by Cynthia Dane
“Sorry to hear that.” That meant that, even though I was sitting right next to him, I couldn’t slyly touch him with my hand or arm as we talked. Damnit! How was I going to flirt? How the fuck did one flirt with this guy?
The universe truly was against me that night, wasn’t it?
Hadrian didn’t owe me anything. He was nice enough to pay for dinner and my tea. If anything, I would usually be afraid he thought that I owed him something. But what a turn of events, huh? The one time in my life I was ready to go – had decided I was going to jump this guy’s bones two minutes after meeting him – the guy I was with either played a long game or was totally uninterested. Just my luck, indeed!
“It is lonely, yes?”
I glanced at him. This man with the perfectly groomed head and facial hair, stylish clothes, and polite mannerisms that would make most women fall over themselves like loons. (Like me.) “What’s lonely?”
“This country.”
I looked out the window. It was the usual sight at any time of day in Tokyo, regardless of the neighborhood. Across the main thoroughfare was the train station. People jetted in and out, alone, no regard for the people around them. Honestly, it was one of my favorite things about Japan. No matter how packed in you were somewhere, people always respected your personal bubble. Funny, isn’t it? You could be in the busiest subway in Tokyo, and you didn’t care, because the people you were slammed up against were lost in their own worlds. Reading books. Texting. Listening to music. Chatting with coworkers and friends. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about you. But the way personal space is treated in Japan is simply unprecedented. As someone who spends a lot of her time in public alone, I appreciate it.
“People are always by themselves.”
“Yes. They go everywhere alone. Japanese people are always alone.”
The way he spoke, whether he realized it or not, was poignant.
“You don’t like alone?”
“It feels sad a lot.”
I had only known this man for a couple of hours, but I felt like I was learning more about him than I had learned about most of my friends back home. “You like to be around people,” I said matter-of-factly.
“Yes! People are best. It’s why I like restaurant business. My restaurant, it is food and bar. The bar is my favorite. Everyone is so happy and having a party. It’s only time you see it in Japan.”
“Well, if you move to America, things will certainly be different.”
“I want to move to America,” he reaffirmed.
Now that he had opened up again, our conversation turned toward the differences between Japan and the rest of the world. How people were lonelier here than they were in America. How they saw their families less here than in Greece, Turkey, almost anywhere else. How they were more educated than many places we had lived. Oh, and how expensive! Hadrian was shocked to hear that America could be as expensive as Japan, but then conceded that things were also seemingly expensive in Greece even with the comparatively low costs – when nobody could afford those low costs, they were expensive.
“The food is also better,” he told me for the third time. “Italy makes the best food. So does Greece. Japanese food is okay, but Italian is better.”
“What about American food?”
“American food is good because it has many Italian foods.”
I couldn’t fault him for that superb logic.
We were laughing about something. I don’t remember what. Maybe he told me a joke about his nieces and nephews back in Greece. All I know is that I took that moment of good humor as an opportunity to put my hand on his arm and test his reaction.
He instantly stopped smiling. Not to say he frowned, but my actions had put some damper on the experience. Right, right. He had said he didn’t like being touched. I pulled my hand away and kept it to myself.
Hadrian tapped his empty coffee cup on the counter. “We go? Take a walk?”
He had his eyes on the train station across the street. Oh. Good job, Cyndi. You ruined the night and got yourself sent back to your noisy share house.
That was what I assumed as we threw out our trash and stepped out into the cool autumn night. November was a strange time for weather in Japan. One day it would be hot and somewhat humid, and the next it would snow a few inches. That day had been warm, but the night was brisk. Hadrian shivered in his jacket and motioned for us to walk as quickly as possible.
Naturally, we made a beeline for the station.
At least it had been a nice enough evening. My body was screaming at me to fuck this guy, but as far as I could tell, he wanted nothing to do with me like that. Leave it to me to find the one man in Japan not down for a one-night stand. Maybe he was looking for a long term thing and was turned off after finding out I would leave the following weekend. With our language barrier the way it was, it was near impossible to find out the truth.
Not that it mattered, anyway. We were never going to see each other again.
I checked for my wallet as soon as we entered the station. Yet we bypassed the ticket machines and continued to pass beneath the station until we came out of the other side.
Uh, well then!
“This is my favorite park in Tokyo.” Hadrian pointed to the paths wandering through the green spaces across the street. “We go?”
“Sure.” My attempts to mask my excitement didn’t work. This date wasn’t over yet? Where were we going? What were we doing? Why did I have to feel like such a teenage girl on her first date? Was I really that sad?
Or was I that… into him?
Whatever. That was silly. The date leading up to any possible sex was that – a date! This guy wasn’t going to hold my hand on a stroll through the park. Nor was he going to tell me his innermost thoughts like we had known each other for years. I barely knew him. For fuck’s sake, I found him through a dating app! I wasn’t going to be in town long enough for us to get to really know each other.
His mannerisms were strange to the point I could barely get a read on Hadrian. He animatedly spoke to me as he described what he loved about this park and how he liked to come here whenever he passed through Oji. Yet at the same time, he kept a respectful distance. I wish I had known more about the culture he grew up in. Was he being polite? God! I wish he would throw his arm around me if nothing else! Touch me a little! I’m not saying he had to slap my ass or try to cop a feel of my tits. Just enough to send me a message that he was into me, damnit!
