Tayla let herself get lost in the background at this new school. She always sat in the back because she didn't like it when people sat behind her where she couldn't see them. The other kids didn't like her, and she didn't need the Force to know that. They peeked at her, and they whispered to each other, and they peeked at her again, and they would giggle. In the few weeks she'd been in this place with these strange kids and these stranger teachers, Tayla grew angrier and angrier that she wasn't welcome.
It was like her world flipped upside down in that respect, because now she liked it when school was over and she could go home. Before, she would stroll home empty handed, hang out with some friends on the street, boost something that looked fun or yummy, and avoid wandering home to the whore house until hunger or exhaustion or boredom won out. Her mom was usually working by the time she got there, and would work into the early morning hours long after Tayla put herself to bed. Hanging out with one of the ladies who didn't have a customer that night was her only adult guidance, and any attention she got was often cut short when a customer did come in and decided Tayla's company was the one he wanted. For years, school was a safe escape.
Now, school sucked and home was the safe escape. Now she had a heavy backpack to haul home on public transit, preventing any easy means to run if she tried to boost something. She had no one to hang out with and kill some time... unless she went home.
She avoided Nik because he was a grown up man who didn't go to whore houses, and his wife was a half a galaxy away, so Tayla didn't understand why he wasn't pawing her all the time. Eventually, she realized all he ever tried to talk to her about was if she ate, and if she hadn't, what she wanted to eat. More days than not, he paused by the dining table to peek at her staring at her homework and offer some help, but she always turned him down with a guarded eye. The man always seemed to receive her decline lightly and strolled away. It was almost as if he didn't have any ulterior motives, but that didn't make any sense! When grown men wanted to help, it was because grown men wanted something. And Tayla figured it out quickly that Luke never offered because he had Kess to get what he wanted, so Luke didn't need Tayla for his man business. But this Nik guy... it just didn't add up.
Today, Tayla thought about all that during her classes, and hauled her backpack home on transit thinking about it more. When the subway stopped at her usual stop and her green eyes traveled out to what had become a familiar walk to go to her new home, she picked up her backpack with a split decision.
I don't want to go to the dead garden today. She thought loudly. I'll do it tomorrow, okay?
The nice man in her head didn't answer. And she didn't feel any disappointment or anger coming from some hidden corner of her soul either. (He was never disappointed or angry with her anyway, so that wasn't surprising.) She didn't know if he heard her, but he didn't argue with her, so she took that as permission to do her own thing today.
Tayla came up the elevator and loud music was beating the air in the apartment. Nik came out of the kitchen half-dancing, bobbing his head, and smiling to mouth the words of the song. Tayla looked at him like he was crazy.
"I'm trying to distract myself," he finally smiled as he turned back to the kitchen. "You want me to turn it down so you can stare at your homework better?"
Suddenly angry, Tayla dumped the heavy backpack on a dining chair and argued, "I don't just stare at it. I do it."
The music lowered to a background volume and Nik wandered out nibbling on a cookie. "Whatever you say." His eyes smiled. Clearly, he didn't believe her at all, but he wasn't going to argue with her about it either.
"I do it!" She demanded.
He shrugged. "I'm not saying you don't."
"But you're thinking it," she spat and slumped down in the dining chair. She stared at that stuffed backpack and worried about all the work in it.
"You don't know what I'm thinking." Nik chuckled and turned back to the kitchen.
Yes, I do. Tayla thought. You're a grown up man. I know exactly what you're thinking. But she didn't say anything about it, because she knew he'd just deny it anyway. She pulled out the datapads of her work and tried to figure out which subject she'd stare at first.
Nik came back out with a plate of cookies and set them on the dining table in front of her. "Have a cookie."
Untrusting, her eyes shifted up to stare at him. He wouldn't offer something like this if he didn't want something for it.
