A/N: Ok, this story is… Well, it's weird. It's something that I haven't really done before, but I wanted to do something a bit different, so…

For those of you who don't know, I'm a fairly big NaruHina shipper, but I do have a soft spot for Sakura as well. This is something that I started a LONG time ago, then promptly forgot until a couple hours ago. I decided to take it out of the Graveyard (the file where I put all my abandoned projects… God, there are a lot of them) and publish it. I figured, what can it hurt?

Read, and enjoy!

"Let's play a game," she said.

I cocked my head in surprise. She and I had spent the past couple hours simply sitting at my apartment reading and listening to music—nothing major. Just two teammates relaxing together after a particularly tough mission. This was our way of blowing off steam. We would enclose ourselves together and relax… and silently dare the other to make a move. The two of us had been carrying this routine for over a year now, splitting time between our two homes. Occasionally, one would fall asleep at the other's after dinner, or something else… but it had never gone as far as sex. We hadn't let it get that far, not yet, no matter how strong our urges might have been.

I can only speak for myself, of course. How could one not be tempted by one as beautiful as her? True, she might not have been a classic beauty—her cheekbones were, perhaps, just a little more pronounced than other girls', but her inner strength and perfect muscle tone evened out the balance more than adequately. Her breasts weren't as large as her master's were, either, but I wasn't a breast man, anyway. Nor was I an ass man. In fact, I wasn't any of the above.

I was simply, as far back as I could remember, a "Sakura" man.

"What kind of game?" I warily asked, mentally marking my page and shutting my book. I could recognize that sly smile of hers from a mile away. It was the same smile that could, one after another, play a minor prank on her friends and set a trap that could kill a dozen enemy forces. It was a smile that, over the years, had come to be recognized as belonging to one of the most intelligent and dangerous women to ever walk the planet.

That she wanted to play a game of some kind with me—in this atmosphere—was more than a little unsettling. I had no idea what to expect. This woman was even more unpredictable than… well… me.

"One that will severely fuck up our friendship," she said evenly. She had picked up a glass of wine and spoke these words just as the rim of the crystal-clear glass met her lips. She sipped the blood-red brew deeply, closing her eyes as the crimson ambrosia slid past her tongue and down her throat. I knew that this was her third glass—or was it her fourth? Either way, we were almost done with the bottle already, and I had only bought it a few hours beforehand. Her tolerance for alcohol was, in fact, greater than mine, but there were limits to even the strongest physical constitution, and this particular vintage was notorious for having a deceptively high alcohol proof.

I paused for a moment, considering her words carefully. She was tipsy, but not drunk… I thought so, at least. Her speech wasn't slurred, but there was a slight tinge of pink to her cheeks that I didn't believe had anything to do with heat or embarrassment. In fact, she looked more alert and focused than she had after her second glass of red wine. Her emerald eyes locked with my sapphire, daring me to respond.

Respond I did.

"Ok," I said. "I'll bite. What kind of game are you proposing?"

Her crafty smile widened fractionally. What was on her devious mind?

She pulled a deck of playing cards from inside her blouse. My slightly alcohol-induced fuzzy mind realized that it must have come from inside her bra. "Well," she said slowly as she set the deck down on the coffee table between us, "I was thinking… How often have you thought about me naked?"

I was lucky that I had put my glass down just seconds before, or I swear to every god ever conceived that I would have dropped it then and there. I gulped. "Um… Is that a trick question, Sakura-chan?" I asked nervously.

There was no fire anywhere in the apartment, and the heat wasn't turned on in this warm summer climate. Why did the temperature suddenly go up?

She shook her head, her long pink hair swishing side to side. For the past five years, she'd begun to let it grow out again, braiding it into a tight bun or braid whenever loose hair would be detrimental at worse, a nuisance at best. "No trick, Naruto-kun," she said, using the honorific that had been reserved for Sasuke when we were much, much younger. Until I had come back from my training with that old pervert, she and I had never been more than comrades in her eyes. True, we were on the same team, but she'd been so obsessed with the Uchiha in that time that she'd hardly had time to spare for me. I'm not going to go into detail all that I did for her that he would never do—all that she never even knew happened, and still doesn't to this day—but suffice it to say that I'd suffered in silence while the girl I'd loved had pined over a righteous prick since day one while I'd practically worshipped at her feet.

