Chapter Fourteen
Before she can answer Naruto is bowled over by an assault from behind, Akamaru yapping away as she falls into the leaves. "Stupid damn dog," she mutters, but he can't be that dumb, because he clearly knows she'll still like him, knows to keep a respectful distance to Sasuke.
"There you are," Kiba says, smirking at her as she finally struggles back on her feet, brushing rotting leaves off her person. "I was wondering where the hell you went off to, come on."
"I suppose class is about to start," Sasuke concedes graciously, revealing troubling pyromaniac tendencies by chucking her cigarette in the demolished pile of leaves.
"Er, yeah," Kiba says, giving her a look of, I'm not talking to you. "Hey, Naruto, there's this thing…"
But whatever the thing is, Kiba doesn't mean it for Sasuke, and Sasuke's walking with them and Naruto won't, can't, slip away from her.
Which leaves all three of them trotting off towards class in silence, taking the route by the bike stable to leave Akamaru with his babysitter, Konohamaru.
"What?" Naruto mutters at Sasuke's sceptical look, her extremely conspicuous failure to return Konohamaru's greeting.
"I wasn't aware they allowed animals on school property."
Naruto knows for a fact that Kiba wouldn't look so pissed if he knew Sasuke was not actually referring to Akamaru.
"Shut up," she says. "Also hurry up, I don't need any more absences."
"Yeah," Kiba agrees. "Fucking uptight teachers, they always get like this."
Holidays do tend to have that effect, authority tightening to strangling in anticipation of going slack, and the semester is drawing to a close, unravelling.
She gets a D- on the Math quiz, which is great because it means passing: means not having to do it over, and it's difficult to concentrate on abstract numbers when all she wants to use them for is counting Sasuke's lashes, her pores, every potential freckle. She's spotted one on the backside of her earlobe.
But it's not Sasuke who corners her afterward, slipping on the bus and plopping down in the seat next to hers, out of breath, hunched over, exploding, "I need you to go on a date with me."
Naruto stares, slack-jawed. She can actually feel her jaw hanging, chin so low the tendons ache. "I don't really like you that way," she says. "Also I think Akamaru would be jealous."
"No!" Kiba snaps, jolting upright so fast he almost dislocates Akamaru. "I didn't mean it like that! I mean – see, you remember Hinata wouldn't go on a date with me, right? Obviously misguided, but she's a bright girl, she'll realise the error of her non-dating ways."
"I remember," Naruto concedes, shuffling down in her seat to scratch Akamaru.
"Well, right – so. She won't go on a date with me. But she will go out with me if it's not a date!"
"That's great? What's your point?"
"My point is I'm getting the date!"
"But you just said…"
"As long as she doesn't realise it's a date, everything will be fine," Kiba declares in much the same tones a priest blesses something: old words, stale words, powerful through repetition now and nothing else. "That's where you come in."
"You want me to chaperone your date? Wouldn't Shino be a better option? He's way more – chaperonish."
"Shino's creepy," Kiba dismisses, which is a sentiment with which Naruto would be hard pressed to argue. "All girls think Shino's creepy. Also you're not so much a chaperon as a distraction. An alibi. So she'll think of it as a friendly hang-out, relax and realise I'm irresistible, and then she'll agree to go on a proper date with me. You see?"
"That you're crazy, sure," Naruto says, but of course she will have to go with him. It might even be a good thing: she's been curious about getting to know Hinata, sometimes, and also it would probably be difficult to top turning up under Sasuke's window to declare her admiration in rhymed verse. Collecting the story of Kiba's no doubt abysmal dating attempts will give her new material for next time.
When Kiba, reportedly having little faith in her punctuality, comes to pick her up the morning of the date day, he's cleaned up. He's sporting a forest green college jumper under his school jacket, the one his mum doesn't let him out to play with Akamaru in.
Naruto scratches her leg with the toe of her other foot, pushing up the worn flannel of her sleeping trousers. "Should I dress up?"
"No," Kiba says after a moment's hesitation, ear turned to Akamaru outside. "It's better if you don't. Right? But – clothes."
"Clothes it is," Naruto says, pulling on fleece and thrift shop jeans: Akamaru clothes. "Remind me again how you got her to agree to go out with you."