At the same time, I’m a paranoid person thanks to a lot of shitty experiences, and the fact this guy I barely knew was leading me through a dark park at night sent up the usual red flags.
At least the guy who kills me and dumps me in the river will be hot? Yeah, that’s how desperate I was.
I never felt like that around Hadrian, though. His unwillingness to touch me – and even talk to me at times – made me more frustrated than comfortable. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him to pin me against a tree and make a dishonest woman out of me. I wanted him to curl his arm around my torso and hold me to him like he was the luckiest guy in the world. We only had tonight, right? Maybe he was the luckiest guy in the world – he certainly had the power to make me the luckiest gal.
All he had to do was authorize that power. Let me know that it was okay for us to fool around a bit. For me to let down my guards that I erected after I realized this may not be a date after all.
“Oh, no, I don’t like.” He stopped in the middle of a path and ducked onto the other side of me. “I don’t know how to say in English.” His thumb jerked toward a cemetery across the small river.
“Cemetery.”
“Yes! Don’t like. Protect me, please.”
I stopped and stared at the cemetery while he lost the skip in his step. “Why?” Japanese cemeteries are one of the least foreboding in the world. Cremation is the norm there. With no bodies to bury, most graveyards are simple granite pillars with the family’s name on them. Personal names of those who have passed on are written
in white, while family members who have yet to pass on are written in red. From our distance, all you could see were a few pointed pillars about three feet high clustered together. Hardly anything to worry one’s cute head over.
I turned to give him a look, but Hadrian’s eyes were elsewhere. Namely, on my ass.
Protection, huh?
Last thing I needed to do was playfully chastise or make fun of him. With the language barrier, that was probably not a good idea… and if he were playful right now…
Yes!
“You’re cute,” I said.
“Cute?” He put one hand on his hip and rubbed his goatee with the other. “It is good thing?”
“If a girl calls you cute, you bet your firm ass it’s a good thing.”
I don’t think he understood a single thing that I said, but his smile was golden. Maybe he was as confused by my signals as I was about his?
We came upon a small wooden pedestrian bridge, the traditional kind that used to be so often found in Japan before the wars. This one was obviously a recent addition, but under the cover of night it looked as if it had been there for a hundred years. I took out my camera and took a picture. Hadrian went to the river’s edge and peered into the deep ravine plummeting beneath flood walls.
“It’s deep.” He said.
“Yeah, think I’ll stay back here.” I’m a tad hydrophobic. Me and rivers don’t get along.
He propped himself up on the fence while I continued to take pictures. The man was practically a monkey while I looked for the best shot with such little light.
“Have too much coffee?”
Hadrian hopped down. “A little bit too much, maybe. Tonight I can’t sleep.”
I wasn’t about to take that as a sign that we were going to have sex all night. (As much as I wanted to.) “Me too. I can never sleep lately.”
This was it. This was my last chance to put sex in this guy’s brain.
“Why not?” He was by my side again.
“I told you. My neighbor is busy.”
He grinned sheepishly. “Yes, you say. Your neighbor has too much…” Here came the phone again. “Stamina.”
I nodded. “How can I sleep with my neighbor having so much sex?”
He scratched his head, opened his mouth… and immediately shut it again. Instead, he jerked his thumb behind him. “We go?”
Every time he said that, I had no idea what was going to happen.
We made another loop around the park. My mind ran with possibilities: was he going to ask me somewhere? Would he want to go home? Would he at least try to kiss me in this nice park? I had never had something like that happen before!
No, no, I couldn’t get too hopeful. I listened to him rattle about nothing in particular, his words growing faster and his pace quickening without him realizing it.
“Where do we go now?”
“Well, I like karaoke…”
“Karaoke? Oh, I’m not good at karaoke…”
Karaoke is perfect, though! Imagine me and Hadrian in a cozy little karaoke booth where I can use the shadows to snuggle up next to him? Or, you know, he could try to score with a hot woman, if I do say so myself. Karaoke is basically foreplay in Japan.
“Do you have plans tomorrow?”
“Not really.” Bullshit. I was going to a concert in the evening.
“Oh, I see. We could go to karaoke…”
I sighed, watching where I stepped in the darkness.
“There’s another coffee shop…”
Was it getting colder? It was getting colder.
“We could go to hotel…”
I stopped. “Yes,” I said in such haste that I think I gave us both whiplash.
Hadrian likewise stopped. His face was the epitome of holy shit.
“Really?” He laughed. “You sure? Hotel?”
“Yes, it’s fine.”
“Fine? Wow.” He turned away, hand on his mouth. When he turned back around again, it was with that false confidence guys love to espouse when they take on the dominant role of a situation. When, you know, deep inside they’re crumbling and convinced the world is playing a dirty trick on them. “We go?”
“We go, dude.”
On the outside, I was cool and composed. On the inside? Dying!
