The Stray He Marked

Keep Going

The quiet room was a small annexed off the main library, four walls, a round table, two chairs, a sofa that had seen better decades, and a whiteboard that someone had never fully erased. It smelled like dry-erase marker and the faint, stale memory of someone's lunch.

Elise arrived seven minutes early on Monday. She set up the table with the materials she'd spent Sunday evening preparing: a condensed syllabus, a diagnostic test she'd designed herself to locate the exact gaps in Carl Daxton's knowledge before she wasted time teaching him things he already understood, color-coded notes for each of the four final subjects, and a study schedule broken into daily blocks that was, she felt, genuinely generous in how much slack she'd built in for someone with Carl's documented level of engagement.

She had also brought two pencils, because she did not trust Carl to have a pencil. She sat down and waited, At four o'clock, the agreed time, she looked at the door. At four-fifteen, she looked at it again.

At four-thirty she opened her own textbook and began to study, because she was here and the room was quiet and there was no point wasting the hour. She told herself she was not annoyed. She was fine. This was fine. He was probably caught up in something. Alphas had obligations, pack business, training rotations, the complex social machinery of being the person everyone wanted a piece of. At five o'clock she packed up her materials, stacked them neatly, and went home.

Tuesday, she arrived at four. The diagnostic test sat on the table in front of the empty chair. She had written his name across the top in her careful, even handwriting.

Carl Daxton.

She looked at it for a while. She got out her own work. At five o'clock, she packed up again.

Wednesday, she didn't bring the diagnostic test. She brought her own revision materials and nothing else, because she was not going to keep setting a place at a table for someone who had made it comprehensively clear that they did not intend to sit at it. She was not his mother. She was barely his tutor. She was, as far as Carl was concerned, apparently a person who did not exist.

She lasted until four-forty before she started drafting, in her head, what she would say to Mr. Smith.

I tried, he didn't show up There is no tutoring arrangement if one of the parties refuses to be tutored. I have to prepare for my finals too and I cannot continue...

At five she went home and wrote it out properly in her notebook, because writing things helped her think, and then she looked at it for a long time.

Three days, three sessions, zero appearances.

She would go to Mr. Smith on Thursday morning, before first bell to present the attendance record which she had been keeping, and explain that the arrangement was not viable and she was withdrawing.

She told herself and felt relieved. She repeated that to herself several more times before she fell asleep.

Thursday, she made it all the way to the hallway outside Mr. Smith's office before her feet stopped.

She stood there for a moment, looking at his door. The frosted glass panel. The little placard: PRINCIPAL — J. SMITH.

Alpha Daxton himself has been told your name. He's grateful.

She thought about doors. The ones that opened easily, because you had the right last name, the right bloodline, the right standing in the hierarchy. And the ones that required something.

She stood there another moment. Then she turned around and went to class, at three forty five, she went back to the library, collected her bag from her locker, and went to the quiet room. She put her materials on the table. Sat down, and got out her chemistry notes.

At four-twenty, the door opened and Carl Daxton walked in. He was wearing a grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows and dark joggers, his bag slung over one shoulder with the casual disregard of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether his things were organized, he had the particular loose, unhurried walk of someone who had never once in their life felt the need to move faster than they wanted to. Carl was bigger in person than he seemed from across a corridor, his presence filled the room the way people like him always filled spaces, not loudly, not with any particular effort, just completely. His jaw was sharp but his eyes were sharper. They moved across the room once, taking in the whiteboard, the neat stack of notes, her and the corner of his mouth shifted almost imperceptibly.

Not a smile, an acknowledgment. The way a cat acknowledges a closed door before deciding whether it's worth the effort.

"You're late," Elise said.

"I'm here." He dropped into the chair across from her without ceremony, letting his bag hit the floor.

Elise held his gaze for exactly one second before returning to her notes. "We've lost three sessions already. That means we'll need to move quickly if you want to have any chance at passing your assessments before..."

"You made a schedule," he said.

She looked up. He was reading the whiteboard with an expression she couldn't entirely interpret. Not mocking but not interested either. Somewhere in the vast, unbothered territory between the two.

"Yes," she said. "It helps to have a structure."

"Hm."

That was all, just hm. As if she had said something mildly curious about the weather. Elise pulled the printed assessment across the table toward him. "If you look at this, you can see which subjects are most urgent. Your mathematics score is—"

"Have you ever tutored anyone before?" He interrupted.

She blinked. "Yes. Several students."

"How'd they do?"

"They all passed." She kept her voice even. "Which is the goal."

