He kissed my lips
I taste your mouth
He pulled me in
I was disgusted with myself

If you were the one who was spending the night…..

So, the cosmos is a scary thing when you think about it. When you are standing in a bathroom, face shifting like a distorted fish in the blunt mirror. When the eyes that look back at you are mismatched, because one of them is long lashed and almond shaped, and the other one is the size of a grapefruit, swollen until the lids seal tight to keep out unwanted visitors, then you realize the size of the universe. You began to realize the size of yourself. That actually you are indeed very small like a tiny single pinprick of ink in an Etch-a-Sketch. And the galaxies dwell around you and to engulf your unimportant existence, swallowing you whole. You begin to realize that as your own individual world rips and begins to unthread itself The World continues to spin nonchalant and jovial about you.

Also, if you are me then you realize that you have been hit awfully hard.

I study myself in the mirror, part my bangs and probe my eye with a fingernail. The skin is tough and resistant as if it's hiding something ballooned in the folds of itself. The former pink hue has been boiled and darkened to a roguish violet color, just about the exact shade of those grapes I used to love to buy from Tanzaku Town before Kakashi told me they were Anko's favorite,too. And before Asuma began demanding them.

Don't get me wrong, I've never claimed to love Asuma. But even though I've never said it out loud doesn't mean I wasn't ever thinking it. Wasn't ever keeping the notion polished and guarded like a locket around my heart. Of course I'm a very feeble and fragile creature. I've heard it ever since I was little. Ever since my delicate girl fists couldn't stack up to my brothers' taijutsu. And I've felt it in Kakashi's body. In the differences between my slightness and his sanctious build. Only in one case this fragility was a sign of comfort and in the other it was not. The point is, it's easy for a spineless heart to fall deeply into something that is a little like love. And more like a grave. Seeing as the more work you put into it, the deeper you dig until you feel the soil compounded on stupid things you shouldn't have said and even stupider risks you shouldn't have taken. And then the black is curling at your feet and riding up your chest, and by then it's too late.

Essentially what I'm saying is this is all my fault.

It's not like there were no signs. Contrary to the way most women put it, it doesn't happen overnight. Asuma didn't lay down to sleep beside me, hoarding me in his arms and then wake up a monster. No. There were little things. It crept along. And it wasn't as if eventually he was anyone different anyway. It was just that he was himself. He was finally and truly himself, and it's important to love someone unconditionally. It's important. That's what they always say. That's what they all say. That love is unconditional. That love is…I love…..him….I love him.

I...

The bathroom door creaks open. Impossible. No one hangs out after training hours at the Academy building. Especially not to wander into the women's bathroom……

One of the best things about being a shinobi, however is that we can turn "impossible" into a split second of fluid motion so swiftly that you might blink and then can't bring yourself to believe it even really happened. So one moment I am there in front of the sink leaning into my distorted mirror face and the next minute I am there crouched on all fours and making a desperate roll under the nearest stall door. I just manage to squeeze through, and end up banging my chest on the toilet base and become curled up around it like a pretzel. The pain seems to be attached to a frequency and reverberates through my whole body. I have to close my eyes and grit my teeth against the pain that scampers across my swollen eye. But it's only for an instant, and in the next instant I'm sucking my breath in and holding it captive behind my teeth.

The visitor makes a noisy way in. And it doesn't take me long to figure out there's more than one person. Their footsteps clap down haphazardly. I can determine that they're moving together. I can hear their breathing, gasping in, and gasping out uneven and pleading and desperate. There's a wanting. I know because I can hear the distinct sound of lips glued to foreign flesh, making tender sounds escape from the one, the woman. She mumbles something breathless, and the man chuckles. There's something familiar in his voice, but it's lost in the action. I can only imagine what they're doing. Through the long thin slice of open space under the stall door, I see their feet move past me, a crazy waltz passionado. A few seconds later, the woman laughs deep and throaty and some unidentifiable article of clothing falls to the floor. Well, this just has to be my lucky day.

Often times I sit and wonder, if it's all even worth it. If living through the clear sunny days is worth having to endure the dark spots like this one, and the pain. Because right now, I feel like I'm being stabbed into. My eye. Theres' another bolt of pain going dancing on it's bruised perimenter.

I could be sneaky about it, try to squirm out on my belly like a snake and get away unnoticed…. Their passion sounds are turning up, reaching somewhat of a fever pitch. I stand up and push the stall door open.

It's Anko and Kakashi.

Her back is pushed to the wall, and she's sitting on the sink, her curvy thighs balancing precariously. None of this matters however, because her skirt is pushed up around her waist and her thighs are full and fully visible and he is standing between them. His beautiful strong, lean body between her legs. One of her hands crawls like a spider up and down the length of his neck, and the other one is drowning in his hair, her fingers grabbing desperately.

