27. Dojin
TWENTY-SEVEN
DOJIN
The third course arrived. Tempura—shrimp, lotus root, shiso leaf, each piece golden and impossibly light. Okada-san served it with a dipping sauce that smelled like heaven’s waiting room and a look that said she was listening to every word and planned to have opinions later.
“What were you like as a kid?” Nari dipped a shrimp. “Before the sleuth and the company and the—” she gestured at all of him, “—all of this.”
All of this. She said it while her hand made a sweeping motion that encompassed his entire body, and the gesture was both dismissive and appreciative in a way he was going to think about later, alone, for an embarrassing amount of time.
“Quiet.”
“You were a quiet child?”
“Enormous and quiet. I was six-foot-one at fourteen. The tallest kid in every room, trying to take up the least space. My father’s the same way—Stellan is six-six and moves through the world like he’s apologizing for it.
” He turned the sake cup in his fingers.
“I spent most of my childhood in the kitchen. Cooking was the first thing I was good at that wasn’t about size or strength.
Food doesn’t care how big you are. It cares whether you pay attention. ”
“So you were a giant shy kid who cooked.” Her voice had gone soft. Not pitying—warm. “That tracks. That tracks so hard, it’s actually painful.”
“What about you?”
“The opposite. The smallest kid in every room trying to take up the MOST space.” She stole a lotus root tempura from the plate.
“I talked in class. I talked at lunch. I talked during assemblies. My third-grade teacher called my mother for a conference and said, ‘Nari is very verbal,’ and Akemi said, ‘She’s a Wixx. We don’t whisper. ’”
He could see it. A tiny, fierce child with black hair and enormous eyes, voice louder than her body, refusing to be overlooked. The image hit him with an unexpected ache—affection for a version of her he’d never met.
“When did you start voice acting?”
“Technically? Seven. That’s when Grandpa started reading me Celestial Ronin scripts and making me read them back in character.
He’d do all the voices—Kaito, the zodiac guardians, the villains—and then hand me the script and say, ‘Now you.’ I’d give him my best Kaito and he’d say—” She dropped her voice low, warm, accented with the ghost of a man’s gentle correction.
“‘Nari-chan. You are shouting. Kaito whispers because he’s already won the fight. Volume is not power. Precision is power.’” She picked up her sake.
“I was seven. I heard ‘volume is not power’ and thought, that’s the most wrong anyone’s ever been.
I still think he was wrong. But I learned precision anyway. ”
Dojin stared at her. She’d dropped into her grandfather’s voice without preparation—not a performance, a memory. Seamless, intimate. Her body held other people’s voices like muscle memory.
She carries the dead with her. Not as ghosts. As instruments she can play.
“Your grandfather sounds like he was extraordinary.”
“He was the best person I’ve ever known. And someone stole his final work and I’m going to make sure they regret it.” She said it without breaking stride. Grief and war in the same sentence, delivered over tempura. “But that’s the folder conversation. I closed the folder. Tell me something else.”
“What do you want to know?”
She tilted her head. Studied him. The assessment was thorough, open, unembarrassed—she looked at him the way she looked at a script, searching for the subtext beneath the dialogue.
“Why are you single?”
He didn’t flinch. He’d been asked before—by his mother (weekly), by Reo (quarterly), by tabloid journalists (annually). The answer was always some version of “busy,” or “focused,” or “haven’t found the right person.” Safe answers. Boardroom answers.
He didn’t want to give her a boardroom answer.
“Women I’ve dated… they don’t stay. Not because I don’t want them to. Because they feel like guests. In my life, in my space. They say I’m attentive, generous, present. And then they leave. The last one told me I was the best boyfriend she’d ever had and she’d never been lonelier.”
Nari’s chopsticks lowered.
“She said there was a wall. That I let people into the living room but not the house.” He turned the cup again.
The ceramic was smooth under his thumb. “My mother’s theory is that I haven’t found someone I’d rearrange my kitchen for.
Bears do that, apparently. Restructure their space when they find their mate. I’ve never moved a single chair.”
The room was quiet. Okada-san’s knife against the cutting board. The low hiss of something frying. The space between two people narrowing by degrees they weren’t counting.
“That’s the saddest, most self-aware thing a man has ever said to me on a date.
” Nari set down her chopsticks. “Every man I’ve dated has eventually told me I’m too much.
Too loud, too successful, too rich, too confident.
They want the Wixx name at industry events and then want me to turn the volume down at home. As if I come with a dimmer switch.”
“You don’t.”
“No.”
“Why would you?”
She looked at him. The statement—not a question, flat and final, no qualifier—landed differently from a compliment. Compliments were assessments. This was a fact. He said it as a truth too obvious to dress up.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Saying things that make me want to either kiss you or hire a therapist.”
“The second one is probably healthier.”
“The first one is more fun.” She held his gaze. No blinking. No retreat. Her knee still pressed against his thigh, warm through the fabric. Her lips tasted like yuzu from the butter and sake and the ghost of the words she kept saying that made her pulse do unreliable things.
Okada-san slid the fourth course between them without a word.
Miso-glazed cod, black sesame, pickled ginger.
The old woman glanced at the twelve inches of space between them on the counter, then at the zero inches of space between Nari’s knee and Dojin’s thigh, and made a sound.
Approval. Possibly amusement. She turned back to her kitchen.
“Okada-san ships us,” Nari whispered.
“Okada-san is not familiar with that term.”
“Okada-san has been arranging our courses so that we have to reach across each other for the soy sauce. That woman is a tactical mastermind.”
Dojin looked at the soy sauce. It was, in fact, positioned equidistant between them, requiring either of them to lean across the other’s space to reach it. He looked at Okada-san’s back. Her shoulders were shaking with what might have been a cough and was almost certainly a laugh.
He reached for the soy sauce. His arm crossed in front of Nari. From this distance, he could see the curve of her throat and the single freckle below her left ear and the pulse beating at the base of her neck—fast, too fast for a woman eating cod.
Her pulse is elevated. She’s not calm. She’s performing calm. She’s performing calm while her heart runs at a speed that tells me everything her mouth won’t say yet.
He poured the soy sauce. Sat back. Didn’t comment on the pulse. Didn’t comment on the freckle. Held both observations in his chest with the care of a man collecting evidence of his own undoing.