a/n: apologies for the delay. next term is supposed to be much easier, so ideally, after i finish my thesis, i will publish more frequently. okay so i have (really) high aspirations to do this fanfiction bingo card, in which case this would be my first square: college AU. god knows i'll probably never complete a bingo, but i will certainly try! also i got inspiration for this from the trailer for a film that i eventually watched after all this and the movie was definitely not going in the direction this story does. but the desk line was inspired from there. just fyi. title inspired by copenhagen interpretation. definitely what they meant by either or.
many thanks to apps for reading the outline and to abbyhatake for her help/shikatema appreciation.
On Copenhagen
Temari taps the paper in front of her idly with her pen. There are currently only three students sitting in the rows before her. It is technically a lecture hall they're in, but she is only expecting twenty-one students and a lot of empty seats. Or twenty students, as fate will probably have it, though twenty-one are registered. The sign-in sheet is in front of her: a list of twenty-one names and a little box to write which seat they are occupying.
Two minutes till class begins and another ten students have arrived, more coming seemingly every second. By the time the clock in front of her hits two, she rises and walks to the edge of the stands. The room is silent apart from her shoes clicking on the wood floor, along with two tardy students closing the door and taking a spot. Temari hands the clipboard with the attendance list to the first boy there and he signs his seat against his name and passes the board along.
After her professor memorizes their names, the students will be free to sit anywhere. It shouldn't take long. Already she recognizes half of them, all but one of them from their class last semester, Advanced Theoretical Physics III. This was Advanced Theoretical Physics IV. The other one she knows is the dark-haired boy sitting in the third-from-last row. He had lived with her younger brother when Gaara was a freshman, but she's never really met him before.
Temari's job was to take attendance, among other things. But she has also been not-so-subtly hinted at by her professor to weed out the student that had not done his or her reading. Yesterday, on Monday, a syllabus, manual, and course packet had been left in the lab for mandatory pick-up by every student. All but one had come to take his or her copy, so, likely, only one person hadn't done the reading.
Her professor is strict about things like this. He has a strict attendance policy and is generally unforgiving in nature. If there is a student he could publicly shame for not having done the reading, Professor Baki was sure to do it. So, it is Temari's job to point out that student. Hey, she does get paid.
Once the list has been passed around and returned, Temari takes her seat in a desk by the corner and starts looking over the names and checking them against the list from yesterday. She knows the only one not to claim the packet was Shikamaru Nara, and now she knows which student he is: the one who knows Gaara.
She looks up at him only to find him staring down at her. His eyes are bright and dark, something she has never seen exist together so apparently as she does now, even from across a hall.
She doesn't mark anything down though. Instead, she holds his gaze, not questioning or daring to look down. He looks at her without threat or interest, really, he is just looking. Not even as though he is trying to recollect where he's seen her before. But a second later her vision is marred by her professor standing in front of the desk.
"Is everything good?" He asks, quiet enough for the rest of the room to not hear.
Temari nods. There is a split second before Baki leaves her desk and walks to the podium where he is waiting for her to show him the attendance sheet for the seat of the, in his words, slacker. But she doesn't do anything. After all, he never asked explicitly. So Temari says nothing and he walks to the podium.
When she looks back at the stands, Shikamaru Nara is no longer looking her way.
She first met Shikamaru Nara over three years ago. She remembers it more distinctly than she remembers anything else about that room. He and Gaara shared a suite with half a dozen other boys. Temari, in her final year of her undergraduate, only came by a handful of times. She is still friendly with Gaara's roommate (mostly because Gaara still hung around with him), but that is all.
She has specific memories of the table in their common area and the way the window wouldn't close in Gaara and Naruto's room. But mostly, she remembers him. The first time she'd come into the suite, Shikamaru Nara — though only now, almost four years ago, did she finally learn his name — had been the one to let her in.
He had been wearing only his underwear, still half-asleep when he opened the door. She remembers the way he looked and moved. He was still young and skinny, but there was something practically erotic in the way he carried himself, the muscles on the pane of his back seemingly swimming beneath his skin. She had found it odd to be inexplicably attracted to a freshman (she tried not to talk to them, let alone find them appealing on principle) and had quickly let it go when Gaara came out of his room and the half-naked boy back into his.
They'd never said more than hello for the next year. And since then, Temari has seen him maybe a dozen times around campus in a full-three years. And in all that time he has never even glanced her way. Nor she his, really, in fairness.
Now she is his TA for a physics class required by the major and she has just majorly saved his ass.
She isn't sure why she'd done it. He is (she thought?) a friend of Gaara's. And she has never exactly approved of her professor's methods anyway. Still, if he kept it up he was going to get in trouble anyway. He hadn't spoken once throughout the entire period, probably because he hadn't received the assignment, but still. Now is the time to suck-up to a notoriously difficult professor and try and earn some brownie-points before the semester has even really begun.
So, out of some wayward obligation to her students and to her brother's old suite-mate, Temari finds herself following Shikamaru Nara out of class and down two halls — far enough away from the classroom — before calling his name.
He turns as soon as any sound has left her lips, as though he is expecting her.
His eyes are much darker up-close. Black and heavy, surrounded by thick lashes and strong features. Not only are they daunting from this distance, she notices, but when they are trained solely on her, they are so much more piercing than had she just been observing him engaged in another activity.
"Hey," she begins, hurried and uncomfortable under his scrutiny, "sorry, I just need a minute."
He responds with his body, shifting a foot in front of him to stand with a casual patience.
"I'm Temari, your physics TA."
"I know who you are." He says, not sounding at all agitated.
"Okay," she tries, leaning back on her heel. "Well, I just wanted to warn you about Professor Baki. He is short-tempered and easy to anger."
Shikamaru Nara blinks. "Oh?"
"When he said he was a stickler for the rules, he was serious. His biggest pet-peeves are absences and participation. So really try and show up to class on time. He will penalize you unfairly, even if you have a good excuse."
