25a/n: coincidental completion around valentine's day, so i'll just publish this and forgo the drabbles this year. idk. good luck. the references to tian mi mi and the before series are not lost on me. if it's any help, the final section was drafted as a potential one shot over two years ago.
my immense gratitude to appy for reading and debating progression with me and to abby-hatake for her consistently flawless, quick, and encouraging editing.
PART ONE
Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
It is hot out. Sweltering is the technical word for it. She is wearing a white tee-shirt that, even though it's meant to be loose, has sweat stains down her armpits. The fact that it's loose is really her only saving grace, because her whole chest is wet and she's absolutely positive if the shirt were any tighter, she'd have a second stain down her front and one down her back.
In short: the heat is miserable. Well, not so much the degree as the percentage of moisture in the air. The conversation all morning has been about the absolutely horrendous storm coming in. It is mid-August, which supposedly is past the peak of monsoon, but the weatherman today had predicted the largest storm of the season. It would have seemed unbelievable — after all, the sky visible to her is absolutely cloudless — if it were not for the practically unbearable amount of humidity in the air (and that was considering Brussels was already a relatively humid city, especially for a girl who'd grown up in desert-like conditions her whole life).
"Thank-you," Temari says without glancing up when the waiter hands her the bill. She has been there for over two hours already, but the moment she folded her book before her, rearing to go, was the moment the check was laid before her.
She is used to the Euro now. She can reach into her wallet and pull out the right amount of coins by their weight alone instead of having to put them an inch before her eye to read their amount. She is a little upset that it's taken so long — all summer — especially when she is planning on leaving all her knowledge of the Euro behind so soon. She places the coins down on the table and then checks her watch at the same moment her phone rings.
Patiently, she swipes her finger and answers by the third ring. "You'd better make this quick. I don't have many minutes left."
Gaara's voice is hazy over the line, but the dictation comes out as succinct as ever in his usual, no-nonsense cadence.
"I am calling to thank you for the book. It arrived this morning."
She had sent him an outdated and somewhat poorly collected Pessoa in the original language before she'd left Portugal a few weeks back.
"Have you looked through it yet?"
"Briefly."
"I found it underneath a bridge."
There is a pause. She can imagine him turning the book in his right hand as he examines it. And then, with no inflection to his voice: "it's in surprisingly good condition, if that is the case." The morbid and grotesque is much more up Kankuro's alley, but the romanticization of the unusual is a secret interest of Gaara's.
"I'm glad you like it."
"Yes, very much."
"I'll look for something too in Belgium before I leave."
"Thank you. And Kankuro thanks you for the chocolates as well."
"No problem — I'll call you when I get wi-fi."
The line clicks shut before she's really said goodbye.
It has been three months since she'd seen them, but she is less homesick now than she'd been two months ago. There is definitely an appeal of being immersed in familiarity, but she is starting to really become used to the isolation of being alone.
The hostel where she is staying is air conditioned, but she had spent almost all of yesterday there, so her best course of action is to try and limit her tourist activities to those that can take place inside. Her hands feel swollen when she tries to make fists.
When Temari looks back up from her palms, the money and note are gone from the table, but in their place is a teenager staring at her earnestly.
The bill was probably better.
"You speak Japanese," he asks without any hesitation.
"Excuse me?" She responds in English, just as quickly.
"You were speaking Japanese just then."
She switches over. "Yes... can I help you?"
Even though her conversation had been fully in the language, she still sees his shoulders relax slightly with her confirmation.
"Thank god," he continues. She narrows her eyes at him. "You're the first person I've met here that speaks it."
"Really?" She counters, unconvinced. He seems too young and too cocky, probably riding on his good looks to (right now unsuccessfully) pick up women.
He doesn't nod, but he does blink in a way that seems like an affirmation.
"We're everywhere, haven't you heard?" He blinks again. "Clearly you just need to go out more."
"Clearly," he repeats, but without any intention, as though he is just minding the word and not actually believing it.
Temari angles her head. His eyes are so dark, they appear black. It must be a trick of the light. It is making the shimmer of his gaze burn.
"So what do you need?"
"I've seen you in here before. You speak English too."
She frowns. "Are you stalking me?"
The boy's lips turn up into the ghost of a smile. "No."
She looks away. Her heart is pounding with the irritation of his arrival and she feels the necessity of his absence immediately.
"Well then," she says, scooting her chair out to grab the slim strap of her bag. "I'm late."
"Where are you going?"
"I have things to do."
"Let me come with you."
Temari almost chokes on her inhale. "Excuse me?" Except she is more surprised with herself. She isn't saying no. And really, as inappropriate as this is, she isn't turned off.
"Look," he tries, his dark eyes still earnest and still bright, "this is unconventional, I understand. But we're both foreigners in a big city. I don't speak the language well and you can maneuver yourself. You're going to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, aren't you?" Temari's hand shoots out to cover the half-formed itinerary she'd jotted down on her napkin earlier without much thought. "Won't you let me come along?" He continues. "Translate for me?"
That didn't seem all that irrational. He is just a child, isn't he? What is he doing so far from Japan on his own, especially if he only speaks Japanese?
"Are you going to pay me for being a tour guide?"
He laughs. It irritates her more, but she still isn't angry. She feels a drop of sweat run down her neck.
"Probably not. But I can buy you dinner."
"Okay hotshot, calm down." It is an immediate, if not misguided, decision. But she has been making those all summer. She is returning to reality soon. And while she is normally not at all rash, if she is ever going to be impulsive, now's the time (even though she'd promised herself not to be that shortsighted since that night in Lisbon). "You can come with me to the museum, but then you'll leave me alone, won't you?"
The boy looks out the window of the cafe for a long moment. He really is attractive. Would she have been as sympathetic if he were ugly? Is she that vain?
"If you want me too." He agrees.
"Temari."
He looks back to take her hand. His hand is much cooler than hers, even though his tee-shirt also has the customary-in-this-weather line of sweat around the collar.
"Shikamaru. A pleasure."
The street is lined with cars. Even though it is the middle of the day, not many people are milling about. It's probably the heat.
"So," she begins when they were a full block and a half from the cafe, "what are you doing here?"
"Following you. You know the way, don't you?"
"Don't be smart."
He smiles to himself. "I'm here to visit a university."
She isn't expecting that. She'd expected family or friends or some sort of shitty summer exchange that hadn't taught him a wink of French.
"You know someone there?"
"I have an interview," he answers, "I'm deciding which university to attend."
"To university?"
He shrugs. Beside her, he doesn't seem as shockingly young as he had initially. Rather, he feels comfortably juxtaposed with her in every way but age. His gait matches hers. Not stride for stride — he is an inch or two taller — but somehow she never feels like she is moving ahead or trying to catch up. And his height is comfortable with hers in a way that makes her chest even warmer than the weather should've permitted.
"Yes."
She glances up from the trail of his brown shoes to the angle of his cheekbone. "No way. How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
"No. Way." Temari stops walking and Shikamaru has to halt short when he realizes she is no longer behind him. He looks at her like he doesn't understand what her problem is, but he shoves his hands in his pockets sheepishly like he already is gearing for his own justification.
"You can't be much older," he shoots back casually, tilting his head up and closing his eyes into the glare of the sun.
"I'm eighteen." She counters. "Practically nineteen."
"In that case, I'm practically sixteen."
"Shit." She breathes. "I can't believe you're that much younger! I wasn't all that serious before when I said I'd picked up a child."
He cracks an eye open. "You never said that."
Temari waves her hands in the air. "Not aloud."
Shikamaru laughs again. "You're not going to turn me away," he says, all too confidently. And then he turns on his heel and continues down the brick road.
She balks. But she follows. Of all the people she's met so far on this far-flung summer adventure, he is easily the most irritating.
"I just honestly don't think you should be on your own in such a dangerous environment."
He turns around — practically skips — backwards for only a moment to look over her head at the sign.
"Rue Saint Ghislain?" He responds too seriously to be mistaken for possessing the emotion.
"Being such a sore thumb foreigner," she snaps, jogging to catch up to his retreating back. "You really don't have parents?"
"They exist."
"Didn't I tell you to stop being smart?" Shikamaru smiles and she rolls her eyes.
"I told you: this is for university. I'm finishing secondary school in a few months and I am going on a tour of all the places I was accepted. And yes," he continues, holding a hand up to her stop her coming interjection, "I know I am young. I'm finishing early."
That does shut her up. How smart is he? He must have something going for him in academics. Nerd.
"Probably used to that." She mutters after a few seconds, almost automatically, brain still wrapped around his shockingly early admittance.
Shikamaru doesn't respond and when she realizes this (although belated a few seconds herself), she is instantly excited. Although she's the one being infringed upon here, she is technically his senior. Both chronologically and in that she's the one he is following. Except, she'd realized a few minutes ago, he is the one leading everything. He is turning corners without asking her for the map and he is the one gloating over their conversation. She is, by all accounts, the one being led. So when her joke doesn't get through for over a minute, it is the closest thing to victory she has tasted since he sat down across from her half an hour ago.
When he does make the connection to her two comments, his only response is to smile and shove her shoulder with enough force to tip her sideways into a stumble. She mimics his expression and rights herself, but doesn't move back. She had been walking too close to him anyway.
They enter the Old Master's Museum first. It is relatively empty, although, given the rest of the day's circumstances, and the time of year, she is veritably surprised it isn't more crowded. He pays for their entry, but he raises his hand to her and she is the one that pulls the coins out of his palm. He declines the offer of a tour that is beginning in twenty minutes without her consent, but she doesn't mind either way.
The whole building smells like stone. The ceilings tower over her and she can hear the barest hint of an echo as she slowly translates the writing below a massive stained glass window. Shikamaru listens on, occasionally nodding his head, and once or twice reaching up to point out something she is missing.
The next room is a mix of pre-renaissance art on the walls and tombs on the ground.
"I'm constantly amazed and surprised by the spread and tenure of Christianity," he says, somewhat under his breath. Temari laces her hands behind her and turns around from reading one of the coffin inscriptions.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," he says, a few feet behind her trail, looking at something else, "for a religion that excites so much suffering, it sure has lasted much longer than probably anyone expected it to."
"I take it you're not religious."
He shrugs.
She wants to smile. He looks so serious like this: eyes thoughtful and brow furrowed.
"Let me clarify," Shikamaru continues after a while. There is a layer of dust in the next room and she sweeps in the smell, reveling in the age. "There are definitely many different ways to interpret the Bible. I don't mean to be rude if you're Christian," he offers half-heartedly, giving her no more than a glance.
"You've read the Bible?"
He waves a hand. "For school. Analytically, if you're contextualizing my comment. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that for most of history, the closest one could come to God was to withhold all of his, or her, desires, right? Like, in almost every interpretation, there is a sense that your purest self is the one in which the only thing you yearn for is God."
"Sure."
"I don't mean every denomination. Just a lot of them."
Temari thinks about this for a long time. They've moved onto the second wing of the museum before she speaks.
"So what exactly surprises you?"
He glances at her from the other side of the room, probably wrongfully assuming the conversations as being completed.
"Hm. I guess, most other religions don't necessarily equate being a good god-fearing person with being a good man." He shoots a petulant look her way and it makes her smile. "Or woman. There are so many regulations to comply with according to the New Testament to be adequately worthy of heaven without having to seek forgiveness for access. So something that dogmatizes the withholding of urges... I guess that's what surprises me. It has lasted so long. And spread so far. Why this religion? What does it offer that others don't?"
"Guns, germs, and steel." She quips, moving from one painting to the next. "Well, less offers and more forces." The painting before her now is, perhaps, the tenth that has seen of Christ as a baby in his mother's arms, but still wounded from the crucifixion awaiting him. Temari turns on her heel and walks to the other side of the room where he is looking over a representation of one of the apostles in a meadow. "It answers for suffering doesn't it?"
She pauses to translate the description of the painting for him.
"We all suffer in life. In the dogma surrounding Christ, people are given an answer for their suffering. It's their own fault. In that way, it seems easier to believe than other religions where you are blaming some far off deity for bad crops or a dead child. It's your fault. Your sins. Or there is meaning, a lesson for you delivered directly from God."
"Hm." He repeats, turning to face her. "That may be true. I'll have to think about it some more and get back to you."
She resists the urge to smile this time. She can't remember if she was nearly as philosophical at his age. And she admires his articulation. He speaks slowly, but there is whir in his eyes that tells her his brain is going a mile a minute, surely lapping hers.
When they finally come to the end of the museum, walking once more through the stained glass hall, Temari stands behind him. He is slow, looking at something in the upper left hand corner of one of the far windows. It's been only a little less than two hours, but the sun is streaming through the building now and his cheek has turned purple with it. He's too beautiful for his own good. His eyes are even darker in the gleam of the sun. She doesn't paint, but she wants to paint him. She takes a photograph instead. It's just an old polaroid — well, a newer throwback one. He hears the sound and turns, surprised.
"You're beautiful," she finds herself saying. "In the light, I mean."
Shikamaru opens his mouth like he wants to say something, and from the quirk of his lip she can tell it's going to be condensing, but then he seems to rethink it and he just shakes his head at her patronizingly and continues off down the hall.
"Where to?" He prompts a few seconds after they step into the sunshine. The humidity immediately weighs onto her whole being and sweat begins pooling in her elbows and the back of her knees.
"I'm going to get some coffee," she announces, unsure by her intention. "Iced."
"Lead the way."
She takes a step off the stairs leading to the museum. "Why are you still following me? Are you trying to fuck me?"
