The Art of Us by Hilaria Alexander (30)

I pressed the crosswalk’s button just like I had that night. I wiped my tears away once more and searched my bag for tissues. Thankfully, I was never out of those, since free tissues outside train stations were one of Tokyo’s most popular forms of advertising.

Amos held my hand as we waited for the green light. There were no cars, but I wasn’t going to risk it.

We were still sharing his earbuds, and we kept listening to “Wish You Were Here” over and over. Amos started singing along, and then I joined him.

“Why do you think there is a whole forty seconds of nothing before the actual song starts?” I asked him. “And why do you think David Gilmour had to clear his throat on the track?”

He laughed, and the smile that stretched across his face reached his eyes.

“I have no idea. Maybe that was the best take out of all the ones they did.”

“But they could have cut that part out, right? Why didn’t they? I mean, it’s still beautiful, but it’s…”

“Unusual,” he said, and his gaze locked with mine. “I agree, but even though the song starts in an unusual fashion, it doesn’t take away from the beauty of it, don’t you agree?”

I nodded. “So, you listened to this song a lot when you lost your brother?”

He turned to look at me. There was a certain aura of sadness in his eyes that broke my heart, and yet, they were still so beautiful, even when he was feeling melancholic.

“It was the only one that seemed to make me feel better.”

“It’s a great song.”

“Is it working for you?” he asked.

“It’s helping…a lot. You are helping.” He gave me a sweet, warm smile.

The streets were deserted, so I leaned in and kissed him right on the corner of his lips. He breathed out a laugh and then pulled me into a hug.

We kept walking.

“I never thought I’d make it all the way over here, Amos. I’m not saying I want to start walking down this street every day, but…I don’t think I will purposely avoid it anymore. Oh, we’re close. It was right over there.”

We walked scarcely a hundred feet, and there it was.

The neighborhood’s landscape had changed quite a bit. Only a few traditional houses remained, including the one where Maggie and I had stayed.

It reminded me of the house from the movie Up, a tiny home surrounded by tall apartment buildings.

There were no lights on, and the gate was locked.

It hadn’t looked new by any means when we’d lived there, but it looked a bit more run-down than I remembered.

Then I noticed the metal bar across the shutters.

The place was empty.

No college kids, no adventurous travelers spending a few months in Japan.

“It’s empty,” I said out loud.

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“I wonder why they haven’t demolished it yet.”

“Perhaps the lot isn’t big enough for a whole apartment building.”

“Perhaps.” I’d never gotten to return to it after the accident because our contract had already ended. Our things had been packed and put in storage by the rental company.

I held my hand around the bar of the iron gate and mentally said my goodbye to the house. I turned to Amos and smiled at him, grateful.

He looked at me with a confused expression.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you know what’s good for me and what I need when I need it, but you do.”

“I just took a guess.”

“It was a good one.” Tears sprang up again but I blinked them away. I felt sad and nostalgic, but I was happy, too.

I was so thankful for him.

He’d become so much more than a physical attraction, was so much more than a kindred spirit.

I didn’t believe in soul mates, but if I had, Amos St. Clair would have been it.

Four months went by.

I loved fall in Japan.

The red leaves of the Japanese maples made the town so magical. I especially loved going to Ueno Park. I would have gone with Amos every day if we had the time, but all we did during the week was work and work and work some more.

We’d finished the second volume of Aiko.

Now we only had one left. I still didn’t know what was going to happen in the end.

Both Ishikawa and Akane were still being incredibly secretive with the script.

I had no idea what was going to happen to the characters, and everything was up in the air. There were so many remaining loose ends to tie up.

I wondered if everything was going to work out in the end.

At the end of the second volume, Aiko Matsumoto had decided to return to Japan just as her best friend had decided to go look for her in France, where several fans had said they’d seen her playing in a jazz bar.

The publishing company had started an insane marketing campaign. We’d catch glimpses here and there on trains, TV, and big advertising screens, and Ishikawa’s name and the heroines were plastered everywhere.

