[Email Log/Thread] [Temari+ Shikamaru+ Tequila+ Kankurou?] [late night drinks]
[Parts played respectively in the log, unfinished as Shika and I would like to invite Kank to join in the fun, and perhaps conveniently walk in at an awkward moment. And I suppose that if they get rowdy, close neighbors (so maybe apartments 7, 9, 3 and 14 (as they all share walls/floors/ceilings)) could swing by and tell them to shut up/have a drink. ps- Sorry for typos and formating issues, I am copy/pasting/posting this from my email to livejournal at the library >.<]
With a long sigh, Temari dragged her fingers through her messy blonde hair, fingers snagging in the tangles resulting from the elastic kinks her pigtails had left. If she were going anywhere, she might have put some effort into straightening the strands, but as all she had to do tonight was drink at her kitchen table with a boy whose opinion of her appearance didn't matter in the slightest, she didn't care. Pushing away from her desk, she hit the power button on her monitor and stood. (She was not going to be one of the idiots caught drunk on livejournal, stupidity forever immortalized in such apartment wide jokes as 'tobogganing '.)
She caught hold of the worn belt loops of the slightly too-large jeans she was wearing and hitched them back to a comfortable level on her hips before making her way towards the kitchen.
The apartment was silent and dark; she knew the place like the back of her hand so rarely bothered with lights. In the long run, it had made a noticeable difference in her electricity bill, which only served to encourage the habit. The only light that burned constantly was the ghost-light above the stove in the kitchen, the faint tubular bulb set beneath the over head cupboards. It cast the cramped room in strange yellow light and long dark shadows. With a slow motion, she pulled open the cupboard and wrapped her hands along the necks of two bottles of gold tequila. She didn't work until tomorrow afternoon, she could afford a long night.
Shikamaru came in quietly and unnanounced. He felt antsy for no real reason he could explain---no, he wasn't used to drinking with anyone outside of Chouji or Ino or his family, and no, he wasn't quite in the habit of branching outside of the company of his childhood friends---but nervousness made his fingers tremble slightly, shoved down deep into the pockets of his baggy cargo pants to hide that telltale sign.
He figured that Temari was something like a lioness. She was proud and she was strong, but she also could probably smell the licks of his fear from down the hallway. He probably reeked of it, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, his dark hair and clothes melted back into the shadowy apartment, and his pale face standing out like a ghostly thumbprint in contrast. Shikamaru blinked slowly---so he wasn't the only one with dark rooms and empty tables as a constant landscape, it seemed---and shifted his weight on the balls of his bare feet as if readying for an attack, be it physical or verbal.
Temari was standing under the sole light in the apartment: one tiny, feeble little bulb which caught the sharp edge of her collarbone, bared due to the scooped neck of her shirt, and the certain tilt of her chin as she looked down at the liquor bottles she was holding. She hadn't noticed him quite yet.
What to say?
'Hello' was a solid start, but it kept bunching up awkwardly on the tip of his tongue, refusing to spill out.
"Do you want to join us Gaa-" Temari cut herself off, the soft half-smile she reserved solely for her baby brother froze on her lips as she looked up towards the doorway. She'd been aware the second the doorknob in the hallway had turned, trained by years of paranoia and living with the most quiet person she'd ever met. Sometimes Kankurou tried to be quiet when he came home late, but the light, near silent, steps in the hall had meant someone far lighter and far more soft footed. Her senses told her Gaara, her youngest brother, but her eyes painted her a different picture. She could feel disapointment curl behind her ribcage.
She forced her smile into her wicked smirk, barely missing a beat. "Hey." She greeted Shikamru before reaching up to close the cupboard and turning away from the stove. The light caught in the soft sheen of the satin slip dress she was wearing over her jeans, she could see the reflections dancing off into the far corners of the room.
"Have a seat." She invited as she pulled a chair away from the old wood table and set the bottles down on the cracked varnished suface.
"Hey," Shikamaru returned in kind, his eyes flicking down to map out the table---it was tons easier than looking at her, and at the fascinating things that one little lightbulb was doing to the fabric of her slip. It reminded him of water, but softer, and suddenly the urge for a drink was a keening cry in the back of his head.
