I Ditched My Childhood Sweethearts for a Brighter Future Chapter 13

I Ditched My Childhood Sweethearts for a Brighter Future Chapter 13

Seeing the tears tracking down his face, my heart softened and I shut my mouth.

Whatever his faults, his tears held a sliver of genuine emotion.

I left without saying another word, turning around and heading back home.

Tearing away an eighteen-year-old bond completely drained me, and I ended up oversleeping the next morning. I didn’t make it to the library until one-thirty.

Noticing the dark circles under my eyes, Waylon actually showed some mercy and didn’t add an extra practice packet to my workload.

“Are you and Alanna biological siblings?” I rested my chin in my hand, watching him mark my test.

Waylon didn’t stop his pen as he glanced sideways at me. “I took my maternal grandmother’s last name.”

I nodded, still leaning into the gossip. “You aren’t even a tutor, so why did you keep pretending to be one?”

Waylon looked at me with dry amusement as he flipped the page. “You’re the one who came to me in the first place. I never said I was a tutor.”

I slumped forward onto the desk with a heavy sigh. I was incredibly unlucky, managing to accidentally find the most brutal teacher on the planet.

“Though, I only agreed to help you because I recognized you.”

Waylon casually tossed the line out, and I immediately sat up straight.

“Where? You agreed to tutor me because you’d seen me before? Did you have a secret crush on me back then, totally blown away by my looks…”

His hand froze over the test packet for a couple of seconds, and he cleared his throat. “Finish this section. Hit ninety-five percent accuracy and I’ll tell you.”

Gritting my teeth, I forced myself back into the questions. It wasn’t until we were walking back that Waylon finally shared the truth with a faint smile.

“The first time I saw you, you were just starting freshman year—dead last in the entire grade at Northwood High.”

I stumbled mid-stride, snapping my head up to stare at him.

He shrugged. “You were only… about this tall back then. Standing right between two boys, this tiny girl with a high ponytail, laughing like a maniac toward the sky. You said, ‘Northwood High is nothing, I’m going to run this place. Let’s conquer it.'”

I wanted to crawl under a rock and die.

Waylon let out a soft laugh. “I remember thinking—is this girl some kind of undercover genius? That confident. It was the first time I ever let myself get curious. I asked around, and they told me you were dead last…”

I jumped up, clapping my hand over Waylon’s mouth. “Okay, I get it. Stop.”

It wasn’t a secret romance plot at all. The sheer embarrassment left me with nowhere to hide.

Remembering our actual first meeting a few months ago, his gaze had lingered on my face with a brief, hesitant pause.

I covered my burning face, wishing the ground would swallow me whole.

But my hands were gently pulled away and caught in his palm.

“Paisley, the way you stood there with your hands on your hips, looking so incredibly bright and confident—it stuck with me. When I saw you again, I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“You looked so deflated, nothing like that girl I’d seen years ago. And I thought, if I could ever see you at Harvard, throwing your head back and yelling ‘Harvard, is nothing, I’ve got this!’—that would be the cutest thing.”

I turned my head to look at him. The usual coldness on Waylon’s face had completely softened.

“I’ll be waiting for you at Harvard. Waiting for that arrogant kid to come and run the place.”

On the day of the SAT, Waylon was the one who walked me to the test center.

Over those brief months, my scores had absolutely skyrocketed. My parents, terrified of wasting a single second of Waylon’s time, had simply invited him to stay over at our place on weekends to keep up the intense prep.

By the time I was consistently ranking in the top five of my class, my parents even trusted him to handle the test-day drop-off.

“Your admission ticket, your pencils…” Just like all the anxious parents crowding the entrance, Waylon was fussing over every little detail.

I reached out, cupping his chin to make him look at me. “Waylon, you look like you didn’t sleep a wink. Raccoon eyes, but you still pull it off.”

Waylon pressed his lips together. “Paisley, do your best.”

I stood on my tiptoes and planted a kiss right on his cheek.

“Relax. I’ve already got you and Harvard in the bag.”