murakami, haruki - Norwegian wood

her why she was burning stuff like that. I mean, she had always been
so careful about putting your letters away in a safe place and reading
them over and over. She said, "I'm getting rid of everything from the
past so I can be reborn in the future.' I suppose I pretty much took her
at her word. It had its own kind of logic to it, sort of. I remember
thinking how much I wanted her to get healthy and happy. She was so
sweet and lovely that day: I wish you could have seen her!
"When that was over, we went to the dining hall for supper the way
we used to. Then we bathed and I opened a bottle of good wine that I
had been keeping for a special occasion like this and we drank and I
played the guitar. The Beatles, as always, "Norwegian Wood",
"Michelle", her favourites. Both of us were feeling pretty good. We
turned out the lights, got undressed and lay in our beds. It was one of
those steaming hot nights. We had the windows wide open, but there
was hardly a breath of wind. It was black as ink outside, the
grasshoppers were screaming, and the smell of the summer grass was
so thick in the room it was hard to breathe. All of a sudden, Naoko
started talking about you - about the night she had sex with you. In
incredible detail. How you took her clothes off, how you touched her,
how she found herself getting wet, how you went inside her, how
wonderful it felt: she told me all of this in vivid detail. So I asked her:
why are you telling me this now, all of a sudden? I mean, up to then,
she had never spoken openly to me about sex. Of course, we had had
some frank sexual talk as a kind of therapy, but she had been too
embarrassed to go into details. Now I couldn't stop her. I was shocked.
"So she says, "I don't know, I just feel like talking about it. I'll stop if
you'd rather not hear it.' "No,' I said, that's OK. "If there's something
you need to talk about, you'd better get it all out. I'll listen to anything
you have to say.'
"So she went on with her story: "When he went inside me, I couldn't
believe how much it hurt. It was my first time, after all. I was so wet,
he slipped right in, but still, my brain fogged over - it hurt so much.
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