Walking back to my hotel from Yasi, where I had my three meals every day, I noticed several ads for rent, which caused me to reflect on my awkward situation. As her mother could be dying at home any time after two strokes in a run, Hua had moved to Shangyite the night before, a better hotel only steps away from her parents’ residence, where her husband would readily come from Zhuhai to join her for the impending funeral. In other words, she and I had to separate from each other for an unknown period of time. This being the case, I found it undesirable to stay alone in Guanshenyuan, nor was it a good idea to return to my mother’s residence in Jingzhou, as the renovation going on upstairs during the day time and the girl wailing three times a night for no reason made it unbearable for me to stay there even for a single hour. Knowing well how ferocious “the autumn tiger” [Indian summer] and mosquitos could be in my native place, I decided to rent a place with an air conditioner, where I could concentrate on editing my Mabakoola: Paradise Regained, a silver romance based on my true love experience with Hua, which had been accepted for publication by an LA-based press.
After making a few phone calls, I paid the deposit for a bachelor studio offering the most reliable connectivity to the internet. About an hour later, I settled down in my new place. Shortly after I texted Hua about my move, she audio-chatted with me for a few minutes, saying that she was sorry to have to stay with her mother instead of keeping me company, but would come to see me as soon as she got a chance.
I was scrolling through my iPad after lunch when Hua sneaked into my rented room. Seeing the small unit with only an old big bed and a worn out table, Hua felt quite surprised that I could live in such a place far from cozy and comfortable. While the room was extremely small, none of the appliances seemed to be in working condition.
“It suits me perfectly, since I don’t do any cooking or wash clothes here,” I said. “All I care about is its geographical proximity to where you are.”
“A lot of mosquitos here? Is it too hot?” Hua asked.
“Everything’s okay, I keep the air conditioner on all day long.”
After a brief talk about her mother’s worsening condition, I drew the curtains tight, while Hua got ready for a catnap. The moment she lay down on the bed, I began to unclothe her and make out, telling her to make up for the loss of the past three days. As there was no security concern about hidden pinhole cameras in this plain rented place as in a hotel, I insisted that we not use any covers. This time, I wanted to take a close look at her body, something I had longed to do during our separation by the Pacific. Seeing her in her birthday suit, I found her skin still fair, firm, smooth, supple and spotless; her whole body looked in perfect shape as in the case of a fortyish woman. In particular, her little garden was so good-looking as to make her a perfect “white fox.” The only fly in the ointment was her breasts, which were both empty and droopy, her titties even too small to suck. Compared with my wife and especially my former fiancée’s, Hua’s breasts were surely disappointing, but I had never mentioned anything to this effect. Once I asked if her breasts had been like this since youth. She simply nodded. From this response, I believed that she herself was never aware of her breasts being unusual in a negative sense. So, each time I made love with her, I concentrated on her lower body. As I saw it, this represented a kind of balance: by reducing the attractiveness of her breasts, Heaven had made her little garden all the more beautiful.
To have another soul-melting intercourse, we had a good and long outer-course, rolling and swallowing like two playing animals on the bed. During the entire process, we remained fully circuit-connected: my dick deep in her vagina and her tongue deep in my mouth. When Hua became aroused enough, I quickly lay on my back and let her take a squatting position and fuck me to her heart’s content. To my great delight, she told me that she had a rare deep orgasm this time.
“Did I act like a tiger?” she asked, referring to the popular saying: “A woman in her thirties needs sex like a starving wolf, in her forties like a starving tiger.”
“A killing tiger you are! …But how come you didn’t bite my bait like a fish?” I asked, curious about why I failed to sense her orgasmic contractions, which I could feel each time when my wife had them. I had never raised this question to Hua before, afraid that the truth might lie in the fact that I was not hard or long enough to feel it, or she didn’t actually have it as she claimed.
“Oh, that must be due to my ‘abnormal’ inner structure,” Hua explained. “My doctor said I got a womb positioned more inside than other women.”
I hoped that was the true reason, but no matter what, I felt sorry that I could never tell whether or when she had an orgasm. “After all, no women are exactly the same after the light is turned off, as people often say,” I thought.
Too excited to fall asleep, we started to share our sexual experiences with each other. When Hua reiterated that she felt extremely guilty to have sex with me while her mother was dying at the ICU in the moment, I tried to make her feel better by recalling a similar dramatic situation in Junichi Watanabe's A Lost Paradise, a highly acclaimed novel supposedly based on the author’s true love experience.
It was a dark stormy night. The 37-year-young female protagonist was keeping vigil for her late father in the mourning hall when she received a short text message from her paramour, a 50-year-old senior editor working for a publishing house, which contained nothing but his hotel information. Though he didn’t expect or, rather, request her to join him for the night, she decided to leave the hall after much hesitation and entered his room at the last moment. Partly because she needed to do something out of the ordinary to release her tense feeling about her loss, and partly because she had a really strong urge to make love with him after a whole week’s separation, she just could not refuse the chance presented to her, though at an inappropriate time. Since theirs was an extramarital relationship, they had to make the best use of every meeting. This time, she demanded him to penetrate her from behind her bottom as wildly as possible while they both stood beside the bed like two pigs or wolves.
“We often took this position when my wife and I were in our thirties,” I added. “I wish to do the same with you.”
“That’s too uncivilized!” Hua complained.
“Sex is the most natural thing to do,” I said. “Being civilized or not is utterly irrelevant."
“But didn’t the Japanese woman feel guilty? Isn't it a perverse thing to do while mourning for her father?”
As far as I could recall, the protagonist-narrator said nothing about what was going on in his partner’s mind, but he did suggest that it was precisely her sense of guilt that must have led her to further violate the social norm by betraying her surgeon-husband and her later father at the same time. Doing something terribly wrong in a conscious manner could give people a unique sense of joy. I added.
“I don’t understand that feeling,” Hua said. “All I’m feeling now is a deepened sense of guilt. Don’t you think I’m a worse woman, if not really a bad one?”
“No. You’re really a beautiful tiger, if not a better fox!” I said.