This just seemed to fit them. While I love me some GaaSaku I actually have a big ol soft streak for NaruSaku and the bunny didn't match Gaara's personality type…

I've done the Halloween party trope before, but I just felt like writing a meet cute and this was what spewed out of me. Forgive me Gaara! I made you a weirdo in this one. Oh, wait. XD Things flowed ok for this one, I think I'm starting to get my groove back a bit and these exercises help.

This is M because it somehow feels more than T. But it's not really M. Whatever comes between M and T, if that rating existed. T-13?

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto (but if I had by gosh those pairings in the end would have been very different!)

"Pick up, pick up, pick up…. INO!" Sakura ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth for what felt like the thousandth time. Sitting on her toilet, sunlight streaming in through the skylight and reminding her that drinking past her limit was an evil she brought on herself, Sakura clutched her phone like a lifeline. It was before 9am on a Sunday and she would be lucky if Ino even had her phone on. They had been at the same party after all.

You've reached Ino, leave a message! Unless you're Chouji, and then you can go to hell. beep

So they were fighting again. Ugh. That definitely meant Ino didn't have her phone on. "Ino call me as soon as you get this message. AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS I'M DEAD SERIOUS."

Sakura's leg bounced as she stared at her phone and tried to will Ino into calling her. Best to leave like another four or five messages to show she wasn't joking. It was a friend emergency.

Firm but polite knocks echoed against the bathroom door, and Sakura yelped. Juggling her phone so as to not let it drop, she heard it continue to ring Ino as she tried to get her mind right.

"I found some eggs and stuff in your fridge, so I'm making us breakfast. Oh shit, I mean, is it ok if I make us some breakfast?" came the muffled voice.

"Sounds great!" No it didn't, what the hell was she saying. Sakura softly hit her phone against her forehead over and over as if she could slowly concuss herself out of this mess. "I'm just going to catch a shower so I might be a while."

"Cool. Take your time, I'll keep it all warm for ya!"

Footsteps padded away, but Sakura thought for sure she wouldn't be able to hear them as the blood rushed in her ears to the beat of her panic attack. The ticking number on her phone told her she had just left Ino a really interesting message.

"Call me NOW." She hissed before hanging up. A shower wasn't a bad idea, at least, even if it had been a quick lie to buy time at first.

Setting her phone down on the bathroom counter next to the sink, Sakura stared at the mirror and took stock of her life:

FACT: All her fake blood makeup from being a silent hill nurse at the Halloween party last night was smudged on her body (with a particularly mortifying smear that ended in a masculine handprint at her hip)

FACT: Other than being greasy, and having bad breath there was a certain off brand Axe smell to her skin that she could only assume was attributed to sweating in close proximity to the man cooking eggs in her kitchen

FACT: Ino still had not called

FACT: Her brain might have been replaced with tapioca pudding because for the life of her she couldn't think of what to do next

"Think Haruno, think!" Her clever mind had gotten her out of some sticky situations before, but this one was a finger trap she had gleefully stampeded into. Or some other mixed metaphor. Even she couldn't make sense of what she was trying to accomplish.

Aspirin first, to fight the painful sunlight. A quick look through the medicine cabinet while it was open to doubly make sure nothing embarrassing was in there like old acne creams, or any of those massage oils Ino had given out as gag gifts at the last bridal shower (Temari had flat out refused to take hers home so Sakura had been stuck with like 5 vials with names like Passion Plum and Wet for Wisteria). Seemed like she was safe for now.

Peeling away from the cabinet, Sakura turned on the shower as hot as she dared and pieced together last night while stripping out of her clothes. First things first: what was his name?

"I said you should be a sexy nurse. This is what you wear to work and it is not sexy."

"I just got off shift, Ino. These are my work clothes, not my costume." Sakura crashed into Ino's living room where it looked like a very specific vandal had arrived to strew around every pair of leggings and half the clubwear Ino owned around her one bedroom apartment. "The costume is in here," she held up a small duffle she had stuffed late last night with the costume she had ordered online.

"Fake blood is in the kitchen. Don't stain anything or you're not my best friend anymore." Ino was pushing her volumonous blond hair into a wig cap. She basically had all the clothing and makeup she needed to look like Black Widow so buying a wig had been the easy way out this year.

Sakura wished she could just go home and sleep after working part of the night and all of the day, but she had promised this year would not be like last year. Tenten had given her so much shit for blowing off her Halloween party two years in a row. It was not like college when she could carve out the time she needed for studying and for people separately and successfully. Jobs kind of liked you to keep to the schedule they set for you.

