Daisuki

by Hildred Billings

  “Would you like some more, Yamada-san?” Just on time the errand girl, Hanawa, appeared with a fresh pitcher of beer. She was the lowest on the totem pole when it came to the business rank, although there were two male junior employees who had been there a year less than Hanawa. But she was the one who wore the short skirt and spent her entire work days making tea for everyone.

  “Ii yo.” Reina waved her hand to keep Hanawa away. The young woman bowed and moved on to the next coworker. By the time Hanawa reached the section chief, her ass was squeezed about a half dozen times. Reina needed one more cigarette.

  Drunken perverts, all of them. She didn’t have much room to talk, but at least she knew what “no” meant. Most of them had wives and children – most of them also had girlfriends at hostess clubs and amongst the throngs of high school girls trying to make some money. And yet I’m the super-perv because I’m a lesbian.

  The hour droned on until coworkers excused themselves to vomit in the bathroom and to pass out at the table. The section chief wobbled in his seat and grabbed empty air when Hanawa made a last round. Soon the sole man still as clear-headed as Reina was one of the juniors texting on his phone.

  The mutual decision to disband and start heading home erupted, and the shuffle outside in the sluggish June night commenced. Reina smashed her cigarette into the ground and said her goodbyes to people, including Ogawa and Hanawa, who cloistered together on their walk to their train station.

  Two stations stood in the area, each serving a different company with multiple lines through the city. The larger station was in the opposite direction, and a vast majority of coworkers, including the section chief, ambled that way. Reina was left in pleasant silence as she meandered in the other direction toward the tiny local station.

  Not until she rounded the first corner did she realize she wasn’t alone: one other coworker joined her in the alley between the bar and the road leading to the station.

  Nakamura.

  He zipped up his pants, having just pissed on the side of the bar, and waved at Reina, who kept her briefcase between them. “Oi! Yamada!” He spat into the alley and stumbled after her, his glasses slipping off his slick nose. “You go to this…station too?” His pause was to allow himself a burp.

  Reina continued walking without looking at him. “Un. I didn’t think anybody else lived on this line.” The line was nothing but local stops between there and home. Even if Nakamura wanted the same company he was better off going to the main station and catching an express train.

  “Hnnnn, I live wherever I please!” He rubbed his sleeve against his nose. “I didn’t know you lived out that way!”

  “Un. And I would like to get there soon.” Ever since their romantic rendezvous after the wedding a week before, Reina and Aiko had increased their time spent cuddling before sleep, a habit Reina would only admit to herself she enjoyed. Plus, if she didn’t feel too tired and Aiko had waited up late enough, odds were good she could get a quickie in before bed. Cuddling meant squat when it also meant no sex.

  Nakamura sucked in his cheeks and chattered like a squirrel. “You still live with your parents, eh? You ain’t got no husband.” Before Reina could spin around and glare at him, he amended, “Oh, that’s right. I remember hearing you live with some woman. Who is she? Your sister?” One thing about the invisibility of lesbians in Japan was at least Reina’s dense coworkers didn’t suspect Sapphic dealings when two women lived together, alone, for fifteen years.

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “Hnn, good thing! You know, I have a cousin who went to a wedding last weekend and said he had some sort of wedding date with some woman who…” He stopped and burped again, while Reina braced herself for more word vomit. She already ruled out it couldn’t have been the same wedding she and Aiko went to – the world could be small, but not that small. “Some woman who looked like you.” Nakamura laughed until he burped one last time. “He heard me describe you before. He said when he saw you he was reminded of the manly woman I work with.”

  Reina furrowed her eyes and continued at a brisk pace. She now regretted not taking the longer route along the main road. “What a story,” she said loud enough for him to hear.

  “Pfft!” Nakamura stumbled after her like a dog chasing a stranger. “My cousin…he says this woman was a real piece of work. I don’t…I don’t remember how just…well, she was probably a frigid bitch, just like you.”

  Reina stopped and pivoted, her hand brandishing her briefcase as if it were a weapon. “Nan darou?” she snapped.

