“Is he handsome?” Asuka urged.
Hiroe lifted her chin. “Remember Yuji from the Weiss-Kreuz anime?”
Rei gaped at her. “You mean the tall blond?”
“Exactly. And not only that, he’s smart! He’s studying history at Kyodai – politics and culture of the Muromachi era. Aunt Setsuko said he knows as many kanji as she does. He’s practically a poet.”
“How does your aunt know him?”
“That’s the very best part,” Hiroe sighed. “He’s staying at her guesthouse!”
“Right down the street from you,” breathed Rei.
“Fifty-four steps,” confirmed Hiroe with a nod of her head. “I counted.”
Rei and Asuka drew their friend into an exuberant, three-way hug. “Iyaaa!” they shrieked in unison. “You’re so lucky!”
“So, does he like you?” Rei prompted, which forced an awkward pause. Hiroe dropped her eyes, scuffing one shoe along the paving stones of the schoolyard. “I don’t know. At first I thought no, but then . . . How can I tell?”
“That’s easy,” said Asuka. “He buys you things.”
SAN
“Happy birthday,” John murmured as the subway gathered speed. It was a Thursday afternoon, an occasion that had shot up Hiroe’s “Favourite Times of the Week” chart ever since she’d met him by chance on his way home from classes and found that their schedules coincided. She’d lain in wait for him ever since.
From his knapsack he conjured a small, flat package, elegantly wrapped in the old style in a square of plum-coloured silk. It was a favourite trick of Aunt Setsuko’s, and Hiroe couldn’t help wondering if her aunt had taught him or if he’d figured it out himself.
She gave a small cry of happiness and then worked at the knot, concealing neither her eagerness nor her disenchantment when her long-awaited present turned out to be just a book of classical poems, and a used one at that.
How . . . boring, she thought. And how cheap! This was nothing like the extravagant presents from the salarymen who wooed some of her classmates.
John watched her closely and then gave a little grin. “I know, it’s not what you expected. But I’m hoping you’ll appreciate it some day.”
“No I won’t,” Hiroe pouted, squinting at the elegant type. “Who cares about standing under a straw roof in the rain?” Yet despite her moue of displeasure, she was more happy than not. Finally, after months of waiting, summer slipping into autumn, he had given her a gift. And now, a lucky break. A rude little dumpling of a boy who seemed destined for the sumo ring had wedged himself in on her other side, giving Hiroe the excuse to press up against John, hip to hip and thigh to thigh, so that, whenever the subway slowed, she could lean in to him, pretending it was her own inertia that took her.
The doors closed, the train gathered speed. Hiroe dared a glance at the object of her affection.
“Now a book of love poems,” she murmured, with her toes touching prettily and her eyes as round as she could make them, “that would be an ideal gift for a girl like me. Why don’t you give me a book of love poems, John?”
He scratched his head, pretending to think. “Uh, because we’re not lovers?”
“Yes, we are. I love you, and you’re just crazy about me!”
That brought an honest laugh out of him. “Ah, Hiroe, Hiroe,” he murmured, shaking his head.
She thrilled at the way he said her name: gently, with each of the three syllables glowing as if lit up from the inside.
“We should take a honeymoon,” she declared. It was half a joke, but as always, it was also half serious.
John raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re getting ambitious. First you suggested a tryst in the park, then a love hotel, and now an honest-to-goodness trip somewhere? Hm . . .” he pretended to consider, “I hear Singapore’s popular. My savings could probably get us to Osaka.”
“I have money. I can pay.”
He pursed his lips and then twisted them in an expression she couldn’t understand. “You probably could at that. Tell you what. Give me a while to pick out a destination.”
“How long?”
His sweeping glance was appraising but not unkind. “How about a few years?”
Hiroe went red and looked down at her lap. The book of poems was still there, also red against the blue pleated skirt of her school uniform.
