Chapter 2: Not Needed Until Monday
For a long moment he didn't move.
That was the thing people never understood about Naruto, the thing she'd learned only after she married him: for a man who never stopped talking, he could go so still. In a fight it meant he'd seen the opening. Here, in the lantern light, with her kimono slipping loose at her shoulders and the obi pooled around her feet, it meant something else. He was looking at her the way he looked at the village from the top of the Hokage Rock when he thought no one was watching. Like he couldn't believe it was his to look after.
"Naruto-kun," she said. "You're staring."
"Yeah," he said hoarsely. "Give me a second. I'm busy."
She laughed, and that broke it. He crossed the tatami in two steps and his hands found her waist through the loosened silk, broad and warm and callused in the places she'd memorized years ago, and he kissed her.
He'd always kissed like he fought, all in, no feints. But tonight he was slow about it. He kissed her like he had all weekend and intended to use every minute, his mouth soft and searching and then less soft, one hand sliding up her spine to cradle the back of her head. She opened for him and he made a low sound into her mouth that she felt all the way down to her knees.
Somewhere deep inside him, so faint she might have imagined it, something huge stirred and grumbled.
Naruto broke the kiss and pressed his forehead to hers, eyes squeezed shut. "Hang on," he muttered. "Kurama's awake."
Hinata bit her lip. "Is he saying something?"
"He's saying a lot of things." Naruto's face did several things at once. "He says he's been sealed inside me for twenty-seven years, he's been through two wars and a fight on the moon, and he is not, quote, sitting through this again. He's going to go sleep in the back of my head where it's dark and he says if I wake him up before Monday he'll..." Naruto paused. "That last part's pretty rude. I'm not gonna translate it."
"Tell him thank you."
"She says thank you," Naruto said to the inside of his own skull. A pause. He snorted. "He says you're too good for me and he's been saying it for years."
"He's right," Hinata said, and pulled him down by the front of his shirt.
They didn't make it to the futon. They made it as far as the open screen, where the steam from the bath drifted in and curled around their ankles and the moon laid a long pale stripe across the floor. He got her kimono off her shoulders and then stopped, again, just to look, and she felt the heat of it on her skin more than the warm air. Her breasts were heavier than they'd been when they married, her hips softer, a pale scar along her ribs from the war that had never quite faded. He touched every bit of it like he was reading a map he'd drawn himself.
"I missed you," he said against her collarbone. "That's crazy, right? I see you every day. I sleep next to you. But I missed you."
"You see me asleep," she said. Her voice came out unsteady. His thumb was moving in slow circles at the underside of her breast, not quite where she wanted it, and she knew he knew. "You come home and I'm asleep. You leave and I'm asleep."
"I watch you, though." His mouth moved lower. "You do this thing where you steal all the blankets and then you push them off at like four in the morning and then you get cold and you scoot over and stick your feet on me."
"I do not."
"Your feet are ice, Hinata. They're Land of Snow feet." His tongue found her nipple and she forgot what they were arguing about. Her hands went into his hair, gripping, and he hummed against her, pleased with himself, and took his time.
She pulled his shirt over his head. She'd seen his body a thousand times, the hard plane of his chest, the old seal-mark that only showed when he molded chakra, the arm he'd lost and the one Lady Tsunade had grown for him from the First Hokage's cells, pale and perfect, a fraction cooler than the rest of him. She ran her palm over it now, shoulder to wrist, and he shivered.
"You always do that," he said.
"It's mine too," she said simply, and he looked at her like she had hit him somewhere soft.
He laid her down on the tatami, half in the moonlight, the kimono spread under her like a sheet of lavender water, and he knelt between her knees and kissed his way down her stomach with a reverence that made her ache. When he reached the place she wanted him, he looked up the length of her body. His eyes were very blue and very dark, and he was grinning, the wide stupid grin that the whole village knew and only she had ever seen from this angle.
"Can I?"
"If you ask me one more time I'll leave you here and go soak alone."
"Got it," he said, and put his mouth on her.
