At First Blush

Both of them felt it when they met, that ooze of opiates in the brain and the dribble of warmth through the nerve canals that told them they were meant for each other. The fall occurred at a meeting of Mensa, the society for people with high IQs. It was all trickle down from there.

Bruce was a Gulf War veteran and a former telephone lineman, presently working in luggage repair for a shop at the base of their building. Though normally somewhat hermitic, going out only to visit his father, for whom he cooked a meal each night, Bruce had attended meetings for years. He took great pride in his test score, which was at the low end of the Mensa scale, and enjoyed the occasional company of others like himself. He felt safe among the Mensa crowd, perhaps because the membership was everyone's only distinction.

Sachiko was something of a recluse, too. She had come from Japan twenty years before to earn a PhD in Literature, but her dissertation was long overdue and her career was a non-starter. Pride precluded her return home without her degree in hand and she eked out a living as a private tutor to Japanese language students. Other than her pupils, she had no contact with others. She was attending her first meeting, and as it turned out, her last. Her manuscript was finished to her satisfaction and she was preparing to publish with an academic vanity press. She hoped to encounter the sort of people she no longer had access to, that she might persuade them to notice her book, but found herself in a crowd of big heads with similar goals to her own, everyone promoting cockamamie ideas, with only Bruce for a listener. Having nothing of his own to shill, he took an interest in everyone, and particularly, it seemed, in her, even though she was past her prime and dressed in castle walls and moat. “There must be something with geniuses,” she said to Bruce, in a guarded moment, “they're so in love with their own ideas, but they have no concept of the marketplace.”

“Present company excepted, of course,” he replied. Remarks such as those had made him the most popular guy in the room. Thus, when he took her hand in his and told her, “let's get out of here,” she would willingly have followed him anywhere, even back to the single bed in his squalid room at Haddon Hall.

“How did you know I live there?” she asked, as he gave the address to the cabbie.

“You don't say,” he replied. "It's just that I live there, myself. I was hoping you might like to see my Nazi memorabilia.”

“What kind of line is that,” she said, “if you wish to get a girl interested in you?”

“If I'd had the chance to try it before, I suppose I might know. It just happens to be my hobby.”

“Did you just move in recently?”

“I've been living there for years?”

“How is it that we've never crossed paths?”

As their eyes met again, her look forgave him, and then it was their lips that met, though he didn't feel the need to kiss, at first. His feeling for her differed from what he recalled of his youthful amours, when he was overwhelmed by hormonal drives that ended so often in despair. He could hardly tell what state he was in, except that he felt so at ease and secure he would simply have enjoyed speaking with her, had her own desires and expectations not been so transparent.

She parlayed that tentative first kiss into a passionate second, along with some wild and frantic groping, the release of years of pent-up yearnings, in the rear seat of the cab. There was almost no stopping him once she had gotten him started, but the driver pulled up at their destination before they could make a spectacle of it. That was reserved for the creaky contraption in which they nearly stripped each other nude on the short ride up to the second floor. They wrapped their dishevelment in their coats as they stepped off the elevator and made a beeline, giggling, towards Bruce's door.

His dingy, eighty-square foot room was a veritable Nazi museum. Two flags of black, white, and red decorated the walls, one with a swastika, the other of three equal stripes. An SS officer’s uniform dressed a mannequin in one corner and Bruce's collection of war decorations was laid out atop his dresser. While Sachiko viewed the spread of medals with a seemingly morbid fascination, Bruce embraced her from behind, fondling her belly first, before she guided his hands to her breasts, and he nuzzled the cheeks of her tail end with his hardened male part as she rocked up and down to caress it. He kissed the nape of her neck and watched as she removed the SS cover from the mannequin's head in the corner.

“I know just what to do with this,” she said, spinning around to loosen his jeans and place the cap on his member's head. It drooped under the weight of the cap, and she chortled with delight as it dropped its load and sprang back like a Nazi salute.

Bruce did not take it personally. He had no pictures of the Fuhrer and wasn't a Nazi in his politics, nor an anti-Semite. Nor would he wear the regalia for fear of antagonizing people and otherwise being taken as gay, for it was the fashion in certain quarters to affect the look of an SS man. It was only the aesthetic that interested him, the sharpness and angularity, the military precision of it.

Sachiko pushed him onto the bed, straddled his legs and knelt over him. She toyed with his manhood and sang its praises, “such a lovely thing you have here,” dragging a finger up its length, “so long, so thick, and so hard.” As her finger circled it lightly, the sensation careened throughout his body. “Its skin so soft and smooth to the touch.” She rubbed it against her cheek, “would that I could have such smooth skin,” teasing it briefly with her tongue. “Such a beautiful thing to behold, and it tastes a bit like sashimi.”

