Four Walls part 2

The next installment of my short story Four Walls picks up where the first left off so re-reading part 1 might be helpful.

James untucked his favourite author's latest and opened the book to the marked page and began to read the horrific tale, lips mimicking speech and with one eye on the quiet disserted street ahead he paced on towards his destination remembering tonight he was getting to study with Macy Blair the girl he has had his eye on since high school and tonight was going to be his night to make his move.
Macy first came to his attention while they were teamed together by their science teacher as lab partners and for the next two years James spent every moment of those classes trying not to look like a fool in front of her or be caught when he was staring from behind his notebook.
James felt more confident now than he did as a fourteen year old scrawny kid but he new from past experience Macy still obtained the power to make his hands run sweaty and his lips run dry. She had come back into his life after nearly a three year absence, she was partnered with another girl named Laura Greenwalt in fifth year and James was demoted to sneaking sideway glances towards her in class.
But yet again they were partners in the lab as Macy herself was now attending university after taking a short break from her studies to travel around Europe backpacking with friends. The difference this time James conveyed to himself was she needed his help to catch up with the rest of the class as she was finding the time she took away from her studies had seriously affected her attention span and had come to find herself falling rapidly behind the rest of the students in the class even the mature student Isa Fonty, a sixty three year old divorcee who was trying something new.
Physics was not something to try on a whim thought James but to his astonishment Ms. Isa Fonty had grasped the subject with both hands and now fully owned it. Her growing knowledge only matched with her growing self esteem which she had found sorely lacking after she discovered her husband of thirty eight years had had an illicit affair with an ex girlfriend of their twenty three year old son.
This had come as a shock to dear Isa as her husband had always been an incessant bore of a man or at least he had been as far back as she could remember and he had never been described by anyone as a Robert Redford in the looks department more a Danny DeVito even the blind man at the fountain knew that. He was neither handsome nor rich so to what this young bimbo of a lass saw in him she knew not but she was in a way indebted to her although she would never tell her such a thing but she was indebted to her for giving Isa her life back and giving her a new found passion, Physics.
James was distracted by thoughts rushing through his head of how to broach the subject, he couldn’t just ask Macy at the beginning of the tutoring session as she would only say yes out of some sort of guilt. Maybe he should wait till the end and then ask her as she is leaving if she says no he can play it off as a joke and then quickly and hopefully hiding his embarrassment he can high tail it out of there with no one the wiser.
If only he could be as heroic as the mysterious Jack Elmry of Bradley M. Hawks series of Killer Winds novels, he fears no man nor beast and always gets the girl. James thought to himself that in the real world Jack Elmry would probably be locked up in the nut house for believing in the beasties of the night but in the novels he was the greatest modern day literary hero in James’ eyes and possibly millions of others. How does Hawks create such vivid characters James wondered to himself as he continued his long walk along the bare Civil street which stretches down to the town’s high street and down to the public Library and James could feel his hands begin to sweat.