Page 29 of Bearly Out Loud

“Someone stole her work and called it business.” Her voice was low, precise, every word placed. “That’s not a failure of talent. It’s a failure of the people who were supposed to protect it.”

He went still.

Not the charged stillness of attraction or the restless stillness of restraint. A deeper quiet—the kind that came when the body stopped bracing and the bones unlocked and the space between heartbeats lengthened into rest.

No one had said that before. Not about Hana, not with that clarity. People offered sympathy. They offered outrage on his behalf, which was its own kind of performance. Nari offeredthe truth: it wasn’t Hana’s failure. It was never Hana’s failure. And the fact that she said it without hesitation—without asking for details or softening the edges or qualifying it with “well, the industry is complicated”—detonated a wall he hadn’t known was standing.

“She’s composing again.” His voice came out rougher than intended. “Privately. Under a pseudonym. She’s contributing to our soundtracks.”

“Good.” Nari picked up her chopsticks and turned to the barramundi with decisive energy. She’d said what needed saying. Now she was going to eat fish. “Does she know the soundtracks are extraordinary? Because the scoring in the Voidborn trailer made me cry in the shower, and I don’t cry in the shower. That’s where I sing.”

He laughed. It broke out of him—startled, genuine, a laugh that rearranged his chest and loosened the knot that had formed when he’d started talking about Hana. Nari glanced at him sideways, and the look was warm and amused and slightly wicked, and he wanted this evening to never end.

“I’ll tell her.”

“Tell her that review. Exact words. Frame it.”

SIXTEEN

DOJIN

They closed the restaurant.

Not deliberately. The courses kept coming, and the sake kept flowing, and the conversation refused to end—veering from animation to her grandmother’s matcha philosophy to his mother’s conviction that duck was the answer to every emotional crisis to her father’s legal career to the specific joy of building a world from scratch. Nari talked the way she performed—with her entire body, her hands shaping ideas in the air, her voice shifting pitch and tempo, her laugh arriving sudden and loud and uncontained.

The chef watched them with patient amusement. Thirty years of feeding couples in this room. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

Outside, the West Village was cold and quiet. At eleven p.m., the streets emptied, the brownstones lit, and the air was sharp enough to taste. Nari pulled her coat tighter, and her shoulder bumped his arm, and the contact was small and electric and she didn’t move away.

“You’re warm.”

“Good circulation.”

“I once dated a man who was perpetually cold.” She walked beside him, their steps syncing without either of them arranging it. “Like cuddling a parking meter.”

“A parking meter.”

“Thin. Metal. Zero warmth. You are the opposite of a parking meter.”

“I’m putting that on my business card.”

“Dojin Keiser. CEO. Beekeeper. Not a Parking Meter.”

He laughed again. The second genuine laugh of the evening, which was two more than most people extracted in a week. The sound filled the narrow street and bounced off brownstone facades, and Nari grinned up at him—quick, bright, delighted with herself.

Her shoulder pressed against his arm again. This time she stayed.

His hand found her waist. Not a calculated move—his palm settling against the curve above her hip with a certainty that bypassed his brain entirely. She was wearing a wool coat over the good jeans, and the fabric was warm from her body, and his hand stayed where it landed like it had found the place it was supposed to be.

She didn’t pull away. Didn’t comment. Didn’t acknowledge it with the deflecting humor she used when the air between them became too charged. She walked beside him in the cold with his hand on her waist and her shoulder against his arm, and the silence was full and warm and unhurried.

Three blocks. They walked three blocks without speaking, and every step was a conversation about the thing they weren’t saying.

At the corner of Bleecker and Seventh, she stopped. Turned. Looked up at him with those sharp brown eyes that missed nothing and had been cataloging him since the day they met.

“This wasn’t about the project.”

Not a question. Not an accusation. An observation from a woman who named what she saw.