My Fake Boyfriend Is the School Bad Boy novel Chapter 64

Chapter 64 A Community Center Revealing Another Side

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The transition from the noisy street to the interior of the center was jarring. It smelled intensely of cheap pine cleaner, old crayons, and the lingering, synthetic scent of boxed macaroni and cheese. The hallway was lined with faded corkboards covered in brightly colored construction paper flyers and crude finger paintings.

It was completely silent in the corridor.

I crept forward, my loafers making virtually no sound against the scuffed, yellowing linoleum.

“Okay, look at the tens column again.”

The low, gravelly voice echoed from an open doorway halfway down the hall.

My breath completely stalled in my lungs. It was him. But the tone was entirely wrong. It wasn’t the dark, threatening scrape he used in the hallways of Crestview. It wasn’t the bored, indifferent drawl he gave to teachers.

It was gentle. It was patient.

I tiptoed to the edge of the doorway and pressed my back against the wall, carefully leaning my head an inch past the doorframe to peer

inside.

It was a multipurpose room. The walls were painted a cheerful, aggressive shade of yellow. The floor was covered in a large, primary- colored alphabet rug. Small, plastic tables and tiny chairs were scattered across the room.

My eyes found him instantly.

Ryder was sitting in a tiny, bright blue plastic chair that was entirely too small for his massive frame. His long legs were awkwardly bent, his knees practically touching his chest. He had taken off his heavy leather jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. He was wearing his faded black t-shirt, the fabric pulling tight across his broad shoulders.

Sitting right next to him at the miniature table was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. She wore a bright pink sweater and had her hair pulled into two messy pigtails.

A crumpled math worksheet sat on the table between them.

“I don’t get it,” the little girl whined, her voice high-pitched and frustrated. She dropped her thick yellow pencil onto the paper. “It’s too

hard, Ryder.

Ryder didn’t sigh. He didn’t look annoyed.

He reached out with his large, bruised hand and gently picked up the yellow pencil.

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Chapter 64 A Community Center Revealing Another Side

🙂

“It’s not too hard, Mia, Ryder murmured, his voice a low, grounding rumble. “You’re just trying to do it all at once. Break it down. If you

have fourteen apples, and you give me six, how many do you have left?”

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“Why do you want my apples?” Mia asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

A soft, genuine, completely unfiltered laugh escaped Ryder’s throat.

The sound hit me with the force of a physical blow. I had never heard him laugh like that. It wasn’t the dark, cynical smirk he gave to Chase Montgomery. It was warm. It was bright. It completely transformed the harsh, bruised lines of his face, making him look impossibly young and devastatingly beautiful.

“Because I’m hungry,” Ryder teased, a slow, easy smile breaking across his mouth. The gold shards in his hazel eyes were shining under the harsh fluorescent lights of the center. “Come on. Fourteen minus six.”

Mia huffed, holding up her small fingers and counting them down. “Eight.”

“Exactly,” Ryder said, tapping the eraser of the pencil against the worksheet. “Write it down. You’re smarter than this piece of paper, kid.”

Mia grabbed the pencil back, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in absolute concentration as she scribbled the number

eight onto the page.

Ryder watched her, the absolute, unguarded tenderness on his face completely stripping the oxygen out of the hallway.

He wasn’t serving a community service sentence. There was no court-mandated supervisor with a clipboard standing in the corner. There was no audience of Crestview elites to manipulate.

He was just here. Sitting in a tiny blue plastic chair, smelling like pine cleaner and crayons, helping a little girl in a rundown neighborhood with her second-grade subtraction.

The most dangerous, feared boy in my school was a volunteer tutor.

My heart physically ached. It was a sharp, tearing pressure right behind my sternum that made my eyes burn with sudden, hot tears.

I had built an entire survival strategy around the assumption that Ryder Steinmann was a monster. I had drafted a clinical, rigid contract to protect myself from his toxic reputation. I had believed the rumors because it was easier to label him a threat than to look close enough to see the truth.

But as I stood in the hallway, pressing my hand over my mouth to muffle my erratic breathing, the absolute reality of who he was completely dismantled my logic.

The bad boy armor was a lie.

The leather jacket, the fights, the indifferent, lethal stares in the cafeteria-it was all a massive, carefully constructed shield designed to keep the vicious, entitled world of Crestview Prep as far away from him as possible. He didn’t fight because he liked the violence. He

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Chapter 64 A Community Center Revealing Another Side

fought to build a wall.

:))

And behind that wall was a boy who skipped class to help me breathe through a panic attack. A boy who held my hand under the bleachers so I wouldn’t drown in the noise. A boy who spent his Friday afternoons sitting on an alphabet rug, making sure a kid named

Mia didn’t feel stupid.

“Ryder, I finished it!” Mia announced proudly, shoving the paper toward him.

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