I Loved the Devil

Ruki wandered, for the third time in five minutes, into the staff office and loitered aimlessly around the receptionist humming an off-beat tune. After a few more moments and an exasperated stare from the lady in question, the vocalist finally docked onto the side of her table and confronted her with a blatantly shameless grin, “Did the D-block make-up artist—”

“No.” The salary worker stared up at him with overtaxed patience. He could imagine her eyes fixating bleakly in the exact same fashion upon an unruly nosehair that refused to be trimmed. Not to his surprise really, as he’d been putting the question on repeat every day for the past two months.

Silence ensued while Ruki slowly arched his eyebrow to maximize what enormous awkwardness there had already been.

The vocalist maintained his anything-but-pleasant companion’s company for half a second longer before clearing his throat. Neither of them said everything, mainly because they had explored in-depth all the possible dialogues which may follow after “no / silence/” in different tones, pitches, and beat. As the ending had always been a social Cold War, Ruki decided he’d be better off leaving.

Ruki cleared his throat and turned to leave. Unfortunately for the blonde, he couldn’t make it five steps past the door when the words he’d been itching to say mushroomed out of his lips and sent him darting back to the desk to vomit it over her, “Please remind her of professionalism. Professionalism. Ahem. Professionalism, please remind her, yes—”

He stopped immediately when the receptionist responded with an enormously long, melodic sigh that said everything from “Christ, you’re actually more annoying than an inopportune limp dick” and “I need to file my nails again”.

And he was glad, because at least now he had good reason to respond in a contemptuous snarl about her un-sorting her panties from their Godzilla-sized bunch. Then she would jeer about his missing the memo on ‘How to Successfully Become an Asswipe Stalker for Dummy Extraordinaires’. And then he would hiss back at least he was a Dummy Extraordinaire, because she was definitely—

“Shit.” From the corner of his eyes Ruki spotted his brunette goody-too-shoed bandmate sauntering up with the “oh-you’re-in-such-deep-shit-sir” spray-painted all over his brows. Immediately the vocalist’s mind flew off of taking the piss out of the receptionist as he instinctively twisted the opposite direction to rush out the door before the know-it-all, living sack of demonic goody-goodness ran into smack him.

Which happened anyway, because the demonic sack of goody-goodness also sprouted powers of general omniscience. And, as Ruki feared, the first thing Kai decided to comment upon was his friendly strife with the receptionist: “Ruki, I’m sure the company needs an artist to lecture the staff on professionalism, especially in the case that the said artist is doing so in neglect of his own belated recording.”

Kai’s arched brow bobbled up and down before Ruki’s flat-lined stare. The drummer attempted catching up to the fleeing vocalist, which wasn’t at all difficult as Kai did have longer legs (to Ruki’s infinite chagrin). The shorter man groaned in dissent; instantaneously Kai cut him off with a sarcastic whistle, “You know, I’m not against you fighting your way into forcing the make-up artist to touch your ahem. But for some reason, I feel that your fiancée may be against it.”

To respond Ruki simply took a half step faster. He ducked into the elevator and slammed his knuckles onto the Close button. From the other side of the sliding doors Kai shook his head, half-amused and mostly exasperated, at Ruki’s victorious gaze.

The vocalist mouthed “What gives you the impression that I’m only forcing her to touch it?” over a crooked smirk, just as the door closed between the two.

On the other side, Kai stared at his own drained frown reflecting off the elevator doors. He emptied a long sigh and all of the nine tons of burdens crushing his chest in. Once again Ruki was digging himself a massive grave, and to worsen it, he was dancing over it completely unaware. But knowing Ruki, this new disaster was just as unstoppable as all the ones before. And for the moment that he held the thought, all Kai could feel was deep sympathy for Ruki’s fiancée, who was tossed aside as usual for the man’s latest fling in the form of an American make-up artist.

Half out of guilt, and half out of shame on his friend’s behalf, Kai pulled out his phone and texted Haruna.

‘Sorry.’

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Ruki had always thought the Caucasians ugly, coarse and uncouth compared to his native Japanese girls. Pretty from afar, they defiled beauty with their grotesque skin and fake eyebrows and the most bizarrely shaped lips. They came in a whole lot of flavors, ranging from outrageously overdone to downright repulsive. With their lips too swollen or too thin, their feet too big and toes too long, their chests ready to explode and nipples faded and enlarged like faded ink, each one was a walking bomb of self-indulgence.

Inconsistent, exotic, without a shred of elegance, the characters with yellow hair stalked Tokyo’s sparkling night scenes like fireflies. To Ruki these foreign creatures were grand, imposing, faceless sculptures—they couldn’t be controlled or protected: they refused to be influenced or marked (some concept about independence). Ruki had no use for objects which he couldn’t possess and mark.

