Kaede endured an hour of tutorial sessions for the next two days. He said nothing, did nothing and responded to nothing. He just tried to stay awake to have her satisfied so he can be escorted to the gym. The past three days were testament to his failing strategy: she was not pleased and she did not escort him.
It's stupid, he felt like a kindergartener that needs to be taken to school and these sessions are a complete waste of time. But Riyota, Gori and Ayako had been very firm in the decision and he could find no way to circumvent their new system. Kaede realized he needed to approach this differently and it had to be on the other side of the spectrum: he had to come up with something to coerce Sakura to escort him. Yelling and force wouldn't do it, he's tried that on the second day and she was stubborn as a mule. Perhaps if he did the opposite?
She had been in the middle of talking about the basic number properties of Math when Kaede gulped and finally moved his chair closer to her and scooted over. She took notice of this and waited for him to be comfortable before continuing. His arm rested on the back of her chair and leaned closer to her to get a good look at the equations she wrote down.
"Associative property always has parentheses. And, as you can see, the numbers in commutative property are all the same, just arranged differently." Sakura said. She looked pleased when she saw that Kaede was really paying attention, he's been staring at the page for a good few minutes now and she could see the muscles in his jaw twitch and tighten. It dawned on her that he was really close when she noticed the small stubble of teenage facial hair on his jaw and the way he smelled of sandalwood.
A bright pink tinge crept up to her cheeks and she quickly turned away.
Kaede cleared his throat and shoved the pad slightly away from him, "I'm not really interested in these numbers." Perplexed, she turned to him. Confused gray met intense blue, and for a moment she trembled at the fire in his eyes. "I'm only interested in yours."
It took a while for her to process what he was saying. She avoided his gaze and huffed, "It's in the card I gave you. But you may only use it on strictly business matters."
Kaede smacked his head, "Oh right. How obtuse of me!" He looked at her and smiled, "But you are really being acute-y." His eyes were so intense that for a moment a warmth went through her and then she snapped out of it, "All right, stop it with the lame Math lines. What are you doing?" She twisted her upper body to face him straight.
"Look, you don't have to do this to catch my attention." Kaede spoke calmly, the smile was still on his face. "Escort me to the gym, Ishihara-san. Do this for me, and maybe I could do something for you." His face looked really smug and Sakura was left confused at what he was up to. A "Huh?" was all she could muster.
"You're good in Math, right?" He strokes her arm, "Maybe one plus one could be two and then we can add a bed, subtract clothes and you and I can—"
SLAP!
"Do not liken me to your posse of bimbos, you giant asshole!" She seethed, her entire body trembled with anger. She moved too quickly, in grabbing her stuff and walking out before Kaede could even recover from the shock of the slap. When he came to, he rubbed his cheek and cursed under his breath.
-o-o-o-o-o-
Meanwhile at the gym, Ayako kept checking her watch. End of the session and he's still not here for the fourth time.
Riyota and Akagi were standing by the water fountain with the newly arrived, Hanamichi, when she approached them. "For the fourth time, no Rukawa again today. I'm getting worried."
"The fourth time, he's probably just sleeping through it all! Or just too baka to get it! NYAHAHA!" Hanamichi laughed as if it was something so amusing.
Riyota cocked an eyebrow, "Well, if I recall correctly, you've only just gotten in here today because you were too baka to get it yesterday and the day before that."
Hanamichi erupted in a string of silly antics at the remark which went completely ignored by the trio. "What are you worried about?" Akagi asked and she checked her watch again, "Well, that we might have stuck him with someone with too high standards."
Riyota scratched his chin, he had decided to grow a scruff for his senior year. "She does have a reputation for being such a perfectionist."
Like a mother, Ayako's brow furrowed in concern, "Yesterday, I overheard some juniors talk about the way she has awesome leadership skills but that she makes them work too hard. She doesn't stoop for anything less. I'm worried that Rukawa and her might not mesh well."
Akagi crossed his arms and turned to look at the practicing team, "No. Give it time. She will be good for him. He needs to be pushed or pulled up and she is exactly the person for the job."
-o-o-o-o-o-
"What do you mean you walked out?!" Riyota screamed and a few students in the hall turned to look. Like parents in a parent-teacher meeting, He and Ayako had sought Sakura out from her classroom to ask for updates on Rukawa's progress. She bluntly told them she'd walked out and that she wasn't teaching him anymore.
"Why? Didn't you say, when you agreed to do this, that you were excited at the prospect of helping someone get better in school?" Riyota said. Sakura breathed, "I did. But Rukawa-kun had insulted me and-"
"WHAT DID HE SAY?!" Sakura stared at the deep line on Riyota's forehead as he seethed and gritted his teeth. "He said some nasty things..." She said in a whisper. It was rather embarrassing to repeat what happened out loud.
"It's Rukawa. Nasty words are his nature." Ayako patted Sakura's shoulder and laughed nervously. "Is it? The things he said...there were some very inappropriate implications that I really did not appreciate." Sakura whispered even softer than before.
Ayako and Riyota looked both in shock and confused at the same time. "You...you don't mean...you don't mean he..."
Sakura only blushed. It was too embarrassing to speak of it. It was a good thing Ayako got the hint, "That jerk! Saying inappropriate things to a lady!"