There is a beat and then Shikamaru laughs. His shoulders roll back and he isn't looking at her anymore.
"I told you already. I'm here for school. I have an interview in," he checks his watch, "two hours, so I have some time to kill. Plus, I wanted to do some touristy things. And those are always fun with someone else."
She shrugs. He probably wanted to fuck her.
Except he's looking over at the street, watching a family walk by, ignoring her instigation. He's not even red in the face, like she was hoping he might be, which was the only reason she'd goaded him in the first place. And hoping, maybe, that he might say yes. The thought momentarily excited her, even if, as she considered it, she would've been angry had he said it.
Still, she lets him follow by her side until they reach the nearest coffee shop. She gets an iced latte. He buys a water and they make their way to small park across the street.
"I'm not after you," he clarifies, coming to sit on the grass beside her. "I have a girlfriend."
Just to counter him, Temari sweeps out her arms to lay down. The grass is cool against her skin, but also prickly on the back of her arms and legs. Shikamaru's eyes follow her down. "Do you? And still wouldn't fuck me?"
"Is it necessary for you to be so unnecessarily crass?"
She shrugs. "No. Do you love her?"
Shikamaru follows to stretch out beside her. From this angle, side by side, he feels different. More complimentary. She had thought herself bigger than him, heavier, older. But like this, she thinks it's not at all true. If anything, she feels small. Overpowered by the length of his limbs and the knowledge that her hair is touching his neck, fanned out as it is.
"Has it been this hot all summer?" He asks, changing the subject, but she'd forgotten what they were talking about anyway.
"I've only been here for three weeks."
"Where were you before this?"
Temari bends the straw from her drink to her lips. "Portugal."
"And before that?"
She smiles. "Yes, you caught me. I'm taking a tour through Europe before university begins."
"God," he smiles, tilting his heads towards her. "You're such a cliché."
"Well, I picked you up, didn't I?"
He laughs. He laughs easily, but she gets excited by the vindication of its retrieval every time, even when it's directed at her expense.
"So," he says, "tell me more."
"Well, I began in France. Then went to Spain, then Greece, then Portugal, and now I'm here."
"That's quite the route."
"I admit, it was poor planning on my part, but I just went anywhere someone would take me."
"You have friends here?"
"Not here. I'm staying in a hostel now. I'm only here because my father made the flights and I'm flying out of Belgium."
Shikamaru crinkles his eyes and glances at the sun. "When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow."
He shoots up to his elbow. "Tomorrow? Is there anything you have to do? Are you all packed? Are you ready?"
The grass itches against the back of her neck as she shifts to look over at him. He is uncomfortable from this orientation; too close "Yes. I only have one bag. But I'm glad you're so over-anxious."
Shikamaru shifts around onto his back again. He has pants on, but they are light and she worries absently about him getting stains. Doesn't he have an interview? He should look sharper than he is.
"Tell me about your purpose here."
"Oh, right." He says, moving his hands under his head. He is tall enough that if they were standing and accurately aligned, his arms would be nowhere near her, but now they are side by side, hips in line, and his elbow bumps the side of her head when he leans toward her side. "I meant to ask: will you come with me to the school?"
"Why?"
"I could always use a translator."
"You know they have people at the embassy for that?"
"But I'm asking you."
Temari glances over at him, grass scratching her cheekbone.
He isn't looking at her, pulling himself up to sitting, but she likes the way he does when his eyes are her way.
"What's the purpose of your interview today?" She asks, stopping to sip her drink. "If you've already gotten in, I mean."
His is leaning his weight back on his hands beside her and she looks down at the creases of skin on his wrist.
"I'm just going to look around. I called up a month or so ago and they scheduled a meeting. I have a feeling they're going to try and recruit me."
"Recruit you? That's very ominous."
"To attend their school, I mean."
"Why don't they just give you a scholarship?"
Shikamaru looks sheepish suddenly. This makes his neck red. Fuck the mentions of sex. Just get him to talk about himself in a bare way that had nothing to do with his cocksure persona and he'll turn red on you.
She'd have to remember this. "They did."
"A full one?"
He nods.
"Then go there."
"They all did."
She sits up now too. "What?"
"All the schools I applied to offered me a full scholarship..." he is looking down at the knobs of his ankles visible between his socks and pants and she follows his eyes. "We have the money, so I'm going to turn down all the offers. My father doesn't think we should take money from the school when we don't have to."
He stops kind of short, like he is going to say more, but another sentence never comes. She can practically see his shoulders hunch in on himself. He should be proud, she thinks. Proud. He shouldn't be shy or embarrassed about his own success.
"Wow, some kind of wonder-kid over here." Temari says, just to break the ice. "Jeeze."
"Yeah, well."
She has a hand on top of his before she's even realized she was moving. She is mimicking his position, overlaying her fingers atop his own and pushing her weight back on top of his hand. It is too sticky out to touch skin, and she regrets it the moment she does it, but it does seem to make him take a much-needed breath.
"So when you start school next term, you'll be with girls and boys my age," she notes. It couldn't have made him particularly popular with his current peers. "Consider this practice for picking up women."
Shikamaru smiles. "Oh. Am I picking you up now?"
She pulls her hand away and reaches for her coffee. A line of sweat falls upon her collar bone. She can feel it, but she can also see him watch it. "Don't be smart."
"Are you done yet?" She asks, tapping the heel of her shoe against the bathroom door. "You've got places to be, Shikamaru."
"Almost."
They're in a public restroom a block and a half from the gates to the university he is going to go see. Her agreement to come with him is reluctant, at best. Still, here she is, waiting for him to clean up before he goes inside. It's probably just because his parents aren't here. She feels responsible. Like she picked up a puppy.
"Okay, how's this?"
He looks better this time when he comes out. He's smoothed back his hair with some water and has put on a light colored button down on top of his tee-shirt, all done up and tucked into his pants. He's even added a belt.
"Shit," she breathes, "you were carrying all of this?"
"Just because I've been admitted doesn't mean I shouldn't give them a good impression."
"You're too passive to put in effort! You couldn't even walk around the city on your own."
"I put in effort." He says, stopping from re-tucking shirt, one hand down his pants to look up at her.
She raises a brow.
"I got you, didn't I?"
She wants to tell him to stop saying that, but he's not really wrong, so Temari doesn't argue it this time. He cleans up well, even though he still looks categorically younger than her, she no longer feels like she is lugging around such a youth.
"Shikamaru."
"Right," he says, finishing with his pants and going back into the bathroom without shutting the door, "I know, I know. Don't be smart." She comes to stand in the doorway, watching as he finishes with his hair over the sink.
"You won't do well in university if you learn things so slowly."
He doesn't turn around, but he does meet her eyes in the mirror with a facetious look.
It's not as sweltering outside by the time they make it into the school. It's still humid, but the sun is behind a thin layer of clouds, keeping the city bright without bearing down on the back of her neck. She's still sweating, but not as uncomfortably anymore.
Around the campus everyone has shed all layers of clothing. Two girls are wearing nothing more than shorts and bikini tops. She's never seen that except in seaside towns. Perhaps it's a university thing?
She is struggling to picture Shikamaru here.
Honestly, she doesn't know anything about him. He is fifteen (practically sixteen) and is some sort of genius, but that's all. She doesn't know where exactly he's from. She doesn't know his parent's names. She doesn't even know his last name. Yet, there is a comfortability about him. She'd felt it all day.
Temari spent the summer with strangers. She's spent weeks with people she'd only just met. It's different with Shikamaru though. She doesn't know him as well as she knew them. She doesn't mean to demonize or under-appreciate the other people she'd met — she was sure they had full and rounded lives that she would never be privy too — but for Shikamaru, she is consistently, poignantly, aware of this difference. Maybe it had to do with the circumstances: when she spent time with others, they were all there for the same purpose. All in Europe, local or not, all young, all wanting to be uninhibited in what little time they could afford to be so. For him, his purpose was less clear. It was different from hers. They were existing on two different planes that intersected for them solely to meet, but perhaps not exist, together.
Here, the university, she understood that. They were college students. Yet something about him seemed to revolve in a different type of world.
She keeps trying her best to picture it: Shikamaru as a freshman. He'll be in her class, surrounded by the people she'd grown up with her whole life. Walking around this very quad, napping in this grass, making out with girls against that tree. Aesthetically, he had all the requirements, but something felt uncomfortable about the whole of the image.
They had been given a tour by one of the student representatives earlier. He'd spoken in English the whole time and Temari had only translated half of it, but Shikamaru hadn't seemed to mind. It is a beautiful school. Perhaps she should have looked more at going abroad.
He's in his interview now, meeting with a woman not too much older than herself.
In six months he may be in this exact building as a student. She probably would have nothing to do with him. She might have even forgotten his name. After all, she didn't remember half the people she'd met this summer.
That thought is a tad disorienting. Of course, the outcome is more likely than any other scenario she can theorize at the moment, but it seems disconcerting to picture Shikamaru making this grassy knoll his home while she exists somewhere else.
That was their world though, wasn't it? They would only exist in each other's reality for a few more hours at most. Then she'll be back home and he'll be... somewhere else.
"Would you like to see a picture?"
"Of what?"
"A movie, I mean. Go to the cinema. See a film. You know."
Temari stares out after him as he suddenly strolls ahead of her. "You want to see a movie?"
"Well what are else are we supposed to do?" He asks, lifting his hands vaguely towards the sky, only half turning to catch her eye before continuing down the street. The clouds are heavier now. Pregnant with rain.
She knows the answer. They're supposed to separate. She feels the necessity of leaving him deeper now, pumping blood quicker through her chest. She should go. She has wasted a whole day — her last day — on him already. She should go make sure all her affairs are in order. She should check on the car picking her up back in Japan tomorrow. She should call her brothers; check in on her father before she leaves.
"This isn't a date you know."
"For being so much more mature than me," he calls back to her, "you sure like to put a lot of words in my mouth."
Her neck is red. The stickiness is suddenly overwhelming.
"There won't be any subtitles," she yells back. Shikamaru 's practically at the other end of the street now.
"My French is passable. And we can find English subtitles, surely."
He knows good French! She stops short from her pursuit after him. "You won't understand half the film!" She practically shouts, angry.
"Well, I speak English too. How else did you think I was going to attend school here?" Oh. What? No.
She suddenly feels the urge to scream. Something about his lingual comprehension suddenly seems so predictable, she can't believe she believed him before. Doesn't he understand?
She isn't sure what she wants him to understand though. Her anger? Her irritation at being so strung along? Something else?
He turns the corner and she finds herself out of breath running to catch up to him, the familiar line of his shoulders an absent image when he moves out of her path of sight.
When she finally catches up, Shikamaru doesn't even turn her way, but she can feel the heat coming off him when he moves the line of his trajectory half a step closer to her. How are his hands always so cool when the rest of him is so hot?
"Would you stop staring at me?" He asks, pointedly looking straight ahead, sweat pooling at his temple.
And that's when, for the first time all day, she realizes that she has been looking in his direction for hours. Under this kind of scrutiny, it feels like she's been looking his way for years.
"You can drink at sixteen in Belgium, you know."
"I'm not sixteen yet."
"It's close enough," she tries, grabbing ahold of his sleeve by his bicep for only a second to shift his walking direction. "And it's about to rain."
"It was about to rain two hours ago."
"I'm so wet it might as well have."
She means the humidity, but Shikamaru shakes his head at her comment anyway, as though sick of her consistent ribaldry.
"We just have to find a place that won't ask for an ID."
Shikamaru is beside her, but she can feel the hesitancy. They cross one side of a busier street and then end up standing on an island waiting for opposing traffic to settle. There is a breeze now and Shikamaru's long unbuttoned shirt is casually pulling behind him, his hair long out of place and brushing in his eyes.
"Have you never gone drinking before?"
"What world do you imagine I live in?"
Temari laughs. "But not even at a party?"
They cross the street. It's dark out and he looks handsome in the glow from the street lamps.
"Yes, Temari," he goads with drawn out words, "I've had alcohol. I've just never had it from any sort of legal establishment."
"What do you like?"
"I've only ever had beer and sips from my parents liquor cabinet."
She laughs now at the image, long and loudly and it gets a glance from him that is mythically familiar and altogether realistically unfamiliar at the same time.
"Got it. I'll make the order."
They end up at a spot only two blocks from where Shikamaru is staying. The doors are unmarked, but the scent of whiskey and the loudness of men is undeniable. He finds a table in the corner and she gets two different drinks. Honestly, Temari has never been a bar before this summer either. But she doesn't tell him that. She doesn't tell him that the drinks she orders are just ones she's seen other people order and enjoy.
She likes the walk back to him, likes the feeling of sliding in next to him.
"I think those kind of movies kind of ruin every other love story you see."
"How so?" He has a sip of the first glass she puts in front of him.
"Well," he says, "they died for each other, right? Their whole lives were dedicated to that one person." He pulls the second glass towards himself and lifts the rim to his mouth while she takes the first one back and vehemently tries not to think about how her lips are around the exact same straw his just were. "It makes every other film or television show seem inadequate." He trades the first glass for the second. "You're fine with either?"
She nods, so he takes the first back and keeps it in his hand. When he pulls his palm back for a second to grab a napkin, she sees the cold condensation from the outside of the glass making the skin of his palm wet.
"It's like," he continues, "when a character doesn't know he is in love, right? He thinks it may be irritation or casual dating or whatever — something else — and then in the end is suddenly like, oh, this is what love is. How can that be on the same scale as two people who meet and then are ready to live for one another not long after?"
