We sit across from each other in a crowded izakaya in Shibuya, after passing a million little bars and restaurants that showcase plastic versions of their foods in the windows. Gaige sips his beer and laughs, his eyes crinkling at the edges, and the sound is infectious. He's relaxed, for the first time in weeks, and I finally feel calm, away from Chelsea and work and the hotel and everything. The izakaya is crowded, yet it feels like Gaige and I are the only two people in the room.
"You love it here," Gaige says.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I was here for a semester. Not in Tokyo, really. I mean, I traveled, but I was mostly down south. Just enough time to fall in love but not enough time to really let the little things start to annoy me, you know?"
Gaige sips his beer and looks at me. "Kind of like us."
My heart practically stops and I take a long gulp of my chu-hi, a drink made from soda and shochu, but tastes dangerously just like plain soda. "You do plenty of things to annoy me," I say, assuring myself that Gaige was simply making a silly comparison that meant nothing.
"Yet you're still here with me, and about to spend the weekend with me," he says, popping a piece of sashimi into his mouth. "You only pretend to hate me."
"I never hated you," I protest.
Gaige groans. "Are you kidding?" he asks. "Hate isn't even nearly accurate. Loathe my very presence would be far more accurate."
I laugh. "When did I loathe your presence?"
"Well, definitely not last night," he says, grinning. "But remember the first summer after our parents got married?"
"I was seventeen," I say. "I hated everything."
"Especially me."
"You were a jerk, with your stupid friends who thought they were better than everyone. And the stupid girls you dated and brought home all the time –"
"You just hated to see me with anyone else," Gaige says. He crosses his hands over his chest and looks so damn smug, so sure of himself as he sits there staring at me, that I want to throw my drink at him. Instead, I kick him under the table and he just laughs. "You're mad because you know it's true."
"I'm mad because you were a complete tool and you know it," I say. But I can still remember the pang of irritation I'd get when Gaige would parade his floozies through the house like he owned the place. I hated him.
I might have also loved him.
Maybe this whole thing is just one long continuation of how I felt when I was seventeen. I thought that being with him would get him out of my system, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. It's made me want him more of him – more time with him, more everything. And wanting someone like Gaige – someone who doesn't stay with one girl -- is dangerous.
I watch as he dips his gyoza into sauce and then pops the dumpling in his mouth, and I try to remind myself that this thing with us is just sex. Sure, it's good sex. Amazing sex. Curl-my-toes and call-my-girlfriends sex. But that's all it can be. Even if my father had some kind of personality transplant that made him suddenly approve of this train wreck of a relationship, it's Gaige. Gaige with women constantly throwing themselves at him. Gaige, the consummate flirt.
"Hey," he says. "Where are you?"
"Huh? Oh, I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"Where I should take you," I lie.
"Come on," he says, taking my hand. "Let's get out of here."
We walk along the streets, looking in the windows of the shops and people-watching as couples and friends gather around the entrances to bars and restaurants that line the sidewalks, smoking and drinking while they wait. And we talk, non-stop, for a while, about life and our families. I tell Gaige about my absentee mother, and how she wants me to return to Manhattan.
"Does she hate that you came to live with your father?" he asks.
"Totally. She can't stand him."
I ask Gaige about his father. "You never talk about him."
Gaige shrugs. "He never wanted anything to do with us," he says. "Anja raised me. Or, well, a nanny raised me. And then boarding school. I don't know how your father ended up with her, you know?"
"He definitely has a type. My mother isn't so different from Anja, I don't think." I pause as we stop at a little shop, looking in the window but not actually looking. "I don't want to end up like them."
Gaige stares into the window, but he takes my hand in his. "I'm not my father's only child," he says. "According to Anja, he's a total philanderer – woman after woman, you know? I always swore I'd never end up like him."
"Well, unless you've got a bunch of little Gaiges running around, I don't think you're in danger of that," I say, my voice light, trying to force a casualness I definitely don't feel. Why is it that I do that?
Why do I feel so vulnerable when I'm with him?
Gaige tugs at my hand and pulls me close to him, runs his hand through my hair. "There are no mini-Gaiges running around," he says. "I don't want to end up like him. Honestly."
"Then don't," I say, my voice casual. He looks at me intently for a second, and it's too much. I turn and clear my throat. "You don't have to, you know. It's not like, written in your DNA or something."
He's walking beside me and I have no idea where we're going. "You've seen our parents," he says. "You still believe in happy ever after? They're not happy."
"I think you make your own happiness," I say, sounding surer of it than I feel. "God, since when did you get so freaking philosophical?"
Gaige laughs. "It's the beer and the weather and shit," he says. "Warm summer night, the city, I don't know. I'm a little buzzed, but I'm a total buzzkill, yeah?"
I punch him on the arm, and he gropes my ass over my dress, but I squeal and jump away. "I just didn't know you were so damn sappy," I say. "One minute you're telling me to drop my panties and the next you're talking about fairy tales and shit."
Gaige takes me by the hand and pulls me down the nearest side street, deserted and dimly lit except for one entrance to a hotel that I recognize as a love hotel. I giggle. "Are you going to take me to a love hotel?"
He pushes me up against the wall of one of the buildings, his hand running up my thigh. "Sappy, huh? Is that what I am now?" he asks. "No idea what a love hotel is, but I've got half a mind to put my cock into that smart mouth of yours right out here."
"It's – " I'm about to tell him it's a sex hotel, but he stops me by covering my mouth with his. My body responds immediately to his touch, and I moan as he runs his hands up my hips and underneath my skirt.
