by Jane Nin
But I needn’t have worried—it sailed right over her head. “Any big plans for Spring Break?” she asked. “I’m dropping a wad on a spa week.”
“That sounds nice,” I said.
“There’s a great deal right in town if you’re interested,” she said. “It’s at the _____ Hotel.”
She’d named the place where Jack and I had started our game. I flushed a little at the memory. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t think I can, anyway.”
“I know that tone,” she said, “that’s the I-have-a-secret-boyfriend tone.”
That she was even half-right bothered me—was I so transparent? And if so, could other people look at me and see even more? “I’m afraid it isn’t,” I corrected her. Though clearly, Jack wasn’t my boyfriend.
Fortunately she took my lack of conviction for dejectedness. She gave my thigh an unwelcome squeeze. “I’m sure you’ll meet someone, dear,” she said, trying to reassure me. “Men these days are just confused, you see. They don’t know if they want to marry a virgin or a whore. And most of us are somewhere in between.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. How could I not think of Jack? He didn’t seem confused—quite the opposite—but was he? He was only human, after all, successful and smart as he might be. He kept saying this game was about my desire, but obviously that wasn’t purely the case. Was I running the gauntlet of his fantasy? Then again, supposing I was, did I really mind?
After lunch I spent two numbing hours explaining acceptable margin widths and figure notations to a string of PhD and Masters’ candidates who made no efforts to conceal their opinions that these sorts of considerations were beneath them. The last one, a lanky Drama Studies student from Tennessee, kept rolling his eyes as I pointed out spots where his formatting failed to conform to the standard.
“You think this is stupid,” I said, annoyed.
“Essentially,” he agreed.
“Well, it might be, but you’re still being a little shit.”
This got his attention.
“I’m sorry?” he said, perhaps actually unsure of whether he’d heard me right.
“You think you’re better than me because you’re a doctoral candidate and I’m some lowly secretary telling you what font you can use.”
He blushed dark, then, and I knew I was right.
“I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “I’m just—it’s a lot of stress finishing all this, and the formatting stuff, well it just seems dumb.”
“I understand,” I said, and before I even knew I was going to say it I was adding, “Do you want to fuck me?”
“Um,” he said, “what?” And he blushed again, which showed he’d heard me and was answer enough.
As for me, I was excited by my own boldness. He stared, transfixed, as I stood up from my chair and reached up under my skirt to pull down my underwear. Then I walked around the desk, and hopped up onto the other side, hiking my skirt up to my hips but not taking it off—not taking anything else off. This one, I was calling.
He looked between my legs and then lifted his eyes to mine but still he didn’t move. I could see his cock straining inside his pretentious, tight corduroys.
I could also see it was enormous.
“Take off your pants,” I said, and he paused for only a second before beginning to do so. He peeled them off, and then stepped out of his brightly colored briefs, and his lovely, ridiculously huge cock stood out beneath the front tails of his shirt. It was always little jackasses like this who were the biggest, I thought to myself ruefully. And no wonder they reproduced so successfully.
No matter, though—for the moment he’d be mine.
He stepped toward me then, taking hold of himself and pressing the head of his cock against the soft entrance to my body. Reaching behind me, he scooted me forward, and I felt him about to plunge into me.
“Wait,” I said, and he looked at me, that same half-gone look in his eyes that I knew must be in mine. We all of us were hunger’s creatures, I saw—or were if hunger wanted us.
But he was listening, exercising some final shred of command over the volume of his body’s prerogative. “Will you make me come?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” he said, breaking into a smile, “absolutely.”
And he rocked his hips back and then moved forward to bury himself in me as deep as he could. Then slid himself out again, then plunged forward. Slowly, slowly, and with each new slow thrust I cried out.
I laid back on the desk now, onto a pile of incorrectly formatted thesis samples, and he hiked my skirt up to my waist so he could rub my clit while he continued to slide himself in and out. I yelped in pleasure-pain as he kept filling me, only to withdraw. Filled me again, withdrew again.
It was nearly impossible that people couldn’t hear us in the hallway outside my office.
But also, in barely a minute, I was climaxing, my yelps turning to helpless, outright cries. I felt him nearing his own orgasm as my own contractions tightened down on him—saw his face as he strained to hold back.
“Are you—”
“No,” I said quickly, “you have to—”
And with a groan he pulled out, his cum spilling onto my thighs, onto the inside of my skirt. He straightened himself unsteadily, then sat down heavily in a chair.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sitting up again and reaching for a Kleenex to wipe myself off, “I should have said something sooner.”
“Probably,” he said, “but hey, I guess it all worked out.”