"Are you asleep standing up? You're just staring at my stove!" Ino called from the living room, picking up the clothes she had tossed out as she had searched for the right combination of tight fitting faux leather for this evening.

"Maybe. Shut up." Sakura, realizing that if she stopped moving she would probably actually fall asleep, wandered out of the kitchen and back over to her friend. "I'm going to shower off real quick to wake up, is that cool?"

"Just don't take forever. We have to get driving soon or we'll never get parking by Tenten's. You know where the towels are." Ino dismissed her friend with a wave and continued to pick up the mess.

Sakura dragged her duffle of costume in with her, and it only took a moment to rinse off and then pull on the barely there dress and white tights. The shoes were fairly sensible, luckily (half the reason she had agreed to this) and all that she really needed to do was bandage up her head and then slap on the fake blood and grime.

"Stop hiding in there." Ino called.

"I'm not hiding, why would you say that?"

"Every time you don't want to do something you hide in bathrooms. Or don't you remember that incident at the mall like two years ago when—"

Sakura growled as she threw open the door, bandages still in her hand. "You said you wouldn't bring that up ever again! Besides, even I don't think that happened anymore. No one goes to malls."

With a snorting laugh, Ino pushed her way into the tiny space and helped Sakura bobby pin her hair down before they wrapped her up in bandages.

"There's going to be some cute guys there tonight. Tenten works with tons of engineers, and she said she invited like everyone under the sun to her party."

"I'm going to see my friends, not pick up random guys." Sakura's words were muffled by the bandages, and she moved them around a little so that she had some room to talk and breathe better. "I hope I never have a real head wound, you're terrible at this."

Huffing at her, pride wounded, Ino stuck out her tongue. "You do it yourself then, Ms. Perfect." Ino shouldered into the mirror space and started applying her eye makeup. Even though she had like five other mirrors strategically placed in her apartment, it was typical she wanted to use the one Sakura needed in that moment.

They spent time in that companionable silence that was the product of being best friends (and occasional frenemies) since they were in grade school until the words Sakura hoped she wouldn't say somehow wormed their way through her brain and past her lips.

"Do you think Sasuke will be there tonight?"

Ino was groaning before the sentence finished and it started small and built to a crescendo where she was knocking her knuckles lightly against Sakura's skull.

"Give. It. Up. Haruno." Ino turned back to the mirror and put the finishing touches on her eyes, which she always said she thought were her best feature. "Sasuke is a lost cause, and even if he is there tonight, which I doubt, you shouldn't hang your happiness there. It wasn't cute in high school or college, and that torch is even less cute now that we have to pretend to be adults."

Sakura had heard various versions of this lecture more times than she could count, but some nostalgic wisp of memory featuring piercing black eyes and a scowl that drew her in even as it drove others away made her normally sedate heart flutter.

"You're totally right." Sakura finished wrapping the bandages after a minor struggle and only one hip check to her friend to quit hogging the mirror space. "But do you think he'll be there?"

Totally disgusted, Ino exited the bathroom saying she needed to put on her wig and Sakura smiled to herself and used her newly acquired space to pin the nurse's hat to the top of her mummy wrappings. Sometimes it was too easy.

"Your yard is incredible Tenten!" Sakura yelled over the music as her smiling friend opened the door dressed like the girl from the Ring. "The fog is really realistic."

The fake graveyard filled with zombies was hyper realistic, and Sakura wondered when her friend had the time to put together all this with her own more than full time job as an engineer. Halloween was Tenten's favorite time of year, and she always pulled out all the stops to make it a huge to do. New husband Neji had probably been recruited to do some of it as well, even if it was hard to imagine the stoic man glad to do anything for anyone.

There was a moment when Tenten seemed to not register who was in the bandages, but then she blinked hard a couple times and broke into a huge grin. "Oh my gosh, Sakura! Ino! Come in, you both look cold. Have a drink, have a snack, there's tons. I think I over bought because so many people RSVPed this year." Tenten, glass of red wine in hand, gestured for them to enter the crush of bodies. As per usual, costume compliance was about 60/40 but the people who had tried really went all out.

Ino, who had snagged a lollipop from the bowl of candy outside ("TAKE 1 OR ELSE") was furiously sucking on it while tapping out a message on her phone. There was a glint in her eyes that boded ill for her conspicuously absent boyfriend. Sakura figured Chouji dressed like a big green Hulk would have been hard to miss. Not wanting to be on ground floor for what would no doubt become an argument shortly, Sakura glided over to the punch bowl.

