As predicted, Lin did hear all about her trip with Mr. Huang, but not via a phone call. It was the always responsible Mudan, who, believing that the documents were too important to hand over to someone from Lin’s company, insisted that she needed him, someone she knew, to come to pick them up himself.
On the third day after she returned to work, she called to apologize for the unforeseen inconvenience she’d caused, making sure to add a languishing sweetness to her voice. Lin, who was holding a company meeting, asked that the call be transferred to his office, where he spent a quarter of an hour criticizing her for being irresponsible, indignantly mentioning Mr. Huang several times. He declared rudely that he would pick her up at eleven that night, before hanging up without waiting for her response.
That happened to be the day for her weekly tryst with Teddy. Yinghong and Teddy usually met during lunch or dinner for an hour to ninety minutes, long enough for their activity at the hotel, but not too long, in case his wife called his office and could not find him. That night Teddy had a dinner engagement. Taipei banquets were often set for 6:30, but a 7:00 arrival would not be considered late. Teddy could leave his office at five, which would give them two full hours.
But Lin would be coming to pick her up at eleven, a mere four hours after she had disentangled herself from Teddy’s body. She hesitated, unsure if she ought to cancel her date with Teddy and, in fact, terminate their hotel meetings. The thought made her smile, a bleak smile that emerged from thin, tightly shut red lips, a soundless expression of what she was feeling.
Lin was jealous, and that put her in a state of heightened agitation; she was jittery all day, unable to settle down; losing her concentration, she frequently stopped working and stood up to pace her office. Luckily her uncle was abroad.
In her mind, the trysts with Teddy were her only chance of stopping the extreme tension and calming her down; the physical exhaustion temporarily counteracted her anxiety and unease. So she waited for the gratification that came with the sensation of being filled, her excitement now turning into waves of urgent need. She felt an eager, burning expansion somewhere deep inside, as if inhaling and exhaling one mouthful of hot air after another. Between the intake and expulsion of hot breaths, she would absorb satisfying penetration and movement, feeling fire, heat, and a throbbing sensation, in and out, waiting, lurking.
They knew each other well enough that, as soon as they were in the room, they began to take off their clothes. Even Teddy, a true believer in sexual theories, no longer felt the need for foreplay or taking off her clothes for her. On that late afternoon, she turned around and straddled him the moment they lay down.
It might have been the position that made her feel that she was on the offense. Her insides, moving in and out rhythmically, felt like a long narrow passage that compressed, pushed, advanced, and exposed the outside while awaiting the moment of penetration. She could feel that part of her body swell up and move forward, rising up as if to snatch the man’s ready-for-action erection.
Then the prey was completely encircled; she breathed in deeply from the tight, filling sensation, but what happened next made her feel cheated. The man was working harder because of her uncharacteristic eagerness, but she felt let down. It was like a sky full of exploding stars sinking into water, down to an unfathomable bottom, where the gratification of contact died off instantaneously. An urgent need remained inside, and it was not to be easily mollified by that thing between the man’s legs.
So she became more demanding and the man responded accordingly. His familiarity with her body meant that he knew how to please her with the greatest result, but Yinghong felt like a beast with an unquenchable thirst, gulping down the source from the wellspring of life but never truly feeling sated.
To be sure, she felt sexual pleasure, and the resultant lethargy and exhaustion began to spread to every part of her body from that particular spot. She laid down her weighty body, as the comfort from the pleasure surged in waves, rushing against her. She split into two people, one moaning and enjoying herself, while the other lurked and waited with a hunger somewhere inside, like a beast lingering in the dark with glinting eyes, announcing an anxiety and desire that was purely physical but could not be satisfied by mere bodily contact.
Lin rang her doorbell that night at 11:05, and was greeted by the exquisite face of a languid woman who had just awakened from a nap. Her newly washed hair spread out loosely; she had pinned one side of the thick, unruly tresses to the back, leaving the curly hair on the other side to billow across an ivory shoulder exposed by her scanty summer dress. She had the lethargic look that came from a long soak in a tub; even without perfume she smelled refreshingly redolent, with a pleasant warmth.
He gave the driver a street name, but she was too flustered to get it. He turned and said, clearly wanting to explain:
“I’ve long wanted to take a break, so I flew to France, where I spent two days in Cannes and Nice alone. It wasn’t all that interesting, so I flew to New York to spend a day there before coming back here.”
She laughed, despite herself.
“Doesn’t that mean you spent your vacation on airplanes?”
“That’s right. I love flying, first class, of course. Who says travel can’t be limited to flying in planes?”
His familiar bombast put her at ease. She was willing to accept that he hadn’t come to see her for a while because he had been on vacation flying first class between Taiwan, France, and the United States. The Rolls Royce glided smoothly through the dark city with thinning traffic, the thick glass blocking out the noise outside, and she was feeling the same dreamy, unreal sensation again.
His short-sleeved shirt, she noticed, was clearly from a well-known Italian designer. The rolled-up sleeves were obviously intended to give the shirt a casual flair.
Streetlights and neon signs streamed into the car, painting his muscular arms in different colors. Those were not the chiseled muscles of an athlete who trained intensively, nor were they the strong arms of a young, inexperienced boy. They were simply the arms of a fully grown man, comfortable, mature, and solid.
Wanting to break the ice, Yinghong asked casually:
“Have you been exercising lately?”
“I’ve played a few rounds of golf, but with my workload, I couldn’t gain weight if I tried.”
He continued, as always, once he’d gotten into the mood of talking:
“I went to a sauna once. It was a club where the usual customers were CEOs, but all I saw was a roomful of ugly male bodies, not a single chairman of the board.”
That made her laugh.
“So I told myself I can’t be like them, at least for now; I couldn’t stand it.”
As the conversation continued, the car rolled out of the lit streets and entered darkness, while the ride got noticeably bumpy. Without turning around, the driver asked for more directions, and as he turned the wheel, she saw a large plot of quiet land under the brilliant moon and stars.
The car slowed down and drove around the edge of land that seemed to go on forever in the dark. Without streetlights, the inky night only intensified the feeling that the land was boundless, as if it continued to expand, rising up in the city where an inch of land was worth an ounce of gold. It had an absurd but imposing air about it.
Then Lin spoke up in the dark car, a note of agitation creeping into his voice:
“Land is meant to be walked on. Come on, let’s get out and take a walk around.”