Getting close to the teaching assistant was not on your bucket list — but it happened anyway. More often than not you found yourself staying behind after class (or alone with him in his dorm room) after he’d given you a shitty grade.

It’s not like you were bad at the subject; you knew you weren’t bad. But ever since Youens hired Lip Gallagher as his teaching assistant, your grades had been slipping. You always, always got at least an A when Youens marked your papers — now, with Lip marking them, you’d be lucky if you got a C.

“I’m not lookin’ at that paper if it’s still as shit as it was the last time y’handed it t’me. Got it?”

You convince him with a shake of your head that it was improved. As usual, you were sat on the edge of Lip’s bed in his dorm, nervously watching as his eyes flitted over your new and improved paper. He’d told you yesterday that if you managed to, in his words, “get rid of the bullshit in this paper”, he’d bump you up a grade or two.

He looks at you with a shake of his own head, putting an unlit cigarette behind his ear as he continues reading through your paper. He would occasionally narrow his eyes at a particular point, or he’d look up at you with a surprised smirk — you didn’t know which one you preferred.

This weird… thing you had going on with the teaching assistant was causing more problems than originally anticipated. Sometimes it caused a distraction, other times it was great for relieving stress or any other pent up emotions.

“I gave you an extended deadline, not ‘cause you’re cute or nothin’, but ‘cause you needed it. That paper was shit.”