Shikamaru Nara eyes her and suddenly his scrutiny seems to turn sexual and Temari thinks she may be feeling herself blush.
"Why are you warning me?" He asks.
"Because," she says, "it is in my best interest to see everyone pass." And right now you're the weakest link, is what she doesn't say, but hopes it is implied.
"And will you be chasing down everyone else through the halls?"
Temari shrugs. "Everyone else picked up their packet."
Shikamaru Nara moves his body back slightly, just enough for her to notice. He inhales and she watches his eyes close for a second before he is staring at her again.
"I did the reading." He answers, but he doesn't give any explanation or excuse.
She is wondering whether to push more or not when he turns on his heel. "See you tomorrow, miss TA," he says over his shoulder. He walks away before she can say anything else.
If she felt kind towards him five minutes ago, she likes him significantly less right now.
She is in the library for the first time in months to checkout a book. There is one copy of it and it is on the second to highest shelf, which is, well, high.
Temari is one of those average heights that is not used to asking for help, but is also not tall enough to be daunted when she cannot reach something on her own. In this case, the tips of her fingers are able to graze the very bottom of the spine. She thinks, if she can get a fingernail or something around the spine dent, she may be able to budge it out enough to be grab-able, or knock-able, in this case.
She tries for it, practically standing on the top of her toes when she feels someone practically press in behind her. In her field of vision she sees a long arm reach up and take the book down easily.
His shoulder only just touched the back of hers, right along her clavicle for a split second when he reached for the book, but now they are fully separated, though she is sure she can still feel the heat of his body burning along her back.
It is only a moment before Temari whips her head around to thank him. To see Shikamaru Nara behind her is the last thing she expects. She doesn't falter though, thanking him and clutching the book to her chest as she waits for him to step away.
She has known him to be taller than her — had never thought about it really. He is of medium height, she figures, not short by any means, but not tall enough for it to be a striking feature of his physical description. Yet standing between him and the shelf, she is acutely aware of the respective shoulder heights between the two, of the length of collar bone that surpasses hers, and of the flatness of his chest.
She wonders, for only a second before he has stepped back and she is on her way, what it would be like to press her breasts against him.
Temari, apart from taking attendance and ratting out students, is responsible for grading papers.
She hates grading papers the most, probably. She has graded two quizzes already and those have all been easy. There is only ever one answer. Essays though, they're more open to interpretation.
She can't count the number of times she has completely disagreed with what someone has said, but has had to give them okay grades because they did everything right except convince her.
She has given almost all B's for these papers. Two B+'s, five B-'s, one C+, and one A. She doesn't like that A though. And she marks it down reluctantly. Shikamaru Nara had gotten an A on one of the quizzes before this, and he hadn't shown up to take the other one. But quizzes are easy. Papers are hard. And she thinks it deftly unfair that he not show up to class and still manage to set the curve. He already walks around cocky as hell, she did not need to add any letter grade to his production. Yet, as much as she tries (and she had tried), his paper is great.
It can't be right though. He is writing on a Galileo dialogue that he hadn't even been present in class to discuss.
Without thinking too much about it, Temari pulls out her phone and calls her brother. He answers on the first ring.
"I'm grading some papers for Baki," she says, doodling in the corner of her notepad, "and I think I have one of your old suite mates in my class."
"Shikamaru," Gaara answers quickly, apparently well versed in the answer. She wonders why — did Tenten snitch to Kankuro again? Or were he and Gaara still friendly? Did he know who she was outside of being his TA? — but it was only for an instant, so quick it might not have even happened: the lines of inquiry tracing out information about him.
"Yeah, Shikamaru Nara. I was wondering if you remember anything about him as a student?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, he hasn't shown up for class that often and never says a word, but he got an A on his first quiz and now on his paper I'm doing."
She thinks she can hear Gaara laugh, but it sounds as if the receiver were pulled away from him. "Of course," he breathes a second later, "Shikamaru is the smartest person I know, just perhaps not the best student. He is lazy and reluctant in almost every activity, but he definitely knows whatever he talks about. He wrote that paper, if that's what you're wondering."
She wasn't. She didn't accuse him of anything. It hadn't passed her mind to. And suddenly she wonders why. Why had she made this call if not to find evidence of his mendacity? But she hadn't. And she shouldn't have called Gaara to check in on a student.
"Good." She says instead. "I just wanted to make sure."
"Not a problem," Gaara answers. "He's a really great guy, I think you'd get on well."
"Right," she gives, not believing it at all. "Thanks."
After they've hung up and Temari has logged Shikamaru Nara's grade into the computer, she wonders what Gaara could possibly see in this man. Everyday she thinks she likes him less and less.
When she hands him back the paper, walking right past his seat, he looks up a half-second too late to see her drop the paper on his desk. There are a dozen notes on the first page, but he doesn't look down to read it, or to flip to the back for his grade and paper-break down. Instead, he stares up at her. They haven't been in such physical proximity since the library and she feels her breath catch in annoyance at the way he stares at her instead of caring more about his grade.
It only lasts a second before she moves away to finish handing out papers to the class. When she eventually returns to her desk, she can feel the burn of his gaze searing into her shoulder, and she deliberately doesn't look his direction for the rest of the hour.
There are twenty-one students and Temari only hates five of them... maybe six. This is her second year as a TA and so far her annoyance at undergraduates is not so bad in comparison to before. Last year, she'd liked more people as a TA than she liked in her graduating class, and she liked even more now than she did then.
It's possible that the students have changed drastically in the past two years. But more likely, she has just become a nicer person.
Which makes sense, probably, when one considers how she took time out of her life to track down Shikamaru Nara and warn him about his impending mid-term grade. Or, at least, she thinks it satisfies as an explanation.
His attendance hasn't been great. He missed three classes the first month — and this class only meets three times a week. So, he has attended 3/4 of the whole class and her professor is giving him a C.
