Up All Night: A True (Enough) Story Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Keep Up

  Up All Night

  A Word From Your Narrator

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Thanks and Connect

  Also Available

  Up All Night

  Cynthia Dane

  BARACHOU PRESS

  Up All Night

  Copyright: Cynthia Dane

  Published: February 13th, 2016

  Publisher: Barachou Press

  This is a work of fiction. Any and all similarities to any characters, settings, or situations are purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  Keep up with Cynthia’s latest releases by joining her mailing list! Behind the scenes,exclusive bonus scenes, and a FREE STORY!

  Up All Night

  A Word From Your Narrator

  The story you’re about to read is true.

  Mostly.

  As with any supposedly true story, there are things that must be altered or outright changed in order to create a fulfilling reading experience. If I told you exactly how this story happened, you’d be disappointed with the ending, and we cannot have that. What we must have, however, is a fun, sexy, and even uplifting experience – the reading experience you came to me for.

  So this is a true story. The setting, the setup, the thoughts and feelings permeating the scenes, many of the scenes themselves… shit, some of the background characters are 100% authentic, although names and some descriptions have been changed to protect the poor fools. I strove for as much authenticity as possible. The story could have only happened in Japan, for example. Plus, I’m not going to pretend I’m some eyelash-batting virgin who doesn’t know what a one-night-stand that turns into something more feels like. I’ve been writing naughty romance stories for yonks. Those stories have origins in my own life, don’t they?

  But this is the first time I’ve decided to write a story that is lifted directly from my own personal experiences. Once the events unfolded, I couldn’t help but laugh at what a perfectly good romantic comedy they would make. So here we are, in the year of our Lord 2017, talking about an event that befell yours truly in November, 2016. Some of you were even there for it if you followed my erratic Facebook posts.

  Yet there is a huge drawback to being so open with my personal experiences. The great thing about fiction is that it builds a natural wall between the characters and reader. That wall says, “You can peer into these people’s sex lives because they’re not actually real.” When that wall comes down, things get awkward, don’t they?

  So here is what I propose: we treat the following story as another fictional account that sprang from my head like Athena from Zeus, and we keep it at that. Cyndi is me, but she’s not really me. Her hunky date says and does many things the date of infamy said, but in reality, he’s a composite of many men Cyndi has met in her life. And the ending? Pure tosh, but it’s happy tosh that creates the story we truly want to tell and read.

  I’m open with you about the ending, but how could everything else be true?

  It’s true because you trust me to tell you it’s true – and mean it.

  Anything you read that makes you go, “Would a guy actually say that?” or, “Oh my God, I’ve totally had that happen to me!” means that, yes, it absolutely happened. My hand on my heart and swearing to that same God we were talking about.

  Imagine us as best friends, Reader. Imagine us in a coffee shop, where the music is loud enough to keep eavesdroppers from overhearing our sordid tales of men past. Imagine me drinking tea and you drinking your favorite beverage that you’ve decided to treat yourself to, because this is Girl’s Day, and we are having a grand time talking about our current partners and the men and women who made up our pasts. Without those people, we wouldn’t be who we are today, and that’s my intention with telling you about what happened to me in November, 2016.

  That and a lot of it was really fucking funny. I mean, really, a neighbor who times himself having sex and a date who spends half the night apologizing for his dick? That shit’s hilarious, and I need to gab about it.

  Join me in my tale of frustration, sleep anxiety, the craziest ovulation cycle a woman has ever gone through, and the one night that made it all worthwhile. I’ve even Romanced the ending for you in case you love your happy endings as much as I do. (Besides, I said that Cyndi isn’t me me! That girl needs a happy ending!)

  I’ll let you get up and retrieve your drink, though. You might also want to make sure you go to the bathroom first. We’re gonna be here a while, and you’ll be laughing most of the way through.

  Let me start by saying I was only in Tokyo for a workcation…

  Chapter 1

  I hadn’t slept in three fucking days.

  My neighbor. It was my stupid neighbor whose name I could not tell you now. All I knew was that he was French (because everyone in my share house was French,) and had recently quit his job to, I don’t know, lift weights at the gym all day and make food in the kitchen that I always had to clean up.

  Basically, this guy was annoying enough when he wasn’t keeping me awake 24/7.

  You tell someone, “My French neighbor kept me up for three days straight,” and the first thing they do is nudge you with a wink and reply, “That good, huh?” Honey, I wish this guy was boning me for three days straight. I wish I was the one he was fucking, because then at least I was getting some.

  No. He was fucking his girlfriend. All day. All night.

  You ever stay in a share house before? It’s the only way to stay in Tokyo for a month or two, in my humble opinion. You can rent a private room in a share house for a month and spend less than a hotel room for half that time. So, if you’re paying a grand on plane tickets, you might as well spring for a month-long trip and make the best of your stay. This was actually my second time, although the first time in this particular share house.

