Author's Note: Today (just a few minutes ago, in fact!) I turned in the last assignment for my degree program! Hooray! So, to celebrate, I am sharing the first chapter of my new (aged-up, sexy) UsaMamo AU with y'all!
As always, big big thanks to my beta, FloraOne, for all her encouragement and support and specific feedback around the smutty bits. And also for endlessly enthusiastically brainstorming with me and for telling me about shuukatsu, because I had never heard of it and it kind of ended up important to the fic!
Chapter 1 – Something truly casual
"Scoot." Usagi slid into the bed next to Mamoru, a large bowl of leftover rei-shabu clutched in her hands.
He rolled his eyes, sliding his bum a half-inch closer to the wall and making no move to rearrange the mess of medical papers that had somehow appeared in the thirty seconds it had taken her to raid the fridge.
"Fine, if you won't make room," she said petulantly, squeezing onto the edge of the bed and throwing her bare legs across his with an exasperated sigh. When he shot her a 'really?' look, she just smirked, popping a piece of meat into her mouth with her fingers.
"You know, Odango," he drawled. "They make these newfangled things called 'utensils' for this exact purpose."
"You weren't so critical about what I was doing with my hands five minutes ago," she shot back.
"True, but I don't generally eat off those parts of my body."
Like a preteen, she pulled down one eyelid and stuck out her tongue. "Defeats the purpose when you then suck on my fingers, don't you think?"
"Hm, yes, you have a point. I should stop doing that if you can't be hygienic."
With a dramatic huff, she flounced off the bed and into the kitchenette, jerking open his anal-retentively organized little utensil drawer and snatching out a set of chopsticks.
She climbed back into the bed – this time he'd rearranged some of his papers, giving her enough room to at least fit properly without draping herself over him – and jabbed her chopsticks into the bowl, grabbing a bite of the pork salad.
"I take it you don't plan to share."
The chopsticks clattered against the glass of the bowl. "Oh my god, I hate you."
"I'm well aware."
"You couldn't have said something while I was actually standing at the stupid utensil drawer?"
He shrugged. "Maybe I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt."
"Maybe you wanted to be a pain in my ass," she grumbled as her feet hit the floor once again. When she pulled open the drawer this time, she deliberately moved some of the spoons over into the divider full of knives as she fetched a fresh set of chopsticks.
"You know," she sighed dramatically as she crawled back into the bed, thrusting the new pair of chopsticks in the general direction of Mamoru's face. "All this unnecessary up-and-down can really ruin a girl's afterglow."
His eyebrows rose ever-so-slightly as he plucked the chopsticks from her fingers. "Is that an invitation, Odango?"
"Depends entirely on if you have another round in you," she tossed back, retrieving her own abandoned chopsticks from the bowl and finally getting a decent bite of the onion and pork salad. Mm, bliss.
"I could, but then we'd have to start the whole post-coital snack dance over again from the top. We might end up stuck in a never-ending positive feedback loop."
She rolled her eyes at him as she carefully selected a particularly nice cut of pork. "Oh no, having tons of sex, that would be terrible."
His grin was cheeky. "Tons of sex, with no breaks for food or napping. Even you would eventually get sick of that."
"Only you could find a problem with loads and loads of sex, Mamoru-baka. I bet this is really just an excuse. You don't have another round in you at all, you just want to make me think you do."
"Oh yeah?" His smirk was familiar as his hand wrapped around her waist, pulling her into the middle of the bed, deep into his plush comforter. Papers crinkled under her back as he leaned his weight in and over her. Her breath caught in her throat at the look in his eyes, steady and alluring, before his mouth lowered down to whisper in her ear. "I think you know exactly how to push my buttons, and you can't resist doing it."
"You're one to talk." She tried to suppress her shiver, but his hand had slid down to caress her exposed stomach and her rational mind was no longer in control of her body.
"Oh, I know how to push your buttons," he breathed into her throat, his fingers traveling lower and causing her nipples to tighten to hard points. "And you make it so damn easy."
The next time she thought about the rei-shabu, abandoned in its glass bowl on the floor next to the bed, it was no longer cold – but she ate it anyway.
She glanced over her shoulder as she did up the last two buttons of her shirt, and found that Mamoru was completely absorbed in one of his medical journals, oblivious to the girl in a partial state of undress not five feet away from him.
Not that she was surprised. Mamoru seemed to have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize – no matter how good the sex, the minute it was over, he was back to his boring medical papers, glasses slapped on his face and pen in hand as he took his tiny, meticulous notes.
What a nerd.
She slipped into her skirt and did up the side zip as she watched Mamoru study from his bed. Well, to be more accurate, she was watching the way the muscles of his arms moved as he idly clicked his pen as he read.
Honestly, it was unfair that anybody who spent that much time with their nose in a book could look like that. Moonlighting as a superhero had certain advantages, she supposed, but damn.
Intensely smart, dedicated to his work, unreasonably cut, and occasionally even a little bit dashing? If he'd only get a personality transplant, it wouldn't be fair to any of the other men.
