FFM – Day 8 – Prompt: Bitter tongue, sweet lips.
Bolin steered Korra back around the corner towards the changing rooms.
"Calm down, Korra." Bolin had his hands on her shoulders, urging her away from Tahno and the other Wolfbats who always seemed to be crowded around him. "You can't keep letting him get the best of you like this!"
"I know!" Korra threw her hands in the air, still exasperated by the intense, although fleeting, face-off she'd had with the black-haired waterbender. "He's just so… ugh!"
Bolin nodded sagely. "Yup, 'ugh' is right."
Korra slumped onto a stool in the mostly empty Noodlery which she had taken to frequenting after training. She seemed to be running into Tahno more and more around the arena and the training facilities and it took all the strength she had not to clock him right in his stupid, pretty boy face. Bolin was pretty good at diffusing her anger and getting her out of bad situations, Mako generally seemed to completely ignore the Wolfbats unless they were in the arena together, but Korra couldn't seem to get the hang of not letting him inside her head.
As if he could sense her thoughts about him, the offending waterbender appeared in the doorway of the Noodlery. Korra ground her teeth together; why did he always have to turn up at such inopportune times? She fixed her eyes stubbornly on the wall behind the bar, trying to ignore the fact that she could see Tahno's approaching reflection in the glass of one of the drinks cabinets.
"Well, if it isn't the Avatar," he drawled, his voice doing that irritating smooth thing it did. "Hiding out after training, are you? Ashamed of what a pathetic excuse you are for a pro-bending team?"
Korra stood up abruptly, turning to face him. "What did you just say?" She asked, trying to keep the shake of anger out of her voice.
Tahno leaned down, one hand resting on the bar, closing the gap between them almost entirely. "I said you're a pathetic team and it's not suprising at all." He smirked and Korra instinctively recoiled away from him a little, trying to regain some ground and self-control.
"You're just bitter," she retorted after a moment, "because we beat you last time and you know that we're going to beat you again."
Tahno flicked his dark hair back, looking down at her condescendingly. "You barely beat us once, Avatar, and your team is falling apart as we speak. Perhaps if you'd taken me up on my offer of one-on-one bending lessons, you wouldn't be such a sad excuse for an Avatar and you'd be able to do something about it."
Before Korra could register what she was doing, she was pulling her arm back and throwing a punch straight for Tahno's face. He caught her wrist easily; she hadn't been thinking and her aim had been horrible.
"Let go of me, jerk," she snapped, trying to yank her wrist away.
Tahno kept hold of her, smirking again. "You'd think the Avatar would know better how to throw a punch. Care to rethink my offer?"
Korra tried to pull away again, still caught in Tahno's vice-like grip. "I told you, pretty boy, you're just a bitter, washed up loser who-"
She was cut off by Tahno pulling her bodily towards him by her wrist. Suddenly, somehow, his lips were on hers, insistently trying to part them. As soon as she regained coherent though, Korra shoved him away from her, expecting him to look angry or taken aback or at least something other than the way he did look. But he didn't, he still had that smarmy, arrogant smirk on his face as he backed away a few steps.
"Bitter tongue," he said, turning away from her and making his way back to the door, "sweet lips."