Title: You've Heard It Before
Summary: Sasuke is a businessman. Sakura is his wife. Naruto is an escape.
FOR FIC'S SAKE, I made everything really vague. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Otherwise, Neji would be the star and he would never get hurt.
You've Heard It Before
Sasuke is lucky.
He knows this; he is not blind.
(not completely)
Two pairs of feet stamp impressions down the hallway. The prints on the left are big, delivered silently with each fall of his shiny loafers. The prints on the right are irregular. Stiletto heels stamp significant dents in the gray carpet, disappearing after a few seconds into the gloomy, uniform shade.
Sasuke is lucky that Sakura is short enough that, when she wears heels, the top of her head never reaches past his eyebrows. He is lucky that her hair is such a light hue that the strands of it littered around the bathroom floor are undetectable.
The sound of metal dancing with metal reaches his ears. He looks down and sees his own hands unlocking the door. It's so routine, it's so mundane, it's become so easy to do these things that he doesn't even think to do them anymore. Every bad habit, each unconscious mannerism is second nature here, and he knows he will never change.
(will never want to)
He guides her into the apartment ahead of him. He shuts the door behind him.
Moonlight falls in parallelogram sheets across the floor, casting a glow on the immaculate space. It is clean here. It is always clean here.
Sasuke calls it the White.
The walls are white, the furniture is white. The White is this life he leads, waking up, seeing the sun, drinking coffee, going to work, and coming home to Sakura. Perhaps they go out sometimes, for dinner or parties, but that's white also. Sometimes, it's too white.
(blinding)
He leads her into the bedroom, and they dance before patient moon. Her body is ideal, and she smells like cherry blossoms. The bed, usually cold with its sheer sheets and pink dressings, is now rumpled and sweat stained, and this is how he likes it best.
The sex is good. It was never anything but. Sex in the White is good, because Sakura is pure and lovely, and she wants to be White for him, even if she doesn't know it.
But afterwards, when the sheets are haphazardly cocooning their bodies, he hears her crying.
Why? he asks the darkness, and it seems like he's lying to himself, because he knows why. He just doesn't know why.
There is no love here. Probably not from either of them, though he can't be sure of Sakura, and if he was to ask her if she loved him, he would have to expend some effort
(would have to give a damn)
which he never does, when it comes to the White. Or, at least, the White that involves only him and Sakura. He knows that, once upon a time, she was just a little girl falling in love. And, like any gentleman seeing a girl falling, he caught her.
(barely)
But now she just loves the idea of him. And he needs the idea of her. That's why he started seeing her, introduced her to his parents, proposed, bought this apartment. The White is the perfect life. So why does he feel the need for more?
And why is she crying?
It's because he never looks at her during sex anymore. It's because when he kisses her, his eyes don't close, and he pulls away before hers do. It's because when he takes her to work events, she is nothing but a woman attached to his arm, like a child who carries around a doll. And Sasuke is a child, is immature, because he just ignores it, doesn't try to fix it
(doesn't want to)
and they just keep living this monotonous stretch of White.
Maybe it's because he was whispering someone else's name.
He might have slipped up. It's happened before, when his White lies turn into daggers which he finds alarmingly close to his neck. Sakura is a smart girl. She probably knows about his someone else, perhaps has her own, but she will never say anything. She can't lose the White. And if she does, she wants Sasuke to be the one to break it off. Because he's the man, and he's supposed to fix things, not watch as they crumble around him.
One pair of footsteps echoes down the tiled hallway, stepping around puddles of water dripping from the roof. The feet stop in front of the familiar door. Three knocks are delivered, sharper and quicker than the footfalls, but echoing just the same. After a few moments, the door swings open, revealing a pair of bare feet on the other side.
"Oh, how sweet. You got all dressed up just to see me?"
"Don't flatter yourself, idiot. I came straight from work."
"So late? Well come in, then. I know some very effective stress-relieving activities..."
"You do know that, even though the smoke disappears, I still have to breathe it in, right?"
Sasuke takes a deep pull on his post-sex cigarette. A few seconds later, deliberately slow stream of gray escapes his lips, clouding up the air before his eyes. Thanks to mints and breath spray, Sakura doesn't know about this habit, along with a number of his other, much larger, guilty pleasures.
"Hn. You work at a bar. You're around second-hand smoke all the time."
"Fine, but it's gonna be you who drives me to the hospital when I have a heart attack."
"Hn. As long as you do the same for me."
A phone rings, and Sasuke knows it's his cell because of the default ringtone he'd never bothered to change it from. He stabs his cigarette into the makeshift ashtray (a chipped tea saucer) and falls out of the bed, the frame of which emitting a protesting creak. Somehow, he manages to locate his pants and fishes his phone out of the back pocket. His legs find their way back to the bed, which offers some protection from the cool air for his naked body.
"Hello?" he says softly into the phone, preparing himself for the White lies.
"Honey it's late. Where are you? I made dinner."
