Chapter 5

The cat nestled onto my shoulder. Darcy said something. The cat glared at her.

I tilted my head and turned to nuzzle the fuzzy head at my ear. Got a purr and a lick on the cheek.

“That’s gotta be your cat, Bud,” Darcy said.

“Cats don’t have owners, they have staff,” I replied. “She just instinctively knows that I’m at first, harmless, and perhaps of some small use.”

“Just means she sees something the rest of us don’t,” Darcy quipped. She walked over to me, reached to pet the cat.

The cat responded by jumping down into my lap and glaring at her. Darcy reached down, the cat moved away from her, up to my other shoulder.

“I dunno, Darcy. She seems to be a great judge of character. Don’t make ‘er mad. We’ll both get scratched.”

“I guess I’ll leave you with your new girlfriend, then, Bud.”

Girlfriend? Nahhhhh.

Two of my students showed up. I left my comfy chair in the big room and commandeered a little study room.

“You bring your cat now?” the guy student asked me.

“Don’t know where she comes from, but she seems to like me.”

The cat nestled up by my feet while I taught. When I closed my laptop at the end of the session, my two students rose to leave. The cat jumped up on the table, came to me, licked my nose as if to say ‘you did well. Here’s your reward.’ At least that’s what it seemed like to me, but what do I know? I’m the guy who’s falling in love with a mythical creature.

Got invited into a gang heading out to a burger joint for dinner. No, no date, no ‘significant relationship’, unless you count Darcy and her fiancé who remains amused at my blatant and playful comments to Darcy. She told him about the Xerox remarks from a few days previous. I’m angling for ‘best man’ at their wedding.

That put me back at the apartment with time to study a bit, then shower, shave, and off to bed. To Sachiko. There may be many parts of my life that are subject to schedule slip and random timing changes, but so far as I can tell, if I’m in bed asleep, Sachiko, my Chiki, is guaranteed.

No longer is it a delightful head of raven hair at my crotch. She’s there beside me. Yes, Naked. And smiling. “My Robert.”

“Chiki, little love.”

“I like being your little love, Robert. It is unexpected.”

“I like ‘inevitable’,” I replied.

“Tell me about love, Robert. You use the word. I use it because you smile when I say it. Tell me what you think...”

“I think I see Sachiko and I want to have her in my life, to live my life with her and for her, to bring her happiness and satisfaction as we grow old together.”

“I am already old. And yet I am fourteen. The world I come from has almost nothing to do with the world you live in, that I visit now. Apart from eating and breathing and eliminating and making babies and...” she paused, finding my dick with her hand, “making THIS HAPPY...”

“Or this,” I said, touching her almost hairless mound, relishing her quiver.

Smile. “Yes, that as well. I was told that the woman’s pleasure was not always something that the man would be aware of. That if I found an enlightened lover, he would care.” She smiled. “It is funny in your language. You use ‘love’ and it means something very special between you and me. I use ‘lover’ and it means something different, the physical only...”

“It seems to me that Sachiko has brought two meanings into my life.”

“And mine, Robert.” Her fingertips pinched a fold of the skin of my dick, idly tugging it up and down my shaft. “It is the full moon tonight, Robert. Perhaps you can open the covering over the window...”

“Yes, my lady.” I got up to pull the drapes aside and open the blinds. The moonlight streamed in, the most light I’ve ever had in the room while Sachiko was here.

She was lying on her back, one leg drawn up, her small breasts rounded, flattened, punctuated by those tiny brown nipples. She noted me staring.

“Perhaps it is too much light. I am small in so many ways. Girls in your world, they are larger here,” she touched her breasts, “and here,” her hands traced her hips. “And blue eyes. Everybody in my world has the same color eyes...”

“You’re trying to say that maybe I don’t see you as beautiful?”

“I am different than most in your world.”

That was a fact. She was completely exotic. South Louisiana is not noted for a selection of Japanese nymphs. Oh, sure, we have exchange students from China and Korea and various other Asian locales, but Sachiko’s so far above the crowd and I can’t explain why.

“That’s a truth, Chiki. But why do I feel like I do about you? And why do you feel like this about me?”

