Shen Yu was the graduate teaching assistant for our major, twenty-four years old, and he taught our sophomore core course. He was cool and aloof, a man of few words, and when he explained a problem his logic was clear as a blade. Every girl in the department had a secret crush on him — including me. Including me, the one who failed her exam because she spent every class staring at him.
When the midterm results came out, he kept me behind. The classroom was empty, the sunset slanting in, just the two of us. “Do you know why you failed?” He pushed my catastrophic exam paper across to me. I lowered my head and did not dare speak. Suddenly he leaned down, one hand braced on my desk, sealing me inside his shadow. “Because in class, you kept looking at me, and not at the blackboard.”
My face went up in flames. The mortification of being seen through, and his breath so close, left my mind a total blank. “Tutoring,” he cut in, his cool voice betraying nothing. “Starting today, every day after school, this classroom, I will tutor you.” He straightened up, towering over me. “Any objections?” I shook my head so fast it blurred. That shameful little flutter in my chest was even greater than the humiliation of failing.
“First lesson.” He dragged over a chair and sat down beside me, close enough that I could smell the faint scent of ink. “This problem — I will teach it to you three times.” He took hold of the hand I wrote with and worked through the calculation step by step on the scratch paper. His hand was very cool, the knuckles sharply defined. I stared at that hand and, once again, took in not a single word. “You are drifting,” he said suddenly, stopping and tilting his head toward me, the corner of his mouth curving almost imperceptibly. “Drift again, and I will punish you a different way.”