Only One Month

The last week of their arrangement comes with rain and foggy landscapes. After the soccer match the week before, Boruto has been doing the utmost to make it up to Sarada, taking her to restaurants and filling up her free time with as much laughter and warmth as possible. This time, however, Sarada has insisted on planning the whole thing. She finally wants to take it to the next level with Boruto.

Whenever she suggested during the past weeks to move to something further than just making out, Boruto stalled. The first time, she assumes, it was because of Chocho being next door and she doubts Boruto would like to sleep with her or stay the night if Chocho is sitting on the other side of the wall, listening.

The other time, his teammates could have come in any second – and while it had frustrated her, she also had to admit that he had been right.

This time will be different though. Chocho is at her parents’ home, away for the break, and Sarada had the dorm to herself. Boruto will come over by 3 pm, so by 2 pm, Sarada has cleaned the house, showered and cooked a meal for the two of them. She also manages to find her best underwear and a pretty dress to wear on top. The lasagna she made is ready to be served and only needs to be reheated quickly in the microwave.

But it turns out, Boruto is late, because by 3:30 pm he still hasn’t arrived and Sarada is starting to get anxious. Either she has gotten ditched by him or something happened and he cannot make it to her.

Retrieving her phone from her bag, she types in a quick message.

You:
Hey, where are you? Everything alright? We had a date at 3, remember?
Sent: 3:34 pm

Boruto:
No I haven’t forgotten! How could I forget you? traffic is just shit
Sent: 3:45 pm

You:
So you’re on your way? Good! I put on a nice dress, just for you! ♥
Sent: 3:46 pm

Boruto:
Yeah, I’ll be there in ten
Sent: 3:56 pm

Sarada knows ‘the traffic’ isn’t shit at this time of the day, the most traffic flows away from her house during this hour, but she doesn’t mention it to him in another text. Instead, she begins to pace anxiously across her bedroom. He sounded distant, she thinks. Why does he sound so distant? It took him minutes to reply to her when usually he would reply on the spot. Maybe he hasn’t left the house yet and is just looking for an excuse so she won’t get angry with him?

Now that seems like Boruto, but he’s never been late to any of their dates. He’s been punctual, always there on point, never a minute late. Their dates had been too important to him to be late – or at least that’s what she thought.

For a terrifying moment, Sarada firmly believed that whatever evolved between them in the past weeks only existed in her head, but she knows this to be an untruth. There’s no other way.

And just like he said in his messages, ten minutes later Boruto appears at her front door, dressed casually. When she leans in to hug him, he lacks of the scent of his aftershave, the one that she likes so much. This, too, confuses her. He’s always made sure to smell nice for her these past weeks, even at university.

She likes this scent.

“Well, you certainly took forever. The food is all cold I bet,” Sarada tells him.

“You cooked for me?” His eyes widen as if her cooking for him surprises him. “What did you cook?”

“Lasagna. With feta cheese and garlic. I’m sure you’ll like it. Come in,” she replies, taking his jacket and hanging it nearby the door. He looks around and Sarada gets the sensation that he feels lost. He looks lost.

“Is everything alright?”

His eyes snap back to her and he manages an easy smile. She sees through the face mask with ease.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Sarada puts both her hands onto her hips and tilts her head to the side, eyes shrewd. “Somehow, I don’t believe you. You look like something bad happened. You can talk to me, you know?” she says before leaning towards him gain with friendly demeanor.

For a second he hesitates and her stomach drops about ten feet below. Quickly her mind skims over every bad thing that could have happened in the last twelve hours. There are no traces of tears on his face, no red cheeks. He hasn’t cried and Boruto – despite trying to come off as extremely manly and collected – is the type to cry when upset, depending on the situation.

“Is Chocho in her room?” he asks, scratching his head.

“No,” Sarada replies, “she has returned home to her parents for the break. She won’t be back for another two weeks.”

“Ah,” Boruto says, but doesn’t elaborate. The silence is heavy in the room, like a third person who is watching them with accusing eyes, every little breath is loud in her ears.

“So…do you want to have dinner or not?” This time, Sarada’s voice has no playfulness, just a factual tone. She demands an answer, Boruto must know this, his behavior is too strange to be excused without a reason.

