"Aardvark."
"Aardvark?"
"Yes. Say it, and I stop. Say anything else, and I do what I want."
She stared at me.
I'd never kissed an Asian girl before, and so far, it had been a little frustrating. A few hours earlier, we'd made eye contact at a cheap, healthy restaurant near campus. In New York City. She was a grad student in education, which we'd talked about for an hour while sipping some hot tea. Everything about her was small. Not frail, but twig arms, twig legs, flat chest. Short hair, maybe 2 inches long? Ears very visible. Gold wire rim glasses. She had to be 25, but she looked far younger. She spoke fluently but with a clear Chinese accent. I didn't care about educational philosophy, but I liked watching her mouth talk. I was increasingly wanting a real drink.
When she told me that it was her birthday, I'd had a choice, and I decided to take a path less traveled (at least by me). After I'd paid for her rice/broccoli, I took her hand and we walked into the night.
She'd asked me why I was holding her hand, but she didn't pull away. Her hand, as I recall, was tiny. Our fingers didn't fit. I was a foot taller. I wasn't sure she topped 5 feet.
I said I wanted to walk her home, so she led me a few blocks to her apartment building. She looked up at me and said thanks. I asked to see her apartment, so she she wordlessly led me up three flights of stairs. I sat on her futon, glanced at her stacks of books, and, still holding her hand, pulled her to sit next to me.
She said we needed to be quiet, that her roommate was asleep, that she always went to bed early, but woke up easily.
I began to kiss her. She responded with a dry, thin, pursed mouth. I felt her thin arms and exposed ear.
She pulled away. She wanted to talk. She quietly tried to explain her decision to shift from being an engineer at MIT, where she'd gone to college, to education. She wanted to explain how she came to the U.S. in the first place.
I told her that I should leave, that I was tired (which was true) and would love to talk about her education (which wasn't true). She asked me to stay. We kissed. She began to use some tongue, but it was a very thin tongue, and still dry. I got up to go, and she again asked me to stay.
She added that she'd never made out with someone she'd just met, that she'd never made out out with a WASPy American, that she didn't understand how somebody would get sexually aroused without really knowing the other person.
I explained that my arousal and my feelings of intimacy ran on separate tracks. I was holding her hand, and so I ran it up and down the front of my jeans, folding her small hand over the bulge of my hard cock.
She said that she liked me, and she'd never kissed anybody cuter, but she wasn't aroused and didn't understand why I would get hard when I didn't even know her last name.
I continued to rub her small, cool hand over the bulge in my jeans. I said I didn't even know her first name, much less her last name. I said I recalled she'd told me her name, but the hyphenated Mandarin name didn't register. I quietly told her I didn't care if I knew her name. I liked her, and parallel to that, I found her arousing.
I reached over to try to pull off her Hello Kitty t shirt. She asked me what I was doing. I said I wanted to feel her body. She said no. We returned to kissing. I felt her chest, but I couldn't tell if I was even feeling her breasts or whether it was all bra. She asked me to stop.
I smiled, good naturedly, and said I had to go.
No, I thought to myself, is no.
She asked me to stay. I walked down her hall, past the closed bedroom of her roommate, but instead of heading straight, I took a right, into her tiny bedroom, with a twin bed on the floor. She followed me. I lay down and looked at her. She asked me to come back to the futon. I said I was tired.
She lay down next to me. We returned to kissing. I pulled her close. I pressed my hand against her ass, which was so small, so trim. She repeated that she wouldn't be able to get aroused until she got to know me. I rubbed myself against her crotch, which was held in place by my hand on her butt.
I stood up and looked down at her. She lay, ruffled, a little girl on a little mattress. She still wore her glasses. I pulled off my jeans.
She asked me to put my pants on. I said my cock was going to get sore from rubbing on my jeans. She was silent. I lay back down and quickly unbuttoned her jeans. She said no, don't. But she kept the jeans unsnapped while I rubbed her taut abdomen. She asked me to stop.
I told her I had two concerns. First, I thought she was lying, that she was sexually excited.
And I told her that I thought when she said no, she sometimes meant yes. And then I said, "aardvark."
"Aardvark?"
"Yes. Say it, and I stop. Say anything else, and I do what I want."
She looked at me.
"Can you say aardvark?"
She nodded.
I pulled off her glasses and placed them on a bookshelf.
I pulled off her jeans. Her legs were thin, but the jeans were tight. i had to struggle them off. She didn't help. She didn't fight.
She wore pink cotton panties, pulled up enough that she had an inadvertent camel toe. I could make out a tuft of black pubic hair.
"Mei Jing," I said, "I'd like to perform an experiment to show that your sexual response runs parallel to your emotional response, that they arent completely in sync."
She looked impassively. "I thought you didn't know my name."
