I.
If he was being completely honest, Ken would tell you that he had always preferred younger women. Though he would probably never admit that to you. The older he got, the less appealing a grown man chasing young women was to the people he spoke to.
Girls and (later) women his own age irritated him. Laughing in cliques, domineering, loud. It was negative behaviour. He admired women like his stepmother, Nora: quiet, demure, ladylike, and clever. The girls in his class who painted their faces and whose short skirts revealed trashy underpants. He found them disgusting.
At 15 years old, the prettiest girl in his class asked him out and Ken was struck by the nauseous feeling that consumed him completely. Before he could gather control of himself, his lip had curled in disgust and instead of a simple “No,” he said, “Why?”
The girl and her friends spread rumours that he was a homosexual, as if there could be no other reason why he would reject her.
Ken didn’t date until he was seventeen. Lisa was in the ninth grade. She was quiet, delicate like a ballerina. She wore bookish glasses, which meant the boys in her class hadn’t started noticing her yet. He had noticed her a handful of times around school and one day, while she waited outside the music room before her piano lesson, Ken asked her out.
Her face went bright red like a tomato. It was adorable.
The relationship was easy. As a ninth grader, Lisa’s life focused around her parents, her friends from school, and homework. It suited him. Ken could pick the topics they discussed. She didn’t argue or contradict him. She listened to what he had to say.
And unlike the girls his age, who seemed proud of being utterly depraved, Lisa was innocent. It was for that reason he chose her to be his first lover. It took a long time to persuade her, but he managed to do so. Her parents had gone away for a weekend, she wasn’t supposed to have boys over, but Ken was helping her study. It had been romantic, the two of them together in her bedroom. The pink sheets smelled like her. She had cried a little, said that she’d changed her mind. Ultimately, she didn’t really mean it. The bleeding was rather off-putting to him, but such is the risk with someone so innocent and sweet.
Afterwards, she seemed confused. Ken thought that was cute. She needed someone to take care of her; she needed him. He went to wrap her in his arms, but she wriggled away, staring at him with an expression he didn’t recognize. However, Lisa never challenged him on anything. It wasn’t hard in the end for Ken to convince her that the whole thing had been her idea. What a wicked girl she was, seducing him like that.
Still, she didn’t seem overly upset when he left for university. He wrote to her, asking her to come and visit, but she never did. His calls were ignored and eventually he heard that she was dating a boy from her school. She would go red and look at the floor when their paths crossed again.
Much to Ken’s disappointment, college girls turned out to be even worse than the girls from his high school. With morals of dirt, depraved minds, and argumentative tongues down their throats, Ken had very little in regards to a love life while he was in college. Every now and then, he’d work as a tutor to help pay for his schooling; it irritated him profusely, but the money was decent. His clients were lazy children with deep-pocketed parents or teenage boys, who he loathed.
Only once did he get to tutor a teenage girl, a bored and rebellious girl named Mai. He would watch her as she completed the work he had tasked her. Her dark eyes, narrowed in concentration. Her soft looking black bob that parted every now and then, revealing one slim, shell-like ear. He would admire her small chest rising and falling as she recited Shakespeare in a bored monotone.
He fantasised about her a lot, but never made a move.
Ken had a few steady girlfriends from his teaching course. It never went anywhere; it was what he came to think of as his denial period. Deep down, he knew that he shouldn’t be interested in school girls. A teenage girlfriend was not someone he could take home to his stepmother, someone he could introduce to his friends.
So his friends and his stepmother got to meet Izumi, from his teacher training course, who he dated for six months. His friend Hideyoshi ended up dating her after they broke up; the two of them got married recently. Nora said that Izumi’s hands were too large for a woman.
They met Karen, an American who worked in a bar he went to after work. His friends were impressed with his fancy American girlfriend. Nora said that American women smelled strongly of milk, like some pregnant cow.
Then there was Tsukiko, who his stepmother set him up with through a friend of hers. Tsukiko was beautiful and elegant, much like Nora had been when she married his father all those years ago. At 22, she could have easily passed for 15. She was from a good family and wore smart white gloves. His friends didn’t think much of her. They said she was snooty and nicknamed her “Her Ladyship” behind her back. She was the only one of his adult girlfriends he actually enjoyed sex with. He might have forgotten his love for schoolgirls if Tsukiko hadn’t met a handsome banker and left Ken for someone with loftier ambitions.
Nora was offended when the two of them broke up. She never spoke to that friend of hers again.
After that, he was asked out by the mother of one of his pupils. He subjected himself to attending the date. Older women repulsed him: too much makeup, too much perfume, as if those things could turn back the hands of time. Usually they were rich and desperate from a messy divorce after a lonely marriage.
No, he didn’t date his students’ mothers: that would be completely unprofessional.
