[Fic] in love
Apr. 22nd, 2011 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suchacharmerIn Love: Ino was the quiet one. Temari was the loud one.
Category: One-Shot
Status: WIP
Rating: NC-17 for sex and language.
Pairing: ShikaInoTem
Notes: This fic explores the concept of polyamory. Being in love with more than one person at the same time and being committed to both equally, though perhaps in different ways.
***
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
I.
Ino was the quiet one.
Shikamaru considered the phenomenon an anomaly since in all other instances she kept her mouth in constant motion, but he didn’t exactly mind. He liked the way her mouth opened and stayed open, as if she forgot how to make it close again. As if she couldn’t even if she wanted to. Aberrations in the air he had to strain to hear over his own harsh breathing tumbled out of her mouth erratically, one here, one there.
If he didn’t lick the cream from her thighs himself, he’d think she was faking it.
***
Temari was the loud one.
She didn’t hesitate to tell Shikamaru exactly how he made her feel. Shikamaru knew what Temari liked because she told him, constantly, easily. Words tumbled from her mouth, sweet and dirty, encouraging, directing, leading them on to orgasm. Half of the time, Shikamaru was absolutely certain that she was the mastermind of the things between them, running the show with her political wit.
He was simply along for the ride.
II.
Blowjobs were Ino’s favorite. She seemed almost eager to drop between his legs and take his cock into her mouth, taking it in slow and steady the way he took her.
He suspected her preference had something to do with the excuse it gave her not to talk. She couldn’t say much with his dick sliding down her throat.
What Ino lacked in words and sound she made up for in action. Her tongue was wickedly good at brushing over each and every ridge, her teeth horribly perfect at hurting him just enough to feel good. Ino went up fast and down slow, her tongue smooth as velvet, somehow licking and sucking at the same time.
Shikamaru didn’t tell anybody how fast she could make him cum. Naruto wouldn’t let him live it down.
***
With Temari, Shikamaru was the one on his knees.
He didn’t take any credit for getting her pushed up against the wall; she let him. Nevertheless, he reveled in the way her legs spread automatically as he began the descent down her body. Lips, neck, collarbone, nipple, navel. Lick, suck, nibble, bite, drag.
The moment his lips touched her clit, her leg hooked over his shoulder and pulled him closer to her center. This was the way she trapped her musky scent in his hair for hours to come, making sure he didn’t forget the things she let him do to her.
“Mmm,” she pushed through partially closed lips. “Damn, Shika.” Heavy breath, a push of her hips. “More tongue, less lip.”
Shikamaru paused in his administrations, the taste of her heavy on his tongue. A quirk in his eyebrows. “Bitch,” he accused without venom, defiantly lipping the bundle of nerves instead of licking like she wanted.
Temari’s hands dug into his hair, yanking his face away from her thrumming heat. She made him look up, blue-green eyes smirking, same as her lips. “Can’t you take an order, jackass?”
Smirk returned the smirk, which gave Temari her answer. She slackened her hold on his almost coarse brown locks, letting him lean back in, mouth open. Her eyes closed as she felt hot breath, ready and waiting.
She knew he would.
III.
Chances were good that if Shikamaru asked, Ino would give him a strip show.
She would dim the lights first, keenly aware of his affinity with shadows. Shikamaru once told her that he could feel her better through them, understanding the bend of light and dark on her body more fully with shadows than his own hands.
The words, breathed in her ear from behind, made her shiver.
A slight tremble chased down her spine as she unfastened the topmost button of her shirt. Already she felt Shikamaru’s dark eyes on her, watching her fingers unhook herself for him. As she parted the shirt in the middle with one hand, the absence of her bra drying Shikamaru’s throat instantly-she’d been waiting for him to ask, knew he would ask-she let the other one feather between the breasts that fit oh-so-perfectly in his palms and scratched lightly. Shikamaru’s eyes, widened by the pornography of the night, darkened to the point where Ino feared he’d ruin it by saying something. She didn’t want to hear let me fuck you, damn you’re gorgeous, or don’t stop.
She wanted to see it. She wanted to see him, feel him, living and breathing too hard for a reason that wasn’t a blow to the lungs.
Shikamaru licked his lips unconsciously. Dry like cotton, dry like his throat where he had to shove down the words he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how hard he was, how wet he hoped she was getting. But he couldn’t.
Ino didn’t say anything during sex. Shikamaru didn’t either. There were no groans, no moans, no whimpers. Sound was contraband. That was Ino’s rule.
So she indulged in only his harsh breathing as she slipped a hand down the front of her skirt, invigorated and vulnerable by the eyes that followed. And she indulged in the flutter of her lower belly as an intangible but very realsensation crept along her calve. Going up. Shikamaru had closed his eyes, head lolled back against the couch as the shadow hands slipped, slid, and whispered their way up and down her body. With pressure no harder than a breeze they, he, Ino didn’t know or care either way, teased her nipples into hardness, rose goose-bumps to the back of her neck. The hands were maddeningly gentle, and she would attest that they were nothing like Shikamaru’s calloused fingers if they didn’t seem to know every single spot that sent agonizingly good spikes of heat and want and need straight to the juncture of her thighs, where the damn hands lingered without touching her where she needed it. Where she was slick and wet and ready for him.
Ino watched as Shikamaru’s lips formed the soundless syllables of her name and didn’t try to resist as the shadows pulled her forward, one step at a time.
***
If Temari asked nicely, Shikamaru would let her fuck him.