“I can’t stay.”

“You…what? Why?” Her voice is a tone too high even to her own ears.

His shoulders sag, suddenly he looks exhausted, years older than mere 23 years. When he looks at her, his eyes are still the same blue shade that she has spent years looking at. Blue like the sea, blue like the sky during its best hours, blue moon. But there is something else too, it takes her a moment to understand it.

Looks like…fear.

“I can’t stay with you.”

Sarada stops herself from flinching, even blinking, her hands falling loosely down her sides, limp and useless. There is no feeling left in her fingers, her hands, her arms. There is a sudden disconnect between her, her body. Between her and Boruto. She doesn’t see the blue in his eyes anymore, his face is engulfed in the dark of the fleeting evening sun.

She bites down on her tongue by accident, almost choking and then swallows her saliva.

Tastes like…gun metal. She doesn’t like this taste.

“Wha-What do you mean, exactly?” she whispers. With the silence so heavy in the air, Boruto must hear her clear enough.

“I just can’t do this anymore, alright? The dating. It’s just…it’s no good for me anymore, you know? I mean…” Boruto wants to explain but when Sarada steps closer he trails off. Her body still is not connected to her brain, to the now new and all-consuming reality.

“What exactly do you mean with ‘no good’?”

He has enough shame to lower his eyes and stare at his feet as he explains. “I just can’t take this anymore. Dating you was good and all, but I don’t have the endurance to continue this-“ he motions between them with his fingers as if she cannot understand “- anymore. I, uh, I guess I am sorry for wasting your time.” Boruto grimaces as he looks into Sarada’s eyes. She isn’t crying, not yet at any rate, but she is confused and hurt.

Her brain tries to make her come up with a variety of curses or demands that Boruto needs to follow, but her body isn’t hers at the moment. She can only stare at the boy in front of her. When she doesn’t try to talk to him anymore, it seems he figures that he said all he needed to say.

He doesn’t leave a trace as he leaves her dorm, only the car’s engine roaring, first still near, then further and further away from her until she only hears her own breath. His feet do not leave prints behind, nor does his scent linger. Sarada supposes that without the cologne his scent just isn’t that strong perhaps.

Not strong enough to stay with her at any rate. She misses his scent.

The disconnect between her mind and her body comes to a stop in sudden waves. At first she lifts her hands, watches them tremble, then her mind catches up with her legs and she sinks to the floor. With a thud she is on her knees, ready for a prayer, but her voice does not yet come to her.

Next are her lungs, filling with air, bigger and bigger until her breath shudders. At first a sigh, then a sob, followed by a second one. Tears spill over the brim of her eyes and fall to the ground as she shakes without control. Faintly, she can make out noise from the outside world. Has it begun to rain outside as well? Or is it just her, raining by herself, on the ground, knees and hands almost ready for a prayer to save herself?

The last thing to return to her is her voice.

“Oh God,” she cries, all by herself, not praying, but cradling herself, “Oh God, he left, he really left.”

She lets her head sink onto the wooden floor, her body rushing forward and spilling over the floor in one single, fluid wave. As she holds herself together, holding herself to not spill over, she does not pray to anyone.

She lets the blue take her.

One, two, three, four, five, six – with a single, solid punch he manages to push the bag as far away from him as possible. In those movies the super heroes always manage to punch these sandbags down and into a wall, but that is not reality. Or maybe he just isn’t a hero.

It’s been three days since he broke up with Sarada and he is still miserable because of it. Not that he expects this to change very soon, but the constant heartache is enough to make him want to punch something other than a bag.

“Your aim is getting sloppy, Boruto. Are you thinking about Sarada again?” The tone in Mitsuki’s voice is not mean or cruel. It is matter-of-fact, no feelings attached. Still, Boruto wants to punch him for even saying her name. It’s hard enough to think about her, worse if he has to talk about her. Mitsuki had been the one to find him crying in his room, alone and miserable. Mitsuki didn’t ask any questions besides the bare minimum and just made Boruto watch a movie with him. Boruto was glad for the distraction, but it didn’t help.

