Page 53 of Bearly Out Loud

TWENTY-EIGHT

NARI

He was furious.

Not at her. Not at the evidence. At Mercer, at the shell companies, at the chain of theft that had turned her grandfather’s final creative act into a line item on a corporate acquisition report. Nari watched the anger move through Dojin—his shoulders squaring, his jaw tightening, the gold flecks in his eyes flaring. She’d been watching that tell for weeks. Right now, it meant he was considering actions that would require a legal team.

He was beautiful when angry. She filed this under dangerous information—carefully, at a safe distance, with the full awareness that the distance was shrinking by the hour and the safe part had been a lie since the hallway.

She told him.

All of it. Sora Nightwind—not the character, but the person Hideo had been building in his last years. The gate mythology from the sketchbooks. The Forgotten Gate arc that was supposed to be his farewell.

She told him about the sketchbooks. Dated, preserved, stored in acid-free boxes that Suki checked quarterly. She told him about the voice notes—Hideo reading his own scripts incharacter, the recordings she played before difficult sessions because his voice grounded her when the booth’s silence pressed too close.

She told him things she’d never told anyone outside her family.

Because he’d told the truth first. Because he’d chosen transparency over self-protection. Because he could have buried the Meridian connection and saved his thirty-million-dollar project. Instead, he’d brought her to a restaurant with twelve seats and no menu and laid the evidence on the counter and said:Because it’s you.

Dojin handled the information with patience, with stillness, with focused attention—as if her words were the only sound worth hearing. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t nod sympathetically. He didn’t make the face people made when you told them about a dead loved one—the face that saidI hear youwhile meaningplease stop making me feel this. He sat on a stool in a basement izakaya and listened like listening was the most important thing he could do with his body.

And his body. God. She was trying to have a serious conversation about generational theft and corporate malfeasance and her grandfather’s stolen legacy, and this man was sitting three inches away with rolled sleeves and forearms and a jawline that made her lose entire sentences. The fifth course arrived—wagyu, thin-sliced, seared for approximately two seconds—and he picked up a piece with his chopsticks and held it toward her mouth.

Her brain shorted.

It was a natural gesture. He fed people. It was instinct, reflex, the bears-court-through-food thing she still didn’t fully understand but was beginning to feel in her bones. He held the wagyu toward her and his eyes were warm and steady and his lips were parted and she thought, very clearly, with the part ofher brain that was still forming rational thoughts:If I eat from his hand in this basement restaurant, I am acknowledging that this man is feeding me and that I am letting him, and we are going to have to deal with what that means.

She leaned forward and took the wagyu from his chopsticks.

The beef dissolved on her tongue. Rich, buttery, warm. A sound started in her throat—she stopped it, barely, just before it escaped—and he watched her eat and his expression was?—

She needed to stop looking at his expression.

“You’re staring.”

“You have soy sauce on your lip.”

She wiped it. His eyes tracked her thumb. He couldn’t help it, she could tell—a man’s gaze following a woman’s mouth because the unguarded part of him had seized control and the polite part hadn’t been notified.

“Gone?”

“Gone.” His voice was lower than it had been thirty seconds ago. Rougher at the edges. She noticed because she noticed every shift in every voice she’d ever heard, and his was the one she’d started listening for above all others—in meetings, in the studio, in the hallway where he’d kissed her and his voice had dropped to a place that lived in her body now, under her ribs, permanent and inconvenient.

Okada-san refilled their sake. Unprompted. The old woman had not spoken in twenty minutes, and her silence was a form of protection that Nari understood instinctively—the grandmother knew the conversation mattered and had decided to guard it with quiet.

“A man who names his sourdough starter Gerald and brings people honeycomb he harvested himself,” Nari said, “is not a man who steals dead artists’ legacies.”

Dojin blinked. “You know about Gerald.”

“Reo told Takumi. Takumi told me. There are no secrets in our combined social circle.” She picked up her chopsticks. Took another piece of wagyu. “Gerald is famous.”

He’d been bracing for rejection and had received a sourdough joke instead, and the whiplash knocked the composure right off his face. She wanted to photograph the expression and frame it on her wall. The great Dojin Keiser, undone by a bread pun.

She loved that face. She was not prepared to examine that sentence.

He told her what Reo had discovered about the Celestial Ronin connection. The fandom reveal. She stopped eating mid-bite.

“Reo is a Celestial Ronin fan.”