She thinks it justified, sort of. After all, he has been warned (personally, by his TA) that the professor is heavily concerned with these two aspects of the classroom, and still, he has chosen not to perform better in any of these areas. Knowing the material required to write a paper or circle some letters doesn't fulfill the class requisite.
Still, when Temari finds herself looking through Shikamaru Nara's file and walking with patient steps over to the library where he worked to warn him about his grade, she can only justify it by saying that yes, she is a nicer person.
Before she'd left, Temari had called to find that Shikamaru Nara works in the library, the one where she'd run into him before. He works there three days a week for seven or so hours at a time, usually at night. So at eight p.m. on a Tuesday, a time better spent alone in her apartment silently ignoring her impending future, she is leaning her elbow on the sort of circle-island counter in the library looking at a little nameplate that says S. Nara as the on-duty librarian.
There are three libraries on campus and this one is easily the smallest. A science library filled with medical texts and then a handful of history of science references. Shikamaru Nara is not currently present, though she can see that a supply closet on the opposite wall is lit.
She is going to give it five minutes, but he comes out in three.
It takes Shikamaru Nara half of the walk from the closet to the desk for him to notice her. It is clear when he does. They lock eyes and he pauses for a split second before looking at the carpet and continuing on until he is before her and staring at her again.
"Can I help you?"
This close, his eyes look even darker. The fluorescent light should be doing absolutely nothing to help the intensity of his gaze, and yet she observes the way the light reflects off his eyelids and parts through the thickness of his eyelashes as he looks down to type something into the computer.
Temari only realizes she has been staring at him without speaking when he stops whatever he is doing and looks back up at her.
"Are you here for a book," he pauses and raises his eyebrows a minuscule amount, "...again?"
She blinks, snapped out of her scrutiny, and he goes back to work, both fully aware that she was staring. "I'm here for you." She says, unsure about why she uses purposefully ambiguous words.
Shikamaru Nara raises his brows, pausing again to look at her.
"As a warning," she says. "I told you to do two things: show up and participate. That's really the most important thing Baki asks for. It doesn't matter if you ace everything else. But of course, you haven't been doing either of the former and now you're going to receive a C next week for midterms."
There is no shame or humiliation in his eyes when he tilts his head to her to say: "I've read the syllabus—"
"Funny," she mutters, "seeing as how you never actually received it."
"—and," Shikamaru Nara continues as though she hasn't said anything, "if I calculate my attendance and participation as the most minimal possible and put my midterm exams with one-hundreds, then I should be receiving a C, thus," he shrugs, "your warning is entirely unnecessary. So, want to tell me again why you're here?"
Her heart beats faster, untapped rage and all, and Temari squares her shoulders.
She was here to be nice. To try and be useful and helpful and to perform her position as TA to the utmost. "You clearly do the reading," she breathes, "so why not say something during class?"
"Grades aren't really a priority for me."
It's like his mouth always seems to form the exact words that press against her chest and push harder until she feels the bone crush beneath. She shouldn't even really be caring about this. He can fuck his own life if he wants. She doesn't need to be a part of that. And she has looked him up in the system before. Grades as one with his behavior might expect — a series of A's interspersed with only a couple of lower grades, probably from professors that found his holier-than-thou attitude to make him a total and complete shit.
He clearly doesn't care. Why would this class be any different? And why on earth did she care? Why was his complete lack of recognition so fucking affecting?
And still, as though knowing exactly what to say to piss her off, he continues through her silence with: "but, Temari, you already knew this, surely. And you knew I could calculate my own grade. So again: want to re-justify your following me to my job?"
It amazes her where the tone comes from, especially considering his blatant use of her first name, but when she speaks, she sounds calm, resolute in her dismissal and finality; as though everything he has said she has easily shrugged off. And ideally (and completely theoretically) she has. Even if she is sure she is still flushed in anger.
"If you are interested in raising your grade you could show up to my lab hours and not miss anymore class."
With that, she turns on her heel, wondering why the frightfully taut exchange ended with him smirking at her in amusement.
It's as though he thinks he has won. And, she supposes, he may have.
The following Tuesday, during her open lab ours, Shikamaru Nara shows up.
She is standing beside one of the other students while reading some of the manual when he walks in. She only knows he is there because one of the other students beckons him over aloud.
There is an instant in which she inhales at his name and her torso, hunched over the manual, jerks up ever so slightly, as though she is wanting to see him with her own eyes. But she thinks better of it so quickly, Temari is sure the only acknowledgement of his presence is her held breath and quickly blinking eyes.
She only looks at him after she has finished going through a practicum-description with the other students.
He is across the room now, setting up an auto-pulley and tying two strings to it. She had done this paper with some of the other students last week, but Shikamaru Nara had missed it. Here he is now though, and she hears some of his peers asking him about something a lab table over.
There is the first Huygen's practicum they did. Temari wants to laugh. He has been here all of one hour and has already completed what had taken most students three hours to complete, not to mention he is half-way through another one.
By the time her open-hours end, it is only her and Shikamaru Nara left in the room. She has packed away all of his projects, going through and making small comments on each that he replies to without even looking up.
When she finally leaves, half-an-hour after she stopped getting paid, he walks her out. He has finished six practicums in the span of four hours and, as far as she noticed, without referring back to any manual once.
On Thursday, Temari walks into class ten minutes before everyone else. She sets her bag on her desk and pulls out her planner — she still is unacquainted with the technology of smartphone calendars —, a pen, and the current Huygens paper they are finishing today. After that she goes into the backroom to pull out the attendance booklet and any papers her professor may need for the lecture. When she comes back out a moment later, Shikamaru Nara is sitting up in his usual seat.
He has never been late, but not once has he shown up this early. He is watching her when she closes the office door and she nods in greeting. He mimics the action and she takes her seat. They are in silence for a full two minutes before another student walks in.
He doesn't miss anymore class after that.
Two weeks before spring break, Temari walks out of a meeting with her advisor when she spies Shikamaru Nara standing against the wall of the building opposite.
