I had sat on the swing seat in the front porch and waited for Cohen to come home for more than ten minutes, yet he still hadn't showed up.

I had refreshed and refreshed again the news feed of every one of my social media and I've seen the same feeds for the fifth times now. I tucked my phone back into my pocket and took out the novel that our English Literature teacher wanted us to read.

For about like five minutes later, a black SUV pulled up in front of the house. I kept the book back into my bag and stood up from the swing seat to walk to the car.

The door of the driver's seat opened and Cohen got out from the vehicle, looking at me with a very confusing face. "Why are you doing here?"

I went to open the door where Amelia was sitting while shrugging, as if it wasn't obvious enough why I was here, outside of his house. "Waiting for you guys."

"Carys!" Amelia yelled my name as soon as I opened the door and she saw my face.

I hold her up and let her jumped on me once she got out of the car, her hands wrapped around my neck hugging me. I kissed on her hair, "Amy! Sweetheart, I miss you so, so much."

She kissed me on my cheek before saying, "I miss you too, Carys."

"Why don't you wait inside, you have the keys." Cohen opened the door and I followed him inside still holding Amelia in my arms after closing the car door with my leg since my hands were occupied.

"I think it'd be inappropriate since nobody is home." I said as I entered the house before letting Amelia down.

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Last time you came in."

I explained for myself, "That's because Amy wanted to come home and I thought nobody was here."

"And yesterday?" His another eyebrow was raised too.

"I thought Amy broke the glass."

"Well," he nodded and shrugged, "what I want to say is, you can always come in without permission, we have already treated you like a family."

"Oh. Thanks for that." I was smiling, but I wasn't really smiling. He said he treated me like a family, that's really sweet of him, but I couldn't help wondering did that mean I was more like a sister to him and he would never has feelings for me in that way? Was my new found hope going to crush overnight?

"You're welcome." He jokingly said, and all the joking tone disappeared when he realized something, "Wait, we start today right? You tutoring me?"

"If you say so," I nodded, "but what about Amy?"

He pointed at the sofa with his chin and I turned around to see a sleeping Amelia drooling on the sofa, what had she done to make her fall asleep right after she came home? Or was it because of the comfy sofa? That I could understand, I'd be fallen asleep right away if I was sitting on it right now.

"How tired is she?" I asked and Cohen just shrugged, saying he has no idea.

"The day you suddenly showed up at Chemistry class, was it the day Mr. Cassidy told you that you'd get kicked out?" It took all my guts to ask him this question I was curious about, and I still had many questions in my stomach that I really wanted to ask.

He nodded and smirked, "The same day I became your honored lab partner."

Did he say 'honored'? He didn't, right? I was just gonna ignore that or I afraid my eyes couldn't come back to the place where they should be if I rolled them.

"You nearly get kicked out but Mr. Kane didn't know about all this?" I could imagine Mr. Kane's face turning red and smokes coming out from the top of his head if he found out about this.

"No, he can't know about this." He shook his head, pointed at me with him finger, trying to warn me, "Don't you dare spill any words to my dad."

"But I thought Mr. Cassidy would like to talk to the parents if a student is going to get kicked out?"

"He didn't call my dad, that's all I know," he said narrowing his eyes, "and can you stop saying I'd get kicked out?"

"Well, you are getting kicked out, and I guess Mr. Cassidy must've known about you failing some of the subjects on purpose." That's not impossible though, you'd be surprised by the fact that how much Mr. Cassidy knew about us, sometimes I even suspected if he stalked everyone home from school.

"I guess so, and, seriously, no more 'kick out' coming out from your mouth." He emphasized the word 'kick out', and I could hear it from his tone that he was annoyed by me saying the words so many times.

Here came the main question that I was really curious about, "Then why did you fail all those classes you don't even bad at in the first place?"

He paused for a few seconds and just looked at me, like he didn't know how to answer my question. "I don't know, I just don't want to be called nerd."

What? He didn't want to be called a 'nerd'? That's the reason? Seriously, Cohen?

I was speechless for a moment before I could find a word to say to him. "Nobody would call you a nerd."

