My mouth has gone kind of gluey while I’ve been talking. Dad asked for the truth and he got it, but now I feel exposed and awkward. Admitting to my Dad I want to sleep with my boyfriend, even if it is only to sleep, is way more honest than I’m used to being with him.
He shakes his head really slowly, and he’s got the bad news look on his face. “Oh, Zo…”
“Dad, please. Maybe Finn’s not the guy you would’ve picked for me, but…”
“I can’t condone you staying over with him.” He looks at me like he expects me to agree, but I don’t say anything. “Even if you’re not…”
“We’re not.” We’re dancing closer to the line, but not that close.
Dad’s face sort of crumples, and he shakes his head. “Eloise thinks you’re good for each other. Maybe you are. I don’t know.”
I resist every urge to try to convince him. It will sound too defensive. And maybe a little desperate.
But I must have some kind of look on my face because Dad shakes his head and his eyes flash. “I don’t want you staying over. That’s it. I don’t.”
This isn’t unreasonable. I know that. I can’t think of anyone I know whose father would actually agree to letting them spend the night with their boyfriend. And if we were in New Jersey, it wouldn’t even be a consideration. But somehow knowing I could be waking up with Finn after days of wanting to makes me want it like I’ve never wanted anything before. Ever.
So I smile. Just a little at first, but I force it at the edges until it’s wide enough to be convincing. “Yeah. I understand. I do.” I look down at the black tank top in my hand I’ve sort of half-folded. Dad’s eyes follow so I have to loosen my grip a little. “I’ll tell him.”
His face eases a little. “I know I’m probably being old-fashioned, but it just doesn’t sit well with me. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I know. I get it.” Another smile. Forced and cracked around the edges, but Dad doesn’t seem to notice.
I should feel worse about the way I blow it off when I’m telling Finn later. But I don’t.
“So you’re inviting me to stay at yours?” Finn asks.
“Right. I mean, my dad said I couldn’t stay at your place, but he didn’t say anything about you not staying with me. And it’s not like he’s coming home.” I sort of hold my breath saying this because it means I’m technically lying and Finn knows it.
“How much exactly do you want him to hate me again?”
I breathe out a little bit. That’s not a flat-out no. “He’ll never know. Besides I told him we’re not having sex.”
“Really?” Finn hooks his finger through the belt loop of my shorts. “Did you tell him why?”
“I told him you mistakenly think you’ll end up being my biggest regret.”
“Editorializing, I see.” He grins and pulls me closer. “And what did he say?”
“He, um, didn’t really know what to say.” I bite my lip. I’m tempted to say it. What Dad said. Because we are in love. And since that night in Roppongi the boundaries have blurred, but they’re still there.
“Well, whatever gets me waking up with you can only be a good thing.” His face falls a little. “But I don’t think—”
I reach up and kiss his neck. “Come on. You know you want to.”
“You know I want to.” He brings me closer until I feel the button of his shorts against my ribs.
“So it’s settled.”
He doesn’t say anything and I think maybe it is. I wait another twelve seconds in case he’s going to protest, and when he doesn’t, I ask, “So what are we doing today anyway?”
“Uh-uh. You know how this works. But don’t worry, it will be interesting.”
I make a face. The last time Finn promised me interesting, he took me to a restaurant where we picked our fish from a tank and the sushi chef fileted them right in front of us. I took a bite but couldn’t swallow more than that, and even he admitted later it was all just a little too fresh. “No fish?”
“I don’t think so. But maybe. You’ll just have to see.”
He still won’t tell me as we get off at Shibuya and join the throngs of people in the scramble crossing. Or at lunch, ramen at 109, which is in an ultra-trendy shopping center full of shop after shop of clothes and accessories. I can’t even count the number of girls wearing miniskirts and stilettos or boys with orange hair, following wearily and holding bags.
After lunch, we walk around people watching and window shopping, and it’s nearly dusk when we climb the hill behind 109. I’m not paying attention to where we’re going, so when Finn stops in front of one of the neon signs, I assume he’s just trying to figure out where we are until he asks, “What do you think? This one?”