  Japanese houses have the thinnest walls. They must be the origin of paper thin walls, and that paper is made out of rice. Even so, you know that going into a share house situation. You know that you’ll hear them snoring, and that they’ll hear you when you catch the cough everyone on the subway had. It’s a part of life. But unlike a college dorm situation, the people in a share house tend to skew older and more mature.

  You hope, anyway.

  Hearing my neighbor have sex was not unexpected. Like I said, these people were adults and had adult lives. Sometimes it can’t be helped – you’ve gotta go back to your crappy dorm room to get off with your girl. (Never mind we were in the country full of love hotels, but I’ll get to that later.) Damn be your neighbors.

  Damn be me, because this wasn’t a one-time thing to giggle over. This was every two hours for three days straight.

  Think I’m kidding? I’m not. My neighbor and his girlfriend were sex machines. From the moment I walked into my room after a day of doing touristy stuff, I was treated to the grunts, groans, and wails of two twenty-somethings rutting like animals. Before I came to Japan, I had no idea how to talk dirty in French. After I left Japan, I knew how to make a girl come – but don’t quote me on my accent.


  Here’s the crazy thing that led to everyone in the share house thinking they (or the guy, at least) had some serious addiction. They’d fuck, get off, roll over and fall asleep – I know, because he snored – and then two hours later their alarms went off and they fucked again.

  I’m not kidding. They woke themselves up every two hours to have sex. For 12-15 hours straight.

  I can’t make this shit up. When I realized what was going on, I wanted to scream at them. How fucking dare they! Some of us were trying to sleep, for God’s sake. My natural sleep rhythm puts me between four in the morning and noon. These two were going at it until late in the morning. Do you know what having to constantly listen to two people have sex is like? When you’re trying to sleep?

  Let me guess what you’re thinking right now. “What about eeaaar pluuuuugs, Cynnnndiiii.” Bugger off. Ear plugs don’t do shit, are you kidding me? I bought two pairs and neither one of them even dulled the moaning and bed creaking! Not even a little bit! My next grab for peace was installing a white noise app on my phone and plugging in my (uncomfortable) headphones, but the internet was so spotty (and obviously I did not have data in a foreign country) that it didn’t work most of the time.

  Besides, the problem wasn’t the actual sex noises as much as it was that damned piece of shit bed hitting my wall every two seconds.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Grunt, growl, ejaculate. Snore. Rinse and repeat two hours later.

  That bed banging made my room shake more than the two earthquakes I tried to sleep through while I was there. Shit fell off my desk. The clock on the wall rattled. I’m pretty sure dust fell from the ceiling. (Speaking of my upstairs neighbor, the only thing I ever heard was the occasional flushing of the toilet right above my head.) No matter what I did, going deaf would not have stopped those idiots next door from keeping me awake for three days in a row.

  By that third night, friends, I had serious sleep anxiety. Which is sad, because occasionally they took a four hour (four whole hours!) break that I could’ve gotten some serious sleep in, but by that time my brain was wired to expect the worst every time I closed my eyes. “What’s the point, Cyndi? They’re going to wake you up again. You’re not going to sleep again, and tomorrow you’ll be so tired and dead at work that you’ll be crying in a Japanese Starbucks. Again.”

  So when they started having sex again at 5am, I lost my cool.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I shouted through the wall. I leaped out of the bed and took the one step necessary to our shared wall. After I gave it a hearty pounding (har, har,) I yelled at them to please, please stop having sex because some of us really wanted to sleep!

  Trust me, by that point I had lost my mind to fatigue and had no sense of shame. Clearly, these people had no shame either. I’ve heard some stereotypical stuff about the French before, but this took the cake.

  Suffice to say, those assholes did not give up their fornicating reign.

  What does a girl do when she hasn’t slept in three days because her neighbors are horny assholes? Why, she goes to her Facebook and rants about it to anyone who will listen.

  “Please save me, I haven’t slept in three days. Neighbors are still having sex.”

  Most people feel for you. Others try to be slick and suggest that they’re stamina training or going for a baby. Because that totally makes it okay!

  Then you get those who are convinced this guy must have his girlfriend tied up in his room and is using her as a sex slave. (Why am I not calling the police, though?) Or that the girlfriend doesn’t actually exist and we are witnessing one French man’s descent into sexual madness. (That’s some serious arthouse, though.) Me? I didn’t care if this guy was jacking off to porn. (And he did. Often. I could give you details about that too.) I cared that he was forcing me to be an unwilling audience to his sex life and keeping me from a basic bodily function while his went into overdrive.

  I felt powerless. And full of petty revenge. When those two things collide, you make some interesting life choices.

  ***

  “What do you think about your neighbor?”

  I lifted my head off the couch while some Japanese news report played on the TV. For the past few days the news had not let up on this huge marijuana bust that went down somewhere. As an Oregonian, I often forgot that there were places in the world where smoking pot was a huge deal. I’m used to smelling it wherever I go. (In Japan, you smell regular ol’ tobacco wherever you go. Fuck it.)

