Lost-in-Mango

You're sitting on the edge of the vanity chair, arms wrapped around yourself. That's all he needs to see. His arms are around you in the next breath. You're here, safe. With him. His face buries in your hair and he exhales, slow and controlled.

"You're safe," he whispers, even as you shake against him. His hand moves in a steady, unhurried circle at your back.

He does not ask what happened. That came on the way here, when your manager briefed him on the incident.

The fan who had barged in. With photos. So many photos. Not the first time. Not the first time your privacy had been violated like this.

"Let's go home," he murmurs, pulling you gently upright. His hands, one at your back, one briefly cupping your face to look at you properly, thumb brushing the dried tear tracks from your cheek with a quietness that says more than he will. "He's gone. And we are going to sue him down to his last pair of drawers."

You sniffle, something fragile and almost-a-laugh catching in your throat as you look up at him. "Let me change," you whisper, still holding on. "Just stay. I'll be quick. Don't go."

He doesn't answer. He just moves to sit on the small sofa along the wall, and waits. Like he has nowhere else in the world he needs to be.

"No."

Hiromi interrupts the lawyer your company has hired for the case.

This is the third meeting. Third in two weeks, where the same suggestion has been laid in front of you like it is a gift. Rescind the case. Accept the settlement. Accept the apology.

It will be better, they say. The press will move on. You might even come out ahead, the magnanimous celebrity who forgives, who rises above, who does not make things difficult.

You have been doing that for five years.

Five years of gracious statements and quiet settlements and smiling through the anxiety that has carved itself into your core. Five years of being advised, very gently, that this is simply the cost of the life you have chosen.

And you have believed them. You have sat in rooms like this one and nodded and signed and told yourself that this is the price. That for every person who loves you, there will be one who does not understand where the boundary is. That for the adoration and the stages and the career you have built with your own hands, you are supposed to accept this too.

You had been about to nod again. Then Hiromi's hand closes over yours on the table.

He looks at the lawyer across from you. His voice is even, unhurried, "We would like to pursue a civil charge."

"Mr. Higuruma, with respect, the settlement offer is generous and it would spare her from-"

"From what? From having it on record that this happened? From the precedent that might discourage the next person?" He doesn't raise his voice. "She has been advised to accept apologies for five years. I'd like to know what it has cost her."

He turns to look at you, and there is something in his expression that isn't quite anger and isn't quite grief. It is exhaustion from settlements, from fear and worry every time someone looked too long your way, came too close.

You don't have an answer. You're not sure you've ever let yourself add it up before.

His hand is still over yours. "We would like to pursue a civil charge," he says again, quieter this time, just for you.

Not a decision but a path offered to you.

The ride home is quiet.

Not the quiet of the past two weeks. This is different. It is peaceful, liberating ever.

You find his hand somewhere on the back seat and don't let go. Your head finds his shoulder. In another context, in another life, you might want more but there is a driver, and Hiromi is private, so this is what you have.

It's enough. It's more than enough.

The car slows to a stop.

You don't think about it. That's the thing you'll remember later. That there was no decision, no moment of weighing consequences the way you have been weighing everything for five years.

You step out into the afternoon and the sun is warm and ridiculous for a Thursday and Hiromi is straightening his jacket beside you and you simply kiss him.

Arms around him, right there on the pavement. There are cameras somewhere, there are always cameras, and your manager is going to call you seven times before dinner and there will be a headline by evening and you find, standing here with your face tipped up to his.

Hiromi goes still for just a moment. One breath of surprise, and then his hand comes up to the back of your head, and he kisses you back.

Lawyer Higuruma slumps in his chair. 34 missed calls. 15 texts. 3 missed reminders. One sticky note on his monitor that said RUI 3PM in his own handwriting, underlined twice.

He had looked at it at 2:47. Thirteen minutes, he had thought, and then a witness had said something that had unraveled time outside the case.

Had the case been that interesting? He couldn't say. The hours had dissolved the way they always did. Someone else's crisis, someone else's important, filling the room until there was no room left. He was very good at that. Had built a career on it.