"I'm still at work. Someone screwed up a big file, and I have to stay all night to fix it. I'll sleep on the couch here, so I can get an early start in the morning."
"Oh... Are you sure? Sleeping on a couch this often isn't very good for your –"
"Yes, I'm sure. I'm sorry I didn't call you sooner. I have to go now. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Sasuke... I love you."
"I love you too,"
(not)
he mumbles into the mic, before ending the call. The phone is shoved back into his pants pocket, where his wallet and wedding ring are also stored.
Sasuke leans back against the pillows in their mismatched cases and lets a breath out of his nose. He senses he's being watched, and lazily swivels his head to the one across the sheets.
Naruto stares back at him, with those big blues that haunt Sasuke's dreams; the expression on his face is pensive, with a dash of hurt. No doubt he is analyzing that entire phone conversation, even the side that he didn't actually hear.
It takes seconds for Naruto to snap out of it.
"Anyway," he murmurs, blinking his eyes, and fidgeting with the sheets around his hips, "you know my friend, Gaara?"
Sasuke knows Gaara. Well, he doesn't actually know him, or any of Naruto's friends for that matter. But he's heard about them, in the endless conversations he and Naruto share after sex. There is the one with the dog, the one who sleeps all the time, the one who faints, the one who eats a lot. Sure, Naruto is less educated than him,
(than Sakura)
but he has so many beautiful and insightful thoughts under that blond hair, that Sasuke is never bored.
"Gaara, the one with the hotel?"
Naruto smiles, obviously pleased that Sasuke remembered the offhand descriptions of his friends. "Yeah. Well, speaking of the hotel, the other day, he... Gaara offered me a job there." Slowly, the corners of his mouth lower, in tandem with the direction of his eyes, until he's frowning at the bed sheets.
"Oh?"
"The pay is good. Better than what I'm getting now, and then I could live in the employees' quarters, but Gaara offered his spare bedroom to me." Naruto twirls the sheet around his finger, until he's holding a white, complicated ball of fabric.
"But that's four hours away."
Naruto finally looks up. The knot of sheets falls slack in his hand. "Right."
And when their eyes meet, it finally dawns on Sasuke.
For the past two years, as Sasuke has visited Naruto whenever he could (only at night, though), he's created another life. This alternative, this Black, is the complete opposite of what he has with Sakura. It's raw. Deep. Painful at its worst and unpolished at its best. It's obvious his family would not understand if Naruto had been the one he'd invited home for dinner. It's obvious that Sakura would not understand if he confessed to everything now.
And it's finally dawning on Sasuke that one of his lives has to end.
When Naruto looks into his eyes, he is daring Sasuke to say something. It's the same challenge he would probably find in Sakura's, if he'd bothered to look. Because, once again, Sasuke needs to be a man, needs to
(fix it)
be the one to call the shots. Everywhere he goes, the White or the Black, they are begging him to change things. Is it wrong for him to be content like this? Is it selfish to have two different kinds of perfection in one life? Won't everything be alright, as long as he keeps the White and the Black from mixing into confusing shades of gray?
(more than they already have)
He can imagine Naruto's thoughts as if they're spoken aloud: Please say something. Please ask me to stay with you. Dump the wife, choose me. If you don't, then I'm leaving, it's over. Whatever I am to you right now, I can't be it anymore. I want to be all that you want.
The desperate sadness on Naruto's face grows with each second of choking silence.
Sasuke can only stare.
"I'm home," he calls into the quiet apartment, lowering his briefcase down with a soft thud. Sakura lounges on the couch, a half-empty box of chocolates on the coffee table. Her head turns when he comes in, and the blue glow of the television highlights the wispy bits of her hair.
"Hi, honey," she greets him, rising off her seat and shuffling over in her slippers. "Oh, you look exhausted. Maybe you should cut back on the hours." She reaches out to him and traces the dark circles under his eyes.
His shoes come off easily, and then he places his hands on her waist. They share a kiss. Like always, it's too short for her, and not short enough for him. "I already talked to my boss and told him the same thing. No more late nights, and no more sleepovers." On his lips is a small smile. He raises his hands to meet hers, and removes them from his face. Their fingers intertwine, a simple contact they haven't shared in months.
"Oh, Sasuke, do you mean it? That's so –"
Sakura cuts herself off as she looks down, then back up into his eyes. There are questions there, but she only voices one.
"Honey, why aren't you wearing your wedding ring?"
Sasuke can only stare.
END
I wanted to write something before I went to New York, but my multi-chaptered ideas just never work out.
Did you like it? I was deliberately vague on the sex, the history of Sasuke's affair, as well as his feelings toward Naruto. I also wanted to take the formulaic "Tycoon Sasuke" plot and see what happens when I crush his life.
And I wanted to write a fic where Sakura wasn't some crazy, redneck, possessive slut. I feel bad for her sometimes, though I still resent her very much because I'm jealous she gets all the sexy guys in fanfiction. Does anyone else feel this way? I hope I'm not the only one =/
Anyway, thanks for reading! Hope you're having a good summer!