I spat hard in his face. That was the command I had been making him wait for. Leroy frowned, a confused look in his eyes, but in an instant his face returned to its placid, innocent self. I spat at him again.
Then, quickly reaching out my hand to his half-zipped fly, I wrenched down the zipper. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. His zipper gaped wide like some cheap whore’s pussy and I felt bile rising in my throat; I was nauseated with jealousy.
I stood up and turned the chair around to face him, and sat back down again. Then, slowly, I opened my legs. Like Leroy, I wasn’t wearing any underwear—I didn’t like it when my panty line showed through my clothes, so the only things I had on under my tight, black skirt were the scarlet garters holding up my stockings.
I made Leroy sit on his knees on the floor in front of me. Then, reaching out my leg toward him, with one long, sharp, red heel, I stood on the soft, limp creature between his legs. His face screwed up tight in pain. But the creature came to life, growing as rapidly as if it had just been fed.
I pulled Leroy’s head toward my skirt and put my legs up over his shoulders so we wouldn’t look like some weird, hermaphrodite monster.
The chair squeaked as it rocked backward and forward, and I gripped his neck tightly between my legs and threw my head back. My stilettos dug into his back and fell to the floor—I was reminded of those coin-operated horse rides that I used to cry and beg my mom to let me go on when I was small. Now I had my own horse and I could ride it as often as I liked, not paying with coins, but with my eyes, my teeth, and my lips.
I buried my fingers deep in his thick, wiry hair, and arched my back like a cat, my body stretched taut like a spring, moving up and down, up and down, as his tongue lapped deliciously over me.
But I wasn’t ready to come yet, so I clenched my fists in his hair and pulled his head up with both hands to stop his tongue. Leroy just gazed up at me with that guiltless expression of his. He must have known how much that look in his eyes excited me.
I pushed him away and peeled off one of my silk stockings. Then I tied it tightly around his wrists. I doubt whether 1 needed to have bothered—he would never have tried to resist me. He would have hand-cuffed himself if I had asked him.
Now it was his turn to writhe. My lips melted like hot crayons on his skin, and the tight, black canvas did not resist. My long hair wandered on its own over his body as my head moved to and fro, and before long I had him crying out.
“Give it to me,” he begged.
I looked up at his contorted face, the sadness and pain in his eyes bringing a lump to my throat, and I gave it to him.
Leroy called my pussy his toothless, hungry woman. And he was right—that night it was ravenous, and I was desperate to fill it. It had always seemed that I could never shake the feeling of impatience gnawing away inside me, like the brush in a bottle of nail polish, always too short to reach the bottom. But that night I really tried for the first time, and the brush finally touched the bottom of the bottle. Hot tears poured down my cheeks.
The next thing I remember I was straddled on top of Leroy’s body like a little girl. He slowly sat up and put his tied-up arms over my head.
It felt like a noose as he brought them down to my neck and drew my face toward his. I could feel my own black stocking rubbing up against the nape of my neck. Leaning his head to one side, he kissed me, and I fell onto his chest as though I had fainted, and took my punishment.
That was the last time I saw Leroy. I heard rumors around town that he had been looking for me, and that he was often to be found drunk, crying in bars. But no one would give him my address or my telephone number.
I spent my nights alone in my apartment, just staring into space, and by the time I started going out again, Leroy had quit the military and gone back to the States. But by then I had a new boyfriend anyway.
No one seemed surprised that Leroy was back. It had been two years since he left Japan, but nobody thought anything much about it when he returned. In a way it was such a small thing—the number of quiet, black men in town had increased by one. None of the people who remembered Leroy had even seen him yet.
Even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have recognized him.
One afternoon, I sat in the apartment, rolling his name around in my mouth. Leroy. It tasted like one of those sugarcoated pills the doctor gives you—nice at first, but it begins to taste bitter if you keep it in your mouth too long without swallowing. In spite of that, the two years he had been away had given me the chance to distance myself from his memory, and now that he was back again, I thought I deserved the chance to have some more fun with him. And of course, it was Leroy’s duty to let me. I began to feel restless just thinking about that bitter flavor that only I could taste. When I began to recall the way things had been between me and Leroy, and considered the possibility of picking up where we had left off, I began to feel horny and excited. I lit a cigarette to calm myself down, but D.C. seemed to have already noticed my change of mood and was looking at me suspiciously.
Memories suddenly began to flood back… the smell of wet grass… the echo of our passionate sighs breaking the silence; Leroy’s silhouetted figure standing in the dark kitchen in front of his opened refrigerator, getting himself a beer; the quizzical expression on his face when he was eating fish and realized he could still smell my musky scent on his fingers.
My heart sped up. I remembered the man who had been sucking nectar from the flowers under the window the day I got the telephone call about Leroy, and, although it was unlikely, I wondered if it could have been him down there in the bushes. But I would have known him if it were. The image of his face was burnt so deeply into my mind that I would have recognized him anywhere. And anyway, if it really had been Leroy, he would have recognized me, too, leaning out the window.
And no matter how far away he had been, his dark, piercing eyes and his thick, black lashes would have blazed with passion, screaming out that he still wanted me. It wasn’t that I was being conceited. That’s the way our relationship was. When we were together, we just slipped naturally into our assigned roles. So I knew the guy in the bushes couldn’t have been him.
“What are you wearing tonight, Ruiko?” D.C.’s voice pulled me back from my daydreams.
“Huh? Tonight? Why, what’s happening tonight?”
“Oh, shit! You’re kidding me, right? It’s the Black Ball tonight.”
I had forgotten all about it. It was just a bunch of young people having dinner together, pretending to be sophisticated for the evening, but everyone took a partner and you never knew what might happen—you might even find yourself sitting at the same table as a guy you had once slept with, who had brought his new girlfriend with him. I knew because it had happened to me once. He and I spent the whole evening trying to stifle our laughter, pretending not to know each other so the people we had come with wouldn’t notice anything was wrong. And when our feet touched under the white linen tablecloth, I pretended to cough, spluttering into my champagne to hide my giggles. Actually, I had really enjoyed myself that night. It had been a lot of fun.
I never imagined that I would bump into Leroy at the ball. I wanted another taste of that relationship of ours, which only the two of us could understand, but I never wanted to hear his piano-playing again.
For the past two years I had been so frightened by the memory of his piano-playing that at times it felt as though I’d built my new life around that mixture of hatred and fear.
By the time we got to the ball and handed in our tickets at the reception, most people had already started eating.
I was wearing a skintight red dress, so tight that D.C. couldn’t even squeeze his hand inside. I often wore red when I went out, and after a while it sort of became my signature color, so that when a guy saw something red it would remind him of me. My red stilettos were a good example. I had worn them during so many encounters that just the sight of them was bound to make any number of faces turn red.