In five months, Supaa– was going to publish the three volumes all at once.

We were stressed and overworked.

My hand had never had to work so hard for such a prolonged time.

I knew the symptoms—my carpal tunnel was back.

Back home, I had been scrupulous about not overworking my hand and using reflexology and acupuncture.

Here, I just didn’t have time to take care of it, and the last ten days had been particularly stressful.

For reasons unknown to me, Ishikawa was in a bad mood.

As far as we’d been told, the first two volumes were great and the publishing company was perfectly happy with them.

Before our rough patch, we had been on schedule, so I didn’t understand what was wrong with her. I was doing my best to follow her instructions, but nothing I did worked. Nothing I did was good enough for her.

I’d thought we were on good terms, but that week she’d been bitchy toward Amos and me on several occasions. I was trying to be patient because I didn’t want to make the situation worse, and even Hiroyuki seemed to walk on eggshells.

Her bad moods and bad manners were hurting me, and Amos had noticed it. He wasn’t happy about how she’d been behaving. On Wednesday evening, after ten long, stressful days, my wrist started hurting so bad it reduced me to tears.

Amos was having none of it.

“Lena, you need rest. If you keep working while it’s hurting this bad, you’re going to permanently fuck it up. You’re not going to be able to draw anything worth a crap if you’re in this kind of pain, anyway. I say we take a couple days off.”

“We can’t. We’re too behind already.”

“We can and we will.”

He told me to pack a bag while he made arrangements for us.

I had just taken some pain meds and I was too numbed by the pain and the medicine to even have the energy to argue.

I absent-mindedly packed a bag with enough clothes for a few days.

“Where are we going?”

“Kyoto,” he replied. “I found a nice place with a memory foam mattress,” he said with a grin.

Amos’ initial enthusiasm for the futon, the traditional style of bed, had worn out quickly. It wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the most comfortable, either. After a while, it got old. He’d gone online and purchased an affordable memory foam mattress, which we were now both using.

It was worth every yen, especially when we spent so much time sitting and straining our backs all day long.

“I have a friend who’s a massage therapist in Kyoto,” I told him.

He frowned, perplexed. “You never said you had friends here.”

“Well, I knew a few people. I lost touch with most of them, but I’m still in contact with Yuri. We used to work together at the same restaurant. Maybe she could see me and help me with my carpal tunnel. She’s an expert in natural healing.”

“Good. Call her, message her, whatever—let’s just make sure she can see you. We need to do something about your wrist.”

I didn’t know what kind of game Rika Ishikawa was playing, but I’d be damned if I let her break Lena just as she was finally pulling herself together.

I wished I could have done more for her.

Besides a few moments of weakness, Lena seemed to be taking her pain in stride.

What I found strange and unusual, considering what had just happened, was the delighted smile on her face. She kept glancing at me from her seat—we’d gotten on the Shinkansen to Kyoto about thirty minutes before—and kept distracting me from writing an email to Marty with her alluring, playful blue eyes.

She’d smile, open her mouth as if to say something, purse her lips, and then do it all over again.

I breathed out a laugh and shot her a confused look.

“What is it? Is there something you want to tell me?”

A small smile appeared on her face again. Her eyes were bright, joyous—not what I’d expected, especially since I knew she’d been in pain for days.

“I’m surprised, that’s all. I’m a little taken aback from what you did back there—at the house, I mean. That was ballsy. And hot,” she said, a dreamy look in her eyes, her smile drawing me in again.

I sighed and smiled back nervously, running a hand through my hair.

“I hate how she’s been treating you. How come you’re not mad about it? I would have imagined you’d be pissed.”

She shrugged and turned to the window just as we entered a tunnel and the train was surrounded by blackness. She rolled her eyes, annoyed, and then let out a long breath.

Her gaze met mine again.

“Somehow, I can’t bring myself to be mad at her.”

“Why not? She’s been terrible to you.”

“She’s nearing the end.”

