Jiro laughed. “You would like me better if I was a Zen monk?”
“Monks don’t get room service,” said Zoe. “And I like you just fine as you are.”
“I like you as you are too, Zoe,” said Jiro.
They looked at each other and smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “We watch your favorite Marlon Brando movie, and then I go to my meeting. Deal?”
Zoe twirled the cord of her robe happily.
“Deal.”
When Zoe woke again, the room was bathed in shadows. The blinds had been drawn over the windows, but a faint square of light still glowed around their edges. So it was still daylight out. She rolled over and found her cheek crushed against a note on the pillow next to her.
I did not want to wake you （it is good for you to sleep I think）。 I will be back from my meeting at 6 and will bring food in case you are hungry. If you have to go before, please do not hesitate.
P.S. Marlon Brando is my religion now too
The clock on the nightstand emitted its digital glow. It was already 5:30 p.m. She must have drifted off during the movie—but that never happened. Usually Zoe had to be drunk to fall asleep with a man. She sat up against the headboard and stretched her arms out in front of her, twirling her wrists. She felt a growl of hunger in her stomach and something else even lower, something new. She brought her hands under the covers to her groin. She could feel an ache of pleasure as she pressed down on it. That was the new sensation. Zoe had touched herself there before, but it had never felt like this. After a while, she had simply given up trying. She had always assumed that part of her body was broken, just like her epileptic brain. She had woken up, however, feeling different.
Zoe scooted back down in the large bed and opened her robe from below the waist. She hesitated, looking again at the clock. She would die if she was walked in on, but she estimated she had more than enough time before Jiro returned.
“Upper left quadrant,” she said softly to herself.
She guided her fingers to the right spot and closed her eyes. Deep breath. Her fingers circled slowly. Nothing was happening. Then. Something was happening. Time passed, time began to disappear. It didn’t feel like much … until it felt like everything. How to describe it, this burgeoning? An exquisite agony, every part of her tensed into unbearable stiffness, toes splayed rigid, a paralyzing concentration, the certainty that if she let up even a little, even this much, she could lose it, it could lose her … But no, she couldn’t because it was here, she was right at the edge, suspended agonizingly above it, she was close, so close, and then, yes, it was now, it was here, she was falling, sinking, rushing into the red sweet center of it, like velvet, like velvet, one rolling wave after another, pure pleasure, there it was again, that immense intensity, that intense immensity, and again the velvet wave came, beyond words and better than any word, it had happened, she was there, there was here, and she was a real girl, a real girl, a real girl …
She opened her eyes and let her hand fall away. A new wetness coated her fingers. She felt empty and full at once. A delicious tenderness between her legs. So that’s what all the fuss was about, she thought. And then she was laughing, pressing the side of her face into the hot pillow. A puddle of pleasure, that’s what she was.
When she heard the door open a little while later, she was still melted on the bed. Jiro stood in the doorway, a takeout bag in each hand, smiling.
“I know you will say I’m a cliché,” he said. “But I got sushi.”
He paused, regarding her. She could feel that her cheeks were warm and pink, her eyes unusually bright. She tried to smile at him, but the laughter returned again, rising inside her like a crowd of colorful balloons. Jiro set down the bags and began to laugh too. Eventually, when they had both run out of breath, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her.
“Now,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Why are we laughing?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
May
Cleo had been staying at Audrey’s for a week when she noticed the neighbor watching her through the window. She had just taken a shower and was standing naked in Audrey’s bedroom, applying body lotion, when she looked up and saw him. She froze. To close the curtains would mean advancing toward him; to retreat would only offer him an alternate view of her behind. In a panic she dropped to the floor and crawled military-style back to the bathroom, leaving a glistening snail trail of moisturizer on the wooden floorboards behind her.
She pushed the door closed with her toe and sat curled on the tiled floor. It was not just that he had seen her naked. It was her scar. The thin purple trench running from her wrist to elbow, thirty stitches like tracks on a railroad. Why did she care if he saw it? He was nobody. But her scar felt more naked than naked, more secret than her sex. No one had seen it but Frank. And she had not seen Frank for two months.