Reina stayed on top when it was over, her body joined with Shio’s even after the firmness gave way to how she was before. When Reina shifted, she couldn’t tell if what seeped out of her was hers or Shio’s. Probably both. What should have disgusted her only made her more content.
Eventually she disengaged her body and fell to the bed, Shio quickly claiming a groove in her lover’s arm for a cuddle. “That was amazing,” she said, placing her lips gently on Reina’s breast. “You were amazing.”
Legs stretched out, Reina wrapped her arm around Shio and played with the ends of her hair. “You weren’t so bad yourself.”
“I haven’t felt it like that in so long. Usually it takes too much effort to make it work like that again.” A happy sigh. “I’m so glad it’s still possible.”
Reina tickled her nails against Shio’s arm. “Me too.” She turned over onto her side and kissed her lover on the lips.
They spent the next half hour wrapped together like that, their kisses frequent and their words less so. But when they did speak, it was hopeful things like, “I’m so glad it was you,” and “I never knew it could feel that way.” “Don’t you dare tell our therapist it was me” was sprinkled in there as well, followed by laughter.
“Stay the night,” Shio said, her fingertips touching Reina’s cheek. “Please.”
“And what? Do it again in the morning?”
“Or right now.”
Reina considered it. “I think I’m done down there for right now.”
“Me too.”
Their next kiss was the heaviest yet, both of their weights behind it as they tried to outdo the other in sincerity. “I need to go home,” Reina finally said. She didn’t want to leave Shio behind, however. “It’s not because of you. You are wonderful.”
“No, I understand.” Shio smiled, sadly. “You have a wife.”
Aiko. The first time she thought of her in many a minute. “The way we are… this might happen again between you and me. But I can’t promise you anything serious. We would not work beyond this bed.” She had said that to other women before. But one girlfriend beyond my wife is damned one enough.
“You’re right.” Shio wrapped her arms tighter around Reina regardless. “But I still want you to stay longer. I’m so happy right now.”
“I am too.”
“Ten more minutes.”
When Reina was finally able to go home, she picked up her clothing and let Shio hang all over her, pulling shirts and socks on while some young twenty-something treated her like the best person in the world. Always a good ego stroke. Reina disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes before returning. If she was going to go home on Saturday night trains full of drunken frivolity, she was going to at least not smell like the sex she just had.
She kissed Shio goodbye and began the trek back to the train station. She looked at her cell phone and noticed how late it was. Maybe I should’ve spent the night with her. Reina would be lucky to make her connections home before the trains stopped running for the night.
It’s so peaceful. Cold, but clear. Reina could see her breath as she walked through her neighborhood, stopping under every streetlamp to get a kick out of it. Her nose was starting to tingle. Too bad her house was so dark. Aiko isn’t home.
Indeed, the house was empty. Reina was glad to be home but also wishing yet again that she had taken Shio up on her offer. I wouldn’t be alone, at least. Reina kicked off her shoes and went upstairs.
She neither took off her clothing nor turned on the light when she entered her bedroom. Instead she lay on her side of the bed, arms beneath her head as she gazed up at the ceiling. If she craned her head enough, she could see the painting Michiko gave her hanging above the headboard. Two butterflies, dancing in the air.
The front door downstairs opened and closed. “Ara,” she heard her wife say as she shuffled around the genkan. “Reina’s home.” Someone hadn’t bothered to put her shoes neatly away when she returned.
It took a few more minutes for Aiko to make her way upstairs. By the time she did, she stood tentatively in the doorway and stared at her spouse.
“Reina?”
“Un.” She crossed one leg over the other. “Okaeri.”
Aiko left the bedroom door open as she shuffled to bed and plopped down on her side, still dressed in her jeans and thick winter coat. “I’m glad you’re home. I thought you might stay out all night.”
“Maa, I thought about it.”
“So did I.”
