February 14th at Momo's

February 14th at Momo's

Hey, bartender. You must be new here, right? Don't remember seeing you before. But then, I haven't been here in a year. What's your name tag say? J-A-C-Q-I. Cute spelling. Give me a Midori and seltzer, with a lime twist. I may get something stronger, but that all depends...

No, I guess you don't get a lot of black women in a bar for Asian women. What can I say; it's what I got used to. My card: Tamara Maple, Sales Rep for women's sportswear. I'm in Asia six months out of the year, and I found women's bars like this in Tokyo. So I started coming here to Momo's when it opened a few years ago. A little bit of Tokyo in the Big Apple.

No, I'm not exactly waiting for anyone, because I don't know if anyone will be here. And I'm not exactly looking—more like listening. You have a great jukebox here, by the way. Last Valentine's Day, I think I spent more money playing some of those songs over and over than I did on the drinks. I really got into this one number that totally kicked, called "Tattoo Kiss."

The jukebox is where I met Hie. I was looking at the tunes after my fourth time out on the floor with "Tattoo Kiss." I felt like something slower, but the only song that really hit home was the last song I expected to find in a machine full of J-pop: Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour." I'm Old School; what can I say? I'm reading the other song titles as best I can, when I hear a voice behind me say, "Onegai."

I turn around, and, well, there she is. She may be Japanese-American, but she looks as out of place here as I do. Her long hair swept back showing a high forehead, skinny figure, holding her hands in front of her like she was going to bow to me. She looked like a housewife rather than the ko-gal or Office Lady look everyone else here tries for. She wasn't dressed to seduce, but something about her just grabbed me at that moment. She says, "I saw you dancing."

Now usually, that turns me right off, because it's usually followed by some bullshit like, "Didn't I see you in a video?" But not this time; she asks, "It's Valentine's and I'm alone; would you like to dance?"

I've been told by friends that I look less like a dyke than any other dyke they know, but Hie didn't even come close to fitting the picture. Like I said, she looked like a woman in her thirties, shy, nothing special, and usually I don't go for the "wounded bird" type. But I punched up Stevie Wonder and we walked out onto the floor.

It was the best slow drag I'd danced since high school. I didn't know what she had going on, but she got to me in thirty seconds. She kind of folded herself into my body, resting her head just above my tits. She held me around the waist, and I just sort of wrapped my arms around her shoulders and hugged her to me. When the song ended, she shifted just enough to look up at me, and smiled. It was one of those soft, simple smiles; no teeth, almost like she was apologizing for something. So I just said, "I love dancing with you."

She says, "Would you like...", and then the jukebox kicks in with some super-loud guitar riff. We go over to the bar, exchange names, and I ask, "What are you drinking?"

"Here I drink one thing, and at home I drink – something else." It wasn't a blatant come-on, especially from such a delicate little mouse of a woman, but I just had to take this Valentine's Day encounter to the limit. I told her, "Let's go."

So we hail a cab. I'm your basic New Yorker; I don't drive. In the cab she takes my hand in hers, tracing little patterns on my palm with her thumb while she rests her head on my shoulder. And, if I were any wetter at that point, I would have needed Pampers!

We stop at one of those new condos in the Fifties. While we're on the elevator, she asks if I've been to Momo's before, and if I know what momo means in Japanese. I tell her, "I know it means peach, and that Japanese peaches look like little pink baby asses." So she asks, "Do you like to eat momo?" I tell her, "Yeah, but don't expect the same with me. My ass looks more like two loaves of pumpernickel."

She laughs like it's the funniest thing she ever heard, and she doesn't stop until she opens the door to her place and lets me in. As soon as the door closes, it's like somebody gave us a signal. We start kissing there by the door, and I swear we don't break and come up for air for two minutes. Then she and I slip off our shoes—I spend so much time in Japan it's a reflex for me now—and we go to her bedroom.

And I have never seen anything like it! It's like she scored a half dozen Army Surplus parachutes somewhere. She's got this billowing silk all over the walls and the ceiling, as well as silk sheets on the bed. It was like some kind of fantasy design, but it reminded me of that line from "My Cherie Amour," the one: "Maybe someday I'll share your little distant cloud." It's like we were in a cloud. It was unreal, and wonderful, and I hardly noticed it as I was slipping off my clothes and she was slipping off hers, with our lips still locked together.