“People don’t die from Parkinson’s. She could still have a decent, long life…if she’d finally stop smoking like a chimney.”

“I don’t mean the end of her life. I mean the end of the manga. She’s not ready to be done with Aiko. That’s what’s making her act out.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t she want to finally get to the end?”

“Because there’s nothing else to look forward to. Think about it: she’s been drawing for years and has always been working on something new. Once this is over, she won’t have any new projects coming up. She’s not in the condition to draw anymore. From her standpoint, she’s got nothing left.”

“I can’t believe you’re not holding a grudge against her.”

“Don’t get me wrong, she has pissed me off the last two weeks—plenty—but I get her…or at least I think I do, and it’s because I feel the same way about Switch.”

She sighed, and I didn’t feel like interrupting her, so I didn’t ask the questions that were running through my mind.

“I probably have no more than four or five issues left at the most. I’m terrified to get to the end. I don’t want to let go of my character. Yes, the story needs to end, I know it…but I’m scared. I’m scared of letting go. It’s the same for Ishikawa. She doesn’t want to let go of Aiko Uemura and Aiko Matsumoto. This is the end of the road for her as an artist. What else is left after this?”

I scoffed. “Heck, the last three issues alone are probably going to outsell any other comic ever, just like the first did years ago. She will probably retain the record for best-selling manga artist for years.”

“That’s not what she cares about, though. She doesn’t care about records. She cares about her stories, and as much as she’ll keep dreaming and wishing to write new ones, new characters…she won’t be able to. That would destroy me. Would it not destroy you?”

We were out of the tunnel now, and we both glanced to look outside as we caught blurry glimpses of the countryside.

I sighed, thinking about her words. Maybe she was right about Ishikawa; she understood her better than I did.

Could I let it go if I couldn’t be an artist? Could I be happy if making art wasn’t an option anymore?

It would slowly kill me.

“I suppose it would.”

There’d been something different in him ever since the previous night. I was surprised by how he’d taken charge of the situation and decided we had to get out of town.

I wasn’t sure if it was going to get us in even more trouble, but I didn’t care.

I went along with his plan, eager to take a couple of days off.

The atmosphere in the house with Ishikawa had become toxic, and we’d never make any progress if she didn’t snap out of her funk. Maybe while we were away, Hiroyuki could make her see reason.

We got to a small, quaint hotel on a little street in Kyoto.

If Tokyo was often overwhelming and noisy, Kyoto was the opposite.

A smaller, quieter city rich with history and gorgeous temples, it made you feel like you’d traveled to the past. Every little street off the main boulevard was lined with traditional-style restaurants and bars.

Our place, a Japanese-style hotel called a ryokan, was a hybrid of Japanese and Western elements.

It had a Western-style bed and all kinds of modern commodities, but the structural elements of the room were just like the ones in our house in Tokyo.

The room was quite large, and it had big glass windows that faced a very small but private garden.

I pressed both my hands against the glass, my right one still clad with the obnoxious brace, when I realized it was the very first time we’d been alone.

Back in Tokyo, we tried to be subtle and quiet, in and out of the bedroom.

We were hardly ever alone, and we were always trying to make sure not to be too noisy at night.

Only once, a few weeks back, we’d gone to a love hotel.

The name said it all. A love hotel is a place where you can rent a room just for a few hours. It was on a little street in Shibuya called Dogenzaka that was lined with many of them.

Love hotels in Japan can be entertaining even just for the crazy décor; our room, however, didn’t have any shock value. It was big and had a jacuzzi tub, but other than that, it was like any other hotel room.

We’d gone there so we could have some privacy and get as wild as we wanted with each other.

And now we were in Kyoto, alone, away from everything and everyone.

I turned around and found Amos looking at me with hazy eyes full of desire.

He walked toward me, and I didn’t waste any time taking my shirt off.

His eyes darkened and he touched my breasts as he pressed me against the window. He rocked his hips into me and I leaned back against the glass wall.

