Page 51 of Bearly Out Loud

“Tell me about her.” Nari rested her chin on her hand. The posture was casual. The focus was not. “Your mother. Colette. She called mine about tea, and the amount of French exclamation points in that conversation could have powered a small city.”

“Maman is…” He searched for the word. “Operatic. Literally and figuratively. She was a mezzo-soprano at the Met. Retired to become a full-time matriarch. She now channels all that performance energy into dinner-party interrogations and strategic matchmaking.”

“So the seven-course dinners I’ve heard about are real.”

“Each course comes with a question. She calls it ‘conversation.’ It’s a deposition.”

Nari grinned. “Your mother interrogates through food. Your instinct is to court through food. Do you see the pattern, or do I need to draw it on a napkin?”

He blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Did I—” she pointed her chopsticks at him. “Did I stump the billionaire CEO? With a napkin reference?”

“You didn’t stump me. You made an observation I’m choosing not to dignify with a response.”

“That’s a yes. That is a full, confirmed, legally admissible yes. You court women with food because your mother made love a seven-course meal. That’s either the sweetest backstory I’ve ever heard or a therapy goldmine.”

“The man who learned to listen to the bear.”

“Stop saying both. It keeps being charming and I don’t have a defense against charming.”

The vibration deepened in his chest. Low. Pleased. Her eyes dropped to his rib cage.

“The hum again.”

“You absolutely hum. We’ve been over this.” She leaned closer instead of farther away, which was the opposite of whata woman should do when confronted with unexplained chest vibrations, and which told him everything about the kind of woman she was.

He picked up his sake and drank instead of answering, which was not a denial, and both of them knew it.

TWENTY-SEVEN

DOJIN

The third course arrived. Tempura—shrimp, lotus root, shiso leaf, each piece golden and impossibly light. Okada-san served it with a dipping sauce that smelled like heaven’s waiting room and a look that said she was listening to every word and planned to have opinions later.

“What were you like as a kid?” Nari dipped a shrimp. “Before the sleuth and the company and the—” she gestured at all of him, “—all of this.”

All of this. She said it while her hand made a sweeping motion that encompassed his entire body, and the gesture was both dismissive and appreciative in a way he was going to think about later, alone, for an embarrassing amount of time.

“Quiet.”

“You were a quiet child?”

“Enormous and quiet. I was six-foot-one at fourteen. The tallest kid in every room, trying to take up the least space. My father’s the same way—Stellan is six-six and moves through the world like he’s apologizing for it.” He turned the sake cup in his fingers. “I spent most of my childhood in the kitchen. Cooking was the first thing I was good at that wasn’t about size orstrength. Food doesn’t care how big you are. It cares whether you pay attention.”

“So you were a giant shy kid who cooked.” Her voice had gone soft. Not pitying—warm. “That tracks. That tracks so hard, it’s actually painful.”

“What about you?”

“The opposite. The smallest kid in every room trying to take up the MOST space.” She stole a lotus root tempura from the plate. “I talked in class. I talked at lunch. I talked during assemblies. My third-grade teacher called my mother for a conference and said, ‘Nari is very verbal,’ and Akemi said, ‘She’s a Wixx. We don’t whisper.’”

He could see it. A tiny, fierce child with black hair and enormous eyes, voice louder than her body, refusing to be overlooked. The image hit him with an unexpected ache—affection for a version of her he’d never met.

“When did you start voice acting?”

“Technically? Seven. That’s when Grandpa started reading me Celestial Ronin scripts and making me read them back in character. He’d do all the voices—Kaito, the zodiac guardians, the villains—and then hand me the script and say, ‘Now you.’ I’d give him my best Kaito and he’d say—” She dropped her voice low, warm, accented with the ghost of a man’s gentle correction. “‘Nari-chan. You are shouting. Kaito whispers because he’s already won the fight. Volume is not power. Precision is power.’” She picked up her sake. “I was seven. I heard ‘volume is not power’ and thought, that’s the most wrong anyone’s ever been. I still think he was wrong. But I learned precision anyway.”

Dojin stared at her. She’d dropped into her grandfather’s voice without preparation—not a performance, a memory. Seamless, intimate. Her body held other people’s voices like muscle memory.