Updated at last, my laptop bust out on me last week, and I got a new one this saturday, oh, it's so sexy. Yes, I said it. It's sexy.
That aside, I was finally able to crack on with this (longer than usual) chapter. I'm upping the rating, because Natsume is incapable of not requiring a big fat M stamp on his little nymphomanic forehead.
But pushing on, enjoy the chapter!
Natsume was, to use a rather tired phrase, speechless.
"You know what, Natsume? I think it's what you get off on."
Even though Mikan was gone now, he couldn't for the life of him even move from the shock.
…Could she be right?
He told himself it was impossible, no way would a dumb bitch like that be able to see into someone like him: she had to be talking out of her ass. She had to be wrong.
But… he was aware that he was the most turned on by girls who flaunted it – the really overtly slutty ones; ones with the shortest skirts and biggest breasts and flirtiest mannerisms. Because those were the ones he really loved to dominate… like her friend, Sumiko or whatever her name was.
He'd been on top of her right from the start, right from the moment when she started talking to him for the sole purpose of meeting Ruka. He wasn't stupid, he saw straight through it, and this girl was such an example of her kind – flirty, attractive, drank, partied, made out with boys in corridors, and had all the guys she'd been out with boasting in class about the things she'd done to them. Right away he wanted her.
And the only reason that he actually wanted her was just to prove that he could have her – his image in school was less than acceptable: guys tripped him up, girls laughed at his appearance, teachers acted like he only wanted to study and gave him extra work – but the joke was on them, because he could play up to that image as much as he wanted, and still run circles around the lot of them.
It had started in middle school, when, being a bookish boy who didn't socialize well with others, the bullies of the class started to make fun of him. At first it bothered him, but soon he couldn't care less, because whenever tests came around he would get a perfect score and the Neanderthals were still bashing their heads against rocks.
Naturally, the fact that he was smart only made other kids want to bully him more, but soon he started to smile, even when he was being beaten up, because he knew that they just were doing it out of their own pathetic inadequacies, and that he was leagues and leagues above them all.
Although, it could be said that the one time he needed help studying – and wasn't naturally getting perfect scores on all the exams, perhaps falling into rank with the rest of them temporarily, led to one of the more significant events in his life.
The girl his parents hired to tutor him was the daughter of a family friend, and, as Natsume discovered, chosen on the basis that being three years older than him she must be smarter and able to teach him. As it turned out, she was an average student at best, and had nothing to teach Natsume that he didn't know already.
Or so he thought, because if Yuri had one thing she was good at, it was fucking.
And yes, she fucked him. A lot.
Pretty soon most of the time they spent in his room 'studying' was spent in the many stages of naked, and Natsume was studying the female body and its subtle intricacies. Yuri taught him almost everything he knew, from how to undo a bra with one hand to just where biting was good; from the different positions and their various benefits to the ins and outs of oral sex, and from the nipples of her generous breasts to the dips of her hipbone Natsume learnt more than he'd ever imagined possible.
It was coincidentally the first year he failed an exam, and after that his parents sacked Yuri and sent him to cram school every day of the week instead. Needless to say his grades picked up in no time, but that was where he first started harvesting the shy studious girls who also attended classes there, and when he began to refine his tools and technique of playing the game.
Just like Sumire – dumb slut – she wasn't good enough for Ruka, but he'd played along with it anyway, pretending he didn't realize her ulterior motives and agreeing to make plans to see him later that evening and to invite her along: she didn't realize for a second he wouldn't do anything of the sort.
Then she turned up, tarted up in a way that had him even more determined to have her that night, and he was the only one there, slothed out across a sofa in a loose shirt and jeans – his hair messy but in a way that had every unruly spike planned out carefully to look carefully attractive: he saw her staring, and he knew she'd noticed. He said that Ruka had plans at the last minute, when in fact he'd never asked him at all, and then, at first shyly, like he was doing this for the first time, he asked if maybe she'd stay a while with him – after all it would be such a waste for her to go home now, not when she'd made herself look so 'cute'.
He saw her reacting subty as he complimented her, and he knew he was in. Outside of school girls would fool themselves out of thinking about him as a 'dork', and then it was just a case of plying her with a few drinks (not too many though) and piling on the accidental touches, the underhand compliments, the ever-so-slightly flirtatious suggestions. He turned it up slowly, like heat on a thermostat, and it became more predatory, more demanding; he'd put his leg against hers and then say sorry in an unconvincing voice, and let his fingers linger on any part of her that he could, as if he didn't notice he was doing it, and wasn't actually planning every single moment.
