"Are you enjoying yourself so far?"
"Fuck no. I'm jittery as hell," I answered Tom, who was leaning into me with a tray of something I couldn't identify and wasn't sure even was cooked. All of this foreign crap was just too much for me. I was out of place and I'm afraid I had just fucked up. "There are Japs to the left of me and Japs to the right, and they all came in their robes."
Thomas laughed. "I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to be referring to them as Japs anymore. I think they're interesting, Jack. Like that young one over there. He's been looking at you and giving a little shy smile since they got here. Dipping his head. You know what dipping his head means, don't you, Jack?"
"Yes, I know what it means—at least I know what is means here and in our circles. I'm not so sure what it means in Tokyo. I'm not interested. He's different and Japanese. Just too different in a robe like that. I think I'd laugh through it all. It would be like unwrapping a Christmas present. And too young anyway. But, what? You're jealous?"
"No, should I be?" Thomas answered. The way he said it told Jack that he was, in fact, a little concerned.
"I didn't ask to be here," I said. "Frank wanted me to be here because he's trying to sell us to the Japs—excuse me, Japanese—he's entertaining. But it backfired that he made me come. That one he had me talk to—Hayashi something or other—wanted to talk theory, and I just make the glass, I don't pray to it. I came across as a country bumpkin."
"No, you didn't mess that up," Tom countered. "He was very attentive to you. You came across as someone who knew exactly how to get it done. He's got a hotel to put back together, not a theory to run after. If anything, I think you helped show that what Frank has to offer is grounded, not just pie in the sky. And you know how too many critics see Frank's designs—as pie in the sky."
"Are you trying to make me?" I asked with a smile, "what with the flattery and all."
"I'm always trying that, Jack. You know you only have to look my way."
"Are you stuck serving the crap on this tray all evening?"
"I can get away for a while, if you want me to."
* * * *
"We're being watched."
I turned Tom a bit to where I could see up the dimly lit corridor leading from the drafting studio at Taliesin back to the main house, where Frank Lloyd Wright was entertaining Aisaku Hayashi, manager of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo; his wife; and Japanese architect Tori Yoshitake. It was unseasonably warm that February of 1916 and it was the first entertaining Frank was doing at his reconstructed complex in southern Wisconsin, near Madison, since the fire there two years earlier during which his mistress, Mamah Borthwick, and her children had been murdered by a disgruntled employee, who then burned the main house down. Frank said he had to entertain the Japanese because he'd been trying to get the commission to renovate and add to Tokyo's premier Imperial Hotel since 1911.
I'd been among those Frank said had to come to the party, not because I was presentable in fancy society, which I wasn't, but because I was his chief stained-glass artist, and Frank wanted the key artisans who would be working on the Tokyo project to be there to convince the Japanese to hire us. Frank was nearly out of money—he always was nearly out of money—and said he needed this job. I wasn't one of his pansy artists—I thought of myself more as the guy who made reality out of someone else's design. I'd come to the stained-glass specialty the rough way—as a welder and glass blower—but Frank and his assistants did the designs themselves, so I only had to do the hot-lead part of the work. I could design as well, but I wasn't up to Frank's standards on that.
What I did design and render in glass beyond what Frank paid me to was glass dildos. I made special ones and was known for doing so. It helped me in getting the men I wanted. Of course, Frank and his designers didn't have an inkling that I made those.
Frank had said to be nice to the visitors. I'd been more interested in being nice to Thomas Aikens, one of the new brick-layer hires, who was serving refreshments at the party.
There was a young Japanese guy among the visitors I'd been exchanging looks with. I don't know why I kept looking at him. I'd told Tom I wasn't interested in the young Jap, but that was a lie. I was attracted to him despite not wanting to be. I told myself I wasn't attracted to the Japanese visitors at all; that they put me off. They were too foreign, too different looking, too stiff. Just too different. I was just a regular guy. An American. I wasn't all that interested in Frank's Japanese project. But I needed the job and I needed to be working on Frank's designs. I couldn't get that feeling of being part of something important and long-lasting from anyone but Frank.
But as much as I was put off by the Japanese visitors, I kept looking back at that young one and wondering. Maybe if he didn't give those signals of submission and I wasn't so horny tonight. But I was on shaky ground here—were those really signals of interest for a Jap? I had no trouble figuring out interest from my own kind. I didn't need this shit.
I usually kept my business away from the main house and stuck with guys closer to my age. Thomas was twenty-six to my thirty-one, but the Japanese guy couldn't be more than twenty-two. I didn't need this confusing shit. But he looked so exotic and sexy in that kimono or whatever Japanese robe he was wearing—all of the Japanese visitors had come dressed that way—that I was turned on. That didn't set well with me, though. I didn't have any interest in anything exotic like a young Japanese guy in a robe—or so I told myself.