Nik sat down opposite her at the table, both of them using the last chairs on one side because all those untouched piles of Jedi Academy notes stacked in semi-organized piles on the other. Tayla's green eyebrows knitted in the middle of her dark face. "What do you want?"
But the man's eyes were tilted to read the titles of her different homework, flicking only to look at her when the untrusting ice in her voice cut across the table at him.
"You want the real truth?"
Tayla crossed her arms tightly at her chest and gave him a hard look.
Nik looked her in the eye with honesty. "I want to find something to distract myself so I don't have a drink."
Tayla blinked back.
"And that's the honest truth."
"I can't help you." Tayla spat and sat up to her homework again.
"Sure you can," Nik murmured and started picking up a datacard. "You can teach me what I'm going to need to teach Ben in a couple of years."
It was just a ploy. She huffed and hissed it into the open. "I'm not going to have sex with you! Leave me alone!"
Nik blinked back and rattled his head. His mouth hung open, his brown eyes bulged wide, and humorous surprise filled his face. "Well, good! Cuz I'm not going to have sex with you either!" He snickered briefly and added an adolescent shout. "So there!"
Tayla didn't understand his reaction.
Nik's eyes shined. His volume dropped to conversational, and his grin flashed from time to time at how silly it was to let her down easy. "Look, Tayla, you're a fine looking woman and all, but I'm married, and your eleven. So I'm sorry, baby, it's just not going to happen."
He was talking like she had offered it? The girl didn't know how to fight back to that.
"Honest!" Nik pronounced and brought one of her datacards in front of himself. "I'm just trying not to have a drink." He plugged it into a pad and turned it on. "I don't understand Artoo and Eye-D bores the crap out of me. You're the only one in the house to talk to."
So, maybe he did want something for the cookies?
"Ooh! Algebra." He peeped. "I think I remember this." He picked up a cipher...
Tayla shot out of her chair and came around the table to snatch it from him. "Don't do my homework for me! I'll get in trouble!"
His hand held it away from her reach and his grinning brown eye peeked at her over his shoulder. "Would that be 'more' trouble or 'less' trouble than not doing it at all?"
Her face scrunched.
"I'm just curious," he smiled.
Not sure how to debate that, she huffed through her nose.
Nik smiled and handed over the datapad of algebra. Once she took it, he pushed up from the table and stepped away, leaving the plate of cookies. "At least eat the cookies so they don't go to waste. It's good homework fuel, yknow." Tayla stood dumbfounded when he strolled away across the living room and disappeared into his bedroom, leaving the door open.
Tayla sat down. Maybe she should have tried to find the dead garden today after all. But she didn't want to be alone. Even if he was out of sight in a far corner of the apartment, she knew she wasn't alone. She set aside the history she was going to start with and instead looked at the algebra.
She looked at it a long time.
And then she got up and took it to the back of the house.
The grown man sat on the floor of his bedroom, his back to an empty wall, his elbows on his bent knees, and wrung his hands with stress. His eyes flicked when she appeared in the doorway.
Tayla licked her lips. She looked at her datapad. She shifted on her feet. She angled her head. Her voice was uncertain. "You promise you're not gonna-" she swallowed hard. "You promise you won't-" She wasn't even sure what to call it all.
Nik shifted his seat to look her directly in the eyes. "Tayla, not all grown men want that from you."
She swallowed hard.
"In fact, most of them don't," he added. "You've just been surrounded your whole life by the few creeps that do."
She struggled with her words and looked at her homework, finally admitting. "There's more than a few."
Nik pressed his mouth with reluctant sympathy and nodded understanding. Then he looked her in the eye again, and raised his palms in a swear. "I promise," and he smiled humorous again, "and if it makes you feel better, you're about twenty years too young for my type anyway."
"So why did you want to help me?"
"I'm a father, Tayla," he smiled at his ease of it. "This is what I do. I'd be helping Ben if he were here. But he isn't." He shrugged. "Besides, we're both Jedi Apprentices, right? You've got stuff you can teach me. I've got stuff I can teach you. No reason to make Luke and Kess do all the hard labor on us."
