Boy meets girl, kind of.
Boy works with girl, kind of.
Boy ignores all the signs that something's supposed to happen with this girl.
Kind of.
Kakashi's a fucking idiot, and I tell him so.
"Why'd you hire her?" I demand the next day I see him.
"Who?" he asks mildly, his attention on his sketchpad as he freehands an (admittedly) awesome pin-up girl on the blank sheet.
"You know who," I grumble at him. "That little shrimpy ballet girl."
"Because she answered the ad," he responds, all innocent as he shades in a skimpy G-string on the big-breasted woman, his bandanna concealing what's got to be a lecherous smirk. "We were in need of a good cleaner. I had Kiba do it last week as punishment for that fuck-up he did on a client…" I remember Zaku's jacked tattoo and hide my smirk. "…but this place was still a shithole. Look around, Sasuke. She was here one night, and it's sparkling."
"It's a tattoo parlor," I mutter, pissed because Kakashi's right, the place looks great. "It's not supposed to sparkle. You can't have her working here, she's a girl!"
"Well that's chauvinistic of you."
I'm not sure why I'm so stressed out having Sakura working at Ink and Iron. It's not like we're coworkers or anything. We'll only see each other at shift change, when I close up the shop and she comes in to clean it. Seeing her more frequently doesn't give her some brand-new significance in my life. But something about her has me…edgy. Granted, most things have me edgy, it's one of the downsides to having an inferiority complex (you can thank my gifted older brother for that.) But Sakura…I don't know.
And I'm not fucking scared of her, or anything like that. You'd have to be high to find anything scary in that doll face and those shiny eyes and her stupid smile. She doesn't scare me.
She…unsettles me. Like whenever I see her, I don't fucking know what to do with myself. She threatens me with her impending relevance.
And something tells me I need to stay away from her. She's bad news for me.
"You think about the liability, old man?" I snap, snatching my sketchpad, too, since I might as well make good use of my time here. "Having a little underage girl working alone, after dark?"
"I've thought about it," he responds dismissively.
This is going nowhere. Kakashi's got his reasons for keeping Sakura around, even if I think it's a nightmare. With a sigh of surrender, I settle into my drawing. It's raining outside, there's mud tracked into the shop from all of our clients. Sakura's gonna have a lot to do tonight.
She's right on time. Not that I was waiting for her or anything, but I get out at eleven when she comes in. So ten minutes before, she breezes inside like she owns the place, still wearing her ballet shit and smiling brightly like this is the most fun she's ever had.
Maybe it is. Girl needs to get out more.
"Hey, Sasuke," she says with a sweet smile, like we're best friends, like we didn't argue the night before. Like she knows me so well.
"Hn."
If she's bothered by how I'm not talking to her, she doesn't show it. She just hangs up her jacket on the coat rack and makes a beeline for the supply closet to get her cleaning things.
"Oh, just so you know," she adds, dragging out a vacuum cleaner that's nearly as big as she is, "I was looking through your design book last night…"
"Is that what Kakashi pays you for?" I snark.
"…and your stuff really is incredible," she finishes, like I didn't even say anything. "I can't believe you're just an apprentice, everything in that book looks amazing!"
She's definitely an amateur, even if her praise strokes my ego the way it likes to be stroked. She doesn't know what to look for in a tattoo to judge it as worth anything, so hearing her gush over it is only semi-rewarding. But for reasons I'm not ready to examine, I decide to push the subject.
"What do you know about it?" I smirk, sitting down on the client sofa and opening the book she was talking about. "How can you tell a tattoo's good or not? Even shitty tattoos look good to the untrained eye."
She pauses on her way to plugging in the vacuum, weighing what I said, and nods. "Yeah, I guess you're right. But…this one right here…"
She doesn't sit down beside me, just stands over me and flips through the pages of my old sketches, then points to one. It's a portrait; some guy came in wanting his girlfriend's face on his bicep. Portraits are crazy hard by themselves, but in a place like a bicep, rounded and hard in some places, soft in others, it was easily one of the hardest tattoos I ever did. Kakashi monitored the whole time but I pulled it off somehow. It's one of the tattoos I'm proudest of, besides my sleeves.
"It's amazing," Sakura says. "You got everything right. It's like I'm looking at a black-and-white photo."
