Linnear 03 - White Ninja by Eric Van Lustbader

undisturbed quiet in order to relax sufficiently for sex. He found the music at once exhilarating and disturbing, almost as if he were making love. to two women at once - or, more accurately, as if they were making love to him, one with her mouth and her sex, the other with her voice.
    Then, sweat-sheened, Shisei sank all the way down on him, and he forgot about everything else.
    Afterwards, he said with an ironic smile, 'I wonder what would have happened if you'd found a David Bowie album instead of this one by Grace Jones.' He was exhausted; she was amazingly dexterous, extraordinarily powerful. He felt as if he had just spent two hours working out at the gym. It was, he thought, a delicious land of exhaustion.
    'I masturbate to David Bowie,' Shisei said. 'Do you masturbate, Cook?'
    'That's an odd question.' He was astonished by her power to shock him.
    'Do you think so?' she said. 'Why? It is merely a parameter of what makes you you - one of many.'
    He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, determined to break the mood. He was uncomfortable when she spoke like this, with the cutting directness of a child. But she was not a child. 'Here in America,' he said, 'it is not something easily spoken of.'
    'Not even among man and wife?'
    'We are not man and wife, Shisei. We are strangers.' And then, because her penetrating gaze compelled him, he added, 'Sometimes not even among man and wife.'
    'That is senseless,' she said. 'It is natural, like the naked body. Like sex. And yet Americans are ashamed.'
    'From what I understand, there are many subjects not openly talked about in Japan.'
    'Shall we speak about all of them now?'
    Branding did not believe her. 'What about kataT
    Shisei moved on the bed, taking between her calves the printed top sheet, flicking it on to the stained wood floor. 'I. have been taught that if something is beneath the ice, if you sense it but cannot see it, it is still there, moving, disturbing the currents.' She opened her thighs, redirecting Branding's gaze. She arched her back. 'Come here, Cook. I do not think that I have finished with you - nor you with me.'
    When Justine had stormed out of Nicholas's workout room, she went into the kitchen. It had been close to dinnertime, but she had realized that she could not remember what it was she was going to prepare. Besides, she had not been hungry, and as for Nicholas, she had thought, if he's hungry, let bun get his own dinner.
    Having come to that conclusion, she found that she was no longer comfortable anywhere in the house. She
    went outside, down the engawa steps, past the huge cryptomeria. In the last of the light, she wandered the grounds, until she found herself at the stone basin where, more than three years before, Nicholas had taken her on their way to this house.
    I'm thirsty, she had said then, and she was thirsty now. She stopped, took up the handmade bamboo ladle, drank from it. She stared down into the bottom of the basin, made out the Japanese character for michi. A path; also a journey.
    Was her destiny here, in Japan? Was that the only direction in which her path lay, the sole destination of her life's journey? Could such a thing be possible? She had always thought that life's journey had many paths, a multitude of destinations. Well, then? But she tried to imagine her life without Nicholas, and all she felt was a terrible loneliness that she knew she could not bear. Living somewhere apart from him would be torture, she knew, because her mind and her heart would always be wherever he was. She did not want to live the rest of her life as an emotional cripple.
    But, on the other hand, she knew she could not continue the relationship as it was. She had relied on Nicholas. He was her anchor, her safe haven, especially here in Japan where she knew no one and, moreover, was increasingly coming to feel that she was unwanted. In the beginning, everyone was friendly - no, she corrected herself, polite was the right word. Every person Nicholas