I look at the sign and the building behind it. Twenty-two thousand yen. I get that. And the English is impossible to misunderstand. Love hotel. But love hotels are for one thing only and it’s the one thing we aren’t doing.
I gape at him. “What are we doing at a love hotel?”
“You said you wanted to go to one.”
This is true. I do. I said it one night when we were coming home from karaoke. I’d only meant for Finn to hear, and I definitely didn’t mean it the way Akihiro took it, but when Finn asked me later if I was serious about wanting to go, I insisted I was. And now here we are.
I look back at the sign. “Okay, then. What do we do?”
“I say we check them out and see which one has the coolest room open. The menus will show the rooms that are available as lit and the ones that are taken are dark on the sign.”
We make our way around the cluster of buildings that comprise Love Hotel Hill. A lot of the rooms are just that—rooms. But then there are the rest of them. One with a complete Hello Kitty theme. The American West. An English castle. A round bed covered in a black fur bedspread. We’re at the last hotel, and there’s a room with a red heart-shaped bed and what looks like a trampoline in the corner, although it’s impossible to tell from the tiny picture.
“I think this one,” I say.
Finn presses the button and a key pops out of the bottom of the sign with the number seventeen on it. We go through the door marked “in” and find the room at the top of the stairs. We’ve seen no one and heard nothing, although when we walk into the room soft music is playing from the CD player on the table. I drop my bag inside the doorway and walk around the room touching everything. The bed is the largest thing in the room, by far, and the sheets are shiny enough to be satin. In the corner, the thing I thought was a trampoline is a kind of stool with no seat. I’m not sure what this is for, but I’m fairly sure it has something to do with the things on the table. Handcuffs, whips, spiked bracelets, and a lot of stuff I’ve only seen in Lady Gaga videos.
“So I guess we got the S&M room,” Finn says.
I twirl the handcuffs around my finger. “What do you want to try first?”
“Don’t even go there. I would totally use those on you.”
My stomach flip-flops, although it’s not so much from his words as the look on his face as he says them. Like he’d do it. And I’d like it. I drop them back on the table. “Promises, promises.”
He opens a drawer and pulls out a strip of condoms and a tube of something. “It’s got everything apparently.”
“At least they’re promoting safe sex.” I wander into the bathroom, and there’s a huge Jacuzzi tub, a walk-in double shower, and more tubes, this time shower gel and bubble bath. Finn follows me, and I catch his glance in the mirror.
“Feeling dirty?”
“Maybe.” He holds my eyes until I turn around.
“In that case, bath or shower?” I lean over to brush my lips to his.
“Shower.” He catches my bottom lip between his teeth for just a second.
I nod and I’m not sure if it’s the thought of the shower to come or the way Finn kisses me that makes the heat pool in my stomach, but it moves steadily lower as he kisses my throat and then steps back, starting on the buttons of my sundress. His fingers whisper over my bare skin as he lingers on the placket. He doesn’t kiss me and leans just out of reach when I try to kiss him. Mostly I feel his touch through the silky fabric, tracing the outline of my bra, my ribcage, the waistband of my panties. It feels like forever until my dress hangs open and his fingers slide across my collarbone, pushing the thin material off my shoulders.
I grab two fistfuls of his T-shirt and pull him to me, kissing him as I work my hands underneath his shirt to yank it off. He unhooks my bra as I slide his shirt up, and when our skin collides, both of us let out a moan. I fumble with the button on his shorts and push down his shorts and boxers in one swift movement. My panties follow, and we both step into the shower.
Finn turns on the water, which comes out freezing cold. I yelp and flatten myself against the wall while he fixes the temperature. Although once he has, I still don’t move because he’s standing right in front of me, tracing the drops of water down my chest.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
I let my hands wander over the smooth muscles of his stomach and up across his chest. “No problem.”
“You know I have this fantasy about you and the shower?” His voice is low and he closes the small gap between us. We’re chest to chest, and his erection presses against my stomach.
“Do you?” My question comes out between a gasp and a whisper. I have a fantasy about Finn and the shower, too, although I’ve never gotten much beyond where we are right now and it looks like real life is going to beat that by a mile.