Her head is back, her eyes are closed and her mouth is a smirking crescent moon, bow shaped lips parted in triumphant pleasure. I can't see his hands. And I can't see his face because he's bent over her, mouth at her throat.

And I break.

And the wind blowing through the air vents could pick up the pieces of my body and disperse me. Anko opens her eyes and says "Kaka." And I hate the way he looks at her when he listens. Hate the way she leaves her hand resting against the back of his neck, her mouth now tight closed, staring at me with stiff embarrassment and her cheeks flushed red. He turns his head and looks at me too, and if he wasn't so practiced his jaw would have dropped. Instead he simply stares. And so does she and so do I. Nobody says anything. I know they are both looking at my eye.

"Kurenai." Kakashi says at last. And usually when he speaks to me everything stops. And I can barely move, let alone breathe because there is nothing else only him. This doesn't work however when he's talking to me and touching her. I turn and leave. They keep watching me. I can feel their eyes on my back. But nobody calls out for me to stop, to wait, to stay. Then, I'm outside in the fresh air and how could I have been so stupid?

She calls him Kaka. When he looks at her, he feels her. It doesn't matter if he's even physically touching her, it's like he feels her all the same. He kisses her neck. He wants her. What am I to im? Just the other woman? When I did I become someone who could be labeled that way? Stupid.

My eye is starting to throb. The pain is really moving in now like how an epiphany can't be put into full effect until it's fully realized. Then it hits you hard. It hits me hard when I'm alone, walking circles in the Academy training field my arms locked around my middle trying to keep everything that's in there from coming out. It's no good.

I've never been one for a crisis. I don't know how to deal with them. They unnerve me so that I'm left loose and frantic like a headless chicken running around and trying to reassemble myself. Being alone has never been my forte. Even when I'm in between relationships....however right now at this moment, I can think only think of one place to go.

Asuma opens the door of his standard issue apartment before I knock, at odds with himself. On the one hand he is shirtless and broad and brown, taking up the entirety of the doorway; his chest crosshatched with brown hairs that lead a tumble weed trail down his midsection, dissecting him with perfect symmetry into two distinct halves. He always used to joke that I was his better one. His pants are bulky, left unbuttoned, the seams frayed and the pockets paint splattered like his toes: fat brown pigs, bare skinned and dotted with wet white paint. He's been painting which is normal.

On the other hand his eyes are red and puffy. His nose is runny and his beard is matted down while his hair is sticking up all around like a crown of thorns. And I know he's been laying down somewhere crying, and I notice that there's no cigarette anywhere visible on his person. Which is not normal. At all.

I know this is the way it goes every time. But still I feel a stab of guilt deep inside my belly twisting my stomach into knots. And still I hear that little voice in the back of my head saying 'you did this to him. It was you'

"Kurenai." says Asuma, and his voice breaks lingering on something he can't bear to express. "Kurenai." Kakashi begs into my ear. And his voice is deep and rich and smooth and slides all over my body like silk. His voice is chocolate inside my head. My eye is pounding. I want to cry now more than anything. I can feel the overwhelming urge pressing, a consistent heat against the orbs of my eyeballs. I step inside Asuma's house.

The atmosphere is all smoke. The place is one big huge ashtray. It's dark and cold. All of the shades drawn, all of the lights off, and a few lamps turned over on their sides. There's a broken wood chair lying like a sunken ship, broken piece of starboard jutting up against a wall, and a large hole in the plaster conceived by someone's fist and the wall climbing into bed together. Asuma's face seems to melt into the debris.

He reaches for me, then thinking better of it, he pulls back and balls his hands into fists at his sides. His eyes search my face repentant. Kakashi's klaidescope eyes , and our faces pressed together. His lashes so long and dark they brush my own like the feathery kiss of a snowflake, when he leans in just close enough to

"I brought you something." Asuma almost whispers. "Wait right here." he says before turning and going away. As if I have anywhere else to go. As if there is somewhere I belong as confidently as Anko basked under the gentle nourishment of Kakashi's lips.....

There's something wrong with my brain.

There's something seriously wrong with me. I can't stop thinking about that man. About....him. About us. No.... Us= me + Asuma. Kakashi is an affair. Kakashi has a wife and they are quite obviously infinitely happy. Kakashi is over what must have been he and I. What must have been bone deep desire and blueberry pancakes. What must have been only just this morning, but seems a thousand light years away,now. Kakashi does not fit into the "us" equation.

