28. Kazashita
Kazashita
The world stopped. Not metaphorically—not in the way poets describe moments of significance—but truly, completely stopped.
The night sounds of Bara faded to nothing.
The distant music from the House of Petals vanished.
Even my own heartbeat seemed to pause, suspended between one moment and the next.
It really was Kaneko.
My Kaneko.
He crouched on the rooftop edge like something from a dream, or a nightmare, or one of those visions that tormented me in the depths of sake bottles when I tried to forget. The moonlight caught his face—more defined than I remembered, sharper, but gods help me, it really was him.
He was alive.
My mind couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t process what my eyes insisted was true.
He was supposed to be dead. I mean, I hadn’t known that, only feared it.
Still, I’d mourned him. I’d torn Bara apart searching for his ghost, following rumors and whispers that led nowhere.
I’d drunk myself into oblivion trying to forget the sound of his laughter, the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the weight of my failure to protect him back on the island.
I’d thought him dead, yet never stopped looking, never truly stopped hoping. My heart wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t let me surrender to darkness, wouldn’t let my mind accept a future in which we were never reunited.
And there he stood—no, crouched—dressed in dark silk that made him look like a shadow given form, staring at me with the same frozen disbelief I felt crushing my chest.
Neither of us moved.
Neither of us breathed.
We simply stared across the space, two phantoms caught in amber, unable to comprehend the impossible made real.
Then he moved.
In one fluid motion, he dropped from the roof and tucked into a roll that spoke of training I’d never seen him demonstrate. He came up in a crouch, perfectly balanced, and that’s when my paralysis shattered.
I ran.
Not away—gods, never away—but toward him with every bit of speed my weakened body possessed. My feet barely touched the ground. The distance between us collapsed in heartbeats, and I crashed into him before he could fully stand, before he could speak, before he could vanish again.
My arms wrapped around him, crushing him against my chest. I kissed his neck, burying my face in his skin, breathing him in as though my very life depended on his scent filling my lungs.
He felt so solid, so real.
“Kaneko—”
The name choked from my throat, raw and desperate, then my mouth was on his, kissing him with all the passion of a man pulled back from drowning. I tasted salt and tears, though I couldn’t say whose. His lips were exactly as I’d dreamed, exactly as I’d tried to forget.
He still stood frozen in my embrace, neither responding nor pulling away, but I couldn’t stop. My hands framed his face, fingers tangling in hair that was longer now, silky-soft and scented with something expensive that wasn’t him but didn’t matter because underneath it all—
Underneath it all, he still smelled like the sea.
“Kaneko.” The words poured out between desperate kisses. “I thought I’d lost you.”
My voice cracked. Shattered. Reformed.
“You were dead.”
I pulled back just enough to see his face, to convince myself again that this was real. His eyes—those impossible eyes that had haunted every waking moment since Tooi—stared back at me, wide with shock.
“Gods, Kaneko, I’m so sorry.”
The apology tore from somewhere deep, somewhere I’d kept locked and buried beneath rage and ruin and the careful construction of a man who didn’t care about anything.
“I failed you.”
My hands shook as they held his face.
When had I started trembling? When had the tears begun falling?
I didn’t know, didn’t care.
“I love you. Gods, Kaneko, I love you. I should’ve said it before. I should’ve told you, held you, kissed you . . . so many times.”
They were words I’d never said when I had the chance, words that had burned in my throat as I watched Tooi burn, as I searched the slave markets, as I’d given up hope.
“Gods of everything, I love you.”
I kissed him again, softer this time but no less desperate. More than a year of grief and guilt and love with nowhere to go poured into that kiss. More than a year of wondering what I could have done differently, how I could have saved him, what I wouldn’t give for one more moment.
And now I had it.
Now I had him.
In my arms, against my chest, his heartbeat thundered—or was that my own pulse pounding so hard it might shatter my ribs?
“Kaneko.” His name became a prayer, a plea, a promise. “I’ve always loved you. Since that first day—that terrible day—gods, since forever.”
My forehead pressed against his, our breath mingling in the narrow space between us. He still hadn’t spoken, hadn’t moved except to place his hands against my chest—not pushing me away exactly, just resting there, as if he needed to confirm this was real, too.
“Say something,” I begged, my voice barely a whisper. “Please tell me this isn’t a dream. Tell me you’re real. Tell me—”
Tell me you forgive me.
Tell me you love me, too.
But I couldn’t ask for that, not yet, not when I could barely forgive myself.
He opened his mouth. I saw his throat work, his lips part, the beginning of—something.
A word. My name, perhaps. But nothing came. No sound emerged except a soft exhale that might have been surprise or pain or something else entirely.
His eyes—gods, those eyes—stared at me like I was a ghost, like I was some impossible thing risen from the dead.
They tracked across my face, taking in what hard years had done to me, the hollows beneath my cheekbones, the gaunt edges that no amount of muscle could hide, the shadows that now lived permanently beneath my eyes.
I must have looked like death walking, a scarecrow version of the man he’d known, held together by desperate longing and a stubborn refusal to die.
Still, he said nothing.
His mouth closed, opened again.
But then—gods, then—his hands moved against my chest, pressing closer, his fingers curling into my shirt, gripping the fabric like he was afraid I might vanish if he let go.
His body began to tremble, a fine shaking that I felt through every point of contact between us.
A single tear trickled down his cheek, catching the moonlight like liquid silver.
And then he leaned into me.
He isn’t pulling away, isn’t resisting. He’s melting against my chest.
His forehead came to rest against mine, our breaths mingling in the narrow space between us. His eyes fluttered closed, and for one perfect moment, I felt him relax in my arms—truly, completely relax—as if he’d been holding himself rigid for too long and could finally let go.
The silence stretched between us, but it wasn’t empty anymore. It was full—full of his fingers twisted in my shirt, full of his trembling body pressed against mine, full of that single tear that told me everything his voice couldn’t.
I searched his face for anger, for rejection, for fear, but there was only stunned silence, those wide eyes that held too many secrets, that mouth that wouldn’t—couldn’t—form words.
Beneath it all, in the way he clung to me, in the way his body curved into mine like it remembered exactly where it belonged—it all felt impossibly like coming home.
“Kaneko?” My voice cracked on his name. “I love you,” I whispered once more, because now that I’d started saying it, I couldn’t stop. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Whatever happened next—whatever complications this moment would bring, whatever dangers we faced, whatever impossibilities lay ahead—none of it mattered.
Kaneko was alive.
He was silent and changed, perhaps broken in ways I could not yet understand—but he lived.
And I would never let him go again.