Chapter 47: Chapter 47: Tomorrow Will Look Good Too

Chapter 47: Tomorrow Will Look Good Too

Why had Audra Sloane decided they should eat together before tutoring?

Cyrus only started wondering about it after the food arrived. He sat across from her in the booth, fork in hand, working through a meal he had picked because the menu picture looked filling and the price did not make him want to leave.

At first, the arrangement had sounded practical enough. They were meeting outside school. The restaurant had tables. The restaurant also had food. For Cyrus, that was already a complete argument.

Now that he had time to think, the timing felt a little too deliberate.

Audra was not wearing her St. Alder uniform. She had changed into a white belted dress, simple enough for a casual family restaurant, but pretty enough that half the room had already noticed her. Her long hair was tied back, leaving her neck and shoulders cleaner in shape than usual. Clear-strapped sandals showed under the table when she shifted her feet. Her wrists and collarbone had no jewelry, but the lack of decoration only made the whole look seem more intentional.

Cyrus lowered his eyes to his plate.

She could not have asked him here just so he would see her dressed like this, right?

That was hard not to suspect. Audra was stubborn in a calm way, and calm girls could be more troublesome than loud ones because they gave less warning before doing something strange.

Then again, maybe this was normal for her. People with money probably had clothes for every situation. School clothes, restaurant clothes, study clothes, clothes meant for walking around on a weekend, and clothes meant for sitting in a restaurant while making everyone else look like they had given up.

Cyrus glanced down at himself.

He was still wearing his St. Alder uniform.

That was not because he loved school or had any deep attachment to the blazer. His closet barely had anything inside it. Before his work schedule changed, his weekends belonged to The Full Moon Lounge, sleep, food, and whatever errands could not be avoided. Casual clothes had ranked below rent, medicine, meals, and anything else that helped him avoid depending on someone.

At this rate, the corners of his closet were going to grow cobwebs out of boredom.

Buying clothes would have to wait until his wages and the Most Improved Student Award money actually reached his hands. He could not dress nicely with confidence and an empty wallet. Stores, unfortunately, did not accept personal growth as payment.

Across from him, Audra had noticed the uniform too.

Her posture stayed neat, her expression calm, and her voice had not changed from the moment he arrived. Inside, though, a small frustration pressed against her composure.

She had not prepared herself with embarrassing seriousness, but she had prepared. She had chosen the dress. She had tied her hair. She had come to the restaurant looking different from the version of herself everyone saw at school.

Cyrus had arrived looking exactly the same as always.

The same low bangs. The same hidden face. The same gloomy uniform. The same attitude of someone who could sit across from her without wondering what right he had to do it.

Did boys like him simply not know how to take care of themselves?

Was Cyrus bad at dressing himself, or did he know exactly what he was doing and refuse to bother?

If it was the first answer, then perhaps appearance could be added to the list of things she taught him. It would be an unusual subject, but not the strangest thought she had had since she started paying attention to him.

If it was the second answer, then he had made the correct choice.

Audra lowered her lashes and picked up her fork.

A cleaned-up Cyrus Calder might become a different kind of problem. She did not know why that thought had appeared, but it stayed with her anyway, quiet and annoying.

After they finished eating, Cyrus took out the books, loose papers, and pencils he had brought with him. Audra did the same from the bag beside her. The restaurant was busier than a classroom, but not loud enough to stop them from working. Plates clinked. A child complained at another table. A server moved past with a tray of iced tea and fries. Somewhere behind them, an older couple argued calmly over who had ordered the side salad.

None of it bothered Cyrus much.

Noise from strangers was easy to ignore. Attention from beautiful women was the part that needed caution.

The tutoring started with review. Audra did not bring in much new material right away. She circled back through what they had already covered, asked him to explain steps out loud, and made him redo questions he had solved too quickly. Her standards were annoyingly precise. She could spot a guessed answer from across the table, even when he had written it in his neatest handwriting.