Damn women. If just a pair of real nice tits did this to him, he really had to be repressed. He had no other explanations, no other easy verbal ways out. It'd been too long since he'd had an opporunity, but given his feelings on relationships and his famous cowardice... Sighing, he took the chair Temari had indicated with a negligent wave of one hand, settling himself in and slouching, his long legs spread akimbo.
Eventually, his eyes wandered up again, and Shikamaru pulled a smirk to hide the mad tapdance his thoughts were really making. "So, alcohol. First you give me a lecture on socialization, and then you temper it with the greatest social lubricant of them all. Is this to be consider 'baby steps' for your socially retarded neighbor?"
Temari arched her eyebrow before pulling out a chair for herself, hitching her jeans at the knees lightly so that she could sit with her bare heels hooked on the edge of her seet. She rested her elbows on her raised knees as she shot Shikamaru a bland look across the table.
"You're the one who invited me drinking, remember?" She pointed out archly before leaning forward to grab one of the bottles. "You seem intend on working out your own shortcomings, I just get really bored when I drink alone." With a short smirk she unscrewed the cap and brought the bottle neck to her lips, taking a quick swig. She swallowed it like it was water, but her eyelids dropped as she savored the burn it left from the back of her throat down to the pit of her stomach.
"Well yeah," Shikamaru said, a little lamely, looking at the second bottle set out before Temari. He pretty much figured it was for him, but he wasn't about to reach for it himself. It just wasn't his style. He leaned over the table instead, an elbow propped up and his chin in his hand, his eyes heavily-lidded with thought. "And I get equally bored when I drink by my own. I usually just call it a night once the warm-and-fuzzies set in, because it's not worth it to follow through until I really feel the alcohol's effects. That, and drinking that much is damn expensive."
He shrugged thinly, definitely not looking at her dress again.
What kind of fabric was that? Was it actually just a slip? And, if so, why would women wear that underneath their desired attire, seeing as it was so much more interesting than anything that could be wriggled on over the top?
"That's why I don't usually go to bars. A bottle is way cheaper than individual drinks." Another long swing, tiping her head back to better accommodate her throat. Temari had first sipped tequila when she was seven. She'd broken into her father's liquor cabinet out of curiosity and an overpowering craving for attention. A craving she still felt curl in her belly, even to this day, regardless of the fact that her father was no longer around to bestow his attention upon her. When she was fifteen, she started experiementing with other alcohols, but ten years later, tequila remained the only one she retained an afinity for.
"You're not going to sit there and watch me drink the night away, are you?" she asked finally as she set the bottle down on the table with a definitive clack.
Women. Always so goddamn pushy. Shikamaru more or less sprawled across the table, nimbly dragging the bottle closer by its thin neck. He muttered "Excuse my reach," under his breath because he was used to drinking with relatives, who felt that manners should be dolled out---no matter how tipsy you claimed to be. Despite everything, the Naras were, in fact, an extremely Asian family---as evidenced by how quickly Japanese replaced English among the older generations as soon as the bottles of sake appeared at the table.
Roots. Traditions. Background noise.
Again, Shikamaru sighed. "Do you usually talk when you drink? By that I mean...is it a social thing for you, or do you usually drink to get drunk? I've been polling around here, and it seems like it's definitely done for the latter among the denizens of Lysgar. Guess that's to be expected; this place is shit." Uncapping the bottle, he took a healthy gulp of the tequila, making an interesting sound low in his throat at that almost too-comforting, too-familiar burn.
Temari stared contemplatively at the bottle in her hand. Why was she so enamored with it? In the beginning, it had been grown up. Later, it had been a good way to focus her uncle's attention and a source of amusement. These days…it provided her with an excuse to spend time with her family without any of them needing to admit to any kind of sentimentality.
Finally she shrugged, "Its just something to do." With that the bottle was brought back to her lips for another long draught, that was caughed on as laughter suddenly faught its way out. Her feet slid to the floor as she rocked forward, hand to her mouth to keep from spitting tequila out all over the kitchen.
"Did you just moan?" She asked through her grin, before wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
...had he made a sound? Shikamaru hadn't really noticed, being too caught up in mentally rolling around the bite-burn-honey of the tequila.