Breathing out a frustrated breath, she stepped down into the genkan to swap out her shoes.
This part of their routine was long established, had been since the very first time she'd gone home with him.
When she put her hand on the doorknob, but not until, he looked up from his reading. "Be safe getting home."
She sucked in her lip and nodded. She was a superhero too, much stronger than he was, so it didn't bother her that he never offered her a ride home. Didn't even offer to walk her to the station, even if it would take her longer to catch the train than it would just to walk the whole way to her apartment.
"See you," she called in reply, but he was already sucked back into his work.
As usual.
She closed the door behind her and spent the elevator ride emptying her mind of all thoughts of him.
Down on the street, though, her eyes were drawn up, almost magnetized to his small balcony eighteen stories off the ground. As always, the glass doors were shut, the curtains drawn. Chiba Mamoru, an island unto himself, keeping everyone out.
Blowing out a small breath, she oriented herself, facing towards Mita so that the moonlight cast her shadow in sharp relief under the soles of her short boots. The lights of Tokyo Tower had already turned off for the evening, and she found herself hoping that Minako's date had gone well enough that her roommate wasn't home yet, either.
She wasn't ready to share where she'd been. Wasn't sure she had the words to explain this odd little thing between her and Mamoru, how it had all started, even.
They'd been yelling, she remembered that, but she couldn't remember what they'd said. He might have blamed her for their being trapped in the Crown's storage closet – even though that was obviously Minako's fault, not hers – but what she really remembered was how blue his eyes were, how close his face had been.
She thought she might have felt guilty for closing that space between them, wrapping her arms around his neck so she could pull his lips down to hers, but she didn't. Not when he'd tightened his arms around her waist, clutching her to him and kissing back just as ferociously.
They'd called it a fluke after; some weird combination of out-of-control hormones and too-close proximity, a one-time thing.
And maybe it would have been – except she hadn't been able to stop thinking about it.
When she touched herself in the bathtub, she'd imagine it was his fingers on her clit, that the steam of the water was his breath against her neck.
She'd wake sweating in the night to find her hand down her pajama pants and the memory of his smirk lingering behind her eyelids.
The next time Tuxedo Mask had snatched Sailor Moon out of harm's way at the last second, the tremble that wracked her body had come not from fear, but a desperate wanting – the desire to strip off his coat and vest so she could lick her way down his abdomen.
All things considered, the fact that she managed to wait three whole weeks before dragging him into an alley and shoving her tongue down his throat was an unusual display of restraint.
After that, though…
She still wasn't sure why the eternally responsible Chiba Mamoru had decided to go along with her impulsive, blood-driven yang, but she wasn't complaining, either. Not when it meant all she had to do was climb in through his balcony to have his muscles spread out beneath the pads of her searching fingertips, his lips hot against the lobe of her ear.
Their version of sweet nothings were almost anything but – all expletives and bakas and god-yes-right-there's – and yet the refrain was beginning to haunt her each time she left him behind, sounding along with the click of her heels against the cobblestones at midnight.
His voice seemed to follow after her; the memory of the way he would breathe 'Odango' against her throat between kisses reverberated through her skin, leaving goosebumps she couldn't blame entirely on the chilly spring evening.
But she didn't have time to dwell on that.
Her final semester of University was almost over – despite everyone's ever-present doubts, she'd somehow managed to get into a social work program at Meiji Gakuin University – and with it came the exhausting and nerve-wracking process of trying to line up a job before she graduated, lest she have to move back home and forever be branded a failure. Almost no one was hiring social workers, her prospects were bleak, and if she didn't nail her big upcoming interview she might get stuck doing clerical work at some corporation, her career dead before it even started.
The stress was getting to her. That was why she'd shown up at Mamoru's apartment five nights this week. That, and his skillful fingers and tongue, the only things that seemed able to shut off her brain these days – better than chocolate, better than umeshi, better even than her favorite vibrator.
Nobody would blame her for taking what little relief she could find. No one would judge her for the fact that she'd been sleeping with her (former) sworn nemesis and (current) secret protector for the last four months – not that she was telling.
At first, it had been because she'd been a little embarrassed – unprepared to face Minako's knowing smirk, Rei's inevitable envy, the overly understanding questions Makoto would ask, and Ami's clinically detached quizzing (just to make sure they were being safe).
But now…
The way her mind whirred on her almost-nightly trip home from his apartment was starting to make this feel less like an outlet for stress relief and more and more like something else to worry about.
Something, maybe, that she didn't want the girls to know about.
So, she was doing what she'd always done, her one surefire way to deal with a stubborn problem: eating way too much junk food and hoping it would go away.
Resolve strengthened, she ducked through the sliding glass doors into the 24hr-conbini a few blocks from her apartment, beelining for the candy aisle.
Even after that last orgasm, she was definitely going to need a healthy supply of chocolate if she was going to make it through her recruiting appointments tomorrow.
AN: Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed and, as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts!