The Secret Life of Teachers
Chapter 3: Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin Song
That moment when you realize your next-door-neighbor is actually really attractive, and all the ones filled with awkward sexual tension that follow.
Another section that wasn't in the original version of this chapter, as well as a couple of other things to help further explain things that might have been somewhat unclear at first — also, the stuff going down in the part with Naruto's birthday party is actually inspired by something that's happened to me far too many times than I care to admit, and, man, was it awkward. Also, I figured out a way to introduce Lee and Karin into the story earlier, the way I'd originally planned, so that's something, too.
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—
On the first of October, Tenten wakes up promptly at nine in the morning, brushes her teeth, makes herself a cup of coffee, drinks it, takes a shower, makes herself another cup of coffee while making breakfast (an omelette stuffed with tomatoes and spinach and feta cheese that in her opinion is more than fit for a king, and also bacon), and eats it, all within the span of fifty-six minutes. Four minutes later, at precisely ten o'clock, she pulls out the large box of Halloween decorations tucked away in her hallway closet, unpacks it, and begins the annual process of decorating her apartment for what is easily her favorite holiday of the year while the soundtrack of The Nightmare Before Christmas plays in the background.
Needless to say, Tenten quite loves Halloween, and everything that it entails.
She's in the midst of stringing pumpkin-shaped lights around the main living area when Neji stops by nearly two hours later (he'd gone to meet his cousins and uncle for brunch) and observes her handiwork from the door. "You do realize that Halloween is at the end of the month, yes?" he asks her evenly.
Tenten sticks her tongue out at him. "You do realize that I actually don't care about that, yes? It's October — every single day is Halloween when it's October."
To his credit, Neji doesn't groan at her juvenile response. He does rolls his eyes, though, and she distinctly hears him mutter something under his breath but how he's hardly surprised that she's apparently one of "those people", before he takes the liberty of properly entering her apartment and setting something in a large brown paper bag on the kitchen counter. "I brought you something from brunch, by the way. Hanabi thought you might like it, so she made me order it for you."
"Tell her I said thanks — what is it, anyway?" Tenten calls over her shoulder. She's standing on the back of the couch, her body half-twisted in an attempt to precariously balance her weight between the wall and the foot she's placed on the armrest for support while attempting to string the lights on a particularly difficult to reach corner of the room; one knee digs into the wall as an awkward support, and she's almost certain that she can feel a series of knots twisting into the longissimus muscles along her vertebral column, courtesy of the unnatural positioning of her torso and limbs.
"According to the menu, it's apparently strawberry mascarpone stuffed french toast," Neji tells her, "but to me, it just looks like a mess of strawberry jam someone slathered on top of bread as messily as they could with the assistance of a toddler immersed in their latest finger-painting creation." He's left the kitchen and is now standing beside the couch and looks up at her with pointed interest and a smirk. "Speaking of assistance, you look like you might be in need of some yourself."
Pausing long enough to scowl at him, Tenten turns back to her task of stringing the lights with a huff of annoyance. "Just because I'm not as tall as you doesn't mean I can't do this on my own, you know."
"But it would easier if I helped," he points out, and when she doesn't say anything to the contrary — they both know she's far too proud to admit that he's right — Neji climbs up beside her onto the armrest of the couch. He braces himself against the wall with one forearm as he uses his other hand to take the string of lights from her (their fingers brush for the briefest of moments; she tells herself that the shock it sends bolting across the synapses of her nervous system is nothing more than static discharge from the lights) and Tenten is surprised to soon find herself wedged awkwardly between his body and the wall as he adjusts the string of orange pumpkins for her.