"You don't think there are different degrees of love?"
He shrugs. "I'm not sure."
"You've never been in love, right?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, are you? With your girlfriend?"
Shikamaru takes a long sip while shaking his head. "No, I'm not. I think if I don't know, or if I can't decide, then I'm probably not."
"How long have you two been together?" Temari asks. "If you don't mind talking about it."
"A year."
"That's a long time... at fifteen."
He shrugs. She sips her drink. She was warm to begin with, but liquor never helps.
"I don't know much about it," he says quietly. "Honestly. I think love is simpler than people make it out to be. In the media, at least."
"Simple? For thousand of years, Shikamaru, our oldest literature — it's all about love. The turbulence of it. You, a future classics scholar, should know that."
"Do you know much about it? And classics major, not scholar."
She waves her hand in dismissal of the latter clarification. "Not really." She completes the succinct answer with a shrug. She doesn't know all that much about love. She's never been in love. But she's had more experience with it than Shikamaru. Surely. Probably. Likely. Almost definitely. Though she'd never had a real relationship. "I don't think it's as straightforward as you're making it out to be though."
"It should be easy," he says, "rationally. I mean, you find someone that shares your interest and wants to share your time. Is it unusual not to fall in love with that? Don't two people just meet and then they know?"
"Maybe. I think it's much more dramatic than that."
"You don't think that's just how the media portrays it? Years of separation and heartache, always holding on to... to one ideal. You often see it portrayed with like, lots of fighting and then lots of sex, and it's just that. Obsession. Violence."
"You don't want lots of make-up sex?"
He sips his drink, his smile visible around the rim. "Not really, no. Volatile relationships don't really attract me."
"What does attract you? You're only fifteen. You have no idea about the real world."
"Do you?" He counters, not at all mad. He rests his jaw in his hand and she slides her glass over to him now that he's finished his own. "You're not older by that much."
"I suppose not." She agrees. She isn't. Ages, now. In a few years, the age gap will be nothing. "Isn't it scary though? Giving yourself to someone?"
"Why do think love entails giving everything you have to someone? Why can't you just join together instead of losing your whole?"
"Why does that bother you?"
"Well once you give yourself away, what do you have left? Do you even exist if you have nothing?"
Temari gestures for two refills.
"Maybe you're right." She leans back and watches his eyes follow her. The plastic seat cover is sticking to the back of her things. Everything is warm. "What do you want though, Shikamaru? Just to meet a nice woman, decide it's true love, and settle down?"
"I didn't say anything about true love. You know for someone who wants to pursue the discovery of truth as a science scholar, you sure make a lot of assumptions about the world."
She smiles and brushes a strand of hair behind her ear where it'd fallen out of her ponytail. Her hair is too short these days to stay in its tie. "Don't rile me. I have no problem with your terminology."
Everything smells like whiskey and leather and it is toxic but exciting at the same time. She wonders if he also smells it in the air.
"Okay." He says, smiling again. The cut of his lips is sharper than she remembers. "I do want to settle down. Meet a nice woman first. Get married. Have two kids. A girl first, because then when I have a son, his older sister will be responsible and motherly, so his energy will be easier to handle."
"Whose the one making ridiculous and unwarranted assumptions about the world now?"
He runs a hand through his hair. It is sweaty at the roots. It has been all day.
"And?"
"And what? That's it?"
"I want children, a family," he says, "I don't think that's all, but that's the most important. I will wait till I'm older. I think I need to learn more about life —"
Temari snorts and he temporarily leans back to knock shoulders with her before settling forward again with his elbows on the table.
"— and I have more things to do. I want to travel. I want to live the kind of life you can't live if you are wholly responsible for the entire care of another human being. But I do want that, in the end. That's my priority."
"So what is your aspiration in cartography?"
"Not map making — cryptology. Do you listen at all when I speak?" He smiles her way for only a second. Everything is seeming brief suddenly. His words, his eyes on her, his shoulder knocking against her. "But yes, it's a topic I'm interested in. I'm doing classics to pursue that. But I want to really dedicate my life to something. And I think I'd like to dedicate it to children."
She doesn't say that sometimes she wishes for the same things. But on the other hand, she wants everything. She wants to dedicate her life to furthering humanity's knowledge. She wants to travel. She wants to speak twenty languages and translate books and critique performance art and work on a sailboat for a year.
She was right, their realities really don't align.
When she stares after him, she hopes he won't notice. There is sheen of sweat on his neck and she wants to run her fingers through it. Ew. That's so fucked up. Since when did other people's sweat turn her on? These Europeans probably really done a number on her.
"God, you're really something."
"Me?"
"Yes you." He responds chidingly, looking at the bar as their second round arrives. "Always you."
"I thought this was some sort of hotel or hostel," she laughs, breathes through the heaves of sprinting so far so fast. "How'd you end up with your own apartment?"
Shikamaru pulls the now-soaked button-down he'd put over their heads in a poor attempt for a makeshift umbrella front when they left the bar to his place off his head and half shakes out his hair.
"Jesus, that was rough."
"Rough?" She mutters. "At least you're home for the night. This rain is supposed to last for the next century. Even with an umbrella, I'll probably be swept into the gutter. Check the papers in the morning. You may need to identify my body."
"That sounds legitimate."
The building is narrow, only a small set of mailboxes filled up the tight entryway. The stairs are rickety wood and if they weren't so thick, she wouldn't be surprised if they fell in beneath their weight.
"The apartment belongs to family friend. He's out of town, so it's mine for the week."
"Have you been here the whole time?"
Shikamaru steps forward and she follows, close to his back and up the stairs. They are making so much noise, each creak only just drowned out by the pounding rain on the skylight. Behind him, his white shirt is totally see-through, sitting like a second skin along his back, and she can see the movement of his clavicles even though his shoulders are mostly still. She wants to touch the dent his shoulder makes in his back.
"He's back the day before I leave, so we'll overlap then, but otherwise. Yeah. I've been holed out up here."
She's instantly jealous. Her hostel is old, but not classic or legitimate in the way this place is. Plus she has a two-inch thick mattress and shares a room with three other people. She's gotten used to the constant nudity this summer, but that doesn't mean she prefers it.
On the third landing, Shikamaru stops and sticks his key in the door. He has to jiffy it a bit, but eventually she hears the lock turn. One or two raindrops remain and are pooling from the top of her eyelashes to fall to the bottom.
"I'll find an umbrella for you." He announces. He pushes in and leaves it open for her to follow. "Come," she hears him call from another room.
The apartment is moderately sized, overstuffed, and spilling with history. She is immediately interested in it. The lights are all off except for one Shikamaru must have hit down a hallway to her left. She watches as his silhouette comes out in front of the light when he emerges from what she assumes is a bathroom.
"A towel too." He says, tossing her one. It is yellow. Happy. She leaves it on the table.
"This place is beautiful."
Shikamaru pauses on his stride to turn on a lamp in the living room where they entered. "Oh. Thank you, I guess."
"If we'd met earlier, I would have loved to spend more time here."
"You can stay," he offers. "I mean, just for a cup of tea or something. If you want."
Temari considers it. She wants to. Except she has already had enough to drink. Actually she kind of has to pee.
"Bathroom?" She asks, pointing down the hall.
He straightens from searching beside the couch for something. There is a pause where he just looks at her, then nods, as though he only just understood her question.
She doesn't lock the door behind her. The light in the bathroom is harsh. Someone once told her, you never really know how drunk you are until you go to the bathroom alone. That is true, isn't it? She's weightless here. Dizzy. She is scared to let go of her grip around the sink in case she embarrasses herself by not being able to walk straight. Her hair is still dripping. Shit, she should've grabbed the towel. She is probably trailing water through this whole place.
Slowly, unsure, she manages to use the toilet before returning to the mirror. She looks okay otherwise. Maybe she is too gone to really be critical in this area, but she does think she looks better than normal. She doesn't like the sun, but it does work well on her. A summer by the beach brought out the freckles she'd long hidden in the city. Even if she usually preferred her skin paler, she'd admit the tan did wonders for her eyes. Did Shikamaru like her tanner? Of course not. He didn't know what looked like any other day. She splashes some water on her face for reassurance on the way out, and that offers more sobriety in a way the torrential rainstorm seemingly hadn't.
"I should get going," she says, upon finding him waiting awkwardly by the table. In one hand he has a closed umbrella and in the other the towel she'd forgotten to use.
"Here," he says, handing her each item. He is skittish. Maybe he is more drunk than her.
"It's possible," he adds. Oh right, she had said that last part aloud. "We only had two drinks though," he says, "which I know is not enough for how I'm doing."
"Maybe the Dutch make them stronger?"
"Maybe," he says softly, as though he doesn't quite believe it.
She stops a few feet from him. Her hands wraps around the back of a wooden chair at the head of the table.
They are silent. She wonders why. Doesn't she have things to say?
A crash of thunder interrupts them and Shikamaru moves, walking past her and to the right, back by the door.
Belatedly, she takes the towel and umbrella from her hand and sets the latter down while she uses the towel to dry off her hair as much as possible in the five seconds she has before he speaks again.
"Here," he offers, extending something else. "Take this too. You're not wearing enough. It's cold, even with all the heat."
She takes the jacket. It big and blue and heavy. There is a butterfly stitched into the collar with different colors of thread. She sets down the towel and takes the coat, slipping her arms into it. She has to stretch to get her wrists out so that she may begin working the buttons. "Isn't it too big? Even for you?"
He steps forward the third time her fingers slip off the buttons. And then suddenly he is there, in front of her chest, moving the buttons into their respective holes slowly, but faster than she had been.
"It's not mine. Or hardly mine. I bought it for a friend, actually. Two days ago. He likes butterflies."
"That's kind of a weird thing to like, isn't it?"
Shikamaru shrugs. "He's kind of a weird guy."
He had begun with the buttons by the bottom, but now he is coming up near her chest and she can practically hear his fingers falter.
"How can I get his back to you?"
"Don't," he says, no louder than a breath, "keep it." His eyes are glued down, looking at her breast in a way that kind of makes her feel like he's trying not to look. She absently forgot that her shirt is white too. Is it as see-through as his? She kind of hopes it is.
It doesn't matter though. He is buttoning her up. He can't see anything. She's swimming in the coat.
This close, she can see each wet strand of his hair, not only his roots now. Moisture clings to each tip, a handful of marked tracks still running down the sides of his face from where his hair settled after he shook it out. He smells good. She can't identify it, but her nose is only centimeters from his jaw. When did he get so close? He smells warm.
He begins on her collar. Her neck. She can feel his fingers on her skin. They're cool. Her heart is pounding, blood drowning out through her ears. She thinks maybe there is more thunder, but it has nothing on the whopping of her heart. She can't think. Two of his fingers push gently under her chin to force her to lift up so that he has a better angle to get at the final two buttons. The jacket is too tight. She can't breathe. He is breathing. Not steadily, loudly. Why is it so loud?
She lifts her chin and her nose bumps his jaw and moves up his cheek and he glances at her to apologize, but then they've kissed.
He steps back first. It was nothing. The absent, accidental press of lips. He is so young. She is so far gone.
And then he steps in. And he presses his hand back where he'd snapped it away, reaching for the final two buttons.
She can feel his breath as an advance to his lips, pressing against her mouth. She is on fire. Isn't this what all those movies were talking about, she thinks, lamely, before his still skittish hands take so long trying to undo the buttons he'd just done up. But he is going to undo every single one. Each one. She knows it. She's hungry for it, throwing an arm around his neck and pulling him even further down as though there were anywhere else for him to go.
It takes ages for him to finish undoing what he'd done, but she won't help. She doesn't. Not once. She follows him against walls, pushes against his chest, forces his hands to move or be crushed between them.
He says nothing as the jacket comes off and falls to the floor. She doesn't hear it, but she does hear him trip over the end table as he leads her to the bedroom backwards. She hasn't even felt his tongue yet. His mouth is so hot. His lips greedy. Everything about him is greedy. He takes all her attention.
There is no wasting time. It's not like sex with other people. It's not a time frame. It's an event. Momentary. Over far too quickly but not in the least bit less than she wants. She just wants him, desperately. She thinks that she has probably never wanted anything this much. Definitely not another human. Definitely not the chase of orgasm. But she does now. She isn't even fully naked when she finally pushes him into her. But he wraps his arms around her anyway and bites into her shoulder and holds her down on him for almost a full minute before he finally eases his grip and lets her move however she wants.
It feels as though she's never been so alive. She is chasing every end at once. He is constantly moving, like he can't quite decide what to do. He looks at her and then moves to kiss her and then pulls away to look at her again. She can't breathe under his scrutiny. She finishes within minutes of when they started and he follows soon after with a flutter of his eyelids and his hand imprinted on the back of her neck, holding her close.
PART TWO
Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
The air is immediately warmer the second she steps away from the balcony. There's no opening nearby to allow for a cross-breeze so the restaurant is significantly stuffier than the table on the balcony had been.
"It's unusual," Tenten says, stepping in behind Temari without looking to bump into her shoulder. "For it to be this hot out this early."
"Do you think it'll be a warm summer?"
"I don't know. I hope not. Winter wasn't too bad."
"Don't you think a warmer winter probably signifies a hotter summer?"
Tenten makes a noncommittal noise.
