Of all the things Kagome imagined being in the job description, setting up accounts for Inuyasha wasn't one of them. He was a grown man that was perfectly capable of doing this himself. She'd witnessed him match the outsourced IT guy word for word when he was called in cause their own was on leave for a month. He was incredibly smart and made sure the guy knew it.

The problem with this was that he just wouldn't. Outright refused.

Ironically, it was the first suggestion of hers that he had ever shot down. Kagome, however, was stubborn as a bull too, which was how she found herself reading the questionnaire to the hanyou from her open laptop. If he wasn't going to do it himself, she was going to.

"Are you religious?"

"Oh god," came the groan from behind his own computer.

"I'll put down that you're open-minded." Click. Click. Click. Click. "Oh. Well. Okay then. Do you like to be tied up in bed?"

"I – what?!"

"Do you like it kinky, Inuyasha?" Kagome looked up to see her childhood friend gaping at her like a fish. "Want me to put open to experimentation with a safe word?"

"How do you know what that is?!" This wasn't something he'd ever expected to hear come out of Kagome's mouth. There were times he still saw her as that scrawny girl, and to hear her talk about being tied up in bed… Not to mention the way she looked now… it was putting all sorts of ideas in his head that shouldn't have been there.

"Oh please," she scoffed. "You're going to tell me that you didn't watch that movie?"

He wasn't sure if he could bring himself to admit to anyone that he'd stayed up late one night watching that movie alone in his apartment, most of all Kagome. They never had secrets between them growing up and had confided in each other about everything. So maybe that was why his mouth started moving before he could stop himself. It was just second nature. "Might've watched a bit…"

"Couldn't finish it either?"

"You didn't?"

"It was horrible!" Kagome laughed. "I've written better fantasies in my head!" The surprised expression on his face didn't last long, and soon she was regretting her words.

Inuyasha shouldn't have enjoyed watching her internal panic play out as much as he did hearing her laugh moments before. "Really now?" he grinned, bracing his elbows on his desk and leaning forward. "What kind?"

That look in his eyes had her skin flushed; she just knew it. It was different. She'd never seen him look at her that way. "M-maybe we should move on to hobbies instead."

"Reading, strategy games, kicking my brother's ass," he ticked off quickly. "Now spill. What kind of fantasies have you been having?"

"Next question – what are you looking for?"

"For you to spill your dirty secrets, Ka-Go-Me."

The purr in his voice with those words had done delightful things to her insides against her will. That was also new. She couldn't recall him ever talking to her like that either. Even picking around, and she wasn't sure how to take it. She swallowed, trying to keep the topic on the application in her web browser. The only problem was that it didn't look like he was going to let up. "If I…tell you one…will you help me finish this application?"

"Make it a good one and I'll tell you whatever you want to know."

She really hoped that noise that escaped came off as a nervous laugh. "Okay… well…okay. There's a recurring one where this guy, he… he's…" Her gaze dropped back to the browser. If she looked at Inuyasha she didn't think she could get this out otherwise. "…possessive. Demanding. Tells me what he wants. What he wants to do to me. Makes me beg for his touch. Teases me for hours and brings me to the edge before he stops. And then when… when we…"

"Go on."

Had – had his voice gone deeper? She had to be imagining that, right? It was just two words. There was no way to tell with two words.

"W-when we…" she cleared her throat again, because in that moment the words "had sex" weren't coming out no matter what. "it's…intense. Toe-curling good. Make your neighbors jealous good."

Kagome knew she was flushed and tried to subtly fan herself. That particular fantasy had become more frequent in recent weeks, and it had everything to do with the dazed hanyou across from the desk. That look he had in his eyes earlier was gone, and if she wasn't so embarrassed to have admitted this particular fantasy she might've found his slack jaw expression amusing. She coughed into her hand, breaking him from his trance. "Can we finish the application now?"

Inuyasha straightened up in his seat, looking much like a boy that had been caught sleeping in class again. "Right. Yeah." He fidgeted, shifting around to make himself more comfortable. "What…what was the next question?"