It is clearly not coincidental. As soon as she is in his sights, he pushes himself off the brick and stalks towards her. It is the first warm (okay not warm, just not suicidally freezing) day in months and he is only wearing a coat, not his usual scarf and glove get-up.
Temari stays still, waiting for him to walk up to her. He has long legs and long strides, but he takes his time, leisurely and absolutely without any of the mid-term anxiety she always seems to feel.
"There are books waiting for you in the library." He opens with, not bothering any pleasantries.
"Books?" Temari pauses. Shikamaru Nara has come to a stop before her, standing just a little too close. She wants to take a step backwards, but recognizes that she will come off as weak in whatever little feud they have going on.
"For your thesis," he explains, "there is are some author-annotation Faraday books and a Principia in the original text."
She frowns, and before she can respond, Shikamaru Nara glances over her shoulder for a second and then looks back at her, the corner of his mouth turned up. "Are you really going to translate from the Latin?"
"You have my books?" She answers instead. (Of course she is going to translate the original Latin — or at least some of the lemmas and a handful of the laws — and definitely with some help, Kankuro was super into Roman theater and was fluent enough to help).
"Well you ordered them, didn't you?"
"I didn't put my name down."
"No," he shrugs, "I know your dissertation topic, I read the list of papers for your name months ago."
She recognizes, far off and not in the immediate now, that this is slightly creepy and so incredibly revealing, and a small part of her wonders why he would ever make himself so vulnerable to her; but a greater, more real-time part of her understands what he is saying because she reads every posting for his name. She knows when he works and which classes he takes and even has (not-at-all) subconscious ideas of the paths he takes around everyday. But she would never — not if they were married with children or anything super fucked-up and unrealistic like that — never, never, never tell him that she knows these things. Never would she be this flippantly vulnerable.
But here he is, saying these words without a hint of dread in his voice. As though he knows exactly what game they are playing at and is in total and full control whereas she feels like she is drowning every time she dwells for more than a minute on the way he looks at her and the way she finds herself looking back.
She swallows and responds as easily as she can: "You could have called. I left my number."
He shrugs again. "They're there for you when you come by."
As he turns around and walks away, she realizes how much he struggles to directly address her questions. It seems as though his answers are always two-steps ahead of the rest of the conversation, as though he assumes she knows his answer and has already asked the follow-up and that is what he chooses to respond to.
And just as she is about to turn on her heel and walk the opposite direction, he turns his head and says: "I'm working tomorrow night."
She thinks, if nothing else, that she may murder him.
The worst thing, she muses as she opens the heavy door to the science library, is that she had, the moment he said it, known she'd be showing up tonight.
He knew it and she knew it too. She knows he is kind of winning this (maybe always has been) and she feels claustrophobic with it.
And the problem is, she kind of likes it: the domination.
Shikamaru Nara is standing behind his desk when she walks into his line of sight and through the periphery of her vision she sees his head snap in her direction. She can almost feel his smirk from ten feet away, but when she turns her face to glance at him head on, he is doing the open-staring thing he does in class sometimes and she has no idea what he means by it. Temari turns her head back and continues in a diagonal path to a row of desks hidden between two shelves somewhere to the left of his counter.
She walks past him without a word and eventually knows she has lost his gaze as she weaves through shelves. When she finally takes a seat, Temari realizes how silent it is. The only sound she can hear is the pounding of blood in her ears.
What the fuck is wrong with her?
She pulls out of her laptop and starts back to typing in some notes. Within two minutes she has forgotten where she is and whoever is in her physical proximity and is just writing, mind filled with electrified cages and the morality of electrocuting the London sewage system. Within two hours, Temari moves away from her computer to go to the bathroom when she sees a stack of books a few feet from her on the desk.
She stands up and runs her fingers over the spines. She hadn't even been aware of their arrival. She looks around. Shikamaru Nara is nowhere to be seen.
She comes back occasionally after that, always on his shift, and always when she absolutely has enough work to distract her.
Some nights, Shikamaru Nara comes to sit with her. It will only be for half an hour or so, and during this time, he will always bring his own book. The books are always, surprisingly, nothing physics related. They're not even scientific. He usually brings in non-fiction, social commentaries, mostly politically based. Sometimes about finance. Once about sexual techniques, which part of her found super humorous, but even that was still one of the only nights in which not even her crushing workload was enough to distract from the proximity of his calf as his leg lay extended beside her.
They won't speak more than a few words. Sometimes he will comment on a visible note she has jotted down on one of her books or he will give a brief summary of the thesis of his current text of choice.
He never brings the same book twice, even when he is working consecutive days, and she finds herself wondering if he is finishing any of these books in the other twenty-some hours she doesn't see him, or if he only read the few dozen pages of each when with her.
She realizes what she is doing.
She is well-aware of it, painfully so. He is off-limits. Not just because he is younger or friends with her brother. It isn't something societal, like if he had dated a friend of hers before or anything. It is against the law.
Kind of. She has signed a contract, at least, so the law, as far as it applied to the university. She would not engage is any sort of extracurricular, amorous activity with her students. She could (would, knowing Baki) be fired, would lose her tuition, her source of income, her housing, any sort of recommendation, and thus likely a good occupational position in the theoretical physics world.
And yet.
Here she was. Here she is. And she knows Shikamaru Nara was staring at her like this purposefully. Stretching his legs beneath the table purposefully. Showing up to class early, purposefully. They are both well past the realm of wondering what the other is doing.
Now Temari is just wondering what the hell she is doing.
It is a Friday night, around her usual bedtime, when she closes her laptop in the library with a movement quick enough to catch Shikamaru's attention. He is sitting across from her reading a book about flaws in the education system when his eyes flicker up. Seeing she is going to say something, he flips down the top corner of his current page and closes his book patiently. Temari waits for his full attention before beginning.
When he looks back up at her, fingers laced over the wrecked cover of his paperback, she has to take a breath to gather herself.