Chapter 7
“This one okay?” Hadrian pointed to a nondescript hotel by the station. The quintessential love hotel, where couples with no privacy at home come to do their romantic deeds all over each other. About fucking time! I wanted to shout into the parking garage entrance. My body was awake again. “Oh, hey, we’re doing this? Sweet. Let me get horny as fucking hell again. Is this the guy? Damn, girl, this guy is hot! Look at that smile! You gonna get that smile all over our pussy soon?”
Shut up, body. You’re not helping!
“This one’s fine.” I tried to hide my excitement. After all, I was a shy and retiring young lady who treated this one night stand as the biggest non deal of her life. Didn’t want to scare the man off, you know.
Then again, my apparent reservations were not giving Hadrian much confidence. The results, however, were nothing short of hilarious. “You sure? We do this? You okay?”
This man was going to fish for my consent until the end of time, wasn’t he? Then again, with his basic English and my coy American attitude, who could blame him?
“Yes. Let’s go.”
He crossed his arms with a smug sensibility that almost made me lose my shit. Whatever language he thought in, the English translation was clearly, “Hell yeah, man, you are the absolute shit scoring this American chick!”
“Okay!” Hadrian uncrossed his arms and marched toward the hotel. “Let’s do it!”
He had no idea what that meant in English, did he?
Full confession: I had never been to a love hotel before. Oh, I knew all about them, thanks to common expat knowledge and tales from friends, but actually in one? Nope.
For the ignorant and confused, a love hotel is not your usual hotel. It’s a place built around romancing your partner and eventually hitting that home run that makes baseball look cute and trite. Some hotel rooms are perfectly innocuous, and you have no idea you’re in one until you find all the porn on TV and the bowls of condoms on your headboard. Usually, though, they’re themed. Some of the themes are utterly ridiculous, like “fairy tale in the woods” or “leopard print paradise.” You also don’t get assigned a random room by the check-in desk. Instead, you pick your own room, where you are presented with previews of the themes and the hourly prices. In the case of this hotel, the rooms were rented for whole nights only.
We stood in front of the LCD panel. About half of them had Reserved stamped on them, and the ones leftover were fairly average – if ostentatious is considered average. (No leopard print, though.) Hadrian looked at me and asked, “Which one you like?”
His tone and erratic mannerisms implied he still couldn’t believe this was happening. I had broken the man. So, I did what any woman getting ready to bed a hot dude would do: I put a reassuring arm on his shoulder and said, “You choose.” He was paying for it, anyway. A consummate gentleman ‘til the end!
“This one?” His smile almost blew his face off as he pointed to a white and gold themed room. “Or maybe this one?”
I don’t remember what the other room looked like. Because my finger smashed the button for the gold and white room before we could dally any longer. This man had bones in need of jumping, and I had body parts in need of humping.
The ticket spat out of the machine. Hadrian snatched it and turned toward the check-in desk, his eyes never leaving my determined visage. “Like that?”
“Like that.” I pretended to be completely taken in with the previews of the other rooms while he paid and received the key from the proper-looking lady behind the desk.
The elevator was a tiny, cramped thing that forced lovers into close proximity. I had another one of those moments, as we rode up in silence, where I realized I was about to settle down an
d have sex with a guy I had barely touched yet. It wasn’t the fact that we barely knew each other. I didn’t care about that. But so far that night we hadn’t as much as held hands. Hadrian made it clear he didn’t like unexpected touching. Would sitting on the couch with him and massaging his thigh be unexpected? Would he like that? This man clearly had the giddies for me. As flattering as that was, what were the boundaries? The limits? How were we going to sort this out? We were in a two-person elevator and not even touching!
I let him lead us to the room on the fourth floor. The place was so quiet, so well insulated that there could be swinging orgies going on in every room around us and we would have never heard. Good. I was loud in bed.
The room was exactly as promised in the preview. A decent size, with a queen-sized bed covered in gold and white-threaded blankets that were as inviting as they were awe-inspiring. The pale yellow walls had golden fleur-de-lis stenciled in particular places, while a faux-crystal chandelier glistened from the ceiling. Across from the bed was a huge flat screen TV with a…
Yes, that was a bedazzled karaoke box. It was also the first thing Hadrian pointed out after we took off our shoes and stepped into the room.
“Look! Karaoke! You can use.”
What I needed to use was the bathroom. A girl needed to make sure those condoms she went through so much trouble getting didn’t get up and run away from her bag. Because they would, the little shits.
I came out to find Hadrian sitting on the couch. The way the living area was laid out? The loveseat was pushed up into a corner, and the only way to access it was via Hadrian’s seat. He caught my eye the moment I entered, wondering if I should go ahead and take off my sweater.
Fuck it. I was going to sit next to this guy I intended to ride until the sunrise. I flashed him a coy smile as his facial muscles did a ridiculous dance to regain control of themselves.
If you’re reading this and imagining two grown adults who were both trying to act too cool in this situation for their own good, well… you would be right. Shame on us!
“Can I sit down?” I asked. Hadrian instantly slid over so I could get a spot on the couch. He sat up straight, mind wound up in rapid thought. Yeah, man, me too. I was going over how I would scoot up next to him and make his fucking night.