A/N: Short little blurb.
Chapter Nex: The Sound of Her Voice
"Aaahn, yes… fill me up more… nngh—more! I'm just a helpless girl who—nf—who needs your strong cock to keep me safe! Yes—yes—oooooo… right there, just… fuck me, don't stop—"
She came to the end of the note and her sensual mewling instantly died away in tandem to her taking her finger off the record button. She read the note once more, making sure she hadn't missed a single word or syllable and that her inflections had hit when they were supposed to.
As far as instructions went, she hadn't seen one as detailed as this in quite awhile. There was the initial quote, followed by certain words outlined for her to show feeling and other words that were underlined to signify a dramatic pause… it was all really elaborate, probably took a lot of thought and consideration to cobble together.
But anyway.
She handed the recorder back to the man across from her, one who was wearing the most conspicuous overcoat she had ever seen, complete with this wide-brimmed hat that cast a shadow over his face. She only assumed it was a man because of the gnarled features of the hand that took the recorder from her.
"That'll be 68 dollars," she told him, and he suddenly paused in the act of slipping the recorder into one of his coats many inside pockets.
"I… 68? But I thought it was two dollars a word?" he questioned, and it was almost hilarious, the way this man shrouded in darkness and mystery sounded nervous.
"It is, and you wrote out the moans, made them into words," she responded evenly. "If that's too expensive, that's no problem—we can just delete that one there and I can do it over without the moans and—"
"NO!" the man suddenly yelled out, cinching his coat closed like she might try and wrench it back open. "I m-mean, no, that's… I-I'll pay, it's really not too much, eheh…."
When she smiled, it was quaint, and she accepted the notes he slid over the table between them.
"Another satisfied customer," she mused as the man shuffled away from under the canopy.
As she stowed the money away in the lockbox underneath her chair, she wagered she had time enough for one more customer, maybe two depending. Today was a slow day, customers trickled in and out like droplets of water; she saw some of the daily usuals sprinkled with faces both new and comically unnerved.
Sakura couldn't blame the newbies for the trepidation. Hell, she had felt the same when she first started this little side project of hers. Because honestly, recording whatever someone wanted for a fee? Ha. Right. Her best friend Ino Yamanaka had suggested it after catching her singing one random day a few months ago, but still, singing was one thing, it was an actual profession that people gladly paid for. Who would ever want to pay her just to speak?
Well, as it turned out, damn near half the village would.
The revelation had flipped Sakura's view of the world completely upside-down, instilling her with an amalgam of distress and invigoration. She was distressed because… damn, the amount of people who flocked to her for a recording could be downright suffocating most times, but then, on the other side of that coin, she felt invigorated because this previously hidden vocal talent of hers only seemed to grow the more effort she put into it. She was basically an under-the-table voice actor.
And then, as with most things that started out genially, there was the more sketchy end of this, the part that remained in shadow. Literally. The amount of people who came to get a recording decked out in the most comical garments to hide their identity was hilarious—especially the ones Sakura could easily point out as her old sensei's or people she generally knew around the village who were all too obvious with their voice or mannerisms.
Which only made sense. She was a ninja after all; being able to pinpoint certain characteristics was standard shinobi affair.
So it never ceased to amaze her when no one—not nare man or woman—knew it was her fulfilling their wildest spoken word fantasy. And it's not like Sakura went out of her way to be incognito. She had only donned a special head wrap to cover her pink hair, threw in some cloudy gray contacts, and switched out her normal attire for something more village friendly.
Her headquarters, such that it was, resided two alleyways down from the main street, a nice little alcove tucked off to the side that she had dressed up with a small circular table and a chair on either side, one for her, one for the customer.
From the onset, Ino had warned her that once she started down the road of pay-per-voice, there were going to be some odd ones here and there that requested the most wildest things to come out of her mouth, stuff that she never would have figured the human mind capable of concocting. And she wasn't wrong, only Sakura didn't think it would happen halfway into her first day.
"Sssh, sssh, come here, don't worry…Let momma clean up the mess you've made," she remembered saying, reciting the first perverted memo of her alternative career with a zeal and enthusiasm that inwardly stunned her. She knew reading such a thing should have sickened her, especially considering she was speaking the words to what appeared to be a forty-something year old man who looked more than ready to go home and put her spoken words to their true use, but after saying it for the third time (twice for practice, once for the recording) she came to the realization of… why the hell did it matter to her?
Most of the people who sauntered or crept into her place of business led double lives in their minds, fabricating and acting out the most sordid of fantasies without sound. And now, she was that sound to bring it all to life. Which was a pretty good feeling sometimes, being that outlet. Well… you know, when the recording wasn't something that Sakura almost felt positive was going to land her in hell.
