Yayoi

"You must be hungry," Yayoi said.

I was. We walked back along the canal, arm in arm. Feeling Yayoi's little waist in my hand was electrifying. We ate some Thai food from one of the food carts. The smell of the joints being smoked all around us was delicious. On the outdoor stage nearby, covered by a band shell kind of thing, was a bunch of wet-looking hippies playing a variety of mostly stringed instruments. There was no sound system, it wasn't an official event of any kind, as far as we could tell. They just wanted to jam under the band shell, rather than sitting at a picnic table. They weren't very good, but I liked their sense of initiative.

I sat across from Yayoi at our picnic table, which seemed entirely too far away. I wanted to sit beside her, and just feel her body next to mine, not talking, but I felt like I should try to engage her with words first. Every topic it occurred to me to mention, or to ask her about, were things we had already discussed recently by email or in a chat window extensively. I said as much, and she said she felt the same way. As soon as she said that, I felt so relaxed that I almost had a little nap right there, sitting on the bench.

In my floaty, euphoric state I really didn't need any pot, but out of habit, I wandered toward Pusher Street, and Yayoi followed. This was an area of Christiania she hadn't explored much. The dealers, who they call pushers here, all look kind of mean, like they're ready to fight each other or fight the cops at the drop of a hat. Which are both things that happen periodically, sometimes often, depending on who's in charge at a given time at the Rathuset, city hall.

But they have good weed, which I duly purchase, along with little cardboard filter thingies, rolling papers, and a lighter, at a nearby Christiania-themed kiosk.

"Where shall we smoke?"

Yayoi's question was so charming, particularly coming from someone who had never smoked weed in her life. And she even had an answer to her own question already, as she pulled me in the direction of the Opera House.

The Opera House isn't an opera house, or maybe it could be, but in any case it's just a cafe and music venue with that name. Not sure how it was acquired.

"No riot on this time, though," Yayoi commented. She had read my writings carefully. Or at least she remembered the bit about the riots in Christiania that were happening all around the Opera House last time I had a gig there.

There was a frenetic klezmer band playing on the stage, entirely acoustic. Some people listened intently, while others talked over the music. We sat down at a table so we were both facing the band. Where I could put my hand on Yayoi's leg and squeeze it, which I did as soon as we sat down, and it then moved closer to me, which is the right direction.

I borrowed some tobacco from one of our neighbors, and rolled a European-style joint. Back in the US I never smoke tobacco, but then I get to Europe and feel compelled to add tobacco to my joints. Yayoi seemed to be enjoying the whole process, taking it all in.

She managed not to cough in the course of smoking, attributable to the fact that she wasn't a stranger to smoke in general, just to weed in particular. The more we smoked, the closer Yayoi got to me, until by the end of the joint she was in my arms, and her sweet-smelling hair was in my face.

Words were failing both of us at this point, but nonverbal communication seemed to be working perfectly. We both knew we wanted to go outside. By which time it felt strange to separate from Yayoi long enough to descend the staircase from the Opera House to the bustling pedestrian area below.

Everything was getting dimmer by then. The Scandinavian sun was rarely too high up in the sky, but by late afternoon it was near the horizon, and would stay there til well into the following day, although it would be a while before actual darkness would fall, and that wouldn't last very long.

Yayoi pushed up against me as I wrapped my arm around her, and we walked toward the canal, and then along the canal toward our temporary home. We stopped briefly on a park bench that looked out at the water. Midway through the water was a sculpture of a bird, which we had to stare at for quite a while in order to determine that it definitely was a sculpture. During which period of observation Yayoi sat on my lap.

No one was nearby, and it seemed like a wonderful opportunity for my hands to explore her body, and there was no question that both hands and body were relishing the experience. At various points beneath her stretchy black garments - at her inner thighs, her waist, her ribs, her stomach - there would be a flinch, as if she were about to be ticklish, but then she'd stay still, rather than laughing or any of that sort of thing.

Soon I found myself asking, "shall we continue on home?"

Before I finished the sentence, Yayoi was standing, holding my hand to help me off the bench, leading me on, very purposefully. Soon we were back in the little house beside the water. Yayoi lit an oil lamp. She carried it as I followed her into our bedroom.