"Is there something wrong with being vocal when you're enjoying something?" Shikamaru asked with a carefully arched eyebrow, unflappable and unaffected by the mini-geyser of alcohol Temari had spouted along with her laughter. Pulling up his shirt hem, he wriggled it up far enough to wipe off his face, trying to smother down his own simmering laughter. What kind of girl was she?
Honestly, his noises were mostly involuntary and a constant well of amusement for Ino. Her favorite to tease him about was the little purr-grumbles he made when she deigned to give him a back rub---she'd talk to him in that voice most adults use on animals, children, and the mentally slow, asking if Shika wanted his tummy rubbed, too.
"Wrong? No. But hilarious." Temari replied in half formed sentences, lips pulled into a wide grin that often got her associated with the Cheshire Cat.
A million similes popped into her head, to better justify how she found humor in the situation, but most of them took far too many words. She had the image of a baby suckling, of a man in the desert finally finding an oasis, of Louis with his rats in Interview with a Vampire, of a kitten purring away over a saucer of cream, all dancing behind her eyes. Seeing as most of them were ridiculously cliche, she didn't bother to share them.
That look on her face? That terrified him. It was a little more...ferocious
than Ino's lilting expressions of "I know something you don't know <3", and
that was enough to make his warming stomach flop fretfully. He didn't
entirely like things he didn't understand.
Still, she seemed happy, and that was something Shikamaru wasn't going to
challenge---even if Temari looked a little mentally unstable. Mmm, alcohol.
Man's best friend.
He took another long gulp---forcing himself to keep silent; no more
twittering about his habits---and peered over at her curiously.
"I don't see why that's so funny."
Her grin quirked into a teasing smirk in the corners. "Well, I had never really pegged you as the vocal type, it seems a little too troublesome for you to bother with."
She set the bottle to her lips again and tipped her head back, neck muscles rolling as she took several long swallows from the bottle. Shikamaru just had this...quietness about him, not silence, not stillness, just...quiet. Which is why such a primitive sound coming out of left field had surprised her into laughter.
He wasn't sure whether to take that as an insult or...something a little
less caustic than an insult. Never a compliment, because Temari didn't seem
the type to dole out that kind of easy fondness.
Not one to waste time fretting over something like how to interpet someone's
words (that'd come later, when he was sitting on the roof and replaying this
episode in his head), he went back to staring at her damn slip. Again. Only
not. Because he wouldn't be staring at anyone's front, especially the front
of She Who Spends Most of Our Interactions Yelling at Me. ---Which, for the
record, was far, far beyond troublesome and well into the just plain
irritating mental-section he filed most social ciircumstances in.
Although, to be fair, they hadn't been anything but civil this time. Maybe
there was just something about a faceless female powerhouse that irritated
him online, but once he put a body to the typist, he felt less threatened.
That, or said body was just distracting him from his irritation.
And this was why he didn't drink with others often, especially those of the
opposite sex. He started noticing things, most of which he didn't
like.
"It is troublesome, but it's involuntary. ---And stop making it sound like
I'm making B-grade porno moans or something like that."
"You totally were. I think you have a career in foreign porn dubbing." Temari said keenly tipping her bottle in a sort of salute to him.
"Seriously, you've got that involuntary lilt that women spend ages trying to perfect." she teased mercilessly, mostly because she was just curious to see how he'd react now that he was a little loosened up. She was holding out for a sense of humor buried beneath all his crusty mysoginistic tendencies.
If you realize you're so desperate for interaction you're drinking with
someone you don't even profoundly like, take one shot.
If you realize you've spent the last fifteen minutes clutching the bottle
and staring at her breasts, take one shot.
If you think you might like her---except the fact that you, y'know,
don't, and that's probably just your frustration and the alcohol
whispering in your ever-attentive little genius ears---take one shot.
If you feel the urge to dredge up and tell her about the one time you were
coaxed into foreign porn dubbing, but left because the pay was shit, take
two shots.
He was going to end up so. Fucking. Smashed, if he kept going this
way.