Filled with some sort of mystery slurry, she took a small ladle of it into a plastic cup and sipped it carefully. It tasted like lighter fluid mixed with Hawaiian punch. Sure that her evening would be ending fast if she started on that too early, she opted for a beer from the cooler next to the snack table.

"Allow me, my lady!"

Sakura took a steadying breath. Maybe she should have gone for the punch, as she wasn't drunk enough yet for a conversation with Lee.

"Hi Lee. Thanks, but there's a bottle opener right here—"

"Sakura! I didn't realize it was you under all those bandages."

Almost by magic, he produced his own bottle opener from some pocket in his Bruce Lee pants and put his nunchucks in his armpit while he opened her beer for her anyway. He really needed to switch up his costume one of these years, but she had to admit Lee embodied the look from the hair to the fake scratches on his well defined chest muscles.

"I brought my own this year so that I could be ready if someone wanted to taste my home brewed kombucha!" He seemed so excited that Sakura, as always, didn't have the heart to burst his bubble and snub him cold. "Would you like to try it? It's very good for you with lots of active—"

"I have a beer already, maybe later. How's business at the gym?"

Lee brightened after his dismay at what was no doubt yet another person rejecting his home brew. "Fantastic! We were featured in a Crossfit magazine after I placed in the top ten at the championships this year. I know I'll do even better next year!" He was all fired up, but Sakura was happy he was at least succeeding at his life goals.

"How has your life been going, Sakura? I haven't seen you in far too long!" He was making that expression, the one she was afraid she still made when she spoke of Sasuke.

She tried to think of anything that had happened to her recently that wasn't some gory work story. "Uhh, I'm planning on visiting my folks for the holidays so long as they don't fly off somewhere tropical like they did last year." It didn't seem like enough information, with Lee's listening face giving her its full intensity. "I was thinking of getting a cat, or something, because it would be nice I guess to come home to a non-empty place once in a while."

That sounded pitiful. Sakura didn't know how pitiful it sounded until she saw that Lee actually felt bad for her after she said it. Absolutely unable to deal with whatever he was about to say next to her, Sakura immediately began to shotgun her beer. Politely, Lee watched her down the entire thing and patted her on the back when some of it went down the wrong pipe and she started coughing.

Filling up her punch cup, and another one for Ino, she made her excuses about finding her friend and Lee let her go without a struggle. It didn't take long to find Ino, who was on the back porch yelling into her phone. Even odds it was one of her attorney "friends" from work or Chouji.

"You promised me. I don't care who missed their shift! You own the place don't you, just call someone else and make them come in! I didn't talc half my body to squeeze into this leather nonsense just so you can stand me up." It was a lie of course, it was probably pleather, and Sakura knew that it was perfectly easy to get in and out of as Ino had worn it back when they used to club together pre-Chouji. But that didn't sound as dire, and Ino wanted him to feel bad.

Stepping out onto the deck she waved the cup in Ino's peripheral vision until her friend noticed it and took a deep drink while Chouji made his excuses. She wrinkled her nose up, finding it just as disgusting at first blush as Sakura, and then dumping the rest of it over the side of the railing into some unsuspecting bushes. Ino waved Sakura away before raging into the phone once again. She lived for this. Indignation was like food to her.

Sakura raised her cup at her friend, acknowledging the futile battle Ino was engaged in to extract her successful restaurant owner boyfriend from his business and to her side. Best to make her rounds through the party without Ino.

There were pods of conversation and laughter everywhere, but even when she recognized people no one was gesturing for her to come over because no doubt the bandages obscured her identity. It was somewhat thrilling to be able to wander around as a stranger among friends and acquaintances. Tonight she could be a different person, maybe, without Ino beside her to give the game away.

A cluster of men were gathered around some guy dressed as a firefighter. He was making huge gestures with his arms, punctuating some fantastical story and basking in the attention. Somehow as his eyes were flickering around, they met with hers and if she didn't know better her gave her a wink before going back to whatever tale he was entertaining his audience with. The wink seemed audacious and she was glad for the bandages to hide her burning cheeks as she marched into the kitchen to find Tenten chopping up veggies for a platter of some sort.

"Who's the firefighter? What's his deal?" She took another disgusting sip from the jungle juice in her plastic cup and then set it down to pick up a carrot and munch while Tenten used her superior knife skills to butcher a celery stalk.

"That firefighter, if you mean the cute blond guy in the living room, is Naruto. I suggest you go talk to him if you want to know what his 'deal' is."

