CHAPTER 10
Naomi
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Steam curled off the cup in his hand, and under the smell of the green tea I caught cedar soap, like he'd washed twice just to be sure he was clean enough to knock on my own door.
He stood in the frame of the connecting door in a dark gray yukata, the collar loose at his throat, his hair damp and combed back from a shower he must have taken after his evening run. He didn't step toward me. He stepped back instead, half a pace, leaving room between us for me to decide.
“I would like to sit with you tonight,” he said, low. “Not more. Do you want this?”
I could have said no. I knew that by now, the way I knew the weight of my own front door key back in Cambridge, worn smooth from four years of the same grip.
He'd told me a dozen small ways since Boston that no was always a real answer in this apartment in the sky: a folder of documents I didn't have to read that night, a clinic errand I didn't have to take, a phone I didn't have to turn on.
A succession of small permissions had accumulated so quietly that I had stopped noticing the pattern and begun trusting its shape.
I looked at the steam rising off his tea, and the damp hair at his temple, and his bare feet on the cold floor, a small ordinary detail that made him look less like the most feared man in Tokyo and more like someone waiting, plainly, to find out if I'd let him in. I gave him the only true thing I had.
“Yes.”
He stepped aside so I could pass through the connecting door first, and that was how I came to be standing, for the first time, in the room I had only ever heard through a wall.
It was smaller than mine, and plainer. A low bed sat on a tatami platform, made up in dark blue, no canopy, no silk.
One lamp burned amber in the corner. A black lacquered dresser stood bare against the far wall except for a folded newspaper and a comb.
The one window faced away from Tokyo Tower, toward a plain slice of rooftops instead, water tanks and antennas and someone's forgotten laundry stiff on a line, as if even here he'd chosen the version of the view that didn't perform for anyone.
In a small alcove cut into the wall, the kind of honored space meant to hold one beautiful thing and nothing else, hung a single scroll, the ink gone the soft brown of old tea.
I read it before I thought to ask if I should.
In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.
I read it twice. Something in my chest went soft and strange, the way it does when a stranger hands you the exact word for a feeling you'd never managed to name.
Homesick for the very place you're standing in.
I knew that particular ache. I'd been carrying a smaller, stranger version of it since the plane.
My mother used to guide my hand over her own brushwork, stroke by stroke, until the characters stopped looking like accidents. I hadn't read live calligraphy since she died, not once, and something in me sat up at the sight of it now, hungry and homesick at the same time.
“Basho,” he said, from behind me. “My mother liked him. I kept the one poem.”
“It's sad.”
“It is honest,” he said. “Not the same thing.”
I thought about that a second longer than I meant to, and he let me have it.
He told me about the bath as we went, walking half a step ahead of me down the short corridor, never behind me, never crowding.
The house was quiet at this hour, the whole city hushed somewhere behind the glass, and my bare feet made no sound at all on the warm floorboards.
“We wash first. Outside the tub. Then we soak. The water stays clean that way, for as long as anyone wants to use it.” He glanced back at me.
“I can show you, if you want to be shown. Or I can leave you to it, and wait outside.”
I thought about being alone with hot water and my own thoughts, the way I had been every night since I got here, careful even in my own privacy. And I thought about the days since my arrival, all the room he had given me and how patiently we had narrowed the distance between guarded and close.
“Show me,” I said.
The wash room was pale wood and gray stone, warm underfoot even before any water ran, lit low and gold from a single lamp set into the wall.
Two low wooden stools sat side by side near a fixture fitted with a hand-held shower and a row of wooden buckets stacked by size, and the whole room smelled faintly of cypress, with something citrus underneath it, the same warm scent that had filled the tub the night before.
He set a folded linen cloth in my hands, put his own beside the near stool, and reached for the sash of his yukata.
“I will go first,” he said. “Watch, or do not. Either is right.”
He didn't wait to see which I'd choose. He turned his back to me, and the yukata slid from his shoulders and pooled at his waist, and I forgot, for a beat, how to breathe.
