The Long Highway Pt. 14B

I'm not saying Nelson or anyone else changed how I behaved toward Akemi. People get jealous and beat their lover and say their rival or even she herself was to blame. That's nonsense.

Akemi had told me before that she was close to her father and that when she was nineteen things between them changed. Suddenly. One day stood out in her memory and she talked about it, opening as she usually didn't about her past, her feelings in general- her belief is that she can handle that on her own. She isn't an American who blabs about feelings, soul searches aloud.

Her description of the day in question was particularly vivid and affected me viscerally. I'll try to relate what she said, though I don't remember her exact words, only a few.

It was a summer afternoon, early summer, and she and her dad were in their yard. They were outside, she repeated, as if seeing it again. On that sunny day she was going swimming. To cool her off before she left her father sprayed her with a garden hose. She wore a black swimsuit, one-piece, and the water, spray from the hose, wet the front, the chest, and drew the fabric even closer to her skin than it already was. Through the sleek nylon her nipples showed, the fabric tight, glistening. Her nipples grew hard through the swimsuit, seemed to widen like diatoms (I think she said "coins" but in my mind I saw those circular sea creatures that resemble them).

Her father and she stood close facing each other in the direct sun that cast strong clear shadows, the brightness making it hard to see the dark places (again, this is my extrapolation of the scene, which became very graphic to me; she affects me that way- as she described those few moments simply, each detail leading to another, the setting became clearer and clearer, almost as if I were standing there watching her at nineteen with her father. She didn't go into much visual description, talked only about what was done and said, yet I could see it in the actions and words she recalled. I know her. I've been to her house in Japan, know her father.

He looked at her and changed, she told me, and said to her, "If you don't feel embarrassed, you should." He made clear that since she was a woman now they could no longer be as close as before.

Akemi said that moment hurt her. Her father had spoken as if in anger, but she hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't, though, the unfairness, if any present, that upset her. She felt sorrow about losing the special relationship with her father, the realization that it was over then and forever. She knew he was right but hated him for those moments, hate coming from love she felt.

Were her feelings for him part of her attraction to Nelson? Was missing him, missing home, what drew her to my old friend?

I'm older than Akemi. Maybe that's part of why she liked me too.

I asked her for more visual details. She's good at them. She paints.

Akemi talked about her thin rubber-like swimsuit, dark charcoal hue changing to deep black by the water soaking it.

She said that day was painful for her father too- the hour of reckoning- but he was hard, immovable, made clear, "No, you can't be my little girl any more." I don't know if he said any of this in so many words. His posture, expression might have conveyed it all.

At nineteen she knew she wouldn't be Daddy's girl any longer.

Her father hosed her because it was hot in the sun and she'd asked him to. She seemed concerned I understand he was sensitive to her. He just sprayed a gentle mist, she said. A rainbow might have formed in it, come and gone.

She was a late bloomer, a homebody as a teenager, had everything she wanted there, a garden, her brother and sister.

She was going off to see friends who were going swimming together. She said she'd rather have stayed home, enjoyed her father's company than her friends', have him all to herself. She liked him that much, she said to me, her eyes scanning my face to see if I really understood the depth of her feeling. I saw its intensity, as I've said. Her intensity was part of what made me fall in love with her and what made her an artist and the woman she'd become.

I felt all of it when I felt my cock shooting in and out of her mouth. "Do you understand?" she often asks me, not quite believing I would or could. I ask the same of you.

Did her eyes tear as she told me this- it was in our living room at around dusk, the subdued light warming the atmosphere around us, as we faced each other close, maybe as she and her father had. Anyway, she looked sad, her face so open. I wanted to embrace, protect, comfort her on the spot and I did, but I couldn't long that day, as I had a doctor's appointment, had to leave. I felt her cling to me. It felt good. There's a poignancy to Akemi I feel that's part of her sexiness and goes deep and shimmers on the surface like sprayed water in the sun.

The doctor's appointment (at a clinic open after work) was to check out a pain in my right shoulder. It hurt a bit when I rotated my arm fully, as the doctor and assistant instructed me. I explained that might have been from all the exercises I was doing. I did them to stay in shape for Akemi. I didn't mention the last part to the doctor though, ha ha.

Late thirties, I was in pretty good condition but not on par with Akemi, who had the body of a dancer, taut, supple in a bathing suit. On her fine shoulders she held erect in her ballet posture (so it struck me) the glittering black of her hair fell in a cascade, flash of highlights and depths, almost not recognizably human that beauty, sharp like a blade with serrated edges.

I, on the other hand, was just a guy. Did I resent her making me feel ordinary? I would have but she loved me. Her mouth, her kiss showed that. It wasn't her fault I compared myself to other guys she might choose from, guys still bouncing in their twenties like her.

"Do you know how many pushups I do?" I'd asked her. She didn't.

"Fifty. No, I mean eighty." In mistakenly saying the lower number I felt I'd lost the moment, though eighty also didn't seem that much, impressive.

Back then I didn't know she might prefer someone as old as Nelson.

No, he wasn't at the party given in celebration of his film-work. He was on the other side of the country, presumably with his wife Leticia, but his presence dominated the party, even before he put in a brief appearance by video call. And the blowjob i got from Akemi back at my place was not the first- we'd been going out a while already- but the first of its kind, different partly due to my jealousy about Nelson, dumb emotion exacerbated by alcohol, desire to get her mind off him. She'd talked at the party and on the way home about finding the man and his work "cool."

Can you see it with me, the words working as a camera lens? At first, as I said, I couldn't see much beyond the top of her head, banging high and low, changing angles of approach, until she came all the way off for a while and brought her mouth to the side of my cock, not pausing, breaking contact only only to rub with her cheek. Playful, affectionate, she glanced up at me as if for approval- no, definitely for approval, seeing whether I liked the variation. Drunk, I enjoyed subordinating her and knew it. Most beautiful woman I'd ever been with, ever seen, and she was serving me. I was lording it over her. No need to ask whether I liked it. Was it a good thing that I was acting toward my girlfriend like a sailor in a brothel? I can't say I didn't care, but drunk I put the caring aside.

Even pressed tight tight to me, her lips were able to move freely because all the surfaces were so wet.

I'm trying to keep this simple but maybe it's complex, unresolvably complex. I also wanted to make Nelson proud of me, was always trying to win his favor, ever since I'd been his student. I wanted to do Akemi in a way he'd find worthy, misguided of me as that might have been.

I put my hands on the concave elegance of her cheeks, touching sensitively to feel all the fineness of those contours, and rougher to pull her up again.

We hadn't talked about me coming in her mouth. It just hadn't happened the other times. There came a point past which it became clear it probably would this time. No big whoop. It happens and happens to feel good.

I feel kind of funny going into the physical description but that's key here. In fact, it's almost everything. The mind turns off to let the body come on. Akemi's rocking, my rolling. You look for words to convey this stuff. Looking back on that night, memory dulled by the fact that I was pretty drunk.

I don't know what got me into this, other than that we talked to Nelson the other day.