After awhile, a certain kind of numbness came with the territory. If that first eye-opening request was the shot in the arm, then the band-aid that followed was her apathy toward the rest. Nothing she read stung or surprised her anymore and she robotically accepted whatever was written on the note. Because she quickly came to the conclusion that a healthy amount of detachment was how you managed yourself doing something like this; she couldn't let the feelings and emotions that people poured into their requests take root in her soul or cause her to reassess her own sense of morals. She was handed some of the most colorful, foulest, perverted, beautifully put together quotes she had ever read, and in order to do the words justice, she needed to shelve her own personal laundry list of hang-ups and lean into the role the recording required.
That's how she got through. That's how she kept her sanity in check. That's how she could read whatever without a shred of care.
Except for this one.
"Sometimes stuff can be a little hard, and that's okay… because, hey, you're alive, right? You made it through another day, you did it. And you know what? Tomorrow will be better. No matter what today has given you, tomorrow will be better. So k-keep it up, okay? Keep walking, keep breathing, and keep smiling. A-and if you can't… if it all gets to be a little too much and you can't do it for yourself, then do it for me until you can."
Those little pauses, the little hitches in tone that caused her to stutter… there were no instructions for her to do any of that. It was all her, struggling to come to grips with what she reading and what it spoke of the person who had presented it to her. Because that's what these notes often did, provide some sort of window into the life of the soul paying for her services.
Some days, this was the cheapest form of therapy that most could hope to obtain, however they obtained it. Her customers ran the gambit from glaringly self-destructive mommy issues to unfulfilled sexual urges and everything in-between, but this one, this note here was the first one that carried some semblance of… simply not wanting to exist anymore.
Which, by itself, really wouldn't have warranted such a response from Sakura, because she had trained herself to let the emotions of the written flow over her like a wayward breeze. A customers mental state was no more her problem than the ones who wanted her to record some escapist fantasy that revolved around murdering their boss and running off into the sunset with their lover. It was just words, just imaginations running rampant in need of an outlet.
Except this one had come from her teammate.
She stared blankly at the annoying blonde in front of her, eyebrows slowly knitting together with confusion. He was busy fishing around inside this weathered frog change purse to pay her and thus missed the way she glanced at the note, then up at him, and then back at the note again, unable to parse why he… what would even make him want this?
Not only was it massively depressing, but coming from Naruto? The Uzumaki Naruto? The bombastic village idiot? Self-proclaimed future Hokage?
Couldn't be.
"Hey, uh… how did you hear about me? About this?" she questioned casually, holding true to her recording tone so he wouldn't be able to glean who she really was. It was easy to ignore the fact that having been teammates for over a year now, who she was should have been something easily identifiable, but anyone acquainted with Naruto already knew he wasn't the brightest bulb in the room.
He half glanced up at her, flashing a nervous little smirk, then went right back to digging in his frog pouch. "Um, how did I…? Probably 'bout four days ago—these two dudes were talkin' about you at the ramen shop," he began distractedly. "Said you'd say anything for the right amount of money, no questions asked, no matter how dirty or embarrassin'… so I was like, shoot, why not?"
When he gave a listless shrug, Sakura blinked, somewhat pleased. Word of mouth was truly a powerful tool, but so was the luck of it all, that those two men would just so happen to be speaking about her business around Naruto.
"Well, they weren't wrong," she muttered under her breath, and she indicated to the note still held between her fingers, "but this, uh… is there like, something wrong or…?"
Sifting through some crumpled up notes, Naruto didn't even bother to grace her with a look this time. "I thought you didn't ask questions."
It was probably the first time Sakura had heard that tone come out of Naruto's mouth. His voice had dropped a couple octaves, there was a close-guarded rigidity attached to every syllable—she had clearly just stepped into the exact thing she had forced herself to become numb to: another person's problems. But… this felt different, and on so many levels, because it involved her cellmate. Shouldn't she be concerned when reading something like that? If there was a chance his mental wasn't there, or if he felt like…
So lost in thought, Sakura didn't realize that Naruto had dropped the necessary amount of notes on her table until he was already walking away. She wanted to call out, to tell him to come back and explain what was wrong, but her voice, the very thing earning her extra coin at the moment, refused to get the words out.
Because really… what words were there?
She tried telling herself that it had nothing to do with her, that whatever Naruto was going through, whatever inner demons he happened to be battling, none of it was her business. He was just another customer, just like the rest of them—just like the morbidly obese man shadowed in a trench coat taking a seat in the poor chair before her.
And just like that, she was back to business, albeit with a barely disguised look of abhorrence when she reluctantly took the note that was handed to her and read a scenario so morally wrong that she felt the urge to call the authorities.
"You, um… concerning the, er, the obvious age of the, uh…." Sakura kept looking from the note to the man, feeling things beyond gross at the toothy smile growing over his rotund face, almost as if he were delighting in her thinly veiled disgust, before she finally just gave in with a dismissive shrug. "Would you like me to pitch my voice higher for this or…?"
"Oh, please do," came the heavy response and there was so much tainted lechery in the mans tone that Sakura had to take a moment to get her mind right, closing her eyes for a count of five, then flaring them, all the wavering emotions dragged to the light with Naruto's note pushed into the shadows again.
"As you wish."
The End