"I'm too skinny to even have mantits," Shikamaru said leadenly, wondering if
he should repeat his personal drinking game for good measure. "And I have no
ass. I can't fuckin' see why people keep thinking I am a woman, or
insinuating that I am two-parts female to one part male. I have a dick. I
promise. Even if I can fake a good orgasm whine."
With a long sigh, Temari dragged her fingers through her messy blonde hair, fingers snagging in the tangles resulting from the elastic kinks her pigtails had left. If she were going anywhere, she might have put some effort into straightening the strands, but as all she had to do tonight was drink at her kitchen table with a boy whose opinion of her appearance didn't matter in the slightest, she didn't care. Pushing away from her desk, she hit the power button on her monitor and stood. (She was not going to be one of the idiots caught drunk on livejournal, stupidity forever immortalized in such apartment wide jokes as 'tobogganing '.)
She caught hold of the worn belt loops of the slightly too-large jeans she was wearing and hitched them back to a comfortable level on her hips before making her way towards the kitchen.
The apartment was silent and dark; she knew the place like the back of her hand so rarely bothered with lights. In the long run, it had made a noticeable difference in her electricity bill, which only served to encourage the habit. The only light that burned constantly was the ghost-light above the stove in the kitchen, the faint tubular bulb set beneath the over head cupboards. It cast the cramped room in strange yellow light and long dark shadows. With a slow motion, she pulled open the cupboard and wrapped her hands along the necks of two bottles of gold tequila. She didn't work until tomorrow afternoon, she could afford a long night.
Shikamaru came in quietly and unnanounced. He felt antsy for no real reason he could explain---no, he wasn't used to drinking with anyone outside of Chouji or Ino or his family, and no, he wasn't quite in the habit of branching outside of the company of his childhood friends---but nervousness made his fingers tremble slightly, shoved down deep into the pockets of his baggy cargo pants to hide that telltale sign.
He figured that Temari was something like a lioness. She was proud and she was strong, but she also could probably smell the licks of his fear from down the hallway. He probably reeked of it, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, his dark hair and clothes melted back into the shadowy apartment, and his pale face standing out like a ghostly thumbprint in contrast. Shikamaru blinked slowly---so he wasn't the only one with dark rooms and empty tables as a constant landscape, it seemed---and shifted his weight on the balls of his bare feet as if readying for an attack, be it physical or verbal.
Temari was standing under the sole light in the apartment: one tiny, feeble little bulb which caught the sharp edge of her collarbone, bared due to the scooped neck of her shirt, and the certain tilt of her chin as she looked down at the liquor bottles she was holding. She hadn't noticed him quite yet.
What to say?
'Hello' was a solid start, but it kept bunching up awkwardly on the tip of his tongue, refusing to spill out.
"Do you want to join us Gaa-" Temari cut herself off, the soft half-smile she reserved solely for her baby brother froze on her lips as she looked up towards the doorway. She'd been aware the second the doorknob in the hallway had turned, trained by years of paranoia and living with the most quiet person she'd ever met. Sometimes Kankurou tried to be quiet when he came home late, but the light, near silent, steps in the hall had meant someone far lighter and far more soft footed. Her senses told her Gaara, her youngest brother, but her eyes painted her a different picture. She could feel disapointment curl behind her ribcage.
She forced her smile into her wicked smirk, barely missing a beat. "Hey." She greeted Shikamru before reaching up to close the cupboard and turning away from the stove. The light caught in the soft sheen of the satin slip dress she was wearing over her jeans, she could see the reflections dancing off into the far corners of the room.
"Have a seat." She invited as she pulled a chair away from the old wood table and set the bottles down on the cracked varnished suface.
"Hey," Shikamaru returned in kind, his eyes flicking down to map out the table---it was tons easier than looking at her, and at the fascinating things that one little lightbulb was doing to the fabric of her slip. It reminded him of water, but softer, and suddenly the urge for a drink was a keening cry in the back of his head.
Damn women. If just a pair of real nice tits did this to him, he really had to be repressed. He had no other explanations, no other easy verbal ways out. It'd been too long since he'd had an opporunity, but given his feelings on relationships and his famous cowardice... Sighing, he took the chair Temari had indicated with a negligent wave of one hand, settling himself in and slouching, his long legs spread akimbo.
