The next morning, he woke up late, his head felt full of cotton, and his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth. He had just decided to spend the day in bed when Kara pushed her way into his dorm, looking as if she'd slept a full eight hours, and carrying several cups of coffee.
"You're going to miss history class if you don't get your ass out of bed" she told him.
He grumbled something unintelligible in return, and she'd threatened to spill the coffee on him if he didn't get moving. He was learning that with Kara, it was always possible that she actually meant it, so he got up.
They'd only been ten minutes late, but the professor had obviously been scandalized by the fact that his favorite student was cavorting with the class clown. He'd actually gotten a lecture later, about how many nice young woman were out there, complete with historical examples of men who'd been led astray.
He decided that Kara had affected him more than he'd thought, because throughout his professor's entire speech, he'd been trying to hold back laughter. He succeeded though, so that was okay. The day when he couldn't hold himself back was the day when he would have to be careful of Kara Thrace and her influence.
He didn't think that was likely to happen anytime soon. He wasn't even sure she was going to stick around, now that her bet with Karl was over.
To his pleasure, she did. She wasn't a faithful attendee at his tutoring sessions anymore, but she found other ways to torment him all the same. They usually involved bribery of some sort. But since it was really poorly done bribery, he didn't feel all that bad about accepting.
" I'll come to tutoring tomorrow if you play on my pyramid team," she'd told him a week after the terrible history lecture.
He'd tried to explain that bribes only worked if you offered to give the other person something that they actually wanted, and that her coming to tutoring did not constitute her doing a favor for him, it was actually the other way around.
It wasn't until after his adrenaline was pumping and he was hurling the ball to her across the pyramid court that it occurred to him that perhaps her bribes were well-constructed after all. This was something he'd wanted, even if he hadn't realized it. The sweat and the heat and, better yet, the chance to weave through a game with her like this, in perfect unison.
She played pyramid like she did everything else, fast and hard and barely controlled, movements so instinctual that she seemed almost feral. It was beautiful to watch.
Not that Lee had made a habit of watching. On the contrary, he was trying quite hard not to watch. It went against some fundamental part of him though. Lee liked to think that it was the historian in him, that part that just couldn't help cataloging people, but he'd never been very good at fooling himself. She was drawing him in, without even being aware of what she was doing. Which meant that clearly, as the one in the know, it was his responsibility to put a stop to it. He tried. He really did. But it never quite worked, and by midterms he'd decided that the best way to stop thinking about her was to be too busy moving with her. Cadets started talking about them in the same breath, and his history professor looked like he had bit into a lemon whenever he saw them together, and Lee was almost ready to believe that perhaps sitting back and watching wasn't the best way to go about life after all.
And then his father came to the Academy on shore leave.
A/N: I know it's short. I'll post another chapter later today.