Lost Girls and Love Hotels Read Online Free PDF

assumes the mouth-shield position—Japan’s answer to orthodontics. I smile at her. She bows at me. The-Guy-Whose-Name-Nobody-Knows puts his hand on the small of her back, urging her forward, urging her out. The sweet potatoes smell sweet. “ Kirei desu ,” I say to the girl being shuttled. You’re pretty.
    I don’t want to listen for the passionless kiss or the mobile phone tango. I want to eat my sweet potatoes and enjoy my strange blend of melancholy and contentment. I know it won’t last. It’s a fine balance, struck when the precise amount of intoxicant produces a temporary amnesia, a dulling of the capacity to fixate, deconstruct, analyze. When life is reduced to this step, then that step, to the way water tastes to a dry mouth, the way kindness comes easily at these times, fits into the moment like a lover’s body curling into mine. When life is not out there. It’s here. And here. And here.
    I want to enjoy it while it lasts, before the midday plummet, when my only recourse will be to sleep or buy useless shit.
    I try to ignore the dinginess of the hallway, the yellowing stippled walls, the hemorrhaging garbage bin under the PUT YOUR CLAP HERE sign. I try to laugh at the fact that I live in a flophouse by Japanese standards. By any standard. I tell myself that everything is experience, that someday I’ll see all of this as part of a puzzle, that it will amount tosomething, that I will amount to something. For a moment, my mind starts up that old neural pathway, toward despair, toward worst-case-scenario territory, but I make it to Ines’s door in time.
    The door is ajar, so I burst in and hold the bag of potatoes over my head like a trophy. I’m afraid I’m manic, but I push the thought aside, swim awhile in my sudden energy, the excitement only aromatic vegetables can engender. “Ta-da!” I scream, attempting a click, failing, almost toppling over. My robe falls open and I stand there all goose bumps and hard nipples, panting, close to happy for the first time in months. I’m not sure why. I don’t care.
    “Good morning gorgeous,” Ines says with a purr. She looks perfect. Makeup unsmudged, not a hair astray. “This is Kazu.” Ines pulls back the duvet and reveals a brown smooth man, painted with tattoos, ropy with muscles, curled in the fetal position, sound asleep.
    “Oh shit, sorry.”
    “Don’t be silly. Entrée . What’ve you got there?”
    “Yaki-iimo,” I whisper. Steam puffs out of the bag when I open it. “Who’s the guy?”
    Ines grabs my hand, giggles, nibbles at the sweet potato. “Kazu. I think he’s a gangster or something. Very dangerous.”
    I look at Kazu, his shaved head, pouty lips, high, broad cheekbones. Something about him triggers an uncomfortable animalism in me, erases for a moment all my accumulated angst, and transforms me into a walking appetite. I let my breath go. Try to collect myself. Tell myself he’ll wakeup and say something unsexy in pigeon English and all will be as it should be.
    “Mmmm,” Ines says. She flashes me her cum face—chin up, mouth open, eyelids fluttering. “Fuck this is good.”
    “I bet.”
    “No this.” She takes another bite, runs her hand over Kazu’s shoulder. “ And this.” His eyes open.
    The sweet potato tastes like candy.
    “Ohayo gozaimasu,” Kazu says.
    “Good morning baby.” Ines kisses his smooth head. My chest feels hot. “This is my friend. Isn’t she yummy?”
    I pull my robe tight across my body.
    “Threesome? What do you think, sweetheart?”
    I breathe in a noseful of the air—Chanel No. 5 and corporeal indulgence. Hope that Ines will dismiss her suggestion with a laugh. The sober light of the morning is not the time for a threesome.
    Kazu stretches like a cat. The cords of his neck tighten. “Time is?”
    “Ten,” I spit out. So pleased to respond to him.
    He sits up. Cracks his neck. Left. Right. I wonder if he really is a gangster. Ines is prone to exaggeration, and there is something