"Be here in 15."

Is the last thing he hears before you hang up, your voice drowning beneath the unrelenting wail of a one month old.

He picks up his coat. He picks up his papers. He doesn't bother with the rest.

You are already there when he arrives.

He sees you from across the street. Kneeling on the concrete outside the gate, Rei screaming in the crook of one arm, your free hand on Rui's back. Both children crying. You holding the whole thing together with a composure he cannot locate the source of.

He crosses the street. When he gets close enough he sees Rui's face over your shoulder.

She has been crying. Her bag is too big for her. She sees him.

The betrayal in her eyes is quiet.

He has failed her.

You miss holding your daughter.

In the mornings that are not quite a new day but the extension of the night you stayed up with Rei, you watch Hiromi run after Rui through the living room. You can hear her laugh as he chases her, can see her squirm from his stubbly cheek, shrieking, delighted. You want to be in that with her. But Rei is against your shoulder and your arms are full and the distance between you and your daughter feels larger than a living room has any right to be.

Hiromi is good at consoling her. You want to thank him for that. He too is stretched thin, between work, between Rei, between the version of himself that remembers to come home on time and the version that doesn't. You watch him scoop Rui up and she clings to him and something in your chest does something you don't have the energy to examine.

There is so much you want to do. You want to be perfectly happy. Perfect mother, perfect wife. You want to be the kind of woman who holds it all without letting anything show. But you feel yourself failing at the edges every day, in small ways that accumulate quietly until they aren't small anymore.

The day Hiromi forgets, you are already in the car when the third reminder goes off on your phone. Rei in the back making the sounds that mean he will be crying in four minutes, traffic moving the way it does when you are already late.

You pull up to the kindergarten and there she is.

Rui, by the gate. Face doing the thing where she is trying very hard not to look like she has been waiting, which is its own kind of heartbreak.

The teacher sees you. You see the teacher see you.

Rei starts crying.

You unbuckle anyway. You go to her anyway. You kneel down on the concrete in front of your daughter and pull her in before she can say anything, her small body going stiff for just a second. Surprised that you came all the way down to her, and then she folds into you completely. Face pressed to your shoulder. Hands gripping the back of your jacket.

You pat her back. Slow, steady.

I am going to kill your father, you think, and almost laugh despite everything, because even now Hiromi makes you want to laugh and you are furious at him for that too.

Behind you Rei is really crying now. Rui pulls back first. She looks at your face, "It's okay, mama," she says. "We can go."

You stand. You take her hand. You don't let go of it the whole way to the car.

He finds her in the kitchen.

Not yet seven, dark still sitting in the corners of the room, and there she is. Rui, in her pajamas, dragging a chair across the tile. Correct angle to clear the cabinet. Both hands on the cup at the dispenser.

She has done this before. He stands in the doorway and watches her drink, climb down, push the chair back to its exact original position.

He thinks: when did she learn that.

He thinks: who taught her that.

"Rui."

She looks up and him and smiles. She had not called for him. Had not called for you. Had woken in the dark, assessed the problem, and resolved it without involving anyone.

He crosses the kitchen and picks her up before he has decided to. She grabs onto him, surprised, and he holds on longer than the situation warrants.

"Papa?"

"Yeah."

"You're squishing me."

"I know."

Upstairs, Rei starts crying. He feels her arms tighten slightly.

He doesn't move.

He had thought his particular way of moving through the world was a him problem. Something that had calcified in his twenties and was his alone to manage. He had not expected to recognize it in a five year old. In his five year old.

Right now he is not looking at you quite carefully.

The meeting is a quarterly review. Eight people around the table. Partners, senior associates, Higuruma, you.

It goes fine for forty minutes.

Then Mori is mid-sentence about the Tanaka brief when he makes a slight pivot, the way men like him do when they have decided the room is warm enough for it, loosened by coffee and the sound of their own authority, and says, "Of course, we'll want to be mindful of the jury composition. Omega jurors." He sets his pen down.

He smiles. "Sensitive lot."