At 25 years old, he had been working at a fairly good school in the city centre for two years. Being the youngest male faculty member, he was popular with his students. The girls flirted or got all flustered when he went by. The boys would joke around with him or confide in him as he was closer to their age. The pay was decent and Ken found himself living very comfortably.
Well, it was comfortable on the surface. Inside, he hungered like a wild animal. It was a blessing and a curse to be able to watch the young girls in their short skirts. He found himself longing to bend them over his desk, one after another. It was dizzying. He would watch them as they sat quietly during a pop quiz and wonder how many of them were still virgins. These girls with nothing but school and their friends to think about. They raised their hands so timidly and smiled so cheerfully when they got an answer correct.
Work was heaven and hell all at once.
Needless to say, he had been six months into his position when he first fucked a student. The girl’s name was Yuri. She was quiet, kept to herself, and had the most beautiful dark hair. She blushed whenever he spoke to her. He suspected she had a crush on him. One night, she stayed late to help him tidy up the classroom after the summer cultural festival. He was locking his desk as she cleaned the blackboard. As he brushed past her, he suddenly found he wasn’t moving. It felt too good to press up against her like that, her tight ass against his crotch. Trembling, his arm rose and rested beside her head.
Ken stayed like that, not daring to move.
“Sir?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
Her hair smelled like honey, a lock of it trapped behind her ear as she twisted her head to look back at him.
“Sir—“
“Stay still,” he said. He bent his head and moved her hair to one side so he could lay his lips upon her neck. “Just stay still.”
She whimpered when she felt his erection press against her backside. He rubbed himself through his trousers before unzipping his fly with a shaking hand. Pulling his cock free, he pressed it between her slender thighs. Unable to stop himself, Ken held her still, moving hurriedly. He shushed her frightened whimpers, his leaking cock squelching as he fucked her thighs. He grunted in her ear when he came, splattering her underwear.
He drove Yuri home afterwards. He didn’t know what she told her parents because nothing came of it.
Afterwards, Yuri would wait for him after school. She seemed upset and confused at first, maybe even a little cross with him. But when he ignored her, she clung on, like she never wanted him to leave her alone. The two of them would fool around in his office or his car. He never took her to a love hotel or back to his apartment. A prude girl like Yuri would think that kind of thing was seedy. She craved intimacy after they had sex. Once they went for a date because it seemed like something she wanted. He drove them out to the countryside, to some little restaurant he used to come to with Nora and his father. Yuri had made an embarrassing attempt to try and look older by wearing a garish red lipstick that didn’t suit her. Her eyes got red and puffy when he told her as much.
The relationship didn’t last long. Yuri was good at keeping secrets, but she transferred to another school for her senior year. It was a pity.
Having whetted his appetite, Ken found himself trying to identify a new mate within the student body. It was hard; there were layers to it.
Firstly, it was most important to be completely professional in general: once a smear was placed on you—a rumour started—the game became that much more difficult or it could destroy you completely.
Secondly, you had to be careful not to select the wrong sort of girl. It wasn’t as simple as going for the prettiest or the class pet. It was prudent not to go for any of the following: the tough type, the weird type, the type that enjoyed a lot of attention from the opposite sex, etc. It could be hard to identify and there wasn’t a definitive rule in the type you could make a play for. There also wasn’t room for trial and error.
Thirdly, it was crucial not to be discovered. The affair was capped due to factors such as the girl eventually graduating from high school. Therefore, he thought it would be prudent—despite how he would have preferred it—to avoid becoming involved with a freshmen student. Three years was a long time to conceal an affair with the same girl.
The second girl he became involved with was in her third year. Her name was Cana. She was an incredibly gloomy girl, a head taller than all the boys in her year. She seemed flattered by his compliments and eager to experiment with a man before she left for college. Her blank expression only changed when they were in bed together. Unlike Yuri, Cana wouldn’t fool around at school; she was cautious. They would always have sex in his car or a love hotel and twice in his apartment. He never had to woo her with the pretext of dating.
Something in Cana was broken, he realised as they spent more time together. There were times Ken felt real concern for her. He would watch her naked back as she sat up to stare out of the window at the night sky. There was something so lonely about her sat like that; it was like she wouldn’t feel it if he reached out and touched her.
She never wanted to see him after she left for college in Hokkaido. He was a part of her life she wanted to leave behind in Tokyo. He could understand that.
It was when he met the third girl that all his problems started.
***
For all installments from True Love, click here.
Rachael J. Llewellyn is an English writer living in Wales, where she is about to start her PhD exploring memory and folklore in the novel. Her work aims to challenge its readers in its uncomfortable social and moral themes. Her fiction has been previously published in The Tinderbox, published by Warwick University—where she completed her MA—and in Wordsmith HQ’s webzine, Freckled Ink.