They were silent for a while, both staring into nothingness as they neither flinched nor sighed. She smells nice. Aiko only put on her special perfume when she was trying to be enticing. The fact it couldn’t be for Reina that night didn’t even faze her anymore. “I had quite the night,” Reina said, breaking the silence.
“Me too.”
More silence. Do I tell her? Reina searched for her wife’s hand between them, clutching it once she found it. “I…”
Aiko interrupted her. “I was with Takeshi-san tonight. I know you said you didn’t want to hear about it, but…”
Reina waited for the inevitable.
“I couldn’t go through with it. It felt wrong. I thought you should know.”
Without knowing how to respond, Reina only held her wife’s hand tighter.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No.” A little relieved, but not mad.
Aiko turned toward her spouse, the padding of her jacket pressing down. “Did you have sex with someone tonight?”
Not even a question like that raised Reina’s hackles. “Un.”
“Someone I know?”
Now Reina turned to her wife, bending her head so her cheek touched the top of Aiko’s scalp. Her fingers splayed out and took her wife’s, one by one, touching her knuckles and caressing her soft skin.
I will tell her. If there were no one else on Earth she could tell, Reina would hold it in. It would eat at her for years, but she would hold it in. I don’t have to. She cupped her hand around Aiko’s cheek and whispered the answer, feeling her wife look up at her in shock.
Reina told her everything. From her fear to her pleasure, she could keep no secrets from the woman she married.
The ensuing days were not strange because of how their lives had changed, but because of how they hadn’t changed.
I feel like we should be different people. Instead, Aiko went back to her housekeeping and teaching, and Reina went back to work and flirting with every woman who would let her. The only change was when they reunited in the evening. Bit by bit Reina remembered new details of the other night that she wanted to share with her wife: how she felt, what happened, how it affected her… and bit by bit Aiko opened up too. Sometimes they would be in the bath, relaxing as they cuddled and talked of how bizarre sexuality was. Sometimes they were in bed, Reina’s arms wrapped around her wife as they tried to go to sleep. And sometimes they watched a movie in the living area, Reina whispering into her wife’s ear how happy she was in that moment.
Life outside of her marriage did not change much either, although Aiko felt like she should see the world in a completely new way. Her biggest fear was that her relationship with Takeshi would fall apart. Certainly, it was awkward. When they saw each other on Tuesday, Takeshi blushed so hard he looked like Aiko. They did not have lunch together that day.
But later that evening she received a call from him apologizing for his behavior. “I told you it might be a bit weird for a while,” he reminded her. “Anyway, what are you doing Thursday after work? I have a book I want to give you.” When she later asked him if she had hurt him again, he could only say that he never had his hopes up.
The following weekend was a big one for Aiko and Reina. With their twenty-second anniversary falling next Wednesday, they long ago decided to make something of the weekend before. Aiko made arrangements at an onsen an hour north of Tokyo, and late Saturday morning the two of them took a train up to spend t
he night and relax. It was a small hot springs resort catering to queer couples from the area. We were supposed to go a while ago. But they had lost the chance, and Aiko couldn’t remember how.
Since it was December, the hot springs were not a busy place, making them the only guests that weekend. The proprietor went all out for the anniversary celebration, offering them free cake and some complimentary mementos from the gift shop. “Twenty-two years,” she said with a romantic sigh. “What an inspiration!” Aiko later heard that the middle-aged woman once had a lover who died unexpectedly years ago. She wishes she could have made it this long.
While the hot springs were refreshing in the freezing December air, it was the lovemaking late that night that Aiko enjoyed the most. By the time they were done, Reina had made a mess of the futon and they scrambled to clean it up and make it usable again before the proprietor could ever find out. And then they did it again.
The closer they approached their anniversary, the more phone calls and well-wishes they received. Back in Tokyo, Michiko called them from America, admittedly hormonal as she sobbed her congratulations to them. “I want to make it that long with my wife,” she said. “It’s only been six years for us, but I’m older than you both!”
