Naruto wasn't home yet. Of course. I figured that would be the case. Sakura's luck was usually like that. The hours at her clinic were long, precisely because it was HER clinic. She was responsible for everything, and while she had a couple of assistants to delegate some of the tasks to, she still usually needed to stay late to get all the paperwork done. And payday was coming up for her employees too, so she'd had to work especially long charting out their hours and getting everything in order. It was exhausting, mind-numbing work, and even if she was decently good with numbers, her head was hurting like a bitch after all that time spent working out the sums and the withholdings. It was exhausting work, and doubly so since she'd had to cram it in at the end of a long, busy day.

And, of course, she came home to a dark, empty house. It seemed Naruto was still out on some job. He hadn't texted her about meeting up with friends, and he usually did leave her a message if he was going to be out late drinking or catching up, so it was safe to assume that a job had kept him busy. Maybe he would call if it looked like he wouldn't make it home before morning, but she didn't believe he had had any work very far away, so she assumed that he would make it home sooner or later. Still, it was surprising that she had returned before him, especially with how late it was. To her understanding, he'd only been going to do a shoot in the park. But maybe there had been unexpected complications, or maybe another job had come up and he'd gone to see about that. His working as a freelancer meant that sometimes his schedule was wide open, and sometimes he was having to juggle three or four projects at a time.

That unpredictability suited him, but this didn't mean Sakura liked it. Not that she could complain too much about erratic schedules, as a surgeon… Naruto had put up with her being on-call at the most inhuman hours when she'd been a med student, so it wasn't like she had a right to bitch about him not being home because of being out on an unexpectedly late job every now and then. Still, it was disappointing not to have him waiting for her when she walked in the door after such an exhausting day. But it wasn't his fault. Well, not more than the tiniest bit, anyway—even if it was work that kept him, he could have had the decency to let her know he'd be running late. But the root of the problem was her own job. She hated it so fucking much, and even when it wasn't a late, exhausting night like this, she came home miserable and self-loathing more often than not. She hated it. She wished she could quit.

Yes, Sakura wanted to quit her job. She really, really did. This wasn't the first time she had thought it, and she was certain that it wouldn't be the last either. But something always held her back. She had never yet been able to muster the resolve to do it, even if with every year that passed she felt more sure that this damn job was the root of all her present problems. She hated it. She hated it. Her hate for it surpassed expression, malignant and soul-withering loathing that had twisted and calloused her heart with a constantly simmering, relentlessly bitter anger and resentment. Hate, hate, hate. She hated her job so fucking much that she sometimes just wanted to scream. It was awful, it was grueling, and every appointment with a patient felt like a direct, personal attack. She hated it, she hated it, she absolutely goddamn hated it, and she hated it infinitely more for how much she made from doing it.

The money was what trapped her. She hated the money, yet she needed it. She hated it, hated it, hated it. Hate, hate, hate. God, it was awful. Again and again and again and again… her mind was going in circles, ruminating on these unhappy thoughts, her soul stewing in a swampy, sucking slurry of resentment and regret. If she wasn't careful, she would get dragged down, down, down into a miserable emotional trough. She was a little neurotic by nature, a little bipolar, and this stress and these frustrations exacerbated that to unparalleled heights. It was awful. Everything about her life was awful. She really did so dearly want to quit that fucking job.

But it all came back down to the money. She needed the money. She didn't have anything else going for her as a woman.

She didn't have anything going for her.

…God, Sakura hated getting into these moods.

She shook her head as she took off her shoes and coat, trying to banish these ruminant thoughts from her head. It wasn't healthy to dwell on this stuff, and she knew it. She had been trying to get better about that, too. Her stress levels were through the roof, and it wasn't good for either her mind or her body to constantly be getting into these angry, gloomy fits.

She needed a drink. No alcohol—not while she was by herself, anyway. That would only make her more depressive. No, she needed something sweet and fruity, something to trigger a simple rush of dopamine and light up the reward centers of her brain. Maybe she could make herself a smoothie. She kept as fit and ate as well as was reasonably possible for a woman who worked the kind of hours that she did in the kind of job she had, and while Sakura knew of course that it was a bad habit to rely on cheap sugary gustatory stimulation to trick her caveman hindbrain into making her feel happy. And even if a fruit smoothie would be healthier than many of the alternatives, it was still inferior to a properly happy and healthy lifestyle.

Well, perhaps happiness was elusive no matter where or when one lived. By nature, it was a state of arousal and could not be maintained for long periods of time. Hormone levels would eventually reset to the baseline even if the stimulus was sustained, and the emotional state would return to a neutral mode: merely an awareness of existing. One couldn't stay constantly happy any more than one could stay constantly horny. The brain could not produce the appropriate chemicals indefinitely, and the body was not designed to maintain constant emotional arousal. If only because of the constraints of biochemistry and neurophysiology, happiness could never last forever. Contentment was a better standard to live by, and a more realistic state of mind to aim for.

Admittedly, Sakura was no more content than she was happy. There were good things in her life, certainly, and if forced to sit down and reflect, she could think of many ways in which she was fortunate and many things for which she could say she was grateful. But there were also some things she hated about her life as it now was, and this hatred for those things invariably poisoned all the rest of her mentality, psychical pollution seeping through her mind and leaching all gladness and all color from her world. And coming home to an empty house after an especially long, difficult, and unpleasant day at work brought those worst feelings to the forefront of her mind, baiting a neurotic personality into the obsessive reiteration of those thoughts, Sakura thinking over and over and over to herself that she hated her job and wanted to quit.