  He slouched next to her, his breath close enough to reek of alcohol and tobacco and the lies he told. “Oh, stop it, Yamada-san. The whole damn office knows you’re the most frigid piece of ass in the office! When’s the last time you got a good dicking, anyway? Never?” He hooted to himself while Reina’s body lit aflame in seething rage.

  “That sort of thing is none of your business!” She turned and marched again down the alley. Her steps echoed between buildings with a force greater than Nakamura’s stumbling feet closing in behind her. “Get away from me!”

  Nakamura grabbed her jacket sleeve. “Are you a virgin, Yamada-san? Is that why you wear these clothes?” He tugged on her arm, her struggling and rising threats no match for his drunken strength. “Have you given up on finding a husband at your age? Ha! Well, need I remind you that I myself am currently wifeless? The last bitch took all my money though…” Nakamura’s arm curled around Reina’s and brought her close, her hand dropping her briefcase and her teeth in his face. If he tries to touch me I’ll rip off his cock. Easy to reassure herself that when he hadn’t “touched” her yet.

  Reina slammed into the wall of an apartment building, feeling the stench and heat of Nakamura’s breath and body closing in on her. In over fifteen years working together he had made horrible passes and comments at her expense, but she had either deflected or ignored them with enough ease to lower her guard. Now here she was, forty, pinned against the wall while a drunken Nakamura convinced himself he did her some sort of great service by offering to sleep with her. “Let go of me, fuckhead!” Her words were masculine but her voice a frightened feminine as it rose into that alto she suppressed.

  “Oh, you’re so vulgar, Yamada-san!” Still laughing, Nakamura kissed her fist and tossed the part in his hair aside. His glasses looked about to fall off his face. “I like that, though. So hard to find a feisty woman these days. But that’s probably why you’re still a virgin.”

  I’m a virgin and he’s an outstanding case of sobriety. Then again, these types of assholes didn’t consider the nastiest acts performed between women constituting as “real sex.”

  Reina froze when she realized Nakamura’s face was inches from her own, the stink of alcohol and vomit wafting into her nose as she kept her lips sealed shut and her face pointed away. Her heart beat with the ferocity of a hummingbird’s, and her adrenaline readied in her veins.

  “Let me go,” Reina said once more. “Let me go and I won’t report you to HR!” The only leverage she had, not that HR would do anything. A woman in another department had been raped by a coworker and all HR did was reassign her to a lower position in another shift.

  “Aw, you’re ruining the fun, Yamada-san!” Nakamura held up her fist and rubbed it against his slobbery, scratchy cheek. “If I let you go we can’t have any fun! I know of a hotel nearby…”

  “No!” Reina attempted to kick him in the shin, but her feet gave out beneath her and she slipped down the wall. When she landed on her rear, Nakamura was right above her, his waist level with her head. Even in the shadows of the alleyway Reina could see a bulge in his pants.

  “No? No hotel? Okay, then I guess here is fine, eh?” Nakamura attempted to grab Reina’s shoulders and pull her up, but he cursed when his fingers slipped and scratched against her business suit. Reina scurried to stand again: fear had turned her legs to gelatin and her hands useless as she searched for her briefcase. She didn’t think she would get assaulted…as
suming she could get away…she could hear a train in the far distance.

  “Yamerou!” Reina scurried from his grasp long enough to trip and crash to the ground. Behind her Nakamura stumbled around and shouted about her drunkenness. Bullshit! Reina attempted to push herself up and run away to the train station, but she heard Nakamura pull out his final playing card.

  “Ah, I’m just hazing you a little, Yamada-san! I know that woman wasn’t your sister or your cousin…” He laughed, low enough to unease Reina where she knelt on the ground. “I saw you two together at a restaurant last December. Remember?” Reina’s heart froze in her chest. “I had a date that night…she said she recognized you after I pointed you out and said I worked with you. Said something about seeing you and that woman in Shinjuku a few times, flirting with women?” Nakamura’s voice had lost its drunken droll, as if sobriety dawned in him like a brand new day. “Everything made sense about you! You really do think you’re some kind of man! Ha!”