His ears pinned back at the way his voice changed. Gods, he hadn't sounded like that since he was a teenager! Kagome was looking down at her laptop again, but she hadn't reacted so maybe she hadn't heard what he did. He hoped she didn't. She'd given him grief the first time his voice had cracked, but this time it was her fault and that – that fucking fantasy of hers, no pun intended.

When he had goaded her into it, he hadn't expected anything more than a cliché daydream of a Fabio-like character riding in on horseback and sweeping her off her feet. That was the Kagome he expected, and not what he got. Oh no, she had managed to get his blood coursing south as she talked, and the longer she went on, the more his own thoughts started to shift. So when Kagome asked him "What are you looking for?" he…might not have been focusing on answering the dating profile as much as he should have.

"What I want?" he murmured, staring directly into blue eyes. "I want what every red-blooded man wants, but I want more than that. I want to be able to make her laugh, keep her safe, love her unconditionally. I want to give her every fiber of my being. For her to know that she's it. I want to be able to wake up next to her every morning and thank my lucky stars that she chose me out of everyone in the world."

Kagome felt a shiver run up her spine when Inuyasha started to talk, and she knew she was supposed to write that down, but her fingers wouldn't move. How the hell could she fit all that in just a couple sentences anyway? His gaze was so intense and hypnotizing, that when he stopped talking, she had to blink a few times to come back to reality.

"Um. S-She's going to be a l-lucky woman." She said, feeling a pang of jealousy as she attempted to paraphrase that answer.

Life just wasn't fair.

Two weeks after making the dating profile for Inuyasha, Kagome was ready to throw every electronic device at his head. She'd gone the extra mile, since he said that he wasn't going to be using the profile himself and scoured through all of the potential matches. Each tap of the screen, each overly polished profile picture had made her sick to her stomach. She was becoming his pimp essentially, and he had the audacity to turn his nose up at every – damn – option.

Once upon a time she used to look forward to the weekend. To not have to worry about bringing her work home with her, because it wasn't practical. If anything, it was impossible to do. Not now, however. Now she was on the prowl for her coworker in her off hours.

"I'm going to kill him myself, Kikyo."

Her cousin let out a bark of laughter on the other end of the phone. "What is he doing exactly?"

Kagome threw her hands up in the air, even though she knew the other woman wouldn't see. "That's just it! He won't give me a reason! All he says is 'no' or makes some kind of disgusted sound. And to be fair, with some of those profiles I don't blame him, but still! I have a decent sized list of women that would be good matches!"

"So he's not even making superficial comments like a man usually does?"

"That would make things easier," she groaned. Kagome dropped down onto her couch. It was a day off so she shouldn't have been working, but after almost two hours of texting screenshots to Inuyasha and getting bupkis in return, she needed to detox. Calling up her no-nonsense cousin was the remedy. "There's only a few weeks before the wedding, and Kagura was really hoping I could get him to bring a date."

"Kagura put you up to this?"

"Yeah, why? Why do you sound surprised?"

Kikyo muttered something away from the phone and Kagome's suspicions rose. There was something she wasn't being made aware of, and she didn't hesitate to push for answers.

"Okay. I shouldn't be saying this, but since Kagura has decided to put her nose in where it doesn't belong, you need to know. There's a good reason why Inuyasha isn't telling you the truth. He was in a relationship before you moved back home. He…broke up with her just before you started work at the company."

"Inuyasha had a girlfriend?" That shouldn't have surprised her, but it still stung. Not like they had ever been an item, so she shouldn't have any reason to be upset by that news. She was going to pretend that the news of the breakup was what caused that pang in her chest. Empathy and all that.

Of course he was going to date. She dated. She'd even had sex. They were adults. That's what adults did.

"Yeah, he was dating a woman named Yura. Yura…shit, I can't remember her name, but I know she's a beautician. She hurt him, Kagome. Badly. I can't believe that Kagura didn't take that into account when she asked you to do this."

"Can I…ask what happened? Do you know?" It was wrong to ask her cousin, and Kagome knew this, but she also knew that if she asked Inuyasha he'd probably shut down. Kikyo had been there though, filling the void and being a friend to him in her absence.