She sighed as she opened the freezer. She had been getting more serious about this idea lately. At first, it was no more than a gripe without substance, an expressive kvetching intended to elicit neither sympathy nor advice but merely to be heard and gotten out of the speaker's head. But these days she had been considering it more carefully and earnestly looking into alternatives. It was almost constructive. They had been budgeting carefully, and they weren't planning to try for a kid yet, so they had some money saved up, and even if she didn't have a different job path ready for herself immediately upon closing the clinic, she would have time to find something and sort matters out. Of course, she was fastidious and conscientious by nature, and she did not like to do things carelessly. If she were going to leave her practice as a plastic surgeon, she would want to have the alternatives ready immediately upon leaving. Anything else would be unacceptable.

It would be hard to find a job that paid as well. Sakura specialized in reconstructive surgery, and while she had a good level of general medical knowledge, she was neither certified nor qualified to go into practice as any other kind of doctor or surgeon. She would need to take classes, get approved and licensed… there were countless hoops and miles of red tape that needed to be surmounted to start out in any medical field, and coming from plastic surgery of all areas, she would not be taken the most seriously. And there weren't many fields that would pay as handsomely as often as plastic surgery did. Because most of the procedures she did were elective, she could charge an arm and a leg without feeling (too) guilty about it. Especially since most of her clients tended to be on the wealthier side.

Well, while Sakura had been putting a lot of thought into this, she hadn't reached a solid conclusion. She was only halfway to the point of practical and emotional preparedness where she would feel comfortable closing up the practice and finding a new line of work. The best (or worst?) case scenario would be Naruto becoming successful enough to support them both by himself, so that she could just quit to become a stay-at-home mom. While one part of Sakura saw an appeal in such a path, other parts of her worried that without her earning power, Naruto would lose interest and…

Sakura grimaced, stepping back from the blender. She was going down that train of thought again. She really should have learned better by this point.

"Damn it, Shizune…" Sakura muttered. "Even if you were my mentor…"

She was pissed off at the woman. That chance encounter with Shizune, who had been the one to first convince Sakura to go into plastic surgery, had been what finally cemented the woman's conviction to quit. That was what had driven her hate for her job into overdrive.

It had been at a conference earlier that week. Sakura had crossed paths with her former mentor and instructor, Shizune. The woman had drawn her into the conversation, ever pleasant and personable, flattering her former pupil with many compliments about what she had heard about her skill, and before Sakura realized it, Shizune had slyly talked her into giving her a discounted appointment for breast enhancement.

Sakura was still indignant. Shizune had been the one to talk her into pursuing this career! Shizune was the one who had convinced her that there were good and noble things that one could do as a plastic surgeon! And now Shizune used their relationship to get herself a discount on breast enlargement. What the hell? Was this really what it had all been about? Was that all it came down to?

Sakura glowered as she turned off the blender and poured out her smoothie, gritting her teeth as she remembered the woman's disarming smile. Shizune wasn't unattractive by any means. Not that much older than Sakura, and possessed of a perfectly nice body. A little on the slender side, maybe, but Sakura had always thought Shizune looked just fine the way she was. Hell, Shizune's bust was at least a tad bigger than her own.

But the woman wanted breast enhancement. She wanted to make them bigger, or "better", or whatever…

God, Sakura hated this.

She downed the smoothie with a grumble, wondering what was taking Naruto so long.

That was when her phone buzzed, alerting her to a message. She nursed the treat and felt her bad mood start to weaken in the face of the sugar, and she checked her phone. There was a notification for a text. She read it.

'On my way home. It was a late night. U still up?'

It was from Naruto. Sakura's mood improved as she read this, and she tapped out a quick reply. She was stressed from work, and while the smoothie would help, she could do with venting some of those frustrations.

'Yes. I'll be waiting for you, honey3'

Feeling a little mischievous, Sakura tugged on the collar of her blouse, stretched the neck out, and snapped a quick photo down the front of her shirt. She checked the picture before attaching it—yes, it came out alright. She felt a twinge, looking at the picture of her cleavage. Even with a designer bra specially made to accentuate smaller busts, her rack looked singularly underwhelming to her; she was almost tempted to delete the photo.

But, no. She was tired, but she also wanted to get these frustrations out of her system. A quick fuck from her husband was as good a way as any to make her feel better after a miserable day like today, and Naruto always insisted that he liked her body. She was sure he would appreciate the pic, and that he would get the point and come home ready to ravish her.

Yes… God, she just needed him to fuck her. Maybe that would cheer her up.

She attached the photo, then sent another short message.

'It was getting awful lonely'

Accompanied by the snapshot down the front of her shirt, the implied meaning of these words became something much different from what it would have been if it were just the text. It acquired an energetic, flirtatious tone, sounding more playful than Sakura honestly felt, making it seem like all she wanted was his dick and some basic, very physical loving.

Both readings of the message were truthful in their own way, but the truer interpretation was downplayed by the picture—this was quite deliberate on Sakura's part. And it would serve the purpose of getting her husband in the right mindset for what she wanted, anyway.

That was all she needed. A good, hard dicking would make everything better.

This was what she told herself, at any rate.