He smells very nice, she realizes with a start. It's the same cologne he always wears, but Tenten's never really taken notice of the blend of citrus and pine that always seems to surround him until now, when the sudden lack of free space makes the scent all the more obvious. With her arms pinned to her chest by the weight of Neji's body above her, she can somewhat feel the outline of the muscles of his torso (her elbows are pointing approximately to the origin of his external abdominal obliques, near the subtle flair of the iliac crests of his hip bone, and as much as she teases him about the superiority of her own transverse abdominal muscles, his are certainly nothing to laugh at, either, if the tautness and solidity she feels against her forearms is any indication). Sure, she's seen him in various states of undress multiple times before, but for the first time since the beginning of their friendship, Tenten becomes all-too-aware of how unabashedly male Neji is.
Wow, she finds herself thinking when he shifts his leg to better distribute his weight across the limited space available up on the armrest, and the movement causes his pelvis to push into the side of her own hip. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Of course, the subject of the apparent hardness of things does nothing but remind Tenten of her current level of hyperawareness concerning everything related to Neji and his body, and so she decides to pointedly ignore the thrum of anticipation that rushes through her veins until a time it can be properly analyzed.
So, ideally, at some point when they're not in such close proximity to one another.
Time seems to pass slowly before Neji is finally pleased with the position and stability of the lights and pushes himself away from the wall, and Tenten watches as he climbs off the couch and back onto the floor.
"I could have done that myself," she mutters when he looks up at her smugly, and he merely quirks one eyebrow at her in amusement.
"You're welcome," he responds, but offers her a hand all the same to help her down from the back of the couch.
Neji's palm is warm against her fingers when Tenten takes his hand — she's not entirely sure why she does, since she's more than capable of doing this on her own — and she is somewhat taken aback with the gentleness he shows when he helps her off the couch. So, naturally, she replies, "I'm more than capable of getting down myself, you know."
"The same way you could get the lights up on your own?"
She glares at him, remembers that she's still holding his hand and pulls away from his grasp as casually as she can manage. "I had most of it done by the time you got here, you know. And they were the last of the decorations I had to put up."
Once again, Neji raises a single dark eyebrow as he looks around the room to observe her handiwork. "Very impressive," he says mildly.
"You don't sound particularly impressed," Tenten observes. "What, do you not like Halloween or something?"
He shakes his head, looks around the room once more. "I enjoy Halloween just fine on its own — I'm not that much a fan of pumpkins, that's all." He pulls a face, then, that's the closest she's ever seen him come to making an expression of abject disgust. "It's a visceral reaction: pumpkins are my least favorite food."
At that, Tenten can't help but let her eyes widen in shock. "Really?" she asks, glancing around the room. With the exception of the lights and a battery-powered jack-o-lantern she's put in the window, a majority of her Halloween decorations feature bats and monsters and anatomically-incorrect skeletons. "Good thing I don't have many pumpkins up, then."
"For that, I thank you," Neji tells her, then, complete with a minimal flourishing of hands and a slight bow at the waist. "An excess of pumpkins is something we can certainly do without."
Tenten doesn't know why there's heat suddenly blossoming on her cheeks, creeping up her neck in response to the action, so she turns away from him and makes her way to the kitchen. "Why don't you like pumpkins, anyway?" she asks as offhandedly as she's able, praying that he doesn't see the tell-tale redness of the flush spreading across her skin.
The paper bag Neji had left on the counter is a good distraction, she decides, and reaches into it to pull out the large styrofoam box resting at the bottom. It's still warm and smells absolutely delicious, and her mouth begins to water almost immediately in response.
He shrugs, follows her into the kitchen and leans one shoulder against the wall. "A bad experience with them when I was in seven," he explains. "Hanabi was still a baby, then, and just starting to eat solid foods."
She looks at him out of the corner of her eye, then, with a mixture of fascination and horror. "She didn't throw up all over you, did she?"
"Immediately after eating nearly an entire jar of pureed pumpkin baby food," Neji confirms, his expression solemn and slightly green.
Tenten turns back to the box of strawberry french toast and decides, then, that maybe this year she'll wait for an opportunity that Neji isn't in the apartment building to make her annual batch of pumpkin bread — there are plenty of other Saturdays left in the month, after all.
Her decision concerning the state of her still-racing pulse, however, is another matter entirely.