“Maybe in your backward country they have some crazy laws, but –”
He sighed and leaned back against the subway seat, fitting the heels of his palms against his closed eyes. “It’s got nothing to do with laws, Hiroe. It’s about consent, and the ability to know what you’re agreeing to – we’ve been through this before. And I wish you’d stop asking all the time.” He took down his hands and gave her a meaningful look. “Do you have any idea what thats like for me?”
“No,” she sulked, and this time her expression was real.
John turned toward her then. He put an arm around her shoulders. “Have you ever heard of the Chinese water torture?”
Hiroe was shocked and amazed. He had his arm around her! In public, no less – like they were a real couple. She fought to keep her breathing even. Betraying her excitement might dislodge him.
“Most likely some product of another barbarian culture,” she said loftily.
“Ah, the youth of today,” he sighed and ran a finger along Hiroe’s forehead, stroking the roots of her glossy black hair. “Please, allow me to educate you.”
“What does this have to do with –”
“Shh,” he whispered. “Now lie back.”
Hiroe felt a gentle tap on her forehead. She knew it was his finger, but it felt as if a drop of water had landed there. She felt another tap after a few seconds, and then another. Hiroe’s head rolled in time to the swaying of the subway car, but somehow he always managed to touch the exact same spot.
“John –”
His opposing hand on her shoulder held her in place. The tapping continued, becoming very annoying very quickly.
“Quit it!” Hiroe twisted away.
He smiled at her. “Terrible, isn’t it? The Chinese used to interrogate prisoners this way. They’d tie people down, suspend a water clock over them, and let the droplets fall, just like that, for hours or days. Sometimes people went insane.”
He leaned in close and his voice was barely a whisper. “That’s what it’s like for me when you keep asking all the time.”
SHI
Hiroe, entranced by the blossoms, has taken longer than usual on her walk home from school. Yet he is there, at the temple.
He is kneeling with his back to her, as still as a lake in winter. She doesn’t dare interrupt his meditation – at least not at first. But after a time, worry steals in. Is he angry that she is late? Did he even hear her approach? It wouldn’t do to call his name, but . . .
Carefully, she slips off her shoes and kneels down beside him.
“Why are you here burning incense all the time?” she whispers in the semidarkness.
“Usually it’s to ask Amida Buddha for guidance.” His measured words rise like smoke toward the wooden rafters. His gaze is also directed upward, until he directs it to her dark and shining eyes. “But sometimes I also ask for forgiveness.”
She shivers.
On the tatami mat in front of him, Hiroe sees a bag from Kyobuy, the new department store near the university.
“What’s in there?”
“You’re a curious little girl, aren’t you?”
“Is it a present for me?”
“Perhaps. Or it might be for me. One never can tell.”
He rises fluidly, makes a final obeisance to the Buddha image, and then strides to the porch to find his shoes.
“Where are we going?” chirps Hiroe, stuffing her feet into her black tie-ups, usually fashionable but now a nuisance. She lets the laces dangle, clattering down the steps after him.
He strides quickly through the mosaic of fallen cherry blossoms, snow white in the light of the streetlamps.
His pace is brisk. She has to run to catch up.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
It is in fact a teahouse in the heart of Gion, one that used to host geisha in bygone days. Hiroe is aghast at being taken to such an elegant place in her school uniform, while he’s almost unbearably handsome in his khakis and a white button-down. But when she tells him as much, he laughs.
“So I was supposed to have let you go home to change? I’m sure your mother would have just let you breeze on out again.”
Hiroe hadn’t thought of that.
“Where do your parents think you are, anyway?”
“At Rei’s house. Studying.”
“Ah, of course.” His expression is unreadable and dark somehow. For the first time, Hiroe feels a bit apprehensive.
