Little Japan

"I have no attachment or allegiance to any of the others, and I couldn't take my eyes off you in the restaurant. You remind me of someone I once knew." Gabriel grazed a hand absently over his own chest and down his stomach. "Take your clothes off for me, please."

Rising from the low bed, Kuri tugged at the knot of his necktie. He slung the tie and his jacket over the back of the chair and started taking off his shirt. "What was his name, this person I remind you of? I can be anyone you like."

Gabriel's gaze remained fixed on Kuri undressing. "His name was Daniel Bailey. His mother was Japanese, his father British. Like you, he had very straight, light chestnut brown hair with reddish highlights, and green eyes like I'd never seen before. Skin like milk, thin as a rail, and he had a smile that could light up the gloomiest day."

Gabriel's stare seemed to penetrate Kuri, as if Gabriel were gazing through him into the past. A soft, wistful smile turned his mouth up slightly at the corners and his focus returned to the present, to Kuri. "I was fifteen years old. He was a year behind me in school, and I was desperately in love with him."

Shirt nothing more than a memory and his trousers open and hanging low off his slender hips, Kuri approached the bed. He slipped one side of the trousers lower, giving Gabriel a generous look at bare skin—Kuri wore no underwear. "Did you ever kiss your Daniel? I can be him for you." Kuri climbed onto the bed and crawled on all fours, trousers falling away as he settled over Gabriel. The subtle change of timbre Kuri adopted with his voice had always worked in similar cases. "Do you think about me every night, Gabriel?"

"Oh God . . . ." Gabriel's breath audibly hitched, and his cock thickened and twitched between them. "I never let on to him how I felt, but I couldn't get him out of my mind. I came out to my parents because of him, but they reacted badly. Daniel's family moved away that summer and I never saw him again. He never knew, and I didn't have any choice but to climb back into the closet and stay there." Gabriel slid a hand up Kuri's narrow chest. "My God, you're beautiful."

Kuri felt Gabriel shiver underneath him as if the room temperature had plummeted. So, the iceberg was human after all. Remaining statue-still, Kuri allowed Gabriel to caress the illusion of his youth's desire manifested in flesh. Kuri avoided eye contact during sex with clients as a matter of course, but Gabriel's attention seemed focused somewhere else, sometime else. "If he were here now, Gabriel, what would you tell him?"

"God, I'd—" Gabriel bit his bottom lip and moved his hands to Kuri's bare hips, thumbs circling with nervous motion. He looked up into Kuri's eyes, rose-tinted shame coloring his cheeks. "You must think I'm crazy."

Kuri settled his bottom down on Gabriel's loins in a nonchalant, innocent manner and placed his palms on Gabriel's chest. "No. I think you got broken. You stuck your neck out for this boy and had the blade of a katana come down so hard you're still running around blind without your head." With his fingertips, Kuri drew imaginary lines along the soft rise of Gabriel's chest. "Now you're looking for a reason to not shrivel up and fall over dead."

"I'm sorry." Gabriel's eyes remained locked on Kuri's, thumbs still rubbing long-simmering anxiety onto Kuri's skin. "I don't feel right dragging you into my problem because you happen to bear a resemblance to someone I barely knew eighteen years ago. You can leave, Kuri. Your fee will be paid as agreed."

"Pfft. Oh, fuck no." Kuri sat up straighter and looked down on Gabriel. "So you can go down the street next trip and find another host boy to pay your money to? No." Kuri shook his head. "How many times have you chickened out? How long have you searched for someone like me? Do you really think you're ever going to find anyone you want more than me?"

"No." Gabriel swallowed hard enough for Kuri to hear. "You're beautiful. Perfect. But you're not real, and in three days I have to return to pretending I'm something I'm not. Why waste your time? What do you get out of this? I have a feeling money isn't your sole motivation."

