“Oh, good. It’s lovely for me, too.” I moved a little faster, deeper. I was starting to breathe hard.
She pulled the quilt off us and turned her head to the side to watch. “Oh, that’s so good,” she said. “Seeing you do that. God, that’s so beautiful.”
Having her watch like that, experience me moving inside her with her hand and her eyes, was insanely erotic. Panting, I said, “I think…I think I have to stop.”
“Yes, stop. Don’t come inside me. Even if I can’t feel it, I can still get pregnant.”
With difficulty, I slowed down.
“But I want you to,” she went on. “Next time, with a condom, I want to feel that, okay?”
“Oh, God, yes. Ask me anything.”
She laughed and I managed to pull out just in time. She said, “Did you come?”
I shook my head. “No. Almost, but no.”
She reached down and started moving her hand up and down my shaft. “Oh, God,” I said. “God.”
She was looking right into my eyes. “I want to make you come again.”
“Oh, fuck…you are…” I groaned, and came on her belly to the firm rhythm of her hand.
When I was done, I collapsed onto my side next to her. She reached down to her belly, then brought her finger to her lips. For an instant, she seemed to remember herself, and looked suddenly self-conscious. “I wanted…to see what you taste like,” she said.
I shook my head slowly, watching her in wonder, absolutely speechless.
She slid her finger into her mouth and smiled. “It’s good.”
“Oh, I can’t tell you how glad that makes me.”
She laughed. “When you were inside me, I couldn’t feel it…but at the same time, I could. And now I feel…I can’t explain it. So relaxed. Like something really good happened to me. Like I had a wonderful dream I can’t quite remember. It’s so strange. So…God, it’s so lovely.”
I looked at her, saying nothing, just spent and happy and feeling I was halfway in love. She said, “Tell me what you’re thinking?”
“No, it’s stupid.”
“Tell me.”
“That…the way you trusted me tonight. With everything. And this was your first time. I’m just…blown away.”
She nodded. “Me, too.”
“I don’t want you to be embarrassed with me, okay? Your legs, or whatever. None of it bothers me.”
“I’ll try.”
“Well, you’ve been doing pretty well so far.”
“Have I? I guess you’ll have to get me into bed more often. I want to try everything with you, okay? Everything.”
And for the rest of the night, we did. To this day, it was the best night of my life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We slept late the next morning, having been up and active pretty much the entire night before, and also as sleeping in was Sayaka’s habit. When we woke, she had to get to class and I needed to go meet McGraw. But I told her I’d see her at the hotel that night.
“You know,” she said, “if you really need a place to stay, you could stay here.”
I couldn’t very well tell her that right then, money was the least of my problems. “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like I’d be imposing.”
“You wouldn’t. Not if you’d be willing to stay up with me for a while when I get home from work.”
I laughed. “How about if tonight, I stay at the hotel, and I go home with you after? And then we’ll see.”
She smiled. “That sounds good.”
I stopped at a shoe store and bought new shoes and socks. The proprietor, a grizzled oyaji who looked liked he’d seen just about everything in his time, was either too polite or too jaded or both to ask why the ones I had on smelled like a urinal. I told him I’d just wear the new pair out of the store. He nodded and didn’t offer to dispose of the ones I was replacing, and I did him the courtesy of not asking, instead finding a trash can outside.
After I’d returned the van, I headed out to Inokashira, a heavily forested park in the west of the city and the place where McGraw had said he wanted to meet. Inokashira was a huge cherry blossom attraction in the spring, when people liked to take paddleboats up and down the eponymous pond at its center, to better delight in the blossoms extending on either shore all the way down to the waterline. The shrine, located in the northwest of the pond, was dedicated to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of everything that flows — water, music, words, knowledge. For whatever reason, Saraswati was known as Benzaiten in Japanese, where she was revered as a Shinto deity, as well.
I crossed the bridge to the bright red shrine — a fusion of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese styles. A few tourists milled about, and I saw a couple of Japanese families enjoying a morning outing. McGraw was there already, predictably enough, taking pictures, dressed in slacks and a polo shirt, looking like a birdwatcher or amateur photographer. He was carrying the usual shoulder bag — looked like it was time for another delivery to Miyamoto. He saw me and walked over.
“Son, you are a goddamn one-man slaughterhouse, did anyone ever tell you that?”
Seeing McGraw right after leaving Sayaka was surreal. Like two parallel dimensions suddenly brushing into contact with each other. “Not in those words, no.”
“Well, what words did they use?”
“Something about my having a temper.”
He laughed. “Is that what you call it? Four yakuza, shot to death in Fukumoto’s house. One of them one of his captains.”
“What do the police think?”
“From what I hear, the working theory is a Vietnamese gang and a dispute over drug trafficking. The Vietnamese gangs have a reputation for violence, and Christ almighty, whoever did this is about as violent as you could ask for.”
For whatever reason, I had the feeling he was baiting me. Surprisingly, I didn’t care. He had something I wanted. Beyond that, at the moment he didn’t matter.
“Say, I meant to ask you something,” he said, mopping his brow. “How did you know about Benzaiten? I make it my business to know these places, because they’re out of the way and good for meetings, but this is hardly Kaminarimon in Asakusa.”
“My mother was American.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a lot of what the natives take for granted, a visitor treasures.”
“So it was your American mother who made you aware of your Japanese heritage?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Odd.”
I shrugged. “Didn’t you say we’re sometimes defined by our paradoxes?”
He nodded. “I did say that, didn’t I? Didn’t realize it was true.”
I didn’t care whether it was true or not. I just wanted to get down to business and get this thing finished and behind me. “So? Where’s the file?”
He set the bag on the ground. I would pick it up when we were done. “We’ll get to that,” he said. “First, Miyamoto will be waiting for you tomorrow at noon in the lobby of the New Otani Hotel.”
“Okay.”
He glanced at the shoulder bag I was carrying and frowned. “Two bags…looks a little odd.”
“It’s temporary.”
“So is life.”
There was an odd pause. I thought it was strange he wasn’t going on to micromanage me about how to do the exchange — follow Miyamoto into a restroom, slide the bags under the stalls, whatever. Or saying anything snide about my tradecraft or lack thereof. I’d gotten so used to his bullshit, its absence was mildly disconcerting.
After a moment, he said, “Can’t you see you’re too good to be just a goddamn bagman?”
I was surprised. “It’s honest work,” I said, not knowing where he was going.
He chuckled. “Look, I know I ride you hard—”
“Yeah. You do.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I? What are you? A glorified errand boy. You want me to respect the guy who shines my shoes, too?”