Temari pushes her palm against her chin and releases a crick in her neck. It's not all that humid out, but it is uncomfortably warm for the month. When she doesn't step forward, Tenten moves past her, bringing out her wallet as they walk. Temari follows quickly behind.
"It's my turn," she protests, reaching out to push the wallet down. "You bought dinner last night."
"Ugh," Tenten heaves, lightly hopping a step, "but you're the guest. I live in this city. When I come visit you, you can pay for more." But she puts away wallet her nevertheless.
The stairs creak with their weight. The kitchen is downstairs and they have to push themselves against the wall when one of the waiters tries to carry a platter past them. She can feel the wood pressing into the skin along the back of her shoulders.
Downstairs is more crowded. It's a popular place. The atmosphere is comfortable, the layer of conversation undercut by the sizzling sound of grilling meat from almost every table. Their server had told her to pay up front. The desk is directly facing the door, so she doesn't see who is there, but she thinks nothing of this and only realizes the lack of foreknowledge in hindsight.
There are two people, the first, a middle-aged woman with kind eyes, and the second is turned around, bent over to look at something on the small shelf below the desk.
"Here you go," Temari says absently, pulling her own card out of her pocket as Tenten slips the bill onto the counter and glances over at her.
"Where are you headed now?"
"I have no plans until tonight."
Tenten leans her elbow on by the check and looks over at the door. "So, I was thinking we should invite Kankuro to the thing tomorrow. I assume Gaara won't want to come, but both are welcome. I won't have many friends there, so please."
Temari glances at her. Her cheeks are red.
"It's your friend's house. What do you mean you won't know anyone there?"
"You know," Tenten says in a way that is supposedly meant to give answer.
In front of her, she hears the older woman say something along the lines of Shikamaru, can you ring this up? but she isn't really paying attention. Her mistake. She doesn't hear anything else though and although the whole time in front of the counter has been less than a minute, it is only now that she is prompted to really turn to the front.
There is no perfect way to describe what she feels. At first, there is hesitant recognition. Later, she will think that perhaps she recognizes the general recognition before she recognizes exactly who he is, but really, she has the name caught in the back of her throat before she even registers his face.
He is looking at her though. He has been looking, for a few seconds, but right now that schism feels like it's been lifetimes.
"Temari," he says, before she can. Is she still breathing?
"Oh," she says, under her breath, on instinct. "Hi. How are you?"
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Tenten turn and look casually between them. He looks simultaneously completely different and identical to the boy she met years ago. "I'm doing well. And you?"
His hair is all gone. Cut short. Longer than average, but shorter than it was. His eyes are the same. His gaze is so instantly familiar, she is amazed she ever forgot how she was pierced by his very attention.
"Fine. Good. I'm good." Why is her heart pounding so fast? Is she angry? Why hadn't she seen him? They'd been seated upstairs, but had come through here. Had he seen her — no, he seems surprised. Had he been here the whole time? Below her? Had they finished five minutes before or five minutes later, would she even have seen him?
"You two know each other?" Tenten asks rhetorically, maybe trying to make it somehow less awkward.
He steps out from behind the counter; side steps his way to her. This is all happening so fast.
"We met in Europe years ago," he gives.
She should hug him. That is the atmosphere. It is instinctual. It is what she would do for anyone she hadn't seen in years. It was what she always does. Even for people she'd only recently met.
He moves in. It's like being in a haze. He steps forward, she extends one arm, he kind of attempts to kiss her cheek, but she pulls her head up to his shoulder past his lips and he kind of half kisses her ear and it is awkward and he pulls away too quickly and she is fumbling.
"Yes," she adds, moving back. There is a foot between them. She isn't looking at him. "It was a long time ago."
"You're in town?" He asks. He's not looking at her either.
She glances over. He gained weight. She can see it in his face. He is stronger. He's aged. Of course. She had never expected differently (never thought about it, or him, not really). "For a bit more, yeah. Visiting my family."
"We should meet," he says, still looking somewhere else, "while you're here." He doesn't sound really committed.
"Take time off now, Shikamaru," the woman says. She's gone. She's over at the bar, but she yells loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear. "Show her around. It's your break in ten minutes anyway. We'll call you when we need you."
"This is the first girl that's ever come for you here." Someone else announces, walking past the counter.
"Jesus," Shikamaru says beside her, his voice weak, "she clearly isn't here for me." She looks up again. He is bright red from the skin she can see after his white collar all the way up to his ears.
"Well," Tenten interrupts, drawing over the vowel, "I'm going to go back to work. Tem, I'll see you tomorrow." She waves a hand in parting and is out of the way before Temari's hand can shoot out and grab her wrist to keep her there.
It isn't that she doesn't want to see Shikamaru. She does. She thinks about him sometimes — offhand, just wondering how he is. Rarely. Wondering about school and about all his dreams. Did they come to fruition?
But right now she wants to run. Her feet are heavy but her legs are antsy. She should turn them all down. She isn't prepared. She has errands to finish. She doesn't want to be charming. She is tired. She's wearing a tank top and she hates tank tops. She didn't put on any makeup today. It's not the right time. She should get his number. Find out his last name and find him on social media. There is always another way.
"Okay," she finds herself saying anyway.
Shikamaru's head snaps to her. "You're —"
She blinks back at him. "I have some time. And apparently so do you."
He doesn't ring her up before they leave and she just awkwardly shoves the bill in her pocket. And when he undoes the apron around his waist, it seems as though, for only a moment, his hands are shaking, but his looks and his voice are as smooth as ever.
"So," he says, patiently, "how are you?"
"You already asked me that."
"I did?" He laughs, uncomfortable, and rubs his hand over the back of his neck.
"I'm fine."
"Oh. Good."
It's a Thursday. Midday. There are not many people milling about, but they are not alone on the street. She's been to the neighborhood, but he seems to know the area better. He is the one that makes the turns. It's only been four blocks, but he is walking with intent, mostly in silence.
She doesn't know what to say. It's been four years. "And you?"
He makes a left and she follows. "Didn't you already ask?" He is smiling, but his shoulders are tense.
So are hers. She is tight, wound up... everywhere. This is so uncomfortable, her legs are shaking as they would right before she had to give presentations during middle school. She thinks, perhaps, that was the last time she felt like this.
"What are you up to, then?" She tries instead.
"I'm still in school." Right. He's younger. Significantly younger. She doesn't think about him much, she doesn't remember much. She doesn't —
"Are you enjoying it?"
"I'll be finished soon, but yes, I am liking it in the meantime."
He goes right and then they are the beginning of a park. She can see the Sumida river twenty yards away. He is probably taking her there. She has heard of the walking path.
"I just graduated."
"Really?"
"Last week."
Shikamaru pauses momentarily in his step, but it is over so quickly, he doesn't fall behind her. "Oh, wow. Congratulations, then."
"Yeah. I quite liked school. I was loathe to leave."
"So what now? More school? A job?" He asks. They are walking up to the path the runs along the river. "Oh sorry. Are you dreading the question? Is that not a conversation topic?"
She laughs. "That seems to be the trend."
He smiles and it reaches his eyes.
She exhales and glances down at her feet. She hadn't realized she'd been looking at him.
"I'm not sure," she says. "I had an internship all lined up. It was meant to last through the year. I had an apartment set up and everything. Two weeks before school ends, they drop me. Out of the blue."
"Shit."
"So, I still used the flight I made. Now I'm here." She shrugs, casually, like her whole life hadn't seemingly collapsed in on her over the past few weeks. The sun is to her right and, standing in one direction for so long, she can feel her right temple warm. She should've put on more sunscreen. "I'm leaving soon though. I'm going to take a job with a family friend, just temporarily until I figure out some other things."
"What was the internship in?"
"Copyright law."
"Sounds boring," he mutters.
She laughs again. "Yeah, I think it would have been."
"So is that what you're interested in? Did you read legal studies?"
"No — physics."
Shikamaru glances down at her with a frown. "I'm not seeing the connection there."
"I don't know if there is one. I'm a multi-faceted woman, Shikamaru."
He eases his frown and looks ahead at the path they're on. "I don't doubt it."
She remembers leaving him. She remembers why. She kind of regrets it. It is the only time she has ever considered herself regretful of sex. She liked him. She really enjoyed his company. Had they stayed together, they may have been (probably would have been) friends. But the sex had prompted her to leave. She'd had sex with half-a-dozen men (and one time a girl) that summer, but she had never regretted any of it. But he was always different, was he? She remembers that.
"Okay," he offers, "so law?"
"It's something I'm interested in. The internship kind of fell into my lap. I met the head of the firm in the winter through a friend and he offered me a job. I took it because it sounded interesting. I thought I'd have the year to do graduate school applications and to figure out exactly what I was going to go for, but now I have no idea. I'm at an impasse." She looks up at him. He seems so much older. He should be nineteen now. Twenty, at the end of the summer. His cheekbones are still as strong, but not as sharp as they were.
His arm hits hers. She's stepped too close. Or maybe he had. She steps obliquely to move away from him without breaking their direction.
"But what about you?" She asks. "Tell me about you. You were interested in cartography?"
He pauses. Then puts it together: "cryptology."
She knows. She wonders why she is being so contrived, wonders why there are so many other things at the tip of her tongue that she keeps swallowing down; wonders why she is so disingenuous when she knows.
"Oh, right. Sorry." He waves a hand.
"It's going well. I'm studying the classics, but for the purpose of cryptology. It's still what I want to study."
"Three and a half years didn't change your mind?"
"Not yet. I still have a semester though, so give it time." She smiles again.
"So are you here?"
"I'm just working here. I'm abroad for school. I spend most of holidays here though. My friends' parents own a restaurant," he rubs his neck again, "uh, that restaurant, so I work for them when I can."
"Your friends own that place?"
"They're not really my friends."
"The wingmen?"
He exhales in a sort of laugh. "I grew up with their son, is what I mean."
"The one with the jacket?" She asks, too quickly. She shouldn't have said that. She should have kept swallowing it all down.
Shikamaru stops again. This time a full halt. She doesn't realize it until she is a meter past him, staring back when she finds her side empty.
His eyes. Her chest hurts. She is suddenly, sharply, humiliated. She shouldn't have said anything. She shouldn't remember. She doesn't. She doesn't. He exhales, visibly, and she thinks, perhaps, he hasn't been breathing.
"Yes." He says, and then he isn't looking at her again, but is walking to her. She swallows. They resume their walk. She looks away and keeps her eyes trained on the river to her left. "That's the one."
It takes over almost an hour, but eventually they seem to find their pace. They used to walk so well together. She thinks about that, sometimes. Whenever she walks with a romantic partner, she thinks about their walking habits. It is never something she noted before Shikamaru. It shouldn't have been something she noted after; but he is a point of comparison now, in that respect.
She doesn't think he is any taller, but he seems much more imposing. The line of his shoulders is bigger. His jaw is wider. She likes his short hair, the way the bottom brushes the top of his collar on the back of his neck.
Shikamaru, too, seems to find the place where their pace becomes comfortable. He seems to relax into it. His breaths are heavier now. His smile more natural.
He smiled more though, when they were younger.
"So, the U.K.," Temari continues, "what's it like?"
"I think it was hard at first. I've been there for some time though, so now I feel much more at home than I did when I first began."
"Do you have many friends?"
"I wouldn't say many. I have enough."
"A girlfriend?"
"I don't have many of those either, but enough."
A laugh. "And so what's next for you? Is that as dreaded a question for you?"
"I have a job offer," he says, "hopefully it'll come to fruition."
"Ha. Yeah. Don't bank on it." She is joking though.
"I'll be back here in Tokyo for some time, likely. If it works out. But we'll see. I'll do applications for further study, but I want to defer."
"Why?"
"I've never had any time off before. I've been in school my whole life."
"You enjoy it though."
He takes a few steps in silence.
"Don't go assuming things."
"I'm not." Though she always is. "You act uninterested, but that's not true, is it? You're always interested."
He looks like he wants to argue; like he wants to say something against her. She thinks, maybe, he is angry, because he suddenly feels furious beside her. It has nothing to do with school. She doesn't know what it is. He stops though. He inhales and suddenly all the tension is gone.
"Would you like some?" She asks, moving away. There is an ice cream stand up ahead of them. "Let me buy you a cone."
Shikamaru shoves his hands in his pockets. His shirt is still tucked in, though she thinks it's only for work. "Will you be having some?"
She nods.
They both get vanilla. How boring, she says, but he doesn't rise to the bait.
"You paid for drinks last time," she intones, handing cash to the man running the stand.
"You remember?"
Everything. She remembers everything. Standing here, she remembers the way he kisses and sees it mimicked in the (downright wrong) way he licks the ice cream. She remembers when she woke up, it was still raining. She remembers watching him buried beneath the covers, the hair on his chest barely grown in. She remembers arguing with herself. She remembers every decision in her internal debate. They wanted different things.
She expects the world. He doesn't.
She remembers leaving. She remembers everything.
"I'm not senile yet, Shikamaru." She says instead. "Plus I hate owing anyone a debt," she adds, just in case.
"Are you still with your girlfriend?"
He leans his elbows over the railing to the river. He's finished the ice cream and is beginning to nibble on his cone. "You mean — ah, no. We broke up not long after that summer. Before I went to university."
"Is that the longest relationship you've ever been in?"
Shikamaru looks down at the water, brows furrowed. "No. We dated for a little over a year, I think. But I just got out of another relationship two months ago. We'd been together for three years."
Temari swallows. Her ears feel hot. "Three years? That's quite something."
"Is it?"
