A/N: It's been, like, a year since I updated this, but my muse packed her bags and slipped away in the dead of night. A new one has moved in, but I don't know if she's gonna stick around for long either.
The first week of school always went achingly slowly, for students and teachers alike. He was used to this after years of being both. Of course, when a day goes slowly up to a certain hour than speeding by too quickly for his tastes and the only cause he could think of involved the blonde sitting in the front row of his last class of the day, things got a little complicated.
It wasn't unlike him to be attracted to a gorgeous blonde; it happened all the time, and with brunettes and redheads as well, but usually they were over the age of eighteen and met outside of school. As much as he appreciated women, even Jiraiya knew that students were strictly off-limits.
That fact had never been a problem for him as he had never been able to see them as anything but kids and never felt anything more than a teacherly fondness toward anyone, certainly never an attraction.
So, of course, it goes without saying that when he realized he was a little too interested in Yamanaka Ino that things were not only complicated but he was also just a little bit freaked out.
It's not a big deal, he thought to himself, I just won't pay any special attention to her, I'll treat her like everyone else, and it'll go away on its own without any problem!
~X~
Things didn't exactly go as planned, though. Sure, he didn't give her special treatment, but yet she was always on his mind. No matter where he went, no matter what he was doing, no matter how sexy the woman he was with, it was always Ino who managed to slip into his thoughts and catch him off guard.
Any time this happened, the only thing he knew to do was to inwardly scold himself for thinking that and to try- and ultimately fail- to forget about those clear blue eyes, forget about that perfect body…
If there was one thing he knew, as a teacher, it was that nothing took away time to let one's mind wander than having to grade a lot of assignments, and that was what prompted him to assign his usual creative writing assignment about a month early.
"Alright, class," he would say, at the end of each class, "before the bell rings, I'm gonna tell you about your next assignment. Each of you is to write a short story-" He was already used to the groans that followed this statement. "Come on, two pages minimum, topic of your choice, school appropriate, you know the drill."
"Like you'd have a problem if we broke that last one!" came a shout from another blonde student, one in his fifth hour, that he definitely would never have an illegal attraction to.
"Everyone take one of these on my desk as you leave, it's got all the information on it," he said as the last bell of the day rang. He left his class before any of his students did, just to make sure his eyes didn't linger on one certain girl longer than they should.
~X~
If Ino said she had gotten over her initial interest in her English teacher, it would be an outright lie. She was still completely and totally infatuated with him, but was trying her best to keep this to herself. One man over the summer was one thing; her teacher was something altogether different and she knew nothing could ever come of it.
However, that didn't mean she couldn't flaunt her skills in the class, and she intended to do just that with this assignment. Two pages minimum? No problem! As she typed away on her laptop, she found herself reaching seven before she knew it, and she only stopped there because she didn't want it to be too long.
She had put a lot of work into it, needless to say, and she knew it was worth being proud of, so she found herself excited for the due date to come.
~X~
Keeping true to his promise to not treat her different from anyone else, he didn't read her story first, nor did he put it last, but just kept it wherever it had ended up in the stack. In fact, he didn't even pay attention to names, but just skimmed over story after story.
It was the same things most every time. Girl meets perfect boyfriend, best friends fight, poorly thought-out action scene, pointless shopping trip, so much so that he didn't have to read them all, just had to look for spelling and grammar mistakes to dock points on.
It came as a bit of a shock to come across one much longer than the required length that actually caught his interest enough to read it. It was well-written and creative and he couldn't spot a single grammatical error. He could hardly believe it, but a student would actually be receiving a perfect one hundred on their assignment.
Then he saw that the writer was none other than Miss Yamanaka Ino.
What to do, what to do? If he gave her a one hundred, wouldn't that be special treatment? Then maybe he could dock two points for length…but, no, that wouldn't be fair to her when she deserved the better grade.
What was he supposed to do about this? He sat there, internally debating for so long that it had soon passed the time he tried to be in bed on work nights (not that he had been getting much sleep lately, not when his thoughts were on her). If he did this, if he did that, if he didn't do this, if he decided to, if he-
Fuck it! Honestly, all this was starting to give him a headache. As long as he didn't do anything to her, as long as everything was playful, did it really matter how close to her he got? A nagging voice in the back of his mind told him he was wrong, but he was sick of constantly stifling his thoughts and avoiding his new favorite student.
That's that, then, he thought, as he wrote her perfect score on the paper and headed to his bed. It was the best night's sleep he had gotten since school had started.
~X~
The next day, Ino was getting ready to leave her favorite class and go home for the day. Like every day, she was slightly slow in getting her things together, but not too slow; she couldn't have Mr. Senshi figuring out her little secret. Finally, as the last student besides herself left, she finished getting everything together and was walking out the door.
"Miss Yamanaka?" She'd recognize that voice anywhere. After all, it was the same one she caught herself dreaming about way too much, the one she adored hearing, the one that belonged to her seventh hour English teacher.
"Um…yes?" she asked, turning around. He had never directly spoken to her before and, while she had fantasized about a conversation a lot, it usually ended in something that would most definitely get him fired.
"There was something about your short story that…concerned me. If you'd like, we could talk about it after school tomorrow," he said.
This worried her. What was it that concerned him? Had he figured out that the main character was deeply inspired by him? Did he know that she had an embarrassing crush on him? What was it that he wanted to talk about?
"No, I don't think I can do that," she said. She didn't want to hear what it was he was going to say and she knew that the less time she spent with him, the better. Declining was the best option.
"And why not?"
"I don't want to discuss anything. Just give me the grade I deserve and it'll be fine," she said.
"Oh, come on," he said with a smirk,- What a hot face! she caught herself thinking and quickly shoved it away- "what if we made a deal? If I can guess one thing about you that no one else could possibly know right now, you'll stay after school to talk to me."
He's mocking me. He's gonna say that he knows I like him, either right now or tomorrow. It's probably now, what else could he guess about me? I should just leave, but…I really want to know what he's going to.
"Fine," she found herself agreeing.
"You're wearing purple right now," said Mr. Senshi, smirk only growing.
Considering the uniform colors were burgundy and white, no one in school could possibly be wearing purple outwardly unless they had some sort of accessory, which, Ino, at the moment didn't. She did, however, happen to have a matching purple underwear set on.
"Wh-how did you..." She broke off, feeling herself go red. This was wrong on so many different levels and if she were to repeat what he had said to someone in authority and explain the context, he would be in a heap of trouble.
But when his smirk grew and he shrugged, saying, "I have my ways," she knew that she wouldn't be able to make herself tell on him any time soon.
A/N: I'm going to try and write as much for this as possible while my muse still hangs out in my writing brain. In the meantime, get on my new account, JHCross. That's where I post everything else.
