Season of Firsts Ch. 02

In the darkness, I held Megumi as she pressed her ear to my chest, the sound of my heartbeat gently lulling her into a peaceful slumber. Her hand upon my shoulder captured my attention, as if she was gripping me for safety as the world of dreams engulfed her mind. Closing my eyes, I gently stroked her long raven strands and realized that I could no longer imagine a world without this charming young woman.

*****

On Christmas Eve, we were both awake somewhat early, for we needed to have the hotel staff do our laundry since we would be here longer than we had originally hoped. It was also the first time in several days that Megumi had entered her own hotel room – since she was officially registered to that room, she felt it best that her dirty clothes be placed there, and we also took a few minutes to make it look like she had actually been in her room and not in mine for the previous four days.

After stopping by the main desk to ensure the cleaning staff would retrieve our laundry, Megumi and I went to the complimentary breakfast. Since our arrival at the hotel, there had been fewer and fewer guests at breakfast each morning, and on the morning before Christmas, the staff outnumbered the guests in the small restaurant. I wondered just how many guests would be staying in the hotel on Christmas Day itself, just how alone we would be.

I had to thank my lucky stars, thank every deity I had ever heard of previously for the fact that I was not alone in this hotel, that I had met Megumi and could at least share this unusual experience with someone, for I would have been very bored and extremely depressed on my own in this situation at such a key time of the year.

"I had a dream," Megumi mentioned at one point during breakfast.

"What about?" I asked with curiosity.

"A dream about us," she said. "You were rich, with large house, nice car, own driver, many nice things. You had sold an invention, made money in market. We..."

I simply waited, although it was clear that Megumi was considering whether she should tell me more about her dream.

"We had kids."

That stunned me, but I tried not to show it. I simply could not imagine myself being a father, not at such a young age, not when I could barely support myself on my meager student budget.

"Three girls, all beautiful, all look more like you."

That truly stunned me, but the expression of love in Megumi's eyes as she looked at me melted away the surprise. Reaching across the table, I grasped her hands in mine, and gazed deep into her hazel orbs.

"May your dream come true," I said softly, and I truly meant it. The money and the house and the things she had seen in her dream sounded enticing. Having three daughters with her, while seemingly unfathomable at the moment, would be an adventure in itself. But the fact that she had dreamed of us clearly well into the future, together, gave me hope.

"May my dream come true," she whispered, the phrase sounding almost like a prayer as it rolled off her tongue. She smiled, somewhat knowingly, and I wondered just what was going on inside her pretty head.

*****

The laundry had been taken from our rooms. I reasoned that with so few guests in the hotel, we would probably get it back around lunchtime, which gave us a little time to ourselves before we would be interrupted. The cleaning staff had also already straightened up our rooms, the covers so tightly affixed to the beds that it reminded me of the scenes in the barracks in the few military films I had seen.

"We have not seen other film of my sister," Megumi mentioned as we returned to the hotel room assigned to me.

"Very true," I acknowledged. "How long is it? Can we watch it before the staff returns with our laundry?"

"Yes. It is maybe sixty minutes."

Unfortunately, the DVD player built into the television could not handle the VCD format, so we sat at the table, Megumi in my lap as the VCD loaded on the laptop, PowerDVD recognizing the format and immediately starting to play the content of the disc.

It was very much a learning experience for me, for this was a Japanese BDSM film.

Megumi explained a lot to me as the first scene unfolded. The initial scene did not feature her sister, but the young woman was equally stunning. The setting was a classroom, at once similar to the classrooms I knew yet just different enough to warrant my attention. The scene began with the beauty bent backward over a student desk, dressed in a stereotypical Japanese schoolgirl uniform, plenty of rope securing her wrists and ankles to the legs of the desk with more rope at her chest and waist securing her to the desktop itself. A blindfold kept her plunged in a world of darkness.

As the scene opened, she struggled a bit, as if making a half-hearted attempt to break free of the rope. The camera lingered upon her for a long time, moving around her, showing the detail of her bondage, focusing on the rise and fall of her breasts.

"Do you like her look?" Megumi asked.

I had to think about that for a moment. "I do," I finally admitted, imagining Megumi instead tied down to the desk and wondering what I might do in that situation.

"She is helpless," Megumi noted. "A man can do anything to her and she cannot stop."

I could certainly understand the appeal of that... for the man.

Footfalls could be heard from off-camera, and the camera turned to show a male teacher having just walked into the classroom, pausing for a moment before approaching the young student. Clearly, she heard his footfalls as well, for she ceased struggling, her head turned in his direction. When he suddenly seized a breast, she gasped aloud, stiffening for a moment, her body beginning to relax as his hand moved across her chest to afford equal attention to her other breast.

