Page 27 of Bearly Out Loud

The gentleness in it—how he let the moment pass without pressing it, without gloating, without any of the things men did when they caught you off guard—was worse. It was so much worse than gloating. She could handle a man who smirked. She could not handle a man who offered her honey and pretended he hadn’t noticed her silence.

She took the spoon. Tasted. This one was softer, herbal, with a floral depth that lived somewhere between perfume and memory.

“Your bees are extremely talented.”

“I’ll let them know.”

“Do you? Talk to them?”

“Bees respond to calm energy. If you approach the hive agitated?—”

“You talk to your bees.” She leaned back on the bench. The sky above the glass panels was pale blue and enormous. “Youtalk to your bees, and you bring people food from a kitchen that doesn’t exist.”

“The kitchen exists. It’s in the den, a few floors down.”

“That is not the point, and you know it.”

He was smiling. The kind of smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made his entire face shift from composed to open, and she was in trouble. She was in so much trouble, and the trouble tasted like wildflower honey and looked like a man who didn’t know how disarming he was.

She didn’t planto talk about Hideo.

It happened the way unexpected things did—sideways, through a door she hadn’t seen open. They were sitting on the bench, the tasting board between them, wind threading through the open panels, and Dojin asked about the ronin voice work she’d done for the films. Not the industry question—not “what was it like to work on a franchise that big?”—but the personal one.

“What was it like to voice characters your grandfather created?”

She picked up the buckwheat honey. Dark, almost molasses. Tasted it to give her hands a purpose while her brain decided how much to offer.

“He used to read me the scripts,” she said, quieter than she intended. “When I was a kid. I became a voice actress because of those readings—not the franchise, not the name. Because his voice made me believe a wooden spoon was a sword and a kitchen table was the edge of the world.”

Dojin didn’t speak. He sat with his hands wrapped around his coffee cup and listened the way he watched her perform: withhis whole body, the full focus of a man who had decided her words were the most important sound in the room.

“He would have loved this garden.” She looked at the hives, the dormant lavender, the copper roofs catching the low sun. “He loved things that grew slowly. Patience was his favorite word. He used to say art was beekeeping—you built the structure, you showed up every day, and you trusted the work to produce sweetness in its own time.”

She stopped. Drew a breath. Met his eyes.

“Sorry. I don’t usually?—”

“Don’t apologize for that.” His voice had dropped. Not performatively low, not a manufactured intimacy. The natural descent of a man whose chest was doing work his words hadn’t authorized. “Never apologize for talking about someone who mattered.”

The breeze moved through the open panels. Bees hummed at the south wall. The city existed forty stories below them and might as well have been forty miles.

“Your honey is very good, Dojin Keiser.”

“The bees do the work.”

“Accept the compliment.”

“Thank you.”

She picked up the late-harvest spoon. Tasted it. Dark and rich and layered, the kind of honey that told you about the season that made it—late blooms, fading warmth, the last sweetness before winter.

She did not make the sound again. She had learned. But her fingers tightened around the small wooden spoon, and she was silent a breath too long, and when she finally looked up, he was watching her with an expression she would think about for the rest of the week.

FIFTEEN

DOJIN

The restaurant seated twelve. No sign, no menu, no reservations—the chef decided what you ate, and you thanked him for it. The omakase counter was pale cypress, polished by decades of hands and elbows, and the room smelled like rice vinegar, fresh fish, and the deep warmth of a kitchen that had been running since four in the morning.