6

You took Haruka to a ballgame on your first date.

Yeah, I did.

How terribly romantic of you, Peadar!

Hey, it was fun. After buying some tickets off of a scalper in the parking lot, we went into the Dome, sat down with some beers, and watched Daiei come from behind and beat Seibu.[1] After the game we went back to my apartment.

Did you score yourself?

No, I was tagged out on second. But, a week or so later, we went out again and I was able to circle the bases, so to speak. That was a fairly typical pattern.

What was?

Screwing a Japanese girl on the second date. She may be just as eager for a roll on the tatami as you are, but she doesn’t want you to get the idea that she’s easy, that she’ll just spread her legs for anyone. I have found that the ones who do end up sleeping with you on the first date tend to be struck with a buyer’s remorse of sorts and are much harder to lure back into the sack than the ones who waited until the second date. Weird, isn’t it?

More determined than ever not to make the same mistake twice, I suppose.

Whatever. Want to know what else is strange?

Sure.

I can pretty much remember intimate details about the first time I slept with every woman I have “known”—what she was wearing, what she said, where we did it, how she responded, and so on—with everyone, that is, except Haruka. I remember lying on my sofa with her after the ballgame and undoing her shirt, seeing her breasts for the first time—really the loveliest pair I had ever beheld until then . . .

Must have been nice after Tatami.

Oh, it was! Poor Tatami was flat as a board and had nipples the same size, color, and shape as the eraser on a 2B pencil. I remember burying my face in Haruka’s cleavage and thinking, “Thank you, God! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” That second date, though, is a total blank.

Why do you think so?

Beats me. Ours was never the most passionate of relationships. Haruka and I would have sex every now and then, yes, but it was always very conventional, almost boring. Nothing kinky. We never stayed in “love hotels” or watched "adoruto bideo". In a sense, it was also the most “mature” relationship I’d had up until then.

Why do you say that?

From early on Haruka and I would spend our Sundays together, eating at nice restaurants, taking day trips, seeing the occasional film. Most of my relationships until then had been dominated by what was happening in the sack. Every date was designed such that, sooner or later, I would get laid. But with Haruka, it was less about the sex and more about what we were doing together. There was always another place to visit, another restaurant to try, another movie to watch.

I see.

And, it was the first time in my life that I didn’t need to worry about money. It was a very stable time for me after three financially and emotionally tumultuous years.

So, why did you start dating Akané?

 

[1] In 2005, after years of struggling financially, Daiei was forced to sell its majority stake in the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks to Softbank, a little known Japanese telecommunications and Internet company. The team is now called the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. The Lions added Saitama to their name in 2008 and have since been known as the Saitama Seibu Lions.