They don't talk about much here; but they never, ever, mention school.
She supposes he may see this as a ruse: asking him about class to keep up some sort of appearance. As though she is here as his mentor or something, when both know this is far from the truth.
Still, she is interested. And proud. And she knows — knows — he is only doing this because she went out of her way to pester him:
"I've calculated grades to incorporate your last test." She says, pausing to glance down at the wood table between them for only an instant before meeting his eyes. "You're up to a B."
Temari doesn't know what she expects. A smile? An acknowledgement of how simple this would have been for him if he had done absolutely anymore than the bare minimum?
Instead he just stares at her, his eyes moving a bit — searching for something, she thinks. Then he shrugs. Lightly and without any hint of condescension. After that, he opens his book and goes back to reading, as though the news that she has delivered is so inconsequential, it may as well have been left unsaid. As though he really truly doesn't care; which she thinks, he may not.
Through the Newton sections, she experiences full-attendance through all of her lab-hours for a whole six weeks. Only one person misses some and that is because she has work on Wednesdays. On the Friday afternoon that she finishes, Temari's lab hours are long past over, but they are on the verge of completing what feels like half-a-semester's unit and she feels as though she must stay in the lab just to let everyone finish.
When they do finally finish, it is nine o'clock and generally around Temari's Netflix time. Still, one of them posits: "what's that bar you always go to?" And when she answers, the idea of going for a drink is audibly agreed upon by practically the whole class.
And that is how she finds herself at the bar two blocks from her house on a Friday night wearing a skirt-suit with her white button-down tucked into her skirt, all the while being accompanied by the class she is TA-ing.
It's not ideal. But it is (kind of) fun. And she thinks that they do all deserve it.
The bar is crowded by the time they arrive. Already a bunch of college kids have claimed the bar area and the few booths in back. Her students spot out two tables in the middle of the room which will hold maybe fifteen of them, and that liberally thinking. Luckily at least six of them were in the mood to dance anyway.
Temari takes a seat at one of the table, asks for a martini in the order, and spends the rest of the first hour in conversation about her thesis and future-life-plans. The most popular topic for any young adult, really.
She spends the second hour — after a slightly judgement-impaired round of tequila shots — bitching about Baki and offering advice from her days as one of his undergrads.
And by the time the third hour has rolled around, Temari has become closer to three kids than she is to half of the students in her three-year PhD program.
Shikamaru though, pointedly, it seems, does not talk to her. He even seems to go out of his way to avoid falling into a conversation that she is part of.
She thinks it's good, probably. Best not get too close. Especially treading the line drawn between the inside of the library and the outside of their class.
But she doesn't feel that way.
She is maybe three drinks in and she would bet her life on the fact that he is staring at her, but every time she tries to catch his eye, he is well absorbed in conversation with one of his peers.
She feels it though: the burn of his gaze. She sees no evidence, but this experience seems factual. The fire painting line from her jaw down her neck and sloping over the jut of her shoulder is the trace of his gaze, moving up and down over and over until she feels dizzy and has to stand up.
"Are you okay?" Her current conversation partner asks just as a round of shots arrive at the table.
Temari nods, "I'm just..." she glances over to the bar. "Not nearly as drunk as I want to be."
Someone behind her laughs.
"Have a shot." The partner tries.
She shakes her head, moving away from the table without giving an excuse. The bar is packed, every seat — and every inch between them — occupied. Temari has to physically maneuver two people out of her way for a shot at the tender.
Without having to ask, a glass of water is placed in front of her.
"Hold on." Tenten says, moving away to fill another order. Temari feels herself nudging the guy next to her so hard, that suddenly there is an empty seat and she slides onto it.
"Full-house," Temari mutters just loudly enough for Tenten to hear.
"No rest for the wicked," she replies, never looking up from making her current customer's drink.
At that exact moment, someone taps Temari's shoulder and she swings her head around.
"Hey," one of her students says, "can you ask the bartender for a first-aid kit? Nara cut his hand."
Tenten, overhearing, barks out a laugh and places a shot of tequila in front of Temari. She takes it without preparation and slips back off the stool.
"No," she says to Tenten, "apparently not."
None of the bathrooms read Occupied, so she tries the first one and surprises him so much, Shikamaru snaps his whole body back against the ceramic sink without thinking to turn off the running water.
There is a pause, just a moment, in which neither say anything and as the door shuts behind her, the only thing that can be heard is the sound of water running from the faucet to the base of the bowl.
She finds herself staring at him then, something she rarely allows herself to do. He is still leaning against the sink, hands pressed tightly on the lip, the outline of his undershirt stark against the thinner white of his button down. She sees the set of his shoulders and the angle his arm makes at his elbow. She observes the bend of his wrist and the veins in his hands, up to the right thumb which is unavailable to her sight from all the blood coating it.
"Shit," she breathes, "let me get—" she is out the door before she finishes her sentence, turning into the back-room where the more industrial first-aid kit is.
When she comes back, Shikamaru has turned again to the sink and is silently watching as the blood continues to issue from his wound and wind down into the drain, turning the water a dark pink.
Temari locks the door behind her and moves to stand half-beside him, half-behind him. She opens the kit on the shelf and reaches for his hand.
"You really do come here often," he say under his breath, eyeing the kit.
She weaves her fingers around his palm and adjusts to get a better view of the wound.
"To this place?" She asks. "My roommate bartends most-nights."
For some reason, the comment seems to loose some of the tension from his shoulders.
They sit in silence for half a minute as she continues to try and wash the cut while giving the blood a chance to coagulate. For some reason, maybe under this particular light, his hand looks delicate. Still, his hands are always dry and today is no exception; but something in the way his fingers bend and the roundness of each knuckle makes them seem more refined.
"I thought you spent all your time in the library." Shikamaru reaches with his good hand to turn off the water after she pulls him out of it.