Eventually, she'd warmed up to me. Without him in the picture, with me as the "alpha male", so to speak, I guess that some animal instinct attracted me to her. Despite that, we were friends for a long time after I returned… good, good friends. But eventually, we had come to the point where she and I only referred to each other as friends, couldn't move past that with all of our history together. She still carried the torch for Sasuke, and there was nothing that could extinguish that flame, no matter how cruel he proved himself to be, time and time again.

Now, it seemed, she had put that flame out of her own accord, after all this time, and was at least open to the possibility of the "you and I" friendship being replaced by an "us" relationship.

I narrowed my eyes. I was just drunk enough to not care where this went, but sober enough to know that I should be careful. "Ok," I said cautiously. "Ok, honestly?" There was no use in trying to deceive her; she knew me better than anyone alive. "Not every day… Usually, I just see you as Sakura-chan, my best friend… my closest friend. But whenever we're on missions and we camp, and we're outside, under the stars—especially when it's just the two of us—I think about you… um…"

She smiled at my bumbling quite wickedly. "Naked?" she asked, a slight lilt in her voice. "What do you think of me doing when I'm naked?"

My somewhat sloshed mind was racing as quickly as it drunkenly could. Was there any conceivable way out of this conversation that wouldn't make her mad at me? I mean, she was the one that brought the subject up! I should have had the right to end it, right?

Unfortunately for me, though, there was nothing that I could do. Somehow, I had been locked into this precarious topic, and not even my strongest jutsu could let me out. "I- I think of—oh, you know!" I said.

She shook her handsome head. "No, I don't know, Naruto-kun," she said. "What did you think of?"

I know that my face was three shades of red at this point. "You're really gonna make me say it, aren't you?" I asked.

She grinned and nodded, her brilliant green eyes sparkling at my personal torture. "Yes, I am," she laughed. "Come on, tell me. I swear I won't be mad."

There was nothing for me to do but give into her demands. That wine surely had polished that silver tongue of hers! "I—I think of you naked, beside me, sharing my tent… holding me, caressing me… loving me." There are no words to describe just how embarrassed I was to actually be saying those words out loud in front of her. It was like admitting to your mother that you had accidentally seen her naked or something—it's not something that you actually speak, let alone turn into a reality.

She was reclining on the couch; me, sitting upright in a plump green chair. Her voice, when she spoke, was huskier than usual. She was cool, though, cool as ice and twice as stoic. She had her jaw propped up on her right fist, her left one against her hip, the connecting elbow sticking into the air forming a near-equilateral triangle. "Really, now," she purred. "Loving you… holding you… caressing you… Awfully detailed, aren't you? How often does this happen? How often do you think of me touching you? Naruto, how often do you imagine me making you feel good?"

I gulped and shifted. Already, I was beginning to get hard, and it would be mortifying to have her head at the same level of my crotch as a tent was pitched in my pants. "Often enough," I said. "But—this game that will fuck up our friendship; what is it, and why; what are the stakes?"

If she was off-put by my rapid and oh-so-conspicuous change of subject, she didn't show it. "It's a simple one," she said. She sat upright and leaned forward slightly, her elbows on her knees. There was a perfect view of her breasts and the hollow between them underneath her loose top, and I unabashedly looked for a few seconds before I caught her eyes again. I want to say it was because I was drunk, but I most likely would have reacted the same way was I stone cold sober. "I shuffle the deck, cut, deal. We flip the top card of the half deck we get. Whoever has the highest card gets to ask the other a question, and the loser has to answer completely honestly, without holding anything back."

I was intrigued by this proposition. Never had Sakura been so—so informal, so casual with me around. In truth, except for the times we'd spent at each other's homes, I'd never known her to let her guard down to this extent. "This sounds promising," I said. "On one condition, though: your first win is automatically stricken, cause you asked me if I ever thought of you naked. Deal?"

She grinned wickedly. "Deal," she said. She grabbed the top half of the deck with one hand, then dexterously began shuffling it, still single-handedly. The rapid-fire flapflapflapflap of the cards hitting one another as she shuffled, bridged, tapped, and repeated over and over again was hypnotizing. I was almost lulled into complacency, even.