Carl looked at her then, not the skimming glance from the doorway but something more deliberate, like he was trying to find a specific thing and hadn't located it yet. Elise made herself hold still under it. She was good at holding still. She had spent years perfecting the art of taking up very little space, of being the kind of person that a room forgot about the moment something more interesting walked in.

He looked away first. She counted that as a small, private victory and said nothing about it.

"Alright," she continued, pulling her chair slightly closer to the table. "Let's start with algebra. If you open to page—"

He pulled out his phone from his jacket pocket and started to play something. The sound that came from the device was not subtle, explicit moans and exaggerated gasps crackled through the tiny speaker of his phone, bouncing off the study room walls like they were mocking her too. Elise’s face burned so hot she could feel it in her ears. Her fingers curled into the edges of her open textbook until the pages crinkled.

She didn’t need to look at the screen to know what was happening. The sounds painted a very clear picture all on their own.

Eighteen years of evolution had given her a very well-developed sense of when she was being dismissed, and it had also given her, through considerably harder-won experience, a finely tuned understanding of the difference between reacting and responding.

She did not react, instead, she picked up her pencil, looked back at her chemistry notes and began to read, she read the same sentence about electron configurations four times until the words had meaning again, and then she read the next one, and the one after that, she kept her breathing even and her face still and she studied, silently, for the remaining forty minutes of the session, while Carl sat across from her and watched clips after clips of videos without acknowledging that she was even present in the room.

At five o'clock, she capped her pencil, gathered her notes, put them in her bag, and stood. She picked up the session record she'd been keeping, a small grid, dates and times, and noted, in the attendance column for Thursday: Present. Late. 0 minutes engaged. She left without saying anything.

Friday was no better, he kept playing explicit clips on his phone and acted like she wasn't even in the room.

Second week.

He came on Monday. Only ten minutes late this time, which Elise clocked and did not comment on. He took the sofa this time, brought out his phone but it stayed face-down on his chest.

Elise was mid-sentence in a quiet recitation of the key points she'd planned to cover, she'd decided, after considerable thought over the weekend, that the most sensible approach was to simply teach as though he were listening, because she had no other tools and she was not going to spend five sessions doing nothing.

She kept talking. Electronegativity trends. Periodic table movement, left to right, the logic of it.

"If the nucleus has more protons," she said, "it pulls the electrons closer. The atomic radius decreases."

Silence, except for her own voice.

"The electronegativity increases because the nucleus is...are you listening?"

"Mm," Carl answered.

Elise stopped to look at him, she hadn't expected him to respond at all. He was still on the sofa, looking at the ceiling, but the phone hadn't moved from his chest and his expression had shifted slightly from not present to something more like distantly present, the way a person looked when they were hearing music from another room and had stopped to decide if they recognized the song.

"Mm as in yes?" she asked.

"Mm as in keep going."

She kept going. She talked about electronegativity for twelve minutes, and she could not have said with certainty that he retained any of it, but he didn't pick up his phone after that. The week went by easier after that.

Third week arrived like any other week. Carl was on time for his lesson on Monday, although he kept interrupting, sometimes grumbling about a totally unrelated subject but it looked like he was finally ready to study, which was a slow progress.

Mathematics was not Carl's problem. That was the first surprise, when Elise pulled out the algebra section of the diagnostic, the one she had privately ranked as the section most likely to expose the widest gaps, because algebra required a kind of sequential logic that students who hadn't been paying attention for two years tended to collapse spectacularly under. Carl had looked at it for approximately forty seconds and then filled in three of the five questions correctly without asking for help.

She had stared at his paper. "You know algebra?" she said.

"Some of it." He shrugged. "My old tutor from two years ago, spent three months on it. Drilled it until I could do it in my sleep." A pause. "I hated him."

"But you retained it."

"Didn't say I didn't." He looked at the remaining two questions with the expression of someone who knew the shape of the answer but not quite the path to it. "These two I'm not sure about."

She walked him through them. He followed without complaint, which was its own kind of surprise.

Polynomials, however, were a different matter. The polynomials worksheet landed in front of him and something in his face shifted, the loose, unbothered composure he wore like a second skin developing a very slight crack at the edges, like a wall that had been dripped on long enough to show a line.

"What is this," he said flatly, it wasn't a question.

"Polynomials. There will be at least three questions on the final."

"This looks like someone spilled the alphabet into a calculator."

"It looks like that until it doesn't." She turned her notebook toward him. "Let's start from the beginning. A polynomial is just an expression..."

"Just." He repeated the word with the particular energy of someone who had decided that suffering should not be silent.

