Chapter Text
You were both sitting on your balcony, fourth floor up, with your backs against the wall and the clammy, summer night heat clinging to your skin. The tube of ice-cream sitting in between you had all but melted into soup an hour ago and neither one of you bothered to return it to the freezer.
“Let’s break up.”
It was well late at night, after midnight for sure, and the balcony tiles had grown warm and sticky against the naked skin of your thigh. It was a hateful summer - as all summer were in the Land of Fire - beating down on you with merciless heatwaves all throughout July, and so you had opted to shed your shorts in favor of parading around the house with a loose tank top and your panties. Shisui had undressed himself down to his training gear shorts he’d left lying around during one of the countless times he’d spend his days and nights here, along with an insurmountable amount of clothing crammed away inside your closet next to yours. Sometimes he’d flicker in and out within seconds, grabbing this shirt or those pants or the tanto strap he’d disregarded somewhere underneath your bed after coming home from a two month mission, all needy hands and impatience etched into tensed muscles. One time he had left his standard shinobi vest here — you had washed it and put it out to dry one night before bed only to find it gone the next morning you woke up, replaced with a scribbled note of a crudely drawn kissing face and a heart in its place.
He’d pop in one second, leave a messy bite on your jawline or a wet kiss on your nape and be gone the next, leaving behind the smell of his shampoo or the scent of the earth he carried wherever he went and you with a heart that throbbed with such salacious pleasure that the feeling spread from your sternum down to your navel.
It was the little things that left you chuffed. You never knew when he would pop up or when. You could be in the bathroom brushing your teeth and soaking in the bathtub, you could be cooking or just sleeping in during your lazy hours, lounging on the couch reading a comic or a book; you’d wait, every day, for that one, two seconds where you’d feel the familiar pull of space.
You expected him but you could never predict him — Shisui had a talent for catching you off guard and tonight was no different.
You wracked your brain, trying to find suitable words to respond with because you couldn’t stay quiet now, you had to say something, anything, everything but to stay silent. Your mouth opened and closed again, opened and closed, lips pulling into a smile too thin and dry to be anything truly genuine, but for some reason you also felt that you were smiling as ludicrous as it were. “Is this because I ate the left-over yakisoba from lunch? Shisui, really, you’re being dramatic.”
“What? No,” he said. “It’s not that — and anyway, I bought that for you.”
Because today was Friday and you had the next week off and Shisui always brought you food after you worked for two consecutive weeks with barely a day off when things got busy at the hospital and you had to be stretched thin and do jobs that weren’t in your jurisdiction and then some. As soon as you stepped foot inside your apartment earlier that day and found the man sitting next to you languish laying in the tatami floors in front of the open balcony door, letting the sun bathe his skin and scars, you had taken it for granted that this was going to be a normal week off — Shisui would try to stay off the mission roster and work more at the police force next to his cousins and uncle. He’d buy you breakfast in the mornings and you’d make him lunch to take into work, and then once he got off of work he would go to his house or come to yours, wash the troubles of the day away and you’d go on to do whatever it is you had planned for the night.
Normal couple shit you’ve been doing for the past eight months and two weeks you’ve been together, ever since you turned the occasional ‘sleeping-together-for-benefits’ arrangement turned into this when Shisui bought you strawberry seeds to plant on the empty ceramic pots sitting outside on your balcony for over two years along with a glass of expensive rose and a flower bouquet so large and with such variety that your apartment had been the epitome of a lofty spring day for the better part of a month. Even now, the dried, well preserved flowers hang upside down next to your bookshelf, a mixture of faded color and the first, brittle feelings of the first serious relationship you’ve had in your life.
“Hold on. I need to wear some pants if we’re going to have this conversation.” You got up, unsticking your skin from the warm tiles and grabbing the ice-cream soup to throw away. “You want a shirt?”
“Yes, please.”
“ Please. Well, now I know you’re being serious.”
“Shut up, can’t I be nice? Am I not nice?”
“Perish the thought, my love.”
You stepped inside the house, closing one of the balcony doors and leaving the other one open. You poured the melted gooey mess down the kitchen sink, threw the tube in the trash and made your way to your closet, relying only on the light coming from the bathroom to find your way, a habit you picked up from a mother who was always scared of the darkness, who would wake up panting and gasping for breath in the middle of the night if the light on the bathroom or the hallway hadn’t been left on, who would grasp around for the covers, for your little hands, for whatever it was she could grab on in order to ground herself.
