That, and when the only things I want in my mouth are cigarette smoke, hard liquor, and the taste of my new guy’s cum.
At first glance, love looks like some kind of terrible disease, but adults seem to develop a technique for dealing with it, like with that bitter French coffee that has too much milk in it.
The reason why everything had fallen to pieces on this occasion was because I had had too much confidence in my own technique. People will probably say it was just a love affair, and that’s how I want it to be.
I would rather die than let anyone know how important he was to me: my feelings for this man made me realize just how worthless all my other memories were, as well as all of the little tricks I had learned along the way.
All I knew was that I wanted him.
“Open the window, D.C.!”
There was no answer.
Clouds of white steam poured out the bathroom from the half-open door and seemed to make directly for me as I lay there on the bed. I hated waking up with my eyelashes all wet and stuck together because it made me think I had been crying in my sleep. But I never had any reason to cry. Then I would realize it was that jerk D.C.’s fault for letting all the steam out into the bedroom again.
I was always yelling at him to keep the door closed when he took a shower—he usually spent over an hour in there anyway. At first he would do as I asked and close the door, but after a while the steam made him feel like he was smothering, and, struggling for air, he would open the door a crack.
Today he hadn’t even bothered to ask me if it was okay, because I was asleep. He was such an asshole.
Irritated, I crawled out of bed and walked across the floorboards to the window, combing my fingers through my hair. I heard a small snap! and looked down at my hand—one of my fingernails was broken and a hair had caught in the split in the nail. Dammit, D.C.! It was probably his fault my nail was broken in the first place. It must have happened in bed the night before. The silver-polished tip was probably still buried in his shoulder. Shit! What a waste of a good nail.
But maybe I was being too hard on him—my fingernails were really too weak for me to grow them long, anyway.
I opened the window and looked out from the fourth-floor apartment. The sun was already high in the sky, and the May sunshine seemed to be the same temperature as my body. I was still feeling drowsy, like a pregnant cat at the end of spring, and I dropped into a chair by the window. I could feel D.C.’s sperm slowly dripping down out of me, leaving stains on my nightgown.
I turned the radio on and lit a cigarette, screwing up the empty red packet and throwing it on the floor. I knew that D.C. would pick it up I and put it in the wastebasket later.
I looked down from the window and could see azaleas blooming in the flowerbed below. They were so crowded together down there that they looked like they were growing on top of one another. Both the air and the flowers were perfectly still. But then, as I watched, the warm sun on the bushes seemed to make the flowers sway a little from side to side.
Strange. I stared a little harder and saw that it wasn’t the sun after all.
A man was in the bushes. He was gently pulling the bright pink flowers from their stems. He deftly removed the blossoms one by one with his large fingers and then sucked the nectar from the narrow end of the trumpet-shaped petals. The way he placed each flower to his big, thick lips made him look like some kind of carnivorous plant drinking cherry brandy. He raised his eyebrows and gazed skyward. He still had one of the flowers in his mouth. Suddenly, I realized that the flower was exactly the same color my toenails had been two years earlier.
That was the time he had knelt down in front of me and clumsily tried to paint my toenails with that vivid, shocking-pink nail polish. He had gazed at the nails so lovingly, but he just couldn’t wait for them to dry before putting them in his mouth, and it had all stuck to his lips like sticky slime. I just couldn’t stop laughing—he had looked like a little boy who had eaten too many grapes. He stared down at my feet, almost in tears. He could see the imprint that his lips had left in the nail polish, and he obviously realized that he would have to start all over again from the beginning, first taking off the old nail polish, and then repainting my nails.
I looked outside again to see if the guy sucking nectar from the flowers had any traces of nail polish on his lips.
But he had gone. The flowers were once again motionless. I wondered if it had been a dream, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew that the still-sweet-smelling blossoms were there, strewn naked and dying on the ground under the azaleas.
“What are you looking at?”
D.C. was standing behind me. He was big, like a bear, but he always looked so awkward, like he was embarrassed or ashamed of his size. I really felt sorry for him when he had that vulnerable look on his face, felt kind of motherly, I guess, but at the same time like I wanted to hurt him, too, so that later I could console him. You see, I liked to keep him guessing, to keep him on his toes. Sometimes I would show him all the love in the world, and then other times I would punish him, really hurt him. He was always so desperate to make me happy, but I took a lot of pleasure in destroying all his efforts, like trampling him in high heels.
It had been the same with my last boyfriend, too.
I was going over it again in my mind, dredging up old memories from the past, and the guy sucking nectar down in the azalea bushes seemed to be a part of it all. Those memories from two years earlier were much stronger than I had realized.
I always went for the same kind of guy. I liked my men big and pathetic—the kind of men I could control, the kind of men I could make deliriously happy or desperately miserable with a single glance They were difficult to find, but once our eyes had met there was no need for conversation—they would just come running to me, sniffing around me like dogs, and they’d be only too willing to fall at my feet and place me high on a pedestal. They were the kind of men who knew that I was the only one who could make them happy.
It was two years ago that I first discovered the pleasure of owning them.
D.C. interrupted my thoughts. “Hey, Ruiko. Why don’t we go to Great Fats for dinner tonight?”
“Huh? I don’t want to go there. The meat is always so tough. And anyway, there’s a new restaurant just a little further down from Fats, isn’t there?”
“There is?”
“You don’t know anything, do you? I want to go to the new place, okay? They have seafood.”
I could tell D.C. was already trying to figure out what to wear to the new restaurant that would please me, and I went back to daydreaming about my affair two years before. He’d been crazy about me, too; he let me treat him like a slave.
Just then, the telephone rang, and I answered in a cheerful voice.
“Hey, Ruiko, have you heard?” It was a friend of mine.
“Heard what?”
“Leroy’s back!”
“Oh yeah?”
I was surprised, but I tried not to give that away in my voice.
“I wonder if he came back to see you?”
“No way,” I said offhandedly.
But as we chatted, I began to consider the potential in the situation—sure, there were plenty of things I would find annoying about him being around again. At the same time there was also plenty to look forward to—and when I put down the phone I could almost taste the excitement.