  He knows! Even if Nakamura wouldn’t know “lesbian” if it smacked him in the face, he knew enough about Reina’s private life to laud it over her head. A thin chance their superiors wouldn’t care so long as it didn’t affect Reina’s work performance. But was it a risk she was willing to chance?

  “You don’t know a damn thing about me!” Reina found some footing and shoved herself up. “My private life is none of your damn business!”

  “Does she cook for you, Yamada-san?” Now Nakamura’s goading was a horrid combination of obnoxious and ridiculous. “Iron your shirts? Make your lunches? Draw your bath?” He looked away long enough for Reina to brush herself off and search out her briefcase. It lay near the wall where he initially threw her. “I remember when I had me a wife to do all that.”

  Reina snuck down and grabbed the handle of her briefcase. Now if she could sneak away while Nakamura rambled on…

  Before Reina could flee, however, a sweaty hand grasped her wrist. Nakamura leered over her with his crooked glasses and yellow teeth.

  “It seems to me that a pretty thing like you has lost her place over the years with that…other woman…” Reina continued to struggle to get out of Nakamura’s grasp. “Was she training you in being a good housewife and you got too comfortable? Ah, Yamada-san! Come with me and I’ll let you put that training to good use!”

  He brought Reina toward him, lips puckered. She shouted at him to let go of her, to get over himself, all sorts of things not accomplishing what she intended. Why can’t I get away? Nakamura’s hands were like a pair of handcuffs with Reina’s name emblazoned on them.

  Nakamura lunged but missed Reina’s face by a literal whisker. He twisted her toward the wall again, her briefcase falling once more while she heard her own voice rise to new levels as she pleaded with him to let her go.

  Almost as if he didn’t speak the same language as her. “I wonder if you’re even a real woman,” he scoffed, looking at her chest. “There’s nothing there!”

  Reina saw his other hand move, and within the next second all the color drained from her face as Nakamura shoved a clumsy hand between her legs. Her words clogged in her throat as a man “touched” her for the first time.

  In her mind she retreated to another place, where Aiko and Michiko waited to tease her and tell her she was “such a man,” that she was the “Master of Fake Dick,” that she was anything but little lady Reina Yamada, who couldn’t protect herself from the perverted hands of an equally perverted man. Even the way Nakamura touched her was so foreign to her memory, for he grabbed at her as if he had no idea what body parts she would have. When Reina came back to reality she saw him sneer and heard him say, “How wonderful. You’re a woman after all.”

  Reina whimpered, and attempted to turn that whimper into a snarl, a shout, anything but something making her feel demeaned.

  And then as if a gift from God, Reina found a slew of strength and hurled Nakamura away, his hand floundering in the air. Reina saw her one chance to escape and, grabbing her briefcase a last time, willed her legs to carry her as far and fast as they could.

  Over the beating of her own heart and the rush of her own blood she heard him curse after her. Another train sounded in the distance, announcing its impending arrival. With years of robotic motions in her arsenal, Reina reached the train station with her pass card out and bounded past the gates as the train arrived.

  The train was one of the last of the night, and so the car was near empty, save some other sleeping drunks and woozy college students. Reina collapsed into the nearest seat, her chest shaking with every adrenaline-fused breath she took. The doors to the train closed and they pulled away before Reina could see any sign of Nakamura appearing on the platform.

  I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe. The one mantra she would allow herself as the train weaved around the tracks and approached the next suburban station. Her shock was still too great to allow her any other reaction from relief. She sank further into her seat and closed her eyes, her mind drawing a complete and wonderful blank.

  She convinced herself she was better when she arrived at her station. Instead of sauntering down her street as usual, she stumbled as if too tired or drunk. She didn’t allow herself to think about why she felt the way she did.

  The light in the living room was on when she reached her house. Aiko. Although Nakamura couldn’t know where Reina lived, let alone what station she got off at…once she reached Aiko, everything would be over.

  That’s what she told herself when she walked through the door, a gust of air conditioning hitting her face and washing away the first layer of grime caked all over her.