"I was with someone for a whole year last year and that was, by a significant stretch, my longest relationship."
Shikamaru laughs for the first time in a little while. "Really?"
She is long finished with her ice cream, but is still waiting on him. "Yes. I'm not that great a monogamist."
He looks over a her like he wants to ask her to clarify. She doesn't want him to. She doesn't understand what she means either. She practices good monogamy, if there is a gauge on that. She's never had more than one interest at a time, technically. She's never cheated. Maybe he isn't asking because he cheated. He had, hadn't he?
Temari wraps her hands around the railing and leans back for a second before pulling up and turning around to lean her back against the bar.
"It's no problem. We just didn't work out. We weren't in love or anything like that. I mean, who is it anyway that says we're supposed to find one person and fall in love with them for the rest of our existence?"
Shikamaru takes another bite of cone and pauses his response to chew and swallow. She watches his jaw and throat move with the action. For a second, it's like she can't breathe again. This needs to stop.
"So you don't believe in the concept of soulmates?"
"No." Temari swallows. "At least I don't think I do. I mean, there's this wide, big open idea that we're supposed to grow up with two parents. That's our sphere of societally acceptable influence. We marry to have either a tax-break or a structure for our offspring. People who marry as a sign of commitment are probably just worried and lacking confidence about their relationship. Otherwise why get married? Why level commitment like that? We're the ones that make it into a tiered, hierarchical, and categorical system."
Shikamaru turns to mimic her position. "You have a lot of thoughts for a bad monogamist."
"Don't be smart," she mutters. "I'm being serious. Have you ever met a married couple that is still truly in love? Like when they were young? I think, in creating a life or children or something with someone, you must, to some extent, love them just in that. But I don't think I've ever met someone fifty years older than me that is still in love with their spouse, as much as they love their life with that person. Does that distinction make sense?"
"Yes," he says, finishing the tail end of the cone. 'But I don't necessarily agree with you."
"What's your opinion?"
"I don't have one. Not yet."
"You were together three years, you have no thoughts on love?"
"I didn't say that. I have lots of thoughts on it."
He doesn't say anything else, but gestures with his chin back to the middle of the path. Temari pushes herself off the railing with a grunt. They continue walking. They should probably look to turn back at some point. It's been an hour and a half, probably more.
"Why did you two break up?"
A pause. She can hear it before he says anything (she hopes to god he won't say anything). "The last girlfriend, I mean."
Maybe she shouldn't have asked him. Maybe it's an invasion of privacy. Maybe she doesn't want an answer. Maybe she wants him to tell her everything — to tell her that he too wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night panicked because it was her hand he'd been holding in his dream, her name he'd been calling.
Shikamaru looks up at the sky. "It was mutual, for the most part. We're not enemies about it, and I'm not nearly as broken up as I think I should be. But it's hard. There was no singular reason to it. Just different lives, different paths."
It's still hot out. Temari is probably sunburned. Soon, theoretically, they will turn back on the path and Shikamaru will return to work.
She could follow him. She could follow him and go to the restaurant again. Or make a solid plan. She could wait for him at the bar, if they allowed her to. Wait until his shift was finished. He could take her home after. Take her home and lay her down and make love to her like he did when he was fifteen.
Except maybe he didn't want to. He is probably staying with his parents. He's still recovering from a break-up. Probably still in love with this last girlfriend. More likely, he isn't interested in sleeping with her anymore.
She wants to say sorry. She can feel it in her throat, on her tongue. She can feel what it would be like to say the words.
But she doesn't know what she's sorry for. Even now, four years later, she still knows that staying would have been the wrong answer.
"Is there anyone else?" She asks.
He glances down at her. There is nothing purple about his cheekbones now.
"I am looking to someone now," he says after a moment. "From school."
"Already?"
Shikamaru frowns. "We're just talking."
"We all know that just means fucking."
"What?"
"I can't believe I have to explain this to you," she says dramatically. "Well, in any case, you take your —"
Shikamaru laughs now, loudly and coercively. She's warm with it. "I forgot how crass you were."
She smiles mid-step and nudges him with her elbow. She's not nearly strong enough to throw him down, but he stumbles sideways anyway.
"No," she replies, "you didn't."
"You may laugh," he says a while later, "but it's really something I've been thinking about a lot this term."
"Yes."
"I may have oversold my interest in cryptology."
"You hardly sold it at all."
He sends her an impatient look. "What I mean is, I've been set on cryptology my whole life. It's less of a dream, I guess, but has always kind of been an assumption."
Shikamaru says nothing more, so she gives it over a minute of silent walking before she prompts him.
"Recently, I've been thinking of maybe joining the military."
"The military?" Temari imagines him stiff and in uniform. "Are you particularly patriotic? Or nationalistic?"
He looks down at his shoes. She wishes he were still looking at her.
"No. Maybe. My patriotism is something I've been struggling with. I don't think any one nation is superlative. I don't even feel particularly connected to the people of my country as a whole. And I don't really mind not being the best."
"You're probably used to that though."
He laughs at her weak humor and when she glances back up, he is looking at her again.
They've been together almost all afternoon and yet her heart is still pounding quicker than is probably healthy.
"I admire the dedication... of offering my life to another; even if that body is mainly institutional."
It's hard to meet his eyes for stretches of time. She finds herself looking over the rest of his face, watching his nose and the curve of his mouth.
"You were interested in that before," she says. "Dedication, I mean. Do you still want children?"
"Of course."
"But you want to dedicate your life to something right now? Before your perfect nuclear family?"
Shikamaru is uncomfortable. He is red again and a little skittish. "I think it has something to do with my lack of passion, if anything. Code-breaking has always been the only activity to hold my interest, so I think I may be putting dishonest, or maybe warped, weight on its significance. I'm choosing that because there is nothing else on the horizon."
"You've only ever pursued one thing?"
A shrug.
"Well, no surprise there. You do seem to date people for long stretches."
"It's just a thought."
She doesn't respond. She was overselling too. She isn't nearly as happy as everyone thinks she is.
If he could read her mind right now, what would he think? What would he see?
I'd follow you, she suddenly thinks, as if a matter of course. Everywhere you'd go, I'd come along. Doesn't he know, everywhere she goes, the sun is missing? Doesn't he know?
Except she's happy. She's happy. She's happy.
"You're getting sunburned."
"I wasn't expecting to be here," she says without thinking.
She never thought she'd see him again. Honestly, she thought that was it. One day in Brussels, four years ago. Why should it ever be anything more? It's been so much time.
His phone rings. She hears the vibration before the sound. He answers too quickly.
"They want me back," he says when he hangs up, giving only an affirmation to the person on the other line. "The dinner crowd will be coming in soon, so they need help setting up."
She swallows. They're no longer moving. He is smiling at her, but he also looks a little anxious. He is uncomfortable again.
"Hey," she breathes, breaking the silence. She is never as aware in the moment. "It was good to see you. Let's meet up again."
"Yeah," he says. His gaze burns into hers and it is only seconds before she has to look away before she completely loses everything. "Sure."
Was his voice always this light?
There is a soft tremor through his hand. When she looks back, he is no longer looking at her.
"Later, then." He offers.
It takes a second, but he has already turned his back when she opens her mouth to say something else. She doesn't know what it is. All she knows is she desperately wants to articulate it to him. But her brain catches up to her tongue almost as quickly as she had called out his name — she hardly does anything extemporaneously. She doesn't know what she wants to say, and that knowledge is enough to stop her lips from forming whatever unauthorized words she may have wanted to voice. He doesn't turn around. She had said his name too quietly.
She doesn't turn away until she has long since lost him in the crowd.
PART THREE
Without your love
It's a honky tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade
Temari stands up and tries to catch a glance of another person in the slit between the door and the rest of the stall. She doesn't see anyone. She doesn't hear anyone. Would she hear them walking? She had run in so quickly, she hadn't paid enough attention to notice if the floor made noise when stepped on. Probably. It is tile, after all.
Except men usually have rubber-soled shoes. She isn't wearing heels or anything, but her shoes probably would have clicked.
She isn't embarrassed. She hates even this little bit of self-consciousness. It shouldn't matter that she is in here. She doesn't think it invading when a man enters the woman's bathroom (guarding the purpose being genuine). Will men be angry with her? She doesn't really care, but she also kind of does. Is it invasive? Do men, like some women, consider the bathroom to be some sort of sacred space? Some kind of holy ground she is defaming by entering?
She's peed in men's bathrooms before, but never in such a large one. Usually she just explains to one person when she leaves, but what if there are fifty men all standing around as she exits?
There weren't any when she came in — which she found universally unfair, by the way — but the room is destined to crowd soon, isn't it? After all, the line for the ladies wrapped all the way outside. Wasn't bathroom-frequency usually equal?
She doesn't hear anyone, but that doesn't mean anything. She is rushing, for the most part. She needs to leave.
Temari inhales and holds it for only a second before unlatching the door with a slow exhale. She should leave with confidence; make it look like just another day at the races.
There's no one there though. Not a single soul. She hadn't planned on washing hands, but now it seems necessary. Why do boy's bathrooms always smell worse? Urinal cakes?
She goes quickly, stopping in front of the first sink she sees. Taro, luckily, has all her bags, so it's only a matter of straightening the collar peeking out of her sweater and the roll of her sleeves. It may be ninety degrees in the airport, but she is leaving Barbados. Next stop: Tokyo in January. She hadn't thought to pack a coat, so the sweater was the best she could do for the ten or so minutes she will be outside between arriving and hunting down the car.
So that's what she is doing — fixing the collar of her peach-colored blouse to fall correctly over the collar of her knit sweater in the mirror — when she sees him. And she sees him first this time. He is walking in, casually, not looking at her. She recognizes him slower now. He is walking too fast, too disinterested to look her way.
It takes him half the long section of sink to cross before Temari recognizes him, but it takes him until he has hit the stalls and is half a foot past her, to turn his head. She watches, silent, panicked, as he spots her — or someone, anyone, maybe just the fact that she is a woman —and does a double take. She doesn't see the exact moment where he figures it out though. They make eye contact in the mirror. Her hands have somehow gripped the porcelain edges of the sink and she feels as though they are holding on for dear life. Will there be bruises on her palms?
She forces herself to turn around. This is not the time. Not again. Not now. She's happy.
"Of all places," she offers in greeting. He smiles. It is unfamiliar. He's as handsome as ever now. Bigger, older; has the makings of a five-o'clock shadow.
"It's really you?" He asks. It doesn't seem genuine.
"As far as I know," Temari replies. She goes up and when they hug this time, it isn't at all awkward. They are old friends.
"Wow," he breathes. He smells like pine-scented cologne. "What are you doing here?"
She leans back on her heels. "I've been visiting the past two weeks." And then she waves a hand to cover all her bases. "Oh, and in this bathroom? Well, you probably saw the line, didn't you?"
Shikamaru smiles and looks behind her at the mirror for only a second before meeting her eyes again. "You've got the right idea, it seems." He clears his throat and shifts his weight onto his heels to mimic her before rolling back onto his toes. It's rare to see a man fidget like this. He is so big — he's always growing, isn't he? When he raises a hand to rub the back of his neck, she absently notes the size of his bicep extending from the black tee-shirt he is wearing.
"So," Temari ventures, "how are you?"
There are butterflies. She is unprepared. Perhaps, if she'd know they'd (ever) meet again, she would have been more equipped. She's planned speeches to him for years and yet right now she can recollect absolutely none of them.
"I'm well. I'm just beginning vacation."
"Really? Where are you staying?"
He opens his mouth and then closes it again. Beside his thigh, his thumb nail is pressing into the pad of his ring finger. It's then that she realizes she has leaned back against the sink and is still tightly gripping the basin, only now more awkwardly at her angle. She should move off casually. It must look like she needs support to keep standing.
"On the West Coast. I have a friend from college there."
"Do you surf?"
"I've attempted to."
"Well, good luck on the West Coast then," she says, smiling. His eyes catch the shitty fluorescent light overhead, but it somehow makes him seem more alluring. She looks (and feels) like shit — but he was always the more agreeable one.
He smiles back. "And you? You're well?"
"Great. I've been fine. I'm returning from holiday, so ask me next week and you'll probably have a different answer." It's too quick, but it's not dishonest. He smiles. "Oh shit, wait," she glances down at her watch. "Okay. My flight's boarding."
"Ah, then it was —"
"I have five or so minutes," she interrupts. She is itchy... everywhere, but she isn't ready to leave yet. "I told my boyfriend to go on if I don't make it back in time and he has all the carry-on's. And it's not like someone can take my seat."
Shikamaru laughs under his breath. "What if the plane takes off without you?"
Her inhale is shaky. "Hopefully he'll stage a mutiny."
He laughs again.
"So you're going home now?"
She nods. He doesn't ask where home is.
"And are you still doing law?"
"No," she'd practically forgotten all about that failed internship. "I stuck with physics. I went to school for my Ph.D. and now work in the university's research labs."
"Good for you," he swallows again, "you seem... good."
"And you," she intones. "You grew your hair back out."
Of course. He's probably grown and cut it again dozens of times.
Shikamaru reaches up, his fingers brush the front of his hair that had fallen from its tie. "Yes."
For only a moment, Temari wants to reach out to him and touch his lips. She suddenly can feel the skin of his mouth beneath the pads of her fingers, how the plumpness would press in and the lines of dry skin would bump beneath her touch. She wants to open his mouth. It is so visceral, she is momentarily stunned into silence, unable to respond to whatever it was he was saying. She has to backtrack.
