Judging a Book

By Annee Nguyen

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Author's note: Hello, dears! XD Welcome back to yet another one of my stories. :D The plot bunnies are just munching away at the back of my brain inside of their nest. Did you know that bunnies are really prolific? Yup—learned that by watching bunnies do it. That's what French films are for, right? (laughs) Anyways, this story came to me and I just thought, hey, my friend Erin would really love this kind of story line. So, here it is, to my dear friend, one of who has supported me all the way in my writing and believes in me with all her heart. :) Thank you so much for believing in my writing abilities. :D To Erin.

Oh, and to those of you who are wondering: this is going to be rated M due to the fact that Sasuke, as a romance novelist, writes very, er, romance-y books that are very explicit (i.e. PORN!). So yeah. There shall be scenes from his novels from time to time (*insert evil laughter here*) and there may or may not be some scenes not from his novel, if you know what I'm getting at. ;) Read between the lines, dears.

This fic may or may not add up to ten chapters. I'm guessing it'll end around there or so… maybe a little less, or a little more if I end up having a great story line that'll prolong it. XD But yeah. This will be good. :)

Full summary: Sasuke is a romance novelist—the most famous one in the entire world, actually—behind the mask of a boring, emotionless, extremely hot psychology teacher. But the problem with him is that he wants to stay that way—psychology professor by day, writer by night, and stay completely hidden under his alias Jiraiya; but perhaps fate doesn't exactly want things to go according to plan, especially not when a certain very perceptive, pink-haired student of his who's an absolute fanatic of his novels comes into the picture…

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Chapter 1

By Its Cover

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Click… click, clack.

Quiet, nimble fingers went at the keypad, typing at an almost breakneck pace as the writer spewed out his ideas into the computer's word document, working on his newest creation that, in a short while, would soon be published. His eyes tracked the words as he read and re-read his sentences word for word, finding ways to revise any parts he thought were awkward or too… too… well…

His eyes found the words again as his fingers expressed his thoughts.

As the couple made their way to the bed, Daichi's fingers found the edge of her robe, fingering the beautiful lace that clung to her like a second skin, growling as he felt her press herself against him, rubbing herself slowly onto his long, hard—

'No. That wouldn't do,' thought the writer as he shook his head and backspaced. Too many '-ing' phrases…

She moaned as he brought a breast to his mouth, slowly running his tongue along her areola and then circling up to the tip of the small, sensitive pink bud. Her moans made him shiver as he continued to slowly, teasingly, achingly pleasure her, his hands trailing down her front, flat stomach as they found their way between her legs, his fingers ready to—

He cursed as he backspaced again, fighting the urge to slam a fist against the wall. "Shit…" All of this was no good. What use would it be if he made this work seem like the last work? This was supposed to be a sequel to the last one, not an exact copy of it. God, fuck him—how in the world would he be able to write an entire novel in three weeks? He put the false glasses that he had grown so used to wearing down next to his computer and rubbed at his eyes, giving a tired sigh as he shut it off and patted it a job well done.

As he pulled on his typical pant-suit, polo garb and tried to find a suitable overcoat, he ran a hair through his messy raven locks, scowling at his surprisingly handsome reflection in the mirror, dark obsidian eyes glaring right back at him. He huffed again before he made his way into the kitchen and rummaged around, managing to find a beautiful, ripe tomato. He tossed it up and caught it, leaning back against the countertop to thoughtfully munch it as he thought about his freakin' dilemma that had to be solved—now.

"What the hell am I supposed to tell my editor?" he grumbled, giving the tomato another vicious bite. God, this sucked ass; why did writing have to be such a drag sometimes? But, then again, it was always like this, him getting a super idea, typing it all down in a night and then shoving it right up in the editor's face before he could even type in the name of the new novel that was soon to be published—which was what happened to his first work. The raven-haired man sighed, but he didn't stop the smirk from spreading across his lips. Okay, so writing did take a while, but, despite the drag of having to continuously pour out the ideas, he loved it. Loved it with all of his (well, what he managed to scavenge from it) heart. The writing came to him in such a thoughtful, creative flash that he just had to write it all down before he forgot it. It came to him as a surprise because, hey, a guy like this—

Insert random picture flash of a guy with a super-hot, sexy, mantastical, emotionless face with raven locks, onyx eyes and a mysterious, not-so-emotional line for lips.

