Koibumi

by Hildred Billings

  “You know I’ll never want one, right?” Reina tapped her cigarette against the bursting ashtray. “A kid, that is. There’s no point thinking about those sorts of things, because it will never come to that.”

  Aiko sucked in her breath. “If it came down to it…”

  Reina looked away.

  She’d leave me. Aiko understood, even if it pained her. Pained the both of them. Having a kid was something Reina would never agree to. Deep down, Aiko knew that, even if she hoped otherwise. But if it’s between a baby or her… There was no question. Aiko would choose Reina over everyone else. “It would never come to that. I know that one day we’ll be torn apart, but it won’t be because of that.” She didn’t say what would do it. She didn’t have to. Death.

  “It hurt for another reason.” Reina extinguished her cigarette and drew her legs onto her chair, arms wrapping around her knees. She looked like a child in time out.

  “Because of your gender dysphoria.”

  Reina said nothing.

  “I’m sorry. I said some hurtful things yesterday. But I love you. And nothing is lacking in that department.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll always feel inferior to the real thing.”

  “You are the real thing.”

  Slowly, Reina’s head came up. “You mean that?”

  “I don’t need to be with a man to know that you make me feel good and always will. I want you. You’re the first and only person I’ve loved like this. It’s because of you that I was able to discover my sexual identity. No man could have given me that. Maybe no other woman, either. I don’t know what made the wind blow right that day we met, but I will forever be grateful for it. I love you.”

  “I love you too. That’s why it hurts so much.”

  “What hurts? That you thought I betrayed you? There’s no need to feel threatened by male acquaintances. Am I not allowed to have male friends and colleagues?”

  “Of course you can! But when you hide them from me, what am I supposed to think? That everything is okay? Trust and instincts don’t always go together.”

  “I know.” Aiko remembered her own trust issues as well, when Reina betrayed that trust by sleeping with Haruka without permission.

  She stood, overcome with the need to hold her spouse to her chest and rub her nose in hair, smoky or not. But when she almost reached Reina, a hand held up in her direction.

  “I don’t want to do that right now. I don’t know when I will.”

  That was a first for their relationship. Usually it was the other way around, with Reina pining for affection while Aiko angrily beat her off with sharp words and cold stares. Is this how she always felt? Aiko took a step back, one hand on her purse. The notebook bulged through the material. “I know how you feel, Reina-chan.” Aiko opened her purse and pulled out her notebook, full of pages and pages of her koibumi. “Whenever I felt like you do now, I had to wait until I was convinced that things really were all right again before I could forgive. Here.” She placed the notebook next to the ashtray. “Please read it.”

  Reina looked at it, but made no promises. “I want to be alone now.”

  “Wakatta.” Aiko took a step back. Before she could embarrass herself again, she evicted herself from her spouse’s childhood room and retreated downstairs into the darkness.

  Sachiko waited outside the living area.

  “Tea?” she asked, opening the door behind her.

  On the verge of crying – is it because I’m happy or I’m scared? – Aiko nodded. “I would love some tea.”

  * * *

  Reina did not look at the notebook right away. As soon as she was alone again, she lit another cigarette and told her lungs to piss off.

  She sat without a thought as she smoked. A part of her wanted to cry. No, she had enough crying for a long while. The entire night before had been dedicated to tears, both in her mother’s arms and in the futon she once slept in every night. Aiko and I used to use it. That seemed another life ago, when Aiko had long hair and wore more bracelets than socks.

  Clouds covered the sunlight, taking away Reina’s reason to bask in the window. She extinguished the cigarette and retreated to her unmade futon, crawling beneath the comforter as the rain began to pat on the window. If she closed her eyes she could pretend she was a teenager again, back before her adult life happened – before she met Aiko.