He is already terrified of the beginning of the next semester. How will he deal with Sarada looking at him from now? Will she look at him at all? The thought is unbearable, too painful to even think about and so he pushes the thought out of his head with every punch he takes at the bag.

He and Mitsuki train for another 10 minutes before another figure enters the gym behind him and he can immediately tell who it is, just by the figure and vague hair. Chocho is making her way across the floor, right to him.

As if he doesn’t feel bad enough already.

“Boruto!”

Before turning to her he wipes the sweat from his forehead and takes a sip of water, better to brace himself on the inside for what is about to come. He doesn’t look at Chocho, but she doesn’t need any cues to start talking to him.

“I can’t believe you would do this, I just cannot. I thought you were going to be good for her, but really, you’re just one big disappointment! I should have never encouraged her to go out with you! I should have tried to get her to date anyone but you!” she yells, while a few other people stare them down from across the room.

“Chocho, can you please lower your voice?” Boruto bites back. Talking about Sarada makes his heart ache and he doesn’t want to break down in the middle of the gym.

“NO! I CANNOT!”

Her voice is loud enough to create an echo and Mitsuki comes around and places a hand on her shoulder with a smile. “How about we calm down and you talk to Boruto in a lower voice – people generally tend to listen more when they do not get yelled at.” For a moment, Chocho looks like she is going to murder Mitsuki, but then she just turns around, exhales in the most dramatic way and looks at Boruto again.

“You really broke her heart,” she begins to explain, “do you know that? That was so incredibly cruel of you, I can’t believe it. I thought you were better than this.”

“I don’t think I broke her heart,” he retorts. “She looked surprised when I left but otherwise she looked alright. She didn’t even ask me to stay or anything, you know?”

“Because she was in shock! She told me everything, about the nice evening she had planned for you two, the food, everything!” Chocho gestures with her arms. “And you just dumped her! What kind of behavior was that? I thought you’re in love with her?”

Heat lights up in his chest and the pain it creates is like white fire on bare skin. “Of course I love her, you know I do, everyone knows I do because I am a big blond idiot.” Boruto bites on his molars to cause himself from saying other, more personal things, things that are none of Chocho’s or Mitsuki’s business.

“The question was if she was in love with me. Yes, she might have liked going out with me but she could have still dumped me.” And I wouldn’t have been able to bear getting dumped by her, he thinks. I would have never recovered.

“You didn’t know if she was in love with you too?” Chocho voice drops to an angry whisper. “Whoa, you’re really dumb. I expected more of you.”

“Well, yeah, and what did you expect of me?” he replies with biting sarcasm.

“I expected you to notice that she prepared an entire date night with you. I know that she tried several times to initiate sex with you – and you refused.” She sounds like she is explaining the obvious.

“She wanted to go all the way with you and you were the one that didn’t go along. Are you shy? Or why are you behaving like this?”

“That is so none of your business.”

“I know it’s not! But what I know for a fact is that Sarada is at home, bawling her eyes out and she was so devastated she called me to come take care of her even though I was on a break from school with my parents.”

She’s crying, fuck, he hates it when she cries. Sarada doesn’t cry a lot, she bears most hurdles in life with a stoic attitude, but it has happened before that he witnessed her breaking down and cry. He’s hated people crying since he was a boy and old enough to become protective of his little sister. As a big brother he’d naturally taken on the role of a protector, but Himawari would sometimes cry nonetheless. Somehow, Sarada crying is different and at the same time worse.

Because I make her unhappy, he tells himself in silence.

“Fuck, I mean, I didn’t want to disappoint her with that cancelled date, I really didn’t mean to, it’s just…I just can’t go there with her. All the way. She’s not really my girlfriend, I just can’t.”

Opening himself up only to be dumped in the end isn’t in his plans, he wouldn’t recover. So better to get this over with sooner than later.

“She’s not disappointed about the date, she is disappointed you dumped her!”

“Huh?” The world suddenly spins around him and he has to take a step back. What Chocho just said doesn’t make sense to him. On a certain level he understood what she said, word by word, but he cannot make out the actual meaning.