Sakura straightened up and composed herself, "Anyway, Miyagi-sempai, I did say I wanted to help Rukawa-kun raise his grades. But he doesn't listen, he doesn't even try, he does nothing. I can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped and who wouldn't help themselves. Ja ne, I'll see you both around." She turned to walk back in her classroom.
Just like parents, Riyota and Ayako headed down to Junior class, Section 10 next to speak with their "child". He came out groggily but Ayako was quick to push his tall form against the wall—for a girl of five feet, four inches, she was strong...and scary—"What did you say to her?!" That was enough to wake him from his sleepy state.
Kaede pushed her arm away and angrily spoke, "Nothing. I just offered her something I thought she would fall for." He turned away to look at nothing down the hall. He'd been feeling very bad about disrespecting her.
Ayako gasped, "It's worse than I thought." Riyota cocked his eyebrow, "Is it something completely inappropriate between tutor and tutee?" he inquired, and Kaede couldn't tell if he was genuinely concerned or if he was just a curious, fantasizing perv. Sure enough, Ayako nudged him on the rib and whispered that he didn't need the details, and he retorted that she was the first one to ask.
"Well," Riyota cleared his throat, "We are not changing our policy, and she's the only one good in Math who can actually teach you rather than ogle you so you better apologize to her."
Kaede thought about it for a second and realized that would be too much for his ego. There was no way he was humbling himself down for offending some girl, "No, I won't." He stated without looking at them.
"No basketball for you then." Riyota smirked and Kaede frowned and glared at him, "We have a game on Sunday."
"Well, apologize to her. Until then, you will not be welcomed into the team." He walked away with his girlfriend with an annoying, proud, victorious smirk on his face. Oh, how Kaede wanted to punch him.
-o-o-o-o-o-
Before bed that night, Kaede found the business card she'd given him. It was designed like graphing paper—a grid of green lines, her title of Class President under her name, her home address, phone number, email address, and a panda sticker was stuck on the upper right hand corner. Kaede stared at it as he lay in bed. The stupid policy will not change. The girl is my only choice. Do I apologize? Should I apologize? Could I apologize?
...He groaned and threw the card on his side table, resigning to a greater love for basketball than his own pride.
-o-o-o-o-o-
It was a Saturday the next day. Normally, he spent it playing basketball at the court behind his apartment building. But today, he found himself standing in front of the Ishihara residence. It was an average Japanese home, though it was smaller than the house he grew up in. Brick pillars flanked an iron gate and there wasn't much of a front yard, but it was made pretty with a blooming Cherry tree in front and Tulips lined the path to the entrance.
He spun the basketball in his hand several times, before he was finally able to talk himself into just ringing the doorbell. Sakura opened the door a few moments later. He realized just how weird it was to have come to her home. Coming here gave him details about her that was too intimate for mere acquaintances to know—that she clips her bangs up and wears her hair in a messy braid at home, that she has panda slippers and wears reading glasses, that she likes to doodle mathematical equations on her leg with colored pens, and that her collarbones look really nice...and that she owned a thin yellow shirt, and wears a black bra under said shirt. Kaede tried to focus on her face upon noticing this. It would do no good to his apology if she still thinks him a voyeur.
"Ishihara-san," It was the first time he'd properly addressed her. Sakura went back inside to slip on some shoes then she closed the door behind her and approached the gate, though she did not open it or welcome him in. She just looked at him with her arms crossed over her chest, waiting for him to speak.
Kaede bowed slightly, "I offended you the other day..." He struggled to get the words out of his mouth, "I want to apologize." Finally. "It was disrespectful and...shit. Full of shit." It was the first time he'd done or said anything like that...it was the first time he'd been around a teenage girl for very long and he wasn't sure how to approach the situation...He'd seen it on TV. It was a desperate move to get what you want. But that doesn't excuse the douchebaggery. "It will not happen again and I hope that you would still tutor me." It was a lame apology, but he kept his head low, like a respectful Japanese person, hoping that she would not doubt its sincerity. This had been the first time in a long time that he'd thought about properly adhering to Japanese customs.
Sakura said nothing and he feared the possibility of her making him try harder to win her back. But then he heard the creak of the gate and when he looked up she took the basketball from his hand, "Then, let's go." She smiled and started walking towards the park.
That's it?
"Where are you going?" he called after her. "To tutor you, of course!" Kaede had no clue what she was up to, but he followed suit. He watched her walking ahead of him, bouncing the ball on the pavement and glancing back occasionally to smile at him. She pointed to the caged outdoor basketball court by the beach, "Great, there's nobody here."
For a few hours that afternoon, she used basketball to illustrate geometry and trigonometry to him: triangles, angles, the Pythagorean Theorem. Every time he answered her questions correctly, he made a shot. He found himself learning, retaining the lessons easily. After two hours, with the sun setting, she stopped talking and Kaede was mumbling to himself, moving around the court as he tried to recall the lesson.
"Hypotenuse, line that connects the two ends of a right angle." He said and made a shot from the three-point line. It went in. Sakura clapped before receiving the ball that bounced towards her. She made a perfect one-hand shot from between the three-point and two-point lines and scored.
Kaede looked at her with surprise, curiosity and confusion. She smirked, "I know other things besides, Math, Rukawa-kun."
