Page 3 of Up All Night
Chapter 2
One thing that I didn’t want to admit to anyone was that, even with my lack of sleep and general disdain for the world, I was going through one of the wildest ovulations of my life.
How the hell else do I describe it? It was going on before my neighbor started acting up, and no, listening to his fuckfests didnotmake me hornier. If anything, that man was doing everything in his libidic power to kill any interest I would ever have in sex again.
Then I lived my day to day life.
Have you ever been so damnhornythat your whole body is constantly shaking with thoughts of getting laid? I’m not kidding. Whenever I had actual moments to myself that weren’t fueled by my hatred for my neighbor, I ended up in a dark hellscape populated by my libido and the fact that I was not getting any.
It did not help that I worked during my supposed vacation. As a romance author, I spend a lot of my time writing about other people having sex. Usually this isn’t a big deal. Honestly, half the time I groan to think I have to writemore sexeven though it’s the farthest thing from my own mind. Yet as I sat in my local Starbucks, overlooking a major Tokyo intersection, with my screen open to some sizzling sex between a billionaire and his curvy little sweetie, I thought,“Fuck it! I want some too!”
I’m not going to get into the details of my love life leading up to this trip. All you need to know is two things: I wasn’t a virgin, and I really, really craved some masculine company.
Okay, so I lied. Here’s a piece of pie for your sweet tooth.
It had been years – actual, literalyears– since I was last with a man in the Biblical sense. I think my body had been reminded of that fact to the point it would not let it fucking go. I was going to watch every paired off couple sneak into a love hotel with as much jealousy as I could harbor in my poor, shaking body.
Every inch of my skin was alive, and had nobody to touch it.
Every dirty thought that entered my mind was practically broadcasted to the crowded room.
Every decent-looking man who came within my vicinity was automatically the subject of five-thousand fantasies. Sometimes I entertained the idea that I was a part of their fantasies too.
I endured this horrible state for days. Luckily, when you’re self-employedandtraveling around a foreign country, you have plenty to distract yourself with. You’ve got that crippling sense of dread that you’re an abject failure if you’re not actively working on a project even at one in the morning. (Assuming your music is loud enough to drown out the fucking going on next door.) You can also go shopping and amuse yourself with a boatload of new CDs (shut up) and office supplies, because Japan does CD shopping and office supplies thebest.
Yet nothing can save you from yourself once you actually do have a few minutes of peace in your mind. In your room. In your bed.
So I couldn’t sleep thanks to the anxiety my wonderful neighbor gave me. I also couldn’t sleep because my body was about to burst if I didn’t get some soon. Basically, my existence was consumed with sex, and it wasn’t pretty.
For some reason, Starbucks is so much more expensive in Japan than it is in America. Fun fact: I never stepped into a Starbucks until I lived in Japan years ago. Another fun fact: most of my novels are written in a Starbucks near you. So even though a Grande English Breakfast tea costs a dollar more in Japan than it does in America, and a chocolate chip scone likewise costs my non-existent first born, my work brain associates Starbucks with getting shit done.
Picture me, at this upscale Starbucks in the Iidabashi neighborhood, where traditional Edo meets modern Tokyo, sitting at a crowded counter with barely enough room for my netbook and my tray of goodies. On one side of me is a geologist studying charts and graphs on his computer that looks like it’s stuck in 2005. On the other side of is a young, fashionable student more interested in her makeup than the biology materials in her textbook. I chugged that English Breakfast with gusto, because I was so fucking tired that the words did not appear in my word processor.
“Bring your boyfriend over and fuck him really loud.”
I opened up Facebook and read the latest comments on my debacle of a post.“Suppose they’re not French enough to invite you for a ménage, huh?”
A part of me wanted to go home and rest, but I knew that there was no rest as long as my neighbor’s libido remained unsated. Like mine.
That dude needed to be put into his place.Ineeded to get laid. Surely, there was some way I could make these two things happen. Perhaps simultaneously.
***
I had reached a new low.
Never before had a dating app graced my phone. Never before had I connected my Facebook (my work Facebook! What the fuck was I thinking? God! It said CYNDI under a picture of me. What was I? Some international stripper?) to an app used to get honeys. Male honeys. Male honeys that had either lived in Japan for so long that they were jaded fucks, or were passing through and on a hunt for Japanese pussy to satisfy their life-long fetishes. (So, you know, neither gave a fuck about me.)
I can’t believe I’m doing this,I thought as I sprawled across my bed and hastily created a profile. I kept telling myself that this was a game, a lark, something I never had to go through with if I felt uncomfortable later on. Yes, yes, placate myself with promises that I could ghost any dude, or that I could nuke this app from orbit once I came to my senses.
Although, if you’ve ever been as hard up for a date as I was, you know that there is no coming to one’s senses until it’s too late.
I took a few cute selfies and uploaded them. I explained in my profile that I was only in town for a couple more weeks, so I wasn’t looking for anything serious outside of a few dates. (Guys were into that, right? You always heard from women on dating sites that guys wanted to hook up. Well, I wanted to hook up! That should land melotsof hot dudes, right? Good looking ones? Decent looking ones? Ones I could sleep with while the lights were off?) The only thing I said about myself was that my name wasn’t actually Cyndi in real life, regardless of what my profile forced me to say. I had a feeling most guys wouldn’t care. If anything, they probably felt sorry for me because my name wasCyndi.
I popped open a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts before activating my profile. If I were the drinking type, I would’ve had a beer or a glass of wine to lubricate this bullshit.
Right away the app prompted me to start swiping right or left on the faces of men from all over the world.
It’s dirty business choosing who you date in this fashion. It feels even less nice when you realize that men are doing the same thing to you. Some guy was sitting on the Tokyo Metro swiping through pictures of women while his dick twitched and thirsted for some pussy. He lingered on my photo and either shrugged before swiping right, or immediately swiped left because he thought I was ugly. (Or because I wasn’t Japanese. Extra nice.)
