The door to the boys' apartment was unlocked when Sakura stomped up to the entrance. Instead of knocking, she let herself in with an irate huff of breath. She kicked her sneakers onto the linoleum floor, cursed when she tripped over her own feet on the way to the living room, dumped her backpack unceremoniously onto the floor, and struggled to unwind the scarf around her neck without accidentally choking herself out. Once rid of the fabric, she tossed it in a heap near her bag, dropping her jacket along with it before stalking over to the beat-up orange couch and flopping face first onto the threadbare fabric.

A short hiss left her as her face was met with a newer stain that smelled suspiciously like old ramen. Grimacing, sighing, and squirming to turn onto her back, she ignored the soft typing sounds coming from Sasuke, who was sitting quietly on the floor, chin resting on one knee, as he looked through black glasses at some coding project on his laptop on the coffee table.

"Hello Sakura," Sasuke greeted her lazily, fingertips hesitating a moment as he checked the meticulously neat notes he had taken from class earlier that day. She responded with nothing but a grunt.

The male typed for a few more minutes, frowned when his code failed, then flipped back and forth in the notebook. Leaning closer to his computer screen to track what line he was in in the Spyder application he sighed and rubbed at his tired eyes. During this period of time, Sakura was uncharacteristically silent.

Sasuke stretched his neck back until the hair on the top of his head brushed at her thigh. "Do you want to talk about it?" he asked gently.

She grumbled something similar to a no, and shrugging he moved to look again at his screen. Readjusting his glasses, he decided that if she wanted to talk about whatever was obviously bothering her, she would. Until then, he would continue to try and discern what the actual fuck an interpolation function was and how to appropriately utilize it.

He was in the middle of typing the said function, when she apparently decided it was time to vent.

"You know, the next time you go over to Shikamaru's to play dungeons and dragons, you need to tell his roommate he's a raging fucking asshole."

Sasuke's brows quirked. "I need to tell his roommate that Shikamaru is an asshole?"

"No, you idiot," Sasuke almost flinched at the tone she was giving him. "Tell the roommate that he himself is an asshole."

"Oh," Sasuke tilted his head back again, looking at the frustrated woman behind him. "Which roommate? Kiba Dog Breath, Angel Choji, or Weird Bug Shino?"

"Why does everyone you know have weird fucking nicknames?"

"Don't ask me, Naruto is the one who names everyone."

"Do I even want to know mine?"

Sasuke opened his mouth, Perky Tits Sakura was on the tip of his tongue, but noting the way her cheeks were still flushed from whatever was bothering her, he decided against it and shook his head. "So which roommate?" he said instead.

"Fucking Kiba." She hissed. He wasn't sure but it looked like there was some amount of wetness in her eyes that wasn't normally there.

"Dog Breath," he nodded. "I didn't know you knew him. Why is he an asshole this time?" He turned back to his work in the attempt to hide his smirk of amusement. He would not deny that the guy, was in fact, a raging asshole.

"I don't know him," Sakura stated, pulling one of the pillows discarded on the back of the couch to her chest. "He was harassing me on the bus."

Sasuke's black gaze swung around and searched her eyes in confusion. "Wait, what did he do? If you don't know Kiba, how do you know it was Kiba?" He knew Kiba was a grade A asshole, but he never knew the man to accost strangers.

Sakura nearly scoffed, seafoam green eyes glaring back at him. "I know it was Kiba because he said his name was Kiba." She punched into the pathetic pillow in her grasp. "And he was harassing me while I was minding my own business, trying to read."

"Harassing you how?" he didn't mean for skepticism to be present in his question, but the way her eyes narrowed at him he realized she felt he was doubting her.

"Because he asked if I was down to fuck him."

Black eyes widened and he shook his head. "Woah, back up. What did you do? What happened?"

"Jesus fucking Christ Sasuke," Sakura used the pillow and smacked him on the side of his head. "I didn't do anything. You know it's like a ten-minute ride from my apartment to here on the bus, and Ino is borrowing my car for work and –"

"I know that part."

