not what it looks like (swear through kiss swollen mouths)

hatake kakashi looks down on her when he's not busy not bothering to even look at her. sakura wants to bite his face off. also, she'd really appreciate it if people stopped taking every single awkward situation she manages to get trapped in with the asshole to mean she wants to kiss him or something. because she doesn't. not at all.

rating: m
genre: romance
pairings: kakasaku
POV: Sakura
other notes: same age AU, prompt was "secret relationship" and this is not quite that
word count: 2,055


The only reason Sakura doesn't put him through a wall, into the hospital for the next three weeks is that she's pretty sure it's an accident. (Rin, Sakura knows, would forgive her for injuring a teammate and endeavour to make sure he lived in fear and without jello for the rest of his life.)

Anyone else, pretty much, and—falling on her so suddenly and spectacularly that neither of them manage to avoid it, their limbs a tangle and their lips inches apart—she would have been certain it was a ploy.

But it's Hatake Kakashi who manages to stumble so badly during a not-so-friendly spar. Hatake Kakashi, who would rather gnaw off his left arm than show an inch of clumsiness or touch her with a ten foot pole.

Sakura is pretty sure he was grown in a test tube, he's so perfect. Or, maybe, that he's an alien. But here he is, tripping over his own limbs after a sudden growth spurt.

(He's taller than her now. She hates him.)

If she weren't so furious about how she's blushing down to her toes from the way his fingers grazed her sides and the weight of his thigh pressed between her legs, she'd laugh at the sight he must have made, tripping so badly out of the blast radius of the earth jutsu she just set off.

Sakura doesn't particularly care that he's made a fool out of the both of them. She's used to Hatake making her look foolish.

Or, well, she wouldn't particularly care that she got caught up in this mess if it meant that, for once, Hatake got some pie smeared on his face too, if it weren't for the fact that Naruto is currently screaming from across the field.

"Hatake, you pervert! Stop groping Sakura-chan! She's too good for you! I'm going to kill you!"

With what air is left in her lungs given the way that Hatake is crushing them, Sakura sighs.

She is in no way looking forward to what is surely going to be a hellish series of missions involving Sai inquiring indelicately about her new relationship, Naruto yelling, and Sasuke-sensei doing absolutely nothing to stop any of his students from killing one another.

"This is all your fault," Hatake grumbles.

Sakura cannot be blamed for the fact that she throws him across the field and beats him into the ground.

.

.

.

Sakura wakes up at some time past midnight, the sky not yet bleeding to grey, her sheets tangled around her feet, every inch of her feverish and itchy, her mind still mired in fog and heat.

Instinctively, she rolls her hips against a weight that is not there, against a body that dissipates like so much morning mist.

"Fuck," she thinks, despairingly.

She does her best not to think about it when she wakes up again, unsatisfied after a night full of dreams.

.

.

.

"Why?" Sakura demands flatly of the universe.

"Shut up," Hatake hisses back, and crushes her further into the back wall of the closet.

Thank all the gods for chest armour.

"You're squishing me," Sakura tells him, her breath a ghost of a whisper along the shell of his ear.

Hatake crushes her further still.

"Shut. Up. You're going to get us caught."

In revenge for the way that he's hot and close and uncomfortable against her, his voice rumbling through her ribcage, Sakura hooks her hand tighter around the back of his neck and digs in with her fingernails.

Fury flares in his eyes and she grins triumphantly.

And then she gulps when he tightens his own hands around her hips, hard enough to bruise.

Asshole.

Sakura resists the urge to one-up him and lean forward to bite at the tendons of his neck: the only part of his body she could reach, pinned as she is.

"You're the one who got us trapped in this closet," she reminds him.

"You're the one who apparently can't get into a building without blowing it to pieces! Has your team never heard of stealth?"

Sakura bares her teeth.

But, well.

It's a fair question.

No, they haven't.

There's a reason Team 17 isn't usually allowed to participate in the kind of black scroll missions that never officially happened.

(And that reason is Naruto. Sakura has never unnecessarily blown out the wall of a building in her life. All of her infrastructure destabilization is deliberate and well thought out, thank you very much.)

"No one would have heard the explosion if you hadn't fucked up the seals on the walls!"

"Me?" Hatake spits, leaning even closer. "I was just following your useless instructions!"

Their lips, Sakura realizes very suddenly, are extremely close.

She can almost taste him.

He's filling up her lungs.

Hatake swallows and blinks.

It's a very slow blink.

Sakura can't look away form the way his eyelashes curl against his cheek.

It's unfair, really, that boys always have such nice eyelashes.

Sakura licks her lips and tastes cotton.

"Hatake," she starts to say.

"Are you planning on being in this closet when the building implodes?" Sai asks conversationally from the doorway.

Sakura barely catches herself from hitting the ground, ass first, when she suddenly finds herself without the weight of a boy bearing her against the wall.

Her hands are trembling.

"Shut up," she snarls at Sai as she stalks passed him, back out into the hallway.

Sai shuts his mouth.

.

.

.

About the sixth time someone catches Sakura in what looks like a compromising position with Hatake, it's the fault of a pet rabbit, a fruit vendor, the Hokage, and a team of genin, all of whom Sakura is now obligated to murder. For the sake of her pride.

She really wishes she'd managed to calmly explain the whole thing when Sasuke-sensei had come across Hatake with his face buried under her skirt, her legs wrapped around his head.

Instead, she'd gone beet-red, stumbled through several half-completed sentences, and then collapsed into a pile of nonsensical goo.