The revelation that Shikamaru would ever allow such a thing, and the willingness to actually do it a second time, was an inebriated accident. Temari deigned it necessary that Shikamaru get legally plastered for the first time on his twentieth birthday party. And when Temari told you to do something, you generally did it. It was a moot point anyway, since Shikamaru hadn’t minded being drunk since the ripe age of sixteen, when he needed a distraction from T&I.
Kiba had seemed to think that shochu was the best distraction. As it turned out, his cock was an even better one.
Now, years after the epiphany, months after a drunken confession and concession, and minutes after a tantalizing tilt of her head and a request that sounded more like a challenge than anything, Temari stood behind Shikamaru, naked on all fours on the bed. She pressed one of her hands to the small of his back: the other hand, slick with lotion, flickered around the puckered hole of his ass, barely pressing more than a fingertip nail in before pulling out to massage and knead.
He sighed irritably, thighs tensing as she rubbed her thumb across the hole. “Do you think you could get on with it back there?”
Temari smiled. Shikamaru sounded petulant, and petulant was one step away from needy as far as she concerned. “I’m just enjoying the view,” Temari informed him, not lying in the slightest. Temari liked to watch. Watching Shikamaru masturbate was almost as satisfying as sex. “Don’t be so impatient. You’ll make me think you want it or something.”
Shikamaru snorted, twisting his head so that she could see exactly how much he didn’t want to play her games tonight, tired and hungry and late. He didn’t mind being dominated in the bedroom. It was only now and then and it was different. But she didn’t need to act like he was going to do what she wanted all the damn time. He was beginning to think he’d been too lenient with her particulars.
“Woman,” he said warningly, squirming as she tickled his side. Just woman. Shikamaru was a master of concise.
Her fingertip slipped inside of him, refusing to penetrate past the first ring of muscles. Shikamru’s breath hitched as Temari rotated her finger, swirling it around a few times, touching nerve endings he kept forgetting that he had. That kept giving her what she wanted all the damn time. “Tell me you want me,” she ordered with the same iron he heard every time she dealt with the shinobi under her command. No room for negotiation with the woman who defied the council to even be here, with him, finger fucking him because, well, fuck, she said so.
“You know I do,” Shikamaru acquiesced, trying not to sound too disgruntled. Or too easy.
But he groaned easily when Temari slid her entire finger inside of him, all the way up to the knuckle in one swift movement. There was no way in hell Temari was going to protest when he pushed himself back farther on her finger, fucking himself. She was too busy memorizing the way his muscles in his back strained and clenched under his skin, hard and tight. The way sweat dripped down the contours. The way his shoulders shuddered and his spine snapped when he came on the mattress.
Her smile was easy.
IV.
Ino knew about Temari.
Kiba told her. Said he smelled someone else on him when they went out drinking one night. That it wasn’t perfume.
She thanked him without meaning it, went to the bar, had a shot or two of something she remembered Sakura saying was good years (god, how many years ago was that?) ago and thought about Shikamaru in bed with Temari. Kissing her, touching her. Making noise.
She was okay with that.
***
Temari knew about Ino.
Shikamaru never hid the reality of their relationship from her. Didn’t lie about what they had. There were never any promises of love, romance, wedding dresses. She knew perfectly well that she was the “other woman.” Once every few months she came to Konoha – as a politician, a diplomat, and, to Shikamaru, as a linen liaison They fucked. They parted.
She was okay with that.
V.
“You wanna know why?”
Smoke accompanied contemplation. He’d given up cancer for the most part, but sometimes, when he was having a particularly bad conversation with his intellect, the motion came instinctually. A part of Asuma he refused to let go, unconsciously.
Ino pushed her hair behind her ear, blonde strands frizzing in the hazy heat of the summer morning as she picked up the bottle of eau de cologne. She tipped the bottle onto her fingertips, the soft, masculine scent of it wrapping gently around her head, like his cigarette smoke. One hand held up her hair high on her head, the other dabbed Shikamaru’s cologne just behind her ears, the hollow of her neck, her collarbones. Normally, she wore the perfume Sakura bought for her during the cherry blossom festival, but on some mornings, the early morning shift that followed that late night shift, Ino wanted to carry something of him with her to the hospital. Something she could smell over antiseptic and ozone. Something to remind her that she hadn’t lost him yet.
She met his eyes in the mirror, smoke rising on the left that was actually the right. The room was full of heat and smoke, salt and sex. Shikamaru was on her neck. Temari was somewhere in Suna. She’d be back sometime in the next week, fucking her boyfriend, but Ino didn’t mind. Ino understood the need for validation.
“No,” she stated simply, releasing her hair to rub her wrists together and wondering what Temari smelled like.
Shikamaru nodded, and took another drag.
***
“Would you ever leave her for me?”
The blankets were a tangled mess around them. Shikamaru had a corner of the sheet wrapped around his left thigh and hip, barely covering his now spent dick. Temari had the rest of the sheet twisted around her middle, breast mostly exposed and bottom half fully exposed. Another blanket lay somewhere at their feet.
Shikamaru laughed solemnly, flicking the cigarette in his hand. It was unlit, but he imagined ashes floating to the ground. They could use the glow anyways. Rain clouds obscured the moonlight. Everything was black.
Sometimes, he swore he was blind without shadows.
Not that he needed shadows to figure out what Temari was feeling, thinking. Ino was the one he’d had the hard time with, and all because when they were younger he’d assumed there was nothing else that needed to be unraveled. Vain thoughts for a vain girl. He knew better now, knew what was going on behind her pretty blue eyes. Knew that she’d wanted him to figure that out on his own.
Temari simply told him what she wanted. Shikamaru didn’t know if he loved or hated that about her. There were things he wanted too.