Jun called the night before their anniversary. She also lamented her lack of experience for that long, and offered them a gift of a small sum. Aiko protested until she was blue in the face, but Reina took the cash from her girlfriend and socked it away for a rainy day.
It rained on their anniversary.
After it started as a lazy drizzle, a storm quickly rolled through, drenched the streets of their neighborhood, and lit up the sky above. Aiko stayed home even though she wanted to go to the store to buy food for dinner, but a phone call with Yuri convinced her to stay in. By the time it had passed, night had fallen and frost permeated the air. Reina used part of that rainy day money to buy dinner on the way home.
“Happy anniversary,” Reina said after clinking a glass of wine with Aiko’s. “Thanks for putting up with me for so long.”
Aiko didn’t know whether to roll her eyes or laugh. “Are you kidding? I’ve got the best marriage in my family.”
“I pray for your family members.”
Although Reina was joking, Aiko still shook her head in disbelief.
They had no definitive plans for the night. Pains of having an anniversary in the middle of the week, tucked between Aiko’s work days and in the midst of Reina’s corporate servitude. Reina stepped outside for a cigarette shortly after dinner, and Aiko went upstairs to “get ready.” She wasn’t sure for what. Other than sex, of course.
“Ho, I haven’t seen you wear that one in a while.” Reina entered the bedroom and remarked on her wife’s white silk negligee with pink and orange flowers blooming on one side of her chest. She was tired of wearing the red one. “You going to sleep like that?”
Aiko crawled onto the bed, too coy for her own good. “Or I might go to sleep naked. It’s up to you.”
Reina closed the window shutters behind her as she slid the balcony door closed. “Up to me, huh?” She unbuttoned the top of her blouse. “Got anything special arranged?”
Am I supposed to? “I’ve got myself. What more do you need on our anniversary?”
“We should do something special anyway.” Reina finished undressing and fished out her pajamas from the bureau drawer. Sweat pants and a green T-shirt looked good on her slender frame, but Aiko was more into nudity that night. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Oh?” Aiko turned on her stomach and kicked her feet in the air. “What is it this year?” Reina was always up to something when it came to their milestones. While Reina wasn’t the best at being romantic, in retrospect Aiko could see where her spouse made her own kind of effort over the years.
Reina winked at her wife and pulled out the laptop from where it had been stored on top of the dresser. A cord to an outlet in the wall trailed behind Reina as she brought it into bed.
“What’s this?” Aiko wrapped her arms around Reina’s shoulders and peered at the desktop. “Whatever it is, hurry up and make love to me.”
“Hang on.” Reina opened a web browser.
Neither of them were much into computers, so seeing Reina so gung-ho about something related to the communal – and not often used – machine confused Aiko. Especially when Reina typed in a somewhat familiar address.
While she had pulled a lot of silly stunts since the day they started dating twenty-two years ago, Reina had yet to grace their anniversary with something quite like this. Aiko rolled her eyes and grunted her disapproval. “Porn? Really? I thought you didn’t like that stuff.”
“It’s not porn.” It was the professional website of Ami the cam girl. Her picture appeared in the header of the website, along with the words, “Please come in!” written in both Japanese and English. “Last time I saw her, I told her about our anniversary coming up, and she gave us some free tokens to watch her show.”
“On our anniversary though?” Aiko still couldn’t believe it when Reina popped open the video feed and waited for it to load. “You don’t like this stuff!”
“No, but you do. I hear you like watching.”
“Not with a bunch of men watching her too!”
Although she worked on a computer for a living, Reina still hunt and pecked her way across the keyboard. “We need a username. Any ideas?
“This is ridiculous.”
“I can’t fit all of that in there.”
Aiko detached herself from her spouse and reclined on the bed. “I don’t want to watch a cam show on our anniversary. Would’ve been one thing if she were here with us…”
“You think I didn’t try to arrange that?”