"Was your school uniform like hers?" I asked Megumi in a whisper, and she nodded slowly, her eyes riveted to the screen of the laptop. "Then perhaps that could be you bound on the desk."

The young woman on the screen was writhing against her bonds and whimpering softly as the teacher groped her body, at least one hand maintaining contact with her at all times. As if in sympathy with the bound student, Megumi moved in my lap, and between her movement upon me and the plight of the woman upon the desk, a part of me began to move as well.

The teacher finally stepped back from the desk, and his hands went to his belt. I figured that I knew what would happen; I figured that he would have sex with the bound student.

I was definitely wrong.

Instead, he doubled over his brown leather belt, and unceremoniously struck the student across her straining breasts.

She cried out, and Megumi hissed softly. They both stiffened noticeably.

After a few moments for the pain to sink in, for the bound student to realize that she was truly helpless and vulnerable in this situation, the belt befell her breasts again. She cried out again, and I heard Megumi's breath catch in her throat. The helpless student's pain was apparently intriguing to Megumi; she seemed able to identify with the young woman upon the desk.

And as the belt befell the bound student again and again and again, with less and less and less time between the harsh strikes, I found the young woman's accented cries mesmerizing, her vain struggles arousing, and Megumi's sympathetic reactions captivating. Of their own accord, my hands were soon groping Megumi, similar to how the teacher had previously been groping the bound student, and she moaned and squealed softly from my harsh touches, my bold grips upon her small frame.

For perhaps ten minutes, the teacher continued to apply his belt to the student's unprotected body. I could only imagine the reddening of her chest beneath her clothes. I did not need to imagine the tears seeping from underneath the blindfold, yet even though she was clearly in pain, even though I was very much a nonviolent person, I found it mesmerizing.

...and equally mesmerizing was the fact that Megumi seemed to enjoy it as well, her eyes riveted to the laptop's screen even as she squirmed in my lap in reaction to my groping of her body. For an instant, I imagined Megumi was the bound student and I was the teacher, alternately groping and belting her delicate form.

Megumi's lips were suddenly upon mine, surprising me from my reverie. I squeezed a breast roughly, and she squealed into my mouth, a breathy sound I swallowed with relish as I noted that I could just subtly feel a hardened nipple even through her shirt and her bra.

Just as suddenly, she tore her lips away, turning to the laptop and pausing the scene. We were both breathing somewhat quickly, our gaze locked, our hands boldly stroking each other.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be said. We both instinctively knew that we needed to stop right there, or else we might regret the consequences later.

I drew my angel into a tight hug, reveling in the feel of her breasts pressed firmly against me, of my arousal trapped against her. We had just hit a boundary, one neither of us were quite ready to cross.

Not yet.

"You enjoy seeing her hurt?" Megumi finally asked softly into my ear.

"Yeah," I admitted somewhat sheepishly, embarrassed by my reaction to the scene – a reaction Megumi had certainly felt against her.

She laughed quietly into my neck. "Kinky," she whispered, giving me a squeeze.

I had heard the word "kinky" previously used several times in a negative way. But that word, coming from Megumi's lips, sounded positive, almost joyous.

Eventually, Megumi ejected the disc from the laptop. "We watch more later," she said, and it sounded like a promise.

I vowed to hold her to that promise.

*****

As we passed through the hotel lobby, we were called to the main desk and informed that because there would be so few guests in the hotel, all meals on Christmas Day would be handled through Room Service. That made sense, and it also confirmed my suspicion that the hotel would be operating with a skeleton crew for Christmas – just one more sign of the familial importance of the Christmas holiday.

...and if my girlfriend's dream eventually would come true, we would indeed be a family one day: a family five members strong.

"You are smiling," Megumi noted as we stepped out into the cold midday air in search of lunch.

I offered her my arm, and she accepted. "Just thinking about your dream," I answered.

*****

Our freshly-washed clothes were awaiting us in our respective hotel rooms upon our return. Never had I known anyone to fold underwear before, which made me laugh as I packed the clothes back into my suitcase.

Megumi soon knocked at the door, and I let her back into my hotel room. "You brought your suitcase?" I noted with mock surprise. "I only live across the wall from you!"

She grinned, her happiness reflected in her eyes.

The afternoon was spent sitting at the table, enjoying the Pepsis we had purchased from the vending machine down the hall and talking more about ourselves, about our lives prior to college. Actually, I did most of the talking, relating stories of the horseplay in the orphanage, the many times of sadness knowing that friends from school were traveling to places I would likely never see because I did not have a family to take me anywhere. I talked about the day the tornado ravaged part of the town, the funnel cloud fortunately bouncing over the orphanage itself and sparing us from severe damage and injury. I admitted my shortcomings in terms of athleticism and how it had led to plenty of humiliation in my gym classes. I spoke about how I would discretely admire many of the girls at school, wishing I had been born into different circumstances so that I was not the outcast, the unwanted person loved by no one.