She pulled something out of her pocket. It was about the size of a playing card. She handed it to me, saying, "I have seven of them. One for each night."

She smiled as I melted. I read the card. It had two boldly-written words on it. HIPPIE VANILLA.

"Interesting," I proclaimed. "Is this role play?"

Yayoi looked shy for the first time since my arrival. "If you like it," she said.

"Of course it's role play. I don't know why I asked." Yayoi already knew I liked that sort of thing. I laughed. "Are you a hippie chick then? You're the best-looking and best-smelling hippie chick I've ever met!"

I chuckled at that, and Yayoi smiled, the sort of smile that seemed to say that I had just made a stupid comment, but I was forgiven.

"Definitely got the environment right, though. Spot on. Quite an elaborate hippie plot already, without adding to it with dialog or something. Spending the night in a home-made house in Christiania that has that unmistakably hippie scent to it. I should roll another joint."

I got out all the requisite bits and pieces for successful joint-rolling, while Yayoi lay on her side on the bed in front of me. She had removed her jacket, I couldn't help but notice, and the outline of her body on the bed in front of a window with the moon shining in behind her was suddenly overwhelming. Though I did manage to finish rolling the joint, after reminding myself that she'd still be right there once I finished rolling, in all likelihood.

And she was. I lit the joint, and we slowly smoked it, enjoying the quiet of the water, a much different atmosphere than the bustling Opera House.

By the time we finished it, we both sank into the bed and into each other's arms simultaneously. We lay there for several minutes, just feeling and listening to each other breathe. I slowly began to kiss her lips and her face, pulling her shirt up to reveal her smooth stomach, quivering beneath my hands, and then my lips.

Yayoi began pulling off pieces of clothing, as I indicated with my fingers that I was in favor of each one being off of her stunning body, and soon we were lying naked beneath the moonlight, intertwined together, facing each other, gazing at each other.

"Hippies are supposed to be naked, right?" Yayoi asked, rhetorically. "They're not really known for lingerie, right?"

We both giggled far more as a result of that comment than we possibly might have, if we weren't both a bit nervous, and high.

"Which reminds me," I thought out loud, "what's your first experience with marijuana like, Yayoi-chan?"

Referring to her using a Japanese suffix somehow set off a new round of giggling, less easily explained than the last one. After fully recovering, eventually, she spoke.

"I thought I might get lost in thought or something, and I guess I've had lots of thoughts. Oh that's a profound observation." More giggling. "But mostly I've just been feeling."

"What are you feeling?"

I suspected I knew, but the idea that she might be feeling something other than what I suspected caused me to breathe too heavily.

"Like I want you to fuck me."

Her use of the term "fuck" seemed unexpected, which made it that much more wonderful, and it caused an involuntary sigh of relief from my mouth, accompanied by a sudden relaxing of the tension that my upper body had been full of, I only realized as it left me.

"Like I just want to merge with you," Yayoi continued.

I reached for my shirt, where I had squirreled away a condom for just this sort of situation. Yayoi heard the sound of the wrapping crinkling in my hand, and knew what it was.

"I've already got what you got," she said, referring to herpes. We had already talked about herpes online. "You can skip that if you want to."

What a generous offer, I thought, as I pushed my very hard cock into her very wet pussy. I was suddenly overwhelmed, once again. This time with much too much pleasure all at once. I lay still, partially on top of Yayoi, partially propped up beside her on the bed, felt her body pressed up against mine, and gave my heart time to stop pounding quite so hard, breathing deeply, repeatedly, eventually managing to calm down enough that I could move in and out of Yayoi's perfect body, without just coming right away.

With each movement in and then out and then in to Yayoi's body, I felt progressively less of any kind of sense of separation between her and I. Our arms were wrapped so tightly around each other, it became hard to tell whose arm was whose.

After a while, Yayoi's body started tensing, and a minute later she spoke, the first verbal communication in what seemed like a long time.

"If you don't stop moving like that, I'm going to come."

I stopped briefly to breathe, to collect myself, since her saying those words almost made me come myself. Then I continued moving, and her body tensed more.

"Do you normally let your lovers know when you're about to come?" I asked.

