Chapter 172

Ino also appreciated that this oddly comforting, quasi-sororal connection between them wasn't because Naruto seduced them behind their back. He isn't a player or the horn-dog women in the bathhouse often lament about. If anything, they were the ones to initiate sex with him and that felt empowering in an odd and unexpected sort of way. Ino would prefer to be chased by a tall, strong, and handsome man—as any budding young woman would—but Naruto wasn't a dog, and despite social convention, taking what she wanted because she wanted it, wasn't a bad feeling.

"I- I'm not telling," Sakura reiterates. "He- He put it in and things happened and that's all you need to know… virgin."

Her eye twitching, Ino felt the swelling fire in the pit of her stomach want to yell she was the one who became a woman first and she's had way more sex than her rival has, but instead, Ino calmly asks, "so you didn't like being with him?"

"I wouldn't say…" Thinking better of it, Sakura instead asks defensively, "why do you want to know?"

"Why not," Ino returns with a shrug. "How long are you going to keep this to yourself? You had sex, for Kami's sake!"

"Shhhhhh," Sakura shushes hotly with her index finger against her lips.

Looking around the empty room confused, Ino reminds her madly blushing friend, "it's just us, you loon." Ignoring the glaring hypocrisy, Ino asks, "wouldn't you want to know everything if I was the one who had sex?"

"Maybe," Sakura slowly admits. Then adds, "if we were actually friends."

"…I still care to be," Ino softly admits.

With a long sigh, Sakura answers, "you may have made me realize Sasuke wouldn't feel anything if he murdered me or my parents but that doesn't mean I can forgive you for how hurt Naruto ended up. Every time I think about it, my insides lurch… It shouldn't have happened like that."

Turning her gaze away, Ino slowly mentions, "maybe I can make it up to him too."

Skeptical, Sakura asks, "how?"

"…O-one thing at a time," Ino quickly chickens out. "So… did you like being with him?"

Rolling her eyes, Sakura tries to pronounce, "he was… I uh, had no real complaints."

Ino bobs her head with the acceptable answer before she asks for clarity's sake, "and you're sure you don't want to date him?"

"Look, I've taken a few steps back from Sasuke, but it's not like I'm apathetic toward him now." Ignoring the flashes of memory of nearly dying at the hands of Orochimaru, she adds, "and honestly, I could use this time to enhance my current training. If Sasuke and I don't happen for a long time to come, that's… that's fine, but no, I don't want to date Naruto."

"This is why I brought up our Death Perspective class," Ino replies. "They laid out why we should try and balance living in the moment a little more than planning too far ahead, but we didn't listen. I thought it was Sasuke or death and spent every day working hard to make him fall in love with me because that, more than anything, would make life worth it."

Thinking about her mother's words and Kurenai's admirable character, however, Ino admits to Sakura, "but as ninjas, the only thing we're sure of is the present, and if it was the last day we had on this earth, I know I wouldn't waste an extra second of it on a boy who doesn't want to spend it with me." With thoughts of Naruto flashing through her mind's eye, Ino nervously adds, "I just feel like giving… things I hadn't considered before a try."

"You mean like pottery lessons," Sakura offhandedly asks.

Falling back in bed, Ino smothers her face with a pillow as she struggles to courageously say, "I mean… like… possibly, maybe, asking Naruto to be my boyfriend."

With pure embarrassment, Ino gradually tightens the pillow over her red face after confessing her most delicate secret. At first, Sakura didn't understand what Ino said, and the exponential silence in the room was electric for several seconds before a flabbergasted Sakura finally yells, "INO!"

SAKURA

It took nearly half-an-hour before Sakura could settle her monumental shock and ask an ungodly hail of probing questions, not that the blond answered any of them. Ino simply held a pillow over her head out of utter embarrassment. Sometimes Ino would murmur an answer in her pillow but Sakura could never decipher and Ino wouldn't repeat it. Though Sakura could've left after hour two, she simply could not let this go. To get her answers, she would sleep there if she had to.