“No,” he answered honestly, rolling over on his side, facing her.
Her eyes were closed, but he knew they looked a lot like Ino’s. “Good.”
VI.
Shikamaru broke the rule once.
Her mouth was on his neck, teeth nipping protectively at his skin. He’d just come back from an intelligence mission, still dirty and sweaty and downright exhausted. They’d skipped hello for the bedroom. He let it happen because her lips made him forget that the things his team had uncovered, the things he’d had to tell Ibiki, meant a man’s family had to die. Even the baby. He loved her for that. And he told her so, whispered it so.
She froze as soon as the first syllable left his lips. Stopped everything to stare at him with something resembling fear and clasp his dirt-streaked cheeks in iron hands. Her fingernails cut into his skin. “People say things they don’t mean, Shika” she whispered the same way he had, something she’d been dying to say but couldn’t. Couldn’t because people died, all the fucking time, no matter what kind of promises she made or how hard she tried to save them. Like Asuma had died. Like Kurenai’s baby. Like Chouji. Like Sakura. Like all of the men and women who came back from missions too broken to be saved.
Ino didn’t make promises. Didn’t believe in words. Nothing was real until she could validate it with touch, sight, smell, taste.
Shikamaru kissed her temple in apology, not wincing when she pressed harder for a moment before she eased up and went back to kissing along his jaw line, like no protocol had been breached.
***
Shikamaru said no to Temari once.
It was a stupid little thing. Not worth fighting over, certainly. Shikamaru enjoyed watching her breasts bounce as she rode him, the same way he enjoyed every other sex position they tried. He had nothing against cowgirl, just like he had nothing against doggy.
He did have something against the way she threw him down on the bed, though, and ordered him to take his pants off. As if she owned him.
He was tired dammit. He wanted to go slow.
Temari didn’t slap. That was a pussy move. Temari backhanded, hard, without reservations or second thoughts. Shikamaru thought about making a snide remark about liking it rough, but stopped when he caught the dark circles under her eyes, just barely undermining the intensity of her hard-as-steel stare. Just barely desperate.
“Don’t you tell me no,” Temari nearly hissed, the sound of it matching the dull sting on his left cheek. “Ever.” No wasn’t acceptable. No wasn’t in her vocabulary. Even if she had to wait another five years before she was elected to the elder council, she wasn’t going to accept no. Temari almost lost two brothers to murderers and gods because the council told her no, wait, wait.
She’d be damned if she ever let anyone tell her no again.
Shikamaru stared straight back for a long minute. A long minute where he felt something breaking silently, as she reached down and unbuttoned his pants for him.
VII.
“She could come over, you know.”
Shikamaru, to his credit, managed not to sputter his too-strong coffee all over his vest. Which was fortunate, since Ibiki would have given him quite the harrowing eyebrow were he to walk into the office with coffee stains down his front.
Ino had her back to him, washing out her own mug in the sink. She was using her soap, the one that smelled like lavender. They’d lived together for three years, still did their own dishes.
She wasn’t his wife.
He swallowed the coffee forcibly, eyes trained on the back of her head, trying to figure out if she meant what he thought she did. The possibility was there, had been there for years now, just hanging around. “She,” he repeated by way of correction. “As in Temari.”
The locket he’d given her for her birthday jingled as she nodded. “As in Temari,” she repeated, reaching for a towel to dry her purple and white ceramic.
Hanging around and coming to earth.
“Next time she comes to town. Bring her here. No reason you can’t fuck her here, right?”
His response was automatic, to stall for time. “Ino…”
“Shika,” she cut in, finally turning around. “This has been going on for years, and you obviously have no intention of stopping. And believe it or not, I’m okay with that. Just”--she put her hand up near her neck, clenching her fist, grasping for words--“don’t run off and do it in secret, like you’re still hiding something.”
He stood as he said her name this time, imploring for…what? Forgiveness? He’d have to be sorry to want forgiveness. He had two women in his life, two women who were as polar opposite as he thought possible, and, yet, the same. Loud and quiet women, telling him what do, how to do it, when to do it.
He couldn’t be sorry because he wasn’t using them; sometimes, he thought, they might be the ones using him.
And he was okay with that.
“No changing your mind,” Shikamaru stipulated the terms. “Once she’s here, she’s here.”
“What do you think I am, fickle?” Ino laughed, an eerie throwback to the days when she actually was. “Don’t think so little of me.”
Shikamaru took a step closer. “I don’t.” Ino wasn’t stupid. That’s why she was still around.
That’s why, a few weeks later, he asked Temari to come home with him. As to why Temari said yes, well, he had his suppositions narrowed done to a few. None of them were particularly sane, but all of them were genuine.
He supposed that counted for something.
“Nice place,” Temari complimented as she toed her shoes off and wandering into the living room on her own. Someone had decorated the room in muted browns and pinks and creams, accented with mahogany hardwoods. Simple, tasteful, and feminine. Ino’s handiwork. “Looks like someone actually lives here.”
Shikamaru shrugged out of his vest, folding it in half and setting it on the window seat by the door, next to Ino’s wrap. “Its home,” he replied simply. He followed Temari into the living room, observing her from a distance as she digested the course of his life without her. Roved her eyes over the crumpled blanket hanging over the arm of the couch, the empty tea pot on the coffee table—she was wondering what flavor tea it had been, who’d chosen the flavor, who made it. Who’d been curled up in the corner sipping it—and raked her eyes over the photographs on the walls and shelves. The one of him, Ino, and Chouji at the spring festival a few years back, just after Ino cut her hair to fall around her ears. Ino and Sakura, just before. Naruto and him on the blonde’s fire escape, saluting with beer bottles in hand. Naruto and Kiba, sticking their tongues out at the camera. Sakura with Naruto’s head on her lap, Ino with Shikamaru’s chin resting on her shoulder.
