CHAPTER 8 #2
He didn't say anything for several heartbeats, long enough that I started to wonder if I'd done something wrong, reading my dead mother's favorite poet out loud in a language he'd surely heard spoken more beautifully than I could ever manage it.
Then, quietly: “Mou ichido, onegaishimasu.”
One more time, please.
I read it again, and this time my voice didn't catch at all.
Riko made curry that evening, a whole pot of it simmering since noon, and the entire penthouse smelled like it by six, warm and thick with something sharp underneath.
She ladled out three bowls and sat down with us at the counter instead of vanishing back to the kitchen the way she usually did, which by now I'd learned meant she was proud of something.
I took one bite and my eyes started watering.
“Riko.” I reached for my water glass. “How much cumin is in this?”
“Not enough,” she said, entirely unbothered, spooning a second helping into her own bowl like she hadn't heard the question at all.
“There's a whole spice jar in here.”
“Good curry,” she said, with the calm authority of a woman who had never once been wrong about food in her life, “should announce itself.”
Across the counter he watched the two of us with the quiet look he wore when he had no intention of interrupting something that clearly didn't need him.
I caught his eye once, mid-cough, and he found something urgent to study in the bottom of his bowl.
I pointed my spoon at him. “Don't you dare defend her.”
“I would not dream of coming between you and Riko-san's cumin,” he said, gravely, and went back to his own bowl. Once I'd recovered enough to notice things again, I saw he was eating without any visible distress at all, like a man who'd built up a lifetime's immunity to it.
“Traitor,” I told him, and drank half my water in one go, and Riko laughed, delighted with herself, and refilled my glass without being asked.
After the dishes were cleared he found me again in the tea room, where I'd gone back to my new notebook to copy the day's words over from the old one, valve, murmur, the line of invented Japanese I'd read twice that afternoon.
He folded down onto the tatami across from me, close enough to matter, careful enough to leave room between us.
It had become a habit neither of us had bothered naming out loud.
“Tomorrow I will be here,” he said. “The whole day. Nothing that takes me out of the building.”
“And Wednesday.”
“Wednesday I will be at the clinic. In the building. Not the room, as I said.” He watched me a moment, the particular look he got when he was about to say something he'd clearly thought over more than once before deciding to say it out loud.
“You are free to walk away from that room at any point, for any reason, or for none at all. Hiro will bring you home if you do. There is no cost to it. No one will think less of you for it. There is no punishment in this house for saying no. Do you understand this?”
I did understand it. He'd been proving it since my very first morning here — a folder of documents instead of an order, a phone handed back with my own trusted numbers still on it, a watch left outside my door just the night before with no ask attached to it at all.
Every rule in this apartment in the sky, I was slowly starting to realize, existed to prove the same single point, over and over, patiently, like he thought I might need to hear it more than once before I let myself believe it.
“I understand it,” I said. “I think I've understood it for a while now.”
“Good.” He nodded once, short and final, and let the subject close there.
“Are you nervous?” I asked him. “For me.”
He considered that honestly, the way he considered most things. “No,” he said. “I have read your work. I am nervous for the doctors, if you decide you do not like their bedside manner.”
I laughed, surprised again, and he ducked his head over his tea, not trying very hard to hide how pleased he was.
I said good night not long after, worn out in the good way, the way a day spent using your whole brain wears you out instead of hollowing you.
In my room I pulled my hair down out of its clip and caught my own reflection in the mirror over the dresser while I worked a brush through the ends of it, and stopped.
I looked softer than I had in Boston, softer around the eyes and the mouth, like six days of being fed and watched over and asked real questions had smoothed something out of my face that four years alone in Cambridge had put there without my ever noticing it happen.
I turned my head a little, studying her.
I didn't know yet if I liked this woman in the mirror, or if I only didn't recognize her well enough yet to decide either way.
I was turning that thought over, the brush caught halfway through a tangle at the ends of my hair, when a soft knock landed at my door, not the connecting door, the other one, and Riko's voice came through it, warm and measured.
“Naomi. Ii?” May I?
“Come in,” I said, and she did, a small folded bundle of pale silk balanced over both arms like something ceremonial.
“For tomorrow evening,” she said, setting the bundle on the end of the bed and smoothing the folds with two efficient hands. It was a yukata, cream and pale gold, soft as water under my fingers.
“For the clinic?” I frowned. “I don't think a yukata is right for a cardiology consult, Riko-san.”
She laughed and swatted my arm with the back of her hand. “Not clinic. Evening.” Her face turned bright and knowing. “Dentou-teki na ofuro,” she said. “Oyabun asked. Tomorrow night.”
I turned the words over slowly. The traditional bath. I'd bathed here nearly every night since I arrived, alone, in the same beautiful hinoki tub with the same wooden walls, the water however hot I wanted it. Something told me this wasn't going to be that.
“Sore wa nan desu ka,” I asked her. What is that.
Riko looked pleased with herself, the look of a woman who had raised half this household from boyhood and had seen every possible kind of waiting there was to see.
She reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, quick and certain, the way my own mother used to, and didn't answer right away.
“Anata wa sugu wakarimasu,” she said.
You will know very soon.
And she winked at me, once, unmistakable, and let herself out of the room before I could ask another single question, leaving me standing there with a folded silk yukata in my hands and no idea at all what I had just agreed to.