For the past thirty minutes, I watched him browse Rich Kids of Instagram, a site that I boycott and find generally revolting. I nudge him to help me twice, and he points to my book. “Do another problem,” he says without peeling his eyes from his phone.

I miss the days where Connor Cobalt gave me a hundred-and-ten percent of his tutoring attention, even going as far as making me flashcards.

Sebastian Ross may just be the worst tutor alive.

He invades my personal space for a second, and I think he may actually be showing me how to do a Statistics problem.

He sticks his phone beneath my nose. “Whose watch do you like better?” He extends his wrist and holds it by the screen, the band gold and the gadgetry so complex that my eyes hurt. The one in the picture is no simpler. A teenager stands outside his gray-bricked mansion, wrists displayed like he’s preparing to box.

“Neither.”

“Amuse me.”

Amuse him? How about amuse me! I’m the one who should be entertained by numbers and words. Connor would know how to make studying fun.

I try not to glare. “I like my watch.”

Sebastian’s one eyebrow arches, so smarmy and elitist that I have to give him props for mastering the technique. He snatches my wrist to inspect the device. He huffs. “You’re wearing a toy.” He flicks the plastic cap, nearly causing the hands of the clock to stop.

“Hey,” I say, retracting my arm and clutching my wrist to my chest. “That’s Wolverine, you know.” The yellow and blue band buckles on my bony wrist, and the X-Men hero is printed inside the watch-face.

He looks mildly interested now. “Is it a collectible?”

“…maybe.”

He restrains the urge to roll his eyes. “Where’d you get it?” he asks. “The kid’s section in Target?”

My cheeks redden even though they shouldn’t. “No,” I retort. “Lo won it from a vending machine. You know, the ones where you put a quarter in and it drops out the little egg thing.” We had a seventy-five percent chance to get either Superman or Batman, so when Wolverine popped out, it seemed like fate. We were easily entertained.

Sebastian grimaces. He has a pretty good stink-face too. “You touched those things?” He returns to his phone, scrolling. “Sometimes I wonder how you’re related to your sister.”

Sometimes I wonder why she’s friends with you.

I would exchange Sebastian for a better model, but not when Rose asked him, her best friend, to tutor me. Before Connor came into the picture, Sebastian escorted Rose to every social function, her go-to arm candy.

He leans back on the couch, wearing khaki slacks, a blazer and glasses with wide frames and thin rims. I have a suspicion that he’s someone who only wears glasses for show, not function. And his honey blond hair is slicked neatly and parted on the side, groomed and styled.

Even if he didn’t take the time to look good, Sebastian is the kind of person that was born to be pretty.

Normally I’d be tempted. But I have Loren Hale.

And Sebastian is gay. So there’s that.

When he snorts out loud, I catch a glimpse of his cell. There’s a picture of a guy sitting in a hot tub on a million-dollar yacht, surrounded by expensive bottles of champagne.

Now I roll my eyes. I really want to grab the phone from his hand and chuck it across the room. “Have you even taken Stat?” I ask.

“Stats.”

“What?”

“It’s called Stasticsssss,” he says, hissing the “s” for further emphasis. “Not Statistic.” His gaze stays fixated on that stupid phone.

“Have you taken Statsssss,” I hiss back.

“Yes, it’s an under level requirement for business majors at Princeton,” he says sharply. “Obviously Penn has different standards.”

Being insulted by my tutor isn’t a new thing for me, but I’m not taking his jabs easily. Maybe because he seems more interested in pictures of rich kids showing off their Ferraris and guzzling liquor.

“You know, Rose claimed that you’re some kind of hot-shot tutor on campus—that you even have a waiting list,” I snap.

“I am. And I do.”

“People actually pay you to ignore them?” I shut my book. I’ve known Sebastian since I was ten, but I spent more time at the Hale residence than my own, so know is really up for debate. He has always been into appearances, especially clothes (which as a fashion designer, Rose values in a friend), and his ostentatiousness is nothing new.

But I didn’t know he was such a raging dick.

He’s actually looking at me this time. “They pay me for other things.”

Like sexual things? I frown. No, that can’t be right.

Can it?

He sees my brows scrunch in confusion.

“I do have a waiting list,” he says, “but not for tutoring.”

That clarifies nothing. A naked Sebastian pops in my head, getting propositioned for sex like a gigolo. I withhold the urge to ask if he’s a hooker. Although it’s there, threatening to be blurted out.

“Then…what?” I mumble. Wow, that took a lot of self-control.

His leg drops from his knee and he leans forward to grab his leather briefcase. What if he sells sex toys? Okay, doubtful, but he would jump up ten points in likability for me.

He pulls something heavy out and sets it on my textbook before zipping his briefcase closed.

These aren’t dildos or vibrators or Ben Wa balls.

It’s paper. Stacks of stapled paper with red markings along the margin.

They’re old exams.

This is one of those moments where someone hands you a joint and you have to make a choice to either pass it on or take a puff.

“Isn’t this cheating?” I ask, not touching the papers on my lap. Fingering one may just corrupt me.

Sebastian slides a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slaps the carton on his palm. “Don’t scribble the answers on your hand,” he says. “Memorize them. That can’t be too difficult for you, can it?”

He twirls a cigarette between two fingers.

“Rose won’t like it if you smoke in here.”

Sebastian arches that one brow again and gives me a look like I know Rose better than you. He lights the cigarette.

Fine. Rose will do a better job reprimanding him anyway. I flip through the old exams, most of them marked up with A’s. “What if the questions are different?”

“You have Dr. Harris,” Sebastian says. “He always recycles questions from tests. Just be sure to memorize all of them.”

I thumb through the stack. “There must be fifty exams in here.” How can I memorize all of them?

“They date back ten years. So yeah, there’s a lot.”

I hesitate to use them as a study tool, even though it’s not outright cheating. “And you can’t actually tutor me?”

He blows a line of smoke towards the ceiling. “You didn’t just sort-of fail your first two exams, Lily. You bombed. Most students would be crying in a corner, and if they had me as a resource, they’d be riding my—”

“Okay,” I cut him off. And then realize that sounds like I actually want to ride his… “I mean, never mind.” I shake my head, roasting from the forehead down.

He wears a crooked smile as he puts the cig to his lips. “To pass the class, you have to make A’s on the last two tests and the final. I’m not a miracle worker.”

“Connor Cobalt is,” I mutter under my breath.

He must hear because he says, “Connor thinks he pisses rainbows, but he’s not that good. And he’s definitely not better than me.” He leans forward and taps ash in my plastic cup—full with Fizz Life, Fizzle’s new soda, zero calories and no aspartame. I stare at the soiled drink for a long while, trying to process what he just did.

But when I turn, I see him tapping more ash into the porcelain vase on the end table that a friend of Rose’s gifted her from Prague. “Rose is going to skin you alive.”

He smiles that smarmy smile again. “She’s all growl.”