—
"Since when have you two been together?"
The question takes Tenten utterly by surprise, and she thinks it's an absolute miracle that she doesn't end up spitting her drink in Karin's face as a result. It does succeed in making her choke on her vodka lemonade, however, and once the coughing's subsided and she's regained control of her voice, Tenten manages to gasp, as incredulously as she's able, "Excuse me?"
From across the table, her old roommate grins at her slyly. "You heard me, Tennie," Karin says. "You and Mr. Tall, Dark, and Emotionally Constipated over there — how long has that been a thing?" She looks pointedly at the bar, and Tenten doesn't need to follow her gaze to know what she means.
"We're friends, Karin," Tenten hisses. "That's it."
Karin doesn't seem to be remotely convinced, and expresses the sentiment with a delicate snort. "Of course that's all you guys are." She gives Tenten a no-nonsense look over her glasses. "Because only friends look at one another like that. Totally platonic. My mistake."
"What do you mean?" Tenten asks, almost afraid of what she might hear next.
"Putting it mildly? Like you guys want to eat each other, of course."
Tenten's only response is to growl and down the rest of her drink in frustration.
It's Naruto's birthday, and in honor of the event, he'd invited a large group of people to his favorite club to celebrate. Some of them Tenten already knows: Sakura and Ino are with Hanabi over by the dance floor, trying to get an extremely reluctant Temari to join them, while Shino and Chouji and Sai and Shikamaru are sitting in a booth with Kiba, whom Tenten's met once or twice before and who's apparently known Shino and Hinata from when they were kids. Hinata herself is with Naruto, though the pair had disappeared after the last round of shots (no one really wants to think about what they could possibly doing at the moment), and Karin — whose familial relation to Naruto she still actually doesn't know beyond it being "distant" — is obviously sitting with Tenten. That leaves Neji and Sasuke, who are standing awkwardly near the bar with drinks in hand as Lee — who is undisputedly Tenten's oldest friend — talks animatedly at them about something they seemed to have little interest in.
Well, Sasuke doesn't seem particularly interested in it, anyway. Neji seems tired, and somewhat exasperated, but at least he has been responding to Lee's excited chatter with the occasional nod and a few words here and there. Tenten finds herself inexplicably happy with the knowledge that her oldest friend is getting along so well with one of her most recent ones (who is also quickly becoming one of her closest friends). She figures they're probably talking about martial arts or something similar, and bonding over that.
"Oh, Tennie." Karin's voice catches her attention, and her gaze drifts back to her former roommate from where she's been watching — oh no, had she really been staring so blatantly at Neji? "You have it bad."
Tenten sniffs primly and takes another sip of her drink. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"I think you do," Karin counters. The grin on her face is positively evil, now, and Tenten hates how well her old roommate can still read her, even though this is the first time they've seen each other in nearly a year. "They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, you know."
"That's hardly applicable, Karin. He's my neighbor and my coworker — I see him every day."
Is it possible for an already evil grin to become even more evil? In Karin's case, Tenten thinks the answer is yes. "You guys were basically joined at the hip from the moment you got here until Lee finally dragged him off and you and I started catching up," she begins matter-of-factly, "and the two of you have been sneaking peeks at each other ever since."
Heat rushes across her skin, and Tenten knows it has nothing to do with the alcohol. "I've done no such thing!"
Karin snorts again and steps away from the table. "Yeah, yeah," she says dismissively, "whatever lets you sleep at night. Now come on — I need to get another drink."
Wordlessly, Tenten grabs her glass and follows Karin to the bar, and does her best to ignore the way her heart pounds in her chest when Neji notices them and waves them over. She also ignores the way Karin deliberately maneuvers her to stand beside him once they reach the bar, and it takes every ounce of willpower Tenten possesses to not give in to her natural reaction of leaning against him for warmth, despite the gooseflesh rising on her arms.
