Qin | Part 3

"You know what, I'm still a virgin."

Much to his amusement and bewilderment, he received this text message from Qin.

"Why are you telling me this? Am I supposed to congratulate you?"

"I'm just saying it seems frightful and repulsive to get penetrated. At the thought of getting 'deflowered' by some ugly, silly, horny, filthy boy, I feel insufferably disgusted. But saying goodbye to high-school days, I won't have any pure, perfect romance any more."

"Tell me more of your Platonic relationships you've had till now."

She deflected: "From now on, it'll be no more than a base contract full of exchange terms, exploiting each other, controlling each other...a shrewd, careful, selfish balancing and weighing between "what you have" and "what I want".

Her down-to-earth cynicism muted him.

"My ex-boyfriend dumped me, saying that I couldn't turn him on. He didn't feel a thing towards me. He cheated on me and we broke up." She then sent him a photo of that donkey in heat:

"Ugly, right?"

He didn't reply. This corny stereotype of premature sex experimented between stupid boys and girls hardly interested him.

"I'd rather give it to someone I really had a thing for."

Speechless, he sensed something went awry here.

"Idiot. Fool. Numskull. Dumbbell. You are."

Several days later, he invited her to take a stroll with him in a large bookstore he frequented, a shabby-chic bordello for a young intellectual in poverty to have orgies with the sexiest brains in human history and thus to hallucinate and embolden himself to fake multiple mental orgasms.

Qin pattered along by his side, her arms rubbing against his accidentally. He indulged in the fleeting moments when his elbow touched a warm and smooth patch of her skin. Like most girls in her age, smart enough to slap a label on most books as being meretricious, Qin barely read. Yet, his rigmarole of introductions and interpretations appeared to thrill her somehow. They wandered around and stopped by a shelf in the section of Fine Arts. Qin picked up an anthology of piano solos and leafed through it, reading a stave, humming a tune, and playing imaginary piano keys.

"You can read?"

"Oh come on! I'm preparing to major in vocal performance in college. And I've been learning to play the piano for, like, fifteen years." He drank in her velvety voice, which was sizzling a bubble of naivete and contempt.

Then, out of no reason, Qin turned towards him, raised her left arm, pressed the first two joints of her index finger against his chin, rubbed her thumb onto the skin beneath his lower lip, caressing hardened stubble on his jaw, as if teasing a kitten's whiskers, and petted his back with her right palm - an amorous gesture of blatant flirtation, a wanton trick to erect his suppressed masculinity, an unconventional aphrodisiac to engorge his bereft phallic scepter:

"Shit, you turned me on."

The delight of Qin's giggling was mingled with a tinge of embarrassment by his faux pas: "How weird, isn't it? My ex dismissed me as a mood killer, but now a simple gesture will do the trick."

She was wrong. It was a mere sight of her graceful presence that would galvanize his abject body.

"Are you real? Or perhaps you are another figment of my imagination. How could you be physically here, while...while mentally somewhere else? Why do you keep talking about someone from your past?"

"I am real. And I am here...with you."