Page 55 of Bearly Out Loud

He looked down at their hands. And his expression?—

She’d seen him run meetings. Direct voice actors. Navigate a corporate discovery that would sink most executives. She had never seen this. Open. Stunned. A locked door swinging inward when he hadn’t expected a room on the other side.

“You look like nobody’s held your hand before.”

“Not like this.” His voice dropped to the low place that made her stomach flip. “Not because they wanted my hand specifically.”

Don’t. Don’t stand on a New York sidewalk and tell me that the specific act of choosing your hand is new for you, because I will not survive the implications and I have a legal battle to wage and a grandfather’s legacy to reclaim and my heart is doing irregular things that would concern a cardiologist.

“I want your hand specifically.”

He squeezed. Careful, measured—he knew his own strength and adjusted it, always, for the smaller hands in his. She’d noticed the deliberateness. As if his body came with a power setting he had to constantly, consciously dial down.

“Don’t thank me for holding your hand.” She kept walking. Kept his hand. The evidence folder tucked under her other arm, the jacket shifting on her shoulders. “That’s a low bar.”

“You’d be surprised how many people don’t clear it.”

She squeezed tighter.

They walked four blocks in silence. Not the tense silence of the izakaya—a different quality, warm and full, the silence of two people who had said everything that mattered and were resting inside the aftermath. His thumb moved against her knuckles in a slow, absent pattern. She let him. She let herself want it. She letherself stop calculating exit strategies and risk assessments and instead exist, for twelve minutes on a Friday night, as a woman holding a man’s hand while the city moved around them.

At Union Square, he hailed a cab for her. Opened the door. She turned in the frame, one foot in the car, one on the curb, and looked up at him.

“We’re going to take Mercer apart.”

“Yes.”

“And give my grandfather’s work back to my family.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going to keep bringing me lunch during sessions like a man who isn’t running a multi-billion-dollar company.”

His mouth curved. The slow, devastating smile that made entire rooms relax and made her, specifically, forget how sentences worked. “Breakfast too, if you’d let me.”

“That implies mornings. Mornings imply proximity. Proximity implies?—”

“Breakfast.”

“Breakfast.”

She pulled him down by his collar. Kissed him—slow, deliberate, tasting like sake and yuzu and the truth she’d been carrying alone for weeks that was now shared, distributed, halved. His hand cupped the back of her neck. His fingers threaded into her hair. She tilted into it—opened her mouth, deepened the kiss, let herself have it. The sound he made against her lips was low and wrecked and she stored it in the same place she kept every important sound she’d ever heard: right next to her grandfather’s voice, in the center of her ribcage, permanent.

She pulled back. His thumb was on her jaw.

“Goodnight, Dojin.”

“Goodnight, Nari.”

She got in the cab. Closed the door. The car pulled into traffic and she turned to watch him through the rear window—standingon the curb, hands in his pockets, the streetlight catching his shoulders and the smile he hadn’t dropped.

Her phone buzzed. Takumi.

Takumi:Scale of 1 to “this changes everything”?

Nari:He told me the truth before I told him mine.

Takumi:…