"Only if I suspect they'd want to know," she replied.

Given her avid consumption of fantasies I had written to her about, she knew well before this evening that I had a thing for orgasm control - mine and others.

I kept moving, feeling Yayoi tense beneath me, until she said in a taut voice, "I'm right there."

I could feel that if I didn't stop very soon, she'd come. I stopped moving, cherishing the completely tense body beneath me, ready to explode. She made a squeaky noise, but otherwise stayed still, and tense.

Satisfied that I had learned something about Yayoi that I really wanted to know - what kind of thing could make her come, and what the edge feels like for her - I resumed the steady movement in and out, but this time a bit more forcefully than before, and Yayoi came with an explosive orgasm that went on for at least thirty seconds, and left her panting.

Pressed up against each other for the entire time, I pushed her over the edge and into one explosive climax after another, until I lost count, and she fell asleep with me still inside her. I fucked her in her sleep, only realizing that I had also fallen asleep while fucking her when she woke me what must have been two hours later, saying, "I can't feel my leg."

I rolled off of her, giving her blood a chance to flow back into her tingling leg, and went back to sleep as I spooned her from behind.

4. Back to school

The sun doesn't really rise in Denmark. It just slowly rises behind the horizon, then eventually creeps above it, usually behind a thick cover of clouds. The lack of direct sunlight can sometimes be a bit disheartening, which I assume is why they're so keen on Christmas parties throughout the month of December there every winter, and putting up lights all over town, tho in a decidedly less gaudy way than we often do it in the USA.

One would have had to be pretty chronically messed up in the head to feel disheartened on that gray morning. Seeing Yayoi's angelic, sleeping face beside me, her chest rising and falling as she slowly breathed, her radiant warmth, was all enough to melt the coldest heart, I imagined.

She opened her eyes, rolled her head in my direction, looked at me, and smiled. That little series of events was also overwhelmingly therapeutic. How many times have I awoken in bed with someone with whom you never knew when they were going to wake up in a rotten mood? Kim would often be sleeping with her arms crossed before she'd wake up in a bad mood. At least you had some warning, not that that's really very helpful.

I tried to remind myself that we had only very recently gotten intimate with each other, and waking up one morning in a row smiling is not necessarily an indication that decades of a happy open marriage will be the result. And then I thought, why have thoughts like that? They're not fun at all. Especially compared to Yayoi's eyes as they seemed to be searching my face for any visible thoughts or feelings.

"Oshiko," she said.

I know so little Japanese, but I know that word. She has to pee. I lay back, predicting her route to the bathroom, ready. I watched as she uncovered her lithe little body, and gingerly stepped out of bed, putting on slippers to insulate her feet from the cold wooden floor. I watched each step, each little sway of her ass and bounce of her delicate breasts as she walked past me, and down the stairs toward the loo.

There was the distant sound of a toilet flushing, and then the running of water, the distinctive sound of the brushing of teeth, then the swishing of water, spitting. The pitter-patter of feet running up stairs. She slowed down as she got to the top. Perhaps she knew how much I would want to see the goose bumps on her body, the hardness of her nipples, in the cold morning air. She walked around the bed and slid under the covers beside me, shivering.

I held her, felt her body slowly warming up, and getting more and more relaxed as it did. Saying nothing, I started caressing and kissing her from her face to her her neck to her breasts. She was responding to each bit of contact with my lips as if she were being mildly shocked by static. I took this as a good sign, as I entered her, and as I entered her, she spread her legs wider. I looked at her face and she smiled.

After having at least a fair amount of sleep, I wanted to fuck Yayoi so much more. It felt urgent, like I was making up for lost time. I think Yayoi felt the same way. In any case, her body became taut and her breathing sped up and she came, three times. By the third orgasm her face was looking a bit frazzled, like she needed a change of pace.

I swung her leg over me and turned her on her side, fucking her slowly that way, watching her wince slightly when I pushed in all the way.

"Itae." It hurts. "But I like it," she added.

I didn't really pound. I didn't pull her toward me. I just fucked her deeply and slowly, and it felt so good. After a few minutes I was getting hot, and I rolled over so I was behind her. I held her hips and fucked her from there. Again so good, but different. The wonderful variety of life and sexual positions, and Yayoi's generous spirit and perfect body.

