Midnight and the Meaning of Love (86 page)

He smiled.
“Sarang?”
he said, meaning, “Love?” Then he pointed out over the waters.

“Somaemuldo.”

That same morning, I negotiated a small fee with a captain whose yacht I always saw docked more than moving. Eagerly, he agreed to take us over. He welcomed us nicely, made us comfortable, and promised to return for us at the agreed-upon time, three and a half days later.

“How come places are more beautiful when humans haven’t rearranged them?” Chiasa asked me. We were both staring at the reddest jagged-edged rocks, the bluest sky, the greenest grass, and into the forest as we climbed out of the transparent waters swarming with colorful sea life.

“Come on, we have to find a hotel,” I told her.

“We don’t have a reservation?” she asked.

“No, everything that happens here will be whatever you and me make happen,” I said.

“So fucking cool,” she said.

“Hotel,” a little Korean lady said, shaking her head back and forth to say no, and placing her hands across one another to say “none.”

“Sarang?”
she said. She was asking if Chiasa and I were in love. Chiasa held out her hands, showing the woman her wedding ring and bangles.

“Honeymoon,” Chiasa said with a soft pride. The lady smiled; she had a tanned face, a black afro, and tilted teeth. She touched Chiasa’s hand, then held it to lead the way. Chiasa looked back at me and said, “See, I’m already making friends.”

In a bungalow in the woods was where we laid our luggage, surrounded by forest and the sound of the sea. It was not a hotel or condo or motel or rental. It was the home of the woman who waited by the waters for the boats to come in, hoping she could make a few won if she could convince someone to stay.

There was no bed and no kitchen. The cooking area was an outdoor oven and grill. There was no bathroom; the toilet was a short walk to an outdoor structure. The shower was also on the side of the bungalow in the yard. The yard was not a real yard. It was the forest.

“We can leave and go somewhere else. I’m sure they have a hotel somewhere,” I told my wife.

“This is perfect,” Chiasa said. I paid the woman her full asking fee. She bowed using only her head, more than a few times, which sent Chiasa into bowing.

The woman pointed out the pillows, blankets, and mosquito nets, pots and pans, hot plate for indoors, rice cooker, and chopsticks. She led us outside and showed us the water well and the showerhead, the woodpile and the toolshed, and the lanterns to light up the yard at night. Then she immediately made herself disappear.

We organized and settled.

Exploring, I followed Chiasa through the woods, I knew she didn’t like snakes. I didn’t tell her, but when we first arrived, on the walk over, I spotted one. It was medium length and green and blended in like a leaf.

When we left the forest and faced a field of camellia flowers, Chiasa bolted. She started running at top speed. I chased her. She was quick and swerving to out maneuver and out distance me. I picked up my speed. I wanted to catch her and I didn’t want to catch her. She was burning off some energy that she probably had bottled up from being unusually still over her past days visiting Korea. I was getting closer to her heels and was excited by her ways.

I caught her, snatched her back by her waist and tossed her into the flowers. She laid there breathing hard. I stood over her.

“There are snakes in the grass,” was all I said. She jumped right up and chased me back to the bungalow, talking the whole time she was running about how she’s not afraid of snakes.

“I feel free,” she said. We were back inside our bungalow. “There is no one, just Chiasa and her husband.”

I sat on the floor, dry and laid out from our run. I watched her sort through her clothes that were folded inside her duffel. She chose a short dress, grabbed the soap and a washcloth, and left.

From the bungalow window, I watched her unwrap her scarf and unravel her two pretty braids and shake her hair into a wild, thick, and long mane. With her hands crisscrossed, she tucked her pretty fingers below her tee and eased it over her head and tossed it to the side.

She unclipped her bra from the front, and her breasts, the size of mangoes, seemed to leap out. They were firm and soft, nicely shaped and golden with deep-dark-brown nipples. Her waist was small and tight. Her shoulders were the most beautiful I had ever seen. They were slim and toned and cut and feminine and outlined perfectly from years of arching back and firing off her bows.