I laughed, and so did he. Then I stood, and handed him his pants.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It was very much not a problem,” he said, amused and still rather taken aback. “And I’m sorry about before. I’ll make sure the margins are one and a quarter inch, like you said.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, “I think I’m quitting this job. Or else I’m about to get fired.” As he pulled on his pants he looked at my office door with trepidation. “There’s a fire escape outside my window,” I told him. “Feel free to take that.”
An hour later I phoned Jack. “It looks I can leave a day early, if you like,” I told him.
It was still dark out the next morning when I locked my apartment and headed out to the waiting car.
9.
Jack was none too pleased when I told him about quitting my job. Of course, I didn’t tell him everything about the circumstances precipitating the decision—I felt like keeping a secret.
“It was an epiphany,” I said, holding out my glass so the flight attendant could refill it. We were flying first class to Tokyo.
I looked at his subtly downturned mouth. “Please, stop frowning like that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m just concerned, is all. I don’t want your life to start crumbling around you and for me to be the cause.”
“It was already crumbling,” I muttered.
“Pardon?” said Jack.
“I hated that job, is what I mean,” I said. “It was petty and boring and I didn’t have any friends. University payroll is 90 percent snobs.”
“Including you,” he jibed.
“Not the same way, though. Not like the professors. Or the students, for that matter. They treated me like a half-wit.”
“So why’d you stay?”
“Laziness,” I admitted. “Or…”
“Or?”
“I mean, what could I get that was really any better?”
“What a ridiculous question,” said Jack. “You’re smart, attractive. You could pursue any career if you were willing to work.”
“I’m willing to work,” I said, hesitatingly…
“You’re afraid.”
“Maybe.”
“ ‘Maybe’ is a fearful answer.”
“Maybe,” I said again. It frightened and thrilled me the way he could read me. And that he wanted to, and did. I felt valued, valuable—like my life, my mind was some fascinating novel, or some shining curiosit
y he’d found in the desert. A moon rock.
The first man I’d ever been with had made me feel that way, too, but he was 17 and I was 16 and we were idiots. Joyful idiots carefully discovering all the sensations our bodies could produce, and mistaking that for love. We’d take pictures of ourselves fucking. I’d follow him around with my fingers hooked in the waistband of his jeans. I baked him cookies all the time, because whenever he wasn’t around all I could do was think of him and it gave me a way to ignore the ache. Maybe it was love, of a sort. All I know is I woke up one day and realized we had nothing to say to each other. The moment I got admitted to college out of state, I dumped him, and he cried like a little kid and called me a bitch and a slut and all the things men in pain call the women who have caused it, no matter how many cookies we have baked them. And the following week he had a new girlfriend and last I heard they were still together, now carting around a passel of kids.
That evidence fell soundly on the side of it never having been love.
And this was its poison, I think—this realization that I was not very special. Women who men loved, those women were special. I had never been one of those women. There was something about me, I became convinced—something drab and sad and ordinary. And even as I got older, and better at making myself attractive to men, better at letting them take me out to dinner and then home to their apartments so they could fuck me—it would never last. Sometimes it might take a while—a few months, a year, but they’d eventually figure out my ordinariness—I wasn’t sure, exactly, how I always gave it away—and then they’d move on to someone more glittering.
“Are you alright?” said Jack, cutting off my bleak nostalgic exercise. I looked at his face, so intelligent and tender, and hated imagining the moment he would finally find me ordinary, too.
I nodded, afraid if I spoke my voice would give away all the sadness I was swallowing.
“Hey,” he said, reaching down and weaving his fingers into mine, “if you hated that job so much, I’m glad you quit.” He squeezed and I squeezed back. “We’ll figure something out for you—something better.”
We, he’d said.
I quickly turned and kissed his ear, and for a long, sweet moment I stayed there, stilling the grateful sobs that wanted to pour out of me, breathing the clean scent of his hair. Our hands stayed linked, tight.
10.
I had never been to a place as completely foreign as Tokyo and I was glad to be arriving with Jack, who either knew or gave the illusion of knowing his way around. We walked out to our car—still “our” car, though it was a tasteful compact sedan—and after the attendant finished loading our luggage into the back Jack bowed and thanked him in Japanese.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said, once we were in the car and the doors were closed.
“What?” he said, innocently.
“You know what,” I said. “You speak Japanese?”
He laughed. “A little. Please, thank you, where is the bathroom. And of course, ‘how much will you accept for this technology’?”
“Promise?”
“Swear. Much as I’d love to impress you, most of our business is conducted in English.”
“I’m frankly relieved,” I said, “maybe you’re human after all.”
“Most assuredly,” said Jack.