  Life was aimless then. Reina held jobs but no dreams. Michiko was her best friend and primary sex partner. Women revolved in Reina’s life, particularly at the strip club where she worked as a server…serving more than just drinks, most of the time. Back then Reina would have never imagined a femme girl like Aiko Takeuchi absconding with her heart and luring her in with a sweet naiveté punctured with an insatiable curiosity for all things carnal. They bonded over the pleasures of sex. I took her virginity. Reina had many under her belt, but Aiko’s was the only one that meant anything to her. I still remember every moment of that day. Christmas Day. She wouldn’t let me penetrate her. It had meant the same to Aiko as if a man were to do it.

  The room darkened as the minutes wore on. While it never stormed outside, the rain grew heavy enough to patter on the roof. The previous night saw rain as well – Reina had cried herself to sleep the same way she had when her father died twenty-five years ago.

  Aiko. She wanted her. She wanted her wife there in the futon with her, curled in her arms and sleeping with a smile on her face. Aiko was downstairs right now. All Reina had to do was call for her, and she would be hers.

  It seemed too easy.

  “Please read it.” The notebook remained on the dresser. Reina sat up and searched for it, fingers passing over the black and white splotched cover. She curled back up in the futon and opened the book.

  English words Reina couldn’t read lined the page. She glanced them over before turning past them, a tad jealous that all the prominent women in her life knew the language. Aiko, Michiko, Jun, Yuri… It all came so easily to them. Reina was useless with language. It rarely even moved her.

  She caught her breath as she met a page full of Aiko’s tiny kanji handwriting.

  “My Love Letter To You” it said up top. Reina traced the lines making up the word koibumi before flipping to see how long it was – five full pages, at least. Maybe more. By the time she scanned through the end, most of the words were blurred by what appeared to be tears.

  Reina turned back to the first page of kanji and read.

  “You are a lovely young lady,” Sachiko said as she poured Aiko more tea.

  Aiko wavered between embarrassment and severe confusion: this was the same woman who used to call Reina the most tired names in the book, right? “Thank you, but I would hardly call myself young…”

  “Anyone my daughter’s age is young according to me.” Sachiko placed the teapot on the table and sat caddy-cornered to her daughter-in-law.

  True, but Aiko was too wrapped up in her own issues to give a hoot. She blew on her tea and looked around the room, surprised to see pictures of Reina in various stages of growth. It made Aiko shudder. Twenty years and she only saw a few pictures of child-Reina and her father. One sat on the nearby bookcase, showcasing a man in a brown suit with a little girl with long black hair and a frilly pink dress in his lap.

  “She stopped wearing those right around the time she went into elementary school.” Sachiko’s voice squeaked from disuse. “Told me one day she only wanted to wear shorts and jeans to school. They were more expensive to get, so I tried to dissuade her, but her father spoiled her so much. Total daddy’s girl. I think I got jealous of the both of them sometimes.”

  He was the glue holding the family together. His death probably did not bring Reina and her mother closer. “She rarely talks about him.”

  Sachiko sighed. “She changed a lot after he died. Horrible time, at that age. I think she harbored a lot of hurt for the world.”

  “She’s never told me his name.” Aiko only knew Sachiko’s name from the phone book.

&nbs
p; “Kenta.” Sachiko smiled.

  Aiko stared into her tea.

  “Even though it’s not the best of circumstances,” Sachiko began again, her wrinkled hands dancing in the air, “I’m glad to have you both in my house again. I feel like I never got to know you properly, Aiko-san, and that was my own fault.”

  Aiko returned the soft smile and attempted to forget her troubles with Reina.

  The early afternoon dragged on as the rain continued to fall and Sachiko attempted small talk with Aiko. Although she was not in the mood to do anything besides sit and wait for Reina’s decision, she admitted there were worst things to do with her time than get to know her mother-in-law. Sachiko’s idea of bonding was getting out the dusty photo albums and showing off pictures of her late husband and small daughter, chronicling their happier early years. Aiko’s heart hurt a little every time she saw a picture of smiling, obstinate Reina either at a birthday party or at a school event. One family vacation photo showed her sitting on her father’s shoulders in front of a waterfall in Nikko, her ponytail long enough to tickle Kenta’s forehead. Remembering Reina’s long hair and how it felt in her hands the first time they made love almost distracted Aiko to the point that she didn’t hear her phone buzzing with a message.