I’d have to commit you otherwise.
“I’m gonna call us Rezu-tachi.”
“Dame da!” Aiko smacked the back of her hand against Reina’s upper arm. “Aren’t you thinking? What if those men watching can see that nickname? We’ll get harassed for being lesbians before Ami-san can kick them off!”
“Ah, good thinking.” Reina backspaced the name. “Does this mean you want to watch?”
Aiko rolled her eyes again. “If we’re going to do this, I don’t want to regret it.”
“Five minutes. We’ll watch for five minutes.” Reina typed in a new name.
“Why do you want to watch so badly? Ah!” Of course. “It’s because you like this girl, isn’t it? You know, maybe if this was your birthday, but since it’s our anniversary…”
Reina nudged her wife before launching the cam application. To be on the safe side, she covered the webcam on their own machine with a piece of colored tape. “Like I said. Five minutes. Then we can do whatever you want.”
The camera kicked in as Aiko was wondering what she would want to do with her spouse. Besides sex. She realized, as she heard Ami’s flirty voice coming through the speakers, that there was little they hadn’t done for their anniversary. Maybe watching a beautiful cam girl would be one memorable thing on this otherwise quiet weeknight.
“Good evening to our new viewers!” Ami wore a black silk negligee in the same style as Aiko’s, minus the feminine additions. Her long black hair parted over her shoulders and framed her breasts as she blew a kiss toward the camera. It’s such high production… Whatever equipment Ami used, it was probably on the same level as filmmakers. Of course, it’s her job, and she makes a lot of money at it… Wasn’t her girlfriend also her business partner? That seemed weird. Aiko couldn’t imagine her spouse pimping her out on camera one night and then going to the grocery store with her the next day as if they… Reina and I don’t have a normal relationship either. Aiko shoved her spouse’s arms away from the laptop and plopped into her lap. She hoped something interesting came of this.
While she didn’t know if she would call it interesting in the classic sense, Ami was a born entertainer and could probably rival Reina in the flirtations department. Then again, there
was no denying that Ami mostly appealed to and marketed herself to men. Women like Reina, who may not usually be into porn but would still hop on to watch a queer cam girl do work, were not big moneymaking sources.
“Who wants to hear a story?” Ami asked, putting on a pair of fake reading glasses and curling her legs beneath her on the bed. Was that really her bed? Or was this an “office” in her condo and she slept with her girlfriend elsewhere? When Ami kicked her legs again, she revealed a pair of lacy black underwear beneath her negligee. Even I’m not wearing one of those. Anything to be smug about. “I found this story the other day and would like to read it to you.”
Of course, it was a lesbian story. Not a particularly good one, since it was obviously written by a man, but Ami’s husky voice did such a superb job enunciating certain words that even Reina cleared her throat and propped herself up on her arms behind her. When the connection lagged and the video went back to buffering, the video hanged on a clear shot of Ami’s cleavage, and both Reina and Aiko laughed.
“She is very pretty,” Aiko said, as the video returned and Ami was still reading, slowly lowering the straps of her negligee and lifting her hem so she showed off her undies. “If I looked like that, I might do a job like this too.” She was teasing, but it made Reina clear her throat again.
Just as Aiko was getting antsy and thinking about saying, “It’s been five minutes, at least,” the woman on the camera tossed her story aside and ripped off her glasses.
“You guys are killing me,” she said. “It’s been what, an hour of this shit now? When is one of you going to take me to private viewing and let me get some relief? I’m killing myself here!” She pouted her lips and tossed her hair behind her shoulders.
Comments appeared in the chat screen. Aiko took one look at them and averted her eyes in disgust. Men. They all wanted it for free. She too was getting tired of nothing interesting happening.
“Eh!” Reina exclaimed as her wife started typing on the laptop. Aiko cashed in their free tokens and offered to take Ami to private chat – and a private show. “How forward of you!”
Ikigai Page 22
