Fool's Paradise

by Shelby

summary: she didn't want to be 'Miss Haruno' to him . . . but Sakura, sexy, alluring Sakura. AU. Konoha high school fic.

rating: T

[a/n: though it isn't the new pairing, there is some KakaSaku]

---

"I hope she'll be a fool --

that's the best thing a girl can be in this world,

a beautiful little fool."

-from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

---

Her New Hair was now cropped close, like Daisy Buchanan without the curls; her Old Hair had fallen to the floor in choppy tendrils like salmon colored snakes.

It had . . . taken some getting used to, but she would smile at her reflection. A bright pink bob, sleek against her neck.

Sakura felt renewed.

Perhaps it was envisioning flapper girls, with heavy black beads around their necks and pageboy caps on their heads, as she read 'The Great Gatsby' to her class that prompted Sakura to go into the salon on an ordinary Wednesday, and come home a completely different person. She had left her Old Self, the timid and day-dreaming Miss Haruno behind in the hairdresser's chair, between the woman getting a perm and the girl getting a dye job.

But perhaps it was because she wanted to be different, because the old her, the real her, was only meant for him.

The new child, the sullen boy with artistic talent who didn't care to read books (this was enough for Sakura to dislike him), Sai – he was always a constant reminder, of the past and the future, a dull and bleak future where her husband was working till night and her child was asleep in the next room.

Before her New Hair, Sakura looked at herself in the mirror and remembered the way she wore her hair each day last year, when Sasuke was her student, her affection, the only-thing-that-made-it-worthwhile.

I wore it for him, Sakura had mused when she pulled it back into a style she rarely desired to do, a french twist.

Her memory was, all at once, flooded with the beautiful image of the Uchiha, achingly.

Sakura's hair had been in a french twist the day of the soccer meet, last year – could it have really been one entire year ago, four seasons gone by? - and as she sat in the stands, her hair was draped over her left shoulder in that prettily painful twist.

She could remember the way his muscles, lean and wiry, were evident beneath his playing uniform, his pale skin looking beautifully white beneath the threateningly gray sky; her black skirt pushing the limit at being too short, her stockings prettily sheer -

- too many memories – even in her hair.

The new boy, Sai, would stare at Sakura, his eyes always blank, void of feeling, of anything. No. He simply couldn't, wouldn't understand her.

If she wore her hair for him any way he would certainly feel nothing. It wouldn't give him the pleasure it had given Sasuke to see her looking beautiful, and Sakura knew that Sasuke had thought she was beautiful with her hair in a bun or braided or twisted back because his eyes would follow her across the room, never leaving her once as she held a yardstick in her hand and explained a comma splice.

Sakura had to cut it.

It was the boy's fault, not her's. The imposter in the fifth row.

She was being eaten away.

---

In truth, Sakura did not notice when Kakashi Hatake looked at her.

The wedding ceremony was in a few months; she was being plagued by the women in her family to go dress shopping, to start preparing a theme, to find a bakery for the cake.

She hoped it would rain.

Meanwhile, her life was filled with grading papers, with handing out paper back novels and giving pop quizzes and making up tests based on old wealth versus new wealth, and the significance of Tom Sawyer in American literature.

Kakashi would watch Sakura, his eyes trained on her – but what was there to desire? The curves was soft, and subtle, like that of a young girl's; her breasts were small, and her skin fair, painted with a light blush on her cheeks.

Sakura hardly had the time to notice a man so subtle, so indifferent as Kakashi Hatake. Yet he still took notice of her, of her short hair and her beautiful black dress that fell in a swishing hemline just above her knee.

"Your hair. You cut it."

Sakura was in Hatake's room again; she had a familiar feeling of nostalgia as she remembered debating with Sasuke about The Scarlet Letter here, making her wish he would no longer be a ghost of her memory -

"It's different. I like it."

She had been talking with Hatake more often . . . and it wasn't always about their students.

At times, when Sakura would be chained to her desk, grading assignments and worksheets about grammar, she and Hatake would discuss lesson plans, their best students with the best grades and those who were too heedless to pass. Their classrooms were so close by; they taught the same subject. It was a natural progression.

But sometimes, when Sakura wanted to have company, or rather just a person to speak with, Hatake was there; they would talk of their lives, their plans for the weekend and often with his cynical humor, Kakashi would talk about his love life, which occasionally made Sakura laugh.

"You really think so?" Sakura asked as she continued to hum "Reverie." Outside, the track team jogged by through the hallways, their footsteps dull behind the closed door. It was raining.

"I do," Kakashi said. He approached her, carefully. He couldn't see the ring on her finger, hidden behind her back.

Or maybe he did. Maybe he didn't care.

