They ran into Tomoko in the hallway and decided to go to their usual restaurant for lunch. Well, Nana decided. Tomoko became crestfallen about something else, and Aiko was busy wondering if they would run into Reina at the restaurant again, even if the last time was an utter fluke.
Apparently their favorite restaurant was now a campus “thing,” since women packed the place as if it were La Lune Café on Christmas. Nana negotiated for a small, intimate table along the wall made for two people. A server provided a third chair for Aiko to crawl into between “excuse me”s from every other person in the room wanting to get between her buttocks and the person behind her.
“We should get a new restaurant.” Nana flicked a nail against her glass of water. “This place is too crowded now.”
Aiko admitted she didn’t enjoy having the edge of the table stabbing her in the stomach, but she said nothing. She doubted anyone could hear her grumbling over the raucous laughter and shouts behind her. When the server had come and gone with their orders, she broke the silence at her tiny table with a strange question. “Nee, how would you feel if your lover had had sex with lots of people before you?”
Both Nana and Tomoko recoiled, as if Aiko had asked them how many sexual partners they had instead. “What kind of question is that?” Nana asked when she regained her bearings. “Who do you know like that?”
“I’m just wondering.” Again, lies. Aiko supposed she had to get used to lying to everyone. “I have a friend who is seeing somebody our age who…had sex with forty different women last year alone. Isn’t that a bit much?”
A new chorus of worn “Ehhh!”s bounced between the ends of the table, mutual looks of disgust and disbelief accompanying. “Forty women in one year! Let alone one lifetime!” Nana’s teeth razed her bottom lip. “Sounds like a sex fiend.”
“How do you know this person has had sex with so many women? Did your friend tell you?” At least Tomoko would react with composure.
“Their best friend told me,” was all Aiko would say about that. “She said this person has sex with so many women. Could you live with that?”
“No!” Nana reacted so vehemently her glasses slid off her face. “That’s disgusting! Why would anybody sleep with a man who had sex with so many other women? Haven’t they heard of that HIV thing going around? And who knows how many babies he probably has out there. Why would a woman risk that?” She scoffed. “If I found out my boyfriend had sex with so many women, I’d dump him.”
“Sou, it is a lot of women.” Tomoko shook her head, her hair limping along the table with each shake. “I don’t know if I could take it well either. Is he at least monogamous? Maybe he just can’t find the right woman he wants to dedicate himself to.”
“Well…” Aiko knew the answer to that in regards to Reina, who made her desires clear when it came to other women. If I stay with her, at some point she’ll sleep with somebody else…maybe she already has. Although she knew it was a possibility before, thinking of Reina performing sex acts on another woman made Aiko steel herself in mild jealousy…a reaction she had no control over, no matter how much she pragmatically thought it through. “I want to say this person is monogamous, but this couple isn’t really in a relationship like that. They’re just dating and having sex right now.”
“That so? Sounds to me your friend needs to dump this loser and get somebody who treats her like she’s worth something.”
She does treat me like I’m worth something, though. No matter how negatively Nana tried to phrase it, Aiko had never felt more human in her instincts and desires than she did with Reina. But that was her. Who knew what Reina felt besides orgasms.
“Forget I said anything. It’s not like I’m unhappy right now.” Aiko drank her water as if nothing flustered her.
However, her friends heard her aside above the commotion around them, and while Tomoko cocked her head to one side with a sneer, Nana blurted, “You? Oh, the old ‘my friend’ lie. You’re talking about yourself! You’re the one dating the playboy!”
The water gurgled in Aiko’s throat. She spat some into her glass lest she choke, but her friends remained unconvinced. “No! It’s not me!” she said after a cough. “I’m dating no such man.” Well, that part was true. Reina wasn’t a man.
Nana made a gagging motion; Tomoko’s eyes narrowed. The latter of the two tapped a finger against her thin lips. “It wouldn’t happen to be that Ren Itou fellow nobody’s met, would it?”
“Uh…” Aiko dabbed her face with a napkin. “You know what? No comment. I can’t win with you two.” She wanted her food. The sooner this lunch was over, the better.