Most nights you slept with the light in the bathroom on too — other nights however it seemed too strong against the shapeless darkness the night dunked your apartment in and so you closed it completely, leaving only the moonlight and the warm palm against your back, wide and warm, almost burning down the skin.
From the confinements of your closet you fished out a pair of shorts and one of Shisui’s shirts, black and stamped with his clan logo at the back. Briefly, looking down on the too large for your frame tank top, the strands slipping down your shoulders no matter how many times you pulled them up, threatening to expose one part or another, you entertained the idea about changing into one of your shirts, though you quickly waved the notion off.
Changing out of his shirt would require a level of chalantness you weren’t willing to convey out into the open, now, when the moment required vulnerability.
Strangely, you felt still, as if a time bubble had come down around your house and paused everything; the frail summer breeze against the leaves and the grass, the sound of cicadas you loved so much, even the quips between you and Shisui remained the same, even the calmness that had settled down on your own self was in and of itself some sort of an admittance, a recognition of this time bubble which would burst once the first peaks of the morning shuttered through the curtains in a handful of hours, long after Shisui would leave, because it was a fact that he was breaking up with you, that he wanted to break up with you, and thus it was so that he would leave once he did so. You’d have the summer warmed sheets all to yourself, the light of the bathroom still on, the balcony doors still open even as you went to sleep, and the clattered clothes, yours and his, around your apartment.
You threw the shirt over his head and sat back down on the cooling tiles, your back against the wall of your small balcony, facing forwards, at the once small strawberry plant which had, by now, sprouted two more roots.
“I need to replant those,” you said, not taking your eyes off the strawberries. “The pots are too small.” You turned to him, watched as he tugged the shirt down the hard cut muscles of his chest, his stomach, the tantalizing sliver of skin just above the seams of his shorts. Nothing better than ogling at your soon-to-be ex-boyfriend in a shattering moment of vulnerability.
“So,” you clicked your tongue against the back of your teeth. “Where were we?”
Hikari was awkwardly charming with a too wide smile and childlike rose coloured glasses.
He was a civilian, like you, and was working as a manga editor in the new literary building that sprouted up two years ago. It made sense, in a way, that he had stayed behind in those childlike pages and romanticized stories of ‘boy-meets-girl’, in between adventures shared between friends and comrades, wine mixed with honey and warm in your mouth, sweet on the tip of your tongue. He held your hand all the way to the restaurant, pulled the chair back for you, gave you a single rose underneath the flickering light bulb of your apartment complex at the end of the night.
His fumbling self had charmed you to an extent, although his kisses left much to be desired — despite it, or perhaps because of it, he was eagerly awaiting to please.
It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good, and at the end of the night you were laying naked on sweat soaked sheets passing a cigarette between raw, bitten lips. The thrumming anxiety underneath Hikari’s skin had dialed down, the small blip of chakra he possessed smoothed out. You rugged a pillow to your naked chest and he was enthusiastic in lending you an arm to use to lay your head instead. He pulled closed to you that way, his chest on your back and his other arm thrown over your waist. You pressed back onto him and buried your face in the pillow. With closed eyes and a steady heart you focused on the sound of his breathing, on the way his body felt against yours.
This went on for two more weeks before you cut Hikari loose.
Tsunade herself had said that the remedy to a broken heart was either booze or short term flings below your league, and both of those things at once, on occasions, but you still had shifts to cover, your job to do, bills to pay, and a reminder to act like a perfectly working societal cog in the grand scheme of things.
You drank more than put out, despite Rin’s sudden interest in safe sex lectures that she had printed and taped out all throughout the brake room walls and her tenacious, subtle-as-shit glances from around the corner or over your shoulder.
It was fine, you thought, because she at least wasn’t whimpering sympathetically while holding onto your leg metaphorically. She put you to work, instead, intent on wringing out any sort of liquid substance of life you had within your veins between the smoke in your lungs and whatever else passed as an acceptable amount of water and food.
Your existence was pure disgust that past week, so busy with work and indulging in miserably pleasurable pity parties or whatever the fuck it was that you were doing in the bathroom with an old sex toy you hadn’t used in years and had taken to now abusing the fuck out of. Between that and sleeping you were barely venturing outside of your apartment.
When Rin started becoming overbearing in her attempts to feed you from her lunchbox and “mistakenly buying” one extra juice box from the vending machine you decided that your lifestyle wouldn’t do. Not if you wanted her busting down your door one of these days and finding you in the midst of debauchery in your bathtub.
