CHAPTER 14
Naomi
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The plum was the color of a bruise just past its worst, dark red sliding into purple, and when I finally bit into it the juice ran sweet and hot over my tongue before I'd decided whether I was even hungry.
I had sat at the kitchen counter for twenty minutes with the same lease translation open—a Shibuya building changing hands from one shell company to another—without completing a line.
Kenji set the plum by my elbow and returned to the stove.
The muscle in his forearm shifted beneath the ink, and I doubted I would survive until night.
“Eat,” he said, over his shoulder. It wasn't a command. It was a worry, dressed as one.
I ate slowly because neither my hands nor the rest of me wanted to hurry. He returned with tea and sat opposite me, his eyes fixed on my mouth with an intensity that made the plum irrelevant.
“You're staring,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He never apologized for it when it was true.
We hadn't talked about tonight directly. But the night before, in the corridor between our doors, I'd told him I was coming to him, and he'd said he would spend today becoming worthy of that. Neither of us had mentioned it since. The silence had only grown louder with every hour.
By midday I'd rewritten the same contract paragraph three times and every version was wrong.
Kenji found me in the tea room around noon, carrying a fresh pot he didn't need to bring himself, and when he crouched to set it on the low table his hand landed over mine on the tatami.
Neither of us moved first. We stayed like that a few seconds too long, his fingers warm over my knuckles, and then he rose and went back to his study without a word, and I didn't touch the tea for ten minutes.
By the middle of the afternoon I couldn't stand my own skin. I found Riko in the kitchen, elbow-deep in a bowl of rice she didn't need to wash twice, and stood in the doorway working up the nerve to ask her something I didn't have the words for in either language.
“Riko-san,” I said. “Can I ask you something? It's personal.”
She looked up, dried her hands on her apron, and waited, the way she does, like whatever I was about to say was the most important thing anyone had told her all week.
“Tonight,” I said, my face going hot before I'd even finished the sentence. “Is there a traditional way for a woman to be ready?”
I braced for her to laugh, or blush, or find something urgent to do with the rice. She did none of it. She dried her hands properly this time, came around the counter, and took both of mine in her small, dry ones, like she was about to teach me a knife cut.
“Daijoubu,” she said, warm, patting my knuckles. It's all right.
Then she straightened, cleared her throat, and said, in the careful, practiced English of a woman who had clearly looked the words up on purpose: “Wear the yukata. Tie it loose. Let him... unwrap you.”
I laughed before I could stop myself, startled and real, and Riko looked so pleased with her own delivery that she laughed too, and for a second the fear under the wanting went quiet.
I barely touched dinner. Riko made a light soba broth, delicate and warm, and I moved the noodles more than I swallowed them. Kenji saw and did not press. He refilled my tea twice and rested his knee against mine beneath the counter, a quiet promise that he was not going anywhere.
By seven the penthouse had emptied around me the way a tide goes out.
Riko untied her apron, kissed two fingers and pressed them to my cheek on her way to the elevator, which she had never done before, and said nothing else.
Hiro took the service stairs down to his own floor with a bag over his shoulder and a nod for both of us.
Daisuke had texted an hour earlier about some matter in Shinjuku that Kenji waved off with one line in Japanese I didn't ask him to translate.
By the time the private elevator doors closed on the last of them, the whole forty-third floor belonged to no one but us.
I showered until my fingertips pruned, telling myself I was only being thorough.
I dried my hair and let it fall loose instead of braiding it.
I put on the cream silk yukata Riko had pressed and folded for me two days ago, the one that had been sitting in my closet like a held breath, and I tied the sash low across my hips, loose, the way she'd told me to.
My reflection didn't look like a woman who'd been taken from her apartment two weeks earlier.
That afternoon Kenji had returned my passport, opened the elevator, voided the paper that named me, and offered me a car to the airport.
I had stayed. The woman in the mirror had chosen this with a door standing open behind her.
I turned my mother's ring once, reminding my hands they belonged to me, and walked to his room with my heart beating in my throat.
