AN: Well, Edward and Emmett finally meet! I would like to thank all my readers who have followed me up to this point, y'all are my inspiration! A special thanks to Penny who beta'ed this for me. I have a prereader; thanks carrottop81690 for volunteering. I promise I will send you something to preread soon. I put my story on an updating deadline of every five days, but, as a student, I have trouble not waiting until the last minute to do things. Anyway, enjoy chapter 4!
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own anything Twilight. I do, however, own my very perverse imagination!
Chapter 4 – More Problems
EdPOV
I was nervous walking into the math building. I didn't want to be here, tutoring a hot jock. Most gay men would kill to have this opportunity, I thought. Well, I wasn't most gay men. I felt really awkward when the conversation ran dry, and I highly doubted he would be able to talk to me on my level.
I walked into the math lab, and I was upset. He was even more gorgeous than I thought he would be. Jet black hair, eyes so dark blue they haven't invented a color to describe them yet, and a solid body hidden in army fatigues. He was something.
"Hi, Emmett Starr?" I said professionally and politely. He stood up.
"Alice isn't tutoring me today?" He asked.
"Sorry, but she won't be able to continue tutoring right now, I'm taking over for her."
Emmett almost looked sad for a moment, but he sat down anyway. "OK, egghead, teach me what you know."
I frowned at what he said, but I sat down anyway. "OK, so where we at?"
He opened his notebook and showed me a problem he was working on. It was basic graphing.
"OK," I began. "To find the slope of a line you need two points. When you have those, you subtract the y-coordinate from the first point by the y-coordinate of the second point, then divide it by the x-coordinate of the first point subtracted by the x-coordinate of the second point."
"Huh?" He said intelligently.
"OK, let me explain it this way..." I took out a sheet of graph paper and showed him how to work it out. "You see how to do it now?"
"Yeah, I guess so." I could tell he was getting frustrated. He picked up his pencil and found a problem in his book. He came up with the wrong answer.
"Emmett, that's not right." I said, almost apologetically.
He tore the paper out of his notebook and put his head in his hands.
"Don't give up," I said. "I wasn't born with the ability to do this."
"Yeah, but it seems no matter how someone explains it, it never sticks." He was frustrated.
"I have an idea," I said. "I know it'll sound silly, but it's how I learned this rule." I got up and placed three chairs in a triangle shape. He looked at me curiously. "OK, you see that I'm standing at this chair, and that there's a chair directly to my right and one in front of that. I have to make it from this chair here to the one diagonal from me, but I can only move front and back and side to side."
"OK," he said, standing up.
"First, I need to move forward." I counted my steps as I moved forward. "One, two, three, four."
"OK, you took four steps," he summarized.
"Yes, now I can move side to side." I took three steps to my right, finally touching the chair.
"OK, so you just took three steps to the right."
"Yes, so the slope is 4 over 3."
"Really?" His eyes lit up. "I can understand that. But, how do you put it on paper?"
I sat back down. "Well, you can only walk across the lines." I grabbed his hand and traced his finger from one point to another. "Like that."
"Holy shit, I think I get it!" He said happily.
"I'm glad you do," I said, and we both looked at my hand grabbing his. I let go.
"When can you tutor me again?" He asked.
I lead him outside into the Hallway. The tiled floor looked like a huge piece of graph paper. I put my keys on one intersection of tiles and my wallet on another intersection. "OK Emmett, walk from my keys to my wallet, and count your steps."
He did like I asked, and came up with the right answer.
"HELL YEAH!" He yelled.
"Very good," I said proudly, "Now, lets try this again..."
I put my keys and wallet in a different place, and I prompted him to walk. He took one step when we heard a voice call to Emmett from down the hall.
"Yo, Emm, whatcha doin'?" His friend called.
Emmett turned around, surprised. "I'm getting tutored, Mike," he admitted.
"Well, whatcha learnin?" Mike asked.
"Emmett turned from him to face me. "Slope," he admitted.
"Slope's easy, man," Mike heckled, and Emmett's face turned red, "I'll tell ya all about it at the gym. You comin'?"
Emmett began to walk away, "Thanks for the lesson, Ed," he mumbled, then he was gone.
AN: Thanks for reading! Please stay tuned for Chapter 5, in which I have dedicated in memorial to the mass of teens committing suicide due to gay bullying. IT GETS BETTER!
