Chapter Seven
IT HAD BEEN A WHILE since Kazeyuki last worked in the ER, but it was still as unforgiving as he remembered.
Blood on the floor and the screams of a woman calling for her daughter. The crash cart wheeling past at a run while a man with half his face burned asked if his wife was alive. Paramedics shouting vitals as they brought in another stretcher.
Many were saved. But not all. And that was something every physician had to learn to accept if they were not to lose their sanity.
Not everyone could be saved.
No matter how hard you tried.
Even though he knew he had done what he could, the thought still consumed Kazeyuki as he walked away.
Kazeyuki knew his skills had limits, and so did the human body.
As a doctor, he had been trained to assess the nature and severity of damage and to accept the cases in which the mortality risk was high.
It was one of the hardest parts of the job, but he wouldn’t still be working now if he hadn’t learned to live with that.
But even so.
It still took time to pry himself from the memories, the remembered chaos making him blind to the stares he attracted.
Even in the midst of disaster, with his scrubs streaked and his hair damp from hours in the OR, his looks still...beckoned, and the eyes of many responded.
There was the nurse from another hospital who had come in to assist stopped mid-step when he passed. And then there was the patient’s family member in the waiting room tracked him across the corridor with wide eyes.
No matter where he went, he was beautiful and different, but it was a beautiful kind of different, and people who saw him for the first time always had the same look on their faces, as if they were trying to place him, wondering if they had a celebrity or foreign prince in their midst.
There was many a not-so-silent sigh as Kazeyuki entered the elevator, and the doors closed behind his back. But he noticed none of this. Because as the memories of all those he couldn’t save faded, what he did remember was the one he could still save, and that was her.
Katherine.
As the elevator that carried Kazeyuki opened its doors on the sixth floor, Nurse Prasida glanced up from the station and watched in thoughtful silence as their department’s most eligible doctor stepped out (Dr. Manolis, bless his Greek married heart, no longer counted).
“Good evening, Dr. Collington. How are things faring downstairs?”
Kazeyuki forced himself to put aside all thoughts of Katherine to refocus on work. “Everyone has been attended to. Five deaths. Three in the ICU.”
Nurse Prasida nodded. Deaths in numbers for now. They would all grieve in private later, once they had clocked out, once they were home and the doors were closed, and it was safe to feel what they couldn’t afford to feel on shift. But for now, life continued.
“I also heard the news,” Nurse Prasida remarked. “Congratulations on your engagement, Doctor.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re a very fortunate man.”
“Indeed.”
Nurse Prasida’s mood remained reflective as she watched Kazeyuki walk down the hallway and disappear into his corner office.
She had worked with Dr. Collington for years, and she had watched that girl follow him around the hospital like a lost puppy who had found her person.
She had also watched the doctor treat Kitty with the same impeccable courtesy he showed everyone, never more, never less, and Prasida had always wondered what it would take for that man to let someone past the walls he didn’t seem to know he had.
And now that it had apparently happened...
Why did it seem that Dr. Collington was only speaking the truth intellectually, but his heart had yet to grasp what made Katherine special?
Meanwhile, Kazeyuki, unaware of the questions his own words had invited, opened the cabinet behind his desk and took out the ishi-usu.
The stone mill was small enough to sit on his desk, two rounds of carved granite that fit together with the kind of precision that machines still couldn’t replicate.
It had belonged to his mother’s family, and the grooves in the stone had been cut by hand in a workshop in Uji over sixty years ago.
Beside it, he set the tin of tencha leaves he kept in the cabinet’s lower shelf, and a ceramic chawan that was older than the mill.
The process of grinding his own matcha was one that most people would have called unnecessary. Powder was available in any specialty store, pre-ground and sealed, ready to whisk. But Kazeyuki had never been interested in what was ready. He was interested in what was right.
He fed the tencha leaves into the top of the mill and began to turn.
Counter-clockwise. One rotation every three seconds.
Too fast and the friction would burn the leaves.
Too slow and they wouldn’t grind at all.
A rhythm that required perfect accuracy would’ve weakened many a man, but for Kazeyuki, it was freeing and relaxing, a process that allowed him to think without distractions.
And right now, all he wanted to think about...was her.
Katherine.
To keep her safe, he needed to focus on the six things in Anastase’s checklist.
Intimacy. Inner circle. Intuition. Inhabit. Inhibit. Impart.
And of those six...
Kazeyuki hadn’t meant to kiss her, but it did happen, and that took care of the first point.
He also hadn’t planned to let her know that she had always been ‘Katherine’ to him while everyone saw her as ‘Katherine’. But that had happened as well without him planning anything.
And after that, well...
The stone turned under Kazeyuki’s hands, the tencha leaves crackling faintly as they were drawn between the granite surfaces. The first trace of green powder began to collect around the base of the mill, and that was when the memory he was doing his best to repress—
Kaz.
It almost had him losing focus, and he could even feel a flush staining his cheeks just from the memory alone.
Kaz.
That was how she had called Kazeyuki, and it had caught him...off guard, the way Katherine had shortened his name when no one else had. And the way she had made that one syllable sound more intimate than anything he had ever heard.
Kaz.
She had helped him achieve the second point on the list without even knowing it, cementing the bond between them as each other’s inner circle, and after that...
Intuition.
Kazeyuki watched the powder—a bright, vivid shade of green—start to accumulate as he kept grinding, and a faint grassy scent started to perfume the air inside his office.
Anastase had told him there was no way of knowing when the third point would happen. Or how. It was an all-or-nothing kind of goal, one that was born from a million little things coming together at the same time.
Intuition was the hardest thing on the list because it required nothing from him at all except to be still. And wait. And trust in the process. For some, that was the definition of fate. For others, faith. But for Kazeyuki?
The jury was still out on that one.
In the meantime, he still had three other points on the checklist, and the fourth one, at least...
Kazeyuki tapped the last of the powder free from the grooves, sifted it through the furui into the chawan, and added hot water from the kettle he kept on the shelf. And then he started whisking and thinking.
It took a while, but that was fine.
That was how it should be for these things.
Matcha. Work. Katherine.
Everything required care and intentionality.
Everything.
And so even with pouring himself a cup, he took his time with it while replaying Anastase’s words about Point #4.
This is entirely your choice, if you want to speed things up.
Kazeyuki took a sip.
Mm.
It was good, but it also carried the necessary bitterness that proved its quality, just like how every rose had its thorns.
Frankly, Kazeyuki didn’t know whether he wanted to speed things up or not.
But things were already moving fast as it was, had done so from the start.
Even so, everything was still fine, and that was why he couldn’t take a risk.
Since there was no way to ascertain if slowing down would make things worse—
Kazeyuki set the chawan down and reached for his phone to send Katherine a text.
Expect a call from Emily tomorrow.
The reply came in the next three seconds—
About what? ??
—and he answered just as swiftly.
You’re moving in with me.