"All I know for certain is that he caught her with another man."

She sighed, looking at her closed laptop on the coffee table before her. Kagome chewed her lip, debating her next move. "Are you at your computer?"

Inuyasha wasn't prepared for Kagome to storm into the office on Monday, hair billowing around her with a look of rage etched into her expression. The bag of donuts was dropped carelessly on the desk, and if he hadn't reached out and taken the tray of coffee he could only imagine the mess that would've been made if she'd have slammed it down. "What's flown up your skirt this morning?"

"Yura Sakasagami."

"H-how do you know that name?" he asked uneasily. He hadn't heard that name, hadn't thought about that name in months –

"Kikyo told me about her," Kagome said shortly, dropping into her seat. "I called her this weekend to talk, and it came up when I told her about how you've been so picky about online dating."

He swallowed, watching her arms fold over her chest as her legs crossed at the knee. That pencil skirt she was wearing inched up her thighs just as little bit more, and if he stared hard enough he could probably see the hemline of her stockings. 'Focus, goddammit! Focus on her face!' If he could stop thinking about how good she looked when she was mad, that'd be great. Because right then, she was looking pretty pissed and he wasn't entirely sure if she was mad at him. "I can explain –"

"Oh, you don't have to. Kikyo told me that you caught her with another man. Left it at that. Which, to be fair, makes sense why you've been brushing off all the profiles I've sent you. But I did some searching for Miss Yura Sakasagami. Wanted to know why she'd be stupid enough to cheat on you."

Wait. Did she say stupid? Was she standing up for him? So she wasn't upset with him?

It was hard to tell from her scent, but he couldn't rule out that she was irritated with him for making her do all the work with that dating profile. He couldn't blame her for that. He just…didn't want to do it. And…now Kagome was uncrossing her legs – holy fuck – FOCUS –

"It turns out," Kagome had nearly growled, and the sound nearly did him in. She could've passed for a youkai with that noise. Inuyasha couldn't tell if he was more proud or turned on. But she had kept talking, and he'd missed words, because the next thing he knew she had cleared his desk of papers with one hand while plopping her laptop down in front of him, talking about –

Fuck.

He swallowed the lump of bile that shot up in his throat as he looked at the screen. He pinched his eyes closed, even reached up a hand to rub them, hoping that when he looked at the screen again it'd be gone.

No such luck.

There, on the internet for anyone to come across it, was a post from his ex-girlfriend putting him on blast. The photo was of her entangled in the arms of that human boy wonder, which he couldn't give two shits about, but the caption… oh the caption was what was bad. She'd gone into detail about her previous relationship ending abruptly – her doing, of course – but she'd stated the reason.

Down to the "little red rocket" details.

His stomach dropped and he wished the bile would've gone with it when Kagome sighed loudly. It being broadcast on the internet was bad enough. At least these were people that wouldn't know him. Kagome finding this though was so much worse than the speculation that Yura had put out there.

"She has no idea what she's talking about," Inuyasha said, wincing as the words came out weaker than he meant them to. "Yura… Yura was a…"

"A bitch?" Kagome seethed.

"Too nice a word, but yes." Inuyasha looked up from the screen to see Kagome pacing in front of the desk. "Kagome…"

She threw a hand up, not even looking at him. "Who – who the fuck does she think she is?!" When the pacing stopped, Kagome was back in front of the desk, resting her hands on it as she leaned forward. "What kind of priss does she think she is to say something so – so horrible about you! Kikyo told me that she was the one to break up with you!"

Inuyasha opened his mouth to speak, but he couldn't find the words. He couldn't decide if it were her words or her image that left him speechless. Her hair was almost as wild as the look in her eyes, and the broad neckline on her blouse was nearly giving him a glimpse of her bra. If he leaned forward just a bit he'd know what color it was.

As tempting as it was, he wasn't gonna. He didn't want that temper directed at him.