Megumi reached for my hand, a deep concern imprinted upon her face, and that was when I realized I was crying.

"You are love," she said softly, her misspoken words clearly conveying the message flawlessly expressed in her eyes. She stood and came around the table, standing before me, holding me as I poured my tears upon her, so many memories and emotions coursing through my mind even as I reveled in the love I felt enveloping me like the wings of an angel.

When the tears finally ended and I looked up into her face, Megumi's eyes still burned brightly. There was no pity, only love.

She truly was my angel. She lacked actual wings and a halo, yet I did not need to see white fluffy wings and a shiny golden halo to recognize that Megumi had indeed been sent to me.

*****

For dinner, the hotel restaurant had more patrons than I had expected. There were actually several families eating when Megumi and I entered the restaurant, which meant that some families in the area decided to come have dinner at the hotel instead of spending the evening cooking at home, especially if they would be cooking most of Christmas Day anyhow.

It was sad in a way, because I knew that this would be the greatest number of people we would see until December 26... or later.

After my having cried upon Megumi earlier in the day, she seemed to have a glow about her. Especially in the somewhat-dim light of the hotel restaurant, she seemed particularly radiant.

"You look at me funny," she finally noted, a quizzical expression upon her face. "Am I now a stranger? I have 'idiot' on the forehead?"

I smiled and shook my head. "I'm just in a bit of disbelief that I'm in the company of an angel."

"Not 'angel,'" Megumi corrected me. "Goddess."

I did not understand her meaning, but given that a goddess would outrank an angel, I was certainly not about to complain. "'Goddess' is even better," I acknowledged with a smile.

Megumi's eyes beamed, her radiance brightening and expanding.

*****

We took a long walk after dinner, strolling through the falling snow. With the exception of a few restaurants and the convenience store and the hotel, everything in the immediate area was closed. The holiday lights and decorations added a hint of festiveness to the scene, but, like before, it was barely noticed. We decided to get some snacks at the convenience store to help us survive the long following day, as there would not likely be anywhere for us to go. In fact, I figured that we would not even open the door to our hotel room on Christmas Day other than to receive room service food.

When we finally returned to the hotel, the restaurant had closed. One member of the cleaning staff was vacuuming in the lobby, likely the last time it would be done until Christmas had truly passed.

Hotels are typically quiet places, especially after nightfall, but on the night of Christmas Eve, it almost felt like a crypt, such was the lack of activity overall. On previous occasions, we might pass someone in the hallway, or briefly share the elevator with someone, or faintly hear a television as we passed a hotel room. But on that particular night, there was no evidence of any other guests in the hotel.

Megumi was keenly aware of this sense as well. In fact, she suggested that we walk past every guest room in the hotel, searching for signs of other guests.

By the time we returned to my hotel room, it was confirmed that we were the only guests in the entire hotel.

That was both a joyous realization and a concerning concept. It was joyous because that meant that Megumi and I would almost certainly not be bothered unless we called to Room Service or if the front desk staff called us with a message from the college. It was concerning because it felt somewhat like we were back on campus, back in the dorm, trapped once again by circumstances far beyond our control.

"I call my family," Megumi announced.

"That'll be expensive on a hotel phone!" I exclaimed. I did not know how much the international charges would cost per minute, but I had seen the rates the hotel charged for the use of its room phones.

"I have calling card and use pay phone in the lobby," she reassured me. "It is Christmas Day now in Japan, in Kyoto. It is nearly ten o'clock."

As I sat on the bed alone in my hotel room, a sense of being alone in life slowly crept over me, its shadow chilling me, its aura dark and menacing, for while Megumi was clearly separated by nearly half a planet, she at least had a family, she had a place where she knew she truly belonged.

I did not, and that knowledge saddened me to the core, so that when I heard Megumi's knock upon the door, I opened it with tears cascading down my cheeks.

To her credit, she did not ask why I was crying. Perhaps she just knew instinctively what was troubling my mind. My angel – my goddess – simply held me, kissing each tear before it could tumble from my face, her fingernails gently scratching at my back.

Subtle yet significant, something changed. It was evident in the way Megumi spoke to me, her voice softer and more soothing. It was evident in her touches, just as caring yet somehow protective. It was evident in her eyes, just as loving yet with a deeper sense of understanding.

*****

It was nearly 11:30PM when we finally slid under the covers together. I still clearly felt the twinge of sadness at not having a family. Megumi could still sense it, still feel it, for she kissed my cheek in the darkness and whispered one phrase to me as sleep overpowered me:

"Remember the dream."