The next day, he woke up with a shiner, and a feeling of great foreboding that reminded him of nothing so much as when, in third grade, he'd pulled Helen Martin's pigtails (because they were shiny, and the perfect length, and Helen had been the cutest girl in their year). She'd refused to sit at the same lunch table as him for months, and he'd been about as crushed as an eight year old could be.
And this was going to be much worse, already was much worse, because with Helen he had an excuse. He was a boy, and he hadn't meant to hurt her, and she'd walked away with little more than a sore head and an unshakable belief that Lee was a moron. He wasn't a boy anymore, though, and he'd meant to hurt Kara. He wouldn't blame her if she never wanted to speak to him again.
When he came into the mess for breakfast, Kara was chatting with Karl. If she saw him, she gave no sign of it. Karl beckoned him over, though, with a concerned look that told Lee that yes, his eye looked just as bad to everyone else as it looked to him. Kara greeted him with a polite, non-committal "Hi Lee" and Karl started interrogating him about his eye.
"What happened to you?"
"I said something I shouldn't have. Something that I didn't mean, and had no right to say. I'm really, really sorry."
Karl was looking at him doubtfully. Kara wasn't looking at him at all.
"Incredibly sorry," Lee continued. "I'd take it back if I could. I'll try and make it right, if they give me a chance..."
Kara got up then, and gave a bright smile that didn't reach her eyes, and said something about having to go, and not wanting to be late to class. Kara, Lee reflected gloomily, was gleefully late to morning class at three times a week. It was a matter of principle for her. He knew, because she always got up early to go for a morning run, no matter what or who she'd done the previous day, so the tardiness wasn't due to laziness or need for sleep. He liked Kara best in the morning, actually. She was softer, somehow, before she'd woken up completely. And the sweat from her morning run looked good on her…
"Are you sure you're okay?" Karl was asking, and Lee realized that the other cadet must have been talking for awhile now. "No delusions or anything? Maybe whoever it was hit you harder than you thought."
Yeah, Lee thought, eyes on the door that Kara had left through. Yeah, maybe they did.
He had no right to be angry, or bereft, or missing his friend after only one night. He knew that. Somehow, though, it didn't help at all.
The next few weeks Kara was flawlessly polite towards him. They still played pyramid together, and sat next to each other in history class, but she refused to joke with him, push him, or spend any time with him outside of those two activities.
People had begun to notice, although some of them widely misinterpreted the situation. One of the soon-to-be viper jockeys had asked him for his secret, how he'd managed to harness the great Kara Thrace. Lee highly suspected that he'd asked because he was trying to get into Kara's pants, and he spent the rest of that day in a foul mood, praying to the gods that his classmate would be stuck piloting raptors for the rest of his life. On Galactica. Non-computer-assisted landings on an outmoded piece of junk for the rest of his sorry career.
He'd wanted to tell Kara that the guy was a creep, that she should stay away from him, but somehow it was hard to work that into a conversation about the importance of agricultural in the First Colonial War, and they never really talked anymore when they played Pyramid.
In some ways, Lee found that incredibly frustrating. After all, half the fun of playing with Kara was her mouth.
No, wait, he thought desperately. That hadn't come out right. Half the fun of playing with Kara was her words, the way she wielded them like they were another weapon in the game, threw them out with the same violence and recklessness that she used on the pyramid ball.
In other ways though, Lee was grateful for the silence. It was better by far than icy politeness, and neither of them could help the fact that when they played together, something just clicked. She might be angry at him, or hurt, or, the most likely and worst choice of all, simply have decided that he wasn't worth the effort anymore, but she couldn't keep up with the ice queen routine when they were on the court together. They could anticipate each other's moves, read each other's intent, and there was nothing either of them could do about their eyes locking and their bodies brushing. Lee wanted it too much and Kara wanted to win too much for them to be anything less than completely in tune.
The rest of the time though, Lee had to settle for watching Kara from afar, like he had before tutoring and pyramid and the whole glorious mess that what his friendship with Kara Thrace.