"Her face card?"
"Yes. I think American girls call that like their status of beauty or—”
“I get it, but basically she brought up that she was too beautiful?”
“Yeah. There were several sentences about her face card, but then she said something about if that bag came near her face, the only solution would be ‘belt to ass.’" He looked at me, completely serious. "That’s the part that lost me. Do you think she's expressing interest but the cultural barrier is causing confusion?"
I stared at him.
“What?”
“Rin. . .I think she was threatening to whip you if you ever tried to cover her face.”
“No.”
“Yes. Whip you with a belt.”
Rin turned back to the sea and then laughed. “Wow. She’s like no woman.”
We spent a few silent minutes smoking until the joint was almost gone. When it got close to done, he put it out on the stone railing and flicked it in the air. “Kenji. . .”
I looked at him.
"What am I going to do?" His voice came out stripped. "Already. . .I don't want to let her go, but I don't know what to do with her if she won't meet my requirements. . ."
I said nothing because what I wanted to say wasjust try without the bag. Those words sat in my throat.
But I also knew why the bag existed.
The ceremony had happened on Rin’s eighteenth birthday. Every man in his bloodline went through this so-called rite of passage tied to the family's obsession with purity and the belief that their blood was divine and their emperors must be sexually dominant.
Generations of inbreeding had made the family brilliant and broken in equal measure, and the ceremony was the proof of both.
Rin had known little about the ceremony, just that it would involve something sexual.
The night of his eighteenth birthday, the royal guards brought him into a spacious room with a huge bed in the center.
Rin only wore a white robe.
The emperor—his uncle—sat on a throne four feet from the bed. Rin's father sat beside the emperor. Another uncle beside him.
Three men watching.
A naked woman lay on the bed with a dark black silk bag over her face.
Young and seeing a naked woman for the first time, Rin’s body responded and his cock hardened.
The emperor told Rin to remove his robe.
When Rin disrobed, his father looked at his cock and proclaimed with pride, “Look how strong and big my son is.”
The emperor smiled.
Naked, Rin climbed onto the bed.
The woman spread her legs.
He got between them and his hard cock pointed at the entrance.
