Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 2

‘Thanks,’ he says.

‘Welcome,’ she says, and heads out to the street, getting into a taxi.

When the driver drops her off at the shopping centre, she picks her way up a halted escalator to the second floor, and shows her ID at the entrance to Club Island.

Inside, the band has started. A group of Western guys is being served beer. She stands nearby. One of them is very drunk, wearing a fright wig, a dog collar and a pair of frilly pink panties over the top of his jeans. ‘My fiance,’ he is saying, ‘is the best … the best … you know. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Lovely Keiko. I bloody love her.’

Marlene walks into his line of sight and gives him the look. He glances at her and smiles. Mine, she thinks.

As she is walking over to the group, it comes to her. That Chinese businessman does need a new category, she thinks, and now she knows what it is.

4. Keiko

Seven weeks of silence

I break on you like a wave

Why are you absent?

Follow in bare feet

We trace our cold apartment

Our soles on cool tiles

You, the setting sun

Falling always away from me

I run too slowly

Dark air between us

My fingers ask a question

Half your heart answers

Divide and divide

Love leaks, an ebbing fluid

Diminishing us

When did you leave me?

Why did I not notice it?

I don’t understand

5. Brett

No work this week. Only essential travel to the Philippines is advised. Unrest has spread from the cities to the countryside. The rice fields are alight. Some flights are cancelled, including the ones he was due to pilot.

He arrives at Boat Quay at seven-fifteen and takes a table by the river, ordering a Heineken. Jazz drifts from the bar next door. Luminous towers dwarf the shophouses.

She arrives. He checks her out-small, cute-he approves-before standing and waving to catch her attention. She has the slightly knock-kneed gait of many Japanese women, as if modestly keeping her legs together. He will see about that.

He has made the most of these free evenings, and this is his fourth date of the week. God bless date-or-not.com, he thinks.

‘So, you’re an airline pilot,’ she says. ‘That must be very interesting.’

It’s a good sign. Impressed by his job. He checks her out subtly while sipping his beer. She will certainly do.

He is already thinking about the mirrors on his ceiling, how she will look, how he will look doing it to her when he sees them reflected. He has lost weight recently, buffed up a bit. He spent a full twenty-five minutes before heading out examining his reflection in the full-length wall mirror in his bedroom.

‘You have lovely ears,’ he says. He means it. She really does. Each woman has her own special part of the body, he thinks. Like Juvita, the air hostess who kept blowing him in the aircraft toilets. Perfect neck. Tragic what happened to her.

‘Thank you,’ Keiko says, modestly. She insists on pouring his beer for him.

‘Would you like to see a great view of the city?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ she says.

She is under him, her eyes wide. He shifts position so that she is on top. He grasps her slim hips with both hands, then lets the back of one graze across the gentle curve of her breasts, feeling the hard small nipples against his skin. Her mouth is open in a silent exclamation, her eyes tight shut, pelvis rocking. He glances upwards, taking in the sight of her moving on him, and his own body, taught under her. She opens her eyes, looks upwards, then squeezes them tightly shut again and digs her nails into his chest. For a moment, he looks up into his own eyes as if into those of an adversary, one who acknowledges him silently in the dimly lit room.

6. Juvita

She meets Andrew at her tennis club. They have sex that afternoon, in the showers of the ladies’ changing rooms, with the water running. They have sex at dusk, behind a bush in the Botanical Gardens, and in his car, and in the disabled toilets at the Esplanade in the interval of a classical concert, and on the beach on Bintan, and in every room of his apartment, and she sucks him off in the cable car between Harbour Front and Sentosa and wanks him off in the back of a multiplex on Orchard Road during a car chase. He is her thirty-second lover since it happened.

‘I love you,’ he says one day. She stops returning his calls.

7. Andrew

May is cooking rice and some kind of Japanese soup with seaweed in it. He stands in the kitchen with her, opens the wine and pours it into two blue-tinged, thick-stemmed glasses. The trick is not to look too desperate, he thinks. He discreetly checks out her buttocks and then feels guilty.

‘How was your friend’s birthday?’ he says.

‘Not bad,’ she says, tasting the soup. ‘Although we had a few too many, I’m afraid.’ He chuckles complicitly. ‘We had to send the birthday girl home early in a taxi. And then I got talking to a very nice couple, and, um, did that for a while. And then Saturday was shopping. How about you?’ She stirs more rapidly.