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“What do you mean, like?” Sakura asked. “Do you like like him?”
“Um, yeah,” Ino said. “He’s really cute, you know?”
Sakura supposed that Sasuke was kind of cute, at least as far as boys go. She didn’t find any boys cute herself, but she could appreciate that some looked objectively better than others. She sat silently for a while, thinking, and began to rip out fistfuls of grass growing beneath the tree she was under. She glanced between Ino and the growing pile next to her legs.
“Do you want to marry him?” she asked.
Ino shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I dunno. I do wanna kiss him, though.”
Kiss him. Sakura curled her lip in distaste. She had never wanted to kiss anyone before either. It just seemed kind of…gross. She had once tried to imagine each boy in her class kissing her to try to understand what it might be like, but she stopped after the fifth one, her lips feeling all slimy and dirty. She talked to her mom about it later that night, asked her why she didn’t like to think about kissing boys, but her mom just said that it was normal to feel like that, that she’d come to like it in her own time.
“What, don’t you like anyone?”
Talking to Ino right now, Sakura felt anything but normal.
“Guess I’ve never really thought about it,” she lied.
“You don’t think about it, dummy. You just know.”
Now what was that supposed to mean?
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How can you know something without thinking about it?”
“You know how to breathe. Do you think about breathing? Liking someone’s the same, or at least, that’s what my mom said.”
Sakura wished that her mom had told her something useful like that. Still, however, it didn’t make things better. If anything, it made things worse. At least if liking someone was something you thought about, Sakura could think about it hard enough and figure out who it was that she liked. She was smart like that, good at solving problems, but if liking someone was something that you just knew, like breathing, she was hopeless. That meant that she really didn’t like anyone, and no amount of problem solving could fix that. She ripped out a particularly large clump of grass and threw it, the blades scattering over her feet.
Was there something wrong with her? Every other girl that she knew had a crush, thought about holding hands and hugging and kissing, but she didn’t. “You’re just a late bloomer”, her mom had told her, but she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever bloom at all. She wanted to ask Ino, but when she turned to look at her friend, the words got caught in her throat.
Ino’s gaze was fixed on the sky, watching the clouds as they passed by slowly overhead. Her hair, which she had kept short for the longest time, was now shoulder-length. The breeze blew it every which way, making it catch the sunlight and appear all the more golden. She didn’t turn to look at Sakura or catch her staring. She was too preoccupied with whatever was in her own head, a small smile playing at her lips. What was she thinking about? Sasuke, probably, Sakura reasoned. That’s what girls do when they like someone, right?
Sakura felt her gut twist up all tight and ugly. She’d never felt jealous before, but she knew immediately that that was what it was. She’d heard it described plenty of times before, like a monster or a sickness or a parasite that, if you let it fester too long, eats you from the inside out. But what — who — was there to be jealous of? Ino?
Ino was Sakura’s best friend. Ino had a crush on Sasuke. Sakura was jealous of Ino. That would mean, by simple logic, that Sakura had a crush on Sasuke as well.
But that wasn’t true.
There was something there when Sakura thought about Sasuke, but love wasn’t it. On an emotional scale, it was more akin to dislike than anything else, but she didn’t necessarily dislike him. She disliked how now, he would probably be one of her and Ino’s main conversation topics. She disliked how he most likely took up more space in Ino’s head than she, probably had for some time now. And she really disliked how, if everything went how it was supposed to, Ino would probably kiss him.
The thought of Ino kissing Sasuke made Sakura feel worse than the thought of kissing Sasuke herself. Sakura glanced over at Ino once more, imagining her leaning in with closed eyes and puckered lips and catching Sasuke’s lips with her own.
Ino would giggle into the kiss, overcome with nervousness and excitement and love, and the joy would spread from her to Sasuke until he was laughing as well. They wouldn’t want to, but they’d break their clumsy kiss to catch their breath, resting their foreheads against each other, eyes closed, mouths hurting from smiling so much. They’d ride their high of joy just like that, resting against each other almost shyly, each wanting nothing more than to repeat the moment again. Ino would then feel Sasuke’s hand against her cheek, not there to pull her in for more but to merely hold her like she was the most precious thing in the world. Finally, Ino would open her eyes, and they would shine with emotion too big to put into words as her gaze met his.
Except Sasuke had green eyes, not black, and his short black hair was long and pink.
Oh.