“It is a question. I asked others in The Void. None have an answer. There are legends of creatures called angels, who are good, who aid and comfort, but they do not have stories about them lying naked in the moonlight wondering why their lover is not beside them.”

“Because this is the first time the lover gets to really see all of his Chiki.”

She stretched. “Like this?” twisting onto her left side, bending her left leg, straightening her right.

“Beautiful.”

“Or like this?” she asked, rolling over onto her knees, putting that svelte rear end into the air. She giggled. “I am like this many nights before I leave. My way to collect your essence.”

I stepped close, reached out, traced my hand over the lines from the back of her graceful neck, all the way down over THAT curve, ending up at her tiny feet. I’m so erudite. “Beautiful.”

She turned her head, hair falling clear of her neck. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I kissed the back of her neck, nuzzling, sighing.

She quivered. “In that, you are very Japanese, Robert. We are taught that a woman’s neck is of attraction to a man.”

“Yours is irresistible.”

“You make my breath go away when you do that.”

“Perhaps it is better that we shouldn’t be together very much, then?”

“Why?” she sounded hurt.

“Because I would do this very often and you would not be able to breathe.”

“Come in my bed, funny man!” and she tugged me onto the bed with her, rolling over atop me, laughing.

“Sachiko, you’re so beautiful, so perfect. And you’re laughing.”

“I am laughing because I am happy and I am excited and I am with you.” She kissed me. “I was told that laughter in the bed is a dangerous thing, that some men think the lady is laughing at their member or their prowess or their looks.”

“I see none of that from my Sachiko’s eyes.”

“This part of you tells me the truth.”

We clasped each other tightly, my erection pressed between us, kissing, sighing.

“Do not make it too fast, Robert. Not yours. Me. You can love me with your mouth...”

Like I need a hint, okay?

I thought this ‘succubus’ thing was supposed to be a one-way street. That afternoon I posed the question to Lady Ramona over a cup of tea.

“That is rather graphic, Robert.”

“I tried to frame it as delicately as possible, Lady Ramona, but the fact remains, we are very intimate...”

“How do you frame, then, what you seem to be relishing so very much to your Christian upbringing about chastity?”

“I pray for God’s grace to cover my weakness, Lady. I am too weak to stop. And in all this, Sachiko is not real, at least not of this dimension...”

“Your lusts say otherwise.”

“I may just the best dreamer in the hemisphere,” I countered.

“But last night you opened the curtains. Were they still open when you woke this morning?”

“They were.”

“Something is passing between the spirit world and your world, Robert.”

“I know. In my heart I know. That’s what I don’t want to stop.”

“So you plan on spending the rest of your life in love with a night creature? That might be troublesome for your wife...”

“If there were a way, Sachiko would be my wife.”

“Think of what that means. She’s from a different world. Feudal Japan. Nothing we take as normal had yet appeared in her world.”

I told her about the conversations when we talked about Mom and Dad’s rice farm.

“That’s what I mean. She knows a world where there was only rudimentary tools and human labor. You’re in a world with electricity and tractors and crop-dusters...”

“Agricultural aviation,” I said. “One of my buddies does it.”

“How do you think Sachiko would react to seeing it? Or your thousands of cultivated acres?”

“You know, I think Sachiko would watch, think, ask questions...”

“You think a lot of her.”

“Lady Ramona, we talk an hour, two hours every night. It’s not about ‘mythological creature satisfies young man’s sexual desires’. She satisfies ALL my desires.”

“That may be an effect of that disaster of a curse that Sybil wallowed her way through,” she said. “Or It might be something else.”

“Sachiko says she’s heard of angels, but none of them were assigned anything sexual. They were just good.”

“Sachiko talks of the other side?”

“She calls it The Void.”

“Very Buddhist. Japanese. I know a little...”

“I don’t have any idea how it works. I ask Sachiko, sometimes she has things to explain. Most of the time she’s as confused as I am about everything, though.”

“Except the part where you say she loves you...”

“We talked about the different kinds of love, Lady Ramona. She says that the concept she learned in Japan was very different, that there was a huge gulf between actions related to duty, and relations to joy. Said it was not unusual for a lady to have a lover, both in the physical and the spiritual senses. It was not common, but some sort of ideal, the stuff of stories and legends, often with tragic endings for one or both parties.”