“Hey, that looks really good, I’m starving.” She pointed to the puffs of pastry, her finger touching the frosting. “Oops.” She licked her finger, and she gave him an appreciative look. “Mmm, that’s yummy.”
“Would you like some?” he asked a little wryly.
“Sure!”
When he sat at the table with their tea, watching with a small smile as she licked her fingers, he remarked, “Well I hope your enthusiasm for geometry is as fervent as your enthusiasm for Danish pastries.”
“Highly unlikely,” Cat replied moodily, mouth full. “But I guess we have to get to it, huh?”
“Well, I do have another student at five.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s see how much we can do over frosting, hm?”
Cat reluctantly finished the last of her sweetness, downed the rest of her cup of tea, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She glanced over at him looking at her, his mouth fixed in a funny little smile, and was struck again by his eyes, how they seemed to miss nothing. She felt suddenly self conscious and tucked her short brown curls nervously behind her ears and cleared her throat.
“Geometry?” she asked.
“Yes,” he affirmed. “Let’s see your book, and we’ll start there.”
And so that’s how the torture began every day, with a little sweetness, washed down with a warm dose of tea, following by an excruciating hour of math-induced hell. Cat threw books across the room, tore papers in half, swore-
although she always apologized to him, somehow it didn’t feel right to swear in front of someone who was British-and slammed her fists on his kitchen table.
She knew he was being patient with her-really his patience was beyond human comprehension-but his sighs, his attempts to show her yet again, a different way this time, something new, somehow it just never sank in. She was a senior in high school, and yet she couldn’t seem to grasp middle school geometry concepts.
She didn’t know how many hours she spent in his kitchen trying to use some guy named Pythagoras' theorem to figure out some strange angle. Long enough for Paj to start asking where she went every day, since she wasn’t hanging out in the garage now. Long enough to know that, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he had a boy named Stephen who came to learn algebra, and on Wednesdays it was a girl named Christine who needed help with Trig-who Cat thought looked like one of those kewpie dolls you win at a county fair. On Mondays and Fridays, thought, David was all hers.
On those days, after the books were thankfully closed, she would linger as long as she could, eyeing his shelves, picking up his trinkets. He seemed to be collecting more of them, odd things, small statues, strange metal objects, and she liked exploring his house, her fingertips brushing the perimeters, as if testing the boundaries every time she came. And he always watched her. He would sit quietly in the large black easy chair, or on the soft leather sofa, and just watch her wander around the room. He looked casual, his arm across the chair or sofa back, his leg crossed the way guys do, his ankle resting on a knee, but his eyes were like beams that followed her wherever she went.
And they would talk. In fact, she tried to keep talking, or keep him talking, just so the time would pass, hoping he wouldn’t notice her lingering. She told him about her mother and stepfather and the pressure of getting ready for college.
She told him about Stuie, and Paj, and even hesitantly revealed her dream of becoming a race car driver. She had expected him to laugh, like everyone else did, but he hadn’t. He'd just nodded appreciatively and probed a little more. She loved him for that.
And then she hated him. That was a Friday, and she stayed quite late, until it was actually growing dark. The doorbell rang and their eyes met quickly, furtively, as if they had been caught doing something secret. David made some comment, she couldn’t hear what, but it was a woman-a very tall, very blonde, very beautiful woman-at the door. He had apparently forgotten he had a date-
Cat took some pride in that, she wanted to believe she'd distracted him- but she found herself rushed out the door with a brief “see you next week” and a wave.
She stood at the end of his street in the orange fluorescent haloed glow of a streetlamp and watched them get into her car filled with a feeling she didn’t quite recognize, something that burned her eyes and her throat. She watched the blonde laugh, lean over and touch his thigh. When she put her hand on the back of his neck and fingered the hair there, a familiar gesture, Cat seethed, surprising herself with the heat of her outrage.
And so she didn’t go to his house on Monday. She told her stepfather that David couldn’t meet her, but she hadn’t counted on him calling to ask where she was. On Tuesday, because Ted insisted, she met David at the door, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She refused tea and some new delectable treat-she later found out they were called scones-and just opened her book and pointed to the problems they were on. Pythagorean again. She hated that guy. Almost as much as she hated David as he sat with her and attempted, once again, to explain the reasoning behind the mathematical mysteries of the universe.
“Cat, you can tell me off the top of your head just exactly what Pythagorean’s Theorem is, word for word, can’t you?” David looked at her curiously. She managed to reach the tip of one of her dark brown curls to her mouth and sucked on it, concentrating hard on not looking at him. She just shrugged. “Well, tell me then.”
“The sides of a right triangle are related by the equation a squared plus b squared equals c squared, where a and b represent the lengths of the legs and c is the length of the hypotenuse,” she muttered, turning her right shoulder toward the opposite wall, away from him.
“Right.” David shook his head, thoughtful. “I don’t understand… you’re so smart…
“Well obviously I’m an idiot when it comes to geometry, ok?” Cat stood up fast, the chair clattering over behind her. “Just put a dunce cap on me and put me in a corner, all right? There is no point to any of this! I’m done with geometry!
I’m done with Pythagorean’s Theorem… and I am most especially done with you, David Slater!”
She kicked the chair as she passed it, heading for the front door-no books, no coat- tears making the world fill with sudden prisms. David caught her arm, and she tried to jerk away, but he was too strong. She stood there, head down, tears falling onto the hardwood floor between them. David saw them, and tilted her chin up. When she met his eyes, his quiet, watchful eyes, she simply burst into tears.
“Catherine, Catherine…” He folded her into his arms and held her, rocking with her. “Beautiful Catherine…you are so bright, please don’t ever believe I don’t think the world of you.” He murmured into her hair, words and more words-
brilliant, lovely, smart, delightful, wise and wonderful. She found herself holding onto him, wrapping her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against the buttons of his shirt. The more he whispered, the harder she cried. He finally eased them both down to the floor of the foyer, leaning against the door while she attempted to curl her long limbs into a small enough shape so she could fit into his lap.
She found her forehead pressed against the side of his neck, her fingers hesitantly rubbing at his collar, grazing the skin at the hollow of his throat. His rocking slowly subsided with her tears. She sniffed as quietly as she could. She was afraid to move. She thought if she could match her breath, even her heartbeat with his, he might forget she wasn’t a part of him, that they shouldn’t be tangled here in a heap on the floor together, that this was the way it should be.
And then his hand crept to her hair. At first she thought he was just brushing the unruly mess out of his face to keep it from tickling him, but slowly, as the sensation of being petted tingled from her scalp down her spine, she realized he was doing it intentionally.