"C'mon Tenten, give me a hint. Is he a jerk?"

Tenten brandished her knife playfully in Sakura's direction. "I'm not playing this middle school game with you, Sakura. Go talk to him yourself if you think he's cute. I know he's single."

"What makes you think I think he's cute?" She grabbed up Tenten's wine, hoping to drown out the aftertaste of the jungle juice but what washed over the taste buds was not her friend's favorite merlot. "Grape juice?"

It took less than a minute to guess between the guilty look on Tenten's face and the absence of alcohol in her drink.

"Does Neji know? Don't give me that look. Ok so Neji knows. Does anyone else know?" Sakura was excited for her friend, but she suddenly felt at a loss. Ino was in a committed (off and on) relationship, Lee was a successful business owner, Tenten was pregnant, and what did Sakura have right now other than tentative feline ownership plans.

"No, we're going to announce it soon so don't blow this for me." The knife was looking less playful and more threatening every moment Sakura didn't answer her so she gave a hasty nod. "Good. Now go out there and talk to the cute firefighter."

"Yes, mom." Sakura saluted with her half full plastic cup and Tenten shot her a dark look that went so well with her Samara costume that Sakura got a chill. Banished from the kitchen and unable to talk to Ino about her suddenly complex feelings regarding her life and its trajectory, Sakura started lingering on the edge of the conversation that the handsome blond man was still dominating.

"…and then I got the bright idea that maybe if I climbed the tree next to it I could see the Frisbee in the first one, but then my neighbor who I told you had that window into her bedroom across the way saw me squinting at something and thought I was trying to peep on her. I had no idea she'd gone nuts until all the cops showed up and demanded I get down. They had me cuffed and facedown on the lawn while the lady screamed at me before I could even tell them what was up, she was still in her bathrobe and everything." He laughed through his story, but Sakura thought that if something like that had happened to her she wouldn't find it so funny. "My worthless friend Kiba was in my back yard with his dog laughing his ass off, but eventually he hopped the fence and got one of the officers to listen to him. We were sixteen so they let me off with a warning like I had done something wrong. After that I didn't want to be a cop anymore."

A guy that Sakura vaguely recognized as one of Tenten's engineer friends, started to launch into his own story about a youthful brush with the law and as he talked Sakura saw Naruto take a sip of his beer and pat someone on the shoulder so he could be let through. Instead of walking away, he settled on the edge of the crowd next to Sakura and held out his hand. For a moment she thought he was gesturing to someone else, but realized after a moment and shifted her drink to shake his hand.

"Naruto Uzumaki. Love that costume, those games are scary as hell." Up close she could see that he had chosen his costume well, as his chest muscles stood out from his fitted t-shirt and without the firefighter jacket on toned arms proclaimed he was no stranger to the gym. The suspenders were kind of dorky though.

"Never played them, so I wouldn't know. But I looked up 'scary nurse' online and this came up first. It seemed pretty cool so I went with it. I'm a nurse in real life, and I rarely get covered in this much blood." It wasn't very funny, but Naruto laughed anyway. Sakura took another fortifying drink of the jungle juice that tasted less vile every time she took a sip. The warmth she was feeling, however, seemed related to the proximity of the man next to her and not the liquid poison spreading through her body.

"What's your name?"

"Sakura." Considering how long she and Tenten had been friends she thought that that name would light some recognition in his face, but he just nodded and smiled. "Do you work with Tenten?"

"Not exactly. We met at her company's CPR training." One of the guys clapped him hard on the back on the way out of the clump of people, causing him to spray some of the beer he was sipping in Sakura's direction. She flinched away, and silently wondered why she thought this guy was so cute in the first place as he turned around quick and lightning and playfully punched his attacker in the side of the thigh. "Sorry about that, my friend Sai came along with me tonight and he basically specializes in being as ass. Do you need a napkin or something? Let me go get you a napkin."

Sakura watched him spring lightly towards the kitchen and took the moment to make her escape. Flirting wasn't to be tonight when all it netted you was spittle, she figured. He had seemed so likely too, so far away from the type of guy she usually went for that even Ino couldn't give her any crap for talking to him as a Sasuke replacement. She wasn't like that these days, but her friends refused to believe her.