A Japanese couple enters the street, a few yards away, and a woman giggles when she sees us. I push Gaige back, smoothing my skirt. "Shit, let's get out of here."
As we walk back in the direction of the hotel, Gaige grabs my hand and I don't push it away or let it go. It feels nice. It feels comfortable. When we pass a sign outside the entrance to one of the hotels that advertises a bar on one of the upper floors with live jazz and a view of the city, Gaige pulls at my arm. "Let's go inside."
"Don't you want to go back to the hotel?"
He slides his hand over my lower back, and navigates me inside. His touch, at once comforting and possessive, sends a shiver up my spine. Behind me, he speaks low into my ear. "Not yet," he says.
Inside the bar, we stand next to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the lights of the city. I turn to him. "You're not trying to avoid sleeping with me, are you?"
Gaige chokes on his drink. "You're kidding, right?"
"We're just – I mean," I stammer, feeling stupid for even saying anything. "Because if you wanted to stop this, it's okay."
Gaige's hand is on my waist. "Do you want to stop this?"
"No," I say. But my voice catches in my throat. I should want to stop this; that would be the smart choice. I'm a person who makes smart choices. I don't make reckless ones. And Gaige is reckless. I find myself throwing caution to the wind when I'm with him, doing things I wouldn't normally do.
He pulls me against him, his arm snaking around to the small of my back, and I can feel his hardness pressing against my leg. "Does that answer your question?"
Heat rushes between my legs at the sensation. "Yes," I say, choking on the word.
"Good," he says. "Because I want your panties."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me," he says, his voice low in my ear. "You apparently think that just because I'm interested in talking to you and listening to what the hell you have to say, that it means I don't want to put my cock in that sweet pussy of yours just as soon as I get you alone. So I want you to be ready for me, in case I want to bend you over and fuck you on the way back to the hotel."
I laugh nervously, but lean closer to him. The heat from his body radiates through my dress and it makes me want more. "I'll go to the restroom and take them off for you."
"Take them off right here," Gaige says, his hand sliding up to the middle of my back. He pins me firmly against him. Then he looks to the side, and takes a sip of his drink as if we're casually discussing the weather and not my removing my panties in the middle of a very crowded, very public, very classy place.
"There are a million people around," I say. "I refuse."
He spins me around, but instead of his hand on the small of my back, guiding me gently, he threads his fingers through the hair at the nape of my neck. He steers me through the crowd, leading me by my hair, and talking to me the entire time. "You're going to slip your hands up under your skirt and take your panties off right here in this bar, and then you're going to hand them to me. Because I asked you to."
Gaige stops at the bar as we pass it, taking my glass from my hand and setting both glasses down before leading me to a dimly-lit corner. There, he stands in front of me, his body only partially shielding me from view, leaning with his forearm on the wall over my head.
My eyes never leave his as I sneak my hand up one side of my skirt, yanking down the edge of my thong, and then do the same with the other side, shimmying as my panties slide down my thighs and drop to the floor around my ankles.
He's making you reckless, I think. The rational part of me nags at my thoughts. He's making you reckless and reckless is not good.
Gaige sinks to the floor at my feet, picking up the panties in his hand and slipping them into his pocket. "Good girl," he says. He traces a finger down my neckline and between my cleavage. "Now, tell me we're close to the hotel, because if we're not, I'm going to have to fuck you right here in the middle of this bar."
"Close." I choke out the word. I don't mean the hotel. I'm so close.
He leans in, his lips inches from mine, and smiles. "I can see that, darlin'," he says. "You pretend you don't like it, and you can protest all you want, but taking off your panties in the middle of this bar made you wet."
"No," I say.
"No," he says, studying my face. "That's not all of it, is it? You like when I tell you what to do."
I realize, with growing horror, that he's right. "No way," I protest.
Gaige grins. He realizes that he's right, and that I know it. "It's okay, darlin'," he says, then he drops his voice. "I like it."
I laugh. "Of course you do," I say. "And it's not accurate."
"No?" he asks. He trails his finger over my collarbone and to the top of my shoulder. Gaige has a way of making the most innocuous gesture completely sexual. "Then I won't tell you that in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to spin your ass around, walk you out of this bar through all the people you just took your panties off in front of, and take you back to the hotel. When we walk into the hotel room, you're going to drop to your knees before the door shuts."
He pauses, and I hold my breath, waiting for him to continue. My head tells me it's ridiculous for me to stand here and listen to him tell me what he wants me to do, yet the throbbing between my legs is insistent. It distracts me from the rational thoughts in my head. "Yes," I say, more of a murmur than an actual coherent word.
Gaige has his hand on the small of my back, and he leads me out of the bar and down to the elevator. The young Japanese couple in the elevator nods at us, then studies their phones as Gaige runs his hand up my back and whispers softly in my ear. "Are you wet yet, darlin'?"
The girl in the elevator glances at me, then back at her phone and my face flushes red. When we're out of the elevator, I smack Gaige hard on the arm. "She heard you," I say.
Gaige shrugs. "You didn't answer me," he says, as we walk on the sidewalk. "Are you wet?"
Of course I am. He knows I am. Apparently, he knows better than I do what turns me on. But I don't say any of that. I just say, "Yes."
"How far are we from the hotel?"
"A few minutes, I think."
"Good," he says. "Because I'm going to spend the rest of the walk back telling you exactly what I want to do to you."