—could never write books like he wrote.

The author picked up one of his old novels and randomly flipped to a passage.

She panted as his hands slithered lower, lower down her body and clutched his hair as she felt his soft, moist tongue run across her swollen—

He sighed as he flipped it closed and returned it on its rightful place on the shelf, grumbling about too many run-on sentences that needed to be edited out of there.

And so, there he was, leaning on the countertop, thoughtfully eating a tomato and contemplating on how he'd get the rest of his porn book out. 'But, then again,' he realized as he stared up at the clock and saw the time, hurrying to grab his keys and textbook, 'now isn't exactly the time to worry about that…'

The last thing that he grabbed before he headed out the door with the tomato in his mouth, keys in hand, and started the car was his driver's license, words in bold letters spelling out his name:

U C H I H A S A S U K E

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As soon as he drove right into the parking lot, Sasuke gracefully stepped out of his car, slammed the door, and locked it all in one swift motion, heading toward the university campus to open his classroom doors and wait for his new psychology students to come.

It was an odd life style, but the raven-haired man didn't complain. He had always been interested in psychology, able to teach it and re-learn it and love it all over again like he had in his early years of college—but there was always that other calling. His writing. Don't get him wrong or anything—he absolutely loved writing, loved descriptions, loved adjectives—hell, if one sentence completely described his life, it would probably be, "I'm so adjective, I verb nouns!"

And yet, as much as he hated to admit it, he wanted to hide it, hide his writing ability behind the identity of a psychology professor, a boring young man who had nothing to do in life but to describe parts of the brain and how chemical imbalances affected behavior, yada-yada-yada. He'd even got as far as creating an alias—Jiraiya, it was—in order to write in secret.

Sasuke glanced up at the clock as he ate the remainder of his tomato. 7:50, it read. A little early, but still, the students should be in class in the next ten minutes or so. He was just hoping that his students wouldn't be as fangirlish as they were the last year…

Of course, that'd probably be too much to ask for too—right?

"H-hello? I-Is anyone in here?" asked a soft, uncertain voice.

Sasuke's head snapped up as he saw a small, raven-haired girl walk in, her books hugged to her chest as she made her way in, big lavender eyes taking in the white-washed walls of the room before they landed on him.

Hesitantly, she nodded at him. "U-Um, m-my name is Hyuuga Hinata," she said shyly, walking up to her professor and holding out a shaking hand. God, she was so nervous; school had always been like this for her—which didn't seem so right, considering how school anxiety habits should have been changed around middle school or so; but, Hinata guessed that she never could and never would grow out of it. Her internal self sighed as she tried at an unsuccessful attempt to seem calm and confident, something she never was when she faced her professors.

Without taking the hand, he simply nodded to her and, picking up a random book from his desk, stuffing his nose into it, not before motioning for her to sit.

One student down…

"HEY, TEME, YOU IN HERE?"

Twitch, twitch. Oh, dear God—fuck his life. Sasuke dared to turn his head toward the source of the sound, apparently a very carefree blond who was already squeezing through the doors as he flashed a grin, a peace sign, and a very cheeky string of verbal diarrhea. "Hey, teme! You're teaching this class this year, ne?" The sound of hard-covered textbooks meeting wooden desks echoed throughout the room as Naruto plopped himself down and put his legs up on the table. "Guess that means that I'll have it easy this year."

"Hn," Sasuke muttered, glaring at his best friend (sadly it was the truth) to put his feet down before he would make sure that the blond would permanently forget how to walk. The raven-haired man smirked as he saw the blond receive the message. "Easy? There's no such thing in my class, dobe."

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST CALL ME, YOU BIG—"

"Jesus, Narutard, I could hear you from all the way at the end of the halls." A blonde girl walked through the doors, gritting her teeth possibly from the grating sound that Naruto could create with just sitting and breathing.

Jesus. That takes talent.

Sasuke smirked. It was amazing to see how many of his friends—or people that he'd known from such a long time ago—still hadn't graduated with their degrees yet. But of course, Sasuke had just graduated with a master's degree in psychology and decided to just go into teaching it rather than studying to become an actual psychologist, and med school did take longer than normal. It still surprised him to no end when he thought about how Naruto was still going through with becoming an orthodontist (I mean, who the hell would want to look at fucking teeth all day?), surprised him when he found out that Ino (the other blonde) was studying to become a plastic surgeon—well, maybe not that surprising—and surprised at the fact that the shy girl that he had in his class (he knew that she was Hinata) was studying to become a pediatrician.