It didn't take long to locate the people she was looking for. In the den, isolated from most of the music and nearly all of the people, were Neji, Shikamaru, and Gaara. The three of them were furiously discussing politics, (something that Sakura usually tried to avoid for her own sanity's sake) and while Neji and Gaara tried to counter one another's points with ironclad logic about freedom versus order, Shikamaru poked holes in both their theories while furiously puffing on his e-cigarette. In the past, she had often found Sasuke in this room, back when Tenten's parties were less lavish and everyone was a little younger and held their alcohol a little better.

"Sorry to interrupt, I was looking for someone."

"Nice costume." Gaara, who had come in no costume but was dressed as always in all black, ate her up with his eyes and Sakura tried to project her distaste at him rather than allow herself to be intimidated.

Shikamaru blew out a cloud of vapor, looking silly in his monk's robes. "Is that Sakura? You hair is showing."

"Dang it." Sakura's hand flew to the sides of her head where she could feel the bandages had separated and exposed her pastel locks. "Thanks Shika, I better go fix it."

As Sakura was turning to head to the bathroom, Neji's voice cut her to the core. "Sasuke isn't joining us tonight. Despite my efforts to prevent it, he's on a date with my cousin and she doesn't do well in noisy crowds."

"Thanks Neji." Sakura didn't know what else to say. Some choice words wanted to flow to the top of her mind but she was too caught up in her own angst to do much more than down the rest of her jungle juice. To hell with the bathroom and fixing her costume or whatever else she had just been planning on doing, it seemed like a good night for total self-destruction.

Things started to get very hazy very quickly after that memory.

She was reasonably sure she played some sort of drinking game involving darts with a person with blue hair in a left shark costume, and then there were some people trying to play quarters and she managed to impress with the trick shots she had taught herself in college while she had been the DD and making fun of all those idiots who waste their school years inebriated. A year later she ate all those words, she recalled. Sakura had always been good at games that required precision, even if she preferred the ones that required force but her greatest talent then had been her whopping ego. She liked to think she was more accepting these days, and less critical of herself and others.

Naruto arrived in the picture again around the time she was playing badminton in the back yard against a shivering Temari in a nun's habit. Gaara's sister absolutely hated being cold but hated admitting defeat even more as she and Sakura traded volleys with the shuttlecock. At some point a warm, stiff, heavy jacket was plopped on Sakura's shivering shoulders that smelled of real leather and a mix of body spray and other unnamed chemicals. Across the net, Shikamaru was negotiating the return back home early because he was bored and Temari was telling him to figure out something to do until she was done with this game.

Sakura had looked up into shining blue eyes and a toothy smile made so much whiter because of Naruto's tan face. "Let's play doubles!" Naruto challenged the couple across the yard, and in that moment Sakura secretly declared her drunken love to him. Or maybe it had been out loud. She couldn't tell at this point.

Shikamaru had groaned as Temari accepted the challenge and Sakura had giggled and downed the last of her (third?) cup of slurry to gird her loins for the fight ahead. It would have been a far more epic win if Temari hadn't been basically forced to play both sides of her court.

The victory was decisive and what was meant to be a high five followed by a fist bump with her surprising partner somehow ended up in a kiss that curled her very cold toes in those now muddy white shoes that had given her wicked blisters on the back of her heels.

Then there was a cab, and her pulling a smiling blond man practically into her lap as he vainly protested and then sticking her tongue half down his throat while her other hand went for his…

Oh god.

The water was starting to lose some of its heat which was how Sakura knew she had been in there too long trying to piece together the broken shards of memory that were probably going to be termed "the jungle juice blackout" in future therapy sessions. Clearly, she had jumped on this Naruto guy and pulled him into her place. She knew she had pulled his shirt off of him and run her fingers over those absolutely sinfully perfect abs of his, but then nothing. Truly nothing.

Time to face reality. Particularly since it looked like Ino hadn't gotten her frantic messages.

There weren't any clothes in here for her to change into, having shut herself in the bathroom with too much haste upon waking up. After all, cold panic was appropriate with a tan arm wound securely around her and a bare chest pressed to her back. That moment she stood up and found herself pacing back and forth next to her own bed in sheer panic had only ended in rage that this blond man looked like a model even when he slept with his mouth slightly open. He had probably drooled on her.

Who was she kidding, he had way more than drooled on her.

Digging out her biggest beach towel from the cupboard in the bathroom, Sakura covered as much of her body as she could and darted into the bedroom in a blur of bare legs and shame. She found her baggiest everything and dressed quickly, finding it ever so hard to pull on jeans when she hadn't dried her legs properly. Giving her hair a quick comb, she steeled herself and marched into the kitchen like a prisoner would meet a firing squad. The time for cowardice was over.