She goes with: "so... military?"
"Briefly."
"Really," she leans forward. She was only half-joking.
"You went through with it?"
"For a time," he says. "I still work for the government, though. Just not the army."
"And your two kids?"
He laughs lowly. She feels like she might choke. "Still in the works."
"You're only, what, twenty-four?"
He hesitates, then meets her eyes. "Yes. I am."
"Take your time."
"I'll do my best."
She smiles through a sigh. It's been almost six years. It's good to see him. She never expects to, yet here he is. Again. Looking at him now, the arch of his cheekbones and the almost familiar slope of his nose, she can practically forget that she once slept with him.
I've been looking for you, she wants to say, but has enough sense of mind to halt the movement of her lips. A voice comes in over the speakers. She has no idea what is said, but she can figure it out. "I should get going." She offers, instead.
"Right. Well it was good to see you."
"Hey," Temari says, finally pushing herself back off the skin, "when you come back my way, reach out to me, okay? I'd like to get back in contact." As if they ever were.
"Me too." He extends his hand and she takes it. His hand is warm. Warmer than hers. She is holding her breath. They aren't shaking. He is the stronger one. He is the colder one. He has always been the leader, as much as she never wanted to admit it. He is the one that doesn't move. He just holds her hand.
And then it's not that simple anymore. His fingers are extending. His thumb is still holding her in place, but his fingers (so much longer than hers, always) are brushing the inside of her wrist.
She's hurting. This hurts. The thrill of it runs through every single system in her body.
There is no oxygen going to her brain, but the blood is pounding in her ears. He is staring at her, but he seems as completely unsure as she is. She has never been so strung in her life.
Here's her answer, standing a foot away with a trembling mouth and eyes so dark it is hard to read any expression in them.
The bathroom has no door, so it takes a second before they know someone is interrupting them. Temari practically jumps back. Shikamaru does.
"Sorry," she says, too loudly, too quickly. "The other one was full."
The man looks warily between them, hesitating for a moment before making his way over to one of the urinals. He pauses, then rethinks and goes into the stall furthest from them.
"I'll let you go," Shikamaru says. His voice is too soft, too slow.
She swallows again. Then leaves. She hears her shoes all the way out of the bathroom and through the small airport back to her gate. She can't think. She walks through the whole plane in a daze, fast as she possibly can, scared that if she were to look back, she'd see him waiting for her. He's still in the bathroom though — there was no reason for him to follow her out.
"Where have you been?"
"I ran into a friend." Temari replies. She waits for Taro to get up so that she may take the window seat and hopefully fall asleep before take off. "From when I was a teenager." She stops a little too short. The comment is too awkward, too hesitant. She doesn't want him to ask about it. She has nothing to say, so she poorly adds: "A really long time ago."
He's not paying much attention though, patting her shoulder when she moves past him. "Not that long ago," he chides, "you're not that old yet."
Almost ten years. A whole decade. A small part of her life in comparison to the sphere of influence it seems to have.
She thinks, absently, temple pressed against the sticky glass of the window, what would happen if Shikamaru were to come on the plane. If he were to come and take her away —
she doesn't want it. She expects the world. She lives a life poignantly absent of his participation. He is a figure on the horizon of her youthful, imagined, and unrealistic reality. He is a mistake, a figure whose world too frequently and never purposefully, intersects with her own for too long to be ignored and too short to be meaningful. She doesn't know him at all.
Temari reaches over and takes Taro's hand without looking. The plane takes off not long after she's sat down. She wants to sleep, but instead she watches the ground disappear beneath her, leaving him behind.
PART FOUR
It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me
It's going to rain. She can feel it in her hair. What a disappointment! An occasion where Temari blow-dried her hair is bound to be an important one. It isn't even the rainy season!
Her hair isn't the most important part (by a long-shot). The pictures remembering tonight and the whole weekend wouldn't be the most important part. And yet, she found herself pushing it down in the mirror. She was never good with humidity to begin with. She'd only cut it yesterday, but if she'd kept it long there would be no problem whatsoever. Now, it only fell to her shoulder and would not be at all capable of weighing down the oncoming frizz.
"I just want you to know," Kankuro is saying, "I told you all of this at the barber's shop."
"And why, pray-tell, should I have listened to you? Not only do you barely have any hair, but you've had it the same length as long as I can remember."
Kankuro leans against the lip of the sink beside her and shrugs, looking over at the stalls. "Isn't this evidence of my general expertise enough?"
Her makeup is still in place. She'd spilled some champagne on the black pants of her jumpsuit over an hour ago, but luckily it looked like the liquid hadn't even formed an outline to stain.
"Bite me," she mutters, running her fingers through her newly short hair. "Well, that's about as good as it's going to get."
Kankuro shoves off the sink and turns to throw his arm around her shoulder. Wow, standing side by side like this, they looked so... old.
"Oh my god," Kankuro sputters, apparently noticing the same thing, "Is that a wrinkle?"
"You're almost thirty."
"And you're getting married."
She rolls her eyes and pushes away from him. "Don't remind me." She's joking. She's been aware of this day for the past year. Had kind of come to expect it for the past four years.
Temari pauses in front of the door to the bathroom. She inhales. Outside are over three-hundred of their 'very closest friends'. And having this dinner was the only way she could get away with having a one hundred-person wedding. The bathroom is nice. It smells like lavender. And is cold. And quiet.
"Good luck," Kankuro offers half-heartedly from back by the sinks. He is still examining his potential age.
"This is the women's bathroom," she throws over her shoulder before pushing open the door.
Honestly, the big wedding thing isn't, really, Temari's thing. She would have preferred to elope, if that were a possibility. Gaara, unsurprisingly, was too much of a big-shot to have a completely private affair.
There are literally people here that she has never seen before. She only vaguely recognizes anyone she passes on her way from the bathroom. The old people all kind of blend into one, which is shitty of her to think, sure, but those people are more common. They are usually related to either her or Taro. The young ones are the more surprising and the much more sporadically found ones. She knows some cousins, a handful of colleagues, and some childhood friends, but there are many more that she is almost positive must have a large degree of separation in their relationship to her and/or Taro.
"It'll be down this way and to the right and then the ballroom is on your left," a voice says. She glances over. The dinner has ended. People have eaten. Now they are just mingling. People will start leaving in half an hour, but the attendant is directing a new guest.
And he is just now arriving. She knows who it is before she even knows.
Temari, without any rational thought, has taken two steps in the direction of him before she even puts together that the ever-late or unavailable best man is also her—
and then she is walking away, faster than the hallway allows. She isn't thinking. She is just running. It takes bumping into three separate people that finally has Temari stopping short.
What is happening?
What is this?
Did she know?
And then: "Temari?"
She is back in the bathroom she'd just left, hand clenched around the polished wooden frame. Kankuro is nowhere in sight.
She holds her breath as she turns around. She can hear her heart in her ears, flooding out everything else coming in.
He looks confused. Confused. He didn't know. Did she?
"I didn't think, I didn't think." She shakes her head.
"Temari," he tries. He reaches out a hand, then pulls it back.
It's been years. Three years? Four? Too many. Not enough. Never enough.
He looks the same. Always. Older. He's always older. He is even wearing a suit. He is missing a tie.
"This really isn't the best time for me," she finds herself saying, desperate for any words to come out. "To see you." She swallows; leans her weight off the doorframe to stand straighter. "No offense."
Shikamaru takes a step back. Looks down. Scuffles his shoe. "So I figure this is your wedding, then."
She misses it. Past Shikamaru's shoulder, she spots Taro coming out from the hotel's ballroom, looking around. She sees the exact moment he sees them. And then he grins and makes his way down the long hallway that suddenly seems much too short.
Shikamaru turns to follow her gaze. There is an instant, for only a second, where his eyes snap back to her after spotting Taro, but it is so quick, she doesn't even believe she'd seen it.
"Thank god you made it," Taro grins as he reaches them, and then he is enveloping Shikamaru in a hug.
It is tight. Long. Temari tries to take deep breaths. Her feet hurt even though she hasn't been standing in these shoes for very long.
"I know it's not a good time," Taro continues, pulling away, "for work." Shikamaru looks a little bewildered, but he is saving it quickly, working hard for the easy smile that passes his lips. "Sorry there wasn't much warning." Taro laughs, not at anything particular. He is happy to have Shikamaru there. He is blushing with it. "So," he continues, "you've met?"
Shikamaru opens his mouth, but she answers first.
"Not yet."
It takes absolutely everything she has to reach for his hand without her whole arm shaking.
"Well," Taro says, arm still thrown loosely over Shikamaru's shoulders, using his other hand to pat Shikamaru's chest, "he just moved back to town six months ago. I've been trying to get him over for dinner for ages."
He had. They'd been busy. Work. A wedding. Work. But she had heard him mention it, once or twice; hang up from two or three phone calls with the explanation of speaking to his college roommate.
"You'd love him, Temari."
"I would?"
She holds her breath. No. She wouldn't.
"Yes." It is so confident. "You will, I mean. I always thought you'd get along well." Taro laughs again, this time more to himself. "How could you not? I love you. And I love this guy."
Shikamaru makes a noise and it just makes Taro seem to grow fonder, pulling Shikamaru closer, which looks vaguely uncomfortable as he is a few inches taller than her fiancé.
He looks wary. Anxious. His brow is furrowed. There is no pretense now. He is staring at her openly, searching for something in her face that she is sure as hell she doesn't have the answer to.
There is a voice. And old man. Lilting. Taro's name.
"Oh, sorry," Taro continues, turning back from seeing who was calling out to him. "I have to go deal with this." He pulls away, all genuine joy. "Please," he smiles, stepping back and clapping his hands together. "Talk. Become friends. I'm glad you're here, Nara. Don't leave tonight without at least having a drink with me."
Shikamaru sends off a half-hearted salute before looking back at Temari.
She can think clearer now. Her heart isn't in her ears. Her knees are no longer buckling. This is a cruel mockery of her fate, but she isn't incapable of holding her own. She reigns herself in.
"Drinks?"
Desperately.
Shikamaru tilts his head. He, too, seems like he's agreed to get with the program a bit more.
"You're not pregnant?"
She stops from where she'd been about to pass him on her way back to the ballroom. "What?"
He swallows. Uncomfortable. Apologetic. Embarrassed. "Sorry. I just — assumed, because it was such a fast wedding."
She waves a hand and continues walking, beckoning him to follow. "There was nothing fast to it." You'd know, she wants to say, if you ever returned Taro's calls and came to dinner. "We've been engaged for almost two years. We only started talking about the actual ceremony recently because we wanted the gardens at this hotel and they had a last-minute opening. Well, last-minute four months in the future."
She can feel him behind her, following her trail and she winds through the scattered throngs of people in the hallway before eventually coming into the ballroom. No one is sitting at their tables anymore, so it seems as though there are more people than before. She should slow down. Or grab his wrist.
Temari does neither. He follows though. Never more than a foot behind her all the way until they reach the bar.
"I'm sorry we didn't get to meet before."
Shikamaru laughs, but it is short and unsure. "Our lives have been too coincidental, really."
"It is surprising." A glass of champagne is put in front of her. She switches Shikamaru's cabernet for her drink. No one had asked her, but she wouldn't have ordered anything carbonated if given the choice.
He watches her with fascination.
"You didn't expect me." It's not a question, but he seems surprised anyway. "He must have mentioned me. You're getting married, after all."
A sip of her drink. "I never made the connection." Another sip. "I know other Shikamaru's." She knew dozens. She had dedicated significant time in her life to looking up the social-media profiles and university and military mentions of every single Shikamaru she could find. If she had heard the name uttered, at all, for years, it would drown out any other conversation. Once, across a cafe, she'd heard the name, and when she found it had belonged to a man she didn't recognize, she had burst into tears.
But no. She hadn't made this connection.
Had Taro ever referred to him as Shikamaru? Or only... Nara? Surely both. Surely she should have known. Did she?
"I didn't know your surname."
Shikamaru thinks on this. He takes a drink from the champagne she forced to him without complaint. He looks different. More than before. More than last time. He just shaved. She can see a cut below his ear.
"Taro should've put it together."
"No," she says too quickly.
Shikamaru opens his mouth, but he knows the answer to the question he is about to ask. So he swallows instead; takes another sip. "Why haven't you told him?"
Temari shrugs. "Why tell him something so trivial?"
This surprises Shikamaru more than she thinks it should. Why would she have told Taro about her occasional run-in and one-time sexual encounter at eighteen with what amounted to, if pressed, an acquaintance?
"Anyway," she continues, "none of his stories really aligned with my perspective of you. He was only ever in school in Japan. He works for a pharmaceutical company. I didn't think you would have crossed paths."
He is about to respond when Kankuro comes barreling in between them, reaching for what's left of Temari's drink and downing it in one gulp.
"Ugh, Christ," he laments, hanging his head between where his elbows hold his weight against the bar. "I know she's all happy and whatever now, but it is still so awkward with Tenten. I mean, like, we didn't even date! We only used to fuck —"
"Jesus, Kankuro, go away." Temari snaps, jabbing his rib with her elbow. This seems to bring Shikamaru out of his momentary backtrack when he'd been pushed aside to make room for her brother.
"—and it's been like, almost ten years but that guy still keeps sending me death stares. I mean what is his shit?" Kankuro bangs his forehead against the wood once and then glances up. "Oh hey bro," he says, pushing himself off the bar, all traces of anger gone. "Shikamaru, right? The missing groomsman." He extends a hand.