I watch Asuma's broad back disappear from the room and become enveloped in the ambivalent smoke. It's so thick in here, that it's almost tangible. I turn my head to cough and the effort makes my eye scream. Asuma comes back smiling, and the effort makes his face splinter. In his large hands he holds a small stuffed cat.

I hate cats.

"I'm sorry." he says, holding it out to me. It hovers there, whiskers sticking straight out glass eyeballs glazed over like a gun between us, no ammunition. I take the doll, squeeze it in my hands and wish it's glass eyes could bug out, and wish it could gasp for breath, and wish that Asuma was not encircling his arms around my waist. And pulling me closer into his smoke smell so that I have to thread my hands together and link them robotically around his neck, and gaze into his face where his eyes are shining wet with desperation. Two ebony gems. Instead of one red and one ebony. I think I'm going to be sick.

I say "I know." I know. I know more than he knows. I know that this is how it's supposed to run. I know there's no other way. I know him well enough to want to dismember him. Nudging mine, his lips feel like sandpaper. Kakashi's lips were not like sandpaper. Kakashi's lips....Kakashi does not fit into the equation. I know this. I know it even as Asuma begins to undress me. And still every fiber in my body begs me to resist.

When it's over I can't sleep. The taste of his mouth was wrong. The touch of his hands were wrong. The make-up of his body was wrong. His voice in my ear sounded wrong. And afterward he rolled over and away from me, content to sleep himself on the on the opposite side of the bed.

Asuma goes through lots of phases. Photography with an old flashbulb apparatus he made himself. Carpentry with borrowed tools. Culinary tinkering with stolen goods. Now he paints. He's been painting again. I can see because the ceiling now is off white like an egg. And dripping thick goop as if it's been cracked. I rest on my back staring up, and trying to make sense of the shadows in all of that white. Asuma snores lightly. Outside of the bedroom window the sky is the color of a felt tip pen. The blue and opaque like a restless ocean or an uneventful midnight.

I hurt all over. Especially in my soul. Where pictures of him and her are pinned permanently to the walls and they keep taunting me. I keep seeing him standing there between her knees. I keep seeing the look on her face, a satisfied I've reached Nirvana look. I keep thinking about what she must have been feeling and what he must have been thinking and what they would have done if I hadn't popped out from under that stall. Not to say they didn't do it anyway after I left.

I remember every inch of his body so clearly. I almost say his name out loud. But I don't. It would cut like a knife. It would deepen the emptiness. Kakashi. This is withdrawal in the worst form. I cup my body into a C and hold myself around the middle. But still feel the imminent emptiness. Why did he...why did we....why can't I shake this?

Affairs come and go. They start and end. They are plants seeded in evil. Thou shall not covet thy neighbors house and all. They're hurtful. Especially when there's the risk of breaking a love involved. Especially when I love Ka...Asuma. Asuma. Asuma.

Ping! If I had been losing my grip on reality, I would have thought the little noise, the pinging!, was a rock or a pebble or something hitting my window. I roll over, shifting around in the bed. Try to get comfortable to rest my imaginative mind. Asuma's leg cuts a giant diagonal slice across the bed. Dividing it in half like a sandwich, which makes it difficult to get comfortable.

Ping! There it is again. Faint. But urgent. And there. Definitely there. I climb out of bed, swinging my feet, and haul myself to the window gathering my discarded nightgown around myself. I press my face to the window. Ping! I see it. The pebble. I see it hit. I see it fall. My heart skips a beat. I wrench the window up and the gust blowing around outside stings my eye, but it doesn't stop me from seeing.

After all, I have only to look down and there he is.

Kakashi stands, a lithe silhouette in the dark; one arm raised, a pebble pinched between two fingers ready for take off. When he sees me his face, glued into a blase expression softens and then breaks into a wide somewhat sheepish smile. I can see the imprint of those dimples through the thin fabric of his mask. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

"What are you doing here?" I hiss in a voice that leaps just short of hysterically down on top of his upturned head. He raises the pebble higher until it catches the moonlight. "Throwing rocks at your window." he says simply. "Why?!" I exclaim. Behind me Asuma groans like a bear and rolls over. Kakashi doesn't seem to notice. "Because," he shrugs. "I thought it'd be hopelessly romantic. And also a way easier on the ears than me strumming a guitar and singing Baby Come Back."

"Kakashi." I sigh. "Baby come back! You can blame it all on me!" he warbles. A few houses over a cat balanced precariously on a fence drops dead. "Okay. Shut-up."I say. "Is it because I forgot the guitar?" he smiles. I turn my head away from him, but not quick enough. I wonder if he can see me smile. I wonder if can see what he does to me inside. If he tries or if it just comes naturally. May'be it's me. May'be I'm off. And I need to end this now. To close the window and climb back into bed and end it all right here, right now.

