II.
"Another one?"
"Mmm?" She tilts her head lazily to glance at him, sliding her cheek against the softness of the pillow. "Another one of what?"
His eyes remain closed as he lies by her side, one hand resting on the top of her right thigh. His thumb strokes slowly across a small, pink scar that gleams faintly just below the edge of her shorts, rising slightly above the skin and smooth to the touch. "You got burned again."
"Oh. Yes."
He snorts. "Ironing."
"Last night," she confirms, yawning and stretching herself luxuriously out on the bed, enjoying the warm stinging in her muscles as she arches her back, fingertips lightly caressing the wooden backboard above her head. His hand falls off her thigh for a moment; he waits for her to finish and collapse comfortably into the mattress before discreetly sliding it back onto her skin.
"Ironing what?"
"This shirt," she tells him sleepily, tugging lightly at the mandarin collar of her now very crumpled pale pink top.
He smiles. "You've ruined it again."
"Indeed." His breath hitches when she suddenly opens her eyes and grins foxily at him. "A worthy sacrifice."
She had managed to distract him from his calligraphy, after all, pulling away the fabric of his collar and pressing slow, delicate kisses inside the hollow of his throat. (Tenten thinks his calligraphy is beautiful. Tenten also thinks that Neji is beautiful, and even more so.) To his credit, he had managed to resist long enough to complete half the characters of the verse he was inscribing before Tenten had lured him from the table by letting her hair tumble down her back, twirling ivory ribbons teasingly around a finger while making soft, remonstrating noises, a small hand trailing light circles beneath his shirt as they made their way across the room.
The wetted brush is currently abandoned on the nearby chair. Gleaming black drops of ink speckle the floorboards in a wide arc.
"Was it?" he asks with a low chuckle, bemused. "Really?" Neji is the only person in the world who knows that a good number of Tenten's scars had been sustained not in the heat of battle but in the heat of ironing; small, glossy burn marks linger across her skin, testament to the countless times she has mishandled the iron and ended up singeing herself. (Tenten privately thinks that ironing perfectly qualifies as "battle".) In any case, ironing is Serious Business, and the end product not something to be taken lightly or sacrificed so easily.
"Mmm." She responds to his teasing by muzzling her nose against his shoulder and smiling languidly into his skin, pressed so close that the late morning light outlining his profile and the flat planes of his chest become her momentary horizon and all she can see is him, all she can feel is him. "Definitely worth it."
And then she reaches up to swat away the smirk she knows is spreading smugly across his face.