MORNING ARRIVED WITHOUT fanfare. The simple shimmer of sunlight through the windowpane woke first Deena and then Tak.
“Mmm. You feel sublime,” he mumbled, running a hand down the length of her body. Immediately, he felt a familiar stirring. “I want to be inside you,” he whispered, planting kisses along her neck.
His body pressed against her backside as remnants of Cartier aftershave and tequila wafted in the air. She eased away from him, rubbing her eyes in an effort to become oriented. Her phone beeped, insisting there were several missed phone calls. Just as she rose to retrieve it, Tak tugged at her camisole.
“Not now, Dee. No Lizzie, no Skylife, no problems,” he insisted.
She smiled at him and settled back into his arms. No problems. The idea was as seductive as the kisses he planted along her neck. The phone beeped again and she plucked it from its resting place on her nightstand before he could stop her.
No problems. The idea was laughable.
Deena looked at the phone’s screen and groaned. “Your dad,” she said, noting the missed calls. “I’d better call him.” She rubbed the side of her face tiredly.
“Come on, Dee, forget that.” Tak pulled her into his arms impatiently, relishing the soft flesh of her backside against his chest.
Tak continued planting kisses along her throat, slowing long enough to appreciate the slope of her breasts and the flat of her stomach before moving on to the curve of her backside. His manhood stirred its approval and Deena laughed sleepily.
“Is that all you do?” she asked. “Think about sex?”
Tak chuckled. “Oh, Baby I can do more than think about it.” In an instant, he was atop her, parting her legs as she laughed, pushing her back as she struggled to sit up.
“Tak!” she squealed. “Would you go back to sleep? I have to call your father!”
“Sleep?” Tak scoffed. “What, are you kidding me? I’m not going back to sleep and neither are you,” he pushed her again. “Now stop playing hard to get! I’ve got a seed to plant, woman.”
Deena shrieked as he began to kiss her body relentlessly, pushing aside the straps of her camisole, tugging at her panties.
“Tak! Your father—”
Tak sighed, lifting his head momentarily. “Dee, I gotta tell you. You’re killing my ego here with all this talk of my dad.” Before she could respond, he returned to her body with vigor, licking, biting and sucking. When she cried out in delight, he lifted his head with a smile of triumph.
Tak was poised to enter her when the doorbell rang. Once, twice, three times, all in quick succession. Startled, Deena sat up, dismounting Tak quickly, efficiently. Not easily thwarted, he attempted to reclaim his position, only to be deterred again.
She pulled on Tak’s UCLA sweatshirt and an old pair of shorts before rushing to the door. As she approached, the bell rang twice more.
“Make it quick, Dee!”
Deena threw open the door, prepared to slam it provided it was a Jehovah Witness, salesman, or some other equally unwanted rascal.
It was Daichi.
“Daichi?” Deena croaked.
He adjusted his crimson tie. “Deena, I expect my associates to answer when I call them, and I consider it highly problematic when they do not.”
“Sir—”
“We need to discuss this project. Now.” Daichi pushed his way past Deena, and into her apartment.
Deena’s horrified gaze followed him. “This is a really bad time right now, Daichi. If you want, I can throw on something and meet you at the office.” She cast a single, sickly glance towards the bedroom.
“A bad time?” Daichi echoed in disbelief. “A bad time? Construction is stalled, Deena, and has been since yesterday afternoon. Every day we’re stalled we burn a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars!”
Deena’s mouth opened, but no words came out. She was aware of the budget, of the opposition they took for the slightest expenditure, but her mind was foggy. Tequila, fatigue and fear muddled her thoughts. She glanced at the bedroom door again.
“You know, Deena, this is incomprehensible and frankly I’m stunned. Rarely have I misjudged a person’s character. But you,” Daichi wagged a finger inches from Deena’s nose. “You are forcing me to question your professionalism, your aptitude, and your judgment. I would recommend that you salvage this deal, immediately.”