But I can't.

"We need to talk." says Kakashi, and he's not smiling anymore. "I'll be right down." I say.

But when I get down to him talking is the last thing on my mind. Face to face he takes my breath away. And in the dark quiet of the moonlight, the soft ambience makes him look almost surreal. It takes every ounce of strength inside of me to control myself. To let him speak.

But his eyes look awfully sad. "What happened to your eye?" he asks. His arms are folded. I can feel the eye, throbbing now, no duller than when the other he first slammed his fist into my face. I bite my lip and Kakashi takes the faulty instant to move closer to me. He takes my hand in his warm, lightly calloused one and peers into my face. This will destroy me.

"Asuma." I say, bitterly because I can't keep it from him when his face is so close to mine. When his omniscience is penetrating me and pulling silent secrets out of my own battered gaze. I lower my eyes and Kakashi is silent. But when I look up at him, I realize that he's not just silent. He's gone. The face I see is not recognizable. The expression there doesn't belong to Kakashi. And it's strange because he's not angry. He doesn't look angry. His face...it's more like a total shutdown. His eyes are wide and empty. His mouth is lax. He stares at me like that. And it's almost....frightening. "Kakashi?" I whisper uncertainly.

"I'll kill him." says Kakashi, suddenly. And before I can make another motion, he's turned away from me and already started taking brisk steps towards the house. It takes a minute for me to register what's going on. Then it hits me, and I'm scrambling after him.

"No!" I exclaim, and I grab his arm and pull, but he keeps walking as if I'm not even there, almost dragging me along behind him. "Shhh, don't wake the neighbors." he says to the darkness in front of him, not even turning around to look at me. "Kakashi please stop." I say. He goes up the porch steps. I pull his arm harder, but he's like a ton of bricks.

"Kakashi!" I exclaim hysterical. "I'm going to break every bone in his body." he says flatly, reaching for the door knob. In a last burst of desperate energy, I throw myself in front of him, pressing my body against the door, arms outstretched prepared to be crucified.

"Kakashi, stop!" I beg him, my voice trembles and he balls his hands into fists. Now, I see the fury in his eyes. "Why?" he almst shouts, his gaze blazing into mine. Because I don't love Asuma anymore than I can live without you, now. Because you're satisfied with Anko and this is supposed to be happening to me for being greedy and disrupting the flow of things. "Because she calls you Kaka." I say and my voice cracks.

He kisses me. And it takes the breath out of me. And it's right. And it's sweet. And it's perfect. His lips are soft and melt against mine like butter. His body melts against mine as if we are two pieces in a puzzle finally finding one another. His scent overwhelms me, a strong spicy cinnamon, wraps around me like a comfort blanket.

We lie down in the grass. And I know it's absurd, but I can't let him get away. Because really right now, I need him more than I want him. And it's scary that really, the only time I ever feel wholly complete as a person is when I'm with him. When our bodies are connecting like this.

He takes me to Heaven and back. We ride on constellations, my nails digging into his back so that I don't fall off. We transcend planes and it becomes a sacred thing. The night is the only thing that shields us. And we rocket back down to earth, I wipe the sweat from his forehead gingerly with my hand and he drops a kiss on my forehead, And it would feel like surgical excision of an organ for him to leave me now, but the dark is fading around the edges like an old photograph, and the sun might soon burst through it's filaments.

I want to tell him that I love him. Instead we get dressed, and he goes giving me a wistful smile because the moment can't be broken with words. We both feel this. My skin feels alive and dancing, and I think I can see an electric current sparkling off of him as he lopes off into the remaining black, head bowed, hands in pockets. I love him. I'm sure.

When I get back into the bedroom Asuma is sitting bolt upright, rubbing his face, eyes squinting as if looking for human shapes in the darkness. "Asuma..." I say. "Where were you?" he asks, and his voice is thick with sleep so the lie comes easy. "In the bathroom." He nods and sinks back down beneath the crumpled covers. "Come back to bed." says the single tuft of hair protruding above the covers. I nod, swallow hard and pad over to him, peels the covers back and slide under. He moves towards me, almost instantly roping his arms around my body from behind. But it doesn't bother me as much as it would have been before or if I had not still been holding on to the memory and trembling over someone else's passion. Asuma burrows his face in my neck, and inhales, then stiffens. "You smell like cinnamon." I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep.

Where there you have it guys.....long time coming, eh? I truly apologize for that. But I recently hopped back onto the literary band wagon on account of scorpiowarrior. Lots of love to you, homie, lol. *says in deep theatrical voice* Next time on passing strangers....sorry, just always wanted to say something like that.