Lots of straight men, and more than a few lesbians, envied John his friendship with Hiromi. The two of them were seen so often together in public, at movies and shows or just cruising around, that nearly everyone assumed they were a couple. But they weren't, John readily admitted when asked. They had a language exchange going, Japanese and English, and they liked each other's company, but it ended short of the bedroom door. "Just good friends," he said, putting the faintest note of irony into his voice, to show he understood why they had difficulty with it.
When he finally got them to believe what he said about his relationship with Hiromi, some of his friends expressed condolences. It was irritating, but John had no trouble seeing why. She was the sort of person who no one attracted to women could ignore. As tall as he was, and with long legs instead of the usual Japanese short legs and long body, Hiromi was spectacularly sexual. She wore her thick black hair loose, down her back to below her waist, and although her smooth skin was a bit dark, almost Polynesian, she had big eyes, high cheekbones, and sensual lips. Her breasts were on the small side of medium, but they were firm and beautifully shaped, with large, dark nipples that seemed to become erect remarkably easily, difficult to miss since she disliked bras and rarely wore them. Her waist was slender, her bottom firm and round, and when she was in a swimsuit at the beach or in a pool, the observant might note that her pubic mound was high and the lips below it long and plump, faintly outlined under the thin cloth of a tiny bikini bottom, or by her jeans if she wore them tight enough. She didn't flaunt herself, but she didn't take offense if someone gave her the eye, no matter how long or lustfully, man or woman.
If there was one thing that put people off about Hiromi, it was the way she interacted with others. It wasn't arrogance or conceit, but rather an aloofness that most wrote off to the assumption that she had a history of being pursued a little bit too long and a little bit too ardently. She always seemed at a distance, as if she were playing herself on the stage. It was done in gentle ways, at least in public, but she made sure that no one got too close.
John knew that most people assumed it was because she was with him. In fact, there was another reason entirely, and he was inwardly amused whenever someone new to the game tried to hit on Hiromi. A few of the more persistent got her to come on dates with them, and one or two even spent the night with her, but they were reluctant to discuss the experience afterward and didn't pursue her further. One was so morose that John couldn't resist asking him what had happened. He wouldn't say anything, other than the glum remark, "She can make a hard seven into a floppy three faster than any chick I've ever seen." From his tone, John understood that he was referring not to post-intercourse detumescence but to sexual humiliation. Because of these incidents, it was tempting to assume that Hiromi was lesbian, and she certainly had no prejudice against them in the day to day, but she wouldn't give lesbians, even the most attractive, the time of day if they approached her sexually. To the world at large, she was an erotic enigma.
John was Hiromi's only close male friend because he had been the only person to accept her as she was. In fact, she had told him long ago that it wasn't because she disliked men, or women, that she didn't have a more active sex life. It was simply that Hiromi seemed to be that rarest of creatures, a truly asexual person. She didn't find sex disgusting or sinful or upsetting; she found it deadly dull. Once, she confessed to John, she had actually fallen asleep while one of her gasping, sweating one-night stands was riding her. It was her utter, sincere, malice-free lack of response that had devastated the men who had pursued her as far as the bedroom door.
"I mean," she told John once, "my nipples get hard, but I don't get any buzz out of my breasts being touched. If I'm licked or fingered, I get wet, but that's as far as it goes. Fucking is about as much fun as being prodded in the ribs. It isn't unpleasant; it isn't
anything
. And just the same if I take it up my ass. I might as well be having an enema. It's that dull. I can suck guys off, but I keep on yawning, and when they eat me, I get sleepy. Someone forgot to make some connections when I was put together."
"Doesn't anything ever happen?" John asked. "If you do it by yourself, for instance?"
Hiromi shrugged. "If I finger myself for half the morning, I'll come," she replied. "It's pretty wild, too -- the only time, really, that I ever feel anything. It's just that getting there makes me so tired it hardly seems worth it. I just want someone to do it to me for a change, instead of getting cramps in my hand. I want to be fucked wild and deep for hours and hours, until I stop yawning and start to scream. But no guy can keep it up that long, not even with his tongue, let alone his cock."