"It's," Kiba starts with an impatient gesture, nervy as an over-bred race dog. "It's not a date if you're there."
"What?" Dad asks on a laugh, wandering by with his coffee cup. "I thought a girl being present was exactly the thing that made it a date."
Naruto sticks her tongue out, shooing him off before Kiba can get lost in his twisted explanations.
"What I meant," he says, "is it's not a date if you're there too."
Naruto waves an I know, I know, pulling on her boots and dragging Kiba with her outside, where Akamaru eagerly waits to ambush them. He too has been groomed, his fur slick with dog soap, his neck circled with a broad black collar she's never seen before.
"Also I promised her puppies," Kiba continues, disjointed, trying to look smug, she thinks; looking sick. "All girls love puppies. Except I guess Sasuke. And Ino, I suppose, and maybe Temari, and – never mind, the point is every true woman loves puppies."
Kneeling to give Akamaru a proper cuddling, Naruto arcs an eyebrow, or tries to; fails, lifts them both.
"Yes, see," says Kiba, "those people saying you were a dyke freak? Were totally wrong. You're the true soul of woman!"
"Uh huh," Naruto says. "Come on, let's go before you lose what little sense you've left."
They're meeting Hinata in Elm Park, ten minutes from Kiba's, thirty from Naruto's, one of the respectable greenery areas, the sort with a few children and dogs but mostly joggers, old people, couples. They've settled on a bench when Hinata arrives, all three of them restless; Akamaru wants to chase ducks, Kiba wants to chase Hinata, Naruto – well. Naruto would've liked a non-date of her own.
She's so invested in the thought that Hinata strikes her, for the first time, as very much like, striding towards them, very much like Sasuke. They might have been related; short, pale, with black hair, which is short on Sasuke and looks short on Hinata, pulled back into a bun, sometimes covered sometimes not. Hurrying, alone, Hinata moves differently; less circumscribed, less careful; more like Sasuke.
"Hi!" Kiba has jumped to his feet, stands awkwardly, gawkily upright; a too-young sentinel.
"Hello, Kiba," Hinata mumbles with that little stutter she has. "Naruto. Akamaru." She bends to pat him, very delicately, on the head. Her hand is tiny, plump, with coral-coloured nails.
They take to walking the lakeside path, close to its innermost edge to let the joggers past. Akamaru, prevented from taking off running, is being contrary and slow, insisting on smelling every crevice on the road. Taking the leash, letting Kiba walk a little ahead with Hinata, Naruto tells him no, she can't blame him, she wouldn't like being pulled along on a chain either, but for god's sake, it's duck shit, how good can it smell?
Conceivably he's being considerate, mature, leaving Kiba in peace to pursue his princess, but then this isn't a kids' movie, which means anthropomorphism is silly. "Mongrel," Naruto mutters, jumping aside as Akamaru retaliates by rubbing his muddy side against her legs. "Goddamn stupid dog." But they're smiling at each other.
Up ahead Kiba is gesturing in jerky stabs, his hands retreating to his pockets between each jab in the air. His talk is fast, interspersed with Hinata's silences.
Halfway through the second lap Kiba sidles up to her, kneeling to take Akamaru into his lap. Two meters away, three perhaps, Hinata is pulling bread apart in her hands, throwing it into the water, feeding the ducks.
"What the hell do you do on dates?" he asks.
"I don't know," Naruto admits, jerking sideway to avoid a faceful of dog tail. "I've never been on one."
"And no wonder," Kiba mutters, smirking. "But you've sure been hanging around Uchiha a lot lately, don't tell me you don't wish that was dating – so what…?"
"Well," says Naruto. "Last time I kicked her in the chest. It was pretty awesome."
Sasuke after all had split her lip, which is a breach of rules: not the face, no marks where anybody can see.
Of course Naruto had, at that point, left a hickey on her neck.
"God, you're useless."
"I'm not the one who can't even manage my own non-date. But fine. Write her poetry? Have sex?"
Turning her back on Kiba's grimace she walks up to Hinata, tries the smile Sasuke calls cartoonish. "Got any duck bread left over?"
"Oh, certainly," Hinata says, smiling back very softly, a whisper of a smile that might invite you to lean closer to catch it. "Please, help yourself."
