“Yes, thank you,” Gakino said, in a deeper voice than she was used to, moving his arm around her back.
The waiter’s eyes flashed to Gakino’s hand, and she was immediately embarrassed. Most Taiwanese couples were incredibly circumspect with displays of affection.
As the waiter left, she hissed, “Stop it.”
He laughed. “I told you.”
“He doesn’t like me. I’m telling you. He is trying to press old fish stock on some poor American who can’t refuse politely in a foreign language.”
“No. You don’t understand. That face you hate is generally considered the best part. I had a friend in high school who made sure that his girlfriend always had it. I think he thought is was ‘healthy, delicious,’ too.” He mimicked the waiter’s carriage and accent.
She laughed. “Oh my god. You almost made tea shoot out my nose. Ow,” she said, holding her nose as her eyes watered.
“I’m serious. He probably doesn’t want to give you too much beef because it’s bad for you. If you look over at him, he watches you every chance he gets.”
“Well, I have noticed that.”
“And you didn’t figure out that he liked you.”
“No, I just thought he liked watching the weird foreign girl fumble with chopsticks.”
Gakino laughed and grabbed her hand, squeezing it tightly. He didn’t let it go. They sat quietly, saying little, squeezing each other’s hand at different times. They ate and barbecued with one hand for the entire meal. They spoke with their hands, with their eyes.
She wan’t sure what he was saying with each long look, but though they shared few words, she felt the words I love you or maybe I like you, spreading around them. They stood up still holding hands and he payed, tossing too much money up in the dish on the counter. Saying thank you to the cashier in Chinese, he bowed his head, acknowledging the large tip and walked out.
He didn’t let go of her hand until they reached the scooter. Then without words, he helped her move her scooter off the stand. They got on together, and, for the first time, he moved close to her and placed his long arms around her, resting them on her thighs. She was taking him to the airport. When would he come back, she wondered, and, when he did return, what would they be to each other?
CHAPTER 8
The air in Taiwan always felt thicker to him than Japan’s, especially in what should have felt like late Spring rather than the beginning of summer. The minute he got off the plane, the moisture in the air swooped in to meet him. The more he came back, the more normal it felt. He actually kind of liked it, especially knowing that it meant he’d get to see Eloise soon.
She was meeting him in their usual spot outside of her apartment building. He hadn’t been sure how he would top the zoo and dinner. It had been nearly perfect. By the end of the night he’d felt like they’d finally hit a rhythm together. It had ended comfortably and in a way that they’d both seemed to find satisfyingly close.
As the car drove him to Eloise’s apartment, he thought about his plans for the night. He didn’t know if she’d like them very much, but he wanted to see Eloise have some fun. She always held herself so carefully. He admired her self-control and dedication to her goals, but he wanted to see a side of Eloise that she didn’t show to others. He wanted to see Eloise as she was when she wasn’t worried about what others might see.
The two hour car ride seemed to drag by as he thought about what lay ahead of him, but then the car pulled up in front of Eloise’s building and she stood there waiting like usual. Her hair was pulled up in a clip, pieces of it moving with the wind when it blew. She had a relaxed look on her face as she leaned up against the large staircase that led into her building, a book in one hand, reading. She looked just like the way he thought Eloise should. It firmed his resolve.
“Hey.” He slid out of the car and met Eloise’s gaze as she looked up. He smiled at her and she smiled back. She met him halfway from the car at the edge of the sidewalk where the scooters parked, their wheels bumping the curb each stacked as closely together as the drivers could get them.
“Hi. You know. I’m getting pretty spoiled with these weekly visits. You sure our luck’s going to hold out?”
“How would you like to go to KTV?” He asked suddenly, hoping to convince her that Karaoke was a good idea before she had too much time to think about it.
“Karaoke ? Really?” She wrinkled her nose at him.
Gakino threw his head back and laughed at the look on her face. “Yeah! It will be fun. We can get drinks and eat and just play around.”
“You may be a singer, but I am not.”
“I really want to hear you sing. I promise I won’t be jealous.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her, trying to make her relax.
“I think that is impossible.”
“Ahh, nothing is impossible. We have wings remember?” He laughed again and tapped his shoulder. He grabbed both of her hands then and pulled her toward him. She bumped into the scooter beside them.
“Just try it. You’re in Asia. This is a very asian thing. You should try it at least once, ne?” He gave her his biggest smile. She let him lead her into the car.
Ten minutes later they were standing at a KTV. The place was mostly deserted as it was 4 in the afternoon, but Gakino didn’t care. He was here for Eloise. The owner quickly led them to a private room and offered to bring them drinks. Eloise ordered for them and Gakino set up the equipment, flipping through the song book.
“Hey! They have some of our songs.” He stared down at the song list book excitedly. He had been worried all the songs would be Chinese or incredibly old english songs as that seemed to be the standard. He wasn’t sure he would look like Yoh or Gakino trying to sing “Unforgettable,” so he hit the number for a Tenshi song and within seconds the music was setting him up for the first verse. Gakino turned to Eloise. She was staring at him with big eyes, hovering by the couch .
