Little Tiger

Koharu's room, past midnight

Shigure had homework to finish. He claimed he couldn't do it unless someone was in the room with him. Apparently Ayame was normally the person who sat with Shigure at a time like this, but it had to be me tonight. To kill some time, I worked on my homework as well. Though, I didn't get very far and gave up halfway through my math assignment. I watched him write for a while; his pen moving feverishly across the page, jotting down fragments of sentences mixed in with complete ones, and filling the page with incongruous annotation marks that would be fixed when he typed it up the following day. When I got tired of that (his way of writing made my head spin), I reread the only book I had that wasn't a textbook for school.

I found myself wanting to impress Shigure; make him think that I was smart, worldly, a "thinker," if you will. But I felt stupid about it because I was so obviously not this type of person---no sixteen-year-old is no matter how hard they might try---not to mention, I was positive that he was paying no attention to me at this time. Still, though I couldn't admit it or even recognize it on the surface, I knew that deep down I just wanted Shigure to be attracted to me. I figured I could fulfill this by appealing to him intellectually, which, now that I was seriously thinking about it, I realized that I didn't understand him well enough to do such a thing. I knew that Shigure read books and a handful of hours ago, I learned that he wanted to be a writer as well. This was the only "intellectual" thing about him. He had a fascination with those obnoxious American and British rock bands. Nothing else came to mind. Obviously I could always appeal to him sexually (that dirty dog would have loved that), but I was too insecure to present myself that way and I still wasn't sure what kind of attention I wanted from Shigure anyway.

"What?" he asked after he caught me staring at him with a pained expression. 

I cleared my throat and put my nose back in my book. "Nothing. You have a piece of fuzz in your hair." He did. It was towards the top of his head, a white fuzz that came from the shag carpet he had just recently put in his dorm room. I knew this because I had tracked that fuzz all the way back to the estate after I laid on it the other day. 

Shigure tapped his pen against the top of his paper while he looked at me. His eyes seemed to ignite when he looked at me these days. This is an over exaggeration. 

"Would you like to get it for me?" he asked as the corners of his mouth curled upwards.  

I laid my book facedown on the mattress to hold my page, and weeded out the piece of fuzz from his hair. I thought of doing it slowly, moving closer to him. I didn't, afraid he'd catch on to me or something. 

"There," I said, like a doctor would after administering a shot to a child. I flicked the fuzz from my fingers, causing it to land somewhere on the floor.  

"Thank you, Ko." Shigure smoothed his hair down after my fingers had been in it, and looked back down at his notebook again. 

I picked my book up and reread the same page over because I hadn't been paying any attention to it the first time through. 

"Are you nervous for tomorrow?" 

I waited a beat before answering, pretending to be very interested in what I was reading and couldn't put it down until I reached a safe spot. I put my finger over the start of a new paragraph and turned to him. 

"Uh---no," I replied lamely. 

Shigure chuckled and closed his notebook, resting his pen on his ear. "Good, you shouldn't be." 

I scoffed. It was easy for him to say. 

"Ugh, Koharu," he groaned, elongating each vowel in my name so it sounded like  'Kooohaaaruuu'. "I don't want to write this paper." He sunk his head into the pillow and closed his eyes.