"Only three nights a week." She responds absentmindedly. Temari is still staring at his finger, watching the clean wound swell once more with blood. There is a half-second pause before it pools enough to begin dripping down his thumb. Her heart beats faster.
She holds his hand up to her face and watches the trail the blood makes down the side of his hand before angling off against the square bones of his wrist. "I think you might need stitches." She whispers before leaning closer to drag the flat of her tongue from the drop, up back its path down his hand, tracing quickly before coming to the wound and enveloping his thumb into her mouth.
She isn't trying any moves or swirling her tongue in any coy play or anything that crafty. She isn't seducing him. She had wanted to taste and so she had. And she is, just holding his thumb there against her tongue, finger enclosed by her lips.
The foreign intrusion is more arousing that anything she has felt in years and she doesn't know if it is that or the alcohol that is making everything in her head hazy and everything below her brain feel like fire.
"Is that so?" And his voice sounds wrecked.
She isn't sure which part of the comment he was responding to, but when she glances up, he is staring at her, eyes blasted.
Temari lets go of his thumb with a small pop.
In the interim, she thinks there must be silence again, but she can't tell because the blood is pounding deafening orchestras in her ears and before she has a chance to really think, she has moved to slip between him and the sink, hip and tailbone bumping against the lip as she faces him. She has waited months to feel her breasts pressed against him. And then her hands are pulling at the intersection between his ears, jaw, and neck, and he is following her down, pressing her as far into the sink as she'll go before finally closing the distance between their lips.
It is just a press at first. Hard and stiff, and they each pull back the smallest amount to just breathe. To get a baring. But she still feels his thumb in her and even the press of chap lips doesn't do anything to dull the feeling on her tongue and on the roof of her mouth. So she chases the feeling, pulling him back the centimeter he'd parted and meeting him with open lips.
This time the kiss is hot and messy and Shikamaru has grabbed the back of her neck to switch positions, and then he is running his hands all over her back, scratching down her clavicles and spreading like wings around her ribs.
"I thought you'd never do this," he breathes, turning her around again to lift her half-onto the sink. "But I've been waiting. For months."
Everything she should be concentrating on seems absent from her conscience — the dirty bathroom, the still-bleeding thumb. All she feels are his hands on her breasts and the hike of her skirt and the wet heat of his breath against the skin of her neck.
And then someone knocks on the door.
She pushes him away so abruptly that he hits the toilet unable to get his baring in time before toppling over to sit on the seat, legs splayed lewdly and mouth red. She watches him for only a second to see his shoulders heaving with his breaths, expression clearly too taken aback to form a verbal response yet, and then she leaves, redoing the buttons that had come undone and pulling down her skirt.
The air is cooler outside the bathroom and as soon as the door shuts behind her, Temari finally feels like she can breathe again. There is no one waiting for the room anymore — thank god — and she turns on her heel to stalk back to the bar as quickly as she can before Shikamaru comes out of the bathroom.
"How much do I look like I almost just had sex?"
Tenten looks her over. "Are you bleeding?"
She waves a hand in dismissal. "Not my blood." But Temari looks down to see swipes of it against her shirt.
Her roommate lets out a bark of laughter. "In that case," Tenten replies, "only 'almost'?"
Temari huffs and waves her hand in annoyance. But she does fix her hair before going to her remaining students and politely excusing herself for the night, making sure to grab her coat before anyone stops to see if she is injured.
"We're both adults," she says before class.
He raises his brows, seeming not to believe her argument, but definitely expecting it.
"We can quell wayward sexual tension." It's not like they are in love or anything.
Shikamaru eyebrows seem to get even higher. His black eyes are glinting as though he knows something she doesn't.
"Plus," she adds, as though it were an afterthought and not the main reason she wasn't pursuing this, "it's against my contract for this class. I would be—"
She stops. Shikamaru stays silent. He doesn't seem upset. Surely not surprised, but not even a little bit angry. Isn't he angry at her? Shouldn't he be?
She remembers (thought about it all night, replaying that singular feeling of his breath over her cheek and the wetness left there with i've been waiting for months) his words. It was clearly something he wanted last night. So why is he so disinterested now?
"Right." He says eventually. "Sexual tension."
And he left it at that, turning and walking the remaining steps to his usual seat. Temari, on the other hand, waits for him to sit before turning herself and walking the remaining steps down and back to her desk. He spends the rest of class staring at her, and even though she searches for some higher meaning in it, his stares don't seem anymore intense than usual.
The month finishes in that way: almost exactly the same as it started. As though the bathroom incident had never happened at all. As though there was never a moment in her life in which she had let herself slip so out of control, that she had felt the overwhelming need to lick someone's blood. And for that to turn her on so much she thought she might come apart from just the feeling of his thumb pressed into her mouth.
She might have been a physics major in her undergrad, but she knew the Stoics. She understood the idea of consumption and ingestion and the raw, complete, and unbridled eros. And she knew that whatever this was, she was the only one that seemed to be feeling it.
Shikamaru, on the other hand, treats her no differently than he had two weeks ago when the whole bathroom thing had happened. He shows up to class early, receives A's on absolutely everything, and doesn't treat her out of the ordinary in any way whatsoever. The sole difference in their routine is that she no longer makes appearances in the library.
The worst thing, she is sure, is that Temari has absolutely no idea what she wants, or more importantly, what she wants from him; though in the classic unfairness that always seems to befall the two of them, he has more answers than she does.
She is at a bar with Tenten when Shikamaru comes in.
She doesn't see him for a good twenty minutes but, according to Tenten, he has apparently been sitting in one of the booths with an attractive blonde girl the whole time.
"Isn't it weird that they're sitting on the same side of the booth?" Tenten asks, cleaning some glasses. There aren't many people here yet. Wednesdays are never very busy anyway, but there is less traffic than usual right now.
Temari has to remind herself not to look over her shoulder at them. There is a direct view of the booths from her barstool and she is sure he would see her staring.
"I guess."
"Was the girlfriend in the picture when you fucked him in the bathroom?"
