“You didn’t bring your gloves,” he said, half scolding me.
“Neither did you,” I said, then I took his hands, cupped them in mine, and blew on them. And added, “We’ll remember next time.”
“Both of us,” he said.
He dipped his chin and I looked up in to his blue eyes and thought about how lucky I was. And what a good Christmas it was turning out to be. Plus, I had Alex’s company to look forward to, and that was the best gift of all.
A TEENY TINY EPILOGUE
Dear Reader, he did finally fuck me.
It was on a flight on Singapore Airlines while we were 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. Maybe we were higher than that. Hell, I had no idea, just that the final result told me a lot about Alex. That he’d waited and planned until just the right moment. Then he nailed me, right on that bed in the sky.
We’d flown from Steamboat in the company’s private jet, over the Rocky Mountains to LAX, in Los Angeles. After waiting in a swank private suite for a little while, we were whisked by private car to the jetway, there to board the huge plane that would take us across the ocean to Japan.
Alex had business to attend to there, and he wanted the company. Check that. He wantedmycompany. Mine. Me. Just me.
I’d expected the flight to be nice, I guess, but I’d not expected we’d spend fifteen hours in a private suite complete with a queen bed and a huge bathroom that had a shower.
We made love the whole way there, and yeah, that’s when I got fucked, way in the air. We had stuff, so either he’d purchasedit without me noticing (maybe when I was in the john in the private suite at LAX?), or maybe the pilot had picked it up before he’d picked us up. Or maybe Alex was magic.
He certainly was amazing. And is amazing.
Japan was amazing, too. Never thought I’d travel overseas at any point. Hell, the Westmores were the ones responsible for me getting me a passport within seventy-two hours after Christmas Morning, when Alex asked me to go with him and they learned I didn’t have one.
I guess the Gov’ment considered me to be enough of an upstanding citizen, they were going to allow me to leave the country and travel the world.
In Japan, I had to wait a bit for Alex to have some meetings and stuff. He said I could come with him and sit in the lobby, rather than walk around in the cold, late-December air, but that didn’t sound like fun to me. We settled on me waiting in a coffee shop near Shibuya Crossing, a place called Komeda’s Coffee.
“Will you be okay on your own?” asked Alex.
“You worried I’ll get into trouble?” I asked, pretending to be fierce and troublesome.
“No,” said Alex, gently clasping my arm with his gloved hand. “It’s just that you don’t speak Japanese.”
“Eh,” I shrugged. “I got Google translate on this fancy phone you got for me.”
The shop was warm and snug, had great coffee and fun sandwiches and noodle dishes, and even a sandwich made of strawberries and whipped cream. I had three of those and two powerful coffees, so I was really buzzing by the time Alex came to pick me up.
“Arigato,” I said with a wave as we left.
“You speak Japanese now?” he asked me with a grin.
“Everybody else was saying it,” I said. “I think it means thank you and goodbye and some shit.”
We watched people at the crossing, then Alex spotted a smallstore that sold only watches and bought me my own Rolex, a slim thing that was heavy on my wrist and made me feel quite conspicuous.
Then I asked him, “What can I get you? I have this credit card that’s going stale from not being used.”
He laughed, and maybe he could have explained to me that’s not how credit worked, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I’d really like to go to a ramen place I know. They serve you from behind a bamboo screen.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Sure,” I said, game for anything if Alex was near.
We walked for about five minutes up Koen Dori Street to a little place called Ichiran. The place looked small, and when we walked in (somehow going right past the long line outside), it didn’t look like it would seat very many people.
I quickly realized there were around forty or so seats in four long rows, each one a single seat set up like a mini-booth. Once I sat down, I couldn’t see anyone to the right or left of me, and in front of me was the bamboo screen Alex told me about.