Her pants were open now, and with both hands she peeled them away from her hips. They dropped down to her ankles; She bent over to step out of them one leg at a time. Her panties were tiny, stretched over her smooth and round backside. The delicate lace stitching was slipping and began hiding in the crease of those soft cheeks. She didn’t see me watching her from the bungalow window, the same as she didn’t see me that first time in the mosque. Yet she sees everything, “perfect vision.” She turned on the shower water.

I spun her around. She was all wet. She cleaned the water from her face like a swimmer coming up for air. I pulled the lace and rolled
her panties over her hips and yanked them down to her ankles. She lifted one pretty foot and then the other. I tossed them. I looked up at her and into her eyes. They were flooded with a mixture of love, curiosity, and desire.

“Ryoshi,” she said when I stood facing her at full length and thickness. I pushed her back against the bungalow, held one hand on her waist and the other on the back of her neck. My joint was now pressed against her thigh. I leaned in closer. Her lips parted and her breath escaped. I slid in and tongued her gently. The inside of her mouth was warm. Her tongue wasn’t in a rhythm with mine at first, so I slowed mine and maneuvered hers until it flowed and felt right. Then I could feel her body relaxing. Her mouth started moving with a hunger. We sucked one another’s tongues. When I pulled back some, she moved forward and her tongue was bringing me back inside her. I could feel her mangoes pressed against my bare chest. I sucked her neck. Her breathing picked up and aroused me more. The warm water continued showering over our bare bodies.

“Oh my God, Ryoshi,” she whispered in my ear. I slid my hand down the center of her body and paused at a pile of black bush. I just stroked the outside lightly, separating hairs to get to touch the opening. She began breathing faster. I could feel the fire from within her rising and heating up her skin. Gently I pushed my finger in but only slightly. I stroked her clitoris and she screamed out loud.

I stepped back and looked at her. She covered both her eyes with her pretty hands. She held them there and suddenly squeezed her pretty thighs together.

“Oh my God, that feels so good,” she said dramatically, as though she could not believe it was happening to her. I turned off the shower. I moved in close to Chiasa and squatted down, petted her pussy, and her thighs relaxed again. I parted the hairs and divided her pussy lips and sucked on her clitoris.

She was on the ground now, my tongue licking and lips locking around her clitoris until she let loose the gushy. When I looked up, her whole body was trembling. Her pretty titties were shaking. Her deep-brown nipples were raised up high. Her eyes were closed and she was sucking her bottom lip.

I pulled up beside her. I began caressing her left titty and sucking the nipple gently. She spread her legs open. I got on top and over her.
Positioning the head, I pushed in and pulled back and pushed in and pulled back, and when it felt too good to me to control the rhythm that way, I thrust inside her. She moaned, “uh,” and breathed in, she exhaled. I pulled back and thrust inside her again. She whined, “uh” again, breathed in and then exhaled. Pushing in and out and going in deeper each time, I could feel her tight walls parting and pulsating, massaging me and allowing me all the way in. I could feel her walls go from narrow, tight, and resistant, to eased and welcoming, to hungry and greedy. Now I could hear only sounds of pleasure escaping from her lips. I had one hand on the ground and the other in her hair. I didn’t realize I was pulling it, yanking it. Her hips were moving beneath me now. She was feeling it, and grooving with it now. We were grinding in the grass. She eased her ballerina legs around my back. I could no longer think, narrate, control, direct, or resist. Her pussy was bliss and I had lost my mind.

When I showered my seeds into Chiasa, my wife, I eased off. There was a stream of blood running and smeared over her left thigh. I reached for her tiny white tee and used it to wipe up her blood. I planned to keep the bloody shirt just like that without ever rinsing her blood away.

I lay flat on my back facing the sky now. She threw one ballerina leg over and rolled right on top of me, she began kissing my face with her thick and pretty lips as though she was thanking me without words. She threw her arms around my neck. She screamed one Japanese word,
“subarashi!”
and then whispered with her lips pressed to my ear and said, “Ryoshi, I fucking love you. You make me feel so good.” She licked my ear.

I don’t know what we both imagined we would do on that island. Whatever it was, all we did was love one another. Of course we did little things like eat, after Chiasa shot a chicken with her arrow and I plucked it, cut and cleaned it, and grilled it.

