"When did this happen?" someone is whispering, her tone almost indignant.
She slows slightly, pausing some feet away from the huddled, hushed voices. The girls bump and nudge at each other, swaying closer to the sky-blue windows before drawing back into the shadowed hallway. She watches their slanting silhouettes dance against the opposite wall. They don't seem to notice her presence.
One pipes up, suddenly, "I think a change like that-"
"-so drastic-"
"-definitely happened at least a month ago," the girl finishes.
"At least," another affirms.
"How did we not notice?" someone absently wants to know, and their collective white noise lulls to crackling static.
She turns, slowly, to look out the window.
Outside, across the field, his discarded shirt is dappled with warm sunlight. She watches him move with a fluid grace that lingers in the curve of his spine and the bend of his knees. Her mind's eye paints a petulant scowl behind his shock of tangerine hair, the glowing halo burning bright in the midst of darker-haired boys. He slips past one, sliding in front and stealing away the soccer ball.
His skin ripples over sleek sinew and her lips part soundlessly.
"He doesn't even know," a girl murmurs.
He draws an arm across his brow, soft shadows playing over the dips and angles of his bare chest, and glances up. She pulls away then, dizzily, and her blood sings a syrup-sweet song in time to the girls' longing sighs.
I would kill for shirtless Ichigo playing soccer. who's with me? XD
but really, until Riruka was kind enough to state the obvious, nobody had really seemed to notice that Ichigo is hot. this just had to be done.