Finally, she grabbed the top half of the deck and put it beside the bottom. I knew, without having to count, that they were completely even. She was just that good. It was a skill, I was sure, that she had inherited from her mistress.

"Pick," she told me. At random, I selected the deck on my left and slid it toward me. Sakura nodded and nudged the other back towards her.

I caught her gaze. "On three?" I asked. She nodded.

We knew each other too well. Simultaneously, we said "Three!" and flipped our card. Hers came up the queen of spades. Mine, the king of clubs.

"Damn," she muttered. "I'd hoped to get mine out of the way first."

I chuckled. "Well, that's what you get for having your master's luck with gambling," I said. "Look at it this way—if you'd have won first, would you feel as good about this as you do now?"

She leaned back in her seat and smiled. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. What do you wanna ask me?"

I thought for a moment. Of all of the conceivable questions I could ask her—all the possibilities!—there were a few that came to me more quickly than others. "Ok, how about this: if you knew that I was going on a mission tomorrow and I could very well die, and we only had one night to spend together, what would you do?"

The corner of her mouth twitched a little. "Coming out with hardball questions so quickly, aren't you?" she asked. She smiled, though. "The truth? I'd probably tie you to my bed and fuck your brains out."

The blatancy of her confession threw me for a loop. I mean, I thought that she might say something like that, but still… such a crude statement!

Yes, I'll admit: when she said that, my cock jumped in my shorts. I'm sure she noticed. She's observational. What do you expect when someone you think is so beautiful tells you that she'd ride you like a pony?

"Erm… Ok, then," I said. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my raging hormones. "That wasn't exactly what I was expecting." Her head tilted to the side, just a few degrees. God, she was looking more beautiful every minute I looked at her.

"Which part?" she asked me. Her gem-bright eyes danced merrily in her head. "The tying part… or the 'fuck your brains out' part?"

I shifted. "Both," I answered honestly. "I never really thought that we were compatible, is all. Never thought that you thought of me like that. Always figured I'd always play the bigger brother role…" I smiled. "Guess I was wrong, huh?"

She smiled, though it was something of a sad smile. "Yeah…" Her nose twitched. "This doesn't count against me, but is that what you always saw me as? A little sister?"

I had to choose my words carefully. "You remember when we were kids? Back when we were in the Academy?"

"You mean back when you were the 'dead last' of our class?" she gently ribbed.

I chuckled good-naturedly. I'd long proved to everyone that I was no longer that kid anymore. "Yeah, back then. You remember how often I told you I loved you?"

She put a finger to her somewhat wine-stained lips. "As I recall… almost every day, actually. What about it?"

I sighed. "You know, it's only obvious in retrospect, but all that really was was infatuation. I had a crush on you, it's as simple as that. It took years for me to actually fall in love with you. By that time, though, I figured it was too late for me to make a serious move on you. We'd known each other for too long… knew too much about each other to make a fresh go at it."

She looked down into her nearly-empty glass of wine. "Maybe we've both been idiots for a while now," she said after a moment. Her eyes glanced up guiltily. "Naruto… I've wanted to talk to you for a while, now. It just never seemed like the right time for a—a confession. We'd gotten too close to… get close."

There was a long, uncomfortable pause then. The silence in the room spoke volumes.

Finally, she spoke. "Next card?" she said, phrasing it as a question. I nodded curtly and put my hand on my half. "One," I said.

"Two," she continued.

"Three," we said simultaneously.

I drew the two of clubs—her, the eight of diamonds. I smirked. "Nice win," I said. "Doesn't count, but still."

She stuck her tongue out at me. "Bite me," she said with a childish smile.

I leaned forward in my chair slightly and clicked my front teeth together. "Remember the last time you told me that?" I asked her playfully.

She chuckled. "If I remember correctly, you did bite me. It took three days for that mark to go away!"

I laughed, myself. "Yeah… If I had bitten just a few inches down your arm, everyone would have been able to see it."

"You remember what I did when you bit me, though?" she asked.

I winced a bit at the memory. "Yeah. You punched me clear down Market Street. Kotetsu was on gate duty that day—he wouldn't stop laughing for weeks. Wouldn't let me forget it for months."

She laughed heartily; gods, I loved making her laugh. "I remember. Hey, I healed you, didn't I?"