You put more effort in the way you dressed, dabbed some concealer underneath your eyes to hide the bruised skin stitched with weariness and an exhaustion that ran too deep. You even bought a new and up and coming magazine talking about all things fashion and what-not. You took the time to study it, read it from cover to cover and then talk about it with the nurses and doctors at the hospital when Rin was within earshot, pitching your voice higher and dipping it in sweetness.
Tsunade had taken one look at your well constructed facade and laughed in your face — but that was fine, it was fine. Tsuande wasn’t some meddlesome wench who would fuss and blow a gasket over something so trivial as a few missed meals and an unhealthy amount of staying up to use getting off in order to deal.
You were pretty sure you were losing all sensation on your clit though.
You had that Friday and the whole weekend off, not expected at the hospital until Monday for the night shifts. Your civilian friends came over, bringing booze for the purpose of getting drunk as a skunk before even setting foot anywhere near close to a club and an opulent onslaught of opinions regarding your ‘slutty Friday outfit’.
After shoving you into clothes that were entirely and embarrassingly too tiny and short on your and after shredding your tights to hell and back and slapped on some hard core, punk themes makeup on you in between the gin laced with bitter lemon juice in between, you had reached the appropriate level of intoxication to leave the house and head towards one of the seediest bars in Konoha.
It was a mix between civilians and shinobi looking to let loose, the stickiness of spilled drinks clinging onto your shoes, the smoke filling the room inside and making its way down your throat and making you grow lightheaded within the span of a few minutes, the noise vibrating from the walls and onto your bones; it was a wonder such place was ever allowed to remain open. The health violations alone were enough to warrant the immediate execution of the owner.
One of your friends, Lisa, had flirted her way towards a table half-way full. She sat her ass right on a guy’s dick and after a few minutes and whispering into his ear and laughing like a dumb bimbo she most certainly was not she turned to you and your two other friends, one of which was her girlfriend, and crooked a wicked finger into a ‘come hither’ motion.
“How do you do it?” Chiyo asked. She turned towards Fumiko while pulling you towards the direction of the table, her grasp strong and sure on your wrist, as if you were at risk of getting snatched at any moment now. “I wouldn’t like it.”
Fumiko only smiled around the blunt on her blood painted lips, teeth tearing at the paper and the plant. “It’s different when you’re in love.”
You stumbled through the crowd in high heels you hadn’t worn in years.
“Besides - Lisa doesn’t like cock.”
Chiyo argues back, “that’s so not the point,” but by the time anything could come of it they were already at the table. Shoved between a rock and a hard place -- Lisa abandoned the dick trying to bury itself in her through various levels of clothing in lieu of climbing over your lap and directly sitting in between Fumiko’s legs now before starting to make out on your left side, tacky heels digging into your calf. Meanwhile on your right was a dude who was halfway smoking his second pack of the day of one went by the raspy quality of his fried as fuck vocal cords and was definitely not just a civilian with the amount fo scar tissue around the visible skin of his arms and throat.
Shisui had the same scars littering his body — one in particular, from the top of his right eyebrow, down over the soft skin of his eyelid until it stopped right beneath his cheekbone.
Kenji, as it turned out, was furiously in love with a man thirteen years younger than him as well as a glutton for punishment. He offered to share his cigarettes with you nevertheless, pouring you drinks from the bottle he had bought for himself and made idle talk while running circles with his thumb on the inner side of your thigh the whole time. He was handsome, older, and the tension beneath well sculpted muscle screamed of someone who had seen a lot of mayhem and maybe even caused a lot of it.
Nearing the end of the night, you asked, blunt and honest, “are you a shinobi?”
Kenji chuckled, white teeth flashing, and the sound was deep and throaty and absolutely fucking fake. “Does that scare you?”
You didn’t hesitate. “No, not really.”
He paused, blinking down at you lazily. He started squeezing your thigh like it was a fucking squeaky toy. “You’re one of those, huh?” Looking at the visible confusion on your face, he explained. “Someone who likes the life, wants to try and take a bite out of it.”
You would have laughed if you felt like it. Instead, you asked, “Does the boy not like the life?”
His silence was an answer in and of itself, even though his smile never left his face.
At the end of the night you leave. Lisa and Fumiko have a swaying Chiyo clasped in between them because if anyone truly knew Chiyo then that meant that they knew her drank urges to start fucking sprinting for whatever reason. Lisa blew you a kiss as Kenji threw his coat over your head and Fumiko loudly declared to her girlfriend that they were out of condoms.
