In the courtyard, there was a fountain with a pool around it, cleverly designed so that the water extended into the interior of the lobby. Saeko and Hashiba were standing on a floor elevated just above the water’s surface. A water court, Hashiba believed it was called. The entire floor was built of strong glass that covered the shallow pool, so that it felt almost like walking across the surface of a frozen lake. Hashiba couldn’t imagine how much it cost just to maintain such an extravagant contrivance. From the paintings on the walls to the sculptures in the hallway, every aspect of the building gave off an air of dazzling sophistication.
As a director, Hashiba had visited the homes of numerous celebrities, but nothing he had seen before even approached the opulence this building exuded.
“Do you actually live here?” he asked, his face a mask of stupefaction.
Saeko simply nodded, stopping in the elevator hall.
Of the two elevators, the one on the left lacked floor-indicator lamps. Only after they entered it — Saeko inserted a card key to open its doors — did Hashiba realize that the elevator was exclusive to the penthouse apartment and connected it to an underground parking lot as well as the lobby.
Where is she taking me? Hashiba wondered, still completely dazed. His hand had gone limp in Saeko’s grasp.
He had a general idea of Saeko’s background. Her father had vanished when she was seventeen, and after college she had gone to work at a publishing company. She had quit upon marrying, only to divorce later without children. Now she supported herself as a freelance writer.
Those facts added up to an image of a tough divorcée struggling to make it on her own. Hashiba had imagined her living in a one-bedroom apartment at best, a cramped living space that doubled as an office with books and magazines stacked so densely you could hardly walk through it, a stark environment dominated by the smell of ink and paper. If not utter poverty, Hashiba had expected Saeko’s surroundings to reflect a hand-to-mouth existence.
Where is this going?
As he stepped out of the elevator, Hashiba’s feet sank into the deep pile of a lush crimson carpet that led straight down the hallway to a single door. Hashiba felt as if he were floating through water as he traversed this astonishing space to approach a heavy door.
Unable to disguise his amazement, he asked, “How long have you lived here?”
Once more, Saeko scanned her card key to open the sole apartment on the building’s top floor, ushering Hashiba in. “Since my first year of high school …”
Hashiba’s own apartment would probably have fit comfortably in the front entryway of Saeko’s home.
“How on earth …” he stammered.
“It’s hard to explain, so I don’t bring people here very often. Even my editor would be surprised to learn that I live in a place like this.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?”
“Does it, uh, bother you?” Saeko asked, her face completely serious.
“Of course not!”
“Well, good.”
Suddenly, Hashiba felt like he finally understood why Saeko always seemed so enigmatic. Her home was the last place you would imagine as a single thirtysomething woman’s.
“I just feel as if I’ve unraveled one of your mysteries,” Hashiba began, but before he could finish the thought, Saeko’s lips pressed against his mouth, silencing him. With an urgency that contrasted sharply with her usual grace, she wrapped both arms around his body and pulled him to her, pressing her groin against his thigh.
As their bodies cleaved together and their hands explored beneath each other’s jackets, the door automatically locked behind them.
Locked in embrace, Hashiba and Saeko stumbled and fell repeatedly as they crossed the floor of the vast living room, so spacious that Hashiba couldn’t imagine how many tatami mats would fill it. Kissing and clinging to each other as they moved sideways through the space like mating crabs, they laughed out loud with each tumble.
Having flung off each other’s clothes item by item, by the time they reached the bedroom and tumbled onto the bed Saeko was in her panties, stockings, and bra, and Hashiba was wearing just his briefs and socks.
The bewildering events of the day had only intensified their arousal. After the shocking revelations that had come to light in Kitazawa’s office, they had watched Seiji Fujisawa, the sole heir to the Fujisawa estate, plummet to the ground from a tall building before their very eyes. The sense that something extraordinary was afoot pricked at their skin like a needle-sharp arrow, pumping adrenaline into their bloodstreams. Still heady with that tension, their passion for each other seemed to flood the void of their apprehension.
It was a well-documented fact that the reproductive capacity of animals increased when their survival was at risk. Saeko and Hashiba’s lives hadn’t been directly threatened, but they could sense danger looming just ahead. The fact that they alone shared that information stoked their excitement, inflaming them with the passion of co-conspirators.
Hashiba lifted Saeko up and dropped her on the bed. Too frenzied to bother with the fasteners, he pushed her bra up and out of the way to expose her large nipples. They were already hard as he took them into his mouth and rolled them on his tongue. The tip of his nose brushed against her bra. As he inhaled the delicate scent of her skin, Hashiba reached around her back with one hand and unhooked her bra. Returning both hands to her breasts, he caressed them from underneath. One wouldn’t know it from her svelte appearance when she was clothed, but her breasts were unexpectedly round and plump.
Saeko slid her hand over Hashiba’s briefs, feeling his engorged member. With her hand positioned the way a runner in a relay race received a baton, it more than spanned the distance from her fingertips to her wrist, and its already-slippery tip had managed to poke its way out from under his waistband.
Saeko was careful not to stroke it too strongly. It throbbed in her hand as if it might explode at any moment, and Hashiba was already panting heavily. She wanted to make sure his erection lasted long enough to go where it was going. Although she still hadn’t seen it directly, her automatic reaction when she felt the shape of his penis in her hand was a rush of tenderness.
It happened just as Hashiba was stroking Saeko’s breasts from bottom to top. When his fingers reached the back of her left breast, the tips encountered a small lump, just around a centimeter in diameter. The sensation was a familiar one to him. Stunned, his fingers froze in their tracks.
The moment Hashiba’s fingers discovered the lump, Saeko knew. It was the exact spot that had been troubling her for the past several days.
As if the tiny lump in Saeko’s breast were a switch, touching it was like shutting down a machine.
Silently, the relentless flow of energy that had been mounting in Hashiba abruptly waned, and his hand hovered in the air as if to embody his unconscious withdrawal. It was as if the sensation in his fingertips traveled straight to his lower body without even checking in with his brain. As he struggled to catch his breath, Hashiba battled the sudden ebb of energy, but it was too late to reverse the flow as all of the vitality quickly drained out of his lower half.
As Hashiba lay flat on his stomach, Saeko tenderly stroked his head. It occurred to her that watching all of the vigor drain so suddenly from his swollen penis was rather like watching the tide go out at the beach. When the ocean receded, it exposed the sand underneath that was previously hidden by seawater, revealing patterns. The image on the wet sand was … Seiji Fujimura’s face, contorted by the paroxysms of death. The moment Hashiba’s fingers found the lump in her breast, the horrific image flashed into Saeko’s mind. She was assaulted by the memory of a man resembling Seiji fingering her breast in the hospital in Ina. She remembered what he had said as he’d fingered the lump.