The shift of control startled Kuri. "I like older men." He hoped to avoid offering further detail, but the immobile gaze from Gabriel gave him little choice. "I never knew my father, and I have no brothers. Mr. Hiroshi doesn't ask for sex. He takes me places, buys me things—simple things like books and ice cream and haircuts. He makes me feel like I have a father. But you . . . when I look at you, I feel something else. Something dangerous. Something I want to touch, even though I know I'll be burned."

"I've worked hard to maintain control over my impulses." Gabriel pressed the pads of his thumbs harder into the sensitive indentions underneath Kuri's protruding hipbones. "Or at least learned how to legally express them. I didn't believe you were of age until your boss produced your official documents; you look significantly younger than twenty-two. But even so, you're close enough to the flame to make me nervous around you."

"There's nothing illegal about this. You made a fair deal, and the money is good. I'm not screaming rape. What are you worried about?" Kuri shifted slightly, easing the pressure Gabriel's hands had begun to exert. Time to speed up and move along. "Whatever, however. So what is your special kink, Gabriel?"

"Youth. At least, the illusion of youth." Gabriel lifted his hips off the bed at an angle that rode his erection perfectly up the crease of Kuri's ass. "Young, slender and pretty, like you. Specifically like you. Like Daniel."

Breath hissed out of Kuri as if he'd been punctured. Head thrown back, eyelashes fluttering, his body bowed like a green cherry branch. "Is that all? For all the money you've paid? You could have had me for half."

"I could have had you for less." The rise and fall of Gabriel's chest came harder, faster. "But I won't belittle what you do and I appreciate hard work. I told you not to shortchange yourself, but you did anyway. You need to work on your self-esteem." Gabriel thrust his hips off the mattress, and Kuri felt the warm, wet leakage of Gabriel's pre-cum trickle down his ass. "Jesus, Kuri, I want you so badly . . . ."

Kuri decided Gabriel was unlike anyone he'd ever serviced before. He knew he'd be thinking about the man long after this job. He wondered what kind of life Gabriel lived in the States. There were ways to find out. Kuri reached back, spread his ass cheeks apart, and sat. He'd lubed up prior to his most recent appointment, but his effort had gone unused. Brief pressure, exquisite burn, and then bliss. "Tell me about your first time."

Gabriel sucked breath in through his teeth as his fingernails dug into Kuri's skin. "I lost my virginity in an alley behind a gay dance club. I wasn't old enough to drink yet and I couldn't get in, so I hung out around back."

The sight and smells of the alley seemed to rise up around them as memories were painted tangible. Kuri imagined a young, scared Gabriel watching for the right man to approach. "How old was he?"

"Thirty, forty, fifty; I don't know. I was eighteen—anything over twenty-five was old." Gabriel bucked his hips off the mattress, a slick sheen of sweat covering him as Kuri sank deeper onto his cock without complaint. "Fuck, you feel so good."

"Yeah?" Kuri licked his lips. He ran his hands down the length of his torso, careful to twist and turn to display his lithe body in a practiced, perfectly seductive way. His gaze never left Gabriel's eyes. "We aren't so different. My first was an older man, too. Our neighbor. He gave me toys growing up. Money when I got older. His dick as a coming-of-age present, with me on my knees bent forward over his family dining table."

Gabriel's eyes reddened and watered. He slid his arms around Kuri's waist and pulled him closer. "I don't want to be one those men. I just want to be able to love someone and have them love me back."

"You flew halfway around the world." Kuri gasped as Gabriel's dick pulled partially out of his ass. "You came to a place where no one would know you, and you found someone who knows you better than yourself." He sat back, sucking in air as Gabriel sank in again, nice and slow. "There are no such things as coincidence or dumb luck. You found me for a reason."

Gabriel carefully rolled Kuri onto his back without breaking intimate contact.

"I don't want you to be Daniel for me." Gabriel rocked his hips in a slow, gentle fuck. "But can we pretend, just this once, that I haven't purchased your services?" Gabriel placed a line of small kisses along Kuri's neck. "Let me make love to you like it means something."