For a little while all three of them stand on the edge of the lake, throwing pieces of dry white bread into the water, before eventually Hinata mentions that Kiba had said something, unless she misunderstood? But she thought he had spoken of puppies?
"Yeah," Kiba says, a grin edging its way onto his face, and before long they've caught the bus, bundling Akamaru in hidden under Kiba's jacket because it's the cranky driver today, and ventured to the Inuzuka home and kennel.
This late in the year even the smallest of the puppies are toddlers, walking and talking in their way. Hinata kneels in the barn and Naruto too, straw and puppy teeth needling through her trousers, Kiba taking off to feed another litter. She picks up one of them, the reddish one climbing her leg, the one that should've been hers, if Dad hadn't been in one of his stingy bastard phases.
"I should've asked earlier," she explains, to Hinata or the pup, "I guess that's irony, right? Because back when I was fresh out of hospital he'd have given me a whole bloody zoo if I'd asked for it, but of course I didn't know about these sweeties before I'd met Kiba, and if I already had a human friend…" It's so typical, they couldn't have pets in the old flat, it would've been cruel, keeping animals locked up on the fourth floor of a town building, but there's a garden now, and parks and dirt roads. It could've been glorious.
"I'm sorry," Hinata says softly. "I used to want very much to have a kitten."
Naruto tilts herself towards the puppy, brushing hair out of her face. The dampness makes it crawl, worming out of the pigtails; it's longer now, the longest she's had in years, but not heavy enough yet to resist frizzing. "Ever get it?"
"No," says Hinata, smiling a little with the corners of her mouth tucked neatly downward, stroking a puppy's ear. "I did get a sister."
"Next best thing, right?"
"Perhaps," Hinata allows, startling when Kiba reappears, the beloved idol of the entire flock of puppies, who turn on him like a yappy furry tide.
"Big Sis is doing the dress rehearsal for the Christmas baking," he says. "We could..."
"Awesome!" Naruto agrees, putting the puppy that should have been back on the floor. "I keep telling Mum it's not too early to start on that, but will she listen."
"That sounds very nice," Hinata says, and Kiba smiles, again, and moves towards the exit.
After much scrubbing they're allowed into the kitchen, which has been transformed into the likeness of a fire-lit cave, the flaking walls reaching inward to embrace the glowing heat of the oven. The smell is everywhere of dogs, of baking, of the red Christmas flowers collected on the window sills. Hana, presiding over proceedings with a floury fist, seems a first eminently grown-up, very formidable.
"Hey, kids," she says then, and smiles Kiba's smile, catching him full in the face with a fistful of flour.
Naruto's primary experience of elder siblings is Itachi, which is very different indeed from Hana.
Naruto and Kiba both have done their fair share of helping out parents, but the star is Hinata, rosy with confidence, perfectly at home.
"Wow, Kiba," Hana says, "you've managed to snag yourself a real wife there."
For all the sarcasm she says it warmly, kindly, and Kiba's blush isn't displeased.
"No," says Hinata, unexpectedly firmly. "No. I am just somebody who likes to bake."
Well, of course, they hurry to concede. Sorry, it was just a thoughtless joke. But the atmosphere has gone tense, stays worried until Kiba, catching sight of himself in a window turned mirror by darkness, turns the flour still covering more than half his face into elaborate designs, into what he declares to be the new Inuzuka tribe paintings.
While Naruto already has her own facial markings, and as such only gets a snowball of flour lobbed at her, Hinata isn't allowed to escape unmarked. She smiles a little, fingers jittery on the counter, as Kiba traces white circles and triangles on her cheeks.
So it's a success, in its way; and the biscuits and buns and cakes are spectacular.
And yet when they've gone, Kiba waving in the doorway, Naruto and Hinata back on the bus, Hinata wrings her hands, a delicate moment, fingers getting lost in her sleeves. Naruto's said something generic and enthusiastic, about fun and stomachs ready to burst.
"This thing, it's not." Hinata stops, looking mortified. "Kiba, he is very nice. But." She struggles for another moment, seeming ready to reach out, but then she doesn't, composes herself, sitting straighter. "Please, if you could let him understand… I don't want to lead him on."