Tentatively, Sakura simply asks, "Naruto?"

"…Yeah," Ino finally responds raising the pillow from her flustered head.

Sakura rapid fires, "how? Why? Since when? Who knows? What about Sasuke?"

Putting up five fingers, Ino counts down with each weepy answer. "I don't know. I really don't know. At some point in the last month. Just you. And you said it yourself, Sasuke needs a steady relationship with a counselor, not a girlfriend."

"It sounds like you've given up on him," Sakura thinks aloud before quickly adding, "not that I mind."

"I'm not planning on marrying Naruto here," Ino asserts. "It's just… Kaa-san's told me a bunch of times how Tou-san is both the love of her life and her best friend, and lately, I'm realizing that those are not the same things, you know? Like a boy could be the love of your life, but he may not be a good friend, or he can be a great friend and not the love of your life. Kaa-san has both and truthfully, I'm sort of envious. A lover who's also your best friend sounds perfect and impossible, but, I look at my parents and I know it can happen."

"But you and Naruto aren't even friends," Sakura voices.

"Shows how much you know about your teammate. Believe it or not, we've actually hung out several times," Ino confesses with a smirk, though she won't admit many of those meetups ended with mind-blowing sex.

"Why didn't you tell me," Sakura demands to know, before realizing, "wait, why didn't he tell me!"

Ino simply asks, "you mean, why didn't he tell you between all the times you hit him or flaunt all over Sasuke that he's hanging out with your ex-best friend?"

"I haven't done either of those for weeks now," Sakura asserts pridefully. "I thought we were in a good place… well, before that night, I mean."

"What do you actually know about his life," Ino curiously asks. "Have you ever bothered to ask him his likes, his dislikes, who he knows, where he's been? I got to learn a lot about him when I was helping Kurenai-sensei and I talk with him. He loves stories with happy endings, he hates ghosts, he enjoys watering his plants and feeding Tori-chan. He's strong, and not just physically either, but mentally. He's funny, like mischievous funny—which I like. He's cute, he's smart, he has such a wonderful heart, and you don't seem to have complaints about his performance in bed… even though, apparently, you just lie there like a dead fish."

Feeling a little convinced herself, Sakura is happy to huff, "I do not," to feel anger rather than confusion. "We did a bunch of stuff-" Sakura cuts herself off, and as Ino expected, she won't say more.

Moving on, Ino admits, "I just can't stop thinking about him, and every day, I catch myself asking, 'why not? Why couldn't we?'" Hugging her pillow with a slyly growing grin, Ino adds, "so, yeah, I think I'd really like it if Naruto were my boyfriend."

The pair fall into silence as the young women process the deep implications behind their entire conversation and sift for every morsel of reflection. Aligned with the fact that Sakura had sex with Naruto, it was hard for the pinkette to believe Ino wants to be Naruto's girlfriend and takes the rest of the morning to mull it over. 'Ino wants to be the girlfriend of a boy I had sex with.' It just seems so odd to Sakura that Ino would be okay with the fact that, no matter what, she took Naruto's first time. It just seems less pure that way. 'How does that not bother you? It has to,' she wonders.

Sakura realizes if Naruto and Ino get married, then Ino and herself would have both slept with the same man. Sakura doesn't know why but she can't decide how she feels about this. A sequence of motion pictures play in vivid detail how shockingly overwhelming Naruto commands over her pleasure center and to know Ino is going to experience the same thing… it's so illicit, her entire body simply reacts. As she quickly walks to her assigned room for some self relief, she simply tells herself, 'it's biology and thrilling and nothing more.'

He was the first boy she'd ever been with and he was better than she ever thought the act of sex could possibly be. Sakura believes a healthy sex drive is part of a healthy lifestyle and since her night with Naruto, she won't deny her body's completely natural needs. Her arousing fantasies staring her blond-haired blue-eyed teammate were frequent and not of her control, but Ino was right.

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