"I swear I'll punch you if you don't shut up." He fell silent, knowing there was no real threat of violence against him. This was the girl who felt guilty about swatting at flies and cried any time she saw an animal hit along the highway. She waited a moment to see if he would continue with his interruption, but when he didn't, she continued.

"Like I said, it's a ten-minute ride on the bus, so to pass the time and take a moment to enjoy myself, I pulled my book out and was reading. And then, he wolf whistled at me from across the walkway." Her hands were worrying at the edges of the pillow, cradled back against her chest. "So I scowled at him with a 'what the fuck is that about?' face, and he said something along the lines of 'Baby if you want it that bad put your book down and sit on my face already' and proceeded to make inappropriate gestures at me with his fingers and his tongue." Her face was beet red, voice wavering as her jaw ground, and Sasuke realized that the wetness was her trying desperately to hold back tears.

"I told him to go fuck himself, which he just grinned about and said he wanted me to join him."

"What did you say to that?" Sasuke asked, and for the second time that evening, his words were taken as more of a challenge of her rather than a simple inquiry for the remainder of the story.

"Well obviously I said no!" she squeaked, mildly offended that Sasuke hadn't already come to that conclusion himself. Sasuke, who she had been kind of, sort of, unofficially, officially seeing in so much as they licked each other's tongues at any moment they were alone for more than thirty seconds, should be fully aware that she had less than zero interest in fucking literally anyone else. "The bus was still a few stops away, but I got off as soon as it stopped and he yelled his name at me as I left, saying I would be the one screaming it soon enough." She was frowning and breathing hard.

Sasuke sighed, closing his eyes. "If that ever happens again, you should stay on the bus." Her jaw dropped as he continued. "If the person harassing you like that got off the bus with you, they could easily overpower you."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Sakura sat up, pillow forgotten in her lap, glaring daggers at the man before her. His brows rose together, inhaling to elaborate, but before his mouth had a chance to open, she cut him off. "Do you really think I don't already know that?" her green eyes were nothing but glinting emerald slits. "Do you think, that as a woman, I am too incapable of realizing how much danger I could be in at any moment of time?"

Sasuke cringed and shook his head, pulse jumping at the insinuation. A few heartbeats passed before he was able to murmur, "I didn't mean it like that."

"Then try again."

He let out another breath of air, glancing down at his fingers. He wasn't sure what they were, what this… thing was between them. It wasn't something he had really ever felt before, so articulating was difficult for him. "I worry about you coming over here sometimes, especially when you have to take the bus, or it's late, or it's dark out. You're…"

Small, delicate, fragile, important, lovely, beautiful.

"I just worry that something would happen to you."

All the fight that she had been holding in her chest leached away as she exhaled and shrugged. "It is what it is." She let herself fall back onto the couch.

They were silent for a few minutes, both uncertain and concerned, thoughts racing.

"I'm sorry about Kiba. I'll talk to him; I've never known him to act like that."

She shrugged again, teeth grinding as she desperately tried not to look over at Sasuke. There were tears burning in the back of her eyes, there had been since the altercation took place, but she would be damned if she let them out. Especially here, in front of Sasuke. She absolutely hated crying, hated it the most when she was in front of another human person.

"Was your book at least goo before he interrupted?" Sasuke gently changed the subject, a move which Sakura was incredibly grateful for. His hands hovered back over the keyboard on his laptop.

She nestled into the couch, rolling on her side and pulling her knees up to her chest. "Yea, I really like this author. It's only the second book I've read by him, but my calculus professor absolutely loves them and recommended them to me at the beginning of the semester."

Sasuke immediately stopped typing, and turned to fully face her, now sitting cross legged in front of the couch. "Wait, don't you have Kakashi-sensei for calculus?"

She nodded.

"Sakura, please don't tell me you're reading one of those Icha Icha Paradise books."

Her mouth tilted into the first smile he had seen on her that day. "You've heard of it?"

Sasuke audibly groaned, sinking forward until his face was mashed into the orange cushion in front of him. "No wonder Kiba was getting fucking weird, Sakura, that's porn." His voice was muffled by the cushion, but a blush leaked into her skin at the statement.