He reaches for a tube of shower gel and squeezes some into his hand. His hands glide over my wet skin. The soap makes his movements smoother and faster, and my pulse accelerates in time with his fingers playing with my nipples and sliding across my thighs. My own hands pull Finn’s hair, rake down his spine until finally I reach between his legs and wrap my fingers around him.
His hand closes over my wrist. “Uh-uh. This is my fantasy, remember?”
I look up into his eyes, ready to argue, but he slides his hand around my waist and turns me around to face the wall. Between his lips on my neck, my breasts pressed against the cold tile, and his erection rocking against my back, I’m already halfway out of my mind when he finally touches me. I cry out when his fingers go inside me and again when, two minutes later, I’m coming so hard my knees buckle.
When we’re lying on towels on the bed ten minutes later and I walk my fingers down Finn’s chest and over the fine line of hair that leads down his stomach, I kiss his shoulder and say, “So when do I get my love hotel fantasy then?”
He grins. “Whenever you want.”
I raise my eyebrows at him, but lift myself up to straddle his legs, inching up toward his hips. I lean down to kiss him, and he tangles his hands in my hair. My hips shimmy up his legs until he places his hands firmly on my thighs.
“I want you, Zosia, you know that.”
“So have me.” I don’t mean for it to sound like a challenge, but it comes out that way. Ninety-five percent of the time Finn’s no-sex rule isn’t an issue. The other five percent, though, when it rears its ugly head…ugh.
Finn sits up and slides back up against the headboard, scooting me back to the middle of his thighs. “I said before I don’t want to be the guy you wish you could undo. I still don’t.”
“Instead you want to be the guy I wish I could do?” I pull myself off of him and lay down.
“I’m not trying to frustrate you, Zosia.” He stretches out beside me and places his hand on my stomach.
“I know.” We’ve talked about this before. And it’s not like either of us are walking around sexually frustrated. Shower. Case in point. But I’ve thought the next thing a hundred times, and I can’t stop myself from saying it. “But you know it won’t make it easier.”
“Make what easier?”
“To leave.”
The words hang between us. It’s the one thing we never talk about. What happens next.
He speaks first. “We have thirteen days.”
Until my flight back to New York. August tenth. Finn’s is a week later because he’s flying directly to Boston.
“You could always come to Westfield with me,” I offer.
“You could stay.”
“I can’t. I have to see Babci and if there’s anything with the house…” I swallow over the lump rising in my throat. How did this happen? Twenty minutes ago we were practically having sex in the shower.
Except we weren’t.
That’s how this happened.
I stare at the ceiling, knowing what I’m about to say is a mood-killer for sure. Not that there’s much mood to kill at this point. “When my mom was sick, I hated it, knowing it was going to kill her. Until I went to this bereavement group. My dad made me go. It was all kids who’d lost someone. I sat there and never said a word because my story wasn’t any worse than anyone else’s. I hadn’t even technically lost anyone yet. But there was a girl there whose brother died. He drowned. And she said the worst thing was that she never got to say goodbye. If she’d known, she could have said goodbye.”
I pause for a minute to swallow. Because I can see that girl still in my head. Her honey-blond hair and blue eyes. She’d been older than me, maybe eighteen, and the way she talked about Matty, her brother, made me ache. “After that I felt lucky. At least I knew. I’d get to say all the things I wanted to say. I’d get to say goodbye.”
Finn’s fingers stroke my ribcage. “Is that what you’re doing then?”
“What?”
“Saying goodbye?” His hands are still, his voice soft.
“Is that what I should be doing?” It’s the closest I can get to asking.
“I love you.” He bites his lip. “This summer has been so much more than I ever thought it would be. You… someone like you…was never supposed to be here. That night on the swings, I remember thinking I wished I knew you. You were so beautiful. So genuine. And then you were here. And all I’ve wanted is more and more and more of you.”
“What’s wrong with that?” My hands clench underneath my legs.
He shakes his head. “Everything.”
“Why? I mean…”
He cuts me off. “I’m not…I’m my father’s son, Zosia.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I reach for him, but he jerks away.
He tenses, like he was waiting for my denial. “I told you that first night. I’m a four, maybe a five on the honesty scale, and the five is generous. Do you want the truth? This isn’t it.”