That one she stared at the longest.
Temari had never met Ino is person. Kiba she remembered vaguely from preliminary exams and Kankuro’s description of him. Sakura she met when the Konoha wonder-team went off to save her brother; she was grateful, yet bitterly so, for that favor. Naruto was damn near unforgettable, no matter how she looked at it. For Ino, all she had was that photograph Shikamaru had showed her, two years ago. The one on the wall.
She was pretty. Unfairly so.
“You’re looking ever so charming,” she jested, nodding at the photo of him with Naruto. “Eyes crossed and all.”
Shikamaru snorted. Naruto was entirely responsible for that going up on the wall. He’d gotten it framed for Shikamaru’s birthday, and he and Ino were conspirators when it came to embarrassing him. “Hard to focus when you’re drunk, Temari.”
“Don’t I know it,” she smirked indolently at the absence of an honorific, stepping back from the collage on the wall and willing away tiny tendrils of jealousy. “What’s a girl have to do to get a glass of water around here?”
“March her ass into the kitchen and get it herself.” He ambled backwards, dropping unceremoniously onto the couch. He had no business in the kitchen. Ino was in the kitchen, and whatever reconciliation had to happen between them did not concern him. Whatever came after, that concerned him. Either they’d pull together or pull apart. From there, hundreds of scenarios could come to pass for the three of them.
Temari laughed, miming his amble into the kitchen. Blindsided into trouble. “Want something while I’m in there?”
She’d wasted no time making herself at home. That would make things either exponentially better or worse.
“He’s good.”
Temari could wonder what he was missing
She was as pretty in person as she was on the wall, Temari decided. Delicately pretty, the way Temari wasn’t allowed to be. Temari had wider hips, bigger thighs, smaller boobs, broader shoulders; she had to be the alpha female in the world of men – laugh like them, brood like them, love like them. It was selective, it was cruel, and it wasn’t what she had wanted, but it was necessary.
She didn’t know how Ino got by.
Then again, she didn’t know how she got by either, so they could probably call it even.
“On second thought,” Temari reconsidered, sliding her eyes over Ino’s naked body, “maybe I could use something a little stronger than water.”
Ino smiled at that, marveling in the way Temari looked at her. She wasn’t blind; she knew, had always known, what she looked like. Knew that more than one boy would have killed to get under her skirt. And she would have, if she hadn’t met Shikamaru first. She wasn’t ashamed of that. She also wasn’t ashamed of the way Temari’s appraisal reminded her of Shikamaru – thorough, but appreciative, and calculating. All that was missing was the gentleness. Shikamaru, in spite of Ibiki, was gentle when he could be. Temari didn’t have to be. Whatever they were to Shikamaru, they were nothing to each other. Just two women in love with the same man.
She wondered, not really caring but curious all the same, if in another life—before Sakura died and became little more than a memory and before her mother begged her to find another man—she would have had the will to do this. If she would have accepted things the way they were. For a moment or two, she played with the idea of being noble, then decided on no. She knew herself better in retrospect.
Temari let her hand drift to her waist, thumbing the wide sash of her dress. “Does he know you’re in here buck naked?”
Ino might wonder who’d brought them to this.
Ino weighed Temari’s words carefully, searching for all the kinds of hidden meaning she wasn’t quite as skilled at finding as Shikamaru. Nowhere near. But she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she wasn’t the one who needed to answer that question. Because it wasn’t about what Ino knew. If Temari were good enough for him, she ought to know the answer already.
She had to.
They could turn their cheeks and pretend this never happened
So she shrugged. Non-committal and vague, the way Shikamaru tended to be when he was absorbed in a puzzle. When he needed answers.
Temari knew that those mannerisms as well as she knew her own brother’s. And she knew, right then and there that he’d never held anything back. Shikamaru had always been himself. Honest to the end and kind of a sap.
So she shrugged. Brief and dismissive, the way Shikamaru tended to be when he was wise to your mind. “Yeah,” she said with her hand still on her sash, fingers poised and ready. “Probably.”
They could decide he wasn’t worth it
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight,” Ino admitted quietly, almost sadly, turning her head in Shikamaru’s direction and not looking into Temari’s expectant gaze. “I feel like I’ve always known about you. Just a feeling that there was something, someone else on the edge of our lives. I think its woman’s intuition, knowing your boyfriend is cheating on you before there’s ever proof. But it never bothered me. Not really, to know there was someone else. I’m just tired of pretending that you don’t exist. So,” she very nearly crooned, making Temari wondering exactly how many hearts she broke before she decided one was worth keeping whole. What kind of woman she really was without it. “Drop the skirt.” She took a few steps closer, the croon somehow still resounding in the way she walked. Like it was suddenly so much more than her voice. Like it was in her blood and she couldn’t help it, even though Temari had seen her consciously make the shift. She couldn’t say she was turned on, exactly, but enthralled was close enough as far as she was concerned. And good enough for what they, without a doubt, were going to do.
They both needed some bravery, after all.
“We have whiskey under the couch,” she damn near taunted, with her hand flicking over Temari’s. “If you think you’ll need it.”
She left her in the kitchen then, walking with that sultry croon that resonated from within into the living room where Shikamaru was waiting. For both of them. Together or, if she chose to leave, apart.