"You don't like him?" asks Naruto, leaving unsaid that if Kiba can't take no dating for an answer, he's the one leading himself on.
"It's not about liking," Hinata says. "I don't know him very well. We're very different."
"Yeah," Naruto says. "But you could get to know him. If you want, I mean. He obviously wants to. Though, I think Sasuke said once that you were, like, basically engaged to Neji. I mean, she says a lot of stupid shit, so I don't know…"
"Well, yes. But it's… Neji doesn't want me."
"Neji's a total sourpuss," Naruto says. "But you? I mean, do you want him?"
"You seem like a good person," Hinata tells her abruptly, looking tortured and grateful and with flour still on her face, from when Kiba put it there. "During Iruka's seminars, I noticed that you – you are very kind."
"Thanks?" Naruto mumbles, rubbing the back of her head and probably getting flour in her hair. "I – try. Thank you. But do you? Want Neji."
"Neji will be a great person. I admire him very much."
"But if you don't like him–"
"But I didn't say that."
She's not, it becomes evident, being coy; when Naruto points out that in this instance, failing to say yes will be translated to mean no, she says, "But that's not fair."
Which, well, yeah. They sit in silence for a time as the bus rocks beneath them, but silence doesn't agree with Naruto, it has always made her want to be loud.
"Hey," she says, hesitant; or she feels she ought to have been. "Can I ask? About the veil."
"The veil," Hinata repeats. "Ah, yes. I'm unsure about it, I suppose." She touches a self-conscious hand to her hair, very lightly. "I wear it when there are people around who like me to. When I'm with people who like me not to, then I refrain." She sighs, looks past Naruto out the window, which is dark now and will only give back her own reflection. "My sister never wears it. She says it's a symbol of sexism and oppression, a war against women, that a woman electing to wear it would be akin to – no, I can't repeat it."
"I heard," Naruto says. "You mean Hanabi, right?"
What she won't repeat is that her sister says a woman electing to wear a veil is akin to a Jew choosing to wear a swastika.
Hinata nods. "And of course I can see where she's coming from, I'm not an idiot." She adds the last clause in the voice of somebody used to assuming that those she is speaking to think exactly that. "My father likes it, he isn't forcing me but he likes it, and if it pleases him and doesn't hurt me – well, of course people like Hanabi would say it does hurt me, and of course I can see that – well, that there's reason to think that. But I don't feel hurt by it, I'm comfortable with it, and it stands for other things too."
"So it's a religious thing?"
"No. If God – I mean, he's God. He must be above what people choose to wear."
"Let's hope so," Naruto says, leaning back in her seat, curving sideways to face Hinata. "Is Neji, does he like veils?"
Hinata gives her a tired, incredulous look. "Neji's best friend is Sasuke Uchiha. Can you imagine for a second that she would wear anything of the sort?"
"Yeah, no," agrees Naruto, who can imagine with aplomb the explosion if somebody tried to make her.
"Quite," says Hinata. "Of course, men have peculiar double standards about the women they consider their own." She shifts, collecting her jacket from where it's been sprawling over her lap. "This is my stop. I had fun."
"Me too," says Naruto, putting her feet up on Hinata's abandoned seat and thinking for a moment more about Sasuke and peculiar double standards; Sasuke with her odd hang-ups about Jewishness, although furtive about it, as though uncomfortable about claiming it when she has white privilege oozing out her ears. Sasuke who would spit on any religion containing prayers thanking the lord for not making me a woman, and who doesn't believe in multi-cultural relativity at, as she claims, the expense of individual liberty.
Speaking of, Naruto'd better get the notions, about truth and culture and relativity and universality and interpretation, sorted out, as Iruka is expecting a paper on Truth: A Cultural Fallacy? very soon indeed.
Iruka whom she dismissed once, but who didn't dismiss her in turn, as just another delinquent, even after he caught her hitting Sasuke; who said she did well, said she could get an A.
Iruka whom she is suddenly terrified of disappointing to the point it might be better to just not turn in the paper.
After the bus she walks through the damp November darkness feeling oddly full.
Then, inside, Dad is waiting, wiggling his eyebrows at her. "Good date?"
"Erm," says Naruto, suddenly embarrassed.
