Chapter 3: Eri Revealed
'I want you to use me' said Eri. This time she remembered to look Steve straight into his eyes. 'You hear that Jeff,' said Steve to Eriโs husband, 'this isn't about what you want, or even what I want, it's about what Eri wants.' This was what Steve wanted to get out in the open. He wasn't going to take advantage of his old friend. Jeff was clearly anxious to keep his marriage together and his pretty Japanese wife happy. He was so anxious that he'd been prepared to ask his old friend Steve to help keep her happy.
But Steve wasn't keen to take advantage of his friend's concern. He looked down at the naked woman who knelt in front of him. He thought he saw more clearly than Jeff did what was really happening here. He wanted to get Eri to admit that she wanted to enjoy some sex play outside the marital bed. He didn't want to feel guilty about having a ride on the back of his old friend's feeling of failure. He did want to have this beautiful young wife, but it would be because she wanted it, not because his friend was desperate. And now he felt he had got to the truth of what was happening.
Immediately he met her he knew it was Eri who was the stronger partner in this marriage. She was a woman who knew what she wanted even if she kept it well concealed beneath a veneer of her Asian politeness. The next step was going to be what she wanted, and Steve would get her to make that plain to all of them. The natural order, what convention dictated, was that she should follow her husband's wishes. But Jeff's wishes had not been going in the direction that Eri wanted. Her scheme had been to get what she wanted by making Jeff feel inadequate.
Now Steve had broken through that veneer - Eri has admitted to her husband that it was she who wanted more. She had been steering Jeff into thinking that it was his poor performance in bed that led him to an embarrassing desire to see his wife get satisfaction from another man. It was the only way she thought she could make it could work for her. But Steve knew there was another way - a way that was more honest and would give her even more of what she wanted.
It meant she had to have the courage to say what she wanted and to then take the consequences and her share of the responsibility. It was not the way Eri had handled her complex sexuality before. But now she had spoken her real desires out loud as she knelt naked between these two men, and once she did so she felt an unexpected sense of release.