  She pulled it out, expecting to see a text from anyone other than who it was.

  “Ii yo,” was all Reina said.

  Aiko excused herself from the living area, feet tripping over each other as they scrambled to take her upstairs. When she reached the second floor hallway she stopped and readjusted her hair, blouse, and jeans.

  The bedroom door opened to reveal that Reina was not in her perch next to the window; instead, she sat in the middle of her futon, comforter wrapped around her waist and notebook lying next to her. She read it. Even though Aiko had declared everything she wrote in that love letter time and again, she still felt a flash of heart exposed for the world to see.

  That went away when Reina reached out and patted the corner of her futon.

  Aiko crept to the edge of the bed and sat down, her senses overcome with the smell of her spouse: the sleep sweat, the tobacco, and if that third essence was tears, then Aiko was not glad to know it. Why are we hurting each other? More specifically, why had she hurt Reina over something so stupid and selfish?

  “I read it,” Reina said, hands clasped on the comforter.

  The notebook was out of her reach. “And?”

  Reina wiped something off her face. “That’s how you feel, huh?”

  Any concern Aiko had was instantly replaced with offense. She sat back on her haunches and wrinkled her nose. Of course that’s how I feel! She had written her innermost feelings in that letter! Did no emotion mean a damn thing to Reina? Was she so detached from the feelings of others that she couldn’t believe a thing her wife wrote? I told her I would die for her.

  “I mean, I’m surprised, that’s all.”

  “Surprised?”

  Reina shrugged, still refusing to look Aiko in the eye again. “I never thought anyone would ever say those things about me.”

  “Even me?”

  She said nothing.

  “You know that I…”

  “Come on, this is me we’re talking about.” Reina finally looked at her with those red, dry eyes. “If you took away my sluttiness, there is nothing special about me.”

  Aiko leaned forward, one hand touching her spouse’s knee. To feel her, at one of her boniest points, was all Aiko needed to reassure herself this wasn’t a dream. “I think you’re plenty special. If anything, I should be insecure!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because out of all the women you’ve ever been with, I’m the one you chose. You could have almost any lesbian in the world if you wanted. We didn’t know if I was gay, and you still chose me to go on a date with you.”

  “But you’re normal and could’ve had a normal life.”

  Aiko bowed her head. “I do have a normal life. I have one with you.”

  After a second of contemplation, Reina covered Aiko’s hand with her own. “You know what I mean. I’m never going to be a ‘real’ man. I’ll never help you fulfill your mother fantasies. I would never be comfortable with you having a boyfriend. Being with me means giving up all of that. I don’t feel like I have the right to ask that of you.”

  The comforter crumpled as Aiko crawled forward, both hands rising to cup Reina’s warm cheeks. “You never have to, because I made that decision a long, long time ago.”

  Reina descended onto her wife a moment before Aiko realized she wanted to kiss her.

  For a relationship built upon passion and sexual desire, their first kiss of reconciliation was tame. Their lips barely touched; their breaths barely mingled. Not until Aiko expressed relief between her teeth did Reina push forward and kiss her wife with everything she had.

  Thank goodness. Reina’s ardor was thriving, hands scouring Aiko’s body and chest coming for her. Aiko fell back into the arm wrapping around her – her hair dangled toward the futon, the blood rushing to her forehead as Reina covered her skin with kisses.

  Aiko knew they would make love, right here in the same room and bed they shared as new lovers twenty years ago.

  “Tell me,” Reina said, voice laced in erotic fervor, “what’s his name?”

  Eyes snapping open, Aiko looked into her spouse’s looming visage. “Takeshi,” she replied, as Reina’s hand grabbed her breast. “Takeshi Matsumoto.”

  She gasped at how hard Reina squeezed. Without another word her spouse pushed her to the futon and smothered her with affection.