For courage, she decided, and left the whiskey alone.
Category: One-Shot
Status: WIP
Rating: NC-17 for sex and language.
Pairing: ShikaInoTem
Notes: This fic explores the concept of polyamory. Being in love with more than one person at the same time and being committed to both equally, though perhaps in different ways.
***
Come on, we all know I’m not Kishimoto, don’t we?
I.
Ino was the quiet one.
Shikamaru considered the phenomenon an anomaly since in all other instances she kept her mouth in constant motion, but he didn’t exactly mind. He liked the way her mouth opened and stayed open, as if she forgot how to make it close again. As if she couldn’t even if she wanted to. Aberrations in the air he had to strain to hear over his own harsh breathing tumbled out of her mouth erratically, one here, one there.
If he didn’t lick the cream from her thighs himself, he’d think she was faking it.
***
Temari was the loud one.
She didn’t hesitate to tell Shikamaru exactly how he made her feel. Shikamaru knew what Temari liked because she told him, constantly, easily. Words tumbled from her mouth, sweet and dirty, encouraging, directing, leading them on to orgasm. Half of the time, Shikamaru was absolutely certain that she was the mastermind of the things between them, running the show with her political wit.
He was simply along for the ride.
II.
Blowjobs were Ino’s favorite. She seemed almost eager to drop between his legs and take his cock into her mouth, taking it in slow and steady the way he took her.
He suspected her preference had something to do with the excuse it gave her not to talk. She couldn’t say much with his dick sliding down her throat.
What Ino lacked in words and sound she made up for in action. Her tongue was wickedly good at brushing over each and every ridge, her teeth horribly perfect at hurting him just enough to feel good. Ino went up fast and down slow, her tongue smooth as velvet, somehow licking and sucking at the same time.
Shikamaru didn’t tell anybody how fast she could make him cum. Naruto wouldn’t let him live it down.
***
With Temari, Shikamaru was the one on his knees.
He didn’t take any credit for getting her pushed up against the wall; she let him. Nevertheless, he reveled in the way her legs spread automatically as he began the descent down her body. Lips, neck, collarbone, nipple, navel. Lick, suck, nibble, bite, drag.
The moment his lips touched her clit, her leg hooked over his shoulder and pulled him closer to her center. This was the way she trapped her musky scent in his hair for hours to come, making sure he didn’t forget the things she let him do to her.
“Mmm,” she pushed through partially closed lips. “Damn, Shika.” Heavy breath, a push of her hips. “More tongue, less lip.”
Shikamaru paused in his administrations, the taste of her heavy on his tongue. A quirk in his eyebrows. “Bitch,” he accused without venom, defiantly lipping the bundle of nerves instead of licking like she wanted.
Temari’s hands dug into his hair, yanking his face away from her thrumming heat. She made him look up, blue-green eyes smirking, same as her lips. “Can’t you take an order, jackass?”
Smirk returned the smirk, which gave Temari her answer. She slackened her hold on his almost coarse brown locks, letting him lean back in, mouth open. Her eyes closed as she felt hot breath, ready and waiting.
She knew he would.
III.
Chances were good that if Shikamaru asked, Ino would give him a strip show.
She would dim the lights first, keenly aware of his affinity with shadows. Shikamaru once told her that he could feel her better through them, understanding the bend of light and dark on her body more fully with shadows than his own hands.
The words, breathed in her ear from behind, made her shiver.
A slight tremble chased down her spine as she unfastened the topmost button of her shirt. Already she felt Shikamaru’s dark eyes on her, watching her fingers unhook herself for him. As she parted the shirt in the middle with one hand, the absence of her bra drying Shikamaru’s throat instantly-she’d been waiting for him to ask, knew he would ask-she let the other one feather between the breasts that fit oh-so-perfectly in his palms and scratched lightly. Shikamaru’s eyes, widened by the pornography of the night, darkened to the point where Ino feared he’d ruin it by saying something. She didn’t want to hear let me fuck you, damn you’re gorgeous, or don’t stop.
She wanted to see it. She wanted to see him, feel him, living and breathing too hard for a reason that wasn’t a blow to the lungs.
Shikamaru licked his lips unconsciously. Dry like cotton, dry like his throat where he had to shove down the words he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how hard he was, how wet he hoped she was getting. But he couldn’t.
Ino didn’t say anything during sex. Shikamaru didn’t either. There were no groans, no moans, no whimpers. Sound was contraband. That was Ino’s rule.
So she indulged in only his harsh breathing as she slipped a hand down the front of her skirt, invigorated and vulnerable by the eyes that followed. And she indulged in the flutter of her lower belly as an intangible but very realsensation crept along her calve. Going up. Shikamaru had closed his eyes, head lolled back against the couch as the shadow hands slipped, slid, and whispered their way up and down her body. With pressure no harder than a breeze they, he, Ino didn’t know or care either way, teased her nipples into hardness, rose goose-bumps to the back of her neck. The hands were maddeningly gentle, and she would attest that they were nothing like Shikamaru’s calloused fingers if they didn’t seem to know every single spot that sent agonizingly good spikes of heat and want and need straight to the juncture of her thighs, where the damn hands lingered without touching her where she needed it. Where she was slick and wet and ready for him.
Ino watched as Shikamaru’s lips formed the soundless syllables of her name and didn’t try to resist as the shadows pulled her forward, one step at a time.
***
If Temari asked nicely, Shikamaru would let her fuck him.