His hands roamed my body as mine started fiddling with his shirt.

I ran my palms up his sides, feeling every ridge and muscle of his beautiful, sculpted body. Amos’ lips placed kisses down from my neck to my cleavage as he dug into the lace of my bra, getting one of my breasts out. I reached behind my back and took it off.

“Take off your shirt,” I commanded, and he obliged, though not without giving me one of those seriously fucking hot glances of his where he looked like he was deliberately eye-fucking me while we still had our clothes on.

Thirsty. He was making me thirsty. He was so good at it.

“Take your jeans off,” I said, and he cocked one eyebrow in response.

“Only if you take yours off.”

We mirrored each other’s movements, both of us being deliberately slow, watching the other. He took his underwear, socks, and sneakers off then stood naked in front of me as I stood pressed against the window, wearing my black cotton undies.

I bit the inside of my lips and kept my eyes on him as I skimmed my hand inside my underwear and touched myself with two fingers.

I moaned quietly as Amos’ eyes focused on the task ahead.

He stroked his erection a couple of times as I flicked my clitoris over and over, getting ready for him.

Oh, but I already was.

Nipples hard, heart racing with excitement and anticipation, the wetness between my legs soaked my underwear.

The coolness of the window behind me made my skin erupt into goose bumps.

I was waiting for him to make the next move and take me.

“Stop,” he said. “I want to do that.”

He knelt in front of me and pulled my underwear down to my ankles then off.

He parted my legs and hooked one of them over his shoulder. His eyes met mine before his mouth kissed my most sensitive, vulnerable part.

I shuddered against the window as his tongue moved in lazy circles on my clit.

My other leg was already wobbly, so he lifted it with one arm, opening me more to him, sucking and stroking until my whole body tensed up, aching for a release.

I moaned his name as he increased the tempo of his sweet torture, steady and relentless. My clit throbbed under his tongue as the release washed through me like lightning.

Still shaky, he put me down and took one of my hands, ready to move over to the bed.

It was amazing seeing her like that. I loved when she let go and lost all control.

I loved the feel of her under my tongue and my fingers, and it only got better when I was inside of her and her body was arched around mine.

I loved every part of her and I never got tired of discovering and possessing the most hidden, vulnerable part of her soul.

I took the condoms out of my overnight bag and placed them on the nightstand.

I heard the noise of Velcro and turned around to see Lena removing her brace.

“No way. You’re keeping it on.”

“But I want to touch you,” she explained.

“You still have your left hand, right? That’s the one you’ll use this weekend. You’re going to keep your magic hand in the brace.”

“Pffff.”

“I’m serious. Do you want to damage your tendons for good and not be able to draw anymore? Be my guest.”

“You’re such a mood killer,” she protested.

I grabbed her left hand and brought it to my cock.

“I don’t think so.”

She let out a small laugh as she started stroking my dick slowly, a bit unsure.

“Here.” I handed her a condom and she slowly rolled it on, using her left hand and the tips of the fingers of her right hand.

I brought her on top of me so she was straddling me. Her beautiful golden hair fell across my face, and she brushed it away so she could kiss me before she guided my erection inside her and started moving up and down, slowly at first, and then with increased rhythm.

“Fuck, Lena. I will never get tired of this…of you. I will never get tired of seeing you come.”

She moaned as I pinched one of her nipples, and I started moving my hips up and down in sync with her. Her breasts bounced and I wanted to be able to touch her everywhere, but I knew what she liked and what she needed, so I placed my thumb at the opening between her legs, giving it just enough pressure to send her over the edge.

I pressed myself into her faster, harder, until her panting got harsher and eyes met mine, ready to let go.

She came before me, her warm release spreading around me. I flipped her over and thrust into her hard as she reeled from her climax and wrapped her legs tightly around me.

“I fucking love you,” I murmured as I lay down on top of her.

Her body shook with laughter under mine, her erratic heartbeat still trying to go back to its natural rhythm.

“I fucking love you, too.”