I gazed out at Tokyo through the windows. It was neon and concrete and orderly. The people walked purposefully along its crowded sidewalks. But I had also read of this culture’s seedier side—the sex clubs and geishas and tentacle porn, the schoolgirls’ underwear in vending machines. I couldn’t imagine what our game would be tonight.
Our car turned down an alley where, in a long stretch of garage-like spaces, craftsmen were turning out furniture: planing and polishing, sanding edges smooth.
Jack rolled down the window and told the driver to slow down. In the car I could smell the wood, and the lacquer.
“Here,” he said suddenly, and the driver stopped. “Come on,” he told me, and I climbed out—that familiar feeling of delicious apprehension rising up in me.
He conferred with an old man carefully buffing a gleaming bench made of mahogany. The man nodded, and gestured for me to approach.
With a quietly proud gesture he yanked a sheet from where it had been draped over a tallish something. The furniture revealed was nothing I could decipher. There were two levels of what seemed like tabletop, suspended over a long, built-in seat. It reminded me a little of a child’s school desk, if such a thing had been built to accommodate a child sitting in it with his legs straight out, and strangely high off the ground.
This man spoke only a tiny bit of English. The bi-level “tabletop” was hinged, and he now lifted it and gestured for me to climb in. I was intended to sit in this thing. I started to climb up—the seat part was bar-stool height. He stopped me, though, and pointed to my head.
“This… here,” he said, pointing to the lowest part of what I’d thought was the seat.
Jack nodded for me to follow his direction. I climbed in and lay on my back, knees bent and ankles crossed. The seat was gently sloped, so that my head tilted down, my hair spilling off the edge.
The man spoke to me impatiently.
“You have to straighten your legs so he can lower the lid,” explained Jack.
I did so, and the lid was lowered. I could no longer see the ceiling—only polished wood a few inches from my face. From there, the wood pressed against my shoulders, and the opening admitted my breasts. Beneath them, the second panel covered my stomach.
Now I felt the man’s hands on my ankles, slowly bringing them apart and in the direction of my head. It reminded me of yoga, a pose called “Plow Position,” where you laid on your back and stuck your ass in the air and finally brought your toes to touch the floor above your head. Except here I was also doing the splits. I relaxed, finally, and the tops of my thighs rested upon the wide upper level of the table.
Even with all my clothes on, it was not difficult to see the kind of view this table had been expertly built to facilitate. And I did not imagine I would be wearing clothes whenever I climbed into it next.
“Good,” said Jack, and the table was opened again and I climbed out. Between the blood rushing away from my head and the anticipatory tingling between my legs I suddenly felt everything spinning and began to lose my balance.
Jack saw, and grabbed me, steadying me. “Are you okay?” he asked, “Is this still okay?”
The room still lurched and spun but I could focus on his face, searching, worrying.
“Yes,” I said. I was dizzy, but terribly excited.
11.
The lighting in the restaurant was somehow both bright and flattering—presumably carefully engineered to show off the gorgeous colors and textures of the fish behind the counter. The sushi chefs were preparing everything for the evening when Jack and I walked in. Once again, I wore my fur. This time, having an idea of what was in store, I hadn’t bothered to put anything on underneath it.
This had led to various stresses, amusements and titillations in the process of getting here from our hotel, nor had I eaten yet, so for the second time that day I was simultaneously floating and aroused. I cruised the counters and inspected the pink and orange and nacreous white flesh of the fish, saw the tank of teeming, striped prawns, the inert coils of octopus tentacle. Beads of salmon roe glistened orange, whole mackerel lay in little streaks of silver. It felt more like a jewelry store than a restaurant, so clean and white, everything safely behind glass.
As I finished my inspection I turned back toward Jack and saw the table. I realized now it had been finished to match the rest of the furniture in the restaurant—it was at even height with the other tables, its finish the same glossy, understated surface as all the other wood in sight.
My breath caught a little and I wobbled in my brand new high-heeled shoes. Jack had suggested I be pedicured and lavishly shod, given that my feet would be very much on display. “I doubt they’ll be looking
at my feet!” I teased him, but I surely didn’t mind some preparatory pampering.
“When does it start?” I asked him, and he looked at his watch.
“Five minutes,” he said. “You should probably climb in.”
I nodded and stepped toward the table as he lifted its lid. He helped me off with my coat and for a moment I just stood there in the middle of the restaurant, naked. The sushi chefs studiously continued their work, not stealing so much as a glance. I found their work ethic reassuring, admirable.
Jack helped me into position in the little table. I wriggled down until my head was at its lowest part, my back and breasts arched up, my legs clear of where the lid would hinge back down.