Eventually, his eyes wandered up again, and Shikamaru pulled a smirk to hide the mad tapdance his thoughts were really making. "So, alcohol. First you give me a lecture on socialization, and then you temper it with the greatest social lubricant of them all. Is this to be consider 'baby steps' for your socially retarded neighbor?"
Temari arched her eyebrow before pulling out a chair for herself, hitching her jeans at the knees lightly so that she could sit with her bare heels hooked on the edge of her seet. She rested her elbows on her raised knees as she shot Shikamaru a bland look across the table.
"You're the one who invited me drinking, remember?" She pointed out archly before leaning forward to grab one of the bottles. "You seem intend on working out your own shortcomings, I just get really bored when I drink alone." With a short smirk she unscrewed the cap and brought the bottle neck to her lips, taking a quick swig. She swallowed it like it was water, but her eyelids dropped as she savored the burn it left from the back of her throat down to the pit of her stomach.
"Well yeah," Shikamaru said, a little lamely, looking at the second bottle set out before Temari. He pretty much figured it was for him, but he wasn't about to reach for it himself. It just wasn't his style. He leaned over the table instead, an elbow propped up and his chin in his hand, his eyes heavily-lidded with thought. "And I get equally bored when I drink by my own. I usually just call it a night once the warm-and-fuzzies set in, because it's not worth it to follow through until I really feel the alcohol's effects. That, and drinking that much is damn expensive."
He shrugged thinly, definitely not looking at her dress again.
What kind of fabric was that? Was it actually just a slip? And, if so, why would women wear that underneath their desired attire, seeing as it was so much more interesting than anything that could be wriggled on over the top?
"That's why I don't usually go to bars. A bottle is way cheaper than individual drinks." Another long swing, tiping her head back to better accommodate her throat. Temari had first sipped tequila when she was seven. She'd broken into her father's liquor cabinet out of curiosity and an overpowering craving for attention. A craving she still felt curl in her belly, even to this day, regardless of the fact that her father was no longer around to bestow his attention upon her. When she was fifteen, she started experiementing with other alcohols, but ten years later, tequila remained the only one she retained an afinity for.
"You're not going to sit there and watch me drink the night away, are you?" she asked finally as she set the bottle down on the table with a definitive clack.
Women. Always so goddamn pushy. Shikamaru more or less sprawled across the table, nimbly dragging the bottle closer by its thin neck. He muttered "Excuse my reach," under his breath because he was used to drinking with relatives, who felt that manners should be dolled out---no matter how tipsy you claimed to be. Despite everything, the Naras were, in fact, an extremely Asian family---as evidenced by how quickly Japanese replaced English among the older generations as soon as the bottles of sake appeared at the table.
Roots. Traditions. Background noise.
Again, Shikamaru sighed. "Do you usually talk when you drink? By that I mean...is it a social thing for you, or do you usually drink to get drunk? I've been polling around here, and it seems like it's definitely done for the latter among the denizens of Lysgar. Guess that's to be expected; this place is shit." Uncapping the bottle, he took a healthy gulp of the tequila, making an interesting sound low in his throat at that almost too-comforting, too-familiar burn.
Temari stared contemplatively at the bottle in her hand. Why was she so enamored with it? In the beginning, it had been grown up. Later, it had been a good way to focus her uncle's attention and a source of amusement. These days…it provided her with an excuse to spend time with her family without any of them needing to admit to any kind of sentimentality.
Finally she shrugged, "Its just something to do." With that the bottle was brought back to her lips for another long draught, that was caughed on as laughter suddenly faught its way out. Her feet slid to the floor as she rocked forward, hand to her mouth to keep from spitting tequila out all over the kitchen.
"Did you just moan?" She asked through her grin, before wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
...had he made a sound? Shikamaru hadn't really noticed, being too caught up in mentally rolling around the bite-burn-honey of the tequila.
"Is there something wrong with being vocal when you're enjoying something?" Shikamaru asked with a carefully arched eyebrow, unflappable and unaffected by the mini-geyser of alcohol Temari had spouted along with her laughter. Pulling up his shirt hem, he wriggled it up far enough to wipe off his face, trying to smother down his own simmering laughter. What kind of girl was she?
