bag and her empty cup, already in motion. At the top of the steps, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder at me.

“Hey.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“The conversation with Mira.” Her cheeks had the faintest pink to them, barely visible in the early evening light. “She just confirmed my order was ready.” She held my gaze for exactly one second. “That’s all.”

She turned and went inside before I could respond.

I stood in the driveway for a long moment.

Right.

“Troublesome,” I said to nobody in particular, and went inside.