From Jenny to Mei Ch. 22

His dad, knowing that Philip would inherit his money, was trying to teach him something valuable. At that point Philip had had no reason to suspect he was going to inherit ninety percent of his father's estate. In fact he was sure that his father would obey the precedent he had followed all his life, generous allotments to charity and perhaps a meaningful token gift to his son. It was his father's way. He did expect a medical trust of some kind and something to keep him in relative security, like a small stipend, adjusted for inflation, probably in the fifty to hundred thousand annually range. But his father had already decided on his plans and therefore his advice on giving was made more poignant upon his death and the revealing of his Will.

His father knew that giving from abundance would be easy for his naturally generous son and had tried to teach him that giving from scarcity would be the only way to imbue a gift with meaning.

'Giving has to be a bit painful,' he heard his father say again. And what could be more painful than allowing Mei to give of herself like that?

'Nothing,' he mused silently in the unfamiliar hotel bed, 'it hurts just thinking about it.'

He wanted her all. He wanted her body, her love, her obedience, her respect and devotion. He wanted her soul.

But wasn't he thinking earlier about how to earn his good fortune at having Mei? Didn't he need to earn her? To balance things out? 'But this? It's just too much to ask.'

Ai shifted in her sleep as if she could feel the mental turmoil whirling so close to her.

'What if it became a precedent? What if Ai wants a past lover to play with too? To entertain her and mix things up a bit?'

He felt the anguish roil and twist his pancreas just thinking the thought.

She squirmed slightly and rubbed her nose.

Thoughts of loosing both of them started his breathing to deepen.

'Fucking ungrateful bitch!'

He was doing it again. He was loosing it. There, naked between his naked lovers, the idea of loosing them was causing his face to flush and his pulse to rise.

"Philip?"

It was Ai.

"Shh, baby. Back to sleep," he whispered.

For many moments she lay still, so still he thought she might have drifted back to sleep.

'If I spank her she'll just climax and ask for an ass fucking,' he thought, 'so much for discipline. Bitch!'

Ai drew one finger from his clavicle to his opposite hip and whispered, "Come with me." It sounded like willow leaves rustling in a breeze. For a moment he wondered if he had heard her at all or just perceived her thought in his head.

She gently turned off the side of the bed and noiselessly stood. He saw, through the dim city lights weeping through the curtains, that she was dressing.

She looked down on him for a moment then turned toward the bathroom. And, as he carefully stood, she returned with a robe and held it for him to step into.

"She's a unique girl," Ai said in a whisper as he turned the security bar to prop the door.

"I'm really kinda pissed right now, Ai."

"I know, that's why you woke me." She began to lead him down the hall toward the elevator lobby.

"Was I muttering? Grinding my teeth?"

"Nah, you were radiating."

"Hmmm, sorry. I'm just so disappointed."

"Don't be. I mean," she said, "I know how men are about this kind of thing."

"How could she ask me?"

"Better to ask..."

"I know," he interrupted her, "I don't mean asking, I mean asking for that. I kinda let it slide, I guess, either because of the sex or just not believing it but after sleeping... it woke me up thinking about it."

At the elevator lobby he let her take the chair and slid down the wall beside her.

"Don't you believe her?"

He stared at the fireman's keyhole at the top left of the painted elevator door. "About wanting to do it as a way to take his mind off his son? Yeah, I don't know."

Ai stroked his hair like a mother consoling her son.

"She was tricky, Ai. You don't know about her history."

"You've changed her."

"How do you know?"

"I know she is sweet, that she loves you, that she has completely accepted me, in, like, no time flat."

"Hmm." The sound was a dismissal of her observation, even if he didn't consciously mean it to sound that way.

"By the way you two talk about her she was a total bitch before you blackmailed her."

"She was."

"She's not now."

"Yeah," he said with an inaudible chuckle, "she has changed quite a bit."

"She said she wants to give. That you made her want to give."

"I tried to expand her."

"You are not seeing this are you?" She spoke like he were too smart not to know what she was trying to say or not to have figured it out by himself already.

"No," he said. "What do you mean?"

"In a way, a way she doesn't understand, she is asking you this as a way to show you how she has changed. She wants your recognition that she can do something for someone else. She wants you to be proud of her."

"Fucking odd way."

"Really? Think about it. She loves sex, figures everyone loves it as much as she does and thinks that it's the ultimate gift. That the most true giving is to give of her body in the most intimate and personal way." She paused to let him think and to stroke his hair. "I think it's beautiful."

For a moment he turned away from the whole problem, just a stolen second or two to let the feeling of Ai's fingers dig furrows of comfort into his scalp and allow his mind ruminate to on the issue by itself.