You took Kenji back to your apartment, fumbled through three flights of stairs and felt for the key hole in the dark and poorly maintained hallway as Kenji latched his teeth at the back of your neck like he was trying to bite through the bone.
Kenji was an attentive lover; he peeled the clothes off your body with care, petted his way down your body, exploring all the while every nook and cranny. His hands were warm on your breast, squeezing as if the skin would split apart with force, so much so that you laughed at him. Coaxing you to lay down on your back on the bed he pushed your thighs open, fingers digging into the soft flesh as he put your ankles over his shoulder and sank to his knees.
After the tenth lazy kiss he left at the crease of your hip bone, sucking on the sensitive skin there, you couldn’t take it anymore. “Are you scared of pussy or something?” you asked, squirming to cram your cunt into his face already.
Kenji laughed, “is romance lost on you?” he sucked another bruise into the meat of your thigh, lapping at the bite as an afterthought.
“No, but patience is,” you answered, leaning forward to tag at his hair.
“Fine,” he mouthed at your cunt, short, puffy breaths warming your core as he spread your labias. “Be like that, brat.”
The first time, he made you come on his tongue, arms wrapped around your legs and hands splayed out on your stomach and hips to stop you from squirming away when the pleasure mounted. He kept lapping at you long after, like a man fucking starved, unashamed and ignoring your senseless babbling. After he was satisfied Kenji wrestled your boneless body until you were laying on your stomach, making a quip about your shit stamina.
“Shut the fuck up,” you retorted. Your mental capacity was preoccupied with gripping the sheets as Kenji fed his cock into you, little by little, pushing in an inch, sliding out and then pushing twice as much into you.
He fucked you until you were hiccuping into the sheets, hips bouncing back to meet his every thrust, until your cunt was puffy and there were bruises and bite marks littering your back. Afterwards, he turned you around and latched onto your breast as you made ribbons out of his back.
Kenji fucked you like you a were a two bit whore, tying the last condom and laying it flat on your stomach with a cackle that made him look younger than he was.
You grimaced. “Thanks.”
“Anything for my lover,” he wisecracked, rubbing your belly as if to soothe you. You almost asked if he did this to the young man he said he liked or whatever the fuck his situation with him was but you stopped yourself. That man had just blown your back out, you shouldn’t finger old wounds and pour salt into them.
“Help me into the bathroom,” you said, picking up the condom cooling on your stomach and throwing it in the small trash bin next to your bed. A wrapper from an old chocolate bar had you blinking down hard. How long ago was it that you cleaned the house? Tomorrow the house was due for a thorough cleaning.
Kenji carried you into the bathroom and cleaned you up with a wet towel before starting to fill up your bathtub, smiling like a fucking school kid as he dropped an infuriatingly pink bathbomb in the water and watched as it dissolved. The hotter was hot against you, borderline on cooking you like a fucking seefood boil, but it was just the right temperature you liked. Kenji didn’t get it -- after cleaning himself with a wet towel he wore his boxers and sat down right next to you outside of the bathtub. Silently, he started scrubbing shampoo on your hair, rubbing small circles into your scalp and untangling entanglements.
It was good, soothing, and something you absolutely didn’t do for your one-night stand.
“What the fuck,” you rasped out, half of your neurons fried from bliss and the other half struggling to keep up. “I’m not gonna pay you.”
Kenji laughed. “I didn't think you would.”
“Well good, because I’m not going to pay you,” you repeated. “Seriously, what the fuck.”
“What, is it bad to take care of your habitual lover?”
Habitual lover, you mouthed, your heavy eyelids fluttering. The acidic taste lingering in your mouth was a cause from the throw you managed to swallow down. “You are so romantic, really.”
“I seem to remember that romance has long since been drifting past you.”
“First of all,” you turned around to face him, wiping the shampoo buds that were threatening to blind you, “don’t start waxing poetics in my bathroom. Disgusting. Second of all,” you paused, mind spinning, “you’re old and probably a pervert. Third of all, you like someone else, isn’t that insulting to that person?”
Kenji took your barraging criticism and insults with a smile on his face. He turned out the shower head and started rinsing your hair. “Are those your only complaints?”
“We are never seeing each other again,” you said in lieu of answering, facing the wall in front of you.
Naturally, you both went on to see each other again.