Page 52 of Bearly Out Loud

She carries the dead with her. Not as ghosts. As instruments she can play.

“Your grandfather sounds like he was extraordinary.”

“He was the best person I’ve ever known. And someone stole his final work and I’m going to make sure they regret it.” She said it without breaking stride. Grief and war in the same sentence, delivered over tempura. “But that’s the folder conversation. I closed the folder. Tell me something else.”

“What do you want to know?”

She tilted her head. Studied him. The assessment was thorough, open, unembarrassed—she looked at him the way she looked at a script, searching for the subtext beneath the dialogue.

“Why are you single?”

He didn’t flinch. He’d been asked before—by his mother (weekly), by Reo (quarterly), by tabloid journalists (annually). The answer was always some version of “busy,” or “focused,” or “haven’t found the right person.” Safe answers. Boardroom answers.

He didn’t want to give her a boardroom answer.

“Women I’ve dated… they don’t stay. Not because I don’t want them to. Because they feel like guests. In my life, in my space. They say I’m attentive, generous, present. And then they leave. The last one told me I was the best boyfriend she’d ever had and she’d never been lonelier.”

Nari’s chopsticks lowered.

“She said there was a wall. That I let people into the living room but not the house.” He turned the cup again. The ceramic was smooth under his thumb. “My mother’s theory is that I haven’t found someone I’d rearrange my kitchen for. Bears do that, apparently. Restructure their space when they find their mate. I’ve never moved a single chair.”

The room was quiet. Okada-san’s knife against the cutting board. The low hiss of something frying. The space between two people narrowing by degrees they weren’t counting.

“That’s the saddest, most self-aware thing a man has ever said to me on a date.” Nari set down her chopsticks. “Every man I’ve dated has eventually told me I’m too much. Too loud, too successful, too rich, too confident. They want the Wixx name at industry events and then want me to turn the volume down at home. As if I come with a dimmer switch.”

“You don’t.”

“No.”

“Why would you?”

She looked at him. The statement—not a question, flat and final, no qualifier—landed differently from a compliment. Compliments were assessments. This was a fact. He said it as a truth too obvious to dress up.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Saying things that make me want to either kiss you or hire a therapist.”

“The second one is probably healthier.”

“The first one is more fun.” She held his gaze. No blinking. No retreat. Her knee still pressed against his thigh, warm through the fabric. Her lips tasted like yuzu from the butter and sake and the ghost of the words she kept saying that made her pulse do unreliable things.

Okada-san slid the fourth course between them without a word. Miso-glazed cod, black sesame, pickled ginger. The old woman glanced at the twelve inches of space between them on the counter, then at the zero inches of space between Nari’s knee and Dojin’s thigh, and made a sound. Approval. Possibly amusement. She turned back to her kitchen.

“Okada-san ships us,” Nari whispered.

“Okada-san is not familiar with that term.”

“Okada-san has been arranging our courses so that we have to reach across each other for the soy sauce. That woman is a tactical mastermind.”

Dojin looked at the soy sauce. It was, in fact, positioned equidistant between them, requiring either of them to lean across the other’s space to reach it. He looked at Okada-san’s back. Her shoulders were shaking with what might have been a cough and was almost certainly a laugh.

He reached for the soy sauce. His arm crossed in front of Nari. From this distance, he could see the curve of her throat and the single freckle below her left ear and the pulse beating at the base of her neck—fast, too fast for a woman eating cod.

Her pulse is elevated. She’s not calm. She’s performing calm. She’s performing calm while her heart runs at a speed that tells me everything her mouth won’t say yet.

He poured the soy sauce. Sat back. Didn’t comment on the pulse. Didn’t comment on the freckle. Held both observations in his chest with the care of a man collecting evidence of his own undoing.