At the same time, though, I was thinking about unwrapping the guy's robe. I needed to stop thinking of what he was like under that robe—what he wore under the robe and how easy it would be to take off. Would his body be small and slender, as berry-brown as he appeared to be, exotic? Would his cock be small or long? Would he sigh for me when I fingered his hole? Would his hole take me? Would he screech in some guttural language or moan as I fucked him?
I had plenty of guys around me who were just rough workmen, like me, and could take a good fuck. I didn't need to go chasing any different tail. He probably wasn't even intentionally signaling to me.
His name was Yukio Takamoto and he apparently was some royal Japanese something or other and had spent the fall studying architecture at the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison. Hayashi had brought him along to meet Frank because Takamoto could help in getting the royals to support the hotel redesign. But he'd done as much looking at me as I'd done at him, and, unless signals were different in Japan from here, I could tell that he wanted it—and from me. I wasn't all that sure that that was what Frank meant about being nice to the visitors, though. And who the hell knew if signals were the same on both sides of the ocean? Maybe the signaling was flip-flopped over on the wrong side of the world.
He was the one Tom said was watching us from down the hall, where the corridor to the drafting studio connected with the now-reconstructed main house. He was standing in the light from the house in his Japanese robe—blue silk with golden-beaked white herons on it—looking sexy, and watching me almost fucking Tom—intending to fuck Tom. And Tom was moaning for it.
I had Tom backed up to one of the brick columns running down the corridor to the drafting studio. He had a hand palming my basket, feeling up my hard-on, and I had one hand cupping his chin to hold him in place while we kissed, with the other hand stuffed down the back of his pants—a finger inside him. He was moaning and I was about to put him on my cock. But he tensed up when the Japanese guy showed up to watch us.
"Maybe later," I said, as I dropped the hand cupping Tom's chin and withdrew the finger from his ass. "I'll stay around until you guys have got the kitchen cleaned up and we can go over to my cottage if you want."
"I want, and perhaps you can show me one of your glass toys I'd been hearing about" Tom said, as he straightened up what he was wearing and padded back to the house, giving Takamoto a lingering look, not all that friendly, as he reached and passed him and disappeared into the main house, where someone was playing the piano and there was a tittering of conversation. I had planned on introducing him to one of my glass dildos there in the hallway; I had one in my pocket—not long, but thick. But that would have to wait now.
The young Japanese man stood his ground while I slowly walked back toward the main house. I really didn't want to go back into the party. I was out of my element there. These weren't my class of people. I was a horse of a skilled laborer, not one of Frank's pansy artists. I knew my job but I didn't know how to discuss the art of it with anyone, let alone some Japanese people.
I paused by Takamoto as I reached him. God, he was young. Early twenties I'd heard, but looking younger, at least in American terms. I hadn't done any guy that young. Even Tom was young for who I normally did. It would be like robbing the cradle. But that look. I thought I knew what a guy wanted when he gave me that look. I was more sure of it now. There couldn't have been much misunderstanding about what Tom and I were doing, even in the eyes of a Jap, and yet Takamoto stood his ground and watched us. I think he would have stayed and watched if I'd put Tom on the cock and pumped him against the brick column. And Takamoto—Yukio—was such a sexy little thing.
OK, I had to admit that the exotic thing turned me on. I liked to pretend it repelled me, but it didn't. And that exotic robe he was wearing. I wondered what he had on under that. Was a Japanese guy's passage as tight as an Americans?
Without thinking, I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He opened to me, taking my tongue inside. It was a lingering, sweet kiss. I let my hand move into the folds of his robe and found his chest bare, slim but lightly muscled and hard-bodied. I found a nipple with my forefinger and was rewarded with a sigh. When I came out of the kiss, I turned and walked back down the corridor, away from the party and toward the dimly lit drafting studio, a long, narrow brick-walled room, trimmed with wood—very much the Frank Lloyd Wright design style—with a row of drafting tables arrayed back along the far wall.
Yukio followed me.
I found out what he was wearing under that Japanese kimono of his—just a loincloth sort of thing that fell apart and away when I unknotted it. I laid him on a drafting table midway down the dimly lit room and laid him good. He wanted it bad. He was such a small, slim thing. I could barely believe he was even twenty. I didn't think I'd feel right about fucking a guy that young and small, but I was wrong. I loved it. And once we got going, after I'd undone that knot of black hair on the back of his head and let it cascade to his shoulders, I wasn't finding fucking someone so different from me repugnant at all. I found a Japanese could moan like an American—that, once on the cock, he could move and receive me like any American could. If anything, he was more flexible and yielding than the American workmen I usually spiked.
And he wanted it; he wanted it bad.
