Adult-FanFiction.org : Naruto

Shadowplay and Hurricanes	By : CosmicStorm14 Category: Naruto > Het - Male/Female Views: 2912 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Naruto, including any of the characters, locations or themes in this fiction. I receive no money for publishing this fiction.

Chapter List
- 2
- 3
- 4
It was many months before Temari returned to the Leaf Village. The leaves were starting to brown and the days were already growing shorter. She was to be placed in the Land of Fire for some time and her youngest brother had been conversing with the Hokage to arrange for her a semi-permanent place to stay. She had been accompanied by Kankuro and Baki who had helped her with her things and stayed a day while she settled before returning home.
The thought of Shikamaru had taken to the back of her mind since she had arrived. She had thought of him on occasion while they had been separated but had no way of knowing how he had been in the time since they had last met so she found herself churning the same questions over and over in her mind. Had he been with Shiho? Had he decided to stick to their decision not to see each other anymore? Had he told any of his friends about them being together? In any case, there was no point worrying herself over the thought of him when she had her relocation and her new missions to think about.
That was until she bumped into Kiba and Shino at Ichiraku Ramen. She had never been able to read Shino so would not have noticed if he had been acting strangely. Kiba, however, she was sure was slightly drunk in the middle of the afternoon and his unbrushed hair and bloodshot eyes suggested that he had been for some time. They were all too pleased to welcome her back to the village and spend lunch in her company. Neither of the boys made any snide comments or jokes about her which made her suspect that they knew none of the more intimate details of her last visit, though she couldn’t be sure without asking directly and that was not something she was inclined to do. Instead, she asked them about the smell of sake on their breath. Kiba explained to her that it had been Shikamaru’s birthday, and they had thrown him a little party at his quarters of the Nara household seeing as his parents were away for a little while.
It was no use trying to stop herself for very long. Before the day was out, she gave in and cursed herself for turning up at his door.
“You didn’t tell me it was your birthday,” she said to him as he opened the door, bleary-eyed as Kiba and Shino had been.
He invited her inside and offered to pour her a round of tea. The floor was littered with rubbish and thrown cushions, empty bottles and spilled snacks, and he had to clear a space for her to sit as he brushed all of the mess from the table onto the floor. She thanked him for the tea and made herself as comfortable as she could in his home. There were others of the Nara clan at home, but Shikamaru, Shikaku and Yoshino’s quarters shared no common room with the others. This meant that when his parents were away, Shikamaru had their place to himself. The front of the house faced the paths back into the village and gardens tended by the elders of the clan. The rear of the buildings faced the Nara Clan Forest, inhabited by deer and marking the boundary to the Leaf Village. It was a relatively isolated home. The tranquillity, the solitude… it suited him. Even when it did smell of sweat and stale alcohol.
“I didn’t even get you anything.” She had worried about their conversation being awkward but the words came easily enough when she reminded herself that they were, first and foremost, friends.
He coughed to clear his aching throat. “You didn’t need to. I didn’t even know you were coming.”
“Did you get anything nice?”
“A few bits, I don’t really go in for birthday presents…” He had been gifted new clothing from his mother, new kunai from his father, and the rest of the Nara clan had pitched in to purchase him shogi set with jade pieces on a jet board. He was grateful for the generosity, of course, but had never considered the anniversary of a birth to be much of a reason to celebrate.
“I know the only thing you want,” she eyed him, and he held her gaze a little longer than necessary as he tried to read what she meant. She had been so bold the last time they had met, is she really offering…? He was wrong. “You want to do absolutely nothing, and spend all of your time staring at the clouds and ignoring your responsibilities.”
He laughed and looked away to hide the flash of embarrassment on his face. “That sounds pretty good to me.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Take a week off. Do nothing. You deserve it.”
“You mean just… not leave the house? Tell everyone I’m sick or something?”
“You don’t need to tell anyone anything. Worry about that later. Just do nothing.”
He thought about this for a moment. How tempting it was, the thought of taking some time off to ignore the world. Could he really get away with that?
“Of course you can,” Temari assured him. “I’ll do nothing with you. Let’s take a week out.”
