“From what? Your group chat?”
The grin twitched but didn’t fade. “From experience.”
My jaw tightened. “Experience doesn’t pass finals.”
Dante checked the time on the clock behind him, then turned back to me, cool as a cucumber. “Neither does babysitting.”
“Dante—”
“Can we cut the hour short tonight?”
I looked over at him. I’d barely been here five minutes. “Why?”
“Because I asked nicely?”
My eyes narrowed. “You didn’t ask nicely. You didn’t even say please.”
“Can we cut the hour short tonight,please?”
God... This man was going to be the reason I smacked a fellow student across the face with a textbook.
“Let’s see how much you remember from our last session, okay?”
“We were discussing, I should say you were talking —a lot— about education policy.” His eyes held mine as I uncapped my pen.
Fine, I’ll play along, asshole.“And what did Isayas I talked...a lot?”
“Governance structures exist in educational institutions to make sure decisions aren’t just made for financial gain.”
Double asshole.
“And how do they do that?” I asked.
His gaze flicked to my notes, then back to me. “They create checks and balances. Bring in committees, oversight boards — people who pretend they know better than the ones actually doing the work.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said, making a note in the margin that he didn’t need to see.
Dante leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “And the other way?”
“That they exist to protect students. To make sure the focus stays on education, not profit.”
He huffed out a laugh. “You really believe that?”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “And so will you, if you want to pass.”
Dante gave me a slow blink, leaning back in his chair. “Savannah, I promise you — no one cares about this in the real world.”
I arched a brow. “You’reliterallyin the real world right now. The NCAA has governance rules that could end your season if you break them.”
“Yeah, but if I breakthoserules, I’m not going to be rescued by knowing how a school board is elected.”
My patience was dropping from tolerable to non-existent. “It’s on the syllabus. You need to know it for the midterm.”
He smirked, infuriatingly calm. “You know what I think? I think that you just like hearing yourself talk.”
My jaw tightened. “And you like pretending this is beneath you when really, you’re just not putting in the work, when you can quite obviouslydothe work.”
That wiped the smirk for a heartbeat — then it came back sharper. “Maybe I’d be more prepared if my tutor didn’t look at me like she’s counting the seconds until she can bolt out the door.” He held my gaze. “Last night you had one eye on a book, and one on the exit.”