The revelation that Shikamaru would ever allow such a thing, and the willingness to actually do it a second time, was an inebriated accident. Temari deigned it necessary that Shikamaru get legally plastered for the first time on his twentieth birthday party. And when Temari told you to do something, you generally did it. It was a moot point anyway, since Shikamaru hadn’t minded being drunk since the ripe age of sixteen, when he needed a distraction from T&I.
Kiba had seemed to think that shochu was the best distraction. As it turned out, his cock was an even better one.
Now, years after the epiphany, months after a drunken confession and concession, and minutes after a tantalizing tilt of her head and a request that sounded more like a challenge than anything, Temari stood behind Shikamaru, naked on all fours on the bed. She pressed one of her hands to the small of his back: the other hand, slick with lotion, flickered around the puckered hole of his ass, barely pressing more than a fingertip nail in before pulling out to massage and knead.
He sighed irritably, thighs tensing as she rubbed her thumb across the hole. “Do you think you could get on with it back there?”
Temari smiled. Shikamaru sounded petulant, and petulant was one step away from needy as far as she concerned. “I’m just enjoying the view,” Temari informed him, not lying in the slightest. Temari liked to watch. Watching Shikamaru masturbate was almost as satisfying as sex. “Don’t be so impatient. You’ll make me think you want it or something.”
Shikamaru snorted, twisting his head so that she could see exactly how much he didn’t want to play her games tonight, tired and hungry and late. He didn’t mind being dominated in the bedroom. It was only now and then and it was different. But she didn’t need to act like he was going to do what she wanted all the damn time. He was beginning to think he’d been too lenient with her particulars.
“Woman,” he said warningly, squirming as she tickled his side. Just woman. Shikamaru was a master of concise.
Her fingertip slipped inside of him, refusing to penetrate past the first ring of muscles. Shikamru’s breath hitched as Temari rotated her finger, swirling it around a few times, touching nerve endings he kept forgetting that he had. That kept giving her what she wanted all the damn time. “Tell me you want me,” she ordered with the same iron he heard every time she dealt with the shinobi under her command. No room for negotiation with the woman who defied the council to even be here, with him, finger fucking him because, well, fuck, she said so.
“You know I do,” Shikamaru acquiesced, trying not to sound too disgruntled. Or too easy.
But he groaned easily when Temari slid her entire finger inside of him, all the way up to the knuckle in one swift movement. There was no way in hell Temari was going to protest when he pushed himself back farther on her finger, fucking himself. She was too busy memorizing the way his muscles in his back strained and clenched under his skin, hard and tight. The way sweat dripped down the contours. The way his shoulders shuddered and his spine snapped when he came on the mattress.
Her smile was easy.
IV.
Ino knew about Temari.
Kiba told her. Said he smelled someone else on him when they went out drinking one night. That it wasn’t perfume.
She thanked him without meaning it, went to the bar, had a shot or two of something she remembered Sakura saying was good years (god, how many years ago was that?) ago and thought about Shikamaru in bed with Temari. Kissing her, touching her. Making noise.
She was okay with that.
***
Temari knew about Ino.
Shikamaru never hid the reality of their relationship from her. Didn’t lie about what they had. There were never any promises of love, romance, wedding dresses. She knew perfectly well that she was the “other woman.” Once every few months she came to Konoha – as a politician, a diplomat, and, to Shikamaru, as a linen liaison They fucked. They parted.
She was okay with that.
V.
“You wanna know why?”
Smoke accompanied contemplation. He’d given up cancer for the most part, but sometimes, when he was having a particularly bad conversation with his intellect, the motion came instinctually. A part of Asuma he refused to let go, unconsciously.
Ino pushed her hair behind her ear, blonde strands frizzing in the hazy heat of the summer morning as she picked up the bottle of eau de cologne. She tipped the bottle onto her fingertips, the soft, masculine scent of it wrapping gently around her head, like his cigarette smoke. One hand held up her hair high on her head, the other dabbed Shikamaru’s cologne just behind her ears, the hollow of her neck, her collarbones. Normally, she wore the perfume Sakura bought for her during the cherry blossom festival, but on some mornings, the early morning shift that followed that late night shift, Ino wanted to carry something of him with her to the hospital. Something she could smell over antiseptic and ozone. Something to remind her that she hadn’t lost him yet.
She met his eyes in the mirror, smoke rising on the left that was actually the right. The room was full of heat and smoke, salt and sex. Shikamaru was on her neck. Temari was somewhere in Suna. She’d be back sometime in the next week, fucking her boyfriend, but Ino didn’t mind. Ino understood the need for validation.
“No,” she stated simply, releasing her hair to rub her wrists together and wondering what Temari smelled like.
Shikamaru nodded, and took another drag.
***
“Would you ever leave her for me?”
The blankets were a tangled mess around them. Shikamaru had a corner of the sheet wrapped around his left thigh and hip, barely covering his now spent dick. Temari had the rest of the sheet twisted around her middle, breast mostly exposed and bottom half fully exposed. Another blanket lay somewhere at their feet.
Shikamaru laughed solemnly, flicking the cigarette in his hand. It was unlit, but he imagined ashes floating to the ground. They could use the glow anyways. Rain clouds obscured the moonlight. Everything was black.
Sometimes, he swore he was blind without shadows.
Not that he needed shadows to figure out what Temari was feeling, thinking. Ino was the one he’d had the hard time with, and all because when they were younger he’d assumed there was nothing else that needed to be unraveled. Vain thoughts for a vain girl. He knew better now, knew what was going on behind her pretty blue eyes. Knew that she’d wanted him to figure that out on his own.
Temari simply told him what she wanted. Shikamaru didn’t know if he loved or hated that about her. There were things he wanted too.
