#rinaii

"Senpai?"

"Too tired to sit up there," he offers as an explanation. Then, a bit more unexpectedly, Rin pats the mattress next to him. "C'mere."

Oh.

Ai blinks, feeling heat rushing to his cheeks, and he shakes himself, sitting down gingerly.

Do not, he tells himself firmly, lay down to smell his sheets. That's a kind of creepy you're not, Aiichirou.

"Alright," Rin says, and Ai looks down at his worksheet to where Rin is pointing, "so this part here..."

Ai bends to the task, watching Rin-senpai's words flow out of his mouth, Rin switching back and forth between the languages fluidly. Ai licks his lips as Rin rounds his around unfamiliar foreign words. It takes a bit for Ai to realize that Rin has stopped speaking, and is instead watching him again, a smile quirking his lips.

"Um," Ai says intelligently.

"Try saying it," Rin tells him, and repeats a phrase Ai's sure he said before.

Ai makes a face, but goes ahead and parrots the phrase back.

Rin's smile gets wider, and he says it again, gently correcting Ai's pronunciation.

After a few more tries, Ai frowns. "I sound like I'm saying gibberish."

"A little bit," Rin says, kind and amused. "But you're getting better. Try it one more time."

Ai sighs, but does as he's bid, just as Sousuke walks into the room. Sousuke blinks, looks at Rin. "Do I need to leave?" he asks dryly. "Sorry if I was interrupting some love confessions or something."

"Love..." Ai blinks.

(Rin, he notes, turns red in his peripheral vision, hisses "Shut up" at Sousuke.)

Ai narrows his eyes. "Rin, what have I been saying?"

"Nothing too bad, I promise." Rin doesn't, however, meet his eyes.

"If you can count 'I adore you' as nothing too bad," Sousuke mutters, and Ai flushes darkly, staring at Rin and at the blush spreading across the bridge of his nose. He doesn't deny it.

Oh.

Ai bites back a grin. "Sousuke, you'll probably want to leave. We're going to be busy. Practicing tongue movements. English is all about the tongue."