"Oh, come now, you know I like Kiba."
"Yes," says Naruto, pulling off her boots and climbing out of the jacket, her own now so the right size, but clingy with rain. She'll have to get a new one, maybe, some more water-proof winter clothes. "I like Kiba too."
"Exactly. Now come here and tell me all about it. You know, I don't advocate settling, but I'm glad if you've stepped off the Uchiha ride. You and Kiba have a lot in common, too."
"Kiba went on a date with Hinata," she says, sitting down and watching Dad's face rearrange itself. "Or, he wanted to, but she'd only go if I went too." She reaches for an orange; too stuffed for dinner, but peckish the way empty carbs make you. "Also I think I sort of have more in common with Sasuke. Where it matters."
Sasuke doesn't drunk drive or play in parks with her, but she could. Kiba on the other hand could never be a magical ninja princess with her, or look at half-spoken words and say, I know, or burn through at once to bone-deep level with his touch. There's – there's a kingdom inside Sasuke, with room for all of Naruto, a big bright scary adventure, a labyrinth she can feel her way through, indistinctly, where the heart is home.
"Oh," says Dad. "Well, that's good too. Heh, maybe you could charge him for chaperoning? It's kind of the same as babysitting, right? Lots of cash in that."
She snorts a laugh, explains it's the sort of sitcom entertainment Kiba could charge viewers for.
There's no way she could possibly explain Sasuke, or the feeling of going with her towards her home, to which she knows the way now, knows at which time of day to take the tube and when to prefer the bus, in which weather to walk or jog.
The flat in town is habitable again, and close to the school, if traffic doesn't block you. But they're barely past the school gates when Sasuke stops her. "You're not wearing that in my house."
"What?" She follows Sasuke's look, haughty and discomfited, a look like a tugging at the Palestine scarf she unearthed from the moving boxes. "Why the hell not?"
Sasuke's expression is disbelieving. "Grandmother almost died in camp."
"Camp – you mean?"
"The Natzweiler/Struthof concentration camp."
"Oh! I'm – I didn't know, should I…" She'll have been a child, Sasuke's grandmother, or young at any rate. "I didn't realise you – cared – no, I mean, that it was, like, personal."
"I don't care."
"So… is your grandmother around?"
"No," says Sasuke, clipped. "We don't see her much. She never quite recovered."
"Oh," says Naruto again, softer; curious. "I didn't think you protected your mum."
Sasuke's gaze shifts past her, impossible to follow, before locking with hers. "This is something that merits protection from. The shit she does to herself isn't. There's a difference."
"Yeah," says Naruto. "I guess there is."
There is also the bus, on which she cuddles closer than Sasuke usually lets her; Sasuke's distracted lighting a cigarette, ducking behind Naruto to obscure it.
"I thought you'd cut down," Naruto says, giggly, breathing against her hairline.
"I also gained two kilo," Sasuke mutters. "Shut up."
"Mmh, I can tell," Naruto mumbles, rubbing up against the jacket, which is too bulky to reveal any potential weight gains. "You crazy scarecrow."
She disentangles only to unravel the scarf from around her neck, balling it up and dumping it in her backpack. Really Jews of all people should sympathise with the struggles of a people without a homeland, but there's political discussion and then there's being an arsehole by upsetting someone just because.
The bus drops them off practically outside Sasuke's building, on the other side of the street. Blinking against the light, Naruto lifts her arm to wave – Itachi's there, leading Anko into the house – but Sasuke catches her arm halfway up. "Let's go to your place."
They haven't been, since that first day, but school let out early, before the worst of the traffic hits. "To the commuter trains," she says. The seats are actually pretty comfortable, once you get used to the baffling placement of the built-in pillow, seemingly designed to fracture your neck rather than rest your head. They share the headphones to Sasuke's phone, Naruto holding her hand, her arm, her leg, Sasuke dozing.
xxxxx
"Behold my trusty stead," Naruto says outside the station, gesturing at her bike, a bedraggled orange spectacle, unlocked and Sasuke supposes unstealable. "Hop on."
