“Do you, now?” she said, smugness written on her face. “So you do feel pleasure?”
I shrank, sensing that the best strategy now was to do what any subservient creature can do in an impossible position, which was to shrink.
The monsoon rain that had been the veil to the pounding sound of my desire had ceased, and in the quiet aftermath, which was speckled only by the sound of crickets emerging in the garden beyond the moon-glinted window, my mind filled in the silence with all the ways in which Lady Evelyn could weaponise my misbegotten desire.
I said nothing to convey my fear of her and whatever reprisal she had in store for me. I dared not to. Besides, I was too flustered to say anything knowing that my words would be used against me. Instead, I set aside her stockings and fetched her evening peignoir as if she had not just asked me a question that warranted a response.
Fortunately, she seemed to have let the embarrassing matter rest. She said nothing more of it as I helped her into the peignoir. Nor as I brushed her long golden hair. Her mind perhaps had wandered back to her husband. The tears that came down her cheeks said as much, and I did not know what else might occupy her mind, as I did not know much of her life outside of this house. In fact, the only things I knew of her were that she had come to Japan to teach Lord Sasaki English and Western customs, and that she stayed and that they married.
When I finished with the brush, I quietly collected her stockings and the rest of her undergarment for the wash and went quietly to the door.
“Niko, stop,” she said, just as I was about to slide the door shut. I stopped. So did my heart. A sharp dagger of a smile drew across her otherwise angelic face.
“I won’t say anything if you take my stockings to bed with you.”
“Madame?” I croaked.
Her smile grew more dagger-like.
“You heard me. Consider it a gift. A memento of me. Of my legs and the pleasure they provide you.”
I was so beside myself I let out a gasp and ran out the room without bidding my lady goodnight.
Surely this was a twisted game. She was stringing me along like a child might string along a hapless dragonfly. A game I should not have to subject myself to. And I did not have to — she was drunk now. By morning she would have forgotten about having ‘gifted’ me her stockings as a bedside memento. I could simply toss the stockings in with the rest of the laundry like I always do, and nothing would ever come of it, and I could simply trudge along in the daily drudgery of my endless sea.
But… I did not do that. I chose the storm. I chose to take the stockings to bed with me.
***That night, I stayed long past the time I should be asleep, contemplating my mistress’s open-ended directive to think pleasurable things. The moon, a diffuse spotlight through the shoji screen of my small compartment, illuminated the object of my obtuse desire, as if to goad it, by which I understood why it is that wolves howl at the moon — hunger had something to do with it.
I was lonely, and I had been for years. It had been so long since I had felt human intimacy that I had strongly considered the possibility that I would never feel it again. Perhaps so long now that madame’s suggestion to take her stockings to bed with me felt very much like the human intimacy that I had been so sorely craving.
I held the stockings close to me. They still carried my lady’s warmth.
It was long after the moon had descended that I finally took action to calm the torment that roiled my insides. As quietly as a dormouse stealing an acorn, I placed her stockings to my face and… I breathed them in. Her perfume, sweet summer roses, entered me deeply. And beneath the perfume, a hint of her bodily odour. My heart palpitated with such excitement that I could barely contain it. The torment inside me did not calm. It roiled stronger, in fact. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, or what I should now do, but one thing was certain — just as a fish has the instinct to flap around on the shore, I had an instinct to lower my hand down between my legs to my very tense sex that was wet, burning, and begging for relief.
This was not the first time I pleasured myself, but this was the first time I had done so while in possession of another woman’s intimate clothing, soiled no less, still entrained with her scent, which made all the difference. It was as if she were right here with me. I could almost feel her holding me intimately. Caressing me. Entwining her legs with mine so that we were one.
As my desire burned, I did my very best to quench it, rubbing my finger tenderly against my hardening bud, while I held her stockings to my face.
My breathing soon turned to stilted gasps, my fingers became moist and slick from touching my blushing bud. I pressed the stockings against my face. I rubbed it against my nose and mouth and, as my breathing became loud and heavy, I gave in to the dark urge that had risen up from the shadows of my mind to stuff her stockings into my mouth. As depraved as it seemed, somehow I had convinced myself that this was the only logical thing she had meant for me to do with them. Now, I could not breathe without breathing her in, and that really did me in. I painted a full picture of her. I pictured her legs and feet, naked, beautiful, flawless. I pictured all the naughty things I’d do to them. I’d use my tongue. I’d lick. I’d use my teeth. I’d gnaw. I’d use my lips. I’d kiss her in all the places one woman should never kiss another. I’d use the whole of my mouth. I’d lick the bottom of her foot. I’d suck on each of her toes. Oh, how the thoughts made me soar! How it made me feel so very free and alive. Before I knew it, I was overcome with the particular feeling that I dare say captures the state of transcendence Christians call rapture.
At the crest of my rapture, birds that had been roosting in the trees just outside made a terrible noise, rustling the branches as they fluttered off, spiking a fear through my heart that if I had made so much noise as to startle the birds, that I might have stirred my mistress awake.
I quickly pulled her stockings from my mouth, held my breath to listen for any signs that my fear had been realised. Only after an eternity of hearing nothing but her gentle sleep-breathing through the paper thin wall, I breathed a sigh of relief. The warm buzzing feeling of rapture crept back in, but soon enough that rapture was overshadowed by a stomach-wrenching disgust, as if a bright spotlight illuminated my dark fantasy to reveal all the ugly marks I could not see before — my act was not only wrong, it was impure. Sinful. And worst of all, it was exactly what she had expected me to do. Ah. This was her twisted game. Just the sort of twisted game a noble woman would play, preying on the subservient for their entertainment, reasserting their noble place by reminding us how weak and pathetic we are as to imbibe in dirty pleasures. She would revel to know that I was exactly what she considered me — a servant girl inclined to wallow in her hovel.