Chapter 7
"Maybe, I should take you to Joji Saiga."
They are standing on the fortieth floor of the MWPSB Axis 0 building, leaning on elbows which are aching from the weight of their ribs. It's windy again, like always, and Ginoza watches Akane pull out her hair again and again from her mouth. They are standing there, like two lonely kites, windswept and lost.
"Why, suddenly?"
Akane tucks back her hair behind, and Ginoza suddenly has a revelation: the delicateness of the lines of her jaw, her shell-like ear. There is a diamond drop earring on it.
"Kogami used to take me to her," she tells him, and he doesn't miss the slight tremour Kogami's name gives her voice. He feels around for a comparison for her voice—and he finds wind-chimes and the sound of Shakuhachi. He catches himself—as he has been catching himself since she had looked at him with cheeks stained with cherry, under the lamplight from his porch.
"He was our instrusctor in the Academy."
"He is very brilliant," Akane smiles at him, the random smile she graces him with, "but the reason I wanted you to visit him because, I...don't know how to say it."
They are silent, as she gathers her thoughts.
"I think you should see him because of the way you got into Katanagi's head. And Matsuru's head. And the Kotoko twins case. All of them. That level of immersion or understanding is not good for anyone."
Ginoza raises his eyebrow at her. "You do realise that it doesn't really matter, since my Crime Coefficient is already high?"
"Doesn't mean you would push it even higher."
He shrugs. "Kogami used to take you to Joji Saiga to sniff better, if I am not very wrong. And now, you want me to go to Saiga to unlearn exactly that?"
"It's not that," She rolls her shoulder, "Joji Saiga is pathopschyologist, which means that one, he can actually tell you and guide you-",she stops for a short breath, "and he can also provide a second opinion, to back you up in some of the more abstract conclusions you sometimes have a tendency to make."
He doesn't know if she's just being protective or she's afraid his instincts will lead them astray and to traps, and a hot flash of anger flares inside him like acid.
"I am a hunting dog," He almost hurls the words at her, "So, let me hunt."
Akane can't help snap back at him, "Don't call yourself a dog."
But the flame burned hotter inside him. He wanted to walk away and shut the door on her face, even though he understood he was being irrational and childish, and he stood there stiffly, eyes over the horizon.
The wind curls around them. His back feels stiff with a mixture of anger and embarrasment over his outburst, and out of the corner of his right eye, he can see Akane staring at him.
"Ginoza-san," his name rolls off her tongue with a delicateness that relaxes the muscles on the back of his neck. "I want you to learn from him too. It will be a good experience, I promise."
Ginoza just gazes at the fuzzy skyline, at the glittery buildings that are everywhere, and he says he is sorry.
He is sincere.
The last thing he feels before Akane departs inside, is her fingers skating over his lower back.
He visits the Enforcer's Den that night.
It's not exactly the first time he's here. He had visited here once along with Kogami. It's just his first time alone, and he is here, because he doesn't know what quells the lonely hunger aching it's way through his midriff. It doesn't have a form, just is an amorphous pain coating his insides, just like the slippery sadness that grips him at twilight.
There are bright, flashy lights and hot, loud music shakes the air as the packed dance floor vibrates with the stamp of nearly fifty bodies. It's a small space, and the smell of alcohol, heat and desire simultaneously repulses and draws him in. He sits on one of the stools beside the bar, covered in shadows, and sweat soaks his hair and runs down his cheeks, back and arms. His body feels warm, and he feels a little feverish, after chugging five drinks. He was never a heavy drinker, and as expected, the stuff starts to get to him, making him hot and strangely restless.
He longer is sure what he wants to do—drown in vodka or the sea. Or both.
Drunk and lonely and wanting, he stumbles to a low couch, and lets his head roll back on the back, his body feeling too tight to contain him, like he had forgotten how to wear it, feeling the imprint of Akane's fingers on his back. Everything is hazy, and the lines between them, he can feel them washing away in the cresting waves of alcohol and dejection. One night, he thinks, or maybe mumbles, because even that line has been erased, maybe just one night could make everything right or wrong or whatever. He doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know-
There is the heat and the softness of another human body on his front, draping itself over him.
He opens his eyes, and there is a drunk girl—around his age—falling over him. He holds out his unsteady hand to steady her, and she does take his help—if only to straddle him. She is too drunk to keep her upper body straight, and he is too drunk to push her away—so, they end up with Ginoza sprawled on the couch, her sprawled on his chest.
And then her mouth is sucking his earlobe, wet and sharp—and he jumps as something crimson and hot shoot to his thighs. He feels strange—detached and disconnected to his body's sharp, alcohol-fueled reactions—made clumsy and overwhelming by twenty-five years of suppression. His hands move without his knowledge—and he becomes the helpless observer of his surreal dream.
Yet, the feel of hers is real against him. Her thighs are real, the pleasure radiating out of his groin as she grinds against him is real and tight and breathless, his mouth on her rapid pulse , the dark sweet pleasure of another human body, Akane will feel the same way over him, soft and hard and pliable and wanton—
She grabs his sweat soaked hair, hands slipping under his shirt—and Ginoza can't help but put her hands on her hips and pressing her down to his growing erection.
She moans as he pushes his pelvis upwards. Guided by blind need and unreality, he slides his hands over her sides and cups her breasts, and suddenly realises, his eyes are tightly closed.
He doesn't open his eyes, letting another ones face and hair and smell claim the body that wriggles and crawls and fondles him.
He has no idea how they end up in the toilet, or when his shirt was taken off or when was hers. He is more drunk than ever, and he suspects he must have drank more right before they heeded to the toilet. It's twelve in the night, and there's just two horny, drunk people making out and groping each other in a graffiti-ed, seedy bathroom, falling over each with very human needs that the society condemns.
She turns away from him and her body spasms and recoils, and in an amazing display or control, she kneels and vomits into the commode. The sour smell of bile and alcohol hits him as he kneels as well, pulling the hair out of her face.
He feels like throwing up.
After nearly fifteen minutes, after he can determine that she is more or less okay (as best as he could, in his current situation) he pulls her top over her head (They seem to have undressed in the bathroom), drapes his own over himself, picks her up and slowly walks out. The smell of piss gives him a vertigo.
After delivering her to a medico drone the bartender had called, Ginoza steps outside.
It's drizzling. He's too drunk to go his place along, even though the Den and his house is in the same MWPSB complex. He wants to see Akane. He doesn't want to see him like this.
Disjointed, staccato thoughts drum along his brain.
His body is burning with the swiftly fading memory of his momentary lust. It's good that it is. He doesn't want to do anything stupid that will make her disgusted.
So he spends standing in the soft, cold drizzle, letting sanity claim him a little, letting the heat and smell drain away from him. He looks like a mess, he knows, but oh well.
He calls Akane.