At the right moment, he began singing the song. Eloise dropped onto the couch with a thump.
How had she gotten here?
A few months ago, she was staring at the one magazine poster cut out that she allowed herself. One had to admire Tenshi’s general awesomeness, of course, but you couldn’t let yourself go crazy, you couldn’t go full-on fan girl. Absolutely not. So she had the one poster and she had one keychain. Both gifts from Mei, thank you very much, and that was that. If you gave your heart an inch, it took a mile.
And if she passed a magazine with them at the bookstore, she looked for a minute. She was a fan after all, but she didn’t buy it, and she didn’t read about them online, and she didn’t think about what they did in their spare time. She just watched the videos Mei gave her, and if she asked for the occasional specific episode, who could blame her?
And, now, here he was in the flesh, serenading her, and she was being irrevocably pulled in by the gravity that was Gakino.
Damn and damn.
She needed one of those concert uchiwas that had the face of your favorite member on it. You waved it around to pronounce your love and to cool yourself down and avoid a fit of the vapors. She definitely needed one now.
She knew her face was pink and red and ridiculous. How could she not blush? He was giving her a special fan concert, a solo performance, and he was pulling out all the stops: choreography, winking, waving. She’d seen videos of his concerts and that’s what this was. And she was sitting in the center of the front row, and instead of hoping he was waving at her, she knew he was. She gulped and her breath came faster and faster, and she knew he could tell.
And he was going to ask her to sing next. She knew he was. Gakino thought everything was better if you just tried to join in and let yourself go. He also definitely thought the more the merrier. An idol at his peak in center stage, he really didn’t understand that some people, people like Eloise, preferred being on the sidelines and in the audience. Maybe if she cheered loud enough, she could keep him performing until he got tired enough to go home? Even as she thou
ght it, she knew it wasn’t possible. Gakino was almost never tired, and dancing would just give him more energy. Damn and damn again. What was she going to do?
*
Gakino sat down on the couch. It had taken him a while to get her up there, but with a little teasing and a bit of alcohol, she was standing at the song book, flipping through it.
“You could sing a Tenshi song!” He laughed when she shot him a raised eyebrow.
“Oh, I suppose . . .”
Gakino waited for her to finish her thought, but she just grabbed the remote instead. He settled in to see what she had picked. Would she attempt something in Chinese or Japanese? He hadn’t seen any english songs in the book that had come out any later than 1989. He draped one arm across the back of the KTV couch and the other rested next to him on the seat. Stretching his legs out, he tapped one foot on the edge of the round table in front of him.
He heard the violins for a second, and then he heard Eloise. She wasn’t looking at him, her back still turned. But he was looking at her. Her curls wriggled against her back as she began to sing. He watched her hunch in on herself a little until finally she straightened her shoulders with determination.
“My funny valentine…sweet comic valentine…You make me smile with my heart…” She turned around with a blush already on her cheeks. He wondered if it was from the alcohol or because he was watching her sing.
“Your looks are laughable…un-photographable…yet you’re my favorite work of art.” She sang with a smooth alto and looked everywhere but at him. “Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak are you smart?” He laughed at these words and she smiled, too. When she sang the next line, she finally looked at him. “But don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me. Stay, little valentine, stay…each day is Valentine’s Day.”
Gakino didn’t feel like laughing anymore. He thought Eloise didn’t want to laugh either. She had stopped singing and the karaoke machine played the instrumental track all on its own. He stood and walked over to where she stood, holding the microphone at her hip. He looked into her eyes. She looked into his. She wasn’t blushing. She wasn’t moving. She was waiting. Gakino reached down without looking to grab the microphone from her hand and put it on the table. Then he reached his fingers out to wrap a curl around his finger. She lifted her own hand to touch his, leaning her head slightly toward his hand. Her hair came easily out of the clip.
Searching her eyes, he moved his other hand to the back of her neck. She didn’t say a thing. He didn’t know what he wanted her to say. She blinded him to everything else when she looked at him directly, so seriously. He bent to kiss her and she met him, her arms around his waist. She had to stand on her toes to meet him.
He pulled her into him and she went willingly. He forgot, kissing her, what he had been worried about this whole time. He forgot to think of himself as mysterious or manly. He just wanted the soft touch of her lips against his to never end. He found his own lips pushing harder against hers, trying to find purchase and never leave. She was warm against him and he could feel the curls of her hair tangling around his arm and fingers.
He felt his rear meet the surface of something, but he didn’t notice much more than that. His arms were full of Eloise and his mind was full of nothing else. She was sitting on his lap, her legs on either side of him. Then she grabbed onto his shoulders.
One of her hands seemed to be teasing the back of his neck, playing in his hair like his own hand was in hers. The other seemed to be trying to find a way to grasp tighter onto his shoulder. He could feel the heat rising off of them and suddenly he remembered where they were and who Eloise was to him.
More importantly, he realized what Eloise might think if she was aware of what was happening to a very specific part of him.
He pulled away, one hand moved to her hip to steady her and the other gently pushed her face back a bit from his.
