Not because she was first in line, but because he had been watching her. He had seen the way her eyes lingered on his body. He had noticed the flush that crept up her neck when he removed his robe — not just fear, not just shame, but something else underneath it, something that she herself probably didn't fully understand.
The crush. The fan-girl infatuation that had been simmering since the tournament, since the Dharma body, since the moment she had first looked up at the sky and seen his face projected a thousand times its size and thought, 'he's beautiful.'
He tilted her chin up with his free hand. Her bright eyes met his gold-crimson ones, and for one frozen heartbeat, she saw herself reflected in those golden depths — small, naked, terrified, and desperately, ashamedly eager in a way that made her want to crawl into the floor and disappear.
Then his mouth was on hers, and thinking became very difficult.