She arcs a brow but obediently climbs onto the back, shifting her weight on the metal bands, holding onto the saddle, Naruto's buttocks brushing her hands with every other push. Naruto hardly seems to notice, looking back over her shoulder laughing, hair in her face, the bike trembling drunkenly across the road. "I feel like a rickshaw driver!"
Sasuke could tell her that if so there'd be no tip, but fills her mouth instead with the crisp sun-flecked air. It's a good day.
Around the butt of a cigarette she said, this is stupid. Indeed, Naruto agreed with her, it is enormously stupid. However Sasuke has spent sixteen years being smart, and feels very much like finally being stupid, monumentally, breathlessly, unmendably stupid.
"Do you know Hinata?" Naruto asks then, looking forward now but speaking clearly, wanting to be heard, to be answered.
"No," says Sasuke. "I know Neji." Even Naruto understands that one precludes the other. After a moment she says, "Why?"
Naruto's back, in only a shirt now, the jacket relegated to Sasuke's lap, moves with her pedalling, with her shrug. "No reason, really. Look, we're here."
Still Naruto's house is a rather macabre apparition, a villa gone to seed, transforming into a hut. Naruto leads her through the garden, the grass so wet with the morning's dew it might as well have been a low moat, and into the vaguely remembered hallway; crowded like last time, darker.
"It's cleaner now," Naruto says, "cosier. So, do you want anything?"
Naruto's rosy-faced like last time, tense like last time, although it's a ripened condition. Boxes have been unpacked and thrown away, their contents exposed now.
Sasuke hangs her jacket beside what must be Naruto's father's, a large dirty coat. "Have you got a lighter?"
"No," Naruto says without having looked, without looking at anything but Sasuke, leaning close, kissing her neck, with too much teeth but Sasuke's always liked that. Naruto laughs at her, a laugh like purring. "If vampires attacked you'd be the first to go, and you'd go with a moan, god."
"Shut up, Cullen," she says, but she doesn't pull away. Her spine hits the wall and still she doesn't pull away.
Her body's woken with a vengeance, after all the quiet months, the long comatose year. Practically every night she dreams, though never about Naruto: lying on top of him, the two of them alone in the luscious light of memory, kissing, rubbing against him, her thighs around his stomach, rubbing and rubbing until everything else is gone, and coming, being rolled over onto her back, still shuddering, burning, helpless as he begins to penetrate her; boneless for a moment before she can begin to move, all the strength of her legs locked in the curling of her toes.
Pressed up between the jackets hanging in Naruto's hallway she's awkward as a teenager, as she hasn't been for some time; not since she became one. Her hands end up in Naruto's face because she's used to reaching higher, she almost collapses them because she's used to her weight being hefted easily, without thought.
Itachi would always carry her, when they were small, proud that he could lift her. She kicked at him, insisted she could walk by herself, but she didn't meant it; then later when her walking was no longer contested she teased him, saying he'd have to marry her because he couldn't manage carrying anybody heavier over the threshold.
"Whoa," Naruto says, glowing, catching herself with an elbow against the wall. "Upstairs?"
"Mmh," Sasuke agrees, tugging Naruto's head down for a quick kiss that turns longer, a brutal kiss like stealing, a ninja kiss. "Upstairs."
The stairs are rickety; the walls in the upstairs hallway have light patches where pictures have been pulled down. Sasuke walks fast, until she's back in Naruto's room, which, unpacked at once, looks exactly the same. There are the unsteady piles of graphic novels and dirty clothes, the desk used mainly for storage and the bed populated by bright blue pillows and a disgusting stuffed animal.
More importantly there are Naruto's hands on her hips, damp heat through her clothes, through her skin, Naruto's breath at the back of her neck.
They're on the bed; she kicks Kyuubi away, leaning down over Naruto, somebody's breathing loud in the room. Naruto will mewl for touches of the tattoo, and in a lighter voice for her nipples, which are sturdier than expected, darker, but what's funny is her knees, how a particular swirling stroke of them makes her twitch and gasp as though she were being tickled, collapsing in on herself, bright red.
"It's funny," Naruto says, too, but as it turns out not about her knees but about how it's oddly so quite different from masturbation, when really it shouldn't be that much of a disparity, physically – yet wanking, as she calls it, is something to do to when overstimulation of whatever form overwhelms, to wind down.
