This chapter blew by so quickly! I was sort of vague about how to progress things, but I really wanted to get them moving, so I just sort of let it write itself and I hope it makes sense and seems reasonable - there's a few jumps of logic in this chapter, but hopefully they all fit in and aren't too deus ex machina. It was very easy and fun to write :D That's why I'm updating prompty, to hell with harvesting reviews, I want y'all to know what happens next ;)
Enjoy the chapter, and thanks to everyone who's read and especially those who review.
"Good morning, Hyuga," Mikan said fake-cheerfully as she barged past Natsume with a deliberate shoulder-thump the next morning, and Natsume tightened his arms around the books he was carrying to prevent them flying everywhere in a classic cinematic dork-moment.
"Sakura," he replied dryly; he was still working out his new angle to get her, so had nothing to say to her now... although, that didn't mean he couldn't admire the angles of the thong just visible above the waistband of her skirt. He felt his desire boil, and had to talk himself out of drawing her into a secluded spot and trying to screw her like he had before – it obviously wouldn't work, but it didn't stop him fantasising about it.
"Feel like apologising yet?" she questioned in the same happy-sappy tone, and Natsume realized she'd stopped walking to continue talking to him, which was a little unusual.
"No," he retorted darkly, and a gradual smile crossed her face as passers-by noticed that Sakura Mikan was talking to the library boy again.
"Aw, that's too bad," she said sarcastically, "and here I was ready to forgive you if you did." Natsume fumed – he would never apologise, and he didn't need to be forgiven by anyone for anything. She was just being a bitch, as usual.
"Tch," he snorted; happy in his knowledge that she would do no such thing anyway, "why don't you just leave me alone?" Mikan raised her eyebrows at him and noticed more students watching-but-not-watching them.
"Why? It's a free country, isn't it?" she said coolly, "Why? Don't you want to talk to me?" For some inexplicable reason she didn't seem to be content in letting him ignore her until he'd decided how he was going to seduce her properly, and that alone irritated Natsume enough to snap.
"I'm sure you don't want to ruin your precious image talking to someone like me, so piss off," he hissed angrily, and Mikan's shaped eyebrows shot even higher up her forehead.
"My 'image'?" she repeated curiously, "What 'image' is that?" Natsume took a threatening step towards her.
"Don't play dumb," he spat, "I know it's not a hard stretch for you but..."
"Look," she interrupted with a throwaway air, "I honestly couldn't care less if I'm 'seen talking to a oo-geeky dork'." She inflected her voice on the last expression to cast ridicule not on Natsume, but on the term itself. "Everyone thinks I'm a slut anyway, so what the hell difference does it make." She shrugged and gave Natsume a 'present company included' look, but he was the most taken aback by her blasé attitude towards what he thought would be the most important thing to her: reputation. She didn't sound fond of her status as a 'loose girl', and that confused Natsume because he believed that all of her type strived for that kind of notoriety on purpose.
"You might pretend to be a 'dork'," she continued, suddenly insightful, "but even I can tell you're not." Natsume froze: no way had Sakura Mikan just sliced through the image he'd crafted flawlessly of himself for nearly six years: no fucking way.
"No dork I've ever heard of has strings of one-night stands and acts like a professional girl-playing shit," she said coolly, and Natsume still tried to deny the possibility that she might have seen through his façade.
"No real dork memorizes the addresses and owners of Love Hotels, no dork has the balls to do things that you do, or knows exactly how to dress himself up or down for every occasion; no dorks I've ever met smell as good as you do," she added carelessly, and then realized how what she just said sounded like.
It was his stupid fault for standing downwind to her and making her think about that cologne he wore: she'd been dwelling on it and the times she'd smelt it as she'd spoken, and then said somthing without actually realizing what she was implying. "I mean!" she spluttered and felt her cheeks burn as Natsume cracked a smug grin: damn her stupid attention-wandering mind.
"Ohhh?" he sneered proudly, and stepped closer as her face rouged.
"I mean..." she mumbled, and now it seemed all she could concentrate on was the fact that Natsume happened to smell really good today as well; better than any of the boys last night at least.
"You still dress like a total freak!" she shouted too loud not to be forced, and Natsume just snorted – she was trying to recover points already lost.
He took a few quick steps up to her, until his mouth was close to her ear, and then he said, "The clothes come off, you know," in an implicit tone. Mikan couldn't stop herself swallowing: she'd walked right into that.