Fortunately for her (or unfortunately, as the case may be — Tenten does not miss the smug look Karin gives her, then) Neji solves her dilemma when he wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her toward him, the way he always does when he knows she's cold, and her heart almost leaps out of her throat when he leans down and asks, "Are you alright? Your face is red."
Neji's voice is low and soft in her ear, and Tenten decides that it is altogether far too much for her already-distracted mind to contemplate. "Yeah, I'm fine," she tells him. "Just need some water."
He nods in understanding. "Wait here," he says. "I'll get it for you."
Tenten shivers when he steps away — It's because you're cold, she tells herself — and pretends not to watch as he makes his way to the first available bartender with Lee and Sasuke in tow.
Karin sidles up next to her a heartbeat later and settles her arm around Tenten the way Neji had just moments earlier; it's comforting, but she's a little disappointed that it doesn't feel quite as nice as when he'd done it.
"Oh, Tennie," Karin croons again, and this time her voice has lost its smug edge, to be replaced by something far softer and more sympathetic. "You guys have it so, so bad."
—
Over the course of the next few weeks, Tenten finds herself becoming increasingly on-edge as she finds herself becoming ever more aware of exactly just how attractive her neighbor is, and she finds herself looking at her friend differently with every passing day.
She's not entirely sure what to do about it.
Which is to say, in turn, that while Tenten's always known that Neji is a fairly good-looking man (she had first noticed him when she happened to see him leaving his apartment shirtless to go for a run one morning soon after he'd moved into the building, after all, and she would be lying if she said she hadn't stopped to watch him for just a little while just to appreciate the view) it had never actually occurred to her that she might find herself maybe-attracted to her neighbor-slash-coworker-turned-friend, and just thinking about it is ultimately entirely too confusing for her to deal with.
Patience is not a virtue Tenten is blessed with, after all.
—
Tenten's awareness of her growing attraction to Neji comes to a head approximately two weeks before Halloween. Ino has invited them to her annual Halloween party, and while Neji had said he'd go with her, it had taken weeks of wheedling and arguing for Tenten to convince him to dress up for the occasion.
("I'll do whatever you want if you dress up," she'd said on their way to the parking lot after school one afternoon. "One favor, no conditions or exceptions. Anything goes."
He'd looked at her out of the corner of his eye, then, with a smirk and an expression of pointed interest. "If that's the case, I might consider it.")
Ultimately, Neji had decided on a ready-made vampire costume consisting of a long black cape and fake fangs they'd found at a local Halloween store a few days before the party — hardly original, perhaps, but at least it was something. He shows up at her door in a plain white dress shirt and black slacks, cape draped over one arm and fangs in his breast pocket a half-hour before they're set to leave, and the first thing he says to her when she opens the door takes her completely by surprise.
"I need you to give me a bite mark."
"Say what?" she replies, staring up at him and stepping aside to let him into her apartment.
"Vampires usually have bite marks, themselves," he explains. "Would you be able to give me one? For the costume."
Tenten blinks up at him. "What, with makeup or something?"
"Unless you're secretly a vampire and willing to bite me for such purposes, I would assume so." Neji blinks at her, then, as if seeing her for the first time, and looks her over from top to toe. "I thought you said you were going to be Beetlejuice."
She's grateful for the change in topic, then, if only because it serves as a way to distract Tenten from thoughts involving her biting Neji in a variety of different situations that have made breathing properly suddenly very difficult, though it does nothing to explain how the way he's looking at her then is doing strange things to her equilibrium.
"That was the original plan," she replies as dismissively as she's able. "And then Ino found out, and said I wasn't allowed to come to the party if I didn't have a sexy costume, so, " and here she gestures lamely at herself, "a sexy costume it is. Not my usual style, but, hey. It's Halloween, and there's going to be free food and alcohol, so I figured I might as well."
Ino had lent her a tight, sleeveless black crop top, along with a pair of black cat ears and a matching felt tail, and in the depths of her closet, Tenten had found a pair of black wedged heels she'd almost forgotten she even owned, finishing off her admittedly half-hearted attempt at a sexy black cat costume with her favorite pair of dark wash denim shorts.