Sasuke almost says, No, this would be more to wind one up, before recalling abruptly that penis jokes don't apply anymore, and for a moment she feels herself paralysed by the abject stupidity of it all.
During the instant of her being struck dumb Naruto rolls her over, pulls up her shirt, puts her mouth on the scar between collarbone and breast.
It's not a part of herself that Sasuke usually touches, at this point. She has very little feeling there but all the same chokes.
Pushes Naruto's head down, away, and Naruto complies, skittering downwards, sucking on her chest instead, catching ribs between her teeth, licking along the pulse, sucking at last on her breasts.
She has her head thrown back, her feet sneaking up Naruto's legs and her hands clenching a bit in Naruto's distressingly coarse hair, too much like… Naruto looks up, flushed, uncertain, her eyelids catching gold in the light, light that is everywhere, on her swollen lips and the pimple beside her nose, slipping down her face like water. "Erm, is that a good sound or a bad sound?"
"Hmm?"
"The sound!" Naruto clarifies with some agitation. "That you're making? Which, hot. But is it cause it feels good or cause I'm hurting you, here?"
There've been sounds, Sasuke is aware, but at one remove, and the sounds are too meshed into each other for her to catch retrospective hold of the one Naruto's referring to.
"A bit of both, actually." Her voice sounds hoarse and far away.
"Oh, should I…"
"Go on."
"Oh. Oh, right." She smiles so wide the whisker scars arc all over her face, bends to it.
She continues lower down, over Sasuke's stomach, to the plane between her hipbones. Sasuke pushes herself up on her elbows, is sitting when Naruto kneels half-dressed between her legs and slips a hand very slowly down the waistband of her trousers. Fingers fumble over her underwear, inside it, sliding low to lie against her. Naruto stares at her, breathless and flushed, kisses her, before the hand starts moving.
"You like that, huh?" There's laugher in her voice, triumph in the curve of her mouth; a touch of terror around the corner of her wide eyes.
"If I didn't, it'd be a sign of a defective clitoris."
"Really?" She looks genuinely surprised, interested, shifting until Sasuke realigns them both to lie facing each other. "Cause you'd think, but pretty much everyone denies it, you know, saying how they need like emotion too for it to work."
"I need a fucking smoke."
"What? No, wait. Sasuke…" Bewildered, which is oddly less familiar than tender or hungry.
"All right, no," she snaps. Sighs, half-sitting, Naruto's hand curving around her, Naruto's fingers curving inside her. "I wish the idea of certain stimuli equals certain response worked. I'd love a sexual diet of nothing but emotionally unattached one night stands. But I guess I'm a repressed maiden after all."
Naruto looks at her in silence, mouth half-open as if undecided on which shape it should form but her eyes calm.
"Most people are annoying idiots," Sasuke says, calm now too, in an ashy controlled tone. "I can't be attracted to that. And if I'm not – if there's nothing there except the body… that's not sex, it's just a ridiculous and unsatisfying set of acrobatics."
Naruto presses an open-mouthed smile to her shoulder. "Good thing your cunt loves me, then. Hey, what?" She wiggles her fingers. "It totally does."
"Vulgar much?"
"It's called reclaiming," Naruto argues, quite happily, moving a little, her free hand petting Sasuke's hair, getting caught in a knot. "But, so, what do you call it?"
She looks fixedly at Naruto's wrist disappearing into her trousers. "We – I always called it the delta. It's from – well, I suppose it's not actually from Jong, but it's where I picked it up."
"Jong the German psychologist? Like, the Freud 2.0 guy?"
"Jesus, idiot, no, not Jung. Erica Jong. The feminist writer."
"Oh, right, yeah, her," says Naruto, who apparently had a crush on Fanny Hackabout-Jones in the eponymous novel.
"Yeah, whatever."
"Yeah," Naruto echoes, with a truly disgusting smile, her nose scrunched up like a lapdog's. "Let's take a dive in your delta, then."
"That's enough," Sasuke says, making to sit up properly; and god, god, it is enough, it's more than enough, the way the movement rubs her against Naruto's hand. Her entire body curled around the sensation, her face is pressed hot into Naruto's shoulder, and Naruto shudders around her.