  The woman talking to me was a Turkish resident who had been friendly since the first day I moved in. I couldn’t tell you her name like I couldn’t tell you the name of my irritating neighbor. When you’re only staying for a month, it’s difficult to remember the unfamiliar names of people you’re only going to see once or twice in your life.

  “I hate him.” I almost knocked my lunch plate off my lap. “I haven’t slept in three fucking days because of him.”

  “Oh my God, me too!” She spun around from the gas stove lighting up in the corner of the kitchen. The November cold had fogged up the window, and yet for some reason the damn thing was open wide and letting in every freezing breeze. “Do you hear it every night?”

  “Yes! They have so much sex I can’t sleep!”

  “Same!” She rushed over to me. “I thought maybe I was making things up at first. But, you know, it’s not the first time something like this has happened. Before you moved here, it happened sometimes. Recently it’s been the worse ever.”

  “Do you hear them set the alarm so they can have sex every two hours?”

  “Oh my God! So you hear it too?”

  “Do you ever actually see his girlfriend? I don’t hear her get up to use the bathroom afterward.” I’m no kidding, folks. Not once, in the midst of all this fucking, did she use the bathroom. The UTI was going to be unreal, and cranberry juice is impossible to find in Japan.

  “I saw her one time. She ran back into his room so fast I barely realized it was her.”

  “Oh, good, I was starting to wonder if she actually existed.”

  “Yeah, she’s Japanese.”

  The only reason that was surprising – we were in Japan, after all – was because he had spoken so much damn French while fucking her that I assumed it was a Frenchwoman on the other end of his relentless dick.

  “Have you said anything to him?” I asked.

  My new friend scoffed. “Are you kidding? I try to say something like I am trying to sleep… but they keep going. Bang, bang, bang.”

  “Right? It’s the bed that kills you.”

  “The stupid bed always hitting the… oh my God, you have it worse! I know the layout of his room, and his bed is right up against your wall. You poor thing.”

  Poor thing was right. Woe was me. The girl who couldn’t escape that fucking bullshit.

  “Know what I wanna do?” I hauled my ass to the sink and rinsed off my plate. “I wanna find some jerk to bring in there and give that guy a taste of his own medicine.”

  “Hell yes! I haven’t been in a relationship in a long time, so I can’t really have fantasies about that… but if you can, bring your boyfriend over and fuck him really loud. We’ll all ignore it for a night if it means that asshole knows what it’s like to lose sleep over someone’s sex life.”

  “Too bad I don’t have one. A boyfriend, that is.”

  She crossed her arms. “You could get one. Men are easy in Tokyo.”

  Yeah, I’d heard that before.

  Chapter 2

  One thing that I didn’t want to admit to anyone was that, even with my lack of sleep and general disdain for the world, I was going through one of the wildest ovulations of my life.

  How the hell else do I describe it? It was going on before my neighbor started acting up, and no, listening to his fuckfests did not make me hornier. If anything, that man was doing everything in his libidic power to kill any interest I would ever have in sex again.

  Then I lived my day to day life.

  Have you ever been so damn horny
that your whole body is constantly shaking with thoughts of getting laid? I’m not kidding. Whenever I had actual moments to myself that weren’t fueled by my hatred for my neighbor, I ended up in a dark hellscape populated by my libido and the fact that I was not getting any.

  It did not help that I worked during my supposed vacation. As a romance author, I spend a lot of my time writing about other people having sex. Usually this isn’t a big deal. Honestly, half the time I groan to think I have to write more sex even though it’s the farthest thing from my own mind. Yet as I sat in my local Starbucks, overlooking a major Tokyo intersection, with my screen open to some sizzling sex between a billionaire and his curvy little sweetie, I thought, “Fuck it! I want some too!”

  I’m not going to get into the details of my love life leading up to this trip. All you need to know is two things: I wasn’t a virgin, and I really, really craved some masculine company.

  Okay, so I lied. Here’s a piece of pie for your sweet tooth.

  It had been years – actual, literal years – since I was last with a man in the Biblical sense. I think my body had been reminded of that fact to the point it would not let it fucking go. I was going to watch every paired off couple sneak into a love hotel with as much jealousy as I could harbor in my poor, shaking body.

  Every inch of my skin was alive, and had nobody to touch it.

  Every dirty thought that entered my mind was practically broadcasted to the crowded room.

  Every decent-looking man who came within my vicinity was automatically the subject of five-thousand fantasies. Sometimes I entertained the idea that I was a part of their fantasies too.

  I endured this horrible state for days. Luckily, when you’re self-employed and traveling around a foreign country, you have plenty to distract yourself with. You’ve got that crippling sense of dread that you’re an abject failure if you’re not actively working on a project even at one in the morning. (Assuming your music is loud enough to drown out the fucking going on next door.) You can also go shopping and amuse yourself with a boatload of new CDs (shut up) and office supplies, because Japan does CD shopping and office supplies the best.