CHAPTER 12
Naomi
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The tape came away from his forearm in one long, sticky pull, and underneath it the stitches sat dark and neat, five small black knots holding the edges of him together.
Not even a day old. Healing clean. The skin around them had gone pink instead of angry, and there was no heat under my fingers when I pressed along the edge of the cut.
Kenji sat on the kitchen stool with his sleeve pushed past the elbow, his arm resting flat on the concrete counter for me, and let me work.
Outside, the morning was doing its slow gold thing over Roppongi, light spilling low and warm across the floor, and behind me the kettle ticked as it cooled from Riko's tea.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“No.”
“You'd say that even if it did.”
“I would not.”
I looked up at him. “You are the worst patient I have ever met. And I've interpreted for actual surgeons. Grown men. Some of them cried over a hangnail.”
“I have been a model patient.” He said it flat, and grave, like he was reporting a fact to a committee that had asked for one. “I have not complained once.”
“That's not the same as being good. That's just terrifying.”
“You would prefer I complained.”
“I would prefer you told me the truth. If it pulls when you lift something, tell me. Don't wait three days and pretend it's fine.”
“Understood.” He watched me finish the tape, quiet, and that one word carried more weight than the stitches needed.
Something eased behind his eyes, there and gone before I could hold onto it. I taped a fresh strip of gauze over the stitches and smoothed it flat with my thumb, slower than I needed to, and told myself the reason my hands weren't quite steady was that I hadn't had coffee yet.
It hadn't been the coffee in a long time. We both knew it. Neither of us said so.
It had been more than a week now since three men had picked the lock on my apartment door in the middle of the night, and somewhere in all those days the fear had made room, a little at a time, for something I hadn't expected to feel this soon.
In Boston I used to wake up already tired, running through a list of translations due and bills that needed paying before I'd even opened my eyes.
Here the list was shorter. It had exactly one name on it.
I still checked the exits in every room out of habit.
I still slept with one light on. But most mornings now, the first thing I thought about wasn't the door.
It was him, and whether he'd slept, and whether his arm hurt worse than he'd admit.
I hadn't told anyone that last part. I wasn't sure who there was left to tell.
By nine we'd moved to the counter with the light coming long and gold across the concrete, him with his laptop and a stack of letters he read without any expression at all, me with a folder of consult notes from Dr. Andersen's last clinic visit, translating the follow-up for a file bound for Kyoto.
“Difficult file?” he asked once, without looking up.
“Not really. Just detailed. A pediatric case, an arrhythmia, and it needs to go to the family in plain English instead of the version doctors write for other doctors.” I tapped my pen against the folder.
“I like translating for parents best. Doctors already almost understand each other. Parents need someone all the way on their side.”
He looked up at that. Just for a second. Like he was filing it away with everything else he kept about me.
It was careful work. Precise work, the kind where one wrong verb tense could turn a nurse's caution into a promise nobody meant to make, and I liked it the same way I'd always liked it — the small, clean satisfaction of getting a sentence exactly right.
We didn't talk much while we worked. We didn't need to.
Every so often he'd slide a pen across the counter to me without looking up from his letters, and every time our fingers touched, just the backs of our knuckles, just for a second, neither of us pulled away first. I noticed.
He noticed too. I knew he noticed because his pen would pause mid-word before he kept writing.
Two hours went by like that. Warm, and quiet, and over far too soon.
Riko brought lunch at noon: cold soba in a lacquered bowl, a little dish of grated ginger, cucumber sliced so thin I could see the window light through it.
She set my bowl down first, then his, and then she looked between the two of us and winked, slow, like she wanted to be completely sure I saw it.
I felt my whole face go warm.
“You're sitting very close today,” she said, cheerful, not even pretending to hide what she meant by it.
I hadn't noticed I'd pulled my stool nearer to his sometime in the last hour. I looked down. There wasn't much gap left between us at all.
Kenji didn't look up from his noodles. “Riko-san. Please.”
“Oyabun, mada mada,” she said. Not yet. She patted his shoulder like he was twelve years old and not a man whole rooms of hardened people went quiet around, and went back to the stove, humming something under her breath I didn't recognize.