Honestly, his noises were mostly involuntary and a constant well of amusement for Ino. Her favorite to tease him about was the little purr-grumbles he made when she deigned to give him a back rub---she'd talk to him in that voice most adults use on animals, children, and the mentally slow, asking if Shika wanted his tummy rubbed, too.
"Wrong? No. But hilarious." Temari replied in half formed sentences, lips pulled into a wide grin that often got her associated with the Cheshire Cat.
A million similes popped into her head, to better justify how she found humor in the situation, but most of them took far too many words. She had the image of a baby suckling, of a man in the desert finally finding an oasis, of Louis with his rats in Interview with a Vampire, of a kitten purring away over a saucer of cream, all dancing behind her eyes. Seeing as most of them were ridiculously cliche, she didn't bother to share them.
That look on her face? That terrified him. It was a little more...ferocious
than Ino's lilting expressions of "I know something you don't know <3", and
that was enough to make his warming stomach flop fretfully. He didn't
entirely like things he didn't understand.
Still, she seemed happy, and that was something Shikamaru wasn't going to
challenge---even if Temari looked a little mentally unstable. Mmm, alcohol.
Man's best friend.
He took another long gulp---forcing himself to keep silent; no more
twittering about his habits---and peered over at her curiously.
"I don't see why that's so funny."
Her grin quirked into a teasing smirk in the corners. "Well, I had never really pegged you as the vocal type, it seems a little too troublesome for you to bother with."
She set the bottle to her lips again and tipped her head back, neck muscles rolling as she took several long swallows from the bottle. Shikamaru just had this...quietness about him, not silence, not stillness, just...quiet. Which is why such a primitive sound coming out of left field had surprised her into laughter.
He wasn't sure whether to take that as an insult or...something a little
less caustic than an insult. Never a compliment, because Temari didn't seem
the type to dole out that kind of easy fondness.
Not one to waste time fretting over something like how to interpet someone's
words (that'd come later, when he was sitting on the roof and replaying this
episode in his head), he went back to staring at her damn slip. Again. Only
not. Because he wouldn't be staring at anyone's front, especially the front
of She Who Spends Most of Our Interactions Yelling at Me. ---Which, for the
record, was far, far beyond troublesome and well into the just plain
irritating mental-section he filed most social ciircumstances in.
Although, to be fair, they hadn't been anything but civil this time. Maybe
there was just something about a faceless female powerhouse that irritated
him online, but once he put a body to the typist, he felt less threatened.
That, or said body was just distracting him from his irritation.
And this was why he didn't drink with others often, especially those of the
opposite sex. He started noticing things, most of which he didn't
like.
"It is troublesome, but it's involuntary. ---And stop making it sound like
I'm making B-grade porno moans or something like that."
"You totally were. I think you have a career in foreign porn dubbing." Temari said keenly tipping her bottle in a sort of salute to him.
"Seriously, you've got that involuntary lilt that women spend ages trying to perfect." she teased mercilessly, mostly because she was just curious to see how he'd react now that he was a little loosened up. She was holding out for a sense of humor buried beneath all his crusty mysoginistic tendencies.
If you realize you're so desperate for interaction you're drinking with
someone you don't even profoundly like, take one shot.
If you realize you've spent the last fifteen minutes clutching the bottle
and staring at her breasts, take one shot.
If you think you might like her---except the fact that you, y'know,
don't, and that's probably just your frustration and the alcohol
whispering in your ever-attentive little genius ears---take one shot.
If you feel the urge to dredge up and tell her about the one time you were
coaxed into foreign porn dubbing, but left because the pay was shit, take
two shots.
He was going to end up so. Fucking. Smashed, if he kept going this
way.
"I'm too skinny to even have mantits," Shikamaru said leadenly, wondering if
he should repeat his personal drinking game for good measure. "And I have no
ass. I can't fuckin' see why people keep thinking I am a woman, or
insinuating that I am two-parts female to one part male. I have a dick. I
promise. Even if I can fake a good orgasm whine."