“I have responsibilities, Temari,” he protested. “I have to think of my duties to the Leaf Village.”
“And what about the Leaf’s duties to you? You know you don’t have to be at Tsunade’s beck and call twenty four hours a day.”
“People will notice I’m gone.”
“So what? Kankuro and I used to do it all the time. When everyone was worried about Gaara this and Gaara that, we used to sneak away and no one would care. Everyone’s too busy with their own issues.”
Shikamaru considered this. The Leaf wasn’t in any immediate danger and he did deserve a break, especially around his birthday. He might not be so lucky as to get such an opportunity again for a long time. He pictured telling Temari no and going about his week as normal, then pictured taking her up on her offer and doing nothing but watching the skies with her for a few days….
“You are such a bad influence on me,” he told her with a smile. She had twisted his arm.
She agreed to help him clean the house after his friends’ antics and stay with him, ignoring the world, until his parents returned home the next week. Perhaps her company could serve as a sort of gift.
Taking the time to speak to him when not drunk or sexually frustrated was a nice change of pace in their relationship. She came across scattered polaroid pictures of the events of the evening before and she collected them to pile alongside the camera atop his little stack of gifts. He took the time to show her what was supposed to go where, what could be thrown away and what needed to be cleaned, and she was happy to do most of the work for him seeing as he was obviously a little worse for wear. When he blinked, he held his eyes shut for so long she wondered if he were falling asleep and after every five minutes of cleaning, he would need to take a rest on the couch to settle his head. The Nara house being full of medicines, he was able to cobble together a resolve of sorts to settle his stomach, but energy still escaped him. He was not the most motivated person at the best of times, especially not when harbouring a self-inflicted illness.
Shikamaru had protested against Temari’s idea to open the windows to let some fresh air in, but he had not won. As a compromise, they kept the shutter-blinds closed over the open windows to keep the light low so he could forget that it was daytime in the rest of the village. With their light coming from some lit oil lamps instead of outside, it was easy to be oblivious to the fading daylight. Day faded to evening, then to night.
After his very busy and tiring day of not leaving the house and watching Temari doing all of his work, he was eager to sleep. Temari was kind and offered to stay on his sofa, but that wouldn’t do. She was a guest in his home and, as a female guest, surely the chivalrous thing to do was to give up his bed for her. Neither of them mentioned the idea of sharing his bed exactly, but instead made a fuss of collecting all of the pillows and cushions in the house to make the living room as comfortable as possible for whoever would draw the short straw. Soon, the sofa spilled down across the floor which was carpeted in blanket and softness from wall to wall.
“I’ll sleep here, then,” Shikamaru decided, landing his backside in the sea of cushions stubbornly. Temari joined him.
“I can’t possibly throw you out of your own bed. I’ll sleep here tonight.”
The pair discovered that after this last little burst of energy neither of them particularly felt like sleeping, so they both stayed for some time together on the bed that they had made on the living room floor. It wasn’t like it had been before. The last few times they had spent together, they had been swept along in the moment and it had all felt very urgent, like satisfying an itch. Here in his home, there was no hurry. They had all of the time in the world. Though comfortable and peaceful, it made getting close to her more difficult. He could no longer blame his actions on frustration or intoxication and if he wanted to be close to her then he would have to admit that he might actually quite like the girl. And he did want to be close to her.
When the night pushed them in the direction of sleep, he took off his shirt before lying back onto the pillows. He lifted one arm to offer her a space to rest against his shoulder and she took him up on his kind offer. She nestled in against his chest and his arm lowered to lay a hand around her. They lay in silence for some time in the dim flickering light, Temari tracing her finger around the blush of hair that lay in a ring around his nipple. The quiet was broken occasionally by the hoot of an owl or the bark of a deer but otherwise the room was filled only with the sound of their breath. He kissed her on the top of her head.
“What’s going on with us then?” Temari heard his heart pound faster as soon as the words fell from his mouth, as though he was already regretting letting them slip.
She swallowed. “Do we have to have that conversation right now?”
His only reply was his racing heartbeat, his chest thumping against her ear. She carried on. “I don’t think what we do needs to have a definition. I enjoy your company, I enjoy your body, but I’m not looking for...” she tried to avoid using the word commitment. “We shouldn’t have any kind of relationship at the moment.”
