CHAPTER 10 #2
The tub was the same one I'd sat in alone the night before, pale gold hinoki, yuzu peels floating loose on water hot enough to fog the little window above it.
We went in from opposite sides and settled with the whole width of it between us, water up to my collarbone, steam curling around both our faces.
The room was small and dim, lit only by one low lamp and the faint glow through the fogged glass, and it made the whole space feel like time had agreed to slow down for exactly as long as we needed it to.
He watched me get settled. He didn't move any closer.
“Anata wa utsukushii. Demo, watashi wa matsu,” he said, quiet, the words landing soft in all that steam. You are beautiful. But I will wait.
I smiled, small and worn thin from a day that had already held a clinic and a crying mother and now this. “How long?”
“As long as you need.” He didn't dress it up or soften it into something easier to hear. He just meant it. “Even forever.”
I let that sit in the steam a moment. “That's a big promise for a man who barely knows me.”
“I know enough,” he said. “I have counted the ways you take your tea. I have watched you decide, every single day since Boston, to be brave instead of something easier. I do not need forever to know what I already know.”
I watched the water rise and fall with each breath he took and let the question remain unanswered.
I believed him. That was the strange, dangerous part. I sat in a stranger's tub, in a city that had once been only a postcard on my mother's refrigerator, and believed the man who controlled the criminal paper bearing my name when he promised to wait forever. It felt nothing like fear.
I moved my hand under the water, slow, and touched the very edge of the koi where it rose out of the surface onto his shoulder, just the pad of one finger, just the black outline of a fin.
His eyes closed. I watched his jaw go tight, watched his thumb find the healed end of his shortened little finger under the water and press there, like he was holding himself down by it.
A muscle moved once at the side of his throat, and I understood, watching it happen, that a thing this small, one finger against one inch of him, had cost him something to sit still for.
He opened his eyes again.
I took my hand back. He didn't reach for it. The water closed over the place my fingers had been like nothing had happened there at all, except that we both knew something had.
We sat like that a long time, long enough that the fog on the little window thickened and slid, long enough that my shoulders stopped feeling the cold even where the air touched them above the waterline.
“The koi was my first,” he said, into the quiet.
“I was twenty-two. My mother had been gone eight years by then, and I had not found a way to carry her that felt like enough. So I paid a man in Asakusa to put her onto my skin instead. Fish, because she loved the koi pond at the temple near our house. Red, because it was her favorite color, on the obi she wore to funerals, which she thought was funny and no one else did.”
“It's her, then. On your back.”
“Part of her.”
He didn't say more than that, and I didn't ask him to.
I could feel the shape of what he wasn't saying, in the way his jaw stayed set a moment past where the story needed it to.
I reached across the narrow space between us, above the waterline, and laid my fingertips over the back of his hand where it rested on the tub's wooden rim.
He turned his hand over, slowly, until our palms met, and we stayed like that a while, not holding on exactly, just touching, steam rising around us both.
I had already learned that with him, a door left open was different from a door pushed wide. I could wait too.
We rose when the water finally started to cool, and dressed in fresh yukatas that Riko must have left folded and warm on a shelf I hadn't noticed coming in.
He walked me back through the quiet penthouse to my own door, one hand resting light at the small of my back the whole way, saying nothing, saying I am here without a single word for it.
At my door he stopped.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For the bath?”
“No.” His eyes held mine, dark and steady in the hall light. “For the trust.”
I didn't plan what happened next. I went up on my toes, one hand light against his jaw where I could feel the faint rasp of a day's stubble, and I kissed him, not his mouth, not really, just the corner of it, where his mouth met his cheek, soft and quick and gone almost before it started.
He went very still. His eyes closed.
He didn't chase it. He didn't ask for more, though I could feel, under my palm, how much more there was in him, banked low and patient as a coal.
“Oyasumi, Naomi,” he said instead, when he opened his eyes again. Good night, Naomi.
“Good night,” I said back, in English, because I didn't trust my own voice to do it gently in Japanese.
I lay in my own bed a long while after, still in the borrowed yukata, smiling at the ceiling like an idiot with no one around to see me do it.
I thought about the tiger along his ribs, and the way his eyes had shut when I touched the koi, and the words on the scroll in his room, that particular ache of being homesick for the very place you're standing in.
I thought I understood that ache a little better with every day I stayed in this apartment in the clouds.
My mouth remembered the exact rough warmth of his jaw against my palm, and the half second he'd gone utterly quiet, close enough that I could have counted his heartbeat if I'd wanted to.
I thought about the dragon at his collarbone and whether I would ever get to trace the whole of it in daylight, and I was still turning that thought over, warm and slow, when my phone lit up on the nightstand, a small cold rectangle of light in the warm dark of the room.
Marcus Bell, the screen said, plain as a stranger's name, because that was exactly how I'd saved him, a long time ago, and never once thought to change it.
I watched it ring. Once. Twice. I thought, for one second, about picking it up just to hear what new argument he'd built since the last one.
I didn't move.
I let it ring until the light went out on its own and the room went dark again, and I lay there a long time after that, wondering how long it would actually take him to call back.