She fell for it, she fell for it so pathetically; she said things like 'you don't seem like this at school' and 'you're so different now... Natsume-kun', and if she ever started to talk about leaving he'd throw out some feeble lie about Ruka mentioning her and she was back on the hook.
Eventually he got tired of the game and really turned the heat up, and in true amoral form she didn't resist one bit – he stuck his hand up her skirt at the table, and she didn't mind one bit. To the contrary, she loved every goddam second of it.
From there it hadn't been hard to get her out of the bar and around the corner to a Love Hotel he knew (having used it before), but deciding – as she was a particularly splendid example of her kind – to see if he could push it just that little bit more, he cajoled her into sucking him off in an alleyway down the side first.
To begin with Sumire had resisted - most girls would - but saying the right things and acting in the right way was all too easy when they had the depth of a puddle, and she was gagging on him in no time: Natsume had taken particularly sick pleasure in that piece of manipulation.
Then as usual, after he'd got her inside and fucked her senseless, he waited a matter of seconds before he got up to shower, leaving Sumire cold on the bed. Then when he walked out of the bathroom fully clothed and said 'you should shower too, you look a fucking state' with undisguised disgust, she realized just how badly she'd messed up.
Natsume had picked his glasses off the side table and walked out of there without saying another word, and before the door had even closed behind him Sumire was in tears - the spell was broken.
It wasn't like Hyuga Natsume had been abused as a child and wanted revenge on all women. It wasn't like his mother had an affair with the gardener and permanently scarred his opinion of them. He had a normal, if not boring, childhood and family life. His parents were good parents - sure they both worked and weren't at home much the time, but if he'd ever wanted a book, or some money, or to be driven to and from libraries and museums, they were always willing: they loved him, and they loved each other.
So it wasn't like he had any particular reason to do what he did; but, as he'd said to Mikan, he did it because he could - just to see if he could, and because he honestly didn't see the point in tossing himself off when there were so many girls who'd do it for him. It was like walking past a full buffet table to pick scraps out of the trash.
He supposed he was always enacting some level of revenge on those who bullied him - he fucked their girlfriends better and harder than they ever did (if he could believe certain orgasmic screams he'd been party to), and even though they acted like they were better than him, and he was just the 'sad library kid', he had one up on them in every way imaginable.
The only person he thought as an equal was Ruka - he'd realized that the first time he'd been beaten in a test: he was tired having been up all the night before, and Ruka sailed past him to the top slot in class, shaking up everything he thought he knew.
"Uh...whoa," was the only thing he'd been able to say at the time, "you beat me."
"Mhm," said Ruka, a half french boy with shocking bleached highlights, who could've been expelled had it not been for his being one of the smartest (and most attractive) boys in school; who melted the hearts of girls with his dreams of pursuing veterinary medicine. "I was waiting for you to get careless." Natsume was caught off guard, because if Ruka meant what it sounded like he meant, then there was possibly someone who actually saw things the way he saw them.
"What?"
"You're wrecked, it was easy to beat you," Ruka explained with a thin smile, "I've just been waiting for the right moment to do it." It was then that Natsume learnt there was someone who was almost as smart as him, and who had the awareness to play the game for what it was. From then on, they became friends, even though (for those stupid hype-based reasons that he so hated) Ruka was one of the most popular boys in school and he wasn't.
Ruka knew people liked him, but, much to Natsume's refreshment, he couldn't care less; they both agreed that the popularity machine was stupid, and Ruka only laughed when Natsume related stories of how easily he'd seduced girls in spite of being 'the total dork'. They got on well, to say the least.
But Mikan was messing with the system. If a... a... a girl could see into him and actually pull out something true, then...
No. It just couldn't be. He refused to believe it.
She was their Queen. No one was more talked about, or lusted after, or openly promiscuous than Sakura Mikan: she fucked a goddam teacher for heaven's sake.
Everyone knew about it – Mikan and Narumi-sensei, she didn't even bother to deny it, she just never said it was true because he'd probably lose his job if it was confirmed that over about a three-year period they'd been more than 'close': he'd probably go to prison.
But that girl, that loud, stupid, sexy girl couldn't have any powers of insight. She'd called him a jerk, she called him a geek, she slapped him and swore at him and didn't once ever show signs of giving in when he pushed at her. She acted like she was the queen of the whole school, and...
And...