She listened to his heartbeat slow until at last his answer came.
“OK.” His tone didn’t give away whether this was the answer he was looking for. “So this week… sex?”
She laughed to him, “yes.” Of course that was what it all boiled down to for him. He must have been waiting all evening to ask.
“Cool. Kissing?”
That one came as more of a surprise. “If you like.”
“Can I tell you you’re pretty and stuff?”
A surprise again, but not an unwelcome one. “Look,” she used a decisive tone, as though setting out the boundaries of a contract. “This week you can do anything you like. If it feels right, do it. You want to call me a whore and fuck me against the wall? Do it. You want to treat me like a princess and pretend we’re in love? Do it.” That would let her off the hook. “This week doesn’t count.” Sure, she no longer had alcohol as an excuse, but now she could say that she was simply playing along with his game if she showed any weakness. Why did she even consider it a weakness? Why was holding him close to her so much more terrifying than fucking him?
“Good.” He broke her train of thought. “Because I have been dying for a smoke all day.”
“You don’t smoke.” She lifted herself from him as he shuffled to rummage through his pockets for Asuma’s lighter.
“I don’t smoke in front of you,” he corrected her. “But this week doesn’t count.” He flashed her that teasing smile and lit up while she rolled her eyes at him.
“Did you think I’d lose respect for you if I knew? Because you’d be right.”
“You know I don’t care what you think of me,” he lied. “And you never had any respect for me to begin with.”
Unable to tell if he was joking, she let his words hang in the air. He took a deep drag of his cigarette, filling his lungs with the smoke before letting his chest deflate and leaning his head back to watch the clouds escaping his mouth play in the air currents and gradually disperse to nothing. When he lifted his head again, it was to look at her.
“Can I see you with your hair down?”
Well it is his birthday… She reached to pull out each of her hair ties. Usually she even slept with her hair up to avoid having to redo it the following morning, and her tangles tugged at her scalp. Even without their restriction, her hair stuck in its assigned bunches until she shook her hands through her locks to let them fall together. He was watching her the whole time.
She nodded to him. “Your turn.”
“That wasn’t the deal.” He inhaled again.
“Are you kidding? That’s not fair.”
“Yea well… life isn’t fair.” He was toying with her.
“It’s your turn!” She lunged for him and his natural instinct to cover his face only turned his ponytail towards her where she could catch it.
“Ow! OK, stop it!” He gave in and held his cigarette between his teeth while he took his own ponytail down. He looked very different with his black hair hanging down around his face. “Happy?”
Very.
She was sat upon her feet now, her hands on her knees, and he settled back down onto the pillows, one hand behind his head and one knee raised. It was the position he usually took when he was watching clouds, except this time he was watching her. He considered her with a steady gaze, and Temari thought that in the moment he looked very like his father. Perhaps it was how the nicotine steadied his nerves or how he could finally relax now he didn’t have to hide his craving, but holding a cigarette made him seem older somehow. It was still a detestable habit, of course, but if he wanted to destroy his own body then that was his problem, not hers. As far as she was concerned, his body only had to hold up for a few days.
“What else do you want to see?” She offered.
“I’d quite like to see you with your lips around my cock.”
His confidence took her by surprise and a quiver of shock ran down the back of her neck to between her legs.
Only when she rose slowly to her feet did he break eye contact to look upon her body instead of her face. She untied her sash first and dropped it to the floor, adding the mix of coloured fabrics that were spread out below them. He lay still, moving only to bring his cigarette to his mouth, and watched her as though she were an art exhibit to be pondered over. Were she not so comfortable in the dark, soft atmosphere they had made for themselves, she might have been self-conscious under his gaze. But not now. She undid the brooch fastenings of her dark kimono and let that, too, fall to the ground. It puddled around her feet and she found herself stood in only her underwear, and semi-see-through mesh armour. She continued to slowly remove her armour and then her bra, the whole time watching him watching her.
