The library was particularly crowded. It always was on rainy days. She had to clear her throat twice.
"Oh, um, Hi."
His glasses always chose the most inopportune moments to slip down his nose. He needn't have been embarrassed. The pretty red-head never looked up from her sneakers.
"Sorry to, uh, bother you" Grace felt yet another blush coming on. It was bad enough she had to ask for math help. The fact that she needed it from Wayne Rigsby only made things worse.
"No, no. You weren't bothering me." A little too loud, a little too hasty.
That blush crept free from her tenuous hold and paraded itself on her porcelain cheeks. To compensate, she kept her eyes glued to the blue carpet.
Grace never had a problem speaking to boys. In fact, they were much easier to converse with than members of her own sex. But Wayne wasn't just a boy. He was a male person.
Distinct from the other thumping Gorillas that prowled around town, Grace had never spoken one word to Wayne Rigsby. Preferring to look from a safe distance, she kept to her world and he kept to his. Clear. Uncomplicated. Separate sides of the tracks.
Everything in its place.
"Good. That's good. I was wondering if I could, uh, ask you for a favor." He watched her long fingers twine like ten pearly, nervous, octopus tentacles around and around each other,
"I mean, I know we aren't exactly friends or anything and I have no right asking you for favors, and I don't normally do this kind of thing so I have no idea how it's supposed to work, but I'm kinda falling a little behind in math and they said I should get a tutor, and, well you're really the only person I could think of because you're in AP and aren't a jack-ass like the other people in your class... Well, what I mean to say is that it would really be good if you could be my math. Um, my math tutor, that is. Because I really need one." The end fell flatly to both sets of ears. She smiled; a half-hearted attempt at recovery.
Wayne could only blink at the pretty, babbling princess who looked better up close than she did in his imagination.
She had him at Sorry.