Okay, so she's got good taste.
"I like your sleeves," she adds, gesturing to my arms. Her eyes trace the ink patterns almost enviously. "Did you design them yourself?"
"I did them myself," I correct her, more than a little smug. Not saying I'm under her spell like the rest of our classmates, but the hottest girl at school is fawning all over my work and it's hard not to let it go to my head.
"Really? You're ambidextrous?"
"Hn. Nah." Just that fucking GOOD.
"Well that's arrogant, then," she says flatly, returning to her vacuum.
"What do you mean, arrogant?" I snap. Who is she to snark at me like that?
"I mean, you just picked up a needle and started drawing on yourself?" She rolls her eyes, plugs in the vacuum, turns it on. The noise grates on my nerves, but not nearly as much as the disapproving expression on her face, like she knows so much better than me.
"Get a tattoo, baby, then you can tell me what's what," I tell her, and I'm shocked, shocked at the words coming out of my mouth. Sure, every other guy who works here calls the chicks that come in here petnames, harmless ones like 'baby' or 'sweetheart' or 'honey,' but I've never called anybody anything but their given name. Ever.
This is what freaks me out about Sakura. I've known the girl for a handful of days, spoken to her three times in my life, but already she's becoming an exception.
I can't have exceptions. I can only have killer marks and golden opportunities.
If Sakura's suspicious of my slip-up, she doesn't show it. "I'd love to," she says conversationally, her voice lilting over the noise the vacuum cleaner makes humming back and forth across the burgundy carpet. "Get a tattoo, that is."
"Then why don't you?" I ask, half-wondering why I even care, but she's got great skin. Pale and smooth and healthy. It would pick up color really well, keep it fresh for a long time. It would be years before it aged on skin like hers.
"I'm a ballerina," she giggles, like it's obvious. "I'd never get hired anywhere with a tattoo. I stand out as it is, pink hair and everything."
Too bad. Something floral would look great on her. She's got toned arms, they'd look good under a half-sleeve, maybe, and…
That's the problem with me, I realize, looking away from Sakura to my guitar case in the corner. I haven't touched it all day. The problem with me, the reason why Itachi was already so successful when he was my age and I'm grasping at straws, is because I don't think like a musician, the way he does.
I think like an artist.
I look at things differently. I look at people like they're blank canvases. I think up things that I think would look good on them, and in the back of my mind, I'm always sketching something.
I like guitar, don't get me wrong. But I don't think up songs the way I think up pictures. I can't put a song to Sakura Haruno, but I'm designing art for her body without even meaning to.
Tch. I'm concerned about the significance this girl might have for me someday, at the same time I'm painting every inch of her body in my mind with indelible ink.
There's something fucking wrong with me. I have to get out of here.
I stand up, leave the sketchbook on the coffee table with the other artists'. Go pick up my guitar (I have a gig coming up, a jam session with Naruto and some of the other guys in our Music Analysis and Performance class, and I haven't touched my guitar all day.) Prepare to leave without a goodbye.
Sakura stops me at the door, all smiles. She thinks we're friends. Stupid girl, I can't let you be relevant to me, pretty skin and all.
"Tell you what though," she says playfully. Is she flirting with me? Does Sakura Haruno flirt with anyone? Is that allowed? "If this whole ballet thing doesn't work out for me, I'll let you tattoo me. As long as you use color, though!"
"Hn. I don't like color."
She smiles like she knows something I don't.
"I heard you guys hired Sakura Haruno!" Naruto says, injecting her name with a sickening amount of adoration.
He's never even spoken to her.
"She's the night cleaner," I mumble, just because he'll keep pestering me if I don't answer, and I'm trying to enjoy this fajita wrap.
"Aw, man, I thought you'd hire her as a model or something!"
While I can see where he's going with this, that a girl like Sakura is better suited to showing off her killer body compared to scrubbing floors and windows like she's doing, I'm not in the mood for another hours-long monologue about her alleged beauty.
"She's got no ink at all, what would she model for at a tattoo parlor?" I snap.
"You gotta introduce me, man! Does she have a boyfriend, do you think?"
"What do I care?"
Naruto looks at me from across the table with this shit-eating grin on his face. Like he knows so much. It pisses me off, but I ask anyway.
"What the hell are you looking at me like that for?"