Neji's eyes rove over her once again. "At least you can show off the results of your hours at the gym this way."
"I suppose that's true," Tenten replies, and the air between them is suddenly a mess of awkward tension. She clears her throat. "So, uh. Bite mark, right? Let me get my eyeliner."
—
The Halloween party is already well underway by the time Neji and Tenten arrive and have put their things in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs (Neji had driven them to the party after Ino had offered to let them stay the night). Ino herself is already a tipsy mess in a form-fitting devil costume when they find her lounging across Sai's lap on the couch, but she springs up almost immediately when she sees them, whistling lowly when she takes in Tenten's appearance.
"You, my friends," she slurs, looking from Tenten to Neji and back again, "look hot. Good work. I approve."
Tenten frowns at her. "You picked out my costume," she says flatly. "You said I couldn't come if I didn't meet your standards of sexy."
Ino giggles at that. "Because I want you to get laid," she explains, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Both of you!"
At that, Tenten can't help but roll her eyes. "Don't worry about us," she says as she turns away, though her lips are curved in a smile all the same. "Take care of yourself first and be careful, okay?"
"I'll keep an eye on her," Sai tells them politely from the couch as he reaches forward, letting his fingers close around Ino's wrist to guide his maybe-girlfriend gently back to the couch. "Have fun, and let me know if you need anything."
With a nod and a word of thanks, they take their leave of the pair, and Tenten (having been to Ino's house multiple times before) leads Neji to the kitchen for a drink. There's a variety of different beverages on the large island-style counter, and she cocks her head at him curiously.
"Pick your poison," she tells him, and he looks at her in amusement as he ponders the choices laid before them.
"Rum and Coke," Neji finally decides after a few moments of eyeing the selection. "And you?"
Tenten is already reaching for a pair of plastic red solo cups with one hand and the bottle of Bacardi rum with the other. "Ninja Turtle," she replies, gesturing to the fifth of UV Blue and the bottle of Mountain Dew beside it with a vague jab of her elbow. "It's a Halloween tradition."
Neji nods and reaches past her shoulder for the two-liter of Coke, the material of his shirt sliding along her bare skin; she fights back the urge to shiver. "I see." His fingers close around the neck of the bottle, and he brings back his arm easily, sets the bottle in her waiting hand. "And you're not worried about the damage that combination of alcohol and sugar might do to your liver and pancreas?"
"It's Halloween, Hyuuga," she scoffs as she hands Neji his drink. "Live a little — things like properly functioning livers and pancreases and all other visceral components don't matter tonight."
He smirks and shifts his weight to one hip, watches her as she pours the UV Blue into her own cup (she fills it a little over half-full and absolutely does not feel thoroughly exposed under the scrutiny of his gaze) before adding the Mountain Dew so that the drink turns a bright, violent shade of lime green. "I thought Halloween was for bad decisions and general debauchery."
"The liver thing falls under the general category of bad decisions."
Neji raises an eyebrow at that. "That is a terrible thing for a biology teacher to say," he responds, before taking a sip of his drink, and Tenten can't help but look at him in amusement when he pulls a face at the taste. "How strong did you make this? I asked for a rum and Coke, not a rum with a hint of Coke."
"Oh, just live a little, for once," she repeats with a wide, cat-like grin, pushing herself away from the counter and sauntering towards basement door. Someone (probably Naruto) is blasting an interesting remix of "What Does the Fox Say" downstairs, the bass shaking the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor beneath their feet, and Tenten finds that she is suddenly in the mood to dance. "This is Halloween."
He shakes his head in half-hearted exasperation, but in the end, Neji follows her down the stairs all the same, and Tenten finds herself wondering if she can convince him to dance with her at some point over the course of the night — only because she thinks it would be hilarious to see someone as uptight as him trying to dance, of course, and definitely not because she's almost half-interested to be pressed up against him again.