Sickened, Deena looked from Daichi to the bedroom door yet again. She needed a moment—a moment for thinking, for clarity, for a plan.
Behind her something crashed.
And the bedroom door opened.
“Dee? Who was that at the door?”
Tak stuck his head out and glimpsed only a partial view of Deena. Grinning, he pressed on.
“Quit playing hard to get and climb your ass back into this bed.”
When she failed to respond he padded into the living room with a brazen smirk, intent on finishing what he’d started, and froze at the sight of his father.
“Oh my God.” he whispered. Tak, in nothing but a pair of form-fitting boxer briefs, felt his libido perish.
Daichi looked from Deena to Tak and back again, his face a myriad of astonishment.
“Now Dad, before you go crazy—” Tak reached for his father in an effort to calm him.
Daichi turned to his employee, his gaze narrowing. “I see your aspiration knows no bounds, Ms. Hammond.”
Deena gasped.
“Dad, that’s not fair. When we met we had no idea that you were the common denominator.”
“When you met…”
“Dad, I know what you’re thinking. And you’re absolutely right. We should’ve been more forthright. We should’ve been upfront. And we shouldn’t have pretended that we were meeting in California. But you have to understand—”
“When you met…”
“Otosan, just—just hear me out. Please.”
“How long this been going on?”
Tak cringed. “Otosan—”
“Otosan? Don’t ‘otosan’ me! How long has this been going on?”
Tak swallowed, suddenly speechless, motionless. Daichi pointed an emphatic finger at the couch, and without a word, Tak sat.
“Takumi, I will not ask you again,” Daichi warned. Daichi stared at his son until he looked away with a sigh.
“Three years now.”
“Three—”
At this revelation, it was not his son he looked at, but Deena. Deena who’d listened to his confessions of parental ineptitude, of resentment and regret, all while feigning ignorance.
“Daichi, I didn’t—I never—” Deena shook her head. “I never told him anything.”
This time it was Tak’s turn to look up.
“What are you talking about, Dee?”
She looked from the elder Tanaka to the younger, desperate for an out.
“He confided in me, Tak, about—things.” She turned back to Daichi. “But I never betrayed you. Not once.”
Tak’s eyes narrowed, and in them, Deena could see the seeds of something new. Distrust.
Daichi turned to his son.
“Takumi. Takumi, you know I can’t accept this.”
Tak sighed.
“You know how I feel about this matter.”
“Otosan, please. Listen. I love her and have for years. She makes me happy. Doesn’t that count for something with you?”
Daichi sighed. Here was his son, sniveling about happiness. It was always that way with Takumi, so engrossed with himself. But Daichi knew he needed look no further than a mirror for someone to blame. He’d always given his son whatever he wanted, believing it the best way to express his affections. When he turned sixteen, he bought the boy his first car, a Ford Mustang convertible, because it was what he wanted. When he graduated from UCLA, it was a three-bedroom condo in South Beach, and for his twenty-fifth birthday, a luxury yacht for cruising the Caribbean.
Daichi was most comfortable when his love could be expressed with gifts, as opposed to the emotional outpours everyone else seemed to prefer. But in showering his son with gifts, Daichi had created a man whose values did not match his own, who had no sense of the group’s greater identity, who constantly sought pleasures of the self and of the flesh. Takumi, he found, knew nothing of modesty, restraint or sacrifice and was, at least to Daichi, the very anti-thesis of Japanese.
“This is your problem, Takumi. Everything is about you. What Takumi wants, what Takumi likes! No reason, or values, or anything. And what has Takumi decided he wants this time? A little flesh?”
“And what about you, Dad? Don’t you go to any lengths to get what you want? Isn’t that what my whole life has been about?”
Daichi’s gaze narrowed. “This is neither the time nor the place.”
“No? Well, can you have Angela pencil me in and get back to me?”
“Takumi, listen to me and listen closely. I am your father. You know better than anyone that I will not tolerate insolence. We will not revisit this. I forbid your pursuit of this. I forbid this.” He pointed a finger at Deena, and like that, he’d reduced her to an object, a thing, a this.