I put my face very close to my bowl so no one would see me smiling into it.
Around two he mentioned his sister. “Yumi will come Sunday,” he said. “For tea. I want to ask if that is comfortable for you.”
“I'd like to meet her.” I meant it. I'd heard her voice on the phone twice now, quick and warm, the kind of voice that filled up a room before the person attached to it ever walked in.
“She will ask you direct questions. She does not believe in the other kind.”
“I can handle direct.” I could. Direct I understood well enough. It was the careful, circling questions, the ones that came at you sideways, that undid me every time.
“She will like you,” he said, like he'd settled the question days ago and just hadn't mentioned it yet.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I like you. She trusts my judgment in exactly one part of my life.”
Something in his voice made that almost a joke. It almost wasn't a joke at all.
“I hope she does like me,” I said, quieter. “I haven't had a lot of family lately. I'd like to not ruin this part.”
“You will not ruin it.” His voice landed certain and final, like something already decided before he'd said it out loud. “And you have more family here than you think. You have Riko. You will have Yumi. You already have Hiro's respect, and Daisuke's, and in this house that is not a small thing.”
I didn't have anything ready to say to that, so I didn't say anything. He studied me for a second, weighing it, and then he said, “I think you can handle her,” and went back to his letters. I sat there feeling like I'd passed some quiet test I hadn't known I was taking.
By late afternoon the light through the tea room windows had turned the soft orange it turned every day around four, sliding low across the tatami, and Kenji knelt at the low table with a wooden board set between us.
The squares were worn pale at their centers from years of hands moving pieces across them, and I ran my finger along one smooth corner before he'd even explained the rules.
Tokyo Tower stood lit and orange beyond the glass, small from this height, almost gentle-looking, nothing like the city felt from the ground.
I'd stopped being afraid of that view sometime in the last week and started finding it beautiful instead, the way you stop flinching at a loud house eventually and start calling it home.
“Shogi,” he said. “You have never played.”
“I don't even know how chess works, and this doesn't look like chess.”
“It is not chess. It only looks like chess to people who have not learned it.” He set the pieces out one by one, unhurried, each a small flat wooden slab with characters inked dark on the face.
“Gold general. Silver general. Lance. Knight.” His fingers were quick, and sure, and moved like he'd done this ten thousand times and never once been bored by it.
“This one is the king. Protect him. Everything else on the board can fall, and it will not matter, as long as the king is safe.”
“So the king never fights.”
“The king survives. Everyone else fights so that he does not have to.” He glanced at me. “It is not a flattering position. I have never played as the king by choice.”
“What do you play as, then?”
“Whatever piece is closest to the danger.” He said it plainly, like it wasn't a large thing to say, and went back to setting the board, and I sat there turning that sentence over twice before I let it go.
“That feels like a lot of pressure for a board game.”
“It is a lot of pressure for a board game.” A low sound of amusement caught in his throat before he let it go. He was doing that more, lately. I'd started keeping track without meaning to, the way you count anything that used to be rare and isn't anymore.
He showed me how the pieces moved, one at a time, patient about every one of them.
When I reached for the silver general and slid it the wrong way, he didn't correct me with words.
He reached over and closed his hand around mine, warm, and dry, and careful, and guided the piece back one square and over one, the way it was meant to go.
I felt the rough place on his hand where his little finger ended one joint early, the old scar of it pressed light against my skin, and I didn't pull away.
I never pulled away from that particular place on him anymore.
“Like this,” he said.
“Okay.” The answer barely carried.
We played, or I played badly and he played patiently, correcting me in that low, measured voice of his, and every time I made a move that made no sense at all he leaned in over the board to show me why, close enough that I could smell him — soap, and something warm underneath that was only his own skin, nothing he'd bought in a bottle.
By the third time, I understood exactly what I was doing when I moved my silver general somewhere it had no business going.
He looked at the board. He looked at me. “You did that on purpose.”
“Did I?”
“That move makes no sense. Strategically. At all.”