The hostess seats them in a private room, with a black lacquered table in the centre. There is a view of the courtyard – some greenery and a pond. A heartbeat after the hostess leaves, the paper screen slides back to admit a cheerful woman with a tea service. There are cups on the tray, a pot of steaming water, and a small porcelain bowl with tea itself. As she leaves, John tips her. The yen notes are discreetly folded, but Hiroe realizes this is much more than the average gratuity.
Once their server has padded noiselessly away, John turns to her.
“Well, my dear, we’re alone now.”
She sits still, wondering what he’ll do next.
“Don’t you want to kiss me?”
She blinks. It takes a moment for her to realize that he really expects it of her, that he won’t move until she acts first. Afraid and yet mesmerized by the beautiful shape of his lips, she slides off of her cushion and crawls to where he sits quite composedly. Her first kiss is delicate – just a brush of his cheek with lips sweetly pursed – yet while he doesn’t flinch away, he doesn’t kiss her back either.
She draws nearer. She takes his face in her hands. With a thumb on each cheekbone she traces them, traces the contours of his eyes and then closes them. His nose and chin are the targets of her kisses, and then his mouth. When their lips touch he returns the kiss at last. The caress of his mouth is indeed as she imagined: as soft as the petals falling silently in the streets outside, but warmer. There is a perfume to him, too – a wonderful manly scent that she’d never noticed because she’d never come this close. His breath wafts across her nose and her lashes, causing a shiver to course through her, and a stirring, farther down.
His kisses are chaste, gentle. After a time Hiroe tries to speed them into something more passionate, but each time he draws away. She is kneeling to one side of him. He has not moved except to turn his head. The effort of rising to meet his lips is telling. Her thighs quiver with the strain of it. It makes her aware of the growing heat between them.
“Hiroe, permit me something.”
She leans against him, the top of her head against the centre of his chest, but she is looking at the tatami mats to one side and not into his lap because she’s shy about what has grown there.
“Anything.”
She can feel his smile. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
He pushes her back and dips a careful finger into the water for the tea, which is still steaming. Fleetingly, he frowns.
“I want you to sit up here on the table facing me.”
Hiroe opens her eyes. He is putting the tray with the tea things on the floor, making room.
“Sit? On the table?” It’s a preposterous suggestion, as if he’d asked her to eat dinner off a chair.
“Shh. I’m going to give you your present now.”
GO
Hiroe shuffled glumly out into the schoolyard. On either side of her, Rei and Asuka chattered merrily, but she couldn’t find it in her to join them. The chill winter air nipped at her knees and nose, reminding her that despite these weeks upon weeks of carefully spaced intervals of flirting with John and ignoring him, nothing had changed.
“Keep after him,” Asuka advised when Hiroe appealed to them for help.
“You must be like the river,” said Rei, who was hopelessly addicted to historical dramas and fond of wise-woman sayings. “The water is soft, but patient. In time, it wears down even the hardest stone.”
“Even the hardest stone, echoed Asuka, with a grin.
But despite all of Hiroe’s efforts, John didn’t give in – not when she flirted and not when she cried and not even when she called him one desperate night after her bath.
“John, I need you.” Hiroe gripped the receiver with one hand, her other wandering. If she closed her eyes she could imagine him standing there at the common phone in the hallway at Aunt Setsuko’s.
“Aren’t you worried about your parents hearing you talking this way?”
“Mother’s having her bath, and Father’s out drinking with his colleagues. I am free to talk to my boyfriend however I please.”
A sigh from the other end. “I see. Well, you’d better hang up then, he might be trying to call you.”
“You silly . . .” She giggled, tracing the downy lips of her sex through a clean pair of cotton panties.
“Hiroe, I have to go. I have lots of work tonight.”
“I can help,” she offered, desperate now.
“I doubt it. My assignment is to write a poem in the style of Fujiwara no Sadai.”
“I could write it for you! On your stomach, with a brush and ink. Our lovemaking would inspire me.”
He laughed out loud. “Yes, I could just see myself untucking my shirt in front of the class tomorrow. I can hear my thesis adviser now: ‘Whose is this terrible calligraphy?’ ”
He’d meant it to be funny, but she hung up the phone in a rage.