We came up for air again, and I looked at Hie. She had the housewife thing going on even with no clothes. Her breasts were small but her nips were fat as my big toe. And a lot of Asian women don't have much pubic hair but hers was a carpet! Thick and lush and shiny, and I wanted to just run one hand through it, and another hand for each nipple, and two more hands for her perfect little ass-cheeks, but I only had two hands, and one of them had been stroking her cheek when she started sucking my thumb!

Anyway, if I tell you everything we did that first night, it still would just be a small part of everything that came later. Plus, I'd get so hot that I'd have to start publicly frigging myself with the neck of a bottle. Just make up another Midori and seltzer. My throat is getting dry even if my puss is getting wet.

I called Hie's pussy that on that first night. This was about two hours after we got to her place. She was lying on the bed, couldn't move, and neither could I; I was just using her thigh as a pillow, running my fingers over and through her hair with my nose not six inches from her clit. I told her that it was like stroking a cat, caressing the fur and also feeling the living, breathing animal underneath. You know, she actually started to cry when I said that? She said everybody she'd been with would tell her to shave, but she didn't want to, and it really moved her that I liked her the way she was. So I asked her why she didn't get it trimmed.

"Because that's the first thing I remember about why I like women," she said. She grew up in Japan with her older sister and pretty rich parents and took baths with all of them. She was never interested in her dad's cock and balls, but she was fascinated by her mom's cunt, which was also hairy. It was so different from her hairless little-kid cunt, but still so much like it, that she just kind of studied it. The mother didn't think much of it at first.

But then Hie got a little older, and she and her older sister, when Hie was almost out of high school, would start out bathing and end up sixty-nining. Her mom caught them at it one day, and, long story short, she has to get married when she turns twenty or the family kicks her out.

"I had an artist friend I could trust," she told me, and it worked out that they'd get married, move to New York, and she could go on and live the way she wanted. Which is exactly what happened: her husband died of a brain aneurysm and they'd only been married six months. She stayed in her husband's condo like it was her tomb, and picked up women from time to time. But she said she never really cared for any of them.

I should have realized what was happening. Maybe I really saw it, but I didn't care. She was stroking the hair out of my face, and I looked up at her and said, "I'm glad you didn't love them, because I love you." I hadn't planned to say that, but it was the absolute truth. Well, she sat up and bent over to kiss me, and it just went on from there.

I lived at her place for six, no, seven months. We couldn't keep our hands or tongues off each other. I'd have to take care of my job, and sometimes that meant a week or two out of the country. So we had phone sex and virtual e-mail sex, and when I got back in country and cleared Customs, we'd wrap ourselves around each other in the terminal, no matter who was watching or how we looked. We'd have to go into a stall in the ladies' room to bring each other off, just to be able to get home without causing an accident.

Anyway, seven months. It was almost October, and I'd gotten back from one trade show and had to get ready for another. She said something about my job, and I was all headache and jet lag and worrying about three different clients, and I just wasn't thinking. I got defensive and huffy, and let me tell you, Jacqi, the myth about docile Asian women is exactly that. We were screaming curses and accusations and recriminations at each other, and I just up and left. I had clothes and papers and things there, and I just didn't care. She'd really hurt me, and I wanted to be rid of her.

Impossible. I even went looking for someone to get into a fantasy playing a desperate widow, but nobody could pull it off. Long story short, I'd broken up with Hie, but inside of a month I wanted to get back together with her, and at first my pride wouldn't let me. I tried to get back to my old ways, but Hie just cast her shadow over all of that. I knew I'd never find anyone else like her, never find the kind of one-of-a-kind sex we had, where she just kind of let go of everything, except for me. She was in that bed—or anywhere else we did it—only for me. Because she loved me, and I, I finally had to face it, I loved her.

But no apologies, Jacqi. I still had enough stupid pride to stop me from doing that. So I held out until I couldn't hold out any longer, and dialed her number, and hung up as soon as she answered the phone. I just couldn't do it. I tried until Christmas, when I had to spend the holidays with my folks in Chicago. And, when I got home, there were a couple of messages on the machine with nobody on the other end. Like they didn't know what to say, either. And I swear one of them had "My Cherie Amour" playing in the background.

So that's what I'm doing here on Valentine's Day, Jacqi. It's where we met before: a stupid black lady with too much pride to say, "I'm sorry" or "I love you," and a thirty-something Japanese widow who means more to me than any lover I ever had. I have this crazy notion that she'll come looking for me, because she has to; I mean, doesn't she miss me as much as I miss her? And I'm looking for her, too, right? So I have one ear on the jukebox and—

Stevie Wonder.

Don't refill that drink, Jacqi. Somebody's playing our song.