Why, goes the question, must all of these different doctorates go through psychology?

Psh. Why the hell not? (A/N: But seriously; in SD, it's pretty crucial that you take psychology in order to go into med school or even pre-med for that matter, no matter what field of doctorate you're going into.)

Hence, why being a psychology professor was so important to the lives of many. It was almost like Sasuke had their lives in his hand, ready to crush their souls if he wanted to. But of course, Sasuke being the emotionless, socially crippled young man that he was, he wouldn't have been able to if he wanted to.

Heh. Epic fail.

As the ten minutes started to spin by, more and more students crowded into the classroom, three becoming ten, ten becoming twenty until the entire room was filled with up to almost sixty loud, unintelligible pre-med (or med) students, bustling about their schedules and the latest chapter that they were told to read in their other science classes.

The raven-haired man stared out into the sea of students, and nearly groaned. So many faces to check on, so many names that he was bound to forget or never even know. And worst of all, so many girls. Not that they were interested in him, of course, with his glasses in the way of his face. Thank God. Standing up, he clapped his hands together and cleared his throat, noticing the instant shushing. The silence almost deafened him as he cleared his throat again, just to make sure that there was still some sort of sound left in the world. Then, he spoke. "Good morning, pupils," he muttered, his eyes swooping over them in an attempt to comprehend the staggering amount of students. "I see we've all decided to take psychology this year." An itch on his nose made him want to take off his glasses and scratch at it, but, remembering the enormous number of girls, he decided against it.

A girl smirked before she whispered something to her friends and raised a hand. "Uchiha-san, your nerd glasses are all giving us headaches."

The raven-haired man turned the other way, pretending to not have seen or heard that question, and, instead, posed a statement himself. "All of you in this room should be a pre-med student in some sense, correct?"

Murmurs of 'yes's and nods reverberated around the room.

Sasuke nodded as he walked back to his desk, checking his papers and his agenda before he returned his practiced dull gaze at the crowd. "Well, then—let's skip little pleasantries and get on to our first lecture and project." He nearly smirked when he heard stifled groans. Well, all except for one.

"D'AWWW, SASUKE-TEME, WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO DO A PROJECT ALREADY?" groaned Naruto, shifting in his seat as he rested a disappointed chin on his tanned hand. "That's uber retarded."

Sasuke glared daggers into his friend, gritting his teeth against the unpleasantries that threatened to slip past his lips. Controlling his emotions perfectly, he gave his friend a smirk and said, "For you, the project will be due a month earlier."

Before Naruto could even open his mouth to complain, the door of the classroom burst open.

"I'm so sorry that I'm late!"

Oh, no. Oh, no. There were so many things with what had just happened at that moment. One: never, ever, ever burst into Uchiha Sasuke's classroom late—if such folly ever happened, the student was to walk quietly, bow in apology, and head to the back of the classroom where the majority of seats were available. Two: the girl who had just burst in had pink hair. No one had pink hair. And three… God this was the most surprising one—this girl was one of the most (and he wasn't going to lie) attractive students he had ever laid eyes on—her hair, despite its odd color was whipped up into a tight bun, her eyes were an interesting deep green that almost seemed to compliment her hair in a strange, multi-color, clashing way. Her petite figure had captured his attention instantly, his eyes unconsciously zooming into the way her white blouse hugged her waist and accentuated that beautiful chest…

Gah, stop it! Now was not the time to be ogling over college girls, no matter how attractive they were!

He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down, trying to make himself seem like an angry, frustrated teacher rather than a porn writer. Great—stupid porn instincts. Sasuke leveled his gaze with hers. "Just sit down," he said in his smooth baritone voice, his eyes tracking her every fidgety move.