  Reina felt like an iron blanket pressing upon her wife. Aiko groaned under the weight of Reina’s determination to prove herself better than a man she had never met before. She doesn’t have to prove a thing. It didn’t matter. Reina would not rest until she felt reaffirmed in her abilities to fuck her wife to the stars and back.

  “I love you,” Aiko managed between breath-sucking kisses.

  A grunt played with her ear as Reina tugged on her own sweater. Aiko helped her remove the top and stared at her flat, pale chest. Reina also looked down and touched one of her breasts.

  “Sometimes…”

  Aiko brushed away the hair from her spouse’s forehead. “Yes?”

  Reina lowered her hand. “Sometimes I wonder how you can think I’m attractive, when I don’t look like a woman.”

  “Didn’t you read my letter?” Aiko let her fingers hover above one of Reina’s nipples, still soft in the warm air. I wrote an entire page about your body. Aiko had made love to many body types over the years, but it was Reina’s thin form that was the most comforting. “I think your body is perfect the way it is. It never fails to get me excited.” And it never fails to get excited. Aiko flicked the nipple until it got hard.

  Reina hid a guffaw. “Are you excited now?”

  That innocent, playful question relieved Aiko in ways Reina could never understand. She raised her hand again and tickled her fingertips against her spouse’s cheek, gazing into deep, brown eyes still lined in red. Don’t cry anymore, please. “Yes.”

  Their lovemaking was both hard and soft, fast and slow. Whenever Aiko thought Reina was showing her gentler side, she would turn around and yank her blouse up and bra down; when she though Reina wanted to do nothing but inhale every moment of sex, she took a deep breath and gently kissed her wife. This was the kind of lovemaking Aiko enjoyed best: the kind with every side and shade of her Reina.

  Nothing compared to when they were both naked enough to rub skin, however. Once Aiko’s blouse flew across the room and her bra soon followed, she was overcome with the sensations of Reina rubbing against her, sharing skin and sweat. Kisses roamed from the lips to the body, feral to propriety. Aiko sank into the futon as Reina’s lips parted over her breast and her tongue lashed against her wife’s areola. The other side was tended to by a firm, needy hand.

  “Kimochi…” Aiko thrashed beneath her spouse’s body, her own hands searching for the w
aist of Reina’s jeans and pulling on her hair. “That feels amazing.”

  Reina dragged her teeth across her wife’s tissue, leaving a lingering trail of saliva between her mouth and Aiko’s flesh.

  “Ai-chan,” She wiped her mouth and caressed her wife’s hair, “make love to me as if it would be the last time.”

  Aiko’s eyes grew big. “It’s not, though!”

  “I don’t care. Because that’s how I’m going to make love to you.”

  Grasping her meaning, Aiko wrapped her arms around her spouse’s torso and pulled her down – as if it would be the last time.

  Such a call for passion leant the lovemaking to full, emotional dry thrusts and mournful moans. Aiko forgot they were not alone in the house when she cried out in pleasure as her spouse pushed a hand down her jeans. She arched her back and felt Reina’s tongue dip into her navel before licking away the aieki she brought back from between her wife’s legs.

  One well-timed look brought about final disrobement.

  They could not make love as they intended with any piece of clothing on. Thus it was not imperative to command a slow disrobement, or a fabulous strip show meant to entice and titillate. No. Reina grabbed Aiko’s pants and pulled them off as quickly as possible, fighting with them over feet and toes until they were flung inside-out across the futon. She likewise made short work of her wife’s lingerie, practically tearing them in her pursuit of flesh.

  Aiko never knew when Reina took off the rest of her own clothes. She didn’t care.

  With no man-made materials to keep them apart, Reina and Aiko slammed together like two women who knew what would bring them the most fulfilling pleasure, physically and emotionally. Sometimes up was down, left was right, and top was bottom. They rolled like animals in search of a kill. If this were our last time making love, it would be good. That horrible thought – making love for the final time – sent Aiko into a bigger frenzy as she entwined her legs with Reina’s and made sure they were as close as they could ever get.