Tomoko continued to contemplate the air between her and Aiko. “Ren… Ren… Rei…” For a moment her eyes widened, but before Aiko could become concerned, Tomoko looked away again. “Ah, never mind.”
Discontent punctuated the remainder of the lunch. While Aiko ate, she examined her friends: Nana, the one who let her boyfriend do whatever he wanted to her, and Tomoko, the one who would never say anything about her love life. Aiko used to think she was the healthy middle of the two, but maybe not so much now. I could never tell them about Reina. They wouldn’t understand. “Ren Itou” would have to continue to be the man whom nobody knew yet everyone slept with.
One drink was all it took to turn Michiko into a wibbling mess. “Iyaa…kimochi warui.”
Reina cradled her friend in the crook of a strong arm, their bodies rocking back and forth in a suspended hammock. In the distance the bass of a dance song exploded to the cheers and whistles of women – Reina became more thankful for the privacy in the VIP section of her oldest haunt the bluer Michiko turned.
“What’s wrong, eh? Your period again?”
“No.” Michiko rubbed her palm against Reina’s chest. “I have too much on my mind lately. Too many decisions to make.”
The lack of light in the VIP room prevented Reina from seeing the trepidation on her friend’s face. “Decisions? What kind?”
“None worth bothering you.”
Together they swayed in the hammock and sipped their drinks – Reina’s gin and tonic went straight to her brain with every taste. What started as a courtesy call to Ni-chome’s only lesbian strip club, the same one they both worked at before switching to less risqué entertainment, ended with their old boss telling them to relax in the abandoned VIP room. It suited Michiko fine, granted her current condition, but Reina wanted to see some breasts. The newest stripper was a nubile young woman with the biggest natural tits she had ever seen. But no, Michiko had to not feel well. Some friend.
“How was visiting your little girlfriend’s house yesterday?”
Reina guffawed beneath Michiko’s weight. “Boring. Awkward. And she’s not my girlfriend.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Because you go and meet the moms of all the women you date and fuck.”
“She said she wouldn’t come stay at my house this weekend if I didn’t meet her mom first. We couldn’t even fool around in her room in case Mommy showed up. We just watched a movie instead.”
“Was it a good movie?”
“I guess. Some Hollywood flick.”
“You must really want her at your house this weekend.”
Reina didn’t know if she would go that far to say it, but yes, she did. She had asked Michiko over first, but she said she had previous plans. Reina saw no point spending a perfectly good night without her mother alone – Aiko seemed the next logical choice. Fucking mother bullshit. If she weren’t so hard-up for a buddy to sleep with in her futon, she would have told Aiko to fuck off, but sometimes meeting old and bitter hags was a necessary evil.
“I have plans for her.”
“Plans, eh? Anything I would be interested in?”
Mutual sparks passed between them. “Thinking about introducing her to what’s in my safe.”
“You’re such a naughty girl,” Michiko said. “That’s why I love you, pervert.”
She uncurled herself and sat up, her body twisting the hammock
until Reina looked down at the ground. I used to clean that floor after the doors closed. Working as a waitress in a strip club wasn’t the worst job in the world, but did she ever hate cleaning. “Where are you going?”
Heels clicking on the floor, Michiko drank the last of her alcohol and straightened her skirt. “I’m going to the toilet. Might be a while.”
“See? I knew it was your period.”
“Fuck you.” Michiko accompanied her coarse English with a solid middle finger.
Alone, Reina kept the hammock swinging like a lazy pendulum. She reached into her pockets and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with one swoop of her hand. Through the tobacco smoke the lights danced and taunted Reina. I should be out there looking at tits.
The amount of time passing was measured in the sways of the hammock and the drafts of her cigarette. When Michiko didn’t return, Reina thought nothing of it, granted how popular she was with all the old patrons and staff. Reina would be more surprised if nobody wanted to chat with one of the most infamous strippers to ever take her top off for other Japanese lesbians.
When Reina tilted the hammock to access the ashtray on a nearby table, she saw her.