He laughs. It is a short laugh. The laugh of a man who has made this kind of remark before and found it landed, and has therefore kept it in rotation.

The table laughs with him.

Not all of it. Two people look at their papers, one reaches for a pastry with sudden great interest. But enough laugh. The comfortable, reflexive laughter of people responding to a senior partner's register, filling the space he has created, not quite looking at Higuruma and not quite not looking either.

Higuruma does not move. His pen rests against his brief. His expression is what it always is.

You look up from your notebook.

"I'm sorry," you say pleasantly. "Could you repeat that?"

The laughter stops.

"I didn't catch it," you continue, pen poised, notebook open, with the attentive expression of a paralegal who takes minutes very seriously and would not want to miss anything. "The part about Omega jurors. For the record."

The table is very still.

Mori looks at you. "It was a joke," he says. The ease is still there but it has thinned considerably. "No need to put that in the minutes."

"Of course," you say, still pleasantly. "I just want to make sure I'm capturing the meeting accurately. Should I note that a comment was made and then clarified as a joke? Or..."

"It doesn't need to be noted at all." Slightly sharper now. The smile still present but working harder.

You look at your notebook. You look at him. You look at your notebook again, with the expression of someone genuinely navigating a professional dilemma and wanting to do it correctly.

"I'll use my discretion," you say.

The meeting continues.

What you write in your notebook is: Mori - remark re: Omega jurors, laughed at by room. Clarified as joke when asked to repeat for record. No further comment.

Afterward, in the corridor, Higuruma falls into step beside you without preamble. "You enjoyed that," he says.

"I was doing my job."

"You were not doing your job."

"I was exercising my discretion," you say. "As discussed."

He is quiet for a moment. "He said it was a joke," Higuruma says.

"Yes."

"You knew he would."

"I did."

"Then why-"

"Because now he knows," you say, "that the next time he makes that joke, someone is going to ask him to repeat it. And the time after that. And every time after that, in every meeting I'm in, for as long as I'm taking minutes." You reach the elevator. You press the button. "It won't stop him. But it'll cost him something. And he'll know it costs him something. And that's not nothing."

The elevator arrives. You both get in.

He looks at the doors. You look at the doors.

"You're a paralegal," he says. Not unkindly. More like a fact being examined.

"I am," you say.

"You have no authority in that room."

"None whatsoever."

"You could have said nothing."

"I could have," you agree.

The elevator reaches the third floor. The doors open.

He steps out. You follow. You are almost at his office before he speaks again.

"He'll remember it was you," he says quietly. Not a warning. Something more careful than that.

You stop. You look at him.

"I know," you say. "I have a copy of the minutes."

He looks at you for a long moment. "HR," he says finally, relenting. "And send me a copy."

"Already drafting it."

He goes into his office. You go to your desk.

Audit days are rough. Audit nights are worse.

Especially after five pm, which is when you have a personal and non-negotiable policy of stopping thinking about work. The policy exists. Tonight the policy has been overruled by circumstance and you are grief-stricken about it.

You cannot leave. The files are not done. Alas.

You order dinner at six thirty, because that is what you do when the work runs past the point of reasonable endurance, and you do not ask Hiromi his preference tonight because Hiromi is in an awful mood and asking Hiromi his preference when he is in an awful mood is an exercise in receiving a one word answer that tells you nothing useful.

You clear the consultation table. You set out the food. You turn on the TV/ The soccer game, because it is on and because you will genuinely cry if anyone attempts to talk about work for the next forty-five minutes and soccer is a socially acceptable reason not to.

You sit opposite him. You unwrap your own dinner. You do not say anything about the mood.

Hiromi eats quietly.

You are used to this. Hiromi's quiet has gradations that you have spent eight months cataloguing.

The scent blockers make him hard to read on bad days. On good days you can extrapolate from posture, from the particular angle of his pen against a document. On bad days the blockers do their job too well and he becomes a closed room and you navigate by the available evidence.

Tonight the available evidence includes: the yelling.

Something about a detective. Something about a timeline that didn't hold. The words were indistinct but the register was not, and you had sat at your desk and looked at your plant and given it approximately four minutes before getting up to order dinner.