Sakura stopped humming. She left off near the end of the song, a piano tune, her favorite Debussy to play.

"You have a beautiful voice, Sakura." Her senses were filled with him, with Hatake, things that Sakura didn't care to notice; he smelled of clove cigarettes, of fresh air and wet pavements. Her heart thrummed.

"Don't flatter me, Hatake," she whispered, her breath ghosting against his cheek.

"Don't come into my classroom uninvited, Haruno," he said, and pulled off his mask.

The moment was all-too-familiar.

But when Hatake – when Kakashi kissed her, hesitantly and carefully, Sakura, in spite of herself, smiled lightly and kissed him back. She could pretend, to her fancy, that it was Sasuke again, that he had come back for her only, that he had come back simply to kiss her. Or she could relive that moment before, one year ago, all over again.

Kakashi was quiet, intelligent, sad; he was almost the same, the same as him, and the line would blur when Sakura closed her eyes.

It was a nice, quiet dream.

---

It was Thursday night. She had been expected to be home by five; make dinner by seven; read a novel and go to sleep by ten.

Sakura never went home.

It was almost the end of the year, and Hatake proved to be . . . a nice distraction.

Instead of remembering the boy in her class, Sai, the name Sakura dreaded to speak aloud (as it felt like poison on her lips), she would think of Kakashi, and of Sasuke, and how she wanted desperately for them to be the same person.

Kakashi would come into her classroom when all the students had gone and the teachers were ready to go home to their husbands and wives, to their children and to the family dog; he pushed her against the whiteboard, kissing her neck and gently cupping her nonexistent breast.

And Sakura would wish, as Kakashi would ask of her kindly to go with him places, to a movie, to the car – to his house . . . that for just one moment, he could be Sasuke.

It was a selfish wish. But Sakura could never purge her mind of him.

Sasuke haunted her. And she loved it.

Maybe that was why Sakura allowed, as the weeks went on and the projects where students would put on plays and do Powerpoints and poems all passed, for Kakashi to take off the band on her finger and touch her a little more each time.

Kakashi had a Honda, in dark gray; a drizzle hid them in a gentle curtain from the outside world.

When he led her to it, pulled her into the passenger seat as her brief case and his were thrown carelessly into the backseat, Kakashi said nothing, and Sakura said nothing as they drove onto the back roads.

Their unspoken arrangement had grown into something resembling a relationship; though Sakura didn't think of them as anything. She still had her fiance, who sat across from her each morning at the breakfast table and asked his routine monotonous questions, the same as always – about what she planned to do at work, if she wanted to go shopping, or out to eat.

But Kakashi hardly asked her those kind of stupid questions – just like Sasuke never would, Sakura's mind whispered. He only wanted to know about her. What made her happy, her favorite poems and what she loved to write, if she kept a diary and if she watched cult classics; what made her hot, what turned her on. Sakura imagined that being with Kakashi was what being with Sasuke would be like.

When Sakura watched Kakashi unlock the door, she entered a new realm, a special kind of dream.

"Kakashi. Do you really like me?" Sakura said nonchalantly as she took off her rain jacket and put it by the door.

The man was silent as he removed his mask, his jacket, his boots and tie. "Do you like me, Sakura?" He always avoided the question, turned it around on her. It made her frown.

"I'm not sure, sensei," Her voice was calm, yet filled with a strange sense of meanness from a place she couldn't find.

Kakashi smiled.

When he took her to the bedroom, Sakura let Kakashi touch her, let the boundaries go fully, and let herself sink further into her own wishes, and wants.

She needed it to be Sasuke nipping her neck, his tongue lightly trailing her jaw and kissing her breast.

She wished it was Sasuke touching her sides, his slightly rough hands trailing down her stomach; travelling lower to rub the heat between her thighs.

She pictured Sasuke holding her hips, almost bruising her, going inside of her, making her shudder against his chest as her nails dug into his back, leaving perfect skin marred.

Time slowed, disappeared; then returned.

When it was over, when everything was finished and Kakashi lay beside her, Sakura no longer let him touch her. Sakura felt empty. She knew he wasn't Sasuke. Her favorite student, the boy with the beautiful eyes – he was being replaced, fading away.

It was her own fault. She cried.

[Important note: I got a really sweet PM from Luciteart, and she inspired me to attempt writing part 3 of Fool's Paradise. And in just a few hours, it actually turned out to be something good. I'm sorry I haven't updated, but I have been having some family issues.

And do not worry - with the upcoming chapters, SasuSaku will prevail!! This, I think, is the last of KakaSaku, but as you can see, Sakura's obsession prompts her to do some bad, strange things, so it was necessary for the plot.]