Why would Sarada be disappointed – unless she had planned to continue dating him of course. But would she really do that?

“How do you know this,” he asks her. “How can you be sure?”

“Because I have known my best friend for most of her life.”

He stands there, unmoving, for many heartbeats and then, just like that, he takes off at a dead run, Mitsuki calling after him, “Is our training session cancelled?”

“It better be,” Chocho tells him.

Yeah, he’s got something else to do right now, he has to get his girl back.

The drive over to her place is painfully long, in spite of him driving well over the tempo limit. If he gets caught by the police, his driver’s license is done for and his father is going to take away his car too. Plus, whatever fee he’d receive would bite him in the ass as well. He’d like to call her while driving to make sure she doesn’t leave the house, but he’s not quite that lax about breaking the driving laws.

He turns into her street still sweaty from his workout, but now with a fierce determination instead of dreadful anxiety fueling him. He wastes no time checking his appearance, it’s useless now at any rate. He’s sweaty, still in gym clothes and he hasn’t shaved this morning so his chin is covered in blond stubble.

At first he thinks that she may really not be home, but then his ears pick up on her light steps behind the door and he starts to grin as she opens the door for him.

“Hey…” he begins, but cannot finish his sentence. Her face is blotchy and she isn’t wearing her glasses. Her eyes are red enough to let him know that yes Chocho didn’t lie. Sarada has been crying.
The guilt takes physical form inside his guts with painful stabs.

“Hey.” Her face is somber, not smiling or friendly. She’s really hurt.

“I came back.”

“Yeah,” she whispers, “I can see.”

He scratches his chin before leaning in. “Can I come in? It’s easier to explain with privacy, you know?”
She doesn’t reply and just lets him slip past her into the hall.

“I’ve come back because Chocho talked to me just about 25 minutes ago. She was hella mad at me.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s typically Chocho.”

“And what she told me really got me thinking and, yeah,” he says, cheeks red, scratching his whiskers again. His prior fierce attitude vanishes with each passing second. He sighs, “Anyway, I want to apologize to you. I owe you an apology for dumping you and I was wondering if you’d hear me out.”

Sarada simply shrugs with a quick motion; he takes this as a yes.

“I know I am stupid, sometimes at the very least. And when you and I got a thing, I was so happy, but the more we went out, I don’t know, the more attached I became. And with each passing date I thought about the end of our deal. I assumed you would dump me.

“And you see, I’m also a coward, often enough at least. So I decided to dump you before you could do it to me. But really, I didn’t want to dump you, I wanted to continue what we had!” He uses his hands to gesture wildly and hopefully make her understand at least a tiny bit of what he wants to express.

“And I guess, what I want to say is, what I need to say is, that I am really in fucking love with you. Have been for a while. Dumping you out of fear was dumb and I wish I hadn’t done it.”

He looks into her eyes, eager to receive an answer but she keeps looking at his hands. Sarada is motionless and white, even soundless.

Please say something, please just say something.

But she doesn’t speak, instead she wraps two arms around herself and begins to cry again.

“Oh, no, please don’t cry.” Without hesitation he engulfs her with his arms, pulling her against his chest in a gentle embrace. “Did I do something wrong again?” She shakes her head and sniffs, then buries her face in his chest.

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong now. I’m so glad you’ve come back to talk to me,” she whispers, pressing her nose against the fabric of his shirt and inhaling. “These past three days were awful. I don’t want you to leave again.”

Boruto chuckles and kisses the top of her head. “I don’t plan on leaving you again.” Not so soon if he can manage it.

“You’re sweaty though,” she mumbles and they laugh in union and Boruto squeezes her even tighter. “Yeah, I worked out before I got here.”

“Oh yeah? Well then you need to take a shower.”

They both look at each other and this time Boruto doesn’t pull away. Instead he dives deep and kisses her, first softly, then with more depth until they both forget about the past awful days.

“Also,” Sarada begins to tell him as they head towards the bathroom, “in case you haven’t noticed yet. I want to take a shower with you because I want you whole. All of you, entirely. Because I also love you.”

He smiles and pulls her closer again, for one, two kisses, because after only one month, this is all he ever wanted.