I couldn't help but smile. "Yeah… you did. And you visited me every day I was in the hospital. You always do, now that I think about it."

She looked down shyly. Perhaps her feelings for me had been stronger over time than I had thought?

I licked my lips nervously. Suddenly, they had become phenomenally dry. "Next card?" I suggested. She nodded and flipped hers without prompt, so I did as well. My nine versus her queen.

She threw her arm into the air and pumped it victoriously. "Oh, yeah!" she crowed. "Two in a row!"

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, yeah," I grumbled genially. "Don't let it get to your pink little head." I prepared myself for the question to come. "So… whatcha got?"

"Hn?"

I sighed. "Your question, genius. What do you wanna ask me?"

She threw a couch pillow at my face. Of course, I caught it and set it in my lap. "My question… my question…" she mused. She lay back down on the couch and stretched her arms up above her head. Oh… gods… She was so beautiful in profile. She had such perfect breasts… such a toned waist… supple hips…

I was glad that I had the pillow on my lap, because my manhood was reacting quite easily to the sight before me. She had always preferred the color red in her clothes, but for tonight she had taken off her customary top and wore only a tank top with a sports bra (I was assuming that's what it was, anyway) and her usual skirt and short combo. Taut muscles flexed and compensated underneath her weather-beaten skin. When she put her arms above her head, her top rose nearly up to her rib cage, fully exposing the most perfect abs that I have ever, ever seen on a woman. She was absolutely perfect.

"My question… Well, I dunno. I already feel like I know everything about you, Naruto. As far as I can tell, you've never kept any secrets from me. What more is there for me to know?"

I shook my head. "Come on, Sakura! This game was your idea! You can't fall out of step already!"

She shook her head and smiled, resting her hands on her stomach. "Ok, Mr. Impatient… how about this? Naruto, what are your feeling for me, in their entirety?"

My breath got caught in my lungs. Oh, oh god, oh god, oh god, I didn't know what to say. She must have noticed the panic in my face, because she laughed and waved me down. "Ok, ok, maybe that question should have waited until later… Um… How about—"

I held up my hand. "No, wait," I said, finally able to vocalize. "No, I want to answer that one." The surprise was evident in her jade eyes.

"Are you sure?" she asked, looking unsure herself.

I nodded. "I am. Just give me a minute to compose my thoughts, ok?"

"All… right."

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Over the years, I'd learned to calm down and look at things rationally every now and then. Of course, I'm not as good as the smartest guy in Konoha—Nara Shikamaru—but I don't just jump into every situation anymore. I have developed some brains.

Where did I want to start? What did I want to say, what could I say, that would fully express what I feel for her? Where, in my soul, could I draw the emotions and give them word for what she was to me? If I were an artist, I would have maybe painted a portrait for her, then and there. Were I a poet, I might have composed the most breathtaking haiku the world had ever encountered, emotional enough to make doves weep.

I was none of these things, and I could do none of the above.

Someone once told me that one of my better qualities was that I can get straight to the point pretty quickly without wasting time. This stray memory reminded me—I really have never been one to get too introspective. Perhaps it was time, again, to keep things simple.

I opened my eyes and looked into hers. She had, once again, sat up and leaned forward in the couch. She had this kind of weird intensity in her gaze, like she was expecting… something. Something.

"You really want to know what I feel for you? Really?"

Her head bobbed. "Yes."

I sighed. "Isn't it obvious?" is asked. "Sakura… I love you. Always will."

Time stopped. There was only her and I in all the world. Everything else had stopped existing. She looked at me, and I, her.

"Y- you love me?" she stammered after time had resumed. "Love, like real love? Like, 'I want to spend the rest of my life with you' love? That kind?"

I turned my head aside. "I know what you're thinking," I said.

"Do you?" she replied softly, turning her head in turn.

I nodded. "Yeah. You're probably thinking something along the lines of 'There he goes again with that "I love you" nonsense' or something like that. But that's not the truth." I stood up and walked around the chair, facing away from her. "Sakura… I really think I love you. I don't know if it's because you're the girl that I had a crush on when we were kids, or that we've always been there for each other. Hell, I don't know even if it's because of Sasuke, as twisted as that sounds. But there are so many little individual things that I love about you that, taken as a whole, I'd find it impossible, objectively, not to love you.