There wasn't any particular reason he was inclined that way. Perhaps it was that he had always enjoyed control over another, the position of owning someone: gaze, body, thoughts. The idea of being possessed on the other hand, falling in love, was too impossible to imagine. The possible pain and humiliation which could result was too great for the gains, if there were any. He’d never tried it, since just thinking about it made him queasy and sick.

But her, she'd managed to be different.

She was simply surreal: god-fucking, mind-blowing, holy-shitting beautiful. Her eyes that sung of pearls buried deep in the ocean's embrace, rested peacefully before a set of proud cheekbones and taut, colorless skin. Her lips were impossibly red, ostentatious and repulsive. Her nose was too sharp for her big eyes and undersized mouth. She was a living caricature, and somehow it worked out to make her art. She was above her race and his: the splendor wasn't human. It couldn't have been real. It was too perfect.

He couldn’t stop looking at her, his golden firefly. He was gripped, intrigued to such an extent that sometimes, unlike a child with a moth caught prostrate in his hand, he desired to reach forth and rip off her beautiful wings. He wanted to tear her apart and love her to pieces, his dream.

On those occasions when they had shared an elevator, he always fought the enormous urge to touch her: her face, her throat, the curve of her neck, her flat collarbones, her voluptuous breasts... he wanted to run his fingers through her hair, grab her close and kiss her until she suffocated. His hands ached to shove her to a corner of the elevator, to run the tips of his fingers down her breasts and waist and thighs, to unveil her from his imagination. He wanted to slide his fingers between her thighs, wanted to hear her breathing become ragged, wanted to see that virgin blush. He wanted to bang her hard, with every drop of his energy, until they both withered away in the hollow memories of pleasure.

He wanted to have her. He wanted her to be angry at him, to want him, to hate him, and to need him like a rebellious pup. He wanted her on his leash, to stop smiling at all those dirty old men who stared at her so shamelessly. He wanted her to look at him.

He wanted her to look at him.

But every time the elevator light struck 12 with that same obnoxious ding, she disappeared and he was left alone again with nothing but memories of her presence. He wasn't aware if she had noticed him. He would have been surprised if she ever bothered to glance at him twice—once more after that coldly polite and patronizing smile she shared with everybody.

It was incorrect.

It should have been the other way around. He became famous for a reason other than to share his music—he wanted fame, for fame’s sake. He wanted to be desired and to be needed and to be pursued. When he

Yet, here he was, having finally struggled to the top of latter, chasing after this nobody of a makeup artist. He was angry that she didn't notice him and never bothered to pay attention to him. She’d hijacked his role so effortlessly and naturally that it made him sick to the guts. How could she be so ignorant? How could she not notice his averted eyes and burning blushes? How could she not know that his every spare second was occupied by thoughts of her and her and her?

He had fallen deeply in love with her, without knowing her name, or her age, or if that ring on her finger was really just misplaced.

He was cruelly addicted to that feeling of anger which she nurtured within him, that feeling of paranoid jealousy every time she spoke with another man. That violent need he had for her raged throughout his soul. The only strands of her he held were memories—of her cold stare at the elevator buttons, of her “good morning” voice, of the scent of her perfume.

He didn't dare demand more because it would merely flame his obsession wilder. Regardless, he took pleasure in his maniac fixation. It felt good to be like this. His chest clenched in joy every time resentment ran amok memories of her smile. When his heart fell at the sight of seeing her with another man, his insides would writhe with pleasure. It was awful and downright bliss.

“Her name’s Jojize.” Uruha disclosed at random one day, as the two stood before bathroom stalls, and neither needed clarifications as who ‘her’ was, “But you really shouldn’t. I mean, I don’t like to cut into your life and all, but you’ve got Haruna and she’s been good to you for as long as I can remember…”

Jojize.

After hearing the name he practiced saying it to himself. He practiced moving his lips to her name before the mirror. Occasionally he dared to let his mind’s eye wander as he imagined the lush hills and valleys of a Jojize. Would a white girl’s skin feel different from Haruna’s? Would her cries and moans be stronger or harder than Haruna’s? How would her lips feel upon his?

Haruna had noticed his distracted dazes and half-finished sentences and tried to talk him out of it. With time the futility of her efforts met her sunken hopes and she let him drift slowly away. He’d had flings before, even as they had their first date so many years ago in high school. She was permanently the second woman, the third wheel in his foot-long list of encounters.

He thought incessantly about Jojize even while Haruna sat across from him at dinner. The last thing he saw before he went to sleep each night was Jojize’s face, and as he climaxed with Haruna in his arms, his imagination would linger carefully down Jojize’s neck and trace the soft breasts and delicate, chocolate nipples which he had never seen. Each morning he would wake up with his boxers sticky of white excess and he would swear profanely about it.

He would tell Haruna that he dreamt of her, but both of them knew it was just a formality. Especially since it was never Haruna's name which he moaned in the embrace of sleep.