Cyrus respected that in the same reluctant way he respected medicine. The process helped him, and the process also made his life harder.

Audra had already been tutoring him for a while, and the effect was obvious even if he did not say it. The gaps in his basics were being filled one by one. The parts of class that used to blur together now had edges. He did not understand everything, but he understood enough to know which part he did not understand, and that counted as progress.

From Audra’s side, the process was not as painful as she had expected.

Cyrus was not brilliant. He also was not hopeless. His problem was mostly that the foundation under his grades had holes in it, so everything built on top of it had started leaning. Once she forced him to repair the missing pieces, his improvement came faster than it should have for someone who had spent so many classes sleeping through the day.

Even that had changed. He slept less in class now. Near his seat, Owen and Faye had noticed it. Audra had noticed it too.

That improvement was obviously her doing.

The thought pleased her more than it should have.

While Cyrus bent over the practice sheet, Audra opened the paperback she had brought and used it to pass the time. She did not truly need it. She could have watched him work, corrected him the instant his pencil moved wrong, and made his life even more efficient. Instead, she gave him space to solve the problems, partly because it was better tutoring and partly because staring too much would make her look strange.

Two hours passed like that.

By the time Cyrus finished the last question, the lunch rush had thinned out. The restaurant had settled into an afternoon lull. A few tables remained occupied, but most of the earlier noise had drained away, leaving soft music, the hum of the drink machine, and the scrape of chairs being pushed back into place.

Cyrus drank from his lemonade and watched the window beside their booth.

Outside, a narrow strip of landscaping separated the restaurant from the parking lot. The flowers were nothing special, and the shrubs had probably been trimmed by someone who cared more about speed than beauty. To Cyrus, they were still easier to look at than strangers.

Several customers had already noticed the odd pairing at the window booth.

A beautiful girl sat with a gloomy boy in a school uniform. She leaned over his papers, corrected his work, and spoke to him in a voice most people would have leaned closer to hear. He, for reasons nobody in the restaurant understood, spent his break looking at the plants outside instead of looking at her.

A woman at a nearby table gave the empty air a look of offended disbelief.

Some boys did not deserve good fortune. Put a girl like Audra Sloane across from them, and they would choose the decorative shrubs outside a family restaurant.

Audra finished marking the last answer and set her pen down.

"You did well. You have mostly gotten this section under control."

Cyrus turned back from the window. "Thank you for helping me with it."

"Starting tomorrow, we can move into the earlier freshman and sophomore material. Those are the parts that keep causing trouble for your current classes."

He listened carefully as soon as the award money became relevant to the conversation. "I understand."

"You should buy a separate practice book for these topics too. The problems we do here help, but you need more repetition outside tutoring."

"I’ll pick one up later," Cyrus said at once.

If a workbook could decide whether he got the award, then the workbook was not optional. It might be the difference between ordinary food and better food, between passing a store window and going inside, between wanting clothes and buying them. Practice problems were ugly, but award money could make ugly things look reasonable.

The time was close to three in the afternoon. Sitting in one place for so long had left stiffness in his shoulders, and the restaurant’s lingering attention had become more annoying than interesting. The tutoring had lasted longer than any of their school sessions, and even Cyrus could tell they had reached a natural stopping point.

For some reason, neither of them said it.

Audra closed her paperback but did not put it away. Cyrus stacked his papers but did not rise. Between them sat the remains of lunch, two cups with melting ice, and a silence that felt less like peace than a hallway with no obvious exit.

Cyrus was already thinking about what he should eat later. The old late-night food craving was no longer tied only to midnight. Once a person learned the joy of cheap hot food, the desire became flexible.

He finally pushed his papers into his bag.

"Then I’ll head back first. I’ll see you tomorrow."

Audra’s face did not change. "I’ll see you tomorrow."

Cyrus stood and moved past her side of the booth. Halfway through the motion, he remembered that people who helped you for hours deserved normal politeness. Also, Audra had looked different today, and even he was not blind enough to miss that.