"Ah, yes—I'm sorry, uh"—she took a look at her schedule—"Uchiha-san." She scurried to the back of the room, trying to ignore the way the numerous girls stared at her with death written in their eyes. God, what the hell was wrong? She just came in late; there wasn't anything to be so homicidal about. Well, the professor she could understand—but the girls? Maybe she had interrupted something…

From her seat in the back, she risked a chance to raise her head when the professor resumed his speech, eyeing him. From first glance, it seemed like he was a regular professor—the cliché glasses and overcoat were there, not to mention the straight posture that practically ever professor on television shows seemed to assume. Sakura's eyes narrowed. 'Someone with that much boring about him has to be hiding something…' She noticed how he never seemed to take off those glasses that he had on—the ones that seemed to have lenses that were prescription, but Sakura knew better than to assume that. Seeing past the glasses that seemed to almost mess up his appearance, she realized that this man was incredibly attractive. Behind the grotesque glasses, she saw dark, obsidian eyes that could bore straight through her soul if she wasn't careful; top that with a nice physique and a great face and cute hair and voilà—instant cute professor.

She rested her chin on a delicate hand, her other one tapping silently on the desk. 'Why the hell is he trying to hide?' Or better yet—what was he trying to hide? Shrugging, she forced herself to tune into his lecture.

"—start out with a lecture on the brain. In psychology, it is crucial to know the parts of the brain, where the frontal lobe is, the cerebrum, the hippocampus—"

Yada. Yada. Yada. She sighed and tuned back out. This was supposed to be a college course, right? Weren't they supposed to be learning something new? 'Maybe it's because I just went ahead of myself…' she thought as she pushed her psychology textbook away. A smile graced her lips. "Well," she muttered to herself as she rummaged through her bag, "Guess this means that I can enjoy some reading."

And then, she pulled out an Icha Icha Paradise novel, smiling in anticipation. God, she was excited. The newest book of the Icha Icha series was about to come out in three weeks! She couldn't believe how juicy the romance novels were. Turning the book over and caressing the front cover, her hands traced over the author's name—Jiraiya. Sakura grinned. It was so amazing how this man could hold the entire world at the edge of their seats by just writing a simple porn novel—hell, this man even outsold Playboy Magazines. That was what's up. And Sakura was a part of that entire world. 'I swear if I ever meet this man, I'll probably kiss him.'

Icha Icha Paradise. Right in front of Playboy—full of beautiful, hot, steamy sex and romance and drama—what more could a girl like Sakura want?

Cracking the spine of the book, she started to read, unaware of her new professor's eyes on her.

—

Sasuke's palms sweated when he heard the faint, almost inaudible crack of a book's spine and saw a familiar orange book in the hands of none other than his pink-haired student. 'Shit… shitshitshitshitSHIT.' His first instinct was to stop his lecture, walk up to the girl and rip the book out of her hands—but what in the world would that do? Probably make the girls in his classroom disgusted at him even more, but what about the girl? She'd probably cry and whine for him to give it back like how girls normally do. Then she'd be stuck with the mental image of a crazy psychology teacher forever.

Would it be nice to have a crazy psychology teacher? Life was full of ironies.

But of course, it would have been nice had the idea that this girl was extremely perceptive had passed through his thick skull before he actually went along with his first impulse.

Stopping the lecture abruptly, he briskly sauntered over to where she sat and, placing a hand on the orange book's open pages to obscure a very, er, provocative picture, brought her attention to him. He gritted his teeth. "What in the world are you doing, reading things like this in my class?"

The pinkette to his surprise shrugged. "I was done with my work and didn't want to disturb the class again by leaving. So I decided to make the best of my time with this." She watched as his eyes flickered with an uncertainty. 'Weird,' she thought. Especially weird how most college professors wouldn't give shit about college kids reading porn. She stared up at him expectantly, the green eyes that had captured his interest at first sight meeting his stormy black ones.

Sasuke swallowed drily before he gently tugged the book out of her hands. "You can get this back after class." He braced himself, expecting a full-out scream from her, expecting her to revert back to her kindergarten days and whine and beg for it back.

But the begging or whining never came. Instead, she nodded and opened her textbook, watching as her professor walked back to resume his lecture on the brain's anatomy.

She smirked behind her hand. 'This guy might be a pretty interesting professor…' she thought as she rubbed her now book-less hands together. 'A man with something to hide.'

From that moment on, Sakura decided that this year was going to be very, very interesting.

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Author's note: WHOO! First chapter peeps! Okay, so a few things about this chapter:

Sasuke is going to be about… 24. And Sakura's going to be about 21. :D So yeah. Just so we get the flow of the story. ^_^

Please do review and tell me how you thought of this story. The plot is still semi-developing in my mind, so I'd like some constructive criticism on your part, if possible. ^_^ Thanks for reading!

Flames shall be extinguished.

Review, review, review.