"And if someone can last that long," John added. "He's probably got his own issues and feels pretty negative about sex too." He said it offhand, but it hit close to home. He'd never mentioned it to Hiromi directly, but one of the reasons it didn't strain him to spend so much time with her was that he had the same sort of problem standing between him and good sex. It took him so long to finish off that women became uncomfortable -- "sored and bored" as one of them had put it, and so he tended to sideline his romantic life.
That summer, Hiromi was under a great deal of stress. She was tour-guiding for a Japanese honeymoon tour company, and half the couples on the trips seemed to be having serious second thoughts about hooking up. It was her responsibility to keep trouble in the group to a minimum, and it was as stressful as babysitting a roomful of delinquents sometimes. But oddly enough, what bothered her most of all were the rare couples that were sincerely wild for each other. The ones that were always half asleep on the trips to tourist spots, because they had spent most of the previous night fucking each other senseless. The ones where the woman would put her hand between her husband's legs and start squeezing his cock every time they sat down at a table, or the man would slip his hands into his wife's blouse and feel her breasts when he thought they weren't observed. The ones that always sat at the back of the bus on long trips, and always seemed to have to rearrange their clothing before they got off. The ones who were so noisy at night that they had to be found rooms a bit apart from the main group, or they would keep everyone awake.
That last type has been the occasion for one of Hiromi's most memorable experiences, one that made her begin to suspect she might be less indifferent to sex than she had assumed. She had been doing a late walkaround in a hotel to see that everything and everyone was in its proper place, and had been brought up short by the noises from one of the rooms. The woman was moaning almost as loud as if she were giving birth, and when not moaning she would be babbling in Japanese and broken English, telling her husband to shoot his load inside her, all of it, all the way in, urging him to fuck her faster, harder, deeper. The man was grunting softly with each thrust, punctuated with occasional loud moans when his wife's vagina gripped his cock, for a moment too tight to move. And the sounds went on forever, a continual climax that grew more and more intense as the minutes passed.
Hiromi was mesmerized. She stopped just outside the door to listen, and her breathing quickened. In an unthinking, automatic reaction, she slipped her right hand down her front and drew her skirt up, and then slid both hands into her crotch, under her panties. Pulling down her panties to her knees, and spreading herself wide with her left hand, she began to tease her erect clitoris with the fingers of her right, and then began sliding them up and down through the slippery fluids that began to drip out of her, working her long, slender fingers further into her open vagina with each thrust. The couple behind the door climaxed over and over again, and Hiromi felt her consciousness of self fading as she imagined herself in the place of that wife, naked on the bed, hard nipples licked and bitten, her long legs wrapped around a man's body and her labia spread and slippery, dripping with their mingled juices, a thick, shining, rock-hard penis thrusting in and out of her as she arched her back and came, endlessly peaking higher and higher, begging to be fucked harder, faster, deeper, for him to fill her with his sperm.
When the unseen woman behind the door went into her final orgasm and began to shriek
Iku, iku yo!
(I'm coming!), it triggered Hiromi too, sprawled on the hallway carpet, eyes closed, with her skirt up, her legs wide apart and her panties around her ankles. Her back arched and she screamed as well, soundlessly, twisting her twitching fingers still deeper into her body. Thank goodness it was too late for anyone else to be in the hall, or she would have had some awkward explaining to do. As soon as she could, she dragged herself upright, away from the wet mark she'd left on the carpet, and staggered back to her own room to shower. In the shower, she began to masturbate again, ending as a gasping, incoherent, naked form curled up on the shower floor in the dark cloud of her own hair, as her vagina tightened around her fingers in uncontrollable spasms, again and again. It was only when she finally managed to drag herself to bed that she remembered her soaked panties were missing, probably still on the hall carpet outside the lovers' room.
To hell with it
, she thought.
Let someone take them for a souvenir.