"I-it is not!"

"It is." Sasuke retorted.

"No," she maintained, glaring at the back of his head through the blush. "It's a romance story."

Sasuke lifted his face up from the fabric, resting his chin in his palm lazily. "Yea, okay sure, whatever you want to call it."

She smacked him with the pillow again. "It is," she asserted, willing the heat on her skin to go away. "I don't usually like romance novels, but these ones have a really fantastic story line."

He snorted, mouth pulling up into something like a smirk. "If it's such a good story line, then tell me about it."

The way he was looking at her made her heart skip a beat and the heat rushed back to her skin. "What?"

"If it's not a dirty porn," he said simply, "then tell me about it."

Sakura shifted so that she could raise her chin, and although it was meant to be in defiance, he only saw it as adorable. "Well, it's about a man who has a lot of familial trauma that he's working through, and he meets a woman, who has a lot of self-confidence issues. They come together and are learning to trust people again."

"Right, where do they meet?"

"Excuse me?"

"In the story," Sasuke repeated, voice even as his eyes stared into her. "Where do they meet?"

"I can't see how that's hardly relevant." She deflected.

"Sakura."

She rolled her seafoam green eyes and blew air up into her bangs. "Fine, it was at a brothel -but only because he had been sold as a child to the Yakuza running it by his father who had outstanding debts."

"Right, and why was the woman there at the brothel?"

Sakura sighed again, but at his raised brow she acquiesced. "Because she was trying to reclaim her autonomy after she miscarried, and her husband cheated on her."

Sasuke couldn't stop the smirk kissing the corner of his mouth. "Of course, of course, reclaiming her autonomy." He paused for a moment, and Sakura thought she could see something like glee in his dark eyes. "Did the… rough and dirty sex that Kosuke and Ima engage in help her reclaim this… autonomy?"

The woman glanced away and mumbled something under her breath.

"What was that?"

She mumbled again.

"Sakura?"

"Oh, I wouldn't know because I don't read those parts!" She exclaimed, cheeks puffing out and red still blossoming on her face.

"How can you miss them?" He asked incredulously.

She floundered for words, hands pressing pink strands of hair out of her face, suddenly too warm under his gaze. "I-I just, I don't, they-" she closed her eyes in an attempt to calm herself. "I skip pages until they stop talking about sheathing their swords into the velvety softness of her scabbard." She was visibly flustered, and he couldn't help it.

He laughed.

The look of indignance on her face, the ever-present flush on her skin, the pout on her soft lips along with the knowledge that she refused to read the very scenes the pornographic novel was renowned for had Sasuke rolling onto his back on the floor. Laughter fell easily from his throat, deep and resonant, tears stinging the corners of his eyes.

"Stop it," she chided him. But he continued and before too long, she found herself smiling and chuckling too. "Seriously," she tried again. "Stop laughing, it's really not that funny."

"No, it's hilarious." He was crying he was laughing so hard. "You don't even read the sex scenes, Sakura, that's literally the only reason people buy those books!"

"Sasuke," she growled at him, irritation and dread of the Kiba interaction fully draining away. She rolled off the couch onto him, pinning him under her thighs. "Stop," she giggled as she caught his wrists. "Please stop laughing at me."

It took him a little while to calm down, face sore from laughing so broadly. He gently tugged one hand free from her grip to wipe at the water beneath his glasses. He couldn't stop the small smile that remained on his mouth as he looked up at her. "I'm sorry, you're just too cute." He offered and felt a pang of endearment as she attempted to scowl at him.

"Well, I'll have you know that Kosuke and Ima – Wait!" her jaw dropped, and her eyes widened. "I didn't tell you their names, how did you know their names?"

His smile shifted into a smirk. "I told you why people buy those books Sakura." His hand came up and settled on her thigh.

"I-I didn't know you had an interest in that type of… literature." She said softly, heart leaping awkwardly in her chest.

His smirk was almost wicked as he licked his lips and answered her. "That's because I don't read them on the bus."