The lamp light flickered in a way that picked out the shadows around him so sharply that she couldn’t be quite sure if she could see the folds of his trousers moving. He must have seen her glancing there, because as soon as this thought crossed her mind, he moved a hand downwards to touch himself there through the fabric. It felt good. She was used to making men bow to her or run from her, but making them hard for her was a whole different kind of power.
She stepped out of the crumpled mass of her clothing, now with only a single garment on her body. It happened to be a pink pair. She had never been the kind of girl to enjoy pink things in general (and had actively avoided them when she was younger in case people might make assumptions on her character based on her aesthetic preferences) but found that this particular strong fuchsia shade quite suited her. By the time she was on her knees and close to him again, his cock was in his hand and she watched his erection grow. She leaned forward onto her hands, letting her breasts fall just a few inches out of his reach. She could smell the salty warmth of his body from here and put a hand to the top of his thigh to ask him to let her take over.
His erection pulsed hard in her hand, thick enough now that she could only just touch her thumb to the tip of her middle finger when she squeezed. She traced her hand up and down the length of him, watching her own fingers manipulating his soft, malleable foreskin, covering and then revealing the head of his penis. She held her face low and close to her work, partially to tease him and partially so that she could have a little time to watch. She drew a second hand across his crotch, brushing against a thicket of black pubic hair and then down to feel his balls. He moved a leg to give her greater access, but his undone trousers meant that his movements didn’t really help. She paused her work a moment to pull his clothing down to where he could kick it off, before carrying on where she was before.
A small bead of precum shone in the lamplight at the tip of his erection and she pressed a thumb to it. It stuck to her, so she spread the glistening lubrication around the head of his penis and heard him swallow loudly at the feeling. She lowered her head and opened her mouth slightly, but stopped just short of his flesh to look up at him. His expression begged her to carry on and she couldn’t help but give an evil smile. She put her tongue out towards his cock but stopped just short of it again. This time he let out a pleading moan and bucked his hips forwards. She took him into her mouth, but from the base first. Her hand continued to play with him, while her tongue spread her wetness around his girth, kissing and licking from the base upwards and stopping just short of his head. She had never done this before, and wanted to take her time to enjoy it.
When his cock was wet and slippery under her hand, she lowered her fingers to squeeze around the base of his erection and took the top of it into her mouth. There was no chance of his full length fitting into her mouth so she didn’t attempt to test her limits yet. How undignified it would be to gag. Instead, she let her tongue play around his tip while she let her hand provide him with friction where it was too low for her lips to reach. She enjoyed listening to the noises he made because of her gift to him, and got into an easy rhythm of pushing her tongue around him as she took him into her mouth then sucking hard as she pulled away. It was a surprisingly enjoyable sport (though a little tough on her jaw) until she felt a hand land softly on the back of her head and try to press her down. She slapped his arm away and stopped her movements to scowl at him. He was still inside her and when she was sure he was looking, she pressed her teeth lightly against his erection and peeled back her lips in a snarl to give him a view of his most sensitive flesh at her mercy between her jaws.
With him shown his place, she carried on her rhythm, speeding up whenever his noises indicated he was ready. He must have enjoyed something about being at her mercy because her wrist wasn’t yet sore by the time she felt his body stiffen, and heard his jaw click with tension. A single strained word forced out between his tight breaths asking if she was ready – how sweet, he doesn’t want to take me by surprise – but of course she couldn’t reply in words. She glanced up to catch his eye again and pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth to save herself from choking, carrying on her task as well as she could.
His cock jumped in her hand as he came, so she could almost feel cum being propelled through it before it even reached her mouth. Her face involuntarily screwed up at the taste of it, hot globs of cum pooling around her tongue and filling her mouth with its strange slimy/fizzy texture. When she was sure he was spent, she forced it down her throat and ran her tongue again over the head of his penis to clean up any that remained. He flinched at this, obviously over-sensitive with post-coital release, so she sat up and let his erection subside on its own. Her mouth was empty, but the taste of it still hung in her tongue like chillies and peppermint. He smiled to her and she returned it, wiping the moisture from around her mouth onto the back of her head.
“Happy Birthday,” she said to him, crawling forward to kiss him on the mouth. He seemed to be trying to hold his lips shut, pulling away from her slightly, but she forced her tongue through his lips to make him taste himself as he had done to her the last time they had been together.