"—with multiple terms. Each term has a coefficient and a variable raised to a power." She pointed to the first example. "This isn't complicated once you see the pattern."

"It's very complicated."

"But..."

"It's extremely complicated, actually. Probably the most complicated thing I've ever seen." He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling with the theatrical desolation of someone performing the death scene in a school play. "I don't understand why I have to know this. When am I going to use polynomials? As an alpha? Will I be solving for x during a territorial dispute?"

"The final exam does not care about territorial disputes."

"I do though."

"Well..." She kept her voice even and patient. She had developed a specific gear for this, not the careful neutral she used when she was genuinely biting her tongue, but something more level than that, almost fond, the way you spoke to someone who was being ridiculous in a way that was somehow not entirely irritating. She wasn't sure when that had happened but she chose not to examine it. "Look at the page."

He looked at the page with enormous reluctance. She began to talk, explaining the expression from left to right, the way she always did, breaking it into its smallest parts first, building the logic piece by piece the way you'd lay out a map so that even someone who'd never been to the territory could find their way. She used the notation she'd developed for students who struggled with abstract variables, grounding each step in something concrete before lifting it back into the symbolic.

She explained the first example. Then the second. She walked through the steps of the third slowly, talking through her reasoning aloud so he could follow the architecture of it.

She was midway through the fourth example, her pencil moving across the paper, her voice settling into the rhythm that came naturally when she was deep in something she understood, when she noticed. The complaining had stopped.

Not gradually, not the way it usually tapered off when Carl reluctantly accepted that a concept wasn't going to leave simply because he resented it, but completely. The running commentary, the sighs, all of it, gone.

She kept talking, drew the next step. The room was very quiet. She glanced up and found Carl was watching her. Not the paper. Not the notebook. Not the worked example she had laid out in careful steps across the page. He was watching her directly, with an attention he had never once in three weeks directed at a worksheet. His eyes were steady and dark and closer than they should have been for someone sitting across a table, and they held something that made her brain register, a half-second too late, that the temperature of the room had shifted in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

She looked back at the page.

"Do you..." Her voice came out slightly wrong. She cleared her throat. "Do you understand the step I just..."

"Say the last part again," he said.

She looked up. He was still watching her. Still with that same expression, intent and unhurried, as though she was something he had only just noticed was in front of him and was now making up for lost time.

Her cheeks went warm. She was aware of it with the specific humiliation of someone who had excellent control over most things and almost no control over this.

"Which part?" she said carefully.

"The part where you were talking."

"I've been talking for ten minutes, which part?"

"Any of it," he said. "Keep going. I'm listening."

She looked at him for a moment. There was nothing in his expression that she had adequate preparation for, not the lazy amusement of the first week, not the careful blankness he used when he was working through a problem he didn't want to be seen struggling with. This was something else. Something without a label in any catalogue she'd built of Carl's behavior.

She looked back at her notebook.

"So... so the key thing to remember is that when you're adding polynomials, you can only combine like terms." Her voice steadied as she found the material again. She knew this; she could always find her footing in the material. "Like terms meaning the same variable, raised to the same power. So x squared and x squared can combine. But x squared and x cannot, because..."

“You’ve got a little freckle right here,” he murmured out of nowhere, tapping the corner of her mouth with the eraser end of a pencil. “Makes me wonder where else you’ve got them.”

Elise’s pen froze mid-sentence. Her mind screamed at her to stand up, pack her bag, march straight to the alpha’s office and report every single inappropriate word. This is harassment. This is abuse of power. This is wrong. But the words never made it past her throat. Instead she swallowed hard, adjusted her glasses with a shaky hand, and kept reading aloud about polynomial long division like her life depended on it.

Carl’s low chuckle rumbled across the table. “You’re so cute when you pretend you don’t hear me, Stray.”

By the fourth evening the teasing had teeth. He arrived earlier, sprawling in the chair opposite her with that lazy, predatory grace only an alpha heir could pull off.

Friday, he brought her a fresh cup of tea, something sweet and floral that smelled expensive and set it down with a wink. “Figured the little omega tutor might need something to calm her nerves. You smell nervous every time I walk in.”

She hated how right he was.

By the end of the third week the flirting had grown bolder still. He no longer waited for her to look up. He would reach over and tuck a stray curl behind her ear while she was mid-explanation, thumb brushing the shell of her ear. Once he traced the edge of her glasses with one finger and murmured, “These make you look like a naughty little librarian. Do you ever take them off?”

"Can we please focus on why we are here?" she had said and Carl raised both hands up in surrender.

"Sure boss, whatever you say."