I glanced at the clock. Twenty-seven more minutes. God help me.
A knock on my door rescued me from dying of boredom. I jumped out of my chair and rushed to the door, throwing it open. There stood my gorgeous earth guy, his short brown hair neatly combed as always. He’d ditched the school uniform for a pair of amazing jeans that hugged him in all the right places, a gray T-shirt straining to cover his enormous shoulders and barrel chest, and when our gazes met, his eyes danced in silent mirth.
“Am I early?”
“No.” I grabbed him and dragged him inside my room. “You’re just in time. Please, let’s go do something.”
“You finished your homework?”
“I haven’t even started my homework,” I countered.
“You said you needed help.”
“We have the entire weekend to do it.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, Katy. Homework first, then we’ll go do something.”
“You are such a buzzkill. Fine,” I groaned into the air. “Can we just do it somewhere other than inside my room?”
“The dorms are practically empty. I bet there’s no one in the common room. How about we move this party downstairs? We’ll have the entire place to ourselves.”
It was either that or the dining hall. I wasn’t hungry and had no desire to walk across campus to the small dining hall we favored. If we weren’t going to go do something fun, I’d much rather pull on my fuzzy-butt PJs and veg out binging on any number of dumb shows over doing homework.
But Bryan was a stickler for the rules. Always had been. Work first, play later. I grabbed my bookbag and slung it over my shoulder. I’d only been a member of Terrae for a few days and already felt more at home than I’d ever felt in any of the other houses. Hanging out in the common room wouldn’t suck. “Lead the way.”
He was right. No one else was in the common room, so we took over and spread out. Bryan wanted it quiet, but I had to have some sort of background noise when I worked or every little noise would break my concentration. Once we settled on a playlist, we got to work.
“Done,” I declared after grueling hours of writing out an assignment I didn’t understand. Who assigned drawings of the elements as homework? Professor Groote and his propensity for assigning homework in the last sixty seconds of class, that’s who.
I rested my hand around my neck, my elbow on the arm of the overstuffed chair, and colored in the ward I’d drawn on my folder while I waited for his assessment. The shape of the ward had come back to me while I finished the assignment. It was so beautiful and unique, it still amazed me that it came from my brain.
Bryan checked my work. “You need to redo the graph of attracting and opposing forces. The entire section is wrong.”
“Because I don’t need to graph it out to know what are attracting and opposing forces.”
“And yet, you got it wrong.”
Fair point. I groaned into the air and accepted the paper, staring at the graph. Who cared about any of this? What did it matter if I couldn’t graph it out? I’d never use it. Just like I’d never use algebra, and yet teacher after teacher had tortured me with A2 plus B2 equals C2 my entire high school career.
“Why would a healer need this crap?” I held it up.
“Ask Syd. He’s got a picture of it hanging in his office. Besides, you’re not a healer yet.”
But I had every intention of becoming one. After healing Leo, and after everything else that’d happened during tribunals, I knew without a doubt what I wanted to do when I graduated from the academy. If Syd had one of these graphs hanging in his office, I’d better figure it out. That motivated me enough to get back to work.
“There,” I said after creating a new graph, spending extra time on my penmanship. If it was right and got me an A on the homework, I’d frame the sucker.
Bryan took the paper and examined my work, nodding before handing it back. “Looks good. Now you can go back and fix the answers you got wrong based on the graph you got wrong.”
“I really hate you right now.”
“You love me.” He pushed off the couch and went to the communal fridge. The academy kept all houses stocked with water to keep the students hydrated and orange juice to replenish our systems after draining our powers during trainings. Or, in my case, after every battle, since I seemed to be a magnet for dark elementals.
My heart palpitated at his words. We hadn’t dropped the L word yet. Rob had been the first to declare it, followed by Clay. Leo would probably never say it, and that was fine. I knew how he felt. Bryan, however, had always been a wild card on whether he’d admit he loved me or keep it to himself like Leo.
He returned with two waters and handed one to me. “You about done?”
“Just finished,” I lied and closed the book, no longer interested in homework. I needed to let loose. Having my mom back and at odds with Stace stressed the bejebus out of me. I wanted the two most important females in my life to get along, dammit. God forbid they grow the hell up and act like civilized adults.
Leo had insisted on completing his final tribunal despite him being a new trio. That was why Clay and Rob had taken him to practice calling his new element, leaving Bryan and me alone to do exciting things like homework. I wondered what it’d take for me to pass my final tribunal. What it’d take for any of us to pass. My most recent test hadn’t been all that