“Dad,” Tak’s voice broke with frustration. “Please don’t be this way. If you—if you knew how important she was to me,” Tak sighed. “I’ve always done as you asked, regardless of whether we saw eye to eye. So you must know that I—I don’t do this lightly.”
“Takumi, listen.” He shook his head sadly. “What would your ojiichan say? What would he think?”
Tak sighed, thinking of the proud historian and Japanese American that was his grandfather. What would his ojiichan say?
“Otosan, I can’t help how I feel.”
Daichi closed his eyes with a sigh. When would the boy learn? Learn that what mattered was not matters of the self, but of the group, of the greater good?
“You’re my oldest son, Takumi. You are supposed to be my pride and joy.” Daichi’s head was lowered, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, and he was no longer shouting. “When I am gone you’re supposed to head this family. You’re supposed to preserve our history, our traditions, our way of life. You know how important this was to your ojiichan, and how important it is to me.” Daichi ran a tired hand through his hair. “I know I have not been the ideal father. Absent when I shouldn’t be, whether through mind or through body, but such a thing doesn’t negate your responsibilities. It doesn’t negate who or what you are.”
Daichi shook his head.
“You cannot be so colorblind as to erase the color from your own skin. You are not as they are. You are of Japanese blood and your history is rich and important and worthy of preservation. Know this before you know anything.”
Daichi paused with the memory of him and Yoshi learning Japanese on Saturdays, going to Dharma school on Sundays, and all of the ethnic and cultural events—Hana Matsuri, Sakura Matsuri, Tango no Sekku and the Obon street festivals. His father had been adamant about his sons knowing and taking pride in their culture.
Daichi looked at his son pointedly. “There are things greater than you, musuko. You must ask yourself: this woman that you love—will she follow our traditions? Will she, for example, honor your ancestors at the Obon Festival? Build a butsudan for you, for me, when we are no longer here? Because Christians are not in the habit of fashioning altars to the deceased, no matter how much they’ve loved them.”
Tak thought of how Deena had been willing to end things between them because he was Japanese. He thought of the lengths to which she had gone to hide who and what he was—lying, skulking, hiding indefinitely. He couldn’t be certain she’d ever embrace their traditions. They hardly ever fought, but when they did, it was because he’d grown tired of lying to his father or of having to keep silent in the background when Grandma Emma called. She was never able to give him a straight answer as to when they could pull the shroud back from their relationship. Perhaps, she’d never intended to. Perhaps, after three years together, he already had the answers to his father’s questions, and simply refused to accept them.
Tak stared at the floor. “I don’t know what she’d do, otosan. I can’t be sure.”
Daichi stared at his son. “I’m leaving.” He turned to Deena. “And you are off the Skylife project.”
“What? You can’t do that to me! You have no right!”
Daichi chuckled. “I have no right? I have no right?”
He took a single menacing step towards her. “I have every right. I am Daichi Tanaka. That is my firm. And I began it with little more than the sweat of my palm. That is my son, born of my flesh and blood. You, Deena Hammond, are the one with no rights.”
Deena shook her head. “But this is personal. You can’t kick me off for—for dating your son.”
“No? How about because your project is over-budget? Or because your inaccessibility this weekend has caused an estimated loss of 2.3 million dollars as we searched for documents that only you seem to know the whereabouts of? So tell me, Ms. Hammond, would you find any of those reasons more to your liking?”
Deena closed her eyes. “Daichi, please. I’m begging you.”
He turned away, unimpressed. “And as for you, Takumi, I will pretend that this never happened and you will do the same.”
Tak and Deena watched as Daichi smoothed his charcoal jacket, straightened his posture, and sauntered out the door.
Silence followed.
“Tak?” Deena said as she watched him disappear into the bedroom. When he re-emerged, he was fully dressed.
“Tak? Tak, talk to me.”
Tak shot her a single withering glare, brushed past her and slammed the front door behind him.