“Well, look who decided to grace me with her presence,” I chided.

Nina stood in the threshold. Her hair was wet as she clutched her books in front of her chest. She always did this thing where she hesitated to come in, like my room was a lion’s den or some shit.

She wasn’t smiling. “I got stuck in a line at the market. Then, it started pouring rain. I got here as fast as I could.”

The damp smell of the rain lingered on her body as she stood in the doorway.

“You can come in, you know.”

She stepped inside and sat on the bed. “Thank you.”

As always, I sat away from her at my desk. Something was different about her attitude tonight. It seemed like she was pissed.

I tried to lighten the mood. “You always seem to get caught in the rain, Nina. Why is that? It’s like you attract it. ”

She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “I guess if the rain is attracted to me, what would that make you then…fire or something?”

Shit.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she muttered under her breath.

I knew what the fuck it meant. For the first time, she was calling me out on my hot and cold behavior toward her, except now she’d come to a conclusion that couldn’t have been more far off. She believed I wasn’t attracted to her when my problem was exactly the opposite.

Just when things couldn’t have possibly gotten more tense, she took off her jacket. Her shirt was damp, allowing me a clearer view of the body beneath. A vision of pulling on that shirt with my teeth and sucking the water dry off of her beautiful tits caused blood to rush to my dick.

“Are you sure you don’t want to change before we start?”

I don’t think she knew that I could see right through the material.

“No. I’m good.”

Well, I’m not fucking good with this.

I took out a shirt from my closet and threw it at her. “Here. Put this on.”

“But…”

I gritted my teeth and repeated, “Put it on.”

She looked down at herself and blushed, finally realizing why I’d been so adamant about it. She took the shirt without further protest, and I turned away so she could change.

She gave me the go ahead to turn back around. My breathing was rapid and quickened even further when my eyes landed on her breasts stretching against my shirt. It was the closest thing that I’d have to my body wrapped around her. She looked so fucking hot in it.

I cleared my throat. “We should get started. Show me the assignment.”

She handed me the textbook and some worksheets. “It’s on probability.”

I rubbed my chin and wracked my brain for some ideas. I always came up with lessons of my own in addition to what homework Nina was given by her professor. She always seemed to pay better attention when she could relate to the examples.

Doing something to break the tense mood was also going to be necessary.

Grabbing a notepad, I wrote a few things down before flipping it around and showing it to her. “Okay…probability. One of these things has a greater likelihood than the other: Nina farts in her sleep. Nina talks in her sleep. Nina does nothing in her sleep.”

“You’re lying.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

***

That night, I snuck another origami bat into Nina’s room.

What I almost wrote:

You’re lucky you’re cute,

When you sleep and toot.

And lucky I don’t mind,

The silent but deadly kind.

What I wished I could have written:

To your rain, you said I was fire.

If only I could show you my desire.

Then, you’d clearly see,

What it is you do to me.

What I actually wrote:

Rest assured, you neither fart nor talk in your sleep.

But should you decide to start tonight,

Mr. Bat won’t utter a peep.

***

My plan to stay away from her suffered two major setbacks in the days that followed.

The first was when Nina found out that she got her first A on a math exam. It was amazing but didn’t come as a total shock because she’d been busting her butt with studying lately.

She was preparing a Bananas Foster dessert to thank me for helping her make the grade. That dessert was like crack to me.

We were in the kitchen alone together. I was trying to help by peeling some of the bananas, but all I really ended up doing was distracting her. She was looking up at me while cutting and sliced her finger.

It caused me actual physical pain to see her blood pouring out and triggered a visceral reaction in me. There was no towel in sight, so I wrapped her finger tightly in my shirt. Red kept seeping through and without thinking, I placed her finger in my mouth and started to suck the blood out.

Okay. So, it wasn’t the most sanitary choice—a little insane maybe.

I just wanted to make it better. You should have seen the dazed and confused look on her face. It was like she was outside of her body watching it all unfold.

It wasn’t supposed to feel sexual; that wasn’t my intention. But without a doubt, it was stimulating because, let’s face it, having anything of hers in my mouth was going to have that effect. It wasn’t even so much my sucking on her finger as it was the way she was looking at me when I did it, like she wanted more of what I was giving her in that moment.

By the time I slowly slid her finger out of my mouth, I was starting to get aroused, and I was pretty sure she was, too. Her cheeks were flushed as I removed my blood-covered shirt and used it to wrap her finger again as she looked down at my bare chest. Her lips were parted in that way they always were when she ogled me. She didn’t realize I noticed it.