  “Reina?” Aiko popped out of the living room, her face turning to shock the moment she saw Reina slumped down in the genkan. “Reina! Are you drunk?” She knelt down and took Reina’s briefcase, noticing the dust all over it. “You’re drunk! Mou! No wonder you didn’t text me to say you were coming home.”

  Aiko disappeared with the briefcase. Reina floundered in the genkan, struggling to kick off her shoes without falling down again. She stood on the hardwood floor and looked down at the palms of her hands, embedded with dirt and small pebbles from the alleyway. But that’s not what she felt – she felt Nakamura’s breath on her face, his hand between her legs.

  “I’m not drunk!”

  As Reina’s voice finished echoing in the hallway, Aiko poked her head out from the kitchen and gaped at Reina as if she were drunk. “That so? Well, you’re a mess. I’ll draw a bath for us.” She tsked some more and waved a dusty cloth in Reina’s direction. “Go in the living room and I’ll get some tea first.”

  When Aiko disappeared, Reina felt her lifeline suck out of her like a fed-up fish hook. The only way she could keep from falling over into a useless lump was to follow Aiko’s directions and sit at the low table.

  She wasn’t thinking when she pulled out her cigarettes and lighter. Certainly not thinking of Aiko’s rule about no smoking in the house. So when Reina lit up and basked in nicotine and air conditioning, she did not expect a tirade from the kitchen once the smoke wafted in that direction.

  “Majisuka?” Aiko marched up to the table and yanked the cigarette from Reina’s hand before slamming it into a stale glass of water. Reina lowered her arm and checked the frown on her face before Aiko could complain about that too. “Seriously? Smoking in the house? Are you sure you’re not drunk?”

  Reina sat up straight and kept her eyes on the table. “I only had a couple drinks. No more than usual.” She sounded like a robot.

  Aiko hovered near her: Reina felt her girlfriend’s eyeballs on her as if they were bugs crawling on her skin. “I see,” Aiko said, and went back to the kitchen.

  The TV was set to some travel show, but as the hour changed over so did the programming. Reina’s dinner of fried food and beer started coming up again as some ridiculous dating show popped on, supporting two awkward looking men in search of heterosexual dates. Reina reached out and grabbed the remote just as the host of the show teased the men in
overt sexual matters, making one turn away embarrassed while the other touted what a skilled lover he was with women. Reina smashed the power button and sent herself into silence, aside from the sound of boiling water in the kitchen.

  “Here,” Aiko announced, depositing a tray of teacups on the table. “Drink this and maybe you’ll snap out of your stupor.” Reina took the nearest cup. She blew away the steam while Aiko raised a hand and brushed down her hair. “Mou, you’re a mess. What happened to you tonight?”

  Reina put down the cup before it could burn through her fingers. “I fell down.”

  “Ehh? Are you all right? Were you drunk?”

  “I’m fine.” Reina picked up the cup and forced herself to take a sip of scalding hot tea. Her burning tongue felt better than her pounding head or tumbling stomach.

  “No wonder you’re so dirty…once we finish this up we can go take a shower. How does that sound?”

  “Sure.” A shower sounded wonderful, since Reina couldn’t wait to get all the man off her. But she wasn’t so sure how she felt doing it with Aiko bouncing around the shower with her, doting on her, worrying about her, touching her…

  Aiko jumped up from the table and went toward the toilet room. “I’ll get the hot water adjusted.”

  Alone again, Reina stared at her cup of tea and watched the steam rise like lazy smoke. When the steam hit the bottom of her chin, she remembered Nakamura’s breath on her face, his disgusting words, and the hand at her pelvis.

  “How wonderful. You’re a woman after all.”

  Reina tapped her fingers against her mouth and felt moisture there. Odd, considering the air conditioner made the living room drier than a desert. Reina felt up her face and pulled her hand away to see her fingers covered in liquid.

  Am I crying?

  She hadn’t cried in over twenty years. Not since that day her mother called her disgusting and a dishonor to her father’s memory. After spending an evening holed up in a public restroom crying so hard she matted her long hair with her own tears, Reina decided she would never cry again. She didn’t cry when Michiko left, and she never cried whenever Junko said something nasty.