The Art of Ruining Him

AMELIA

My mother used to say you shouldn’t judge people before you know them.

I don’t agree with that.

I didn’t need to know Leo Vance. Two years of watching him from the back of lecture halls was plenty—six-foot-two, never in a hurry, wearing a coat to a nine a.m. class that cost more than my rent. I made up my mind about him somewhere in the first semester, and I’ve had no reason to revisit it since.

But as of this morning, he’s the person I’ll be spending most of my days with.

I agreed to it.

More or less willingly.

The office was on the third floor of Wexler, hot enough that I’d started sweating under my coat, and Dean Vance had been talking about the budget for four minutes before he got anywhere near anything that really mattered.

“—so the board wants twelve percent gone by June, and they’re taking most of it out of the scholarship money. Which is the one thing in this building that actually works. But nobody asks me.”

I nodded as though it were news.

It wasn’t. The letter had sat on my desk for nine days, and I’d read it enough times to know what it meant to me. A cold prickle still went up the back of my neck.

“Coffee?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He poured it himself.

“Your file is very good, Amelia.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. Fourth in your class. You took Fixed Income a year early, which almost nobody survives, and you came second in a room full of graduate students.” He tapped the folder without opening it. “I’d hate to lose you over a spreadsheet.”

Lose. Like I was a set of car keys.

“What do I need to do?”

He looked up from the folder. “Sorry?”

“You didn’t call me in here to tell me about the budget. I’ve got that in the letter.” My thumb kept moving along the rim of the saucer, slow, so that my hand had something to do. “So there’s something you want. I’d rather hear it than sit here working it out.”

He didn’t answer straight away. Then he sat back, and something warmed in his face, and I realized I’d just done the thing he’d been waiting for me to do.

“There is a way to keep your funding,” he said. “It isn’t one of the normal ones.”

I have read enough books to know where a sentence like that belongs, and I gave it about a second of serious consideration before deciding I couldn’t do it.

“Do you know my son?”

Oh, thank fuck.

“I know of him.”

“That’s a very polite way to put it.”

“It’s a big campus.”

“It really isn’t.” He waited. I let it sit, and he gave up first. A small win, no use to anybody.

“Leonard’s in your program. Five courses this semester. You’re in three of them. Last year he came to about a third of his classes.” He said it lightly, like a weather report. “He vanished for eleven days in February. In April there was the arrest.”

The cup got very interesting.

“I’ve handled what I could handle. But I can’t sit in a lecture hall, and I can’t be at a party at two in the morning. I’ve run out of things a father can do from behind a desk.”

“You want me to tutor him.”

“I want you in the room.” He turned the folder a fraction, squaring it to the edge of the desk. “Someone responsible, near him, most days. That’s most of what this is.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Then I’d want to hear it from you before I hear it from a teacher or students.”

I said nothing long enough for the radiator to tick twice into the gap.

“You want me to report on him.”

“I want you to keep me informed.”

“That’s a lot. Could you give me a second to think about it?”

I asked, but I already knew what I’d do. That was the humiliating part. I’d known since the word funding, and everything after that was me arranging the set.

Because if the money goes away, I go away. Six hours east, back into my father’s house, back to waiting tables for people who’d known me since I was nine.

“I work Tuesday and Thursday evenings,” I said. “And Saturdays. Campus Grounds, in the library basement. I’m not quitting it. I need the hours.”

“You’d have tuition covered.”

“Tuition isn’t groceries.”

He looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable.

“How much do they pay you? At the coffee place.”

“It varies.”

“Roughly.”

The number sat in my mouth a second before I let it out, and it sounded too small in that office.

“Two-fifty. Two-eighty if I get a weekend double.”

“Let’s call it five hundred.” He didn’t pause. “Is that all right?”

Five hundred a week was rent and groceries, with room left over for the dentist I’d been putting off since March. It was also nothing to him. A number he’d picked up and rounded because the real one was inconvenient to say out loud.

“You can’t pay me for that.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” My hands tightened around the cup, and I couldn’t get to the end of it, because the end of it was “because it doesn’t feel right.”

He watched me, and his face softened.

That was worse.

“Amelia.” He said my name carefully. “You’ll be tutoring my son. Three shared courses, two you’re not in, and a boy who hasn’t opened a textbook since March. That’s real work. It’s more work than pulling espresso, and you’re better qualified. Same days you already had. So it’s a job.”

My coffee had gone cold in my hands.

I still hadn’t taken a sip.

“It’s a job,” I said.

“One more thing.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer. “He’s going to try to make you like him.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious. He’s been doing it since he was five. I have watched grown adults with doctorates hand that boy things they had no intention of handing him.” He shook his head, almost fond. “He’ll be funny. He’ll be interested in you. Actually interested—that’s the trick. He’ll make you feel like the only person in the room. And then, once you’ve decided he’s not so bad, he’ll ask you for something small.”

“And you want me to say no.”

“I want you to notice that he asked. Be smart with him, Amelia.”

“That’s never worked on me.” It came out before I decided to say it. “Charm. It’s what people learn instead of being useful.”