When Sasuke-sensei had turned abruptly on his heel and stalked off, his face had spoke of deep, deep shame.

(Sakura can't believe her beloved sensei now believes that she has forsaken their sacred feud with Team 7 and taken up with an idiot like Hatake.)

(Sakura is never going to get the memory of Hatake's fingers curled around her thighs or his dark, dark eyes burning up at her out of her head.)

.

.

.

"I'm not dating Hatake!" Sakura yells to the suddenly silent bar.

The bar blinks back.

"I didn't think you were, Forehead," Ino says, one eyebrow raised. "I just thought you two were fucking. But now, I think the lady doth protest too much."

Sakura downs the rest of her drink and drops her head to the slightly sticky table.

"That's not even how the quote goes," she moans.

.

.

.

Sakura is content to let him have his way as he laves suckling bites down her stomach, but then he blows at her bellybutton, making her giggle, and skips down to press kisses to her knee, and she has had enough.

Kakashi grins up at her, breathless, when she flips them, his eyes full as he drags his gaze along the length of her, a touch unto itself.

Sakura shudders, and then grinds herself down onto his cock in retaliation.

"Sakura," Kakashi gasps, his hands spanning her waist, thumbs dipping to trace circles in the hollows of her hips.

"Kakashi," Sakura answers, leaning down to tease, her hair dragging along his chest as it slips over her shoulder.

"I need you," Kakashi says.

Sakura smiles and takes his mouth and—

.

.

.

"I am going to murder you," Sakura tells the ANBU when she finally flings her window open.

He waves at her, all cheek, and disappears in a puff of smoke.

.

.

.

"Looks like your mission ended in its usual disaster, hey Haruno?" Hatake drawls out as she slumps through the gate.

Instead of lifting her head to look at him, where he's surely leaning casually against a wall or standing with his hands shoved into his pockets, all effortless ease and careless confidence, Sakura just turns in the direction of her apartment building and starts to trudge home.

She wants a shower and she wants to sleep.

Her hair is filled with mud and she can feel the blood still flaking off her palms.

"Hey," Hatake says, "Haruno."

He grabs her by the shoulder and Sakura whirls.

"Don't touch me!"

Her voice is piercing, too shrill, and Hatake takes a half-step back.

"Leave me alone."

Hatake blinks, and then he looks at her, all-seeing, and she hates him.

She hates that he looks at her and sees all her weaknesses, all her fault lines.

"Leave me alone," she repeats.

"Sakura—" He reaches out again in an abortive move to touch her.

She dodges.

She couldn't bear it if he touched her.

She runs.

He lets her.

When she collapses in her shower, tiles cold against her back, Sakura hates herself for crying for herself when there are so many other people she should be crying for.

.

.

.

"What do you want?" Sakura demands when she opens her front door.

She gets a face full of flowers instead of an answer.

She's caught spitting greenery out of her mouth as their deliverer flees.

Sakura pretends that she doesn't recognize the scent of ozone and liquorice that lingers.

She puts the eyebright in a vase to stare up at her, small and open-mouthed and wishing her cheer, and goes back to her laundry.

.

.

.

"Don't look at me like that," Hatake grumbles at her.

Sakura raises an eyebrow at him over the edge of her book. "Like what?"

He shifts in his chair and stares at the bookshelves over her shoulder. "Like you don't hate me, or something."

Sakura raises the other eyebrow to join the first.

"Why not?"

Hatake lets the question fall heavy into the silence of the small fūinjutsu library they're squished into.

Sakura sighs, and goes back to her books.

"I'm going to start thinking you like me, or something," Hatake finally mutters, several minutes later. "I don't think I can take it."

.

.

.

The spines of the priceless fūinjutsu books are pressing into her spine, but Sakura doesn't care as long as Kakashi keeps moving his fingers the way he's doing, thumb high on her clit.

"Kakashi," she moans, his name breaking in half in her mouth. "Please, just like that, don't stop."

"Do you have any idea," he mumbles into the crook of her neck, his teeth scraping the tendons there, "how long I've been dreaming of this?"

"Not as long as me," Sakura answers. "Now shut up and put up. I want you to fuck me. C'mon, please please please."

.

.

.

"Haven't you two been together a little bit too long to be having trysts in a library in the mid-afternoon, when anyone could walk in on you?" Tsunade-shishō demands just as Sakura takes a deep drink of water.

Sakura swallows primly and does not spit water all over herself. Not that it would make a difference, really, given the way she's currently drenched with sweat after getting beat up all afternoon by her shishō. But she cannot afford to show weakness. "Kakashi and I aren't seeing each other," Sakura says. "And I've no idea what you're talking about."

Tsunade-shishō just looks at her.

Sakura is envious of the amount of sardonic disbelief she manages to fit into a single look.

"Sure," Tsunade-shishō drawls. "You've no idea what I'm talking about."

And then she flicks Sakura on the stomach where her shirt has ridden up.

Sakura flinches.

Tsunade-shishō cackles. "No apprentice of mine should be incapable of healing her bruises, even if they are inflicted by Hatake's teeth. I think you're due for a rotation in the civilian ER. We've got to get you back up to snuff!"

"It's not—" Sakura starts to lie, but Tsunade-shishō is already gone, whistling a merry tune.

Sakura collapses back on the grass.

Oh well.

Worth it.

She closes her eyes to the sunlight filtering through the trees, and dreams of boys with dark eyes and hungry hands who hold her like she's precious and kiss her like she's unbreakable.