It's only thanks to Temari's heels that she can even see over Kankuro's shoulder to watch Shikamaru take it. He looks different here. Maybe it's just the angle. There is nothing familiar except for the technicalities when he looks at Kankuro. It isn't how he looks at her.
"I'm Kankuro. And hey, lucky you, I think you're walking Tenten in on Sunday." He spares Temari a glance over his shoulder. "Right? If she's the maid of honor." Then he reaches forward to kind of pat Shikamaru on the bicep. "Well watch out for her boyfriend. Guy's a real asshole with a serious jealous streak."
"That's enough." She has to put real force behind her shove.
"Whatever." Kankuro calls, tripping back into the fray of people. "Don't say I didn't warn you."
Shikamaru is eyeing her when she looks back. "My brother," she offers in a sigh of explanation, gesturing for a new glass. This time they give her cabernet.
They are silent for a little while. He looks relieved that he has time to gather his thoughts while she is desperately trying to come up with the proper thing to say.
She can hardly think though.
Finally, right before she is about to come up with some sort of excuse, Shikamaru straightens enough to get her attention.
He smells. It's good. Some sort of cologne she can't place. It was pine last time. It's something different now. On second though, not a cologne, just a scent.
"We should talk," he tries.
Dinner is over already. They don't have anything to talk about. Every line of conversation is contrived from her own memories and false fantasies. Her own stuff that needs to be resolved and reconciled with the man standing before her is her own. It has nothing to do with him, really.
"No. We shouldn't."
Shikamaru doesn't argue. He doesn't push. He doesn't even move as she walks away, spotting Taro speaking with a group in the middle of the room, but she can feel his eyes on her shoulder blades and the back of her neck the whole time. She remembers, once, when they were very young, his gaze used to burn. That was how she described it. Was this that feeling? The heat rising up her back? Was this still the same?
Offhandedly, she wonders what he wants to say. For her, the answer is apparent. But what could he possibly want to tell her? They would spend the weekend together. The wedding. Then she'd be on a honeymoon. And after that, she'd be back to work. She'd see him once a year, maybe, at most if the past six months were anything to go by. He was busy. She was busy. And if he'd ever take Taro up on the invitation, they'd sit at the dining room table and discuss politics or literature or she'd be brought in on stories of Taro's college antics. Then he would go home and that would be all.
Taro extends his hand when he sees her, eyes still trained on the person speaking.
"Hey," she whispers, sliding closer. "How are you doing?"
"Drunk."
"Good." She smiles into his shoulder, leaning her head against the familiar comfort. When she looks to the side, Shikamaru, across the room, is no longer watching her, but is ordering a second drink. She doesn't hear her own words until they're spoken and made real.
"So, I think I'm going to go on a walk with Shikamaru. Is that okay?"
"Why wouldn't it be okay?"
"Well," she moves off him and shrugs, smiling, "I didn't know what the plan was for the rest of the night."
"You're getting along then?"
"Right now we are." She feels her smile shift from genuine to forced. "We'll see how long that lasts though."
"Show him the gardens," Taro whispers, leaning closer for a quick kiss. When he pulls away, he is giving her a look that is something between come back soon or maybe be nice. Temari rolls her eyes in dismissal and pulls away, waving her hand in parting. This time, when she looks over to the bar, Shikamaru is watching her again.
"Would you like my jacket?"
The top half of her outfit it white and silk and there is the distinct possibility that she would be equally as cold if she were topless, but that's not the problem right now.
"It's been over ten minutes of complete silence and that's what you choose to begin with? Aren't you the one who wanted to talk?"
Shikamaru glances away from her. "It's getting colder."
"I'll be okay. It's not too bad yet. Just humid."
"Let me know, then."
They walk further. The gardens are extensive. There are paths winding through what she would have assumed was a manmade forest before Taro had first taught her the history.
"So. How are you?"
"That felt natural," Shikamaru chides half-heartedly. "Really good transition."
"You're not offering me anything!" She snaps; then rescinds, "just... tell me about yourself. Like you used to."
She shouldn't have said that. She should have drunk more water. She shouldn't have had that final cabernet. She shouldn't have been here in the first place.
He kicks a stone, hands in his pockets. "It used to be easier."
"Yes. It did." She inhales with purpose. The air is filled with the scent of earth. "Now tell me what you've been up to."
"There isn't much to say." He kicks another pebble, a bigger one this time. "I am still doing the same work as I was the last time I saw you."
"And what exactly is that?"
"Cryptology."
"Hey," she says, surprised, "Shikamaru, that's awesome."
He frowns.
"It's what you wanted to do your whole life. So even with graduate school and the army, you still ended up doing what you wanted in the first place."
"There's nothing that grand to it."
"That doesn't amaze you? Huh." She glances up at the stars, somewhat visible through the foliage. "It seems like you kind of tried all these different paths, but they all took you back to the same place, just further along from where you started. I find that wonderful." Shikamaru is walking too slowly. Temari has to stop and wait for him to keep up. "I know it's all my own theory from what I know about you, but I think things like that are really magnificent. Fated."
"That's more optimistic than I gave you credit for."
She shrugs when he catches up to her. "I have my moments."
"And a wife? And two children? Are those your next questions?"
They weren't. He had just broken up with someone. He had come back to Japan to work on their relationship, but it hadn't seemed to help; or at least it didn't help enough, according to Taro.
"Have them yet?" She asks instead.
"Not yet. Probably not anytime soon."
"You're getting older. You don't want to be a geriatric father."
"I'm twenty-seven."
She knows. Young. Younger than her. But so much older than back then.
"And you?" He asks after a minute. "How are you doing? What are you up to?"
"I have nothing different for you either." She gives. There isn't much mud, but occasionally she can feel her heel sink into the ground a centimeter or so. It takes her out of her worries for only a second when she has to put purposeful effort into putting one foot in front of the other. "Nothing has changed."
"Really?"
"Well now it sounds bad."
He laughs under his breath. "I wouldn't say I'm any different. I was a lot more active in the past ten years than I will be in the next ten."
"How's your relationship with God?"
It takes him half a minute. "No different," he answers. "Still atheist. Though maybe less sympathetic and open-minded to those who read the bible as canon."
"You're quite the cynic."
"I don't think I've ever portrayed myself any differently." He says nothing after that.
They used to walk. They mostly only walked. And talked. They spoke for hours. Why was it so hard for her to find the words now. She lived a happy life. She did things that excited her. Why was it so hard to suddenly find an answer for him?
Though still, as long as it's been and as brief as it was, she does feel comforted by the unexplainably familiar presence of him beside her.
"This is where we had our first date," Temari decides to go with when the silence has once more dragged on too long. Neither of them had mentioned Taro yet.
"In a hotel?" There is a laugh in his question.
"He had won some sort of raffle at school for a free meal at the restaurant."
Shikamaru rubs the back of his neck. "Grad school? Jeeze, I don't even remember that."
Silence again.
It used to be easier, he said.
Yes, she had said.
Except it's never been easy. Not once. Not since that first time when he shoved his way into her life and then left with absolutely no effort to plug the hole that remained.
And even then. Easy has never been a word to associate with him.
The night is cold. She is chilly, but she won't take his jacket. She concentrates on her heartbeat to keep from shivering. With this much intent, she can feel it back in her ears, the blood coursing through with each pulse. He is beside her. Heat comes off him, but she won't move closer. She won't look up at him either. Really, she's only met his eyes once so far.
One minute turns into five. They finish one trail and begin another. Five turns into ten and then fifteen. The dinner is long over now. Except for a few stragglers, most people should have gone home right now.
Never mind the water — she definitely should have drunk more alcohol.
There is no prompt this time when he reopens the conversation with: "why didn't you tell him about us?"
She halts for only a second. She wants to stop, full on, still, weight rooted to the ground, but she doesn't. She thinks she shouldn't. That seems to dangerous. So she keeps pace with him.
"And say what?" Temari justifies again. "I've spent less than, totaled, twenty-fours hours in your presence. What exactly is there to tell?"
Silence, again, though this time only long enough for the conversation to shift without being overly purposeful.
"Hey, how was that vacation four years ago, in Barbados?"
"It was only three years ago," she responds. She is irritated. She doesn't know why. And she recognizes it is without reason. Maybe the atmosphere is just too tense. She is getting married in three days. She shouldn't be here, in the middle of what is basically a forest, with him. "It was good. And yours?"
"Were you with him then?" He asks instead. "I'm amazed we've really never intersected. We were so close. I would've recognized him if I'd only gone to the restroom a few minutes earlier. Spent time, if I'd made vacation plans for the week before."
"We were never meant to though, were we? Intersect, I mean. It was always an accident." She knows where this is going, knows she should stop herself, but she isn't. She can't.
"Well we did."
"It never worked out with purpose. Whenever we tried to make plans, they didn't work out."
"They could've."
"You don't know that."
"You left."
And that's it, isn't it? That's what he's been waiting for for the past twelve years. It was why, every time she tried to reach out, he let go of her hand. It was why he was always leaving her behind.
But he is wrong.
She stops walking. Stops, right there, in the middle of the gardens.
It is dangerous, but so is she.
"Don't."
She can hear how harsh it is, how strongly she means it.
But it makes no difference. It's like something has broken. Shikamaru doesn't even turn around when he realizes that she isn't beside him anymore. Instead, he waits, hands in pockets, ten feet in front of her, facing the path. "I waited for you in Brussels. In Tokyo. I waited every day. You knew where to find me."
Her knees buckle again. The silk of her jumpsuit is so thin, she really does feel naked now. It feels like her ribs are going to bruise with the sudden and heavy-handed repetition of her lungs beating against them.
"Now?" She asks, breath short and voice too high. "Twelve years and now?" This is what he wanted, wasn't it? She was eighteen all over again and it was always going to come back to one momentary decision.
But she isn't the villain. She isn't the only one with guilt.
"Fine." The inclination, the full acceptance of what she is about to say, seems to land on him, because now he turns around. There are no crickets in the air. No cicadas or nearby cars, no roar of airplanes overhead. The sounds of rustling leaves is the only noise in the air apart from her heavy breaths and his slower ones. There is no one here to hear them. Twelve years of silence and now —
only Shikamaru.
She has never even said it aloud to herself. Never told another soul.
But the importance isn't missing her. She is still so angry, so furious that the blame is still on her. That this whole time, he has been unfairly putting everything on her, weighing her with what happened to them and what could have happened if she hadn't left that first time. He's always blamed her. She knows it. She's always known it. But he is wrong.
"You waited for me? I was the one that threw you away?" Her laugh is cruel, tongue pressing against her teeth. She looks over at the trees beside her for only a moment because she can't stand to look at him. She never could.
His arm jerks as his feet shift their weight. "I woke up and you weren't there. I was fifteen, Temari. I woke up and... and you were gone."
"Right." It comes out shaken and vicious. "I remember you. Young and naive. Flirtatious. Too smart for your own good. How many women did you have there, in college?"
"Don't try and make me sound pitiless." He sounds exasperated in his exhale. "Does it even matter? You don't think every other woman ever since has been compared to you?"
"Why?" She spits back. "Because I was your first?"
"You weren't. I'm not hung up on the loss of my virginity. This was always so —"
"First love, I mean." She says it so quickly, the drop in her tone practically shoves her body back in it's distinction. "Held up on the pedestal of teenage fantasy?"
That brings him forward now, both hands out of his pockets and fisted in the air. He's as angry as she is; as furious with over a decade of pent-up frustration that he has never had an outlet for until now. It's all directed at her. She has never had anything with so much raw force of energy thrown solely in her direction, but she has more than enough of her own resistance to push off the velocity he is throwing his words with.
"You say everything easily except the things that are most important to you, the things that make you at all vulnerable. You once stared up at me within three hours of meeting me to ask if I wanted to fuck you. Verbatim. Yet here you can't even admit that — Fuck. You over-analyze everything, Temari. How can you not understand this?"
She yells. For the first time in his direction. For the first time to anyone in her entire life with any seriousness. "Because you don't know me!"
That stops his movement towards her. It stops her movement back. It stops the lock in her knees and the cramp in her quads. When she speaks again, it is quieter, more reserved. It is more honest. And it is absolutely what she has been saying to herself for the past twelve years.
"I've spent more time with every single person at this wedding, even Taro's great-fucking-aunt whose name I can't even remember, than I have with you."
Shikamaru's exhale shakes. He turns toward the trees and rubs his eyes before turning back.
"Why are you fighting this?" He asks, genuine and confused. "Why have you always fought this? Don't you understand how rare this is?"
"Stop spouting such obnoxious bullshit."
She knows what he is going to say. What every movie taught them since they were children. What it meant to find that one-hundred-percent perfect person. What he thinks they are. What he believes about the universe.
"You don't get to play the victim here," she shoots again after a moment. She is not the villain. She is not the only one who made a decision. "You didn't wait."
There is a pause. Two seconds longer than he should have taken. He looks up from the ground, glances at her, face pale and brows furrowed. "What are you talking about?"
She wants to laugh. How daft can he be? How self-centered is his world view? How long has he been putting everything down on her? How far does he think her penance should extend?
"The world isn't here to be kind to you, Shikamaru. Life doesn't always work out. Love isn't always the most important thing."
She's never said it before. Not out loud. Not even to herself. She'd never even said the word to him since she'd realized it for what it was. But that is what it was — what it always had been, from the moment he sat down at her table all those years ago.