She retaliated by pushing him away, a hand firmly in the middle of his chest, and she said something rushed like 'getawayfrommefreak!' But neither of them could deny that the ball had landed in Natsume's end of the court this time.
"You know," she stuttered awkwardly as the bell for lessons went and they officially ran into being late, "maybe if you acted more..." she was going to say 'like yourself, then you might have more friends', but then she remembered who he was and changed her mind.
"Actually, never mind," she sniggered, and Natsume scowled – this girl had started breaking rules everywhere now. First she started speculating accurately about what turned him on, then she claimed she didn't care what people thought about her, and then she slashed through his whole self-created and maintained image.
The strangest thing, though, was that he had still managed to flirt with her: Natsume had never hit on a girl 'freestyle' before in his life, he always planned everything out first. He felt oddly proud of his verbal triumph, and promised himself that it was just the first step in things to come. The next bell for lessons rang somwhere in the distance.
"You'll be late to class," he remarked coolly, and Mikan returned his gaze with equal iciness.
"So will you," she stated, and they stared each other out, waiting for one of them to crack first and run to their class – Mikan had been sure it would be Natsume, after all, he was still pretty swotty, but he didn't seem to be bothered by it at all.
"You'll get in trouble," she chanced a little thinly, and Natsume smirked back at her.
"It doesn't matter if I miss a lesson," he said smugly, "my grades are the best anyway." That was unfortunately true – Natsume had the best grades in the entire school, whereas Mikan was somewhere in the lower deluges.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Is it that hard to go a whole minute without acting like a jerk?" she sniped, and at the same time wondered why, if she hated this guy so much, did she refuse to just ignore him and instead actively initiated conversation, and ended up bantering with him too comfortably for her own peace of mind as well.
Suddenly, Natsume realized what he could do to get closer to her: it would be taking one step backwards in his books, but it was worth it to take two steps forwards.
"Why don't you find out?" he posed quickly, "…Go on a date with me." There was stunned silence as Mikan replayed what he said in her head, and then she burst out laughing.
"Go on a date?!" she screeched as tears of laughter pricked her eyes, "You want me to go on a date with you?!" Natsume was wounded, but he'd expected a reaction like this and insisted he should bide his time.
"Listen!" He yelled it loud enough to stop Mikan laughing and got her paying attention to him. "If you agree to one date with me," he speculated – one date would be all he needed anyway, "then I'll apologise to your friend." Mikan was caught: she wanted Sumire to get her apology, but Hyuga was asking her on a date for heaven's sake!
"...Why?" she questioned eventually, "Why do you want to go on a date with me?" She didn't claim that she wouldn't go out with Hyuga just once – after all a date was hardly anything serious, and if she did it then Sumire would get some proper closure on what he'd done to her. She'd gone on dates with people she ended up hating within ten minutes of it, so dating someone she already despised would just be cutting out that first stage, and she could also use it to inflict some personal revenge on him, without making too fine a point of it.
"I..." Natsume hesitated, flustered – he could hardly say it was because it was part of his grand scheme to violently fuck her and then get on with the rest of his life. "I..."
"Ooh, do you have a crush on me?" she simpered mockingly, and Natsume scowled.
"As if," he spat, "I'm just proving that you... really do care about your reputation," he accused. "You said you didn't care what people thought, but refusing to be seen with me proves you only pretend not to care, and really-"
"One, I don't care," she boasted, "and two, you need some self-esteem," she remarked, "it's not healthy to talk about yourself like you're a disease." She shot him a lot. "Oh, wait, you are, aren't you?"
"Funny," he snapped insincerely. "Do we have a deal?" Mikan thought for a moment.
"You won't just apologise to Sumire," she said thoughtfully, "I'll do it, but you don't just apologise to her, you apologise to every girl you've done that to." Now it was Natsume's turn to consider the conditions of the deal: he'd decided that he'd have Mikan at any cost, so this obviously had to be inclusive to that.
"Fine," he grunted, and rubbed his nose where his glasses rested, "it'll take some time, but…"
"Brag-brag-brag," Mikan jeered while making chattering actions with one of her hands, and then while he glowered she whipped a pen out of her bag and in a flash grabbed hold of his arm.