The firing squad had a megawatt smile and steaming eggs and bacon for her. She sat down at her tiny table across from him on the chairs she had gotten on sale at some upscale store that specialized in antique looking furniture. Usually this table was covered in work related papers, but she saw there was a neat stack of those on her couch. On the ground next to her couch was her nurse costume and some stray bobby pins, and Sakura's eyes snapped right back to the breakfast she was no longer hungry for.

"Morning beautiful. There was a paper on your doorstep. Who reads a real newspaper these days?"

"I do, sometimes. But really I did it just to give money to a local business." She waited for him to find fault with that somehow, but he just shrugged and continued to read the comic section while flicking his eyes over to see if she'd tried any of the food he'd fixed for her.

It was unfairly delicious. Despite telling herself she wasn't hungry she found herself eating ravenously.

"Oh! Almost forgot." Naruto darted up, seemingly wanting to do everything at top speed, and grabbed a glass of water he must have placed in her fridge earlier. "You'll probably want this too. You were pretty drunk last night. Cute, but really drunk."

This man was unrealistically nice. And hyper. She couldn't imagine where he got all that energy.

"How are the eggs? We take turns cooking at the station and I like to think I do a pretty mean breakfast. I had to teach myself how to cook or else those guys would have given me the worst shifts for forever."

"They're really good." Sakura found herself saying after a moment of hesitation. Naruto basked in her simple compliment and she felt suddenly bad for wanting to kick him out ASAP for no other reason than she felt ashamed for having had a one night stand. Better to rip off the band-aid. She always swore to herself she wouldn't be like those simpering girls who played games with guys. "Look, I like you, but I'll be honest with you. I don't remember tons of last night, and I feel like we can't get on the right foot now that I've done something so out of character like take home a guy I barely know."

Naruto looked at her with surprise for a moment, but then put the paper aside and caught up one of her hands with his. He was so warm, and even though his hand was rough he held her gently. He might be the first person she had ever met that seemed to assume she was fragile.

"My name is Naruto Uzumaki, after I got my fire science degree I had to take more tests than I ever thought possible and somehow lucked into a job here in my city doing the greatest job I'll ever have at a station across town from here. My birthday was October 10th and I didn't even get to eat my cake before I got called out to an emergency. I think you're pretty, I think I liked you the moment I laid eyes on you, and I think you think too much."

Sakura stared at him, not sure of what to say after that declaration. She couldn't tell if this guy was an idiot, or such a straight shooter that he wasn't capable of artifice.

"I also know that you lectured me for twenty minutes about consent and something or other about alcohol's effects on the body before dragging me into your bedroom. I told you I would sleep on the couch, but you insisted and you are weirdly strong for being so small. Then you jumped on me and we made out for a while before you announced you were sleepy. I figured I'd just keep an eye on you at first, but I fell asleep too."

He looked sheepish when he got to the part about making out with her, but everything he said matched her other memories of the evening in which she had been the aggressor for most of it. She had dragged him out of the party, she had dragged him into her apartment, she had (apparently) dragged him into her bed as well. But if all that happened was that she had made out with a handsome firefighter, then she should thank her lucky stars.

The phone next to her on the table finally buzzed. She couldn't help but glance at it.

Got ur voicemail, did you use protection? devil smiley Sakura did not want to dignify Ino's message with any response.

"Go out with me tonight."

"What?" Sakura had been plotting a scathing reply to Ino for being totally unhelpful when Naruto's voice brought her back to the present. Her relief had been so total to find out she hadn't slept with a near stranger that to be suddenly cut off from the morning's adrenaline surge had made her disoriented. "Are you asking me out on a date?"

"I mean, we can trade numbers and then I can wait for you to call me, but I think we both know that you won't." He said it lightly, but it was one of those observations that cut to the truth at the very heart of her insecurities. It was a mistake to think this man simple. "I want to skip all that and just get to the part where we can have a good time together. I remember like 90% of that lecture from last night, so if you say no I'll just leave."

Sakura was quiet as she considered his offer.

"Ok, more like 60%, but you talk really fast when you're being serious and you kept poking me in the chest as you made your points." He rubbed around his solar plexus as if it pained him.

Revisiting her memories from last night Sakura thought about Lee's pity, Ino's disgust, and Tenten's joy. Maybe it was about time she took a leap of her own into some new adventure. Life wasn't about retirement funds and other people's medical emergencies, but that's what it had been for Sakura for far too long.

"When does our date start?"

"How about now?" Naruto beamed at her.