Mago-chan.
She stood in the VIP entrance, staring. No surprise. “You know, if you keep showing up at these kinds of places, women are going to start thinking you’re gay.” Reina took out another cigarette and held it between her fingers. “And when these women think you’re gay, they’re going to want to fuck you.”
Mago-chan pulled a lighter from her jeans and approached Reina, who didn’t say no to some quick service. She dangled a leg over the hammock and winked at Mago.
“Yamada-san…”
“Call me Reina.”
“Reina.” Mago looked away. “Do you think I’m gay?”
“Hmph. I can’t tell you that. Do you like fucking women?”
Mago-chan’s hands searched for each other in front of her chest. “I don’t know. I think so? I like my boyfriend too.”
“Some people like both.” For whatever damn reason. Reina would never understand a physical or emotional attraction to men, just like she would never understand how a person could eat turnips.
The girl tried to open her mouth to speak, but failed.
Reina took a clean draft of her cigarette. “I’m not gonna feed you any bullshit. I like women. I have no shame in that. I don’t think you should either. And if you do, I’ll be really annoyed that you keep bothering me.” She smoked again. “I’m not a toy for you to use. Either grow a lesbian backbone or get out of my sight.”
Convinced the girl would turn and run out the door, she received a pleasant surprise when Mago-chan looked her in the eye and said, “Okay.”
“Okay?” Reina chuckled. “Saa, do any of your friends know you’re here? Talking to me, specifically? For all you know, I’m dating one of them.”
She wondered if Mago even knew to what she alluded. “I guess that depends. Are you Ren Itou?”
Right in the gut! Reina fought to keep a straight face. “No. I’m Reina Yamada.”
“Then you’re not dating any of my friends.”
“Good.” An itch appeared throughout Reina’s body. Mago took a step toward her. “No. Wait.” She surveyed Mago’s figure. She might have tits under there. “I came here to see women take their clothes off. This is the VIP room, where women do that.”
Reina remembered those days a few months before, when sometimes even she “volunteered” to go in and give the lap dances the strippers were supposed to bestow. Of course, Reina had no time or tempo, so her “lap dances” consisted of her ripping off her clothes and jumping bones. Somehow Mago picked up it wasn’t Reina who was supposed to strip. She gaped at her a little, and then closed her mouth and put her hands on the bottom of her shirt. She almost looked determined. Look at her, proving herself to me.
Mago pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it at Reina. Beneath she had on a lacy black bra…and almost nothing to fill it. Reina raised one eyebrow but said nothing; instead, she took a liberal drag of her cigarette. Mago unhooked her bra and let it slide off her arms, exposing a pair of petite breasts. The first thing Reina thought was that they were the same size as her own but had the same areolas as Michiko’s.
Reina drank in the sight of Mago’s chest and extinguished her last cigarette. “All right,” she said, settling into the hammock and polishing off her gin. “Get over here.”
She put her empty glass on the table and extinguished her second cigarette beside it; meanwhile, Mago finished the distance between them and curled into the hammock. Soon she was covered in casual kisses.
Reina didn’t know how many women she’d had flings with in that hammock, but she knew it was more than a few. She also knew it never got easier to have sex in a hammock. Each kiss and stroke she gave caused the hammock to swivel like somebody shaking them.
But as always, Reina’s need for sex prevailed her annoyances with the hammock, and with some minor maneuvering she had Mago-chan beneath her and whimpering. She reminds me of Ai-chan now. Once Reina had kissed her long enough, Mago responded with fervor, as if all her internalized homophobia drifted away and left a sexual being behind. She likes her boyfriend, eh? Reina was better than any boyfriend Mago could come up with.
Mago didn’t offer any reciprocation: no taking off Reina’s clothes, no caresses, and certainly no clitoral rubs or even nipple flicks. If Reina wanted satisfaction, she had to solicit it herself. I’m used to it. Who said there was only one way to enjoy sex? As much as Reina enjoyed voracious women like Michiko and curious girls like Aiko, sometimes she just wanted to rub on top of another woman.