You had not knocked. You had simply cleared the table and set out the food and turned on the soccer and sat down, and he had come out of his office at some point and sat down across from you, and that had been that.

He is on his third bite now. His shoulders have dropped approximately two centimeters from where they were when he sat down.

"So," you say, because the silence has done its work and you are constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, "I rented a box truck over the weekend."

He looks at you.

"For the move. Big mistake." You gesture with your fork. "Huge."

"The road to my new place," you continue, "is, technically a road. In the sense that it exists and connects two points. In no other sense. I hit a pothole the size of a small lake and my phone flew off the seat and I had to stop the truck in the middle of this road and get out in the rain-"

"Why were you moving in the rain."

"Because I had the truck booked for that day."

"I had already paid for it," you say.

"Hm."

"Non-refundable."

"Hm."

"Anyway." You point at him with your fork. "The phone. I find it in a puddle. Face down. I pick it up and it is fine, completely fine, not a scratch, and I am relieved for approximately four seconds before I realize I have put my knee directly into the same puddle retrieving it and my jeans are soaked through and I still have sixteen boxes in the truck."

He makes a sound. It is a very small sound. It is the sound of a man who is not laughing and is also not not laughing.

You take this as a victory.

"New place is good though," you say, more quietly. "Closer to the train. I can see the park from the kitchen window."

He nods. He finishes his burrito bowl. "The pothole," he says eventually, without looking up from where he has picked up his tea.

"Enormous."

"You should have rescheduled."

"Non-refundable, Hiromi."

He takes a sip of tea. The not-laugh is back, briefly, at the corner of his mouth. "Show me the new place," he says. "When it's done."

You look at him. He is looking at the soccer game with the composed attention of a man who has said a perfectly ordinary thing and sees no reason to elaborate.

It is, you think, an invitation. Dressed as nothing, the way his invitations always are.

"I'll make sure the road is dry first," you say.

"Appreciated," he says.

The baby is still there. And this time Hiromi is beside him, hands flying up in wide arcs, airplane noises and all, while the baby in question, claps with the uninhibited joy.

The joy monster baby, notices you first. He turns, finds your face, and deploys a gummy smile of such immediate and unconditional warmth that something in your chest simply releases. Your cortisol drops in real time. You smile back before you have made any conscious decision to.

"Hi, baby."

"Rude," you say, turning to Hiromi. "You could have invited me to the birth." You cackle, extremely satisfied with yourself. "Am I the father, Hiromi?"

Hiromi's expression does the thing it does. "Very funny," your fiance replies, in a tone that indicates it is not. "His name is Riku. My cousin had an emergency. He will be here for a little while."

That is all you need to hear.

You are in the kitchen washing your hands before he finishes the sentence. You come back, scoop Riku up from the couch, and settle him against your chest. He goes willingly. Immediate and trusting, one fist closing around your collar.

He smells exactly like a baby. Warm and clean and entirely specific. You put your nose in his hair.

Hiromi watches this with the silent judgemental expression.

"He retains the scent," you say, into Riku's hair.

The silence is extremely loud.

"Can we keep him?" you ask. Riku bounces on your knees, having discovered the fundamental toddler joy of up-and-down and intending to explore it thoroughly. "Can you represent me when your cousin sues me for kidnapping?"

Hiromi, recognizing a lost cause when he sees one, sets down the airplane spoon and picks up his phone to reply to clients. Unbothered by the coos and babbling from the living room. The evening carries on.

You should be helping. But taking photos takes precedence.

A nice, helpful fiance would have rescued Hiromi by now. You have instead chosen to be the spawn of evil, phone raised, documenting the situation in real time as Riku's fists close around Hiromi's hair with the grip strength of someone who has found something excellent and intends to keep it.

Hiromi's expression is extraordinary. It is the expression of a man who has faced courtrooms and difficult clients and the full weight of a broken justice system, and has not, until this moment, encountered a problem he was not prepared for.

You take several photos. You will cherish them always.