"Nothing, man. You just sound really sensitive about the whole thing, that's all. Does wittle Sasukins have a wittle crush on pwetty Sakuwa?"
Is it normal to have fantasies about killing your best friend?
Itachi doesn't call for the rest of the week.
Instead, I get a string of texts each night, words misspelled or misused, barely legible. He's drinking, still. Heavily. I wonder what else he's taking, but I think I'm happier not knowing.
My brother the hero. My brother the rock star. My brother the celebrity.
Weird, though. How I wish he was just my brother the kid who picked me up from school. The kid who taught me how to play three chords on his old guitar before he gave it to me and went on the road.
If it makes me a pussy to admit it, then whatever, but I really just miss my brother.
Friday morning, I don't have any classes, so I usually head to the shop early. There's nobody else there, since we don't open till eleven, but it's a surprisingly good place to practice my guitar. Good acoustics. Go figure.
I get there around nine. It's a shitty day, rainy and dark when the sun should be up, even a little bit cold. I shake rainwater out of my hair and fumble with my key, and eventually stumble inside where it's warm and dry and…
I stop dead.
Stupid Sakura's still here.
On the sofa.
Asleep.
She must never have gone home last night after her shift was over, which would have been about six hours ago. I'm irritated already. What kind of stupid girl spends the night in a tattoo parlor, when she should be in her dorm across campus?
She's asking to get molested, I swear.
Dumb girl, I think, glaring at the way she's curled up on the old, threadbare couch cushions, her arms crossed for warmth, her hair a tangled mess as she sleeps.
"Hey," I snap. I'm not known for my grace or gentility. "Hey. Get up, what the hell are you doing?"
She stirs and it takes her a moment to open her eyes. When she does, she sees me, and sits bolt upright, completely startled.
"What? What time is it?" she demands, her voice raspy from sleep. I refuse to admit that I like the sound of her voice like this. Refuse to.
"It's after nine, what the hell are you still doing here?"
"It's after nine?" she gasps, and she's on her feet in nanoseconds, yanking her hair into a ponytail as quickly as she can. "Shit, shit, shit!"
Hearing a ballerina cuss is like watching a dog walk on its hindlegs. You know it happens every now and then, but it's so fucking weird when it does. The ballerinas at KPAA are like fucking soldiers. They're painfully proper every minute of their lives, they don't swear, they don't show up messy or unprepared for anything.
There's something fucking different about Sakura. The way she drops cuss words like she's been doing it her whole life, the way she takes a bizarre pride in doing a job that requires her to scrub toilets and sinks, the way she doesn't have the same fears a regular girl does about being alone at night all the time.
She's different. She's not like everyone else. I can't figure her out.
And whatever X-factor she has that makes her so unique, that's what's threatening to me. The way she doesn't even mean to do it, but she's making herself interesting to me.
That's what's so terrifying about this girl.
"I'm so fucking late," she moans, seizing her hoodie from the back of the sofa and ripping it over her head. "Miss Suzume's gonna have me running laps for a month!"
Fucking neurotic. I should've just let her sleep, she wouldn't be this noisy.
"Sasuke I'm so sorry. I swear this won't happen again, I just closed my eyes for a minute and…God, I have to get over to Studio A, she's gonna tear me a new 3-bedroom, 2-bath doublewide asshole."
Something different. Something terrifying.
"Crazy bitch," I grumble as she sprints out the door into the pouring rain.
Something interesting.
If I'm not careful, she's gonna be my downfall.
note.. all right, so i've been getting some questions: what tattoos do i have? i've got violets up my side, a phillies logo on my wrist, a tiger on my thigh, stars on my ankle, a disney castle on my shoulder blade, and a tribal tramp stamp. sky's the limit. but what i want to know: what tattoos do YOU have?
i do not promise instant romance in this story. please be aware. i promise EVENTUAL romance.
and about this jawn: i write what i know personally. i write about things i've done and been through because those are the only things i can write convincingly. i change all the circumstances, obviously, but i write from my heart, so thank you earthbender068 for recognizing that. i fucking love your reviews, you just fucking get me.
thank you, everyone, for supporting me on this story and all my others (you guys HAVE to be tired of me by now!)
love you, dollfaces. leave some love ;)
xoxo daisy :)