“No,” he answered honestly, rolling over on his side, facing her.
Her eyes were closed, but he knew they looked a lot like Ino’s. “Good.”
VI.
Shikamaru broke the rule once.
Her mouth was on his neck, teeth nipping protectively at his skin. He’d just come back from an intelligence mission, still dirty and sweaty and downright exhausted. They’d skipped hello for the bedroom. He let it happen because her lips made him forget that the things his team had uncovered, the things he’d had to tell Ibiki, meant a man’s family had to die. Even the baby. He loved her for that. And he told her so, whispered it so.
She froze as soon as the first syllable left his lips. Stopped everything to stare at him with something resembling fear and clasp his dirt-streaked cheeks in iron hands. Her fingernails cut into his skin. “People say things they don’t mean, Shika” she whispered the same way he had, something she’d been dying to say but couldn’t. Couldn’t because people died, all the fucking time, no matter what kind of promises she made or how hard she tried to save them. Like Asuma had died. Like Kurenai’s baby. Like Chouji. Like Sakura. Like all of the men and women who came back from missions too broken to be saved.
Ino didn’t make promises. Didn’t believe in words. Nothing was real until she could validate it with touch, sight, smell, taste.
Shikamaru kissed her temple in apology, not wincing when she pressed harder for a moment before she eased up and went back to kissing along his jaw line, like no protocol had been breached.
***
Shikamaru said no to Temari once.
It was a stupid little thing. Not worth fighting over, certainly. Shikamaru enjoyed watching her breasts bounce as she rode him, the same way he enjoyed every other sex position they tried. He had nothing against cowgirl, just like he had nothing against doggy.
He did have something against the way she threw him down on the bed, though, and ordered him to take his pants off. As if she owned him.
He was tired dammit. He wanted to go slow.
Temari didn’t slap. That was a pussy move. Temari backhanded, hard, without reservations or second thoughts. Shikamaru thought about making a snide remark about liking it rough, but stopped when he caught the dark circles under her eyes, just barely undermining the intensity of her hard-as-steel stare. Just barely desperate.
“Don’t you tell me no,” Temari nearly hissed, the sound of it matching the dull sting on his left cheek. “Ever.” No wasn’t acceptable. No wasn’t in her vocabulary. Even if she had to wait another five years before she was elected to the elder council, she wasn’t going to accept no. Temari almost lost two brothers to murderers and gods because the council told her no, wait, wait.
She’d be damned if she ever let anyone tell her no again.
Shikamaru stared straight back for a long minute. A long minute where he felt something breaking silently, as she reached down and unbuttoned his pants for him.
VII.
“She could come over, you know.”
Shikamaru, to his credit, managed not to sputter his too-strong coffee all over his vest. Which was fortunate, since Ibiki would have given him quite the harrowing eyebrow were he to walk into the office with coffee stains down his front.
Ino had her back to him, washing out her own mug in the sink. She was using her soap, the one that smelled like lavender. They’d lived together for three years, still did their own dishes.
She wasn’t his wife.
He swallowed the coffee forcibly, eyes trained on the back of her head, trying to figure out if she meant what he thought she did. The possibility was there, had been there for years now, just hanging around. “She,” he repeated by way of correction. “As in Temari.”
The locket he’d given her for her birthday jingled as she nodded. “As in Temari,” she repeated, reaching for a towel to dry her purple and white ceramic.
Hanging around and coming to earth.
“Next time she comes to town. Bring her here. No reason you can’t fuck her here, right?”
His response was automatic, to stall for time. “Ino…”
“Shika,” she cut in, finally turning around. “This has been going on for years, and you obviously have no intention of stopping. And believe it or not, I’m okay with that. Just”--she put her hand up near her neck, clenching her fist, grasping for words--“don’t run off and do it in secret, like you’re still hiding something.”
He stood as he said her name this time, imploring for…what? Forgiveness? He’d have to be sorry to want forgiveness. He had two women in his life, two women who were as polar opposite as he thought possible, and, yet, the same. Loud and quiet women, telling him what do, how to do it, when to do it.
He couldn’t be sorry because he wasn’t using them; sometimes, he thought, they might be the ones using him.
And he was okay with that.
“No changing your mind,” Shikamaru stipulated the terms. “Once she’s here, she’s here.”
“What do you think I am, fickle?” Ino laughed, an eerie throwback to the days when she actually was. “Don’t think so little of me.”
Shikamaru took a step closer. “I don’t.” Ino wasn’t stupid. That’s why she was still around.
That’s why, a few weeks later, he asked Temari to come home with him. As to why Temari said yes, well, he had his suppositions narrowed done to a few. None of them were particularly sane, but all of them were genuine.
He supposed that counted for something.
“Nice place,” Temari complimented as she toed her shoes off and wandering into the living room on her own. Someone had decorated the room in muted browns and pinks and creams, accented with mahogany hardwoods. Simple, tasteful, and feminine. Ino’s handiwork. “Looks like someone actually lives here.”
Shikamaru shrugged out of his vest, folding it in half and setting it on the window seat by the door, next to Ino’s wrap. “Its home,” he replied simply. He followed Temari into the living room, observing her from a distance as she digested the course of his life without her. Roved her eyes over the crumpled blanket hanging over the arm of the couch, the empty tea pot on the coffee table—she was wondering what flavor tea it had been, who’d chosen the flavor, who made it. Who’d been curled up in the corner sipping it—and raked her eyes over the photographs on the walls and shelves. The one of him, Ino, and Chouji at the spring festival a few years back, just after Ino cut her hair to fall around her ears. Ino and Sakura, just before. Naruto and him on the blonde’s fire escape, saluting with beer bottles in hand. Naruto and Kiba, sticking their tongues out at the camera. Sakura with Naruto’s head on her lap, Ino with Shikamaru’s chin resting on her shoulder.