"I didn't—" Temari rolls her eyes. "No. Well, maybe. Not as far as I know, at least. He could have."
"Wow," her roommate scolds, not even trying to hide the grin. "A student of yours and you're the mistress... Temari, this is so unlike you."
Temari doesn't try to justify herself. Anyway, Tenten is right. Maybe. The mistress part is still unclear.
Five minutes later another girl and boy come in and sit in the seat across from Shikamaru and his possible-girlfriend. Temari only turns her head once to see the new additions, but she is getting enough of a feed on the happenings from Tenten.
Apparently he is not with his girlfriend, but is being set up — or maybe has just started seeing or something — this new girl. Supposedly it is really apparent that she is not close with him yet, but the flirtation is heavy in all their movement, or at least that is what Temari is told.
"It's definitely a first date." Tenten says, sparing sentences every time she happens to walk by Temari. The bar is more crowded now and Temari is no longer getting live-updates as her source suddenly seems to have a more important job to do.
She looks back again to see Shikamaru and his date — not the blonde girl, the other one — have moved from the booth to the middle of the floor, he is whispering in her ear and she can't seem to smile any coyer.
Temari huffs and turns back, nursing her gin and tonic.
Tenten is somewhere at the opposite end of the bar when she feels the new presence behind her.
"I thought martinis were your drink of choice."
Temari stiffens. She doesn't need to turn her head to see him only inches from her.
It takes a second, but she makes the connection from his comment to her drink and she inhales, finally swiveling in her stool. Sitting down, even on a barstool like this, it is intimidating to feel Shikamaru's body looming over her. He isn't looking at her though, waiting for Tenten to come serve him.
"Shouldn't you not be talking to me?" She asks, fingers twiddling with her flimsy plastic straw.
At that, Shikamaru angles his head to stare at her.
She hasn't seen him this up-close in weeks. He has a new cut on his bottom lip, as though he has been chewing on it too hard, though more likely, the dry air had simply ripped the skin apart.
He is expressionless though, brow unfurled.
"You're jealous."
She bites her tongue. "Don't be naïve."
She turns back to the bar, elbow leaning on the lip and eyes trained on the table.
"What do you want me to do, Temari?" He asks, still staring at her.
At the sound of her name, her eyes skanse over to his elbows on the bar, gaze locking on the cut of his wrists. He seems to notice this, inhaling sharply in turn with the movement of her eyes. He lets his breath out slowly, exasperatedly.
"Should I go home with you?" He isn't looking at her anymore and now both their gazes locked on the bar seem more intimate than had they been staring at one another. "Bend you over your desk and fuck you after class? Is that what you want?"
Her first reaction isn't to argue it. She isn't angry or affronted as she would have been had anyone else said it to her. She should be furious. But she is disquieted. She isn't sitting still or lying in wait, she wants to agree and submit and she knows this. And he does too.
So she says nothing. And she feels the heat pooling in her gut and her legs and the pounding of her heart.
He leans closer a bare amount, heads parallel. "After all," he half-whispers, "we're both adults."
They sit in silence for another minute before Tenten comes over and fills his order, eyes very obviously looking at the work before her the entire time she is there. When he gets the drinks, Shikamaru turns and leaves without any other moment for interaction.
Class is more angry after that.
The first day, Shikamaru doesn't look at her once, not even as she hands back his quiz. But her hands trace the lines of wood in her desk as class rolls on, fingernails scraping lightly perpendicular to the panels. She presses her palm into the lip of the desk and watches her flesh turn white out of the corner of her eye.
She has never fantasized about him in class before, but here she is, in the middle of a lecture, imagining the press of the wood.
Temari glances up at the stands again, but Shikamaru is still not looking at her. Now, it makes her angrier.
The second day, he spends the whole time staring at her. Eyeing the set of her shoulders and the increasingly quick pen taps on the papers before her. She feels him this time and this makes her angrier too.
The third day is like the first. And so is the fourth. And on the fifth, Temari's annoyance has permeated into every sphere of her life and she decides she should no longer get out of bed.
It happens like this: The day before, Temari spends every second looking over her shoulder to see if he is behind her. She looks for him in lines at her coffee shop that she has only ever seen him enter once, like, two years ago. Around the crowd milling to classes and in the crowd leaving the science buildings.
She doesn't even have anything to say to him. She doesn't want to talk to him. But she wants nothing more than to get his attention and she brushes off anyone else who tries to speak to her all day.
And so on Tuesday morning, Temari lies in bed before her alarm goes off and stares at the ceiling, wondering how she ever got head-over enough on a student to absolutely lose her sense.
Five hours before class, she finally picks up her computer and emails Baki about her absence. Four hours before class, she gets out of bed and showers. Three hours, she has re-heated old pasta and is watching TV. And three hours stay like that. Ten minutes after class ends and her door to her apartment is being pounded down.
She practically flies off the couch at the noise. It doesn't start soft and grow. The person is slamming a fist (likely a fist, but it sounds a hell of a lot like a hammer) against the wood panels of her shitty apartment door and Temari is so caught off guard, she trips in her own blankets as she tries to move away from the sofa.
"Hold on, I'm coming. Jesus." She untwists the blankets and throws them back on the cushions. The attempts to straighten her too short tee-shirt are futile and she ends up kind of just bouncing the hem back up before opening the door.
Shikamaru is on the other side and she forgets how to breathe.
But he doesn't notice, because he wastes no time.
"Are you okay?" He asks, barging into her apartment without waiting for an invitation. She barely manages to move out of his way before he runs into her. "Are you sick?"
Temari turns around. He is standing in the middle of her apartment now, hands antsy.
"What are you doing here?"
"You weren't in class." He snaps his head to her. "You never miss class."
She opens her mouth and quickly shuts it. She doesn't have to defend herself. Instead, Temari finds herself closing the door in his wake and walking over to the disheveled couch and coffee table before her. The rest of her apartment is spotless and she can't find it in herself to be embarrassed about the mess.
