CHAPTER 24 #2
Daisuke leaned back, grinning. “Twenty years old, this one decides to quit cigarettes cold, no warning, just because he'd decided he didn't want to need anything he couldn't control. Gave me his last pack. I have it somewhere, unopened. Never seen a man want something that badly and refuse it purely out of spite for his own weakness.”
Riko spoke last, quieter, her hand resting flat on the table.
“When my husband died, Kenji was sixteen.
He came and sat with me for three days. Didn't say much of anything.
Just sat. Sixteen years old, and he already understood that some grief doesn't want words. It wants a body in the room.” She looked at Kenji, her eyes wet, and said something in Japanese too soft for me to catch.
He reached over and put his hand over hers.
“Thank you,” I said into the quiet that came after, to all of them at once, and Riko patted my knee like I'd said exactly the right thing and nothing more needed saying.
I sat there and listened to my husband being loved, story after story, by people who had known him since he was a boy with a broken kite, and I felt so full I could hardly hold my chopsticks.
Later, our room fell quiet around the low futon and the single paper lantern by the window. Kenji removed his father's watch and placed it on the table—the familiar boundary between the man the world required and the husband who came to me.
“Come here,” I said. It wasn't a question. I'd been waiting all day to say it.
He came. He untied my yukata slowly, the cream silk sliding from my shoulders, and I let it fall and didn't reach to cover myself, because six weeks ago I might have and tonight I didn't want to.
He turned me gently so my back rested against his chest, and I felt his cock against me, thick and hard and already wanting, and I pressed back into him and heard the low sound he made against my hair.
His arm crossed beneath my breasts, one palm cupping me as his mouth found my ear. “Anata no,” he said. Yours. I answered, “Watashi no.” Mine. I felt his smile against my neck at the reversal. He kissed my shoulder without hurry, the whole night open ahead of us.
He took his time. He always did, when it mattered most, and tonight it mattered more than it ever had.
He pushed inside me from behind, unhurried, one long slide that left me gasping at how full he always made me feel no matter how many times we'd done this, and he waited there, forehead against my hair, until I rocked back into him to tell him I was ready for more.
We moved slow and close and slow again, no hurry in it anywhere, his free hand sliding down my stomach and settling low, holding me against him like he meant to keep every inch of me touching every inch of him.
I turned my face and found his mouth over my shoulder and kissed him like that, awkward and perfect, and when I came it was quiet, a long warm wave instead of a peak, and he followed a breath later, my name breaking against my throat.
After, I laughed, small and helpless and happy for no reason at all, and he pressed his mouth to my hair and didn't ask why, like he already knew.
We bathed afterward in the ryokan's private open-air onsen, the water dark and warm beneath a clear sky.
Beyond the bath's stone rim, a koi pond held slow orange shapes under the moonlight.
I sat between his knees, his arms loose around me, and turned to kiss the plum blossom under his left rib.
He went quiet beneath my mouth, as he always did.
He lifted my left hand out of the water.
He kissed the jade ring first, then the thin gold band beneath it, then finally my mouth, without rushing, tasting faintly of sake.
Outside, the wind moved through the pines with a sound like something breathing slow, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all, because nothing left needed saying out loud.
In the morning we walked the ryokan garden before anyone else woke, mist low over the pond, the koi slow and pale gold beneath it.
My breath came out in small clouds in the cold morning air, and Kenji's fingers were laced through mine, warmer than they had any right to be for a man who claimed the cold never touched him.
Kenji stopped at the water's edge and said, in deliberate English, like he'd practiced it in his head before he trusted it out loud, “Nowhere, my love, will the world exist, except within us.”
I stared at him. “That's mine. That's the line I read you weeks ago.”
“I remembered it,” he said, like that explained everything, which, from him, it did.
I kissed him for it, right there with the mist clinging to the grass, and neither of us said anything else for a long while.
We drove back to Tokyo Sunday evening, the mountains giving way to the city's glow, Yumi asleep against Daisuke's shoulder in the back, Riko humming something old under her breath.
Kenji held my hand over the console the whole way, his thumb moving over my knuckles, over the new gold ring, like he wanted to make sure it was really there.
I let my head rest against the window and watched Tokyo Tower rise up out of the dark, lit red and white the way it had been the very first night I ever saw it, except this time I wasn't afraid of what waited at the other end of the drive.
That night, back in our own bed, in our own dark, I lay with my head on his chest and listened to the city breathing outside the window, the sound that had been a stranger's noise once and was only home now.
His hand rested warm in my hair, and for a while I just let myself lie there, married, full, gathering the courage for the thing I actually wanted to say.
“Kenji,” I said.
“Hm.”
“I want to talk about what we said. In the garden. At Hakone. About children.” His arm tightened around me, just slightly, like he already knew where this was going. “Not tomorrow. Just soon. Soon enough that I wanted you to already know.”
He went very still. Then he turned, gathering me so I was facing him in the dark, and I could just make out his eyes.
“Whenever you wish,” he said.
“After New Year,” I said.
He kissed my forehead. He didn't say anything else.
He didn't have to. His hand slid under the blanket instead and settled flat over my stomach, warm and certain, like he was already making room for someone who didn't exist yet.
I lay awake a long time after his breathing slowed into sleep, staring up at the dark, counting months that hadn't even started.
Could either of us really wait until January?