That one she stared at the longest.
Temari had never met Ino is person. Kiba she remembered vaguely from preliminary exams and Kankuro’s description of him. Sakura she met when the Konoha wonder-team went off to save her brother; she was grateful, yet bitterly so, for that favor. Naruto was damn near unforgettable, no matter how she looked at it. For Ino, all she had was that photograph Shikamaru had showed her, two years ago. The one on the wall.
She was pretty. Unfairly so.
“You’re looking ever so charming,” she jested, nodding at the photo of him with Naruto. “Eyes crossed and all.”
Shikamaru snorted. Naruto was entirely responsible for that going up on the wall. He’d gotten it framed for Shikamaru’s birthday, and he and Ino were conspirators when it came to embarrassing him. “Hard to focus when you’re drunk, Temari.”
“Don’t I know it,” she smirked indolently at the absence of an honorific, stepping back from the collage on the wall and willing away tiny tendrils of jealousy. “What’s a girl have to do to get a glass of water around here?”
“March her ass into the kitchen and get it herself.” He ambled backwards, dropping unceremoniously onto the couch. He had no business in the kitchen. Ino was in the kitchen, and whatever reconciliation had to happen between them did not concern him. Whatever came after, that concerned him. Either they’d pull together or pull apart. From there, hundreds of scenarios could come to pass for the three of them.
Temari laughed, miming his amble into the kitchen. Blindsided into trouble. “Want something while I’m in there?”
She’d wasted no time making herself at home. That would make things either exponentially better or worse.
“He’s good.”
Temari could wonder what he was missing
She was as pretty in person as she was on the wall, Temari decided. Delicately pretty, the way Temari wasn’t allowed to be. Temari had wider hips, bigger thighs, smaller boobs, broader shoulders; she had to be the alpha female in the world of men – laugh like them, brood like them, love like them. It was selective, it was cruel, and it wasn’t what she had wanted, but it was necessary.
She didn’t know how Ino got by.
Then again, she didn’t know how she got by either, so they could probably call it even.
“On second thought,” Temari reconsidered, sliding her eyes over Ino’s naked body, “maybe I could use something a little stronger than water.”
Ino smiled at that, marveling in the way Temari looked at her. She wasn’t blind; she knew, had always known, what she looked like. Knew that more than one boy would have killed to get under her skirt. And she would have, if she hadn’t met Shikamaru first. She wasn’t ashamed of that. She also wasn’t ashamed of the way Temari’s appraisal reminded her of Shikamaru – thorough, but appreciative, and calculating. All that was missing was the gentleness. Shikamaru, in spite of Ibiki, was gentle when he could be. Temari didn’t have to be. Whatever they were to Shikamaru, they were nothing to each other. Just two women in love with the same man.
She wondered, not really caring but curious all the same, if in another life—before Sakura died and became little more than a memory and before her mother begged her to find another man—she would have had the will to do this. If she would have accepted things the way they were. For a moment or two, she played with the idea of being noble, then decided on no. She knew herself better in retrospect.
Temari let her hand drift to her waist, thumbing the wide sash of her dress. “Does he know you’re in here buck naked?”
Ino might wonder who’d brought them to this.
Ino weighed Temari’s words carefully, searching for all the kinds of hidden meaning she wasn’t quite as skilled at finding as Shikamaru. Nowhere near. But she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she wasn’t the one who needed to answer that question. Because it wasn’t about what Ino knew. If Temari were good enough for him, she ought to know the answer already.
She had to.
They could turn their cheeks and pretend this never happened
So she shrugged. Non-committal and vague, the way Shikamaru tended to be when he was absorbed in a puzzle. When he needed answers.
Temari knew that those mannerisms as well as she knew her own brother’s. And she knew, right then and there that he’d never held anything back. Shikamaru had always been himself. Honest to the end and kind of a sap.
So she shrugged. Brief and dismissive, the way Shikamaru tended to be when he was wise to your mind. “Yeah,” she said with her hand still on her sash, fingers poised and ready. “Probably.”
They could decide he wasn’t worth it
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight,” Ino admitted quietly, almost sadly, turning her head in Shikamaru’s direction and not looking into Temari’s expectant gaze. “I feel like I’ve always known about you. Just a feeling that there was something, someone else on the edge of our lives. I think its woman’s intuition, knowing your boyfriend is cheating on you before there’s ever proof. But it never bothered me. Not really, to know there was someone else. I’m just tired of pretending that you don’t exist. So,” she very nearly crooned, making Temari wondering exactly how many hearts she broke before she decided one was worth keeping whole. What kind of woman she really was without it. “Drop the skirt.” She took a few steps closer, the croon somehow still resounding in the way she walked. Like it was suddenly so much more than her voice. Like it was in her blood and she couldn’t help it, even though Temari had seen her consciously make the shift. She couldn’t say she was turned on, exactly, but enthralled was close enough as far as she was concerned. And good enough for what they, without a doubt, were going to do.
They both needed some bravery, after all.
“We have whiskey under the couch,” she damn near taunted, with her hand flicking over Temari’s. “If you think you’ll need it.”
She left her in the kitchen then, walking with that sultry croon that resonated from within into the living room where Shikamaru was waiting. For both of them. Together or, if she chose to leave, apart.
For courage, she decided, and left the whiskey alone.
