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The party’s far from over by the time Lee shuffles off to bed, but her eyes have been drooping for the past half hour and she can’t stifle the yawns wanting to crack her jaw open.
A delegation from Suna is visiting, though a more apt description would be ‘the Kazekage and her siblings used a trade negotiation as an excuse to attend Naruto and Sasuke’s housewarming.’ After years of pretending they weren’t in love with each other, they’ve finally skipped straight to living together, and it’s lovely! It’s beautiful to watch how in love they are! But… parties involving their group tend to get rowdy. And exhausting.
The hallway of their modest apartment is painted in a delicate buttercup yellow, scratched and faded from years of bumps and sunlight. Pictures pock the walls — old posters from magazines that are misshapen with fold-creases, a few framed family photos with dust still smeared on the glass, katanas and kunai and shuriken hung off hooks or simply embedded into the plaster. It’s brimming with personality, and it makes Lee’s heart swell.
Parties like this go on until the night wears out, Lee knows, and it’s become a chore to pretend she can last that long. The master bedroom is at the end of the hallway, white painted wood ajar to reveal a stack of messy sheets pouring off a queen mattress on the floor.
She’d left Neji and Tenten on the tatty secondhand couch in the living room. Neji’s head was already drooping onto Tenten’s shoulder, and it felt too private to sidle in with them.
When she last saw Gaara, she was tucked into a plastic chair in the corner of the balcony, wedged neatly between Kankurō and Kiba — both wielding cigarettes between their index and middle fingers with all the grace of a drunken swan. There’s something about alcohol that makes the two of them crave the curl of smoke, much to Lee’s disgust. It always sticks to her hair and clothes, and has nausea curdling in her belly. She usually avoids the balcony.
And by extension, she’s been avoiding Gaara. Though her reasons for that have been growing.
Gaara had slunk into the party, flanked by her siblings, dolled up beyond what Lee even thought she was capable of. Tonight, her short red curls are slicked back as if wet, thick eyeliner smudged to bring out the brilliance of her seaglass eyes, and iridescent glitter is daubed onto her cheekbones and eyelids to glisten wetly every time the light catches. A long maroon skirt shifts like oil around her ankles, a matching robe belted around her waist. Lee has found it increasingly hard to look away. But she isn’t allowed to look.
Still, Gaara’s presence has lurked on her peripheral like a ghost.
She wants to hide away in this lovers’ bedroom until she’s sure Gaara has returned to Suna. It makes things far less heartbreaking.
Naruto and Sasuke’s room is joyful. One bedside table is littered with water glasses in varying states of emptiness, a lamp shoved to one side, and the other table is neat. A book is lined carefully with the edge, a lamp to match the other carefully aligned in the middle, and a messily torn box of… prophylactics is nearly falling off one edge. Lee sits at the foot of the bed and lets herself breathe.
She likes her friends. They all have this limitless ability to at least attempt to understand some of her idiosyncrasies, and she understands theirs, and they can talk and laugh and — but they’re all just so —
“Oh, fuck.” A breathy sigh. A near moan.
Lee’s head whips around when the door slams open and Ino and Sakura tumble in, wrapped around each other. Sakura’s mouth is fixed firmly to Ino’s throat, both arms gripping onto Ino’s thighs to hike her onto her hips. Ino puts an arm out to brace against the door when they threaten to topple over, then one of her eyes cracks open, and she realises they aren’t alone.
“Sorry! Sorry, we’ll leave you to it, Lee!” Ino croaks, back against the door. Sakura doesn’t even look up, just wobbles them back out of the room again. They don’t shut the door behind them.
—They’re just all so in love. They all have someone. Lee goes, and might always go, to sleep alone.
She leans back into the sheets. Smells the combined scents of two people who’ve found each other. Pale curtains are cracked to let the night in, stars glittering like water on oil slick, and Lee doesn’t cry. She won’t cry.
The low bass of music still thumps through the walls, melding into the throb of her own heartbeat. The chatter of her friends is a faint, steady wasp-buzz that feels like a reminder she isn’t out there with them. She isn’t contributing to it.
With a stretch and a groan, she reaches out to flick off the lone bedside lamp still switched on. The world slips out from under her head at some point. She drifts in that not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake space, watching the ink over her eyelids slowly brighten.
A squeak-thunk-click rouses her. The door’s been shut.
Her lids are still closed when the bed dips, a body splaying out beside her own with a deep sigh. It smells like old cigarette smoke, stale and sharp in her nostrils, and she’s unable to rein back her sneeze. As her sneezes always do, it comes out in an almighty shout and a gust of breath. The body beside her stiffens.
“Are you awake?” Gaara whispers, and her breath is soft warmth over Lee’s bare shoulder. Lee stiffens. She can’t stop herself, and it’s too late to continue to feign sleep when Gaara snorts quietly and says, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“It is a yes.” Lee yawns, scrubbing at her eyes. She hasn’t really been asleep long enough to accumulate crust, but there’s certainly grit catching and pulling at her lashes. “Is the party over?”
“Most people are passed out in the living room. I think Sakura and Ino are cuddling in the bathtub, and Shino is telling them about his favourite acid jazz albums between vomiting. Oh — and Choji is currently playing marriage counsellor to some inane squabble Sasuke and Naruto got into.”