He stopped beside the table.

"The dress suits you, and it looks really nice. You..."

Audra lifted her eyes before his next thought could become a question.

"Tomorrow’s will look good too."

Cyrus held the strap of his bag and looked at her for a short pause.

He had been about to ask whether she knew any decent places to buy men’s clothes, since her taste seemed reliable and he clearly lacked options. The words died before they reached his mouth. Audra’s answer had landed so quickly that the conversation had already turned into something else.

Besides, she had spent hours tutoring him. Asking for shopping advice on top of that felt like adding another chore to a debt he was already trying to keep manageable.

"All right. I’ll see you tomorrow."

He left the restaurant after that, his bag against his shoulder and his mind already moving toward practice books, cheap food, and the cruel fact that clothes also cost money.

Audra remained in the booth.

After Cyrus disappeared through the front door, she picked up her phone and sent a short message. Then she set it beside her cup and opened her paperback again.

The words on the page did not hold all of her attention.

So Cyrus was not completely as dull as his school appearance suggested.

At the very least, when she dressed nicely enough, he reacted. His timing was late. His delivery was awkward. He had the air of someone remembering a homework assignment after the bell had already rung.

But he had reacted.

That was enough to make the effort feel less wasted.

A small sound of amusement almost reached her throat, but she swallowed it before it became visible. She was still in public. A Sloane did not sit in a family restaurant smiling to herself over a boy who dressed like he had lost a private war against his closet.

As she reached for her cup, another detail surfaced.

When Cyrus had passed beside her, the hair near his ear had shifted. For a brief instant, something had caught the light beneath the dark fall of his bangs.

A small metal stud, perhaps.

It had been half hidden, gone almost as soon as she noticed it. His hair covered too much for her to be certain. Still, the faint flash stayed in her head.

Cyrus Calder wore an ear stud?

Audra’s fingers rested on the edge of her book.

The thought did not fit easily beside the version of him she saw every day at school. Low bangs, gloomy posture, plain uniform, average grades, minimal social presence. He looked like a boy trying to disappear into the back of a classroom.

An ear stud did not match that image.

Her memory moved from the brief glint to the line of his jaw, the part of his face his hair did not fully hide. His jaw was finer than she had expected when she first started paying attention. The lower half of his face was not unattractive. It was not enough to tell her what he actually looked like, but it made the curtain of hair feel more deliberate.

Maybe he was not ugly under there.

Maybe he had some mark on his face and hid it for that reason.

Maybe there was nothing wrong with his face at all, which would make the hiding stranger.

The possibilities annoyed her because none of them were useful yet.

A voice broke into her thoughts from beside the booth.

"Audra Sloane, what a coincidence."

The boy who had spoken sounded as if he had used all his courage getting her name out. He was one of her classmates, broad-shouldered, stiff with nerves, and standing too straight beside the table.

Audra looked up politely. "Good afternoon to you too."

The response seemed to encourage him and ruin him at the same time. His face tightened with effort, and his next words came out unevenly.

"You look really beautiful today."

Audra did not give him much more than a small nod. "Thank you for saying so."

Her phone sounded on the table before he could build the courage for another sentence.

The timing was convenient. Audra picked it up, gathered her things, and rose from the booth with practiced ease. Outside the window, a black sedan had already pulled up near the curb.

She left the restaurant without looking rushed.

Inside the car, with the restaurant sliding out of sight behind her, Audra watched the street pass beyond the tinted glass and pressed down the absurd irritation that had followed her out.

According to that large, nervous classmate, she was beautiful today.

Only today, apparently.

Audra turned the phone in her hand and almost laughed.

That was a rude way to praise someone.

She looked good no matter what day it was.

Back inside the restaurant, the boy who had finally managed to compliment her stood beside the empty booth, stunned by how quickly the moment had ended. Then his attention snapped toward the seat across from hers, and resentment settled there because he had nowhere else to put it.