Chapter 2
I met Harrison during my freshman year of high school. He was my tutor. I was a
nightmare.
Not an academic nightmare. My grades were someone else’s problem, and that
someone happened to be my parents, who had burned through every tutor in the city
trying to rescue my GPA.
I did not see why studying should eat into my free time, so I made every last one of them
quit.
Harrison was the last one standing.
The day he showed up, I had just shredded every worksheet on my desk and was in the
middle of a screaming match with my parents. Then Harrison walked in.
I froze mid-tantrum. It took a full second for the embarrassment to hit me. A very
attractive stranger had just watched me completely lose it.
Embarrassed or not, I still had no intention of opening a textbook.
Harrison barely looked at me. He turned to my parents, his voice calm. “I’ve got this.”
Excuse me, who even are you? But whatever authority he radiated, my parents bought
They left without a fight. They just handed me over like I was his problem now.
Obviously, I was not going down without a fight. I pulled out every half-baked move I
had ever picked up from TV, fully intending to scare him off.
It took him about four seconds to have me pinned to the desk.
I glared up at him, fully committed to the idea that TV martial arts were a total scam. It
had nothing to do with him being stronger. Nothing.
I braced myself for the lecture, the condescending rundown about why I needed to try
harder, be better, stop wasting everyone’s time. Instead, he just asked,
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“Why don’t you want to study?”
No judgment in his voice. No agenda on his face.
He was not mocking me. He was not trying to scare me into behaving. He was just
asking, like I was a person with a reason, not a problem to solve.
Something tight in my chest let go, and the words came spilling out before I could stop
them.
“I don’t want to spend every second of my life studying. Is that really so terrible? Since high school started, it has been nonstop, like I’m not even allowed to breathe.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.” I crossed my arms. What else could there be?
Harrison slid a workbook across the desk. “Raise your grades, and you will not have to study around the clock. Better grades, more free time. Simple.”
I scoffed and looked away.
I caught the ghost of a smile before he said,
“That’s fine. Let’s just go through these together.”
Maybe it was because he did not talk down to me. Whatever it was, I actually listened,
and kept listening longer than I had ever sat still for anyone else.
I found out later that my parents were paying him a thousand dollars per session.
Hazard pay, basically, for putting up with me.
That made my stomach drop. We had money, sure, but not the kind where you casually
drop a grand on a teenager. My parents had officially lost their minds.
So I tried a different angle.
“You’re actually really good at this. Like, way better than the others. It’s just… a
thousand dollars a session? I don’t know how many more of these my parents can
swing.”
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Harrison smiled.
“I won’t charge you after today.”
“For free?”
“For free.”
What I did not know then was that Harrison was barely keeping his head above water. Every dollar he earned already had somewhere to go.
His dad was a degenerate gambler who had bailed and left Harrison and his mother buried in debt. His mother got sick on top of that, and every cent he scraped together went straight to medical bills.
Still, he stopped charging me.
Back then, I was so sure it meant he liked me.
Now, I wondered if he had spent all these years wishing I would just let him work.
It tracked. Over the years, he had canceled meetings, rearranged his entire schedule, reworked deals, all because I wanted him to give me his undivided attention. He bought me a cruise ship for my birthday this year. An entire ship.
But he hadn’t always been this powerful. He used to have absolutely nothing. So why did my love only become a burden when he finally had the world at his feet?
