Page 1 of Spoonful

Chapter 1

“You look like shit,” Aditi said in greeting when Jaylin finally stumbled into their designated study room in the library. She pushed up the frames of her gold-rimmed glasses with one hand, the other still flying over the keys of her laptop. “And you’re late.”

“Sorry,” Jaylin mumbled, hunching his shoulders. He hated being late and he knew he didn't look good. He’d just been so exhausted from last night that he’d managed to sleep through his alarm. Scrambling to get ready so he could catch the bus for his Saturday morning tutoring session meant that he hadn’t had time to condition and define his springy black curls, and coupled with the dry winter air his hair had turned into a frizzy mess. He also knew he had bags under his eyes, weary down to his bones.

Having Aditi point this all out made him feel even worse than he already did. He liked Aditi and he really, really appreciated that she had decided he was worth tutoring, but when you’re twenty-one and struggling in college, having a teenage prodigy tell you that you’ve wasted their time sucked on a number of levels.

“I mean, it isn’t like it’s a big deal,” Aditi said hurriedly. For all that she was blunt to the point of painful sometimes, Aditi’s heart was in the right place. She waved at her laptop. “I was just coding. Not like it makes a difference where I code.”

“Still, I’m sorry.” Jaylin shrugged off his backpack and fell into the chair next to Aditi, and the movement sort of made his head spin. Fuck, he was so tired. “It’s not right to make you wait on me.”

“Whatever.” Aditi shrugged, clearly done with the conversation. “Let’s get down to business.”

They got through most of an entire set of problems without trouble, which was, at least, gratifying. Proof that Jaylin’s hard work was actually paying off. Written math was… hard for him. It was annoying how hard itwas,because he did kind of like math, sort of. He liked that there was one right answer to work toward. He just had a hell of a time showing how he got to said answer, and his teachers always wanted him to show his work.

With the way the numbers jumped around on the page, flipping upside-down or backwards, Jaylin usually just did math in his head because it was easier than trying to write it all down. But that didn't get you good grades. Teachers didn’t just want answers, you had to prove how you got there. He’d done so badly in high school because of it. And there were only so many times you could be accused of cheating before you just gave up trying altogether.

Jaylin was only in his second semester of community college and already he was struggling to keep up with his workload. When desperation had forced him to summon up the courage to venture into the tutoring office to try to keep from flunking out of his math class, he’d been paired with Aditi, and he was so incredibly grateful for it. Aditi actually got how frustrating it could be when you did stuff in your head because writing things down took too much time and energy. For Aditi, it was because she was wicked smart and her brain worked too fast for other people, not because she was so dumb that trying to read letters and numbers gave her a headache, but still. She didn’t care that Jaylin had to take time to figure out where the numbers were supposed to be, where so many other people who’d tried to teach him had gotten frustrated with Jaylin staring at his work for too long.

Aditi was volunteering as a tutor at the community college courtesy of her dad, who did some moonlighting as an adjunctwhen he wasn't working as a literal rocket scientist, and she was getting a full ride to some fancy-schmancy college come next fall. Her parents had wanted her to “finish out the high school experience”—which included getting in volunteer hours—before she got thrown into the deep end of kids just legal enough to get themselves in trouble.

Jaylin was under the impression that Aditi got into plenty of trouble already, but more of the “hacking into the Pentagon” variety over getting drunk or high.

He sort of understood where Aditi’s parents were coming from. Aditi was really booksmart, but also kind of naive. He got why her parents wanted her to have an extra year around other kids, on top of getting some real-world experience with helping out people like Jaylin, who were a lot dumber than she was.

“Okay,” Aditi said, flipping to the next page in Jaylin’s workbook. “A researcher wants to determine if there is a significant difference in the average test scores between two groups of students who used different study methods. Group A consists of thirty students who used Method A…”

Jaylin struggled to pay attention to the whole question, so tired it was hard to focus. He appreciated that Aditi liked to read the questions out loud, because it meant he didn’t have to muddle through trying to read them first, but right now the words kept turning into a wash of sound.

He wished he wasn’t so tired. Wished Brent hadn’t kept him up all hours of the night. Wished, far from the first time, that he wasn’t paying for his college classes with what little pride and self-dignity he had left.

Jaylin hadn’t entirely known what he was signing up for when he’d submitted himself to a sugar baby website six months ago. All he’d known was that he was desperate for something to change. He’d wanted to go to college, to get a chance at getting a better job, a job he actually wanted to do, one that could makeadifference. He’d wanted to not worry about his bills for once in his life, where he wasn’t choosing between making rent and buying groceries. He’d wanted things to just be a little biteasier.Just a little bit.

Instead, Jaylin had gotten Brent Kingston. Forty-three years old, with blond hair just starting to grey around the temples and an ex-football player’s build, though he was softer around the middle than he probably used to be twenty years ago. Single—thank fuck, Jaylin refused to be a homewrecker—and a high powered lawyer working for Temporal Inc., a huge name in the medical R&D industry. Wealthy. Distinguished.

But things hadn’t gotten…easier.

Jaylin knew that he shouldn’t complain. He was well-aware that he'd been lucky Brent had taken an interest in him and offered him an arrangement. Because while yeah, Jaylin was on the smaller side, short and thin and fine-boned, the kind of build a lot of sugar daddies seemed to be after…he also wasn’t white.

Jaylin had learned early on when he’d been thrown into the system that potential parents weren’t looking for black kids. He hadn’t really expected potential sugar daddies to be any different.

But Brent had seensomethingin Jaylin. And he’d been willing to pay for Jaylin’s classes and give him an allowance, and had even moved Jaylin out of his rented room into a modest one-bedroom in a decent neighborhood.

All he wanted in exchange was Jaylin being at his beck and call.

There were worse ways to eke out a living. Jaylin knew that well enough.

So now he was living the life where he’d gotten a text at ten o’clock last night that Brent was sending a car to pick him up because he’d wanted Jaylin’s help “arranging some furniture.” IfBrent saidjumpJaylin had to sayhow high,so off he’d gone. He was just lucky that Brent hadn’t wanted Jaylin to spend the night and entertain him in the morning, because otherwise there’d have been no way he would have made his tutoring session at all.

The only furniture Jaylin had touched last night was what Brent had bent him over.

After over five months of… being with Brent, Jaylin was well aware that Brent did stuff like that entirely because he could. Brent was the sort of guy who liked having all the power, and Jaylin was someone who had none. He was perfect for Brent, in a way.

But Brent had promised he wouldn’t interfere with school stuff. It was one of the only two rules Jaylin evenhad.

“Jaylin?” Aditi’s voice asked. “Did you get that? Want me to read it again?”

“No,” Jaylin said quickly, forcing his brain to rewind and play back what Aditi had said. The question wanted him to conduct a hypothesis test at the 0.05 significance level to determine if there was a significant difference between the two groups. Right. That wasn’t so hard.

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