"Yura…" She really needed to straighten up , he was having trouble thinking of the right words. "Yura doesn't mean anything anymore. She never wanted more with me than to be able to eat at high end restaurants and look more important than she was. I should have known sooner –"

"Don't tell me you're trying to take the blame for her cheating on you?!"

"I'm not! I'm saying that I should have seen this coming!"

"What?" Kagome fired back. "Her dragging you on her socials? Telling the world that inu youkai have a red rocket penis? Saying that it was small? Inuyasha – she doesn't get to get away with saying things like this about anyone!"

Inuyasha was on his feet before he could stop himself, mimicking Kagome's position from his side of the desk. "Dammit, Kagome! She has, alright! She's gotten what she wanted! Did you even read all of the post? This isn't some shot she's taken against youkai in general – it's hanyou."

Some of the fire dissipated in her eyes. "What?"

"Yura told me that…that things may have been different…if I had been either human or youkai," he admitted softly. Inuyasha waved a hand at the laptop screen, unable to look at it again. "Everything she wrote, all those details she's made off to be fact. All of them are rumors she's heard." The hanyou dropped back into his chair, rubbing a hand over his face. "She told me…that she wasn't going to experience bestiality if she could get it from any other human or youkai that looked normal."

"Inuyasha…"

"Don't."

"But –"

"I said don't, Kagome."

The way he was retreating into himself broke Kagome's heart. Those fuzzy ears she yearned to touch had almost lowered into his hair. He wasn't looking at her. He couldn't even look at the laptop screen. She silently closed it, moving it out of sight. When she got home she was going to do some damage control on his behalf, find some way she could get Yura permabanned for slander or harassment. Inuyasha's family name had to have some pull to it, and if his ex could get away with it she damn sure could. In the meantime, she needed to fix this.

"She's not right," Kagome spoke at last.

"How…how do you know that?" Was this something he wanted to know? Had she…had she met another inu youkai?

Kagome must have realized what she'd said and blushed brightly. "I mean –! I – I don't know per se! I just…I know that she's wrong!"

"How do you know she's wrong if you don't know yourself?" Inuyasha probably shouldn't have pecked, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. "Have you ever..?"

Hearing her blurt out "Yes" almost indignantly should've been amusing. It might've been if he hadn't thought about her with another male. "It wasn't…with a youkai," she admitted, coming around to his side of the desk and leaning against it. "He was human, and it was college. It wasn't….it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. We drifted apart as I finished college, and then I came back here."

"Since we're sharing," he sighed. It wouldn't be right to not tell her now. "It wasn't for me either. I was so drunk I still can't remember if she was human or not. I just remember her complaining about my claws."

"Wuss. I bet her nails were twice as long."

Inuyasha snorted. "They actually were. Some gaudy neon." He let out another sigh, tapping his fingers against the armrest. "We build up these expectations in our heads, and when the time comes, we end up disappointed. All I can figure is that some small part of Yura had been let down once, so she's built up this defense."

Kagome hummed. "I can see that, but it doesn't make it right."

"She isn't right, anyway. Matter of time before an actual inu youkai comes along and shuts that down."

'Or a human.' "So…not to pry, but…"

"It looks perfectly human!"

"Okay, okay!" she laughed, raising her hands in defeat. "I won't ask you to show me, I promise!"

For Kagome, he would have done it, and he didn't know how to feel about that. She was his friend, at the heart of it, and if she were to ask him to streak down the hallway he probably would have. He leaned back into the chair and tried to relax as silence fell between them. Why he thought that his ex wouldn't do something this stupid was beyond him, and now Kagome had seen it firsthand. He tried not to think about what was in the hundreds of comments on that post. Did they agree with her? Go against her? Laugh at his expense?

It didn't matter. It was in the past.

"Inuyasha? Can I ask you something?"

"Is it about what's in my pants?" he asked dryly.

"No – well," her expression went funny, and his eyebrows raised as he looked at her. "In a sense?" Kagome shook her head, making her hair fly about more. "I wanted to ask if…if this stuff with Yura…is this why you've been digging your heels in on this dating profile stuff? Are you worried that any of the women that I showed you would act the same way?"