I didn't knock. We had stopped needing to knock on this door somewhere in the last two weeks, though neither of us had said so out loud. I opened it.
Kenji was standing at the window with his back to the room, a dark gray yukata loose over his shoulders, the lights of Tokyo spread out gold and endless behind him. He must have heard the door. He turned.
He looked at me the way I imagine a man might look at something he'd wanted so long he'd stopped letting himself hope for it, and then it was standing in his doorway anyway.
His eyes went from my face down to my bare feet on the tatami and back up, slow, and he didn't hide that he was looking, and I didn't want him to.
His thumb found the healed end of his shortened little finger and pressed there once, a small private motion I'd seen only a handful of times before, always when something in him needed steadying.
He said my name first, then the rest of it, low: “Naomi. Hontou ni ii no.” Naomi. Are you truly sure.
I crossed the last of the distance between us before I answered, because I wanted him to feel it before he heard it. “Hai,” I said. “Anata dake.” Yes. Only you.
A sound broke low in his chest. His hands entered my hair and framed my jaw, holding my face as though permission were a gift he intended to remember precisely. He kissed me slowly and deeply, letting the whole night open around us.
His hands slid to my hips and he walked me backward without breaking the kiss, until the backs of my knees found the edge of his bed. Then he did something I hadn't expected. He knelt on the tatami at my feet, his dark head level with my waist, and my breath went thin at the sight of him there.
He untied the sash at my hip with two fingers, slow enough that I felt every inch of the silk loosen, and slid the yukata off my shoulders and let it fall to the floor between us.
He looked at me, all of me, and he didn't rush that either.
The look went on long enough that the old reflex to cover myself rose up in me, and then I let it go, because the way he was looking at me didn't feel like being seen.
It felt like being read, carefully, in a language he'd spent weeks learning and had finally gotten fluent in.
“Utsukushii,” he said. Beautiful.
Then he said, in English, low: “I would like to touch you now.”
“Please,” I said. It came out as barely more than breath.
He rose from the tatami and kissed my collarbone, and then the space between my breasts, his mouth warm and unhurried, and my hands came up into his hair without my deciding to put them there.
Then he lifted me, one arm under my knees and one behind my back, like I weighed nothing at all, and laid me down against the cool linen of his bed.
He stood at the edge of it and undid his own yukata and let it fall the way mine had, and I looked at him the way he'd looked at me, plainly, without shame.
I'd seen the koi at his wrist and the edge of his shoulder in the bath, but never all of him.
Ink ran the length of both thighs, black scale and red gill scattered with pale chrysanthemum petals.
A snarling tiger crossed his ribs. Two old scars cut through the work near his left shoulder, the ink flowing around them like water around stone.
On his right forearm, five fresh stitches lay protected beneath a narrow dressing.
His body was beautiful in the complicated way a life writes itself onto skin, and I wanted to learn every mark in time.
Tonight was not for questions. It was for seeing him without looking away.
His cock was hard and thick against his stomach, and I looked at it plainly, because I'd decided somewhere in the last two weeks that I was done being shy about wanting things.
He came over me with his weight supported on his left forearm and right hand, careful not to strain the fresh stitches, and kissed my mouth, then my throat, then the curve of one breast. His mouth closed over my nipple until I gasped and arched toward him.
He kissed down my stomach, taking his time, his hands learning what made my breath catch and what made it break.
When his mouth settled between my thighs, I was already shaking.
I said his name because no other word remained.
He didn't stop until I came apart under his mouth, my hand fisted in his dark hair, my whole body drawn tight and then loose all at once.
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark and steady on my face.
“May I?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
He reached for the nightstand. His father's watch met the wood with a small metal click; beside it he set a foil packet and looked back at me.
“Protection?” he asked. I nodded. Only then did he tear it open and roll the condom on, the question and the answer as deliberate as everything else between us.
He settled between my thighs and held my gaze while he entered me slowly through the thin barrier, stopping twice to let my body adjust. My hands found his shoulders. Beneath my palms, raised koi scales crossed warm skin and hard muscle.