Rather, she wants to laugh about how much power she suddenly has over him:
She misses one class and he comes barreling into her apartment, helpless. Helpless. Over her.
Yes, had he missed class, she would have found him. She would have gone to the library or waited outside one his lectures. She probably wouldn't have shown up to his apartment without warning, but that is neither here nor there. And the best is: Shikamaru knows all this. She can see it in the stiff line of his spine and the inhale he has yet to release.
"So." She says, turning off the paused television. "You were worried about me?"
And then he does what he always does and sweeps the power right out from under her, saying the last thing she would have predicted.
"I was trying to make you jealous." He finally takes a breath and glances over to her, eyes resting on her exposed stomach for a second before looking her in the eye. "You know, that night. At the bar. I knew you'd been there more often recently and that you'd be there that night and so I proposed the venue with you in mind." He glances at the ground, lip turning up in a smirk. "I'm sorry. It was unfair of me. You had rejected me and I should have respected that."
"I didn't—" but she had. She had rejected him.
There is a pause and Temari bites her lip for lack of anything reasonable to say. Finally she settles on following suit: "you're right too," she say, "I was jealous. I am so consumed with you, the thought of someone else catching your eye makes me angry."
Shikamaru laughs and she sees that glint in his eyes she hasn't seen since their nights in the library.
"I think it's ridiculous that we've known each other for practically four years and..." He trials off, still smiling.
Four years and only when they can't be together, do they decide it is actually the better thing. Because they are good together. They work well. And he challenges her. And she wants — she wants — so badly.
Shikamaru leaves then. Still smiling, though less so now. And as she hears the door close, she remembers the first time they'd met and the exit he'd made then, the knobs of his bare spine moving with each step and the line of shadow his clavicle made on his cold skin. She could have had him then. She'd known it the minute he'd opened the door, the crease of his lid disappearing as his eyes widened with her appearance. She'd known it all this time. In every moment they'd passed by all that year. And every avoidance of eye on campus since. All this time, she should have been his.
She shows up in class the next day. Three students check on her before and after class, wondering where she'd been. Shikamaru smiles back when she looks his way, but other than that, he leaves her alone.
After the two months she'd been gone, the science library hasn't changed at all. She can imagine that in another two months, two years, not a single thing will change about this place. Except in two months, two years (two weeks), Shikamaru won't be here.
It is something she is counting on.
He isn't by the desk when she comes in. And after a minute or so, she is still the only life in the building as far as she can tell. But his name is on the counter and so she throws her bag on the desk behind his nameplate and starts her hunt. The supply closet is open, so she starts there, and gets lucky.
Shikamaru is standing on his tiptoes with his back to her, reaching for something on a high shelf. Without pause, Temari steps into the closet and closes the door behind her.
"Sorry, we don't allow—" he begins, turning around. Then stops.
The closet is smaller than she pictured. He isn't pressed against her, but he might as well be, with all the heat coming off him. She feels claustrophobic and anxious, though not necessarily in a bad way.
"Temari," he says, brow furrowed. He has an ID around his neck and she finds it ridiculously attractive that he is on duty. And she can't even muster up the patience to recognize how disgusting her infatuation with him is.
He inhales when she doesn't say anything.
"Are you here for a book?"
He is staring at her again like he knows something she doesn't. And, she supposes, he does.
"You'd better not tell a soul."
He opens his mouth and closes it again. She is pleased to see his fist clench and unclench by his thigh.
"And it has to stay casual," she continues, smile in her voice. Temari presses her hands behind her back and leans against the door. His breath is coming quicker, but he still isn't speaking. "Because if it ever becomes something more than sex," though she already knows, deep in her gut, that it is far from that, and even though she sure he is aware of this too, he shows no indication, "like, if we get married or some bullshit, and Baki finds out, I will lose my essay advisor."
He still doesn't say anything.
"So, you know, sex. I mean, we could do that." She blinks. "That is, of course, if you're still okay with—"
His hands are on her shoulders before she can finish the sentence and his grip is so hard, she knows she will have bruises within the hour.
But she isn't deterred, craning forward and his hands, while not letting up, allow her to come closer. When she is close enough to breathe in his scent, she angles her head and licks a line a little beneath his ear and he shudders with it.
"Got it." He breathes, pushing her back again, though this time, he comes with her against the door. "Just sex."
"Just sex," Temari affirms, hands moving to pull out his tucked shirt.
"I can do that," he whispers. He leans his forehead on her shoulder, hands finally releasing her to help her shaky fingers with the buttons at the bottom of his shirt.
"Good." As soon as she has enough room, Temari reaches underneath to touch his skin, scratching lightly down him, moving to feel his heartbeat, blood ringing in her ears. She wants to pull keening gasps from him, is desperate for it, so she hooks her ankle around his calf and pulls him closer. He laughs under his breath, stepping in to press his full form against her. He is already hard against her hip and she tries to laugh, but it comes out as more of a moan than anything. She feels him smile into her neck.
"And then," she continues, practically out of breath even though they haven't even kissed yet, hands moving again to circle his jaw and neck and hair at the base of his skull. She pulls out the tie and grips what falls from his ponytail in her fist. "Ideally," she pulls his head back to look at him, "my thesis will be finished by this time next year."
"Good," he mimics. "Then you'd better get to work."
"Wait," Shikamaru says a few minutes later, taking his (second) break with Temari at her usual table. His hair is still out (the tie fell underneath one of the shelves in the supply closet and neither of them had skinny enough arms to reach for it) and she has a feeling he is embarrassed about the hickey blooming beneath his ear, anyway; plus she likes it better this way.
Temari angles her head in question.
"Does that mean that we will get married this time next year?"
She rolls her eyes. "Oh, go fuck yourself."
She swears he winks at her before looking back down at his papers, pen tapping on the desk.
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
leave love (or not love. questions/critique always 100% desired)