I had seen the edge of it before, a strip of ink at his wrist that first night, koi scales rolled into view when he pushed up a sleeve. I had told myself, in the abstract, that a man like him wore ink the way other men wore a coat. Standing here, I understood I had been wrong about that.
It started somewhere below his hips and climbed the whole width of his back, black-lined koi swimming upward through red-gilled water, scale over scale, so finely worked they looked wet even dry.
Cherry blossoms drifted between the fish here and there, pale petals scattered like they'd fallen from some tree just out of view, softening all that motion with something almost gentle.
A dragon coiled up one shoulder blade, its claws spread wide at his collarbone.
Chrysanthemums bloomed low across the small of his back, dozens of them, petal over black-veined petal, where the koi gave way to flowers.
When he turned to reach the shower handle I caught the edge of something else along his ribs, a tiger's face, teeth bared, one eye and half a snarl, before he turned back and it was gone from view.
It wasn't only the size of it, though it was enormous, more of him covered than not.
It was that every inch had been chosen. Someone had held steady through this, needle after needle, hour after hour, and let it happen to him on purpose, the way a person only lets something happen when they've already decided it's worth whatever it costs.
A gasp got away from me before I could catch it, soft and involuntary. I clapped a hand over my mouth.
He didn't turn to see my face do that. He sat on the low stool, poured water over his own shoulders from a wooden bucket, and began to wash, unhurried, like I wasn't there at all, which I understood, after a moment, was its own kind of gift.
I watched anyway.
Some distant, sensible part of me understood I should have been afraid of a man carrying that much ink, that much history I couldn't read, across skin that could have just as easily stayed bare and ordinary and safe.
I wasn't. I stood there in a borrowed yukata with my pulse going too fast and thought, plainly, that I had never in my life seen anything so deliberately beautiful.
The only sounds in the room were water and his own quiet breathing, and under both of them, if I held very still, the faint hush of the city forty-three floors below, going on without either of us.
I watched the muscle move under all that ink when he lifted the bucket, lean and easy, no wasted motion in him even here.
I watched water run down the dragon's spine and off the last chrysanthemum at the small of his back.
I watched him tip his head forward to rinse his hair, and the tiger came fully into view for one bare second along his ribs before he straightened and his own arm hid it again.
He worked a bar of soap between his hands, yuzu, sharp and sweet, I could smell it from where I sat, and I saw, without meaning to look for it, the place his left little finger ended one joint early, smooth and old-healed, pressed into the soap like it was any other finger. He'd never hidden it from me. Not once.
He rinsed the last of the soap away, wrapped a small towel low at his waist, and turned to face me.
His face gave me nothing to read, and I understood now that this was the opposite of coldness. It was a door held wide open. He was giving me every version of tonight where I said no thank you, and good night, and meant it, and none of it would cost me a thing with him.
“Do you want to?” he said. Not a command. Barely even a question. An offer, set down between us with the same unhurried patience that let his own tea go cold rather than rush me to drink mine.
I twisted my mother's ring once around my finger, the small habit she'd given me without ever meaning to, and reached for the sash of my own yukata.
I untied it slowly, and I kept my back to him for the first part of it, the way he had.
My hands weren't quite steady, and I let them not be.
I was afraid of nothing in particular and everything at once, standing there in a warm room with the door unlocked and his back turned, and it felt like its own strange kind of freedom, the first I'd had in longer than I wanted to admit.
I heard him shift his weight on the stool, but he didn't turn.
When I finally sat down on the second stool he was looking at the wall, at a knot in the cypress grain, like it was the single most interesting thing in all of Roppongi.
I washed as he'd shown me, water and linen and the yuzu soap, the warm water running down like something slow being undone in me, more unraveling than chore.
My heart went faster than the plain little task should have warranted.
When I was done I wrapped a towel around myself, and only then did he look back, and only at my face.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yes.”