She yanked up his sleeve, and then before he reacted started to doodle her mobile number down on his inner arm; after struggling at first, and then settling down when he realized what she was doing, Natsume chewed his lower lip and tried not to think about her touching the sensitive skin of his arm – the last thing he needed right now was an erection.
Mikan finished her number with a sardonic smiley face and stepped promptly away from him again.
"I'm… free tomorrow morning," she remarked as if she wasn't talking to anyone in particular (it was a Saturday), and Natsume nodded awkwardly: it was only now that he realized he'd only been on a few proper dates before, and they were all with Yuri a long time ago (she'd moved away last year). In his eagerness to further the cause he'd forgotten himself and ended up flying out on a limb he had no experience in: he was going to have to wing it.
"Hey! You two!" a voice snapped from the window of a nearby building, "stop flirting and get to class!" Laughter was heard in the classroom, and within seconds both Mikan and Natsume had bolted in embarrassment, also both thinking 'what the hell have I done?'
However, they both reasoned that what was done was done, and they became sure over the course of the day that they'd easily be able to twist the small accident of ego around to serve their own causes.
"Late again, Mikan-chan," sighed Narumi-sensei as Mikan ambled into class a full ten minutes after the bell went, and Mikan flashed him a pouty smile.
"Sorry, Sensei," she said sweetly, and only two students exchanged a muted whisper - people had generally moved on from the 'Mikan and Narumi-sensei' fiasco of the past. Everyone had just accepted it and had grown bored of the gossip.
Mikan, in spite of the common belief that she would sleep with almost anyone, had in fact only made love to five different people in her life. Only two had ever made her come, and one of those was Narumi.
It had only happened a handful of times, but they had been spread out over a mildly criminal period of three years – she was only just sixteen the first time they'd ended up… well…
However, Narumi was still the one man Mikan trusted most in the whole world, and the fact that she'd been intimate with him was only a fraction of how she felt about him. She could say he was like a father to her, but that would probably make the fact that they'd slept together even more criminal – it was part of the package though. She barely remembered her biological father, and he was the most stable male (even if he was sometimes hard-pressed to act like it) in her life.
He was the person she went to when she had no one else, when on the anniversary of her father's death when her mom was blind drunk and sobbing hysterically in a locked room on her own, and Mikan was scared and alone and just needed someone to watch over her until the storm passed – Narumi had been there – he'd held her – and he hadn't, she might add, laid a hand on her inappropriately.
No, she'd started that; she'd crawled in through his apartment one late night after she'd narrowly escaped being raped, and found him fast asleep in his bed - not surprising really - and she'd been the one who'd stripped to her underwear and put on one of his too-big-for-her-shirts; crawling teary-eyed under the covers next to him.
She had just wanted comfort and reassurance, and this was the only safe place she could reach this late at night, and she really needed a hug, but when in his confused state of waking he'd held her like a lover something had been started that they were powerless to stop. That night was the first time she'd ever had an orgasm, and it had been before they'd even had proper sex; she came twice more after that, and Narumi was from then on burned forever in her memory and soul.
The other person was Tsubasa, but he was at university now anyway. He wasn't as important to her, they'd just had a lot of practice.
"Mikan-chan," the fair-haired Narumi probed, "would you please take a seat." Mikan snapped out of her daydream with a giggle, and dashed over to a desk with an embarassed glance at Narumi, who was now returning her stare with the glazed-over sort of look in his eyes that meant he was more probably than not thinking about her in a less than teacher-ly way.
They didn't do that anymore now, at least, they'd sworn to each other after the last time that they wouldn't. Narumi was in a relationship with an older man now (he was bisexual), and Mikan dated people of her own age. They'd moved on, but it never quite closed down that possibility that had been blasted open that night over three years ago.
She had the date with Natsume now anway. Not that she thought it'd be likely to stop her thinking about Narumi. Fat chance of that.
And out comes the deal with Mikan and Narumi :P Yes, I have a massive student/teacher fetish, so this is partly personal fanservice, but I think a lot of it is also quire important to Mikan's character, and quite revealing about what she's really like.
Leave a review! If you don't know what to say then tell me anything from this list.
Do you think Mikan and Natsume's date will go well or badly? Who reckons he'll seduce her sucessfully? What do you like/dislike about Mikan and Natsume's characters in this story? Or their pasts? What is your opinion on the Mikan/Narumi pairing?