Chapter 55: Not Right Now

The laughter in the classroom seemed to catch on itself when Audra stepped onto the platform, pausing for one startled breath before spilling louder than before.

"So," Cyrus asked from the back of the room, sounding much too relaxed for the person being dragged into public humiliation, "what is Audra Sloane’s answer?"

Audra held the folded paper in her hand and made her decision quickly.

Accepting was impossible. She had no reason to accept.

Refusing was also annoying, because that would mean denying her own appeal in front of the whole class.

She still had not seen Cyrus visibly shaken by her charm. He had sat across from her during tutoring, looked at worksheets more than her face, and treated every one of her attempts at subtle pressure like bad weather he could wait out. Letting this mess end with a blunt rejection felt like admitting he had never wanted her badly enough in the first place.

The simplest answer was obvious. She could say the handwriting was not his and cut the whole thing apart.

For one wild instant, another thought crossed her mind.

She could agree.

She could say yes, right here, in front of everyone, and watch Cyrus’s calm finally crack.

The thought was gone almost as quickly as it came. Audra did not have some clean, fixed standard for the person she would choose, but a few tutoring sessions and a pile of completed math problems were not enough to justify choosing Cyrus Calder in front of an entire classroom.

At the very least, she needed to confirm that her charm actually worked on him first.

While Audra stayed silent, the students below watched Cyrus with growing disbelief.

Was her silence lasting a little too long?

She could not seriously be thinking about saying yes, could she?

Audra silently cursed whoever had written the fake love letter, then lowered her eyes to the page in her hand and said, "This is not Cyrus Calder’s handwriting."

The classroom broke open again.

Several students started whispering at once. A few caught the part that mattered more than the letter itself, which was that Audra had recognized Cyrus’s handwriting fast enough to deny it on sight.

Before Cyrus could speak, Miles Sutton leaned against the edge of the platform with a careless smile.

"People ask their friends to write love letters all the time," he said. "Maybe Cyrus was shy."

The room quieted a little.

Cyrus did not look shy.

He stood there near the back of the room, his bangs low over most of his eyes, his posture loose, his expression so flat that the fun began to drain out of the scene.

Most of them had wanted panic. They had wanted him stumbling over a denial, face red, hands shaking, his voice cracking while everyone laughed.

Instead, he looked bored.

Cyrus did not rush to argue with Miles. He only waited for Audra’s answer.

He wanted to see whether she would actually convince herself the letter belonged to him. If she wanted to reject him while pretending she believed it, that would be interesting in its own way.

Then again, maybe that would make sense for her.

Audra had cast enough hooks that she probably had fish pulling from every direction. If one fish had not even bitten yet, she might decide to yank the line early just to prove the hook existed.

Fine, then.

If she did that, he would count it as her talent.

Audra looked down at him from the platform and seemed to read the meaning behind his calm.

Even if she wanted to reject Cyrus someday, she did not want to reject this version of him.

Not like this.

Not while he stood there unmoved, as if the whole room had failed to touch him.

For Audra, the attention of every student in the class suddenly felt less important than the reaction of one boy in the corner.

"You..."

"You all sound ridiculous!"

Audra had barely gotten one word out before Ms. Hart’s sharp voice cut through the classroom from the door.

"The entire hallway can hear you. I should not be able to identify my own homeroom by volume from halfway across the building."

The gossip-heavy air collapsed at once.

Ms. Hart stepped inside with the kind of stern expression that made even the louder students sit up straighter. She did not ask for the story first. She started with the noise, then the self-study period, then the basic expectation that students at St. Alder Academy should be able to sit in a room without turning it into a lunchroom brawl.

Her lecture did not end quickly.

By the time she finished scolding them, the next class was about to begin, and whatever appetite the students had for the love-letter drama had been ground down under ten solid minutes of adult disappointment.

Cyrus had stayed calm the whole time, but most of the class did not care about that part. What they wanted had been simple: Audra refusing him, Cyrus looking ashamed, and everyone getting to enjoy the collapse from a safe distance.

The ending had been interrupted.

That did not mean anyone believed Audra would have accepted a fake letter supposedly written by a boy who barely existed in their classroom.

Why would Audra Sloane look twice at a gloomy guy who spent most days trying to disappear?

Even the more ordinary girls in class probably would not have done that.

The incident from self-study did not get a proper ending, but everyone filled in the missing piece on their own.

During the rest of the day, students occasionally glanced toward the back corner of the room. What they saw was not some crushed loser drowning in embarrassment.

Cyrus looked exactly the same.