“Ore no,” he said against my mouth, so low it was almost not sound at all. Mine.
“Anata no,” I said back. Yours.
He moved slow at first, with deep, measured strokes that made my whole body arch up to meet him, and I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him closer, because slow wasn't close enough tonight, not after every night I'd been listening for him through the wall.
He kissed my mouth. He kissed the line of my throat.
Between one slow thrust and the next he told me, in short pieces, like he was rationing them, that I was beautiful, that I was his, that he had waited his whole life without knowing what he was waiting for.
“I don't know how much longer I can be gentle,” he said against my ear, rough now, his control fraying at the edges for the first time all night. “Tell me if you want gentle.”
“No,” I said. “Yes. Please. All of you. I want all of you.”
Something in him broke open at that, quiet but total.
His pace changed, deeper and harder, still controlled, still careful of me even now, but no longer holding anything back, and I felt the shift in my own body, in the sounds I made that I didn't recognize as mine.
His hand slid under my hip and angled me up into him, and I came a second time with his name torn out of me and his mouth on mine to catch the sound of it.
He followed a few strokes later, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, my name breaking low and rough against my ear, once, like it was the only word he had left in him.
He didn't move away after. He stayed where he was a long moment, his weight braced carefully off me, his breath slowing against my throat, and then he eased down beside me and pulled me into the curve of his body like he'd been doing it for years instead of minutes.
He got up once, only once, and came back from the bathroom with a warm, damp cloth and cleaned me himself, gentle, his hand steady at my hip while he did it, and I let him, because it didn't feel like anything except being taken care of.
He wrapped me in his own dark yukata afterward, the one he'd worn to the door, and it smelled like him, cedar and clean skin, and he poured two glasses of water from the carafe on the nightstand and made me drink half of mine before he'd touch his own.
Then he pulled me back against his chest, my ear against the koi at his shoulder, his arm heavy and warm across my waist, his hand resting low on my hip where his shortened little finger barely grazed my skin.
“Thank you,” I said into the silence, because it was the only thing big enough to say and also the only thing simple enough.
“I should thank you,” he said.
I laughed, a small tired sound, and felt it against his chest as much as I heard it. “We could just thank each other. Take turns. All night.”
“I would not object to that,” he said, and I felt, more than saw, the almost-smile against my hair.
We talked for a while after, small things, easy things.
“What do you miss most about home, after all of this?” he asked, his voice low against my hair.
I thought about it honestly, my cheek against his chest. “Some days, almost nothing at all,” I admitted. “I miss Miso. And my mother's tea tin. Not much else.”
He went very still under me when I said it, the good kind of still, the kind that meant the answer had landed somewhere that mattered.
“Riko cried a little in the kitchen this morning,” he said. “From happiness. I hadn't told her anything. She only looked at the two of us and knew.”
“I'm not surprised,” I said. “She reads rooms better than either of us.”
He almost laughed, a low sound I felt more than heard. I told him about the plum after that, how I hadn't tasted anything else all day, and he pressed his mouth to my hair like that confession pleased him more than it should have.
Eventually the words got slower and further apart, the way they do when sleep is closer than either person wants to admit, and I let my eyes close against his chest, warm and worn out and entirely unafraid, and somewhere in the dark I stopped fighting it and slept.
I woke deep in the night, the city quiet below the windows, and knew before I opened my eyes that he was not asleep. His breathing had a different shape from sleep—slower, controlled—as though he held pressure beneath his ribs and feared jarring it loose.
I opened my eyes. He was watching me in the dark, the way he'd watched me at the elevator door two weeks ago, like I was something he couldn't quite believe had walked into his home and stayed.
“Mou anata no inai jinsei ni wa modorenai,” he said so quietly I almost thought I'd dreamed it. I cannot return to a life without you.
I was half-asleep, warm, wrapped in him and his yukata and the last of the yuzu-and-cedar smell of a bath we hadn't gotten to yet, and I didn't have the strength or the wish to be careful with my answer.
“Watashi mo,” I said. Nor I.