And he would have her.
From the moment she'd said he 'couldn't get a girlfriend' in the library that day he'd resolved to fuck her: she would eat her words, and probably much more.
When she resisted him on that same day he was even more determined – the fact that she'd knocked him back once meant that it was even more important that he did succeed in the end. Natsume did not tolerate losing.
However, he was no fool, and he'd learnt that simple confrontation wasn't going to get her to give in to him – she was too high up on the hierarchy to allow her position to be jeopardized so easily. He needed a new plan.
Mikan wearily unlocked her front door and dumped her shoes and bags in the hall.
"I'm home!" she called out, knowing full-well that there was no one around to hear her or to say 'welcome back' to her; not that it didn't stop her missing it.
Although she still stood by her mother's decision to follow her heart, and her own decision to finish her education and be independent, Mikan still missed having someone to come home to... and to eat meals with, and to ask for help studying from, and to say goodnight to.
She missed her mom, basically. She never mentioned it because she knew that her mom was so much happier living in Sapporo with Haruki, and she was happiest when he mom was happy, but she hated her empty house, with its empty dusty rooms and cold quiet aura. She really, really hated it.
That was why she quickly boiled a bowl of miso soup while she floated into the master bedroom (now her bedroom) and opened her mom's closet. Yuka never threw things out and had kept all her clothes from her youth for Mikan; she was practically still a youth when she had Mikan, so it wasn't like there was a long crossover period, and they had almost identical tastes in clothes and body sizes, so Mikan wore a lot of 'vintage' things, which kept her close to her mom in several ways.
She put on some brightly coloured tights and rather short shorts, and then a cute low-cut top and waistcoat she bought in Harajuku. Sliding a few chunky hair-grips into her bunches and walking back into the kitchen to pour her soup into a thermos to take out with her, she flipped open her phone and messaged Sumire, letting her know she was leaving now.
She made a few more trips back into the bedroom to put on some more makeup – with no one to tell her to tidy up the entire desk of the room was covered in a well-used assortment of the stuff – and to add some more accessories: a necklace, bracelets, wristwatch and some rings, and then while taking gulps of her 'dinner' she grabbed a coat, dragged on some electric-blue leather boots and bustled out of the door.
She hated her empty house, so she went out a lot; what was the problem with that?
"Mikan-chan!" Sumire mewled as they met up at the train station – Sumire had changed too and they now looked suitably attention-drawing. "I promise you, this time the boys are super cute!" she teased, and Mikan laughed and slipped her arm through Sumire's.
"You always say that," she replied wryly, "it's because to you they all look like Nogi-kun." Sumire shrieked in protest and jostled Mikan as their train arrived and they ran, screaming, onto it.
"Speaking of Nogi-kun," Sumire said a little more seriously, "what happened with him?" Him meaning the only 'him' that either of them knew.
"Oh," Mikan snapped awkwardly, "um, I dunno, nothing much..." She didn't feel like mentioning Natsume's repeated attempts to force himself on her, nor his extravagant claims about the girls he'd slept with.
Which Mikan realized, after innocently questioning a few of the friend's he'd named, were absolutely true. Not one of the girls denied having got with Natsume, and most of them were extremely evasive and embarrassed about it, saying things like 'how did you find out?' and 'But I didn't tell anyone!'
"What does that mean?" Sumire sighed.
"It means 'nothing much'!" Mikan said quickly, "I mean, I did most of the talking anyway... he's... a jerk, so... look, let's not talk about him." She couldn't say 'geek' anymore, because she knew that what was seen at school wasn't the real him, and the real him was no dork. Sumire agreed to stop talking about him wholeheartedly, and nothing more was said on the matter. Besides once they met up with the boys and went around some arcades, eventually ending up doing karaoke with a few free beers inside them, they were having too much fun to even bother thinking about an anti-social dor... jerk like Hyuga Natsume.
A little more background on Natsume and Mikan, the next chapter is partially written already and it has much more N/M interaction in it - I just need to get this character background done first :) Update shouldn't be too long.
Harajuku is the area around the Harajuku station in Tokyo, and it's where lots of hip teenagers hang out in mad and brilliant clothes/costume at the weekend, google-image it for some really cool pictures.
Leave a review please! If you're reading this story it would be really nice to hear a few words on how you like the AU, whether you think the characters resemble their canon selves, what you think about the mysterious relationship between Mikan and Narumi, anything you have to say, praise and criticism alike, is very welcome.
So review! :P