It salved his pride to hear such talk, and excited him beyond all reasoning. He'd never known the girls of his youth, or even his wife, to say such things. They had always been quiet receptacles for him, and in retrospect, disappointing, as though the bestial act itself was all that brought them together. Yet here was this deeply conservative woman, who seemed, at first sight, a batty old maid, one whom he would have considered a prig, tossing it all to the wind and the waves, getting down and talking dirty in such a pleasing way, and doing so for the likes of him.

“You amaze me,” he said. “I never would have guessed you could be like this. I'm absolutely stunned.”

She beamed at him and removed what little was left of her clothes. “If you only knew how I count sheep, you might understand where it comes from,” she said.

“You mean you've never...”

“We're taught that serious people don't waste time on sex, unless it's for conception. But that doesn't stop us from wanting it.”

“Sounds like the Puritans here,” he said. “Is that what you believe?”

“I suppose I did, in practice, until you came along. Then, suddenly, I didn't anymore.”

She unbound the long, luxurious hair she had earlier rolled in a bun and swung it lightly back and forth across his bare torso. It felt so good it brought tears to his eyes, and he buried her in kisses of gratitude.

“It occurs to me,” he said, “that it's not the physical strokes so much as the things we say to each other, and what we give of our inner selves, that really matter in making love. It's physical and spiritual. I've never experienced that before, even when I was married.”

“Who was to blame for that?”

“We were both young and stupid, I suppose, but the war had something to do with it, too. I didn't come home the same man that left.”

“Shall we shower first?” she replied.

They pursued each other from bed to bath, where they climbed into a claw footed tub that, along with mosaic tile floors, was one of the original fittings from the Gilded Era glory days. The jerry-rigged shower was added later, with a curtain ring suspended from the ceiling. She handed Bruce the bar of soap. “Lather me up, and make enough for two.”

His hands grazed all over her, first on her public parts before moving on to the privates. She was pleasingly fleshy, but not overweight, with a thick black bush that he liked down below and found especially useful in lathering the soap. Her breasts, though not so protuberant, seemed all the more sensitive to the touch. She shuddered beneath his gentle strokes and permitted him liberties under her arms that his ex-wife never would.

Soon she went to work on him, rubbing him all over with her soapy muff, spreading the suds between them and making merriment of it. “Men in my country pay dearly,” she said, “to have the soap ladies do this to them.”

“Then I'll be sure to reward you appropriately.”

She smiled and gave his manhood extra special attention, taking it into her soapy hands and giving it a minute inspection, in addition to a lengthy massage. “You know,” she said, “it might sound strange, but it excites me to hear you say that. It's as though this were purely transactional.”

“You'd like me to think of you as my whore?”

“Just as having the skills of a whore.”

“I prefer the affections of a lover,” he said.

“Suppose you got both as a package deal,” she replied, with a sly, gaping grin. “and a ready reception whenever you please? Would that not be preferable?”

She turned on the shower again for a rinse then plugged the drain to run a hot bath, in the usual Japanese style. They settled into the tub together, as the hot water filled the bath.

“For a woman who plays the role of old maid, you don't seem virginal at all,” he said.

“I should be ashamed to say this, but we have a tradition in my country in which brides to be are instructed in the marital arts by their mother's circle of friends. They take us to lunch and show us old scrolls of fine erotic artwork. It's the Japanese version of the Kama Sutra, portraying all manner of sexual acts. I simply ran away from home before I got to try them. But I've fantasized ever since.”

“You mean you've never...”

“I ran away from an arranged marriage a week before the ceremony.”

“I thought that was just for royalty.”

“Where I come from, it's business.”

“You mean to tell me your father would marry you off as a business arrangement?”

Seeing where Bruce was headed, and fearing it would break the spell to speak, she rolled around, knelt over him, and took him once again in hand. “I'd much rather talk about this little guy, it seems that he needs some encouragement.”

But Bruce would not let the subject drop. “And women in your country just accept it?”

“Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

“I'd be delighted just to talk to you.”

“I didn't accept it. And I'm not alone.” She took him in her mouth to stop his own.

“You must have had boundless opportunities here.”

She made him wait for an answer. “I never met a foreigner I could trust. Present company accepted, of course.”

“And your own countrymen?”

“I don't often get to meet them. But when I do, I am not impressed.”