Definitely.
Though she really wouldn't be that opposed to it, either, when she thinks about it, especially if the pressing was of the more intimate variety, and he was looking at her the way he had earlier that evening, and —
Oh. Oh, no.
Karin was right — she did have it bad.
She always hated it when Karin was right.
—
Through the intervention of some strange twist of fate, a few more drinks, and maybe a pinch of Halloween magic, Tenten somehow manages to convince Neji to dance with her an hour or two later.
At first, he's not very good. For all the natural grace he possess when walking or running or even just sitting around, it seems to leave him entirely when he's forced to match it to music. Being drunk probably doesn't help much at all, either, but she is, too, so she really shouldn't judge him (especially since they're surrounded by people they both know — Hinata and Naruto and Hanabi are here, for one, and so are Shikamaru and Temari and Shino and a few of the other teachers from school, though Karin and Lee are, fortunately, not present) and decides instead to take his hands and settle them on her hips in an attempt to show him how to properly move with the music.
They're face-to-face when they first start, with her hands on his shoulders and his on her waist. It's fun, and easy, so natural, because it's Neji, and Tenten doesn't notice that they've been pulling one another closer with every passing song until she's pressed so tightly to his chest that it's starting to get uncomfortable, and unconsciously turns herself around in his arms until her back is against his front.
Neji's hands are still on her hips as he follows her lead, and she's enjoying herself so much, losing herself in the comfort of his solid warmth against her and the rush of adrenaline she tries to tell herself has nothing to do with her dance partner, that Tenten doesn't really think anything of their new position until she feels one of his arms wrap around her waist, his fingers grasping the belt loops of her denim shorts, and he leans forward, allowing his chin to rest on her shoulder as his breath fans across her neck.
It's a subtle thing, really, but the slight change offers a new intimacy she's never experienced with him before, and it occurs to Tenten, then, that she is currently dancing dirty with Neji.
She can't help but twist herself back around to look at him, curious to know what he feels about the whole thing, and what she sees, then, leaves her mouth dry and her lungs breathless, makes her pulse race in a way it never has before.
There's a faint flush along Neji's cheeks, and from this close she's able to make out the dark shadow of stubble across the pale skin of his jaw. His eyes are hooded, and Tenten wonders if she's imagining what she sees in their pale depths. Her attention flickers to his lips, briefly, before she meets his gaze again a heartbeat later, and in that instant, the growing cord of tension between them snaps.
Neji's lips are against hers less than a moment later — or had Tenten been the one to kiss him? — and the arm around her waist tightens, pulling her flush against him. His other hand ghosts across her intercostals, her clavicles and neck, before coming to rest beneath her ear with his thumb brushing against the crest of her zygomatic arch and his fingers curving to cradle the back of her head and neck, approximately where the first (atlas) and second (axis) of her cervical vertebrae articulate with the base of her skull.
It does not take long for her to lose herself in the sensation of it all, and she wraps her arms around his neck, raises herself onto her toes to kiss him even deeper (because he still towers over her by a few inches, despite the height offered by her wedged heels), to press herself to him even further. All she knows is Neji, Neji, Neji, and it is only then that Tenten realizes that she has wanted exactly this for a very long time.
She's startled out of her reverie when someone yells at the them to get a room, and Neji pulls away from her almost instantaneously. Tenten's about to ask if she's done something wrong when she sees the look in his eyes, and this time she makes no effort to suppress the shiver that runs down her spine. Somewhere in the air between them an agreement is made, a tacit understanding reached, and then they're running up the basement steps, and to the second floor of Ino's house.
When they finally reach the bedroom they'd been given for the night, she has barely enough time to consciously give thanks to the universe that he has the presence of mind to lock the door behind them before he pins her against it with his own body and presses himself against her.
Tenten moans, and he does it again.
"I'll be collecting that favor, now," Neji murmurs against her jaw, and it is the last thing either of them say for a very long time.