Admitting it felt like it was taking off some weight she hadn't even known she was carrying.
"Tell me what is —" he'd always known. Maybe he'd known before she had. "What is the most important? What has ever proven to be more valuable than true love?"
"There you go, always putting on some conjecture of what I want and I how I feel. Stop making assumptions."
He takes three steps forward. "You're the one making them!"
He is sweating. The humidity. The back of her neck is wet. She is cold, but her blood is boiling.
"You're so concerned with doing right by others. Right by me, right by him." His lips are red. They're shaking. "Don't you ever want something for yourself? If he is really in love with you, he wants you to be happy, even if that means leaving him."
"Isn't it the same for you?"
He opens his mouth the say something, then closes it again. She has to stop herself from hyperventilating.
"If that's what you want."
He is quieter now. He's stopped moving again.
She takes a slow breath, forces it out in parts. Another one. Her entire body feels light, unattached.
Was she right? Has this been what they have both been trying to say for twelve years? They've only met each other three times. But nothing was reserved to those times. Just because that was all she saw, it didn't mean she spent a single day with him out of her existence.
"I tried for you."
He looks back at her. She is shaking again, this time in her stomach and her wrists.
"I went back to Belgium. I asked for you. Every time we met after that — I asked for you. You're the one who never followed me." Her hands have clenched into fists, but her voice isn't shaking. "I made a mistake. And I spent every day of my life trying to atone for it. You don't get to throw that off on me anymore."
He swallows. She traces the line of it down his throat. She hates him. She loathes him.
"No."
It is final. What does he want from her? To hurt her like she had hurt him? To leave her life for him? Was the cordiality of every subsequent meeting a guise for this? Even if every interaction had been nothing but cordial, that didn't mean this anger, this fury and helplessness was at the bottom of it. Was this always what it was?
"I stayed in Brussels. You never came."
She bites the inside of her cheek until she can feel it bleed. "You went to school in the U.K."
"I transferred. I stayed a whole year hoping you would come back."
"No you didn't."
"How would you know?"
She says it, practically yells it, again. "Because I came back for you!"
Silence. Not even the wind makes a noise now.
She can feel the gravity of her confession. It feels akin to when she was a child and a classmate would whack her on the back if she coughed, straight between her shoulder blades with enough force to practically propel her forward. That's what it feels like now. Her whole chest is collapsing. She tastes tears in her mouth, but hadn't even felt them leave her eyes.
"I went back to Belgium. I ran off from school, bought a plane ticket with the pocket money I'd saved from cleaning one of the lab rooms so my father wouldn't know. I went back. And I looked for you. I asked for you."
When she looks up, he is staring at her wide-eyed. The sweat at his brow makes him glow. Whenever she looks at him — late at night when she can't sleep and the explanation is at her fingertips, she'll go through the pile of meaningless things in the bottom of one of her boxes at the top of her closet, the unpaid bill from the BBQ place, a movie stub, an old polaroid of his profile — there is nothing purple about him now though. Nothing young, though her most recent memories still have him at fifteen.
"You love him?"
"Yes." She does. She knew she would the moment they met, panting on the side of a small hill, dizzy when he put his hand on her shoulder: she could fall in love with this man, she'd thought.
"Temari," he tries again, voice low and heavy. His hands are back in his pockets. Her heart is pounding. "Why haven't you told him?"
She meets his eyes. It hurts. "You know why."
This is it. This is what they were leading to, dancing around, make-believing... for years. She had thought it was only her. He had left her behind and she had been dangling on her own hoping for answers, but too scared to ever look over the edge.
Shikamaru is about to respond. She can feel it in the way his body moves with his inhale, with the way his eyes yearn for an answer to his yet unspoken question, but before he can ask it, his phone rings.
It takes two rings before she can clear her head enough to recognize that it will probably be Taro. It's three rings before he answers.
She slips her own phone from her pocket. Two missed calls. It had been on silent for the dinner. She hadn't even remembered it was in her pocket.
Shikamaru strains a look at her before he says anything into the receiver.
"Hello?"
She holds her breath.
"It's fine," Shikamaru says, using a different voice that she can't even associate with him. She bites her lips.
"Yeah... Yeah." He says. She has been standing in the same spot for twenty minutes. She hadn't even realized it until she tries to move her legs to walk closer and they feel funny. "Okay, no problem." He finishes. He pulls out the tie holding back his hair with his free hand. He is no longer facing her. She watches it come undone. His fingers run through his scalp to grip the hair near the back of his head.
And then he hangs up the phone and completely bends down into a squat, elbows digging into the tops of his thighs and head hung down. She watches his back heave with each breath.
There is no next move for her. She is at a standstill. She doesn't know what to do. It's no more than a few seconds before he stands up and gathers himself.
"Come," he says without turning to her. "I'll take you back. If we go down here, we can catch a cab."
"Where are we going?" She asks, too late. They've been riding in silence for over five minutes.
The lights pass by through the window. The hotel where she is getting married is outside of the city.
She hadn't listened to the address or directions he'd provided the driver.
The backseat lights up every few seconds with each consecutive streetlight before going dark again. Her hair has gone completely curled in the humidity and she can feel the front sticking to her forehead.
"My apartment."
"Why?"
"Because we're not done talking."
Were they? Did she have anything more to say?
Everyone had left the dinner. Taro had called to make sure they weren't lost. They lived together, but his mother had come back in town for the wedding, so he was staying with her. She wouldn't be missed, but she should call soon just to check in — if he wasn't already asleep.
When they begin to come into a more metropolitan area, there are lots of people milling about. Late workers, night-shifters on break, teenagers. Her whole life has paused in this taxi cab, but the world outside it still moving on without her. People are still living, unconcerned with collision of forces passing before them.
They could be speaking now. That would solve everything. Both her apartment and, in the time this was taking, supposedly his too, were over an hour from the hotel.
But they stay in silence. She doesn't know what more to say.
"I wonder if it's destiny." She thinks aloud. She has wondered this before, meditated on it extensively. "Or maybe we'd always bump into each other like this. Maybe dozens, hundreds do. Had you not spoken to me that day, we still might be in these places. Maybe others from the cafe met me on the same flight from Barbados or served me food in college. Maybe it has nothing to do with divine intervention or anything like that. You probably just shifted the order by sitting down at my table, fifteen and cocky as hell."
They were so young. Every version of them she had thought up over the years was no more of a fantasy than dreaming up a future with a celebrity crush was. She had painted it to be destiny when she was in her early twenties — but that was wrong. If they were fated, he would have been there and she wouldn't have tried to find happiness with someone else. They would have wanted the same things in this life.
He says nothing, but he'd given her his attention. She can see it in the way his knuckles bend and straighten in the space between them, even if he keeps looking out the window.
She doesn't mind. She wasn't looking for his input.
His apartment is slightly larger than she had expected. It's larger than hers. That government paycheck must be really pulling in.
Shikamaru leaves her in the entrance. He doesn't explain his absence or put up any premise of hospitality, just shuts the door behind her and disappears down another hallway.
It smells like he does in here. Would she know this scent if she had been the one he chose?
Temari takes a few steps in. There is nothing much in the living room. Some half-empty shelves and a television that has gathered dust, though she has a feeling it's more used than her own. He had a girlfriend. Taro had mentioned it, but Shikamaru still hadn't. She can see the traces of it in everything. Memories half gone; a home half empty. They must have lived here together. This apartment doesn't wholly belong to him. The separation was really recent. She can feel it, walking through the living room to the windows opposite the entrance, like walking through the remnants of a whole life.
Sometimes, she weighs that she must be as a part of his life as he is hers. How could it not be so? She didn't believe feelings like this could ever be so unrequited. If she felt it, he must too, right? But here she was imagining that at the end of the line he would choose her if given the choice, but that wasn't ineluctable, was it? He was likely in love with this girl, he likely had someone else waiting at the end of the line for him. He had worlds and lives and relationships that she knew nothing about — that she had never been a part of and never would.
Shikamaru comes back into the room, some sort of book in his hand. He looks hurried; disheveled. Maybe coming here wasn't such a good idea, but then again, nothing concerning tonight was.
"When we graduated a friend put together a photo album of Taro and I in school. It was a gift to me, so I don't think you'd have seen this. I thought you may like to look at it."
She does, though she thinks perhaps she shouldn't.
He places it on the coffee table anyway.
Temari pulls at the collar of her jumpsuit. It feels too tight around the neck although the material comes to a few inches below her collarbone. She feels lightheaded, like it might be hard to breathe.
Shikamaru has taken off his sports coat. She watches him undo some of the buttons on his collar and brush his hair behind his ears, and then she watches him open a closet door beside the front door. He hangs up his jacket and then pushes the door wider to get at something in the back.
Except then it happens, and suddenly nothing has ever been so clear. It's akin to a slap in the face. A full volume alarm system. A curtain held up before her eyes her entire life that has slipped down to expose the real universe she had always been a part of.
"It's going to rain any minute," he is saying, "so you should take one of my umbrellas. I know they're back here somewhere."
But she barely registers the words.
At the very edge of his closet, stiff and bright, is the distinctive collar of the jacket he had undressed from her all those years before. She hadn't even remembered what it looked like, but her eye is instantaneously drawn to it. She isn't sure if she'd even remembered it, but seeing it now, the flood of her entire life hits her like a brick wall.
"You kept it?"
The sound of rustling clothes don't even make it to her register.
When he pops back out, he has one of those mini, doubly-fold-able, umbrellas in his hand. He hadn't listened to her, but stops when he notices her expression. Shikamaru follows her eyes. He gets it now and it takes away from his generally cold and angry demeanor as he rubs a hand against the back of neck sheepishly.
Everything is clear now.
"All this time," she says under her breath in amazement. And then: "Shikamaru, it's always been you."
His head moves slowly in her direction as if he either hasn't heard her words or doesn't believe them.
And this time, when she speaks, she understands perfectly well what she is saying — what she has always been meaning to say.
"More than anything in the world," she continues, "I want to wake up beside you every morning. It's never been anything different. I've never wanted anything as much as I want you." She doesn't smile, but she feels as though she is. "Do you even know how I met Taro?"
He doesn't speak, but the umbrella slips from his grasp and hits the floor with a thud. His hair is messy and there is sweat on his brow and his shirt is not fully buttoned, but even if this is all there is, even if this everything, she wants to tell him that he was beautiful in this moment.
"It was four years ago. I was in a taxi on my way to the airport." She was sitting in the backseat, staring out the window with a whole suitcase sitting on her lap. "I was moving to Australia. I had a job. An apartment lined up with half my stuff already sitting in boxes on the floor. There was a whole life ahead of me. My whole life, moved and shifted and ready. I wasn't hesitant. I wanted to go."
He doesn't blink.
"And then, right in my window, I saw you. Maybe it was my imagination. I never found out. You were biking down the street in front of me. And then before I realized it, I had leapt from the car and was racing after you. I ran as fast as I could. I didn't think. I ran through traffic and pushed people around, but you were long gone. And I got lost in the crowd. "
He blinks now, glances at her feet, and then back up to her face. This time, she no longer feels like smiling.
"Taro was my cab driver. He pulled over and ran after me. He didn't want to force my payment, but wanted to return my things. I couldn't even speak when he finally caught up, I was so out of breath. I had run so hard. I had run for what felt like forever. But you were long gone. From the moment I threw the door open, you were gone."
Shikamaru breathes in and then out. Once. Twice. Then he bends down to grab the dropped umbrella.
She feels exposed, naked... honest.
"He took that job two weeks after graduation. We had been living together up until right then. Might have been, even, that day. He only worked there for a month or two. And I left midway through the summer."
That was always how it was though — of course he would have been that close. Of course they would have passed through one man's life in parallel times, but never together.
"You're right." She says, pushing her own hair behind her ear. Outside there is a roll of thunder. "You were always right," about before.
She understood how rare this was.
"It's never been enough for me." He gives, staring at her openly, as confident in his confession as she was in hers. "I want to give all my time to you. My commitment. I want it to be you. It's always been you. Since the moment I sat down at your table and mustered enough confidence to speak to you, I've never wanted anything else." He chokes on the words. "Temari, you had to know: I can't take my eyes off of you."
She is crying again, without even realizing it.
"He's a good man."
"Better than me," Shikamaru acknowledges. Better than you, he implies.
"I never came to him with ingenuine feelings or ill intentions. I never lied to him until tonight. I want you to know that."
Shikamaru swallows audibly. He takes a step forward. "Do you love him," he asks again.
"Yes."
And she did — but not like she loved Shikamaru. A beat.
"Is that your answer?"
She takes a shaky breath.
"I don't know if I could do it either," he says, voice cracking. "I — I don't know if I can."
Except he did. Except she did. She knew. Of course she knew.
"Can I stay?" She asks before he can say anything else.
His eyes are once more trained on her shoes. His hands are in fists by his side. His hair is half in his eyes.
"I know what I'm asking for," she manages before he is coming to her.
His yes is breathed into his inhale and suddenly she is backed up and pressed against the spot of wall between the two windows, ankle bruising into the plug from some outlet by her feet, lips pressed so tightly against his, she can do nothing but shake.
"Yes," he says again, "yes."
And then they are kissing and he doesn't say much else.
fin.
Thank you so much for reading! and to all the people on tumblr for the encouragement on finishing what is easily the longest one-shot i've ever written.
I have lots of thoughts about this and questions of my choices, so i'm around the discuss on tumblr.
Reviews appreciated!
