Chapter 1: The Bargain and the Blush
The tutorial room smelled of stale coffee and dry-erase marker. Pyke lingered as the other first-years filed out, their chatter about microeconomic models fading down the hallway. He was stuffing his notebook into a battered backpack, the zipper catching, when he saw Ashlee approach the whiteboard.
She was the tutor, a second-year political science major who wore her confidence like a leather jacket. To Pyke, she seemed impossibly cool, all sharp wit and sharper eyeliner. He’d spent the last hour in a state of quiet panic, convinced his one mumbled answer about fiscal policy had cemented his status as the room’s irredeemable dullard.
Now, she was alone with him. Well, almost.
She picked up the eraser and began wiping away the session’s diagrams. Her movements were odd. Jerky. Nervous. The usual effortless grace was gone. Instead, she put her whole body into it, her hips swaying in broad, desperate arcs as she scrubbed at a stubborn smudge of blue ink. The fabric of her skirt strained with the motion.
Pyke froze, his hand still buried in his bag. He wasn’t a voyeur by nature—his fantasies were usually private, meticulously curated things—but this was different. This was performance. A strange, charged pantomime meant for an audience of one. Him.
His heart did a clumsy thump against his ribs. His secret, the one he carried like a hidden switchblade, suddenly felt visible, glowing beneath his skin. He’d discovered SpankBlue months ago, a late-night algorithmic accident that had opened a door in his mind he didn’t know existed. The videos were a revelation. Not just the act, but the… transaction of it. The crisp, clear rules. The deserved consequence. The shocking, gentle afters. It represented a world of stark, understandable cause and effect, so different from the fuzzy, ambiguous social maze of university life. In that realm, in his imagination, he wasn’t awkward Pyke. He was someone else. Someone with a quiet, certain authority.
Ashlee finished with the board. The squeak of the felt stopped echoing. The room was profoundly silent, just the hum of the overhead lights.
She turned slowly. Her cheeks were flushed a deep, rosy pink, a high color that spoke of more than just the physical effort of cleaning. Her eyes, usually so direct, darted to the empty chairs, the door, before finally landing on him. She looked terrified. And exhilarated.
Pyke’s mouth was desert-dry.
She took a small step toward him, then stopped. Her voice, when it came, was a low murmur, barely slicing through the static in his head.
“I saw it,” she said. “Last week. When I picked up your phone to show you that graph. It was paused, but… I saw the SpankBlue tab.”
The floor tilted. All the air left the room. Pyke’s carefully constructed normalcy shattered into a thousand tiny, shameful pieces. He wanted to melt into the linoleum. He wanted to run.
But Ashlee didn’t smirk. She didn’t recoil. She swallowed, her throat working, and her gaze somehow grew more intense, pinning him to the spot.
“Maybe,” she breathed out, the word trembling. “Maybe I’d let you…”
She paused, and the universe held its breath.
“…if your scores improve.”
For a long moment, there was only the hum. Pyke stared. The words replayed themselves, stark and impossible. This wasn’t a fantasy. This wasn’t a hidden browser tab. This was Ashlee, in a too-bright tutorial room, with the scent of markers in the air, offering a deal. A bizarre, terrifying, electrifying deal.
His embarrassment didn’t vanish, but it shifted. It fused with something hotter, something dangerously focused. The awkward boy receded. The part of him that understood the transaction, that craved the clarity of rules and results, stepped forward.
The part of him that understood the transaction, that craved the clarity of rules and results, stepped forward.
He didn’t run. He didn’t stammer. He blinked, and when his eyes opened, his gaze felt different. Steadier. He let his backpack drop to the floor with a soft thud. The sound was decisive in the quiet room.
“Why?” The word came out flat, more curious than accusatory. “Why would you… offer that? To me?”
Ashlee’s shoulders tensed. The bravado flickered, revealing the panic beneath. She glanced at the door again, ensuring it was shut. When she looked back, her expression was stripped of its earlier playfulness, raw with a practical desperation he recognized all too well from his own life.
“My session,” she said, the words quick and low. “The feedback scores from the first-years. They’re posted internally for the tutors. Mine are the lowest. By, like, a lot.” She forced a brittle smile. “If they don’t improve, the department coordinator said they’d ‘re-evaluate my position.’ Which is academese for firing the crap tutor.”
Pyke just stared, processing. This wasn’t about his secret at all. Not really. This was about her.
“You watched that video,” she continued, her voice gaining a shred of strength, a businesslike edge. “You’re clearly… interested. And you’re quiet. You don’t talk. Your participation score is dragging my average into the abyss.” She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders as if facing a difficult negotiation. “So, I’m making you an offer. You talk. You contribute. You bring your grade—and more importantly, my session average—up. You save my job.” She met his eyes, her own blazing with a fierce, embarrassed hope. “And I’ll let you. You know. Consider it a fee☺️”
The emoji was absurd, a tiny digital smile pasted onto a profoundly real and bizarre proposition. It hung in the air between them, a speck of levity in a thickening atmosphere of mutual need.
Pyke looked at her—really looked. The swaying hips at the whiteboard hadn’t been a seduction; they’d been a tremor of fear. The blush wasn’t just arousal; it was humiliation at having to beg. She was leveraging the one thing she’d accidentally learned about him to solve a very real problem. It was brutally pragmatic. It was, in its own strange way, fair.
A strange calm settled over him. This was a rule. A clear, quantifiable objective: improve the scores. A defined, staggering reward. His pulse wasn’t frantic anymore; it was a deep, steady drumbeat of possibility.
He nodded slowly, a single dip of his chin.
“Okay,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d ever heard it. “What’s the target score?”