Page 28 of Bearly Out Loud

Dojin had not brought anyone here before.

The thought arrived, and he let it pass because examining it would require him to acknowledge what this evening had become, and he was not prepared for that. He’d invited her to the rooftop for legitimate reasons. He’d invited her to dinner because she’d talked about her grandfather on a bench between beehives with honey on her lips and he’d wanted the evening to keep going with a force that startled him.

She’d said yes without hesitation. He was still processing that.

The chef greeted him by name—a small, precise man in his sixties who’d been making sushi in this room since before Dojin was born. The greeting included a raised eyebrow at Nari that communicated, in the universal language ofJapanese grandparents, both approval and the promise of future interrogation.

Nari slid onto her stool and surveyed the counter with focused pleasure. Not performative appreciation—not someone who’d read about omakase in a magazine. The real thing—the lean-forward, track-the-knife, watch-the-rice kind of attention that meant she’d eaten at places like this before and respected the craft enough to pay attention.

She ordered sake before the first course.

“Junmai daiginjo.” She said it without checking a list, scanning the room for a menu that didn’t exist. “Do you have the Dassai 23?”

The chef’s eyebrow went higher. He produced the bottle.

Nari poured for Dojin first—a Japanese dining custom he hadn’t expected her to know, and when he reached for the bottle to pour hers, she nodded once. She’d noticed. She appreciated that he knew it too.

“My grandmother taught me three things.” She raised her cup. “Matcha. Sake. And how to identify a man who’s listening versus one who’s waiting to talk.”

“Which am I?”

“You haven’t interrupted me in forty minutes.” She sipped. Set the cup down with a precision that matched the chef’s knife work. “Do the math.”

The first course arrived. Tai snapper, translucent, a single shiso leaf. Dojin ate and tried not to catalog Nari’s expression shifting with each bite—a woman experiencing pleasure and not hiding it, eating with her whole face, her eyes narrowing in concentration when a flavor surprised her.

Warmth settled into his bones like a second pulse—heavy, radiating, a contentment so intense, it bordered on gravitational. He wanted to push his plate toward her. Hewanted to order everything on the menu that didn’t exist and watch her eat it. He wanted?—

Stop.

He didn’t stop.

By the third course—uni, briny and golden, served on a warm bed of rice—she’d explained rice polishing ratios with the casual authority of someone who’d grown up around the information. Twenty-three percent remaining grain, she told him. Everything else polished away. What was left was the pure heart of the rice, and that’s where the flavor lived.

She describes sake like she performs. Strip away the surface. Find the core. Let it speak.

He was staring again. He kept doing that. She kept catching him. Neither of them had addressed it.

She askedabout Hana between the fifth and sixth courses.

Not the way interviewers asked—not the sideways approach, the “I heard about what happened” framing that left room for a corporate answer. Nari cut straight through.

“You built an entire entertainment company around protecting creative IP. That’s not a business strategy. That’s a wound.”

He set his chopsticks down. The precision it took to keep his hands steady—to not let what he felt show in his grip—was a project.

“My sister. Hana.”

He told her. Not the public version—the one crafted by lawyers and publicists after Reeves’s company collapsed. The other version. The one that started with a twenty-year-old girl who trusted a business partner with her original compositionsand ended with that partner licensing her music in a global campaign without her name on a single credit. Hana’s voice on a hundred million screens and not one person who heard it knew her name.

“She tried to fight it.” He turned his sake cup on the counter. “She went to lawyers. She went to the press. He discredited her. Called her unstable. Emotional.” The word came out with an edge that startled him. “The industry believed him because he was older and connected and male, and she was young and talented and inconvenient.”

Nari’s hands were still on the counter. She hadn’t moved.

“I destroyed his company.” He said it flat. Fact, not boast. “Every contract. Every partnership. Every asset he’d built on other people’s work. It took two years, and it wasn’t enough, because Hana stopped composing for three of those years and no amount of corporate demolition gives that time back.”

The chef placed the sixth course between them. Grilled barramundi with yuzu. Neither of them looked at it.

Nari leaned forward. Her eyes were steady and fierce and free of the one thing he couldn’t bear—pity. There was no pity in her face. There was recognition.