*             *             *
The morning came before either of them had even noticed that they had fallen asleep. Temari woke first, but stayed where she lay in a half-dream until Shikamaru began to stir. She thought he had woken once in the night but realised he was only talking in his sleep, mumbling something about exams and clouds. This time she knew he was really awake when she saw his eyes open. It was the first time they had ever woken up together.
“What do you want to do today?” She asked him.
“Nothing.”
The blinds remained closed all day and the couple barely moved from their “bed”. Neither did they dress, wrapping in blankets to venture to the kitchen for food, before returning to the living room floor. She made a point of removing all of their clocks from sight so they would have no inkling of time passing. He showed her his new Shogi board to pass the time, and they had a few games. She was one of very few people who could challenge him and he loved her for it. He was one of very few people who could beat her and she hated him for it. The smooth, jade runes were clouded with a smoky translucency and laced with little trails of white and green. The polished jet board underneath was lined with white quartz to mark the parameters of the boxes.
They played with the polaroid camera and added more pictures to his collection. She agreed to be the subject of the images on the condition that he showed the pictures to no one. He requested some of her naked body being covered only by her fan, but the rest were spontaneous. She lay naked on the cushions, her hair spread out messily behind her, while he sat above her with the camera in one hand a cigarette in the other. He tapped the cigarette to allow ash to fall onto her body, dirtying skin between her breasts. Her only reaction was to place a hand affectionately on his thigh and he stole a picture of her like this; her gently smiling eyes in the top of the frame, her naked chest in the lower half.
They fell into a slow sex which merged seamlessly into sleep. And so the time went on, the two slipping between love, sleep and play, with no concept of time passing or any life going on in the outside world. Spending this kind of time together, there was no room for any shame. She didn’t worry about pushing out her chest around him, he didn’t worry about sucking in his gut around her. There was no escape from being immersed in each other’s habits; how Temari snored when she slept on her front and how Shikamaru would hum the same fragments of songs over and over, always out of tune. This is what it would be like if we were really together, thought Shikamaru.
*             *             *
On the second day, they decided to leave their cave in search of food. Shikamaru knew there was a little convenience store on the edge of the village, so they could stock up on supplies there with little risk of being discovered. At first Shikamaru offered to go alone, but Temari refused. They decided to share a shower, to wash the stink of stale sweat and sex from their bodies but ended up in the steamy room much longer than anticipated. He got distracted by playing with her breasts after they slipped around under his grasp, soapy and warm. She played with the streams of water trickling down through his chest hair. They tried to experiment with sex in the shower but found the water surprisingly non-lubricating and after nearly knocking each other out a few times by slipping on the tiles between bursts of laughter, they decided to give up and do it on the bathroom floor instead.
Their bodies blushing with heat from the room, bruises stood prominent against her chest, his shoulders, her back, his thighs. They had been careful not to leave any marks where they couldn’t be hidden under clothing but it gave Temari a kick to mark her territory with her teeth in this way, and of course if wouldn’t be fair if he wasn’t allowed to return the favour. In the adrenalin of the moment the pain felt amazing and inflicting damage like this was just another way to vent some frustration on each other.
They dressed and put each other’s hair back up to an acceptable standard. It seemed a lot of effort to go through now that they were used to spending so little energy in a day, but perhaps this irksome errand could be one of their games as well. It was Temari who suggested they wore each other’s underwear to leave the house in.
How strange it was to be back out in fresh air and daylight. But it still didn’t seem as though they were really a part of the Leaf Village again yet. It was as though they were walking through the town in a dream. They passed a few villagers who nodded good day and the two were trying so hard to look as though nothing was out of place that they must have appeared really quite obviously hiding something. They were almost at the store when they bumped into a familiar face. How troublesome.
“Hey, you two!” Naruto was as energetic as ever, bounding over to them. “Where are you going?”
“My uncle is making kenshin soup and ran out of shiitake mushrooms,” Shikamaru lied, hoping his face didn’t show it. “I offered to collect some more for him, and happened to bump into Temari.”
