“I HAD THIS DREAM. I sat with my arms folded by the side of a bed where a woman lay on her back. She quietly told me she was going to die.”
The first lines from Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights’ Dreams played through my mind as I loosened the tie of the man sleeping on the bed. A masculine odor wafted from his shirt collar. I got a whiff of the scent—which wasn’t by any means unpleasant—as I sat atop him, straddling his stomach. My hair dangled into his face, and he turned his head as if it tickled him.
“Come on, get up,” I said.
I received only a few unintelligible murmurs in response. An empty beer can lay toppled over on the table. He’d still try drinking them, even though he was a total lightweight—one can of beer was all it took to send him into a drunken stupor.
“Wake up, Rintaro.” I tried again but got no response.
Patience running thin, I put all my weight on his stomach. He croaked like a frog being crushed and finally opened his eyes.
The first words out of his mouth sounded annoyed. “You’re here again, Iguchi?”
At school, he gave a youthful, almost boyish impression. Seeing him here in his room, though, he looked just like a drunk middle-aged man.
Through the half-drawn navy curtains, I saw the moon drifting in the sky. The curtains blocked the unsightly streetlights and power lines, and there was something almost picturesque about the moon floating alone in the starless night sky.
“I hung your suit up for you. It would’ve gotten wrinkled otherwise.”
The first thing you’d see upon entering his apartment were the shoes he’d haphazardly kicked off in the entryway. He’d removed his socks and tossed them on the floor with his bag, then left his suit crumpled in a pile somewhere along the way. Heading straight to the fridge, he’d grabbed a beer and downed it immediately. Before long, the alcohol went straight to his head, and he’d tumbled into bed with his limbs outstretched like a giant starfish before falling fast asleep. It was just too easy to picture that exact sequence of events.
“I put a few outfits together for you in the closet,” I told him.
“Why keep sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?”
“We’re embarrassed that our homeroom teacher wears the same outfit every day,” I retorted.
He always put on the same tie; he found it too troublesome to search for anything that wasn’t close at hand. He was a single guy living alone, but it was almost unbelievable that Kakei Rintaro, one of our school’s most popular teachers, was such a slob.
“Get off,” he said. “You’re heavy.”
Still dizzy with intoxication, he held his head in one hand, searching for a cup on the table with the other. It was just out of his reach, and I decided to tease him a bit. While still straddling him, I leaned close to his face; I could feel his breath and smell the trace of alcohol that lingered on it.
I was about to kiss him when he put a hand over my mouth. “Do that with someone you like.”
“But I like you, Rintaro.”
Instead of attempting to argue, he sat up. The momentum sent me tumbling off the bed. He must’ve been incredibly thirsty because he downed the water almost instantly. That seemed to give him some self-possession; he finally met my gaze. “How many times have I told you not to come here?”
“It’s your fault for never changing where you hide your key.”
He rose from the bed and unsteadily put on the sweatpants he usually wore around the house. Then he pulled off his collared shirt and tossed it to the floor, keeping on only the undershirt beneath. He gave a big yawn and scratched his stomach lightly. I saw his belly button poke out as he did, but he didn’t have any unnecessary fat.
“Go home. Your parents are probably worried about you,” he said.
“I highly doubt they even care.”
Rintaro looked disgusted by my stubborn attempt to stay at his place. His true nature was curt, but he played the role of the wide-eyed, pleasant fledgling teacher at school; very few people knew his true self.
He grabbed another beer from the fridge. When he cracked it open, it made a refreshing sound. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he chugged it in one gulp. Something about the sweat-drenched hair around the nape of his neck exuded unspoken sexuality.
His place wasn’t big at all—just a studio apartment. The navy curtains and coffee-colored bedclothes were plain, and laundry always seemed to be scattered here and there. It wasn’t clean or pretty by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I felt right at home in this bachelor pad.