Yours to Keep by Serena Bell Read Free Book Online

softened her further toward him. It wasn’t his fault that he had no idea how lucky he was. Few people did. They took their complete comfort, their sense of belonging where they were, for granted. It was, she guessed, their right.
    “This way.” He shambled away from her.
    She followed him into a spacious, brightly lit kitchen that could have been straight out of a magazine spread. On the far side, a big dark-wood table squatted on its trestle. Nearer, bar stools clustered around a kitchen island with glossy granite countertops. Behind a farmhouse sink, two huge windows looked out to a vast span of lawn—Theo’s personal soccer field—elegant landscaping with clumps of tall grass, and an expanse of woods past which no other houses could be seen.
    She’d probably never have a kitchen this big and beautiful in her life. She wondered if Ethan actually cooked. So many of the people she tutored for had expensive kitchens they used mainly to microwave food. If she ever had her own house, and enough money to furnishit any way she wanted, she’d spend all the money making the living room and bedrooms cozy.
    Theo cleared two spots at the table, pushing place mats and papers and a laptop computer onto a heap of other stuff.
    She reached out and rescued the laptop from its precarious perch, setting it carefully on the table. Fifteen-year-olds still had such an imperfect grasp of cause and effect. That’s why the driving age should be twenty-five. Or thirty. It terrified her that Marco was about to learn to drive, even though it would save her skin a million times over.
    She set her backpack on the floor and sat down next to Theo. “So tell me why you need a Spanish tutor.”
    “I don’t.” Theo picked up a pen and turned it between fingers with nails bitten to the quick. His gaze was on the pen.
    “Well,” she said evenly, “why does your dad think you need a tutor?”
    “I’m behind everyone else in my class because I started a year late.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
    “You’re a freshman, right?”
    “Yeah. Everyone else had Spanish in the seventh and eighth grades, but I did French. They were all way ahead. I was never going to catch up.”
    “So you dropped it?”
    His body went rigid.
    “Your dad told me.”
    He scowled.
    She ran a hand over the smooth surface of the table. “It’s hard to learn a new language.”
    A slight shift in his shoulders told her that he was listening.
    “When I came here, they put me in a kindergarten classroom where everyone spoke English all the time. I knew a little bit, but basically I had to figure everything out—how to ask to go to the bathroom, how to find out someone’s name, everything.”
    Theo’s head had shot up as she’d spoken, and now his eyes fixed on her face. “So what did you do?”
    “I cried every night. I listened a lot. Eventually, I picked it up.”
    She watched his expression soften while he thought about that. Then he dropped hisgaze again to the pen, turning it in his hands. “I suck at Spanish.”
    “Nah. You just need practice. Are you usually good at everything in school?”
    “Pretty good.”
    “So when you’re good at most things it’s hard when you find something you’re not so good at. But it just means you need more practice. That’s what I’m here for.”
    “Your English is really good now.” Theo took a deep breath. “I thought because I knew so much French it would be easy to learn Spanish.”
    “But it doesn’t sound anything the same, does it?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t understand when the teacher speaks.”
    “We can fix that.” She pulled her backpack onto her lap and extracted a notebook and some pens. “¿Tienes tarea?” —“Do you have homework?”
    His green eyes widened. “No entiendo,” he admitted. “I don’t understand.”
    “Tarea,” she said, pointing to her backpack.
    “Yeah.” He got up and trudged out of the kitchen, and she heard his feet clomping up the stairs.
    She took a deep