Spread out on unfamiliar sheets, Gaara is so beautiful. Even with glitter and eyeliner smeared underneath her eyes, with her cheeks flushed in the early fragments of sunrise. She’s beautiful with her head turned to watch Lee, her hands folded neatly over her bony chest. Her jacket is off, and all she’s wearing underneath is a ribbed black tank top, and she’s so beautiful that Lee wants nothing more than to reach over to brush her knuckles over her jaw.
“Is this a successful party for your group?” Gaara asks, eyes tracking over Lee’s face. “It’s hard to tell.”
Lee laughs, “Judging by that, I would say it is one of the more successful ones. You know, the last time we got together like this, Neji put her — supposedly gentle — fist through a wall.”
Gaara’s answering smile is small, but it feels large and glimmering and overwhelming. She doesn’t wear her emotions loudly, but they decorate the glint in her eyes, line her edges in gold thread. It’s breathtaking. Lee doesn’t have it in her to look away just yet.
Despite Lee being so unworthy of it, Gaara looks right back. She inspects Lee as if there’s something in her that she needs to unearth.
“You’ve been quiet tonight.” Gaara says, still watching Lee with her lip caught between her teeth. Sticky remnants of some brownish glossy product are still stuck in the wrinkles, at the corners, smudged around the rim of her lips. It’s not hers — Lee’s watched Temari lean over to reapply it for her multiple times throughout the night.
“Have I? Oh, I suppose I have not noticed!” Lee lies, pasting on a grin.
“You’ve hardly spoken to me.” It’s quiet, meant for Lee’s ears only in case any of their friends passed out in the hallway have woken. Gaara frowns, “I was hoping you would.”
Lee’s grin fractures, crackles, peels off her face in fragments like Gaara’s sand armour. “You seemed busy,” she says, cheeks twitching with effort to lift again, “I did not— it was— well. You seemed busy.” She repeats, meaningfully.
Just as meaningfully, Gaara whispers, “I’m never too busy for you.”
By most standards, Gaara isn’t good at eye contact. It’s certainly remarked upon enough by those around Lee, who often seem to take disconcertion from the intense way Gaara either stares into someone’s eyes until they’re forced to look away, or steadfastly refuses to meet their gaze at all.
She’s known to have difficulty with it, but right now, laid next to each other with their heads tilted close, Gaara’s stare feels perfectly flaying.
“I, um,” She swallows, lovely pale throat bobbing, “like spending time with you, Lee. You’re kind and surprisingly hilarious, and you always have such interesting things to talk about. I feel like I learn so much from you.”
“I feel the same! It is very rewarding to have a friend like you.”
“I thought you looked very pretty tonight too. Your hair…” When Gaara reaches out to tuck a loose strand of Lee’s hair behind her ear, Lee’s heart thuds hard, heavy against the inside of her ribs. It forces the air out, leaves her gulping down a desperate breath she can’t hide well enough.
“My hair?”
“Ever since you walked in, I’ve been thinking about touching it. I thought it looked soft.” Gently, Gaara shifts her hand along Lee’s skull to cradle it, thumb pressed neatly to her cheekbone. Lee’s face heats, her heartbeat tramping up the side of her neck with the force of an army.
Lee’s voice comes out small and soft, “You, um. I’ve been thinking about you. Tonight.”
Gaara might ask Lee to clarify, she might, but she’s also leaning closer as she does so and Lee’s lost in the gloss on her lips, the glitter on her eyelids, the gentle flush along the bridge of her nose. Her mouth gets syrupy slow, right until the second Gaara’s own meets it.
Dawn’s light is cracking gold through Lee’s lashes, kintsugi melding every split in her seams, and Gaara’s holding her together to let it stream in. Her fingers, thin and long, curl around Lee’s cheek, tilting her head into a kiss that’s all hungry hesitance. Bitten back, as if it’ll slip from their grasp if they stop to acknowledge it.
It’s smoke. It’s breath. It’s everything Lee has been thinking of, and it’s swelling so much warmth into her chest that she thinks briefly that she might still be asleep.
Gaara kisses with insistence, surging forwards with a crushing grip on Lee’s face. Lee can hardly keep up with it, not when she isn’t sure where to settle her hands or whether it’s okay to let out the whine rising in her throat. With that same blind confidence, Gaara grabs at Lee’s hovering hand to plant it firmly on her waist.
Beneath the tank top, Gaara’s soft. There’s a give to her flesh, a gentle dip where her waist swells into her hip that Lee can’t help but smooth up and down. She thinks she might pass out when her pinky brushes against a sliver of exposed, warm skin.
Lee pulls back when Gaara slings her thigh over her hips, when she presses in close and tugs at Lee’s lower lip with her teeth.
“Gaara — I — Is this—“
“Is this what?” Gaara mumbles, lids heavy, cheeks flushed in that dazed kind of way.
“Is this happening because you like me or because you think I am pretty or…?” Base attraction, Lee understands. Genuine affection is where she struggles — or more accurately, she struggles to understand how anyone might feel that way for her.
“Lee, I think you’re very pretty, but I also like you. A lot. If it wasn’t obvious from the kissing or the damp spot in my panties.”
Lee sucks in a harsh breath, thumb dug into the spot where Gaara’s thigh meets her pelvis. The split in her wrap skirt has hitched up high, her downy skin poking from between the folds of fabric, hot when Lee slides her hand down to hold it.
“I take it you like me too?”
“Y-yes, I do. So much, Gaara.”
“Then you can kiss me again.”
And Lee does.