“Oooh,” the jinchuriki spread this word out slowly, flicking his narrowed gave between the two of them as though he was concentrating hard to try to work out a puzzle. “Are you two sure you’re not a date this time?”
Temari rolled her eyes at him. “You need to drop that ridiculous thought, Naruto.”
“She’s right,” Shikamaru agreed, feeling the satiny lace of Temari’s pink underwear between the cheeks of his butt, “there’s nothing going on between us. You’re imagining things.”
This seemed to satisfy Naruto’s curiosity and he left them to their errand, wishing Temari good luck in her time in Konohagukure.
*             *             *
On the third day, there was a knock at the door. They were going to ignore it, but when the unexpected visitor heard no sound from the house, he knocked again and called through the keyhole.
“Shikamaru!” It was Choji. “Shikamaru, are you in there?”
Begrudgingly, they allowed their solitude to be interrupted and Shikamaru pulled on a pair of trousers while Temari snuck off to another room, out of sight.
“Just a second,” Shikamaru called to his friend. Choji was his best friend after all. He went to the door and was careful not to open it too wide, so not too much of the unusual living room was visible.
“Where have you been?” Choji had a look of genuine concern on his face and Shikamaru felt a sudden sting of guilt. He scratched the back of his head, searching his mind for an excuse but found none. “You know Tsunade’s been asking after you?”
“Yeah, sorry Choji, I’ve been kinda busy.” It was hard to look his friend in the eye but when he did glance up, he saw Choji looking behind him into the house.
“Why is it so dark in there? Is everything alright? Are those bruises?”
Shikamaru couldn’t find any words, but didn’t have to. Choji’s eyes widened, his jaw falling open as he stared behind his friend into the house. Shikamaru didn’t have to turn around to know what he was looking at.
“Hey, Choji,” Temari said sleepily. She had covered her nakedness only with one of his shirts, just long enough to reach the top of her thighs, her bare breasts pushing forwards against the fabric. She wandered across the living room to Shikamaru’s bedroom and landed so heavily on his mattress that sound of springs bouncing was clearly audible from the front doorway. “Shikamaru! Come back to bed!”
Shikamaru stood frozen to the spot watching Choji’s wide eyes dart between his friend’s naked torso and where the girl had just disappeared into his room, the realisation of the situation visibly washing over him as he began to blush red.
“You…! You…?” Choji couldn’t finish his sentence so Shikamaru interrupted.
“Yeah, I would appreciate it if you could maybe… keep this to yourself?”
But Choji looked as though he was dying to speak. “How long…?”
“It’s a one-time thing. It’s no big deal. But the point is,” he hurried the conversation along. Choji was his best friend but he could explain all of this to him in greater detail later. “The point is that I’m doing fine. Thank you for your concern. And I’ll be back to normal in…” he suddenly realised he had no clue what day it was or when his parents would be returning, “two to three days.”
Choji politely took his leave and as soon as the door was closed behind him, Shikamaru’s attentions turned to Temari who was now letting out a burst of laughter from his bedroom. He ran across the darkened, messy room to her, and found her with her face pushed into his pillows, trying to suppress her laughter.
“What did you do that for?” He shouted at her, trying to sounds serious despite the smile spread across his face.
She looked up from the bed, still dressed only in his shirt. Her jade eyes met his jet ones with such youthful brightness that she looked almost childlike.
“I thought it would be funny,” she said to him, knowing she was right.
He pounced on her.
“What if he tells people?”
“That’s the fun of it,” she explained. “Doesn’t it feel naughty and exciting to have this little secret bubbling so close to the surface?”
He considered this for a moment. “I guess so. You mean, knowing that we could be discovered at any moment?”
She nodded to him and he kissed her deeply. He picked her up from the bed and led to her his window. Pulling up the blind, she saw that the view here was of the paths from the Nara Clan household that lead back to the Village. Paths that any of his family, or villagers, could walk along at any time. He picked her up to sit her on the windowsill and stood between her legs as he had done that first night on the chest of drawers in the inn in the Land of Rivers. She removed his shirt from her own body so that her naked back rested against the window, and Shikamaru could look over the shoulder to watch the view of his garden path. No one saw them, but he loved that they might have done.