Fuck.

Could he get away with a shrug? He was going to try it.

Kagome's expression said that it wasn't enough.

Dammit.

"Partly," he admitted at last. "I just…don't want to meet some strange woman for the purpose of being a date to a wedding. Women get weird at weddings as it is."

"Weird how?"

He shrugged again. "Sloppy ass drunk. They start complaining that they'll never find the one to their date. Or they'll want to hookup during the reception and just…no. I don't want to deal with that. If I took a date to my brother's wedding I'd want to enjoy being around them. Have someone that I could talk to that wouldn't act stupid like that. You know, to be able to sit next to someone and have fun making fun of those kinds of people."

Kagome sighed. "I don't know what to tell you, Inuyasha. I can't say if any of those women would do that, but I can't say they wouldn't either. Kagura asked for my help so that you wouldn't be going stag."

"I shoulda known that she'd force you into this."

"She's concerned."

"She's nosy is what she is!"

"What about me? What if I said I was concerned, huh? What if I want you to go to this wedding and have a good time?"

Inuyasha looked up at her. If it was his future sister-in-law he didn't mind disappointing, but when it came to Kagome… "If I pick a woman from the matches, will you accept my choice, no questions asked?"

The look on her face was shock. "You'll choose?"

"Yeah, show me the matches," he conceded. "You can just pull it up on this computer." Inuyasha rolled the chair off to the side to give Kagome some room as she leaned over to type the url in a new browser tab. He was trying to keep to his word and focus on the screen, but he wasn't doing a good job when all he could think about was how her natural scent and perfume filled his senses. The screen before him flashed as she logged into the account, pulling up the list with the highest compatibility matches before she stepped back.

"Any one of these?" she asked. "The page scrolls, but these are all the current best matches based on what you told me when I completed your profile."

Inuyasha leaned forward to glance at the list. It was…a long list, he thought with disappointment. He was hoping this would be a quick decision. A one and done kind of deal. He grabbed the mouse and spun the wheel with his index finger, frowning as each profile picture scrolled by without any interest. None of these women caught his eye, either by look, name, or even their stupid little tagline under their name. They weren't anything special to him, and he couldn't see how even one evening would be worth the trouble for either of them.

Then again…

"I have my choice," he stated, and it bothered him that he was picking up a bitter twinge to her scent. "You said anyone," he reminded her, looking up to see that she wasn't even looking at him.

"I know," she mumbled. "What's her name, so I can go about reaching out to her?"

"You ain't gotta worry about that," he chuckled. "Cause I'm choosing you."

"W-what?"

"You agreed – no questions asked."

"I know, but –"

"You showed up on the list. You said I could pick anyone. I'm picking you."

He should've been surprised that she even had a profile but given the times he really couldn't be. It was how Koga had first gone out with Ayame years ago. The odds of her having a profile on the same site she signed him up for was eerie, but it would also explain how she was so versed. She must not have checked the list beforehand, given her expression.

The silence, however, was suffocating. "Unless…you already have a date."

"N-no!" she blurted out. "No, I…I don't. I'm just…surprised, is all." Of all of those women, Inuyasha wanted her to be his date?

"Why? Because it's me?" He knew she wouldn't say it was because he was a hanyou. She wasn't like Yura. "Kagome, out of all of these women on this list, the only one I would want to go to this wedding with would be you. I know I'd enjoy myself a hell of a lot more with my best friend than some stranger I'd only know for the night."

"…I'm still your best friend?" she asked shyly.

"Hell fucking yes you are! Damn, Higurashi, you think I'm gonna forget about you because we ain't seen each other in so long?" The truth of it was, he couldn't forget about her if he tried. All the alcohol in the world couldn't make him forget about Kagome. "You were my first real friend when we moved into town, even if we both were still in pull-ups. Time don't mean nothing. Now I'm asking you, will you be my date to my brother's wedding?"

Kagome tucked some of her hair behind her ear as she ducked her head to hide her blush. "You make a compelling argument," she said. "Yes, Inuyasha. I would be honored to be your date."