CHAPTER 12 #2
“Maybe I'm just bad at this.”
“You are not bad at this. You are very deliberately bad at this.” He set his own captured piece down on the table, slow, and looked at me with something in his face I hadn't seen him let all the way to the surface before — open, unrationed, the whole width of it.
“Naomi.”
I looked at his mouth. I hadn't meant to. It just happened, the way my eyes went there and stayed.
I rotated my mother's ring once, giving my nerves that small familiar circuit.
I set down the piece I was holding. I came up onto my knees on the tatami, and the distance between us went from a board's width to almost nothing, and I stopped with my mouth two inches from his, close enough to feel the warmth coming off his skin, close enough that if I breathed out he'd feel it against his mouth.
“Kenji,” I said. I didn't say his name like that very often. Out loud. This close. Like it was the only word I had left in me.
“Naomi,” he said back, low, like it cost him something to keep his voice that quiet.
I kissed him.
I kissed him slowly, my hand resting along his jaw, and for a beat he did not move, like a man deciding whether the moment was real after days of rationing himself down to almost nothing.
Then his hand rose, unhurried, and settled at the small of my back, light as a question, holding me the way you'd hold something breakable that had asked, out loud, to be held.
He let me lead. I deepened it, and he made a low sound in his throat, almost helpless, like it had gotten out of him before he'd decided whether to let it, and his hand slid up my spine, slow, following the whole line of it, and I felt that sound everywhere.
All the way down to my knees. All the way to the backs of my hands.
I broke it first. I had to, or I was going to forget how to breathe. I rested my forehead against his, both of us a little unsteady, and he let out a breath that shook on its way out of him.
“Kimi ni wa kanawanai,” he said against my mouth. You undo me.
I laughed, a short, breathy sound I hadn't planned on making, and felt him almost laugh too, more than I heard it, a small give in his chest under the flat of my hand.
We didn't go any further than that. Not that afternoon.
He took my hand, laced his fingers all the way through mine, and walked me the short distance across the tea room to the low table by the engawa, where the chipped kintsugi bowl sat catching the last of the orange light in the gold lines of its mended seams. He'd told me once whose bowl it had been. I hadn't forgotten a word of it.
He poured the tea himself, without any hurry, and we sat close together on the bench, his arm along the back of it behind me, his fingers resting at the nape of my neck.
I leaned into that hand on instinct. It felt like the most natural thing that had happened between us yet, more natural than the kiss even — this small, hushed after-part where neither of us had to prove anything to the other.
“So,” I said, into my cup. “That happened.”
“It did.”
“Do you have a comment?”
“Several.” He looked out at the city instead of at me, but his hand at my neck hadn't moved, not an inch. “I will keep most of them to myself.”
“That seems unfair.”
“Life is unfair,” he said, so dry I almost choked on my tea, and this time when I laughed, he let himself smile all the way, no almost about it, and I thought: there it is. There's the whole thing.
“Do you feel different?” I asked, because I did, and I wanted to know if it was just me.
“I feel like a man who waited until you chose me and would wait twice as long for one more kiss like that.” He said it so plainly that it took me a second to understand it was the closest thing to poetry I had ever heard out of him.
At dinner I sat beside him instead of across from him, close enough that our knees touched under the table.
Riko noticed. I watched her notice, watched the small, satisfied set of her mouth as she set down the rice.
She didn't say a word this time. She didn't need to.
She just hummed over the miso pot like she'd already known this morning, before either of us did.
After dinner we returned to the tea room, and I brought the worn red Rilke that had crossed an ocean in my suitcase. I opened to the ninth elegy, the poem he had once asked to hear twice.
My voice came out softer this time. I didn't have to try to make it that way.
It came on its own, the way things had started coming on their own with him lately.
I used to read that poem to an empty room and a sleeping cat, back when the only creature listening was Miso, half-asleep on the arm of my couch in Cambridge.
It felt strange, reading it to someone who actually listened back.
Good-strange. The kind of strange I was starting to trust.
He listened with his eyes closed, one hand loose around his tea. When I finished, he remained silent for several heartbeats before saying, “Again. Someday. Not tonight.”
I understood him. Tonight had already been enough, all on its own.
He walked me to my door, and stopped there instead of going in.
“I will not come to your room tonight,” he said. “Not because I don't want to.” He paused, careful, like he was choosing each word off a shelf before he set it down in front of me. “Because I want the next step to be yours. Whenever it comes. However long it takes.”
I looked up at him. “You're a strange man.”
“I am a certain man.”
I smiled. I couldn't help it. It had been the best day I could remember in longer than I wanted to admit, and I was smiling when I stepped back toward my door, already half in love with a man serious enough to make even a goodnight sound like a vow, when my phone lit up on the little table by the entry.
My father's name filled the screen again.
I looked at the screen, then at Kenji waiting in the doorway with the focused patience he gave every choice that belonged to me.
I picked up the phone. I didn't answer it. I held it out to him instead.
“Answer it,” I said. “Tell him I'm not available. Tell him I don't want him to call again.”
Kenji looked at the screen. He looked at me, one long, steady look, checking, before he moved on anything that mattered.
“Are you certain?” he said.
“I've never been more certain of anything in my life.”
He took the phone out of my hand. I stepped back into my own room and shut the door between us before I could hear a single word he said to my father.
I didn't need to hear it.
I'd already said everything that mattered.