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Tenten shook her head. "Not happening. You're not invited."
"Why not?"
Tenten gave Sakura a look usually directed at something particularly unpleasant you found stuck underneath your shoe. "This is a Valentine's Day party for single people."
"I'm single!"
"Being in an open relationship doesn't count."
"Ino and I aren't like that," Sakura growled.
"So you weren't planning to go to the party together?"
"We live together. For rent. It's hardly strange to go to a party with your roommate."
"Your roommate that you make out with at parties."
Sakura shrugged. "It's a good way to pick up guys."
Tenten rolled her eyes. "That would be a much better argument if you two didn't always go home together."
"It's not our fault that all the good guys are either taken or going on some sort of bullshit spiritual journey."
"Or died in the war," Tenten said bitterly. Sakura almost apologized but Tenten held up a hand to ward it off. "Look, even if we accept that you and Ino aren't dating, this isn't a singles party for people to hook up at. This is a singles party for us to be bitter, drink too much, make bad decisions and probably wear a lot of black. Ino would try to cheer us up, and while that would be welcome three hundred and sixty four days a year, not on Valentine's day."
Sakura blinked a few times. "Isn't the point of parties to have fun?"
"There's fun fun and then there's angry, bitter fun that may lead to fires and jail time."
"...So what you're saying is that for the sake of plausible deniability I should pretend that I never heard that you were having the party."
Tenten smiled evilly and nodded.
Sakura sighed as she got home. Turning on the light, she paused and really looked around the apartment. This wasn't a quick scan like when she was trying to find the scissors, but really looking at it like it was the home of a target she wanted to analyze. What she found wasn't the apartment of a couple of girls, but the apartment of a couple who were both girls.
Oh, the living room/dining room/kitchen area wasn't really indicative of couple-ness. There were a lot of photos of Sakura and Ino together which wasn't unusual for couples, but also wasn't unusual for besties and there were also lots of photos of them with their teams or larger groups of friends.
Things looked a bit different when you knew who owned what, however. For example, Ino and Sakura's books were all mixed together on the bookshelf. In some cases, Sakura didn't know who owned what. For instance, her parents had gotten her a nice tableware set when she had moved out, but Ino liked it and bought additional pieces from that set whenever she saw them for sale, so Sakura genuinely had no idea if that bowl she was looking at was hers or not.
Things got worse if Sakura looked at the bedrooms. Ino's bed obviously hadn't been slept in for a while as it was currently being used as additional clothes storage. In fact, the room looked more like a very large walk-in closet than a bedroom, and it wasn't a temporary arrangement judging by the fact that Sakura's clothes were arranged neatly on hangers. At least she wasn't responsible for them being there, but the fact that Ino felt comfortable moving Sakura's clothes around was a pretty big sign.
Sakura sighed as she opened the door to what she considered her bedroom, but now realized was their bedroom. She wasn't completely blind. She knew that she and Ino had moved beyond best friends a while ago, but she thought they had moved a single step to best friends with benefits. That phrase implied something like friends that helped each other out when they were particularly pent up, but looking at their room objectively, Sakura would have mistaken it for a couple in their honeymoon period who had sex three times a day. You did not keep that much spare bedding close at hand if you didn't need to change the sheets frequently. It was actually worse than that since they were shinobi and had chakra tricks to reduce the effect of messing up the sheets.
Sakura swore and went back to the kitchen. There was really only one thing to do, so she started to make a pot of tea.
"We need to talk."
Ino paused with one foot through the door, which was a bigger fear response from Ino than anything Sakura had seen since the mess with the Ten Tails.
Sakura arched an eyebrow. "I thought you were the wrong clan for the frozen deer look."
Ino groaned and started entering the apartment proper. "Stupid Nara are too lazy for that. What's up?"
"Do that mind partition technique and look at our apartment like you were casing it for an infiltration exercise. In particular, what kind of relationship would you need to emulate if you were replacing the residents?"
Ino scrunched her nose cutely but a moment later a blank look washed over her face as she went into investigation mode. Ino poked around the apartment essentially following the route that Sakura had taken half an hour ago.
Sakura got about halfway through her cup of tea, sipping slowly, as Ino sat down next to her.
"Married couple, together for about a year, obnoxiously in love, with a vigorous sex life."
"I was thinking about three months."
Ino shook her head. "No, they're obviously having lots of kinky sex. You can see signs that they've gone through more than one set of ropes, plus the wear on the headboard-" Ino flinched as the partitioning technique obviously unraveled under the load of cognitive dissonance. "Holy crap."
"Obnoxiously in love?"
Ino looked back and forth at their usual places at the table. "Yeah, you can tell from the wear patterns on the wood that for meals they usually sit next to each other rather than across from each other, meaning that either they can't keep their hands off each other or even if they're not in the mood they just want to be physically close." Ino took a deep breath and repeated, "Holy crap."
"So Tenten told me we weren't invited to her singles party, because being in an open relationship still counted as not single, but I realized that the open part was only theoretical." And in retrospect, the reasoning that they were only making out to attract guys was complete garbage. Just what kind of epic level denial had she been living in?
"So want to get married?" Ino asked.
Sakura blinked a couple of times. "Straight to marriage?"
Ino gestured vaguely in the direction of their bedroom. "Apparently we've effectively been married for a while now. Besides, this way it will be obvious that we won't be part of the upcoming Valentine's Day Singles Riot."
Sakura sighed. "Sometimes I really question why I'm friends with some people."