“Daijoubu...Okay? Are you okay?” He tried to clear his head, and found himself looking at how red her lips had gotten. He dashed in to kiss them again softly before just as quickly pulling away and setting her off of his lap and onto the glass table.
He got up and walked to the window that looked over the Taichung skyline. “Okay?” He asked again, his voice trembling slightly. He put one hand on his hip and kicked his leg out for the sake of comfort.
“I…yeah. I’m fine.” Her voice was quiet. Was she upset that he’d kissed her? He wanted to be with her so badly that he couldn’t control himself. He clenched his fingers into his pocket and tried to calm himself down so that he wouldn’t make a complete ass of himself.
“So, you have a great voice! You could probably be famous here!” He shook his leg again, cursing his damned body and its terrible timing. “I’ll be right back.”
He left the room quickly, heading for the bathroom. Gakino couldn’t let her see how much he wanted her or she would run screaming from the room. He’d only just gotten her to look at him as more than an annoying tag-a-long. Now she would think he was an insensitive animal? Think of your brother pulling out his leg hair. Think of your brother pulling out his leg hair, he told himself. A good man did not treat the woman he liked this way. It was dishonorable to push yourself on her, almost shameful.
Gakino found his way into the bathroom, braced himself on the sink with both hands and looked into the mirror. He only hoped she wasn’t offended too much by his forwardness.
“Oh my god.” Eloise touched her own lips lightly as she watched Gakino’s back dash from the room. Had that just happened? What had just happened?
Eloise looked to the couch and table beside her. Had she just been sitting there with Gakino? Not sitting. Had she just…had she just been making out with Gakino Yoh at a KTV? A rush of adrenaline filled her body and she couldn’t decide if she should scream or pass out.
She, Eloise Bromleigh, had just had her hands all over Gakino Yoh whose hands had been all over her. Not to mention what their lips had been doing.
The squeal that filled the room could not be called back and neither could the urge she had to jump up and down. He had really kissed her? He had really been unable to resist her? They had really made out sitting on that couch. Well, he had been sitting on there. She had been perched on top of his lap. It made sense that she couldn’t stop herself from wanting Gakino, but here was the undeniable proof that he wanted her, too.
Until he ran from the room.
Why had he gone? Did he regret what happened? She refused to spiral into thoughts about being too heavy, or a bad kisser, or too forward. And she certainly wasn’t going to think at all about how KTVs had been bad news for Tenshi since Hiro’s latest snafu. Nope, she was blocking the door. No way those thoughts were getting in.
“What do I do? What do I do?” Eloise turned in a circle until she saw her purse buried in the cushions she and Gakino had pushed off the couch. Seeing it, she had one thought and one thought only. “I have to go.”
She grabbed her purse and ran from the room, too.
*
“Eloise?"
Gakino, finally calm enough, walked back into their KTV lounge, but Eloise was already gone. He ran down the stairs and into the street to catch up with her, but she had disappeared already. He pushed his fingers into his hair and pulled, shaking his head at the floor.
“Chikushou!” Gakino pushed the door to the room back open, grabbed his things, and went back to his hotel. On the way, he opened and closed his phone at least a dozen times. He couldn’t call her. He didn’t know what to say.
CHAPTER 9
The Kiss –which she would forever think of as a proper noun– made her head spin and the world with it.. The feel of his mouth on hers, the feel of his hands on her face and neck…if his hands hadn’t been there, she might have fallen. But they were there and she grabbed them and held on, so she wouldn’t be swept away. The Kiss had none of the normal awkwardness she had come to expect from first kisses, which were always too ea
ger, too wet, too grasping.
Their first kiss was perfect, and his lips had tasted like the strawberry milk he had earlier, and there would never, in the history of the world, of the universe, be anything as sweet as that kiss.
At least that’s what she’d thought an hour ago.
But then he had pulled backed so suddenly, and there had been such an immediate distance between them, and she just couldn’t bear it if he hadn’t felt what she did. When he’d left the room, her mind was racing, screaming what now, what now, what now? So she’d run. Because she was good at running.
She was great at it actually.
Look at her, half way around the world from all her friends and family.
On the way home in the cab, though, she’d wondered if running was the right thing to do.
She kept replaying the night over in her mind, and she still couldn’t believe it. She wanted to just enjoy it, just pretend the kiss was a fantasy and not real life...because you had to deal with stuff in real life, and she didn’t want to think about the Kiss and question it and analyze it. She wanted to hold on to it, freeze it in time because she was afraid to want more than this.
It was hard enough considering what she felt, what she wanted, but the kiss meant that she would have to think about what it meant for Gakino, too.
She flung herself back on her bed, and tried taking deep, long breaths. Her heart was beating out at what had to be a dangerous pace. Despite her worry, she couldn’t stop smiling. Her face hurt a little. She imagined she looked a little mad and definitely slightly off kilter, a person that you would scoot away from on public transportation, a person you didn’t trust because they looked unhinged from reality.
She laughed at herself, and then she couldn’t stop laughing, full of a joy so eager to fly out and celebrate, she had to laugh. But she could hear her panic, too.
How to Date Japanese Idols (The Tenshi Series) Page 10