Besides, the hammock was a literal pain in the ass. Reina thought, as she stuck her tongue down Mago’s throat and thrust her fingers between another pair of lips, that she could spend the rest of her life pleasuring other women and not give a single shit.
Until she thought of Aiko, excited to touch and kiss Reina in various places.
A brief pang of guilt shot through her like a bullet. The sensation was as foreign to her as a man’s touch.
Stale tobacco smoke permeated the genkan area of Reina’s house. Aiko put a polite hand on her nose to keep the stench out. She had smelled the homes of smokers before, but this was beyond a father smoking while eating dinner: almost as if Reina and her mother did nothing but smoke cigarettes from the moment they walked through the door until they went out again.
“You can put your shoes over here.” Reina kicked off her rain boots and stepped onto the hardwood floor a few centimeters above the genkan. She picked up her boots and stuck them in the corner of the genkan next to the umbrella stand, full of old, plain umbrellas with broken arches and holes in the material.
Aiko lowered her hand and sat on the hardwood floor, her pink polka-dotted umbrella clattering to the genkan ground. Her stubborn boots weren’t quite as amicable as Reina’s, and it took two extra pushes to get them off. By the time Aiko was ready to delve further into Reina’s house, the gracious hostess was already heading up the staircase.
To Aiko’s amazement, no slippers waited for somebody to wear inside the house. She shuffled up the stairs in nothing but her socks, her overnight bag full of clothing and hygiene products smacking against the wall.
Claustrophobia suffocated Aiko in the upstairs hallway. A dusty bookcase sat against a wall, but the hall was so narrow she had to hug the other wall in order to pass it with her bags. The stench of tobacco grew stronger toward the end of the hallway.
Sadness gurgled inside her. This is a house that has given up. She knew about Reina’s parents but couldn’t imagine the extent of her mother’s breakdown as a human being. And Reina didn’t seem the type to pick up a knife or a broom on her own. Yet Aiko attempted to keep a smile on her face whenever Reina looked back at her, lest she offend or embarrass her lover.
“Koko yo.” Reina pushed the last door on the left open, and light spilled into the hallway.
Aiko
gasped at the size and brightness of Reina’s bedroom. Two tiny bay windows poked above the neighboring rooftops, accumulating the thin rays of light from the cloud covered sky and broadcasting them across a beige carpet. The white walls held tasteful posters and magazine pullouts of popular 80’s singers, some of whom Aiko recognized from her middle school years. Until that moment she never knew what kind of music Reina liked to listen to.
Somehow the tobacco wasn’t so strong in Reina’s bedroom, although one ashtray decorated the brown desk by the door while another collected dust in a windowsill. Aiko’s smile turned genuine until she saw the doublewide futon sprawled on the carpet.
“Ara, you didn’t put your futon up today!” Aiko imagined the furor she would feel from Junko if she ever left a futon on the floor instead of folding it up in the closet. “But it’s pretty.” She touched a toe against the baby blue comforter. Tonight, I will sleep with Reina in this bed. Her first romantic sleepover.
Reina tossed her wallet onto the desk. “I never put that up. I made it today, though. Didn’t want you thinking I was a total slob after the tour through my house.”
Aiko remained silent in regards to that. “I like your room,” she said, instead. “It’s cheerful.”
“Really?” Reina extended a hand to take Aiko’s bags, which she deposited on the other side of the desk.
“Yes.” A bird flew by the left window, inviting Aiko to go over, the hem of her baggy sweater grazing the ashtray. Outside she saw hundreds of gray and brown rooftops all huddled together, and in the far off distance were the high-rises of downtown Tokyo. This is what a northern suburb looks like. Coming from the western suburbs, Aiko was used to a little more space between houses, but this had a charm to it.
That lazy afternoon became a fluttering blur in Aiko’s mind. They wandered between playing cards, flipping through magazines, and rummaging through Reina’s dirty comic books collection. The candid lesbian sex of the latter made Aiko drop a copy and cover her mouth with her hands. Reina laughed and suggested she try reading it again.
Hatsukoi Page 19
