Where between sleep and life some brief space is—
Swinburne

She's always been a little afraid of him: his distance, the aloof and casual gaze he graced them—her—with for as long as they'd been under his tutelage, and his power. He very nearly burned with it.

Like most children, this fear was filtered through exhilaration: the excitement of being chased by someone you trust not to hurt you and the wonder that overpowers the instinctive terror that running from someone who can hurt you engenders.

She can remember the first time she felt his body heat against her. Perhaps puberty had made her recognise things she had no need of knowing when she was twelve. But at sixteen, his form was no longer a generic adult body towering over her, responsible for teaching and guiding her. Suddenly his body was a living, breathing, touchable thing. Warm, despite his cool exterior. She suddenly and instinctively recognised the sensuality smouldering beneath his surface.

Still waters do run deep, she thought, but fault lines were unpredictable and molten.

On her seventeenth birthday he was late.

When he arrived, he reached out to clamp his hand on her shoulder—a short visit, he'd have to leave quickly—and when that heat touched her bare shoulder she nearly jumped out of her skin. It didn't show outwardly, but a shudder began in her belly, waves radiating out to her ears, fingers, and toes. There was a sudden rush of tension pulling between her legs that nearly took her breath away. She felt a pulse and then, hypersensitive no doubt, she was numb as his hand and its warmth slid away. He wished her a happy birthday before slipping away.

She couldn't explain why exactly, but she never thought of Sasuke the same way after that; only of warm, calloused hands that lit a flame-like heat in her very core of being.

He was gone, but Sakura smiled suddenly, eager for her next birthday, and what touch it would bring.