She had forgotten. Or not forgotten; she'd stopped letting herself remember, in the tired months, how good he was at this, how he approached it the way he approached everything he cared about, with the stubborn single-minded devotion of a man who had once trained for three years to learn a single jutsu. He learned her again in minutes. Slow, broad strokes of his tongue, then a focused flicker, then slow again when her thighs began to tremble, his hands spread over her hips holding her open, holding her down. He did not get distracted. He did not look at anything else. For the first time in weeks the Seventh Hokage was giving his complete and undivided attention to exactly one thing, and it was her.
"Naruto," she gasped, dropping the honorific the way she only ever did like this, and felt him smile against her.
When he slid two fingers into her she arched off the floor. He curled them, patient, finding the spot that made her breath stutter, and kept at it, kept at it, his mouth never leaving her, until the pleasure that had been building low in her belly pulled tight as a bowstring and snapped. She came with a cry she muffled against her own wrist, her heels pressing into his back, the moon blurring above her.
He kissed the inside of her thigh while she shook. He kissed her hipbone. He crawled back up her body and kissed her mouth, and she tasted herself on him and pulled him closer.
"Still with me?" he murmured.
"Take those off," she said, tugging at the waistband of his trousers, "or I swear I'll use the Eight Trigrams on them."
"You'd hit my tenketsu. I wouldn't be able to..."
"Naruto-kun."
He took them off.
When he finally pushed into her, slow, both of them watching each other, she felt it everywhere. The stretch, the heat, the solid weight of him settling over her. He stopped when he was fully inside and stayed there, braced on his forearms, his face close above hers. His breathing was ragged. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
"Hey," he whispered. "Hi."
She laughed, which made her clench around him, which made him groan and drop his forehead to her shoulder. "Don't do that. Don't laugh. I'm trying to be romantic and I'm about two seconds from embarrassing myself."
"You're very romantic," she said, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and rolled her hips up against him, and he swore into her neck.
He started to move. Long, deep, deliberate strokes that drove the breath out of her each time, his hips grinding against her at the end of every one so the pressure built all over again where she was still sensitive. She held on to his shoulders. She held on to his back, the muscles bunching under her palms. The bath steamed beside them and the river ran on far below and the lantern hissed, and the only other sound in the world was the two of them: his breath, her soft broken noises, skin against skin, the wet slide of him in and out of her.
"Look at me," he said, and she did.
He was looking at her with his whole heart in his face. He always had. It was the thing she loved most about him: that he could not hide what he felt, not even when it would have been safer to. Now, with a marriage and a village between them and the rest of the world, he was staring down at her like she was the reason the sun came up.
"I love you," he said, rough and urgent, his rhythm faltering. "I love you. I don't say it enough. I come home and you're asleep and I just stand there and I think it, I think it so loud, and then I fall asleep before I say it. I love you, Hinata."
Something in her came apart that had nothing to do with the way he was moving. She pulled his mouth down to hers and kissed him hard, and against his lips she said, "Then don't stop," and he didn't.
He pushed up onto his hands and drove into her faster, harder, and she met him stroke for stroke, her nails dragging down his back, her heels digging in. She felt the second climax coming like weather, a pressure that kept rising and rising, and when it broke it was deeper than the first, rolling through her in long waves while she cried his name into the warm dark. He followed her a few strokes later with a sound like he'd been punched, burying himself as deep as he could and holding there, shuddering, her name broken into pieces against her throat.
Afterward they lay tangled in the lavender silk with the moonlight sliding slowly across the floor. His head was on her chest. Her fingers were in his hair. He'd already gone heavy and boneless in the way that meant he'd be asleep in about ninety seconds, and she was trying to decide whether to let him.
"Hinata," he mumbled.
"Mm."
"The bath's right there."
"It is."
"We should get in the bath."
"We should."
Neither of them moved. He laughed, a little puff of air against her breastbone, and then he was quiet for so long she thought he'd fallen asleep after all.
"Can I tell you something kind of stupid?" he said finally.
She opened her eyes.
He'd lifted his head. He was looking not at her but at the open screen, out past the bath and the railing toward the dark line of hills to the south, where, two hours away, the village was going on without him, every lamp in it a person he'd promised to protect.
"Sometimes I go up to the top of the Rock," he said slowly, "at night, after everybody's gone, and I look at my own face. The stone one. And I think, that guy's always smiling. He's never tired. He never misses dinner. He's never late." His throat moved. "And I'm scared that if I keep going like this, one day you'll look at me and that's who you'll see. Just the face on the mountain. Not me."