CHAPTER 20
Naomi
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A bird was singing just outside the shoji screen, close enough that I could hear the small catch in its throat between notes, and the paper had gone the pale gold of steeped tea where the morning sun pressed against it.
I lay very still and listened, because for the first time in what felt like weeks, there was nothing else to listen for.
No footsteps in a corridor. No phone lighting the dark.
Just a bird, and the ordinary work of a house waking up around us.
Kenji was awake. I felt it before I turned my head, the particular quiet of a man watching rather than sleeping, and when I did turn, his eyes were already on my face, black and unhurried, like he'd been memorizing me for an hour and had no intention of stopping.
“You're staring,” I said.
“Yes.”
I smiled at him. He smiled back, slow and unguarded, the kind he never gave the rest of the world, reaching all the way up into his eyes. It landed in my chest like a hand pressed flat over my heart.
“There it is,” I said, softer than I meant to.
“What?”
“That smile. I don't get it very often.”
“You get it more than anyone has,” he said. “More than I knew I had left to give.”
I kissed him before I could think of anything to say back to that.
Slow, unrushed, my palm at his jaw where the night's stubble had come in rough under my fingers.
He made a low sound against my mouth and gathered me in, and when he rolled me onto my back, slow and careful, I let him, because for once neither of us had anywhere else on earth to be.
He undressed me slowly, one piece at a time, the way you'd open something you had waited your whole life to be given and didn't want to tear the paper doing it.
My sleep shirt first, lifted over my head, his mouth finding my collarbone the second my arms were free.
Then the rest, patient, each new inch of skin met with his mouth before his hands moved to the next — the soft skin below my ear, the curve where my shoulder became my arm, the space between my ribs where my heart was working too hard to hide from him.
“Kenji—”
“Let me.” His voice was rough against my stomach, low, the words landing more than sounding. “I have wanted to do this since the elevator. Let me take my time.”
I put my hands in his hair and let him.
He said the rest of it there, mouth moving against my skin between sentences, plain, no performance in any of it.
“I have loved you since the elevator. I did not have the word for it that night. I have it now.” His mouth moved lower, to my hip, and tears came up out of nowhere, hot and sudden, not sad ones.
“I will love you when I am an old man. I will love you after that, if there is an after that.”
“Don't stop,” I said, when he lifted his head to check my face, to see if the tears meant he should. “Don't you dare stop. I want to hear every word of it.”
He kept going—every seam, every hollow—until I was aching, slick, and shaking beneath his hands though the room was warm.
Then I wanted my turn.
I pushed at his shoulders until he understood, and I sat up and took the hem of his sleep shirt in both hands, and he raised his arms and let me pull it over his head the way he'd just done to me.
I looked at him the way I always looked at him now, greedy and unashamed, and set my palms flat against his chest — over the koi rising toward his collarbone, the black lines of the dragon climbing his shoulder, the chrysanthemum low on his ribs that meant endurance, that meant a boy who'd lost his mother at fourteen and kept going anyway.
I traced them slow with my fingertips, name by name, in the same order he'd once given me their meaning, on a bench beside a pond full of koi of a different kind.
Koi. Dragon. Chrysanthemum. And then, on his left side, just under his ribs where the ink went pale and small: a plum blossom, five soft petals, half hidden by his arm until he shifted and let me see it whole.
I already knew whose it was. He'd told me the day before, kneeling in the moss, in a voice I would carry with me for the rest of my life.
I bent and kissed it. Once, soft, deliberate. “Aoi,” I said, quiet, not a question.
He went still under my mouth. Then, after a breath, he nodded.
I kissed it again. “And now me,” I said, and I laid my own hand flat over the small pale flower, my fingers spread across old grief and old ink both.
He covered my hand with his, the one missing the last joint of its little finger, the blunt place fitting itself over my knuckles like it had been carved to, and he held it there against his own side for a long moment.
Neither of us said anything else about it.