"What could I teach you?"
Nik shrugged again, "For one thing, you can teach me how to help Ben with his algebra when he gets into eleventh level."
She looked at her homework again, considering.
Nik still hadn't gotten up. He still hadn't reached for her. And everything he said sounded genuine, especially this, "I could really use the help."
Tayla conceded with a high nose of confidence. "Okay, I'll help you. But if you lay one finger on me, I'm going to sneak into your room at night and pour a bucket of fire ants in your bed."
Nik tried not to look humored by that. He tried to nod with deep severity and a little bit of fear. "I think that's a fair trade."
Giving her a lot of space, Nik climbed back to his feet and walked back to the dining table with her. He sat down in the chair next to hers because he would have to look over his shoulder, but he made sure his hands stayed on the table top or on his own knee. He took great care he didn't even bump into her with his elbow. Tayla picked up a cipher and scrunched a broken hearted face at the algebra, "If this is math, why are there letters in it?"
"Ah ha! Let me show you." Grinning softly, he pulled the algebra homework away from her hands and looked over the table for an empty card he could use for scratch work. She had nothing of the sort in her collection, so he leaned toward the other end of the table to see if any blanks were amongst the Jedi Homework. He found one, but his eyes snagged curiously on the titles of the others.
Kindly, patiently, and keeping his hands far away from her person, Nik began with the basics. Aurek equals 4, helping her visualize that aurek was maybe some apples. "So, how many apples?"
"Four?"
"Right." So he sketched more onto the screen. "So let's say, you have all these apples over here, and I don't how many there are, because you've got them hiding behind your back or something. But I see you throw away two of them. So how do I figure out how many apples you have behind your back...?" He broke it down in smaller bits, eventually talking about a bag of apples because she complained she couldn't hold that many apples at once, and instead of "doing algebra" they talked about logical ways he could figure out the number of apples in the sack with other available data.
Nik recognized the real problem right away: Tayla missed large pieces of her first few formal years of education. She didn't have the basics on which to build all this eleven level stuff. So he gave her the kinds of problems that Ben was probably having to do right now. Each time, he gave her plenty of time to sort out the new puzzle in her head and sat back with patience, during which his curious eyes drifted back towards the Academy clutter at the other end of the table.
Once someone took the time to explain the basics, Tayla picked it up quickly and grew excited that she could solve these simple problems by herself. When she paused, and he tried to explain, she snapped at him to wait a minute because, "I can do it myself!" So Nik shrugged and sat back again... and his eyes drifted until he leaned over to peek again at the titles at the other end of the table.
Within a half an hour, Tayla was working on her actual homework, and Nik brought over a few curious titles about wind power and solar power. Standing by to answer questions that frequently popped up, he spent the dead time browsing the brochures of overwhelmingly large power facilities.
"Good lord, how many students do they think they're going to fit in twenty klicks of land."
Tayla tried to peek over. "Whatchyou lookin at?"
Nik scrunched a face at this stuff. "Their Academy construction stuff... You work on that. Let me work on this." He sat up and brought over another blank and cipher. "Later, we can check each other's homework. Deal?"
"Okay," she nodded, and then she grinned shyly. "Do cookies really help you with your homework?"
"Absolutely!" He declared, looking at her like she was crazy for thinking otherwise. He grabbed two cookies, handed her one, and ate the other. "But I won't make them again unless you let me help you with your homework."
Tayla tried to smile secretly as she chewed on the cookie. This was the best con she ever pulled off. Her feet swung free under the chair as she turned her attentions to the next problem.
Nik peeked at her out of the corner of his eye, hid a smirk of success, and sat back to consider a totally different puzzle as he chewed on his cookie. In seconds, he began to sketch an entirely different power facility and grinned to realize that cookies do indeed make the best homework fuel.