Dull, low-profile, and almost offensively unaffected.

Audra, sitting not far away, kept her expression composed, but the question she had failed to ask on the platform stayed with her.

The later classes moved on. Teachers came and went. Notes were taken. Pages turned. The fake confession lost heat little by little until even the students who had laughed the loudest grew bored of checking whether Cyrus would react.

Owen, however, did not forget.

During a break between classes, he leaned slightly toward Cyrus and kept his voice low.

"Cyrus, are you really okay?"

"I am fine," Cyrus said.

Owen hesitated, then frowned toward the front of the room. "I did not think Miles would actually pull something like that. I mean, he can be a jerk, but that was low. For what it is worth, I believe the letter had nothing to do with you."

"Thanks," Cyrus said.

Owen watched him nod, the uneven ends of Cyrus’s bangs shifting with the movement.

He had a very solid reason to believe him.

Owen had seen Cyrus at The Full Moon Lounge. He had seen him standing there with a face that could make grown women forget what they had ordered, while customers watched him with open interest and he remained detached from all of it.

That kind of appearance had not made Cyrus smug. It had not made him eager. It had not made him chase anyone’s attention.

Owen had no idea what kind of woman could actually affect Cyrus in the end.

Maybe even Audra Sloane missed the mark a little.

In front of Cyrus, Faye Larkin turned slightly in her seat. After confirming that Cyrus did not seem bothered, she quietly faced forward again.

When the final bell rang, Cyrus stayed in the classroom for a while, the way he usually did, then headed up to the fourth floor.

For once, he arrived before Audra.

Usually, she was the one already waiting in the empty classroom, calm and prepared, as if her schedule had naturally placed her there before anyone else.

Cyrus stood by the window and looked down at the athletic field. A few students were still outside for club activities, scattered across the grass under the late-day light. Their voices came up faintly through the glass, too distant to make out.

He wondered whether the self-study incident would affect Audra.

When she finally entered the room, she did not look affected.

That was good.

The atmosphere between them had changed, though Cyrus could not name exactly how. Nothing obvious had shifted. Audra still took out the materials. Cyrus still sat down. The tutoring session began the same way it always did.

Her voice moved through explanations. His pen followed. One person taught with a question held back. The other listened like every number on the page mattered more than whatever had happened downstairs.

Time slid toward the end of the session.

Audra glanced at his worksheet, then asked in a tone that tried too hard to sound casual, "Was that love letter really something you asked someone else to write?"

Cyrus lifted his head.

He had not expected her to bring it up again.

"Do you want me to confess to you?"

Audra froze.

Then heat rose behind her composure, sharp and immediate.

What kind of question was that?

What did he mean, did she want it?

She had been trying to help him prove the letter was fake. If she had known he would throw that line back at her, she should have accepted the confession on the spot and let him suffer a little. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Audra’s fingers tightened around her pen. "Can you guarantee you never will?"

Cyrus went quiet.

Seeing him finally caught without an immediate answer made the irritation in Audra’s chest ease a little.

Then she noticed his fingers.

He was rubbing the plain ring on his hand with a small, unconscious motion. His face lowered, and when he spoke again, his voice had picked up a thread of old grief.

"The truth is, I lost my memory once."

Audra’s expression changed. "What does that mean?"

"Even after losing my memory, there is someone I cannot completely forget." Cyrus kept his eyes lowered. "Every so often, a figure appears in my mind. Sometimes I see her from behind in dreams."

The quiet in the classroom thickened.

His voice carried a faint ache as he continued, "I do not remember her name. I do not remember her face. I only know she was important to me, and everything else is gone."

"She was important?" Audra asked.

"Thinking about her hurts," Cyrus said.

Audra did not answer.

Cyrus let a pause settle between them, then added lightly, "Now that I think about it, your back looks a little like hers."

The meaning was clear enough.

You asked whether I might confess to you someday.

His lashes lowered, hiding whatever expression sat beneath them. The line sounded careless, but his hand trembled faintly around the ring.

Audra said nothing.

Her attention dropped to that plain, forgettable ring, and she stared at it for a long breath before closing the tutoring session without looking back.

When she left, the classroom returned to silence.

A small laugh slipped out into the empty room.

Stubborn girl. Easy to trick. Fun to trick.

He would do it again next time.

As for the trembling hand, that counted as real feeling too.

It came from fear.

Cyrus smoothed his expression back into place and left the classroom.

When he passed the restroom, a sudden force caught him and yanked him sideways.

Are you seriously haunting me now?