We played in the forest, ran together and raced to nowhere.

“Run!” she told me, as she took aim at me with her arrow.

“Woman, don’t be crazy,” I told her. But she was serious.

“I like a live target best,” she said, and let off her arrow over my head. I liked the adrenaline rush and started running. I just pretended I was back in my Brooklyn hood running from the police after a block party got shut down. I was dodging and zig-zagging. She was
firing off those arrows repeatedly, just missing my head each time till they were all gone. Then she chased each arrow down and I began chasing her.

“I know you could’ve hit me if you tried,” I exposed her.

“Then who would make love to me?” she said, switching from assasin to temptress.

In the middle of the late night, I spread out my sleeping bag.

“Get in,” I told her.

“There are blankets,” she said softly.

“Get in,” I said again. I zipped us inside.

“Ryoshi, you really do love me, don’t you?” I just hugged her up. Having her naked inside my sleeping bag was a fantasy, a dream I had had on the rooftop in Hokkaido. Now we were in a warm, darkened hut on an island where only fifty people lived. As my hands rode her curves, and as she kissed me everywhere in an explosion of emotion, it had become real. We were just touching not speaking, not grinding. We were winding down into a sleep, I thought.

“Ryoshi, when did we fall in love? I tried to pinpoint the exact moment in my mind,” Chiasa said to me.

“Probably we both fell in love at different times,” I said sincerely. “Also, I think a man could fall in love at one time but not acknowledge it to himself until later on.”

“Tell me,” she asked.

I was stroking her skin while thinking. My hand paused on her lower back right before the curve of her behind. The moonlight was streaking through the window, cutting through the darkness in our bungalow, but revealing only Chiasa’s incredible eyes. “I fell in love with you at the Senegalese restaurant in Tokyo,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked. “Why there?”

“Because you were so beautiful and completely quiet. You were surrounded by men but weren’t flirting. They all knew you were a precious gem but that they could not have you, because you were mine.” She moved her hand to the inside of my leg and left it there. “Besides, you killed them all by throwing those darts into the bull’s-eye like it was nothing to you.”

She laughed a bit. “Ryoshi, you killed them. You had already beaten them at their own game on their board!” she said with soft excitement. “So when did you acknowledge it, your love for me? You
said it was at a separate time.” She asked me again. She was very curious. But now she was playing in my pubic hairs. Aroused, I slid my middle finger inside of her, touching her clitoris. Her accelerated breathing was background music to my true response to her.

“When I was in Busan and you were on the telephone speaking to me. When I couldn’t even get my words right. When I asked if you were still fasting and you said yes. That sealed it for me. I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

I swelled up to a full thickness and full length then. She knew it. Her hand touched it and she moved her fingers away. I eased my finger out before she could explode. I guess she didn’t want to seem greedy. She didn’t crawl on top of me but her heart was beating in her pussy. I was greedy for her. I moved in the tight space of the sleeping bag that was designed for one body. When I was on top, the pretty puma said, “Yes, please fuck me.”

“Dirty-mouth girl,” I called her. We were grinding. My sleeping bag was puffing up like a hot-air balloon with our body heat and heavy breathing.

We awakened sticky and glued together. Sunrise came without notice. We showered separately and then made the prayer. We had no early morning meal or water.

* * *

In the daylight, we prayed and read Quran together but separately. Chiasa’s mind was so sharp. She read slowly and thoughtfully. She would explain her interpretations clearly and ask me about my understanding. It seems she compared each line to her own life and experiences or what she thought she might face in the future. I am a Muslim man and I loved her independent thinking. It was both respectful and beautiful to me. It revealed that she was not simply acting or going through the motions for my sake. She was searching for meaning and she was sincere.

Later, she showed me how to drive a motorcycle on a broke down half-rented, half-borrowed motorbike. After an hour of training, I was riding her. She was on the back with her face pressed against me as we toured the tiny island.

We stopped here and there and bought some rice and vegetables
and a few small items for her to cook after sunset. I would not eat from her hands before, but I would eat from hers tonight, eagerly.