Sasuke grabs her face, licks the whisker scars: they fall on the bed, trousers are tugged off, there are hot hands on hot skin.
Very shortly her own fingers are searching downward. Naruto's entire body is heaving with her breathing, slippery and solid at once, perpetually in motion. Her skin tastes good.
Tentatively she strokes, a finger getting lost in the channel; she hesitates – where exactly is she supposed to…? Both, probably, both will be best, Naruto's going to be blown away, she rubs circles with her thumb, pushes a finger inside.
Naruto grabs her hand, which stilled as Naruto shuddered, obviously climaxing, moaning, "ah, no, wait", rubbing it once, twice more against herself, twitching and gasping before falling back, gazing up at Sasuke with dazed half-closed eyes. She's stretched luxuriously on her back, legs curved queerly underneath her, her chest still heaving, her face not soft at all and then, looked at from another angle, the softest it has ever been.
She lays her hand on the pulse-point where Naruto's throat becomes Naruto's chest, collecting breath in her palm. Naruto's saying the silly things, I want you always; the polite phrase for, orgasm is awesome. She's also curling around Sasuke, proprietary, animal, her chin on Sasuke's thigh, Sasuke's calves arching over her stomach.
"Before," Naruto says eventually. "Was it awkward?"
"No. Well, he knew what he was doing." Sasuke didn't, of course, then. Yet it was easier – it was understood she had never touched a man, she was so young it was sweet, innocence instead of incompetence. And she loved him and he was attractive but they were still, unavoidably and absurdly, generally understood also to be in beauty and the beast territory: she was giving him something.
She's not so young now and she took, she chose to take, this woman's arm and say, let's go to your place, and certainly it's understood she's probed deltas before. One, years ago, but all the same… She taps her foot, heel rubbing against Naruto's back.
"Hey, ouch," Naruto mutters.
"Hm?"
"I think you… Stupid pimples." A colony of them has erupted where the bra normally lies against Naruto's back, several of them close to the breaking point. "Why do you never have pimples?" Her face is grumpy and relaxed, snuggled close.
On instinct she strokes the inside of Naruto's left elbow, a square movement, a particular flick of her finger; Naruto looks at her soft and happy, but it's a blank, generic pleasedness. There's no particular desire attached to it, no memories. Sasuke grabs for her trousers and the cigarettes in their pocket with clammy fingers. Flayed fingers, it feels like. Light-headed, her body very heavy, she smokes slowly, Naruto pressing a kiss to her hip. "It's, it was different from last time."
"Yes," says Sasuke.
Naruto stretches, sighs, kisses her hip again, rather harder than before, while Sasuke finishes the cigarette. The light has turned yellowish, thick and smoky, when she puts out the cig against her thumb nail.
"That…!" Naruto says, erupting into a sitting position, her hands grabby on Sasuke's feet. "You sick fuck, are you all right?"
The black circles that once lined the soles are faded now, paler than the remnants of Naruto's freckles. Naruto's thumb is inordinately hot against them. Sasuke says it's fine, it was a long time ago, it was just a few times, she was just trying to feel.
"Things aren't just fine," Naruto says. "Not just like that, after."
"Fine is really boring," Sasuke says, sliding on top of Naruto, biting at the scars on her cheeks.
Immediately Naruto's arms are around her, her body open wide as her eyes. "You're excited because I–" A gasp interrupts the exclamation, Naruto's lids slamming down as Sasuke moves on her, kissing now below her ear. When she speaks again her eyes are soft and solemn; outrageous. "Because I know something real."
Sasuke's about to tell her where to show that condescending pseudo-insight, but Naruto's caught hold of her hands, stroking them, licking them, but with her eyes always on her face. "I remember, before, it was – when pain was the only connection I could have to other people, it, well it started to seem pretty tempting. Though I was always a lot more into inflicting it."
Helplessness is sudden and strange on her face, her hands heavy and lax around Sasuke's. Hands that have been laid on her with almost every emotion, with calluses and small round fingers which are too short for their knuckles.
"Extrovert," she says, rubbing circles on Naruto's thighs.
"Mmh. But. Oh, gross, ash."
Naruto kisses her neck instead, until very soon the taste, which Sasuke no longer feels, ceases to be a problem.