"Philip," she said with a changed voice, "I'm going to say something that will cause you some pain. But I want you to know something about me and maybe about Mei too." She took his momentary silence as consent. "I loved making love to my clients. Not because I got my sensual fix, ok, but because I could bring a bit of their deepest fantasies alive. I could be that one unattainable girl for them.

"I'm pretty, I know that, and I know that, for most guys, they will never have a girl as pretty as I am. They all want, just once, to have, to possess, even for an hour, a girl as pretty as their fantasies. So when I was with them I could touch them at their most vulnerable and show them that I loved their lust, that I understood and accepted that part of them that they kept hidden or were ashamed of.

"It's funny," she said in a voice that indicated an aside, "society idolizes a pretty girl, makes her an icon and sells cars and stuff with her sex appeal. But when a guy shows lust for her he's somehow a pervert or disloyal to his wife.

"Anyway," she returned to her main point, "I gave them the freedom to find that pretty girl in me. I became that icon. I put flesh on the skeleton of their imagination. They could put their desires into me. They could, quite literally, rent me."

"It made you feel good?" he said, not so much as a question as an observation and as much to fill in the gap in conversation as to elicit a reply.

"Like a goddess. Really. And there was something more. Every desire needs an object and I liked being that object. Know what I mean?"

"Do I make you into an object?"

"I hope so. That sounds strange I guess but girls like feeling beautiful. And, when you think about it we all are objects."

"Women hate being objectified."

"Most women are ignorant."

He gave a shrug and sort of harrumphed a bit but wasn't sure he agreed or just didn't want to talk about all women at the moment.

She continued. "If a woman knew what it was she was rejecting she wouldn't be offended. The same woman that takes pride in her shoes and how people think they make her look sexy doesn't understand that a guy looking at her tits is paying triple the compliment."

"You do?"

"Of course I do. I love it. A guy with a hard-on is, like, giving me the sweetest complement a guy can. It's honest, heartfelt and really warms me."

"You are unique, Ai."

"But back to why I liked it." She returned to the tone of voice that was caring and yet didactic. "A man needs a mistress. I think that while women are naturally monogamous, men are not. There is a basic urge in men to procreate, of course, and contrary to the interests of the female, men look to mate with several genetically diverse partners."

She looked at him to see that she was getting through to him. "To maximize the chance of success, of course."

"I understand."

"So," she went on, "a man carries that something around inside of him that only a mistress can accept. It's his forbidden desire, scorned by society but completely part of his nature. His need for the other woman. Smart girls like Mei know about that. She knows she can never have that part of you and knows you won't be happy until you find a place for it.

"So she was relieved when I stumbled into your lives. I could take that from you and make you happy that way. She would be free to be your wife or number one girl or whatever and she'd have the safety and convenience of having your mistress in the same bed. That's what the harem is all about." She looked at him as he raised his face to hers. "It wasn't your idea, was it?"

"No."

"Of course not. It's not you."

She was making a very strange kind of sense to him.

"So when a man looked at me like that, like he had finally realized that I... like... that I completed something missing, that he could place his burden with me and be accepted, it was beautiful and touching. Sometimes it made me cry, Philip. It was an emotional instant that made the job very fulfilling."

"I'm sure you were great at your job, Ai," he said with a bit of melancholy in his voice.

"Yep. I'll miss that part."

"Are you next? Are you going to ask me in six months..."

"No."

"Just no?"

"No fucking way. Does the profanity help?"

"Kinda," he said with a smile, "but still..."

"Listen, jackass, what part of, 'you're the last man I'll ever have,' skip your keen mind. Do you imagine I have ever said that before? I'm nineteen, Philip. If I wanted I'd have ten thousand men by the time I was your age. That's a lot to give up but now that you've been delivered to me I have zero interest. More than that. I have a kind of revulsion at the idea of another man's penis. I want, absolutely demand, that yours be the only dick in my body - forever."

He turned to look up at her. "I believe you."

"Look in my eyes and shut up." She took his face in her hands and gazed into his.

He felt the weight of intimacy again but this time he didn't panic. At first he only saw a pretty, no a fabulously beautiful, young woman's dark brown eyes, but as he lingered there he noticed a change in his understanding and in her countenance. Like a physical touch he felt something that looked like the truth in her irises. And he believed.

"Only you, my Philip, only you."

As though the words were pulled from his chest, he said, "I love you, Ai."

She kissed him and said, "Of course you do. Now, about jiějiě."

Like a spell had been broken he heard her and changed gears.

"What do I do?"

"Give her love."

"What does that mean?"

"You love me. You love her."

"Yeah, and?"

"Let her love her grandfather too."

"He's dead."

She smacked his head from the back with surprising force. "Don't be an ass. You know exactly what I'm saying. She's a damaged girl, Philip. There is so much that has been denied her. So much she needed as a kid. He's a symbol that represents a kind of supra-father to her. An over-arching paternal figure. In short he is her granddad."