Dean Vance stopped with his cup halfway down. Then he laughed, one short, startled sound, and set it on the saucer harder than he meant to.

“God,” he said. “You might actually be the right one.”

The door opened and clicked shut, but I didn’t turn around. Two steps, unhurried. Then a hand on the back of my chair, and he leaned across me, close enough that the wool of his sweater dragged over my shoulder.

Soap. Something warm underneath it, sweet and expensive.

I turned my head before I could talk myself out of it.

Dark blond, thick and badly cut, falling over his forehead like he’d run a hand through it instead of finding a comb. Shoulders that filled out the jacket too well.

A smile already waiting there when he looked down at me, easy and aware of itself.

My body got there before the rest of me did.

“Hello, Dad.”

“I said eleven-thirty.”

“Then I’m early, and you should be thrilled.”

He looked at the folder under his father’s hand, then at the desk, then down at me again, and something in his face changed when he got there.

“Is that coffee?”

Before I could answer, he reached past me, took my cup off the desk, and drank from it.

“It’s cold.”

“It’s mine,” I said.

“You weren’t using it.”

“Leonard.” His father didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“I’m hydrating.” He set the cup down hard, and the saucer rang.

“Coffee isn’t hydrating,” I said. “It’s a diuretic, actually.”

I have no idea why I said that. My mouth had gone ahead without me.

He paused. Then he smiled, slower this time.

“Oh,” he said. “Dad. She’s adorable.”

“Behave.”

“I’m being lovely.”

My face went up in flames, ears included, and I had nothing to do but sit up straight and fix my gaze on a point on the desk.

“Amelia Doyle,” Dean said, with patience. “She’s in your program. Three of your classes.”

“Doyle.” He turned it over as if to check how it sounds. “Third row in Valuation last year. Aisle side.”

I looked up. “Fourth row.”

“Fourth row.” He took the correction without blinking. “You asked Halloran something in October that made him lose his place for about a minute and a half. Man never recovered. Retired in June.”

“He was sixty-eight.”

“Sure he was.” He pushed off the back of my chair, and my shoulder went cold where his sleeve had been. “Leo, by the way. Only he calls me Leonard, and only when I’m in trouble.” He yawned without covering it. “Can we go? I’ve got a thing.”

“We’re not finished.”

“We’re so finished.”

Something crossed his father’s face and smoothed out again, fast. He stood.

“Amelia. Paperwork this afternoon. And you and I check in every couple of weeks.”

“Sure.”

I took my phone out and made a note:

September 7, Monday. Leo Vance. Three shared courses. Attendance + tutoring. Report issues before faculty does. Check-in with Dean every two weeks. $500/week.

I got up, put my bag on my shoulder, and walked out of that office without ever saying yes.

He didn’t wait for me in the hallway. He walked, and I walked after him, and I hated that a little while it was happening.

“So he bought you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Relax. It’s not an insult.” He shouldered the doors open and took the steps two at a time. “There was a grad student last year. Peter. Nice enough, wanted to be a friend about it.” A shrug I mostly heard. “Five weeks, research stipend, very warm letter. Before him there was a woman from athletics, and I’m ninety percent sure she was in it for the parking permit.”

“I’m not—”

“You’re the third. Prettiest one so far, I’ll give him that.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Maybe he thinks that’s what gets me to a nine a.m.”

Heat rose up my neck again.

“I have a scholarship,” I said, louder than anything I’d said upstairs. “That I earned. It’s getting cut. If you’d ever had to think about money for eleven consecutive seconds, you’d know exactly why I’m standing here.”

He stopped walking. Turned around properly this time. Looked at me in a way that made me want to fold my arms, so I made myself not.

“Doesn’t it bother you? Babysitting a grown man.”

“Does it bother you? Needing one.”

“That’s the point. I don’t need one.”

“I’m not—”

He started walking backward, away from me, straight through the middle of the quad without looking where he was going.

“What do people call you?”

“Amelia.”

“All of it? Every time?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds exhausting.” He thought about it for a moment. “Mia.”

“Nobody calls me that.”

“I will.”

He said it the way you’d confirm the time.

“That’s not my name.”

“It’s most of it.” He turned to go, then twisted back. “Ryerson Hall tomorrow. Nine.”

“I know.”

“I know you do.”

The grin came fast and left faster.

“See you tomorrow, Mia. Try not to miss me.”

Then he was gone, halfway across the quad, hands still in his pockets, walking into a crowd of people who moved out of his way without seeming to notice.

I stood there with the bag strap cutting a line into my palm, took out my phone, and looked at my schedule properly for the first time.

Three courses. Same room. Same hour. All semester.

I never said yes.

Nobody seemed to need me to.

❤️🤎

💬 Do you think Dean Vance is right about Leo—or has Amelia already judged him too quickly?

This story is my entry for Inkitt’s Lessons in Longing: A Back-to-School Romance Contest 2026. If you’re enjoying Amelia and Leo’s story, reactions and comments really help support it in the contest. I’d love to know what you think. ❤️