"Sakura, you have to believe me. I've been thinking about this for a long time now and…" I turned around to see her sitting on the couch with her head hung low, her pink hair falling nearly to the ground. "Sakura?" I said hesitantly. "Sakura, are you… are you ok?"

She raised her head. The tears that I had somehow expected to see were absent. Instead, she looked somewhat confused. "Do you really—I mean, do you really think that you love me because of Sasuke?"

I had to shake my head. "No, not at all. Not really. I love you because of you. You're just… Sakura. Perfect. That's all that I can ask for."

She looked down again. "Perfect? I'm nowhere near perfect, Naruto. Not anywhere close."

I was back in my seat in a second. "That depends on how you define 'perfect', Sakura-chan," I said, adding the affectionate suffix. "That word is really dependant on the user, right?" I smirked. "I say you're perfect, because I actually believe that you're perfect. Not that you're infallible—remember that escort mission to Wind country last year?"

She stuck her tongue out at me. "We already established that that wasn't my fault! How was I supposed to know that that guy was a council member? I mean, anyone who grabs my ass is asking to get punched!"

I laughed, tossing my head back a little. She and I had been eating at—surprise—a ramen place in Sunagakure after successfully escorting a diplomat back to his home in a nearby village after stopping in and chatting with Gaara and his siblings. When I had gone to find a bathroom, an old guy copped a feel on her rear. He was fairly new to the Suna council, and hadn't yet met either Sakura or me yet. Unfortunately for him… well, her hair might have been pink, but she had a redhead's temperament. She punched him square in the jaw, sending him crashing through the walls of the restaurant.

Luckily for us, the councilman had been quite an accomplished shinobi in his day, and basically shrugged of the blow. He took it as just desserts, to our—Sakura's, especially—relief. Had he taken it personally, things could have gotten very, very dicey for us.

"You were the apprentice to Tsunade, for crying out loud! You need to learn to control yourself a little bit better, Sakura!"

She merely grinned and took another long sip of wine. "I'll have you know, Naruto," she said, setting the delicate glassware down, "I have absolutely perfect control. It is my specialty, after all."

"I know," I agreed. "Anyway…" I leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers behind my head. "What now? I already told you I love you. You can't really say you're surprised anymore. I guess what I mean is… what do you feel for me? Who… no, what do you see me as?"

Her eyes never left mine as she took another swallow of her glass, emptying it fully. She set it aside and slowly stood up with the grace of a lioness. She sauntered around the coffee table separating us, her movements fluid and relaxed, a certain sensuality in the sashay of her hips. In only three steps, she was before me, standing tall over me. Her long pink hair fell over her shoulders in waves, even brushing against my face gently as she leaned over me slightly, resting her hands on my own shoulders.

Her hands cupped over my ears, softly tilting my head to look directly up into her beautiful green eyes. "What do I see you as?" she whispered softly, gazing down. Her fingers lightly curled and twisted through my hair; my neck strained to keep my eyes on hers.

She bent at the waist, slowly, erotically, her each and every curve accentuated by the wine I had just imbibed. "What do you think?" she whispered, her lips now less than an inch from mine. She pressed them against hers, lightly, softly, as if kissing the back of a hand. Then she pressed further into me, her lips mashing against mine with an almost animal ferocity, her tongue snaking into my mouth, my tongue invading her; in seconds, words and rationality had escaped us—

I stood up, not breaking the kiss, pulled her lithe body against my abdominal core. My hands were pressed against the small of her back and the back of her head, crunching our bodies together almost violently, losing my identity in her, losing everything and succumbing to my base instincts…

Sakura broke apart, her breathing labored and heavy. This was beginning to get much more intense than she had ever imagined it would. "I think," I muttered, my own breathing heavy, "that I know what the deal is by now." She looked deeply into my eyes for a moment. "Naruto…" she said huskily. "Get in your room and take your damn clothes off."

For an instant, I didn't know what to do. But the look in her eyes betrayed her desire, and I knew damn well what I wanted.

She ran towards my room, with me right behind her.

A/N: So… My first official foray into NaruSaku territory. Um, I'm still not sure what to think about this overall. But if you lot liked it, I could be convinced to write another chapter? Anyway, thanks for reading. Review please!