"And sucking his dick is going to make all right in the world?"

"Shall I just call you jackass. Is that what you are telling me? 'Cause I will."

"No. Seriously, how is that supposed to help?"

"She told me her father abandoned her."

"And?"

"Rejection from a father is, like, a girl's worst nightmare. And the way she told it to me he was brutal about it. Her standing at the curb and just driving off, like, without a word. Imagine that."

Philip could not. "And blowing granddad would sort of be like filling in years of bouncing on his knee."

"In one way, yes. Is that so strange? For us sex is our deepest bond, our greatest gift to give. We are taking you inside our bodies for god's sakes, don't you get it? Don't you know what that does to a woman?"

"That's what has me pissed off, Ai. Don't you get it? It's what I want. I want to be the one she gives that gift to. Only me. Why do you think I react that way thinking of Tim messing with her? And why your pledge, or promise, or whatever, means so much to me."

"She'll change."

"That's what concerns me."

"Philip. From what I understand you are trying to transform her."

"Right."

"From a slut who used men as her own play toys to a slut totally dedicated to you."

"Right."

"Putting aside the selfish element for a moment, did you consider what a messy job that is? Did you think a little blackmail and some anal sex was going to be enough?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you want analogy or want me to spell it out?"

"Spell it out, please."

She tousled his hair lovingly and gave him the analogy anyway. "The eggs you break aren't all going to be fresh, free range organic ones. Some are going to be rotten and putrid. Some are not going to please you but you can't turn away in disgust."

"How do you know this shit?"

"Listen. For you to succeed you have to love her. Love her completely like you've never loved anyone before. And it's going to fucking hurt."

"Wow."

"Yeah, and I said fucking to get it deep in your head."

The truth of it was like an ice cold railroad spike driven between his eyes. She was right. He hadn't been looking at it the right way. He had let his self-interest block his understanding of what Mei really needed. Of course she needed to replace her loathing of her father and by association, all men, with a connection. He had an inkling that he was part of that but the even older Dr. K could be a supplementary influence.

"So I've made a commitment to her, you're saying, and if I don't follow through, no matter what the cost, it will destroy her?"

"You knew that."

"Yes, but I didn't know it like you just made me see it."

"You are her savior, Philip. I wouldn't have done it and I admire your courage but I worry for you. If there is anything that could damage our own relationship it will come from her."

"What do you mean?"

"When you love someone you give them a knife and the trust that they aren't going to stab you." She noticed he was waiting. "Mei is good but she's never loved anyone the way to she loves you. I mean, it's like it's tattooed on her forehead. You see the way she looks at you and that smile? And, I mean, any guy who can fuck a woman into a coma like that has a head start anyway. So she is vulnerable and with me in the mix she's going to have a hard time adjusting."

"But you said she needed you as my mistress."

"Yeah, inconsistent."

He waited for her explanation.

"Did you expect you'd be lucky enough to blackmail a hundred pound Asian hottie with great tits, a supercharged sex drive and dedicated to logical consistency?"

"Asking too much?"

"Might as well ask for a square circle."

"But..." he began to ask about why she was the way she was.

"I'm not human," she interrupted.

"What!?" For a moment he was ready to believe anything about Ai.

She paused a moment to look into his eyes and laughed the most joyous laugh he had ever heard. It was angelic in its innocence and mirth. It made him feel fantastic to witness and participate in her joy.

"Oh god, I love you, Philip. You are so fun. So damn cute." She stroked his head and slid her palm around to cup his cheek. "So adorable."

"You had me for a minute," he confessed.

"What? That I'm not human? Well, I'm not telling. But I'm not a slave to logic either. Logic is my servant, like for most women. Which is how it should be. Men are dumb to let it rule their lives."

"How are you the way you are, Ai?" He genuinely wanted to know.

"By stage three you'll know."

"I'll be lost by then."

To which she simply smiled her agreement. Then with a change of countenance, reverted to the previous issue. "So, Mei Chun?"

"No Tim," he said.

"Hell no! Never Tim and most likely no one else but this doctor friend of hers."

"God, Ai, I can't believe you're going to talk me into this."

"Nope. That's not your way out either. Don't do that. If this blows up in your face it's all your responsibility. I didn't blackmail her. You did. She's your broken toy and you've gotta fix her."

He stood. She took his hand and they began to walk back to the room.

"Thank you," he said and pulled her hip to his.

"Don't mention it. Pay me later."

"What do I owe," he asked with a smile.

"Semen, of course."

He noticed she wasn't smiling.

*****

Thanks to my friends VanessaNelson, Mr. Fox and GTDaytona.