When they were finished, they went to lie together on the bed to recover their breath and Temari wasted no time in sitting above him. She was looking at her fingertips, choosing her longest fingernail. She picked the ring finger of her right hand and pressed it into the flesh of his abs, so hard that it broke the skin.
“Ouch!” He called out. “Be careful, I’m post-coital.”
“Shush.” She felt his skin peel and stick under her fingernail, little hot red jewels swelling up along the lines that she was scratching. He moaned and gritted his teeth against the pain, but didn’t try to stop her. Soon, it was finished. Across the flesh of his abs, carved into his skin, was the word “TEMARI.”
*             *             *
On the fourth day, the novelty of boredom and freedom was beginning to wear thin and for the first time, they opened the blinds by the windows and tried to tidy up the place a little. The house was more messed up now than it had been the day after Shikamaru’s party. Temari suggested they do a load of laundry and began collecting together some clothes from the floor before Shikamaru mentioned that he wasn’t exactly sure how to the washing machine worked.
“So do you just buy new clothes whenever your old ones get dirty or what?”
“My mother always does it.” He didn’t sound like he was ashamed of the fact at all, so she felt the need to tell him how wrong that was.
“Are you serious? You’re an adult now and your mommy still washes your clothes?”
Shikamaru shrugged.
“I feel so sorry for Yoshino,” if Temari ever had a son, there was no way she’d still be doing his laundry at that age. She was angry now, and his apparent indifference only made it worse. “Funny how you won’t fight girls because you think we’re too weak and pathetic to make it a fair fight, but you’re quite happy to let women do all of your work for you so you never have to learn basic human tasks to take care of yourself.”
He tried to ignore her outburst, using his gender to explain his ignorance. “Well it’s easy for you. You already know how this stuff works; you’re a girl.”
“I know how this stuff works because my parents are dead.” Did he think women were just born with this knowledge? She suddenly wished she had never helped him clean up after his party. It had obviously given him the wrong impression. “I’ve been looking after my little brothers my whole life. There’s no way I’m looking after you too.”
“Hey, you don’t have to look after me. I just thought that while you’re here…”
“While I’m here, I might as well make myself useful? Is that it? I can stick around as long as I can make you cum and clean up after you?”
“I didn’t mean-“
“You know what, Shikamaru? For a genius, you’re a fucking idiot.” She began to rummage through their mess to collect her things and pulled on her mesh armour and sandals.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to go and do my own laundry.”
We watched her in a flurry of bottled anger. She had that obnoxious, stubborn look on her face that meant there was no point arguing with her. She had already made up her mind. “You’re not coming back are you?”
“What do you think?”
“I thought this week didn’t count.”
She was already at the door. “Well, maybe I don’t want to play this silly little game any more. This could turn into something really unhealthy and I just can’t deal with that right now. And you’re disgusting when you smoke.” She spat the words at him and slammed the door behind her.
Suddenly alone in his house, the walls they had built to protect them from the outside world were crumbling and Shikamaru remembered the mess he was in Choji, the trouble he’d be in with Tsunade, what his parents would say when they came back. He was angry at himself, and let his head fall against the wall, gritting his teeth. Temari just couldn’t help but ruin everything whenever she was around. She was right, their relationship was unhealthy. There was nothing for it but to pick up the pieces and move on. He would explain as best he could to Choji, apologise profusely to Tsunade and clean up before his parents returned home.
In a few hours, the open windows let fresh air banish the smell of smoke and sweat and sex from the house. The bed on the living room floor was dismantled, the whole house was tidied and scrubbed and fresh. It was just like normal. Like the last week had never happened. Shikamaru made himself a pot of tea and lay his cup on the clean table next to the only thing left that didn’t have anywhere in his home that it could be tidied away to. He had thrown most of the ones like it away, but just couldn’t bring himself to get rid of this particular one. He picked the photograph up, and walked to his room with it. Those eyes like jade looking up at him, one shoulder forward where her arm was reaching out to touch him, the mark between her breasts where he had smeared ash across her heart. He tucked the picture underneath his pillow, and returned to finish his tea.
- 2
- 3
- 4
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Shadowplay and Hurricanes