There wasn't anything else that needed saying.
Outside, impossibly, the bird kept singing, like it didn't know what kind of morning this was.
Then he brought my hand up, and kissed my palm, and drew me back down against him.
He reached across, measured, and set his father's watch on the low table with his right hand, the small ritual I'd come to know meant the rest of the night, or the morning, belonged only to us.
Then he came back to me and settled his weight over me, careful on his forearms, looking down at my face like he meant to ask permission with his eyes before his mouth caught up to it.
“Naomi.”
“Yes,” I said, before he could finish whatever question he was building. “Yes. Please.”
I reached between us and closed my hand around his cock, thick and blood-warm against my palm, and guided him where I needed him most. He let out a breath that wasn't quite steady, and then he pushed inside, slow, so slow I felt every inch of him, my body opening around him like it had been built for exactly this and nothing faster.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his shoulders, over old ink and older scar both, and he started to move.
Nothing fast. Nothing rushed. Long, deep strokes, one of his hands sliding up to cover my breast, his thumb slow over my nipple, his forehead against mine, his breath mixing with mine, both of us watching the other's eyes the whole time, like looking away might break something neither of us could afford to break today.
He said my name once, low, like he was testing whether it still meant what it had meant an hour ago. It did. It meant more.
“Kenji.” I said his name back, just to feel it in my own mouth, just to give him what he'd given me.
“Ore no,” he said against my lips. Mine.
“Anata no,” I answered. Yours.
He rocked into me slower, deeper, one hand sliding under my hip to hold me exactly where he wanted me, and I felt the slow build of it low in my belly, patient the way everything that morning had been patient, like neither of our bodies had anywhere left to rush toward because we'd already arrived.
I came softly. No shout, no arch, just a long shudder and my breath catching and tears sliding sideways into my hair, my whole chest cracked open with how much I felt.
He watched every second of it happen on my face and didn't look away once, and when he followed me over a moment later he said my name again, quiet, into the skin of my throat, like a man setting something down after carrying it a very long way.
We stayed tangled together after, neither of us in any hurry to be anywhere else. He eased down beside me and gathered me against his chest, my ear finding the place where his heart was slowing to match mine.
Neither of us spoke for a while. I liked the quiet. I liked that he let it sit there instead of rushing to fill it.
“Do you want tea?” he said eventually, his mouth against my hair.
“Yes.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.” I pressed closer anyway, just because I could. “Say my name again.”
He huffed something that was almost a laugh, low in his chest. “Naomi.”
“Again.”
“Naomi.” He said it like he was turning a stone over in his hand, checking every side of it. “Naomi.”
I smiled against his skin and didn't ask for a fourth. Three was enough to feel it settle all the way through me.
I understood something in that small stretch of quiet. Safety didn't sound like silence, not really. It sounded like my own name, said slow, like it was worth savoring.
He got up long enough to heat water on the little burner in the corner of the room, and came back with two cups of the loose green tea Riko had left for us, and we sat up against the low pillows with the blanket around our waists and drank it slow.
“You promised me something,” he said after a while, watching me over the rim of his cup. “In the garden.”
I remembered. I'd asked him to read to me that day, right after he told me about Aoi, and when he finished I'd promised him the next reading would be mine to give, not his to be asked for.
I reached for the red-spined paperback on the low table. It had ridden in my suitcase from Boston to Tokyo to a mountain safehouse without feeling heavier for the distance. I opened to the ninth elegy.
It wasn't really about grief, whatever the word elegy promised.
It was about praise. About how strange and singular it is to be alive at all, once, briefly, a jug and a window and a blossoming tree and a path worn smooth through a field, and how carrying that plain, ordinary miracle inside you and saying it out loud might be the only work worth doing with a life.
I translated it under my breath as I read, the way I used to translate for strangers in hospital waiting rooms, except this time the only person listening was the one I would have crossed an ocean for even if no one had made me.