14. Nari
FOURTEEN
NARI
The honey tasting undid her.
He’d arranged five varieties on the board—wildflower, lavender, clover, buckwheat, and a dark amber he called “late harvest” with a reverence that bordered on devotional.
Small wooden spoons in each well. He poured water into two glasses—“to cleanse the palate between tastings”—and sat across from her on the bench like this was normal.
Like billionaires served hand-harvested honey on handmade boards on Manhattan rooftops every Saturday.
She started with the wildflower. Lifted the spoon. Tasted.
Her eyes closed. The honey was extraordinary—bright and complex, floral without being cloying, with a finish that reminded her of the way sunshine tasted in childhood, warm and golden and impossible to hold.
It spread across her tongue and her eyes stayed closed a moment too long—the kind of pause her body made when pleasure arrived before she could decide how to hold it.
She opened her eyes.
He was staring. Not polite interest, not casual attention. Full, undivided, arrested focus—his coffee untouched, his body still, his eyes on her mouth with an intensity that made the air between them contract.
“That was involuntary.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying ‘I know’ like you expected it.”
His gaze didn’t move from her face. “I hoped.”
Nari opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
Nothing came out.
This had never happened. She was a woman who always had an answer—a comeback, a redirect, a joke sharp enough to cut the tension and give her room to breathe.
Her mouth was her instrument. It did not malfunction.
It did not go offline. And yet here she sat on a rooftop bench in February with honey on her tongue and a man looking at her like she’d handed him a gift he hadn’t known he wanted, and her legendary, never-failing mouth had absolutely nothing to offer.
He picked up the lavender honey. Held it out. “Try this one.”
The gentleness in it—how he let the moment pass without pressing it, without gloating, without any of the things men did when they caught you off guard—was worse.
It was so much worse than gloating. She could handle a man who smirked.
She could not handle a man who offered her honey and pretended he hadn’t noticed her silence.
She took the spoon. Tasted. This one was softer, herbal, with a floral depth that lived somewhere between perfume and memory.
“Your bees are extremely talented.”
“I’ll let them know.”
“Do you? Talk to them?”
“Bees respond to calm energy. If you approach the hive agitated—”
“You talk to your bees.” She leaned back on the bench. The sky above the glass panels was pale blue and enormous. “You talk to your bees, and you bring people food from a kitchen that doesn’t exist.”
“The kitchen exists. It’s in the den, a few floors down.”
“That is not the point, and you know it.”
He was smiling. The kind of smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made his entire face shift from composed to open, and she was in trouble. She was in so much trouble, and the trouble tasted like wildflower honey and looked like a man who didn’t know how disarming he was.
She didn’t plan to talk about Hideo.
It happened the way unexpected things did—sideways, through a door she hadn’t seen open.
They were sitting on the bench, the tasting board between them, wind threading through the open panels, and Dojin asked about the ronin voice work she’d done for the films. Not the industry question—not “what was it like to work on a franchise that big?”—but the personal one.
“What was it like to voice characters your grandfather created?”
She picked up the buckwheat honey. Dark, almost molasses. Tasted it to give her hands a purpose while her brain decided how much to offer.
“He used to read me the scripts,” she said, quieter than she intended. “When I was a kid. I became a voice actress because of those readings—not the franchise, not the name. Because his voice made me believe a wooden spoon was a sword and a kitchen table was the edge of the world.”
Dojin didn’t speak. He sat with his hands wrapped around his coffee cup and listened the way he watched her perform: with his whole body, the full focus of a man who had decided her words were the most important sound in the room.
“He would have loved this garden.” She looked at the hives, the dormant lavender, the copper roofs catching the low sun.
“He loved things that grew slowly. Patience was his favorite word. He used to say art was beekeeping—you built the structure, you showed up every day, and you trusted the work to produce sweetness in its own time.”
She stopped. Drew a breath. Met his eyes.
“Sorry. I don’t usually—”
“Don’t apologize for that.” His voice had dropped. Not performatively low, not a manufactured intimacy. The natural descent of a man whose chest was doing work his words hadn’t authorized. “Never apologize for talking about someone who mattered.”
The breeze moved through the open panels. Bees hummed at the south wall. The city existed forty stories below them and might as well have been forty miles.
“Your honey is very good, Dojin Keiser.”
“The bees do the work.”
“Accept the compliment.”
“Thank you.”
She picked up the late-harvest spoon. Tasted it. Dark and rich and layered, the kind of honey that told you about the season that made it—late blooms, fading warmth, the last sweetness before winter.
She did not make the sound again. She had learned. But her fingers tightened around the small wooden spoon, and she was silent a breath too long, and when she finally looked up, he was watching her with an expression she would think about for the rest of the week.