Fucking her on her side and from behind, whatever else it did, didn't make her come, but she was still very wet, and seemed ready for anything, which in itself was something to revel in. All the money and power and whatever other shit in the world couldn't come close to matching this experience, the experience of Yayoi giving herself to me completely. Life couldn't possibly get better than this, I thought over and over on that gray Copenhagen morning.

My stomach was rumbling after a while, as it does.

"Shall we go find some breakfast?" I asked, interrupting the exquisite silence.

We got into the shower together. I put Yayoi in the water, my hands tingling as I familiarized myself with every inch of her body, massaging soap into her skin, making what was already velvety and smooth even more so.

"We have plans for tonight?" I asked.

Yayoi sighed. "At the moment I'm kind of inclined to cancel all our plans and just stay here for the next week. What more do we need? Cafes, Thai food, pot, a walking trail, a bed. But yes, we have plans. But first, breakfast."

We both put on black clothing again. For me this was nothing new, but for Yayoi it was a recent adaptation to the environment. But while most people in Copenhagen may wear black most of the time, Christiania is an exception to that rule, and with Yayoi and I both in black, we kind of stuck out. (The pushers usually wear black, but it was fairly evident by my lack of tattoos and the fact that Yayoi was female and Japanese that we weren't Danish drug dealers.)

We ate and drank espresso at the Moon Fisher. Yayoi was starting to look more awake. I was also feeling somewhat ready for doing something outside of the bed for a while. That kind of variety is also important, I know.

"We're visiting the folk school in Helsingor this evening," Yayoi announced.

Yayoi evidently knew that I had been there numerous times before. Culturally, the regular Danish schools are run more along the lines of private Waldorf schools in the US, with a heavy emphasis on the emotional well-being of each child, and healthy social relations between them. The folk schools are like the educational equivalent of the old communist summer camps we used to have in significant numbers in places like upstate New York and New England. Some of the kids - and more of the teachers - know Pete Seeger's musical repertoire about as well as Pete did.

Not only had Yayoi reserved a room for us to sleep in at the school, she had set me up with a paying gig, singing for the kids along with their headmaster, Jan-Robert, the best folksinger among the staff.

We drove up the coast, reaching Helsingor early enough to have a leisurely walk through the woods to a cafe I remembered from previous trips, which is located in the forest. You can get to it on foot or by stopping on a very local train, but reaching the place by car is impossible, without parking a long way off. There should be more cafes like that.

The cafe served traditional Danish fare, which Yayoi had never actually seen before, though she had been in Copenhagen for several months at that point. It's a very cosmopolitan international city, Copenhagen, and Yayoi hadn't ventured outside of it much since getting to Denmark. But you're unlikely to encounter traditional Danish food much unless you leave the capital, and Yayoi was face-to-face with pickled herring, and was decidedly unimpressed.

"Japan is a hot climate," she reasoned. "Most thing we eat fresh, probably because we can. There was never a need to learn how to pickle everything to prepare for the winter."

"Definitely an acquired taste," I admitted, as I ate another slab of hard Danish bread covered with pickled herring.

That evening the shaggy teenagers of the folk school were gathered together and the hootenanny began. From a Japanese perspective, I realized at the time that the scene might not have seemed too out of place, aside from the degree of shagginess and lack of a school uniform. In Japan, everybody grows up learning the songs of one Stephen Foster, a 19th-century American songwriter who wrote iconic American songs like "Oh Susanna" that might tend to just get forgotten if they weren't part of the curriculum of the elementary school system throughout Japan. But as a result of Japanese schooling, there is a body of music that anyone who grew up in Japan has some familiarity with. Which is also true of the communist summer camps and folk schools in North America as well as Europe.

I thought as I looked out at the faces of adorable teenagers and teachers, it might be nice if the kids were wearing uniforms. That way one can have immediate confirmation that this person is not an adult. Not someone to flirt with, and not someone to fantasize about either, though that one's harder. In Japan, of course, fantasizing about school girls is totally mainstream fare. And they wear uniforms, so they're easy to identify.