RYOKU
Her heart was sore with the agony of yet another refusal. Still, it did not stop Hiroe from drifting past the guest house on her way to school. But when she saw him looking mussed, and as if he’d only just stepped into his shoes, Hiroe hurried past.
“Good morning,” he said with exaggerated politeness. His eyes looked small in the morning light and his shirt was wrinkled.
“Leave me alone,” she shot back.
“Well, that’s quite a change from last night.”
“I’m a changed woman,” she said airily, “one who’ll forget you by taking another lover.”
“Taking a lover, you mean.”
She quickened her pace. “There are a lot of boys at school who would kill or die to have me.” This was not precisely true, but with a bit of advertising, she could probably make it so.
“Hiroe.” He stopped walking, and after a few steps she did, too. “I told you to forget this.”
“I am.”
“No, I mean really forget it.” He sighed. “I’m tired of this.”
“Tired of what?”
“Of you trying to force everything to be the way you want it. I told you how I feel, so live with it.”
She rounded on him angrily. “I’m not going to stop my life just because you feel guilty.”
“I never told you to stop your life, Hiroe. I just want you to wait for the right time.”
“And you’re the one who gets to decide my right time? Well, forget that. I’ll just find a real boyfriend.
In two steps he was on her, hands on her upper arms.
“Don’t do this to be vindictive. All that will happen is you’ll wind up getting hurt.”
“What do you care?”
Suddenly he turned and pressed her up against the stone wall of the temple. He had an arm on either side and a leg between both of hers. His lips were close and his breathing ragged. Hiroe struggled, aghast. No one could see them now, but someone could turn the corner at any moment.
“Listen!” he said forcefully, and she was compelled to stop moving. “Maybe it’s not obvious to you, but I care quite a bit.”
They stood that way with gazes locked. Out of the corner of her eye, Hiroe could see the cherry blossoms falling to the avenue, just a few steps away.
&n
bsp; “You want it your way?”
“It’s not –”
“Do you want it your way?!”
“If that’s how you see it, then yes!”
“Fine. Meet me at the temple after school.”
He walked off without looking back. Hiroe gazed after him, confused, her throat tight with words that had gotten stuck. The event had to be some kind of victory, yet it didn’t feel that way at all.
SHICHI
Naturally, her friends got to hear everything.
“Make sure he buys you something nice,” said Asuka, playing the role of auntie. She was only a year older, yet well versed in this type of transaction. She’d given her virginity away on four separate occasions and had found it quite profitable.
“Quiet, you girls!” commanded their teacher, and of course there was no choice but to obey.
HACHI
“You want to give me my present?” whispers Hiroe.
“That’s right.” He sweeps a hand over the table’s smooth, shiny surface. “Go on.”
Hiroe gets up, adjusts the pleats of her skirt, and then sinks uncertainly down onto the black lacquer. He is still on his cushion, gazing up at her now. She blushes furiously.
He reaches up to stroke the tender flesh of one calf, to run his hand over her fashionably bunchy sock and slide it down to her ankle so he can kiss the smooth flesh he has laid bare. The other sock promptly follows, and when both her legs are naked, he begins kissing his way slowly up one and then the other, in careful increments calculated to tease. Whenever his lips reach a new level, he pauses long enough for her to draw a breath and then switches to the other leg, starting at the bottom and moving steadily up. At the level of her knees, he feels resistance. Her legs close in on either side of his head, forcing him away.
He sits back.
She’s the very image of timidity, there on the table with her eyes closed and her head turned to one side. Her knees are together now and the last knuckle of her middle finger is pressed against her lips. It’s almost a caricature, really, and John doesn’t know which is stronger, his irritation or his mad urge to laugh.
“Come on. Don’t tell me you’re going to play the blushing maiden now, after all this.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 Page 52