"I thought they would." He exclaimed rising his volume a little.

"Then why didn't you want to be called nerd?" I didn't know whether should I continue asking more questions upon this case or not, since he was a little annoyed at the fact that I kept mentioning 'kick out' earlier, asking more about this might just annoyed him more, but I really, really wanted to know what's behind his 'nerd' exclamation, and I already threw the question out there, there's no room for me to regret.

"Because I don't want to be labelled nerd." Luckily he wasn't as annoyed as I thought he would be, instead he sounded calmer. "I don't want people to think that I am a lame person who just know how to read the textbooks. I wanted people to think that I am a cool person, as in not-a-book-nerd kind of cool. I used to think that if you have good grades, then no one will think you're cool..."

"That's not true." I said looking at him, "You can be good at study and people'd still think that you're cool."

"I know. I made a bad choice." He replied me quietly.

"Mason didn't. He has good grades." Actually there's not many people knew about Mason's good grades at school, I knew it from Shelley.

He shrugged. "Well, that's because he doesn't care how other people see."

"And so should you, Cohen. You are who you are, not who they labelled you. And what about those labels that people call you at school? Like the 'bay boy'? The 'playboy'?"

"That I admit." He said nonchalantly.

I chuckles coldly, glaring at him. "You don't care people spreading rumors about you sleeping with half of the girls at school, but you cared so much about people calling you 'nerd', so you rather to pretend not to be smart and failed all your classes, and now you're asking me to tutor you because you were too busy skipping your own classes, to become the one the others were talking about, just so people will think that's you're cool?"

WTF, Cohen. WTF.

"I made a bad choice and I regretted it, and now I am trying to fix my mistakes, if you haven't figured it out."

"Oh, so you think you still can fix it right now? Why don't you try to fix everything after you get kicked out from school?"

"I said no more 'kick out' coming out from your mouth, or..." He narrowed his eyes once again, I guess he really didn't like the words 'kick out'.

"Or what?" I cut him off, raising an eyebrow, asking him, "You're going to kick me out from your house? Well, after I told your dad that you're getting kicked ou..."

I never got my chance to finish my sentence.

I stopped talking because I couldn't speak, my lips were locked by Cohen's lips.

I felt my eyes widened, my body frozen, my mind stopped working, my breaths were getting held, and my heart skipped a beat.

What the hell is going on?

After five seconds or less, since every second passed like a light-year, he parted away from my lips, looking just as shocked as I was.

For a long moment, the both of us just looked at each other and no one was saying anything, or trying to say anything.

I could see his lips moving, saying something, and I immediately darted my eyes away from his lips. I guessed he was saying he was sorry, but I wasn't so sure about that because my soul still have yet to crawl back into my stiffen body.

When I finally found my sense and was able to listen clearly at what he was saying, I heard him saying, "You know what? I am not sorry about that."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but a second after that, his lips were on mine again. My body was still paralyzed, of course, but my eyes shut down on its own accords, and my right hand found its way to Cohen's hair.

His lips moved, kissing me, and before I could think of anything else, I moved my lips too, just to kiss him back.

Did my dream finally come true? Was it real that Cohen was kissing me and I was kissing him too? It was too good to be true.

His lips were just as soft as I imagined, even softer than that. He kissed me slowly and gently before I felt he licked my lips, asking for permission. It didn't take me more than a second to part my lips to let his tongue in in order to deepen our kiss.

But that didn't last longer than five seconds.

We immediately pushed each other away when we heard the sound of Amelia moving. Turning into Amelia's direction at the same time, seeing that she was still asleep, we both let out a sigh of relief.

Then we both turned to look at each other, and everything just became extremely awkward, none of us knew what to say at that time, especially me.

I didn't know how long has it been, but it felt like forever to me. I was the one who looked away first, the awkwardness was killing me slowly inside.

I was trying to find an excuse to get out of the 'situation' and wanted to rush home, but Cohen coughed and broke the silence, "Uhm... Can we start the tutoring right now?"

"Sure..." I nodded without looking in his way.