You do eventually take pity, specifically at the moment Riku, having secured the hair, attempts to put it in his mouth, which crosses a threshold even you respect. You scoop him up and transfer him to your arms, then lean over to inspect Hiromi's head with genuine thoroughness.

"Checking for bald spots," you explain.

"I'm fine," he says, indignant.

Riku, at the sudden displacement from his preferred location, registers his complaint immediately and at volume. His arms shoot out toward Hiromi, fingers grasping, his entire small body twisting away from you with the single-minded determination of someone who knows what he wants and cannot believe the obstacles being placed in his way.

Hiromi looks at him. Riku looks at Hiromi. The reaching intensifies.

You hold him. He is surprisingly strong for someone who weighs approximately as much as a bag of rice.

But the past two hours have been an education, and you have learned two things about Riku with the certainty of lived experience. First, he loves pulling Hiromi's hair. Second, and more importantly, he loves TV remotes. Any remote. All remotes. Remotes, for Riku, are the pinnacle of human achievement.

You reach behind you. You produce the remote.

The wailing stops.

The arms reaching for Hiromi stop.

Riku takes the remote in both hands with the reverence of someone receiving something sacred. He looks at it. He shakes it once. He looks at you with an expression of profound satisfaction.

Later, when Riku is gone, you sit on the couch.

It feels wrong. Too quiet. Too still. The exact same couch it was this morning and somehow diminished.

"I want one," you announce, resting your legs on Hiromi's lap.

"No you don't," he replies, not looking up from his book.

You open your mouth.

He looks up. Deadpan.

You close your mouth.

"Okay," you say. "Yes. I know." You recite it with the resigned fluency of a line long memorized after several arguments. "No joking about children when reproductive health laws are being challenged."

He returns to his book.

You migrate from legs-on-lap to head-on-chest, arms around him, and he lets you rearrange him without comment, one hand settling on your back.

The apartment is quiet. Outside the city is humid and gross from summer rain.

You rest your chin on his chest. You look at the ceiling. You think about Riku's gummy smile and the way he smelled and the specific wrongness of the couch now that he is gone.

You give it four minutes.

"They're coming to see us, Hiromi. Not the laundry room."

"They will see the laundry room."

"Only if we show them the laundry room."

"We will be showing them the laundry room."

Four months of break and counting. This Hiromi is so different from Lawyer Higuruma you had come to know.

He has color coded both your closets. He has created a wash care ledger, a physical document, with laminated pages, cataloguing every garment in the home by fabric content and care requirements. He has perfected a croquembouche recipe across three attempts for the New Year's party you both want to host in the new home this year.

And he has stolen your cat.

This is the gravest offense.

Kano, your cat, your little paw monster, now allocates the majority of her biscuit-making activity to Hiromi's chest. She seeks him out. You have watched her walk across you, to reach him on the other side of the couch. You have watched her slow blink at him. A favor she has never once extended to you despite five years of feeding her and cleaning up after her.

"The color on the left," he says from the ladder, "has better depth."

You look at the paint strips. They are, as far as you can tell, identical. "They're the same."

"They are not the same."

"Hiromi. It's 3am."

"Your mother arrives at eleven."

"She has never once in her life looked at a laundry room and had thoughts about the depth of the paint."

He looks down at you. The look is brief and complete and communicates, without any words whatsoever, that this is not the point and you are both aware of it.

You hold the ladder.

"It should be by the tea drawer," Hiromi replies from the couch, where Kano has him hostage. Or the other way around.

"We have a tea drawer now?" You turn around, incredulous.

He doesn't look up from Kano's paw. "Third drawer. By the window."

You open it.

It takes you a moment to understand what you are looking at. Blends organized by use, by brand, by color, each one labelled in his small precise handwriting. Morning blends. Evening blends. Chamomile. Peppermint. Something for digestion. Something for sleep. Ginger peach tucked neatly in the corner like it has always lived there.

You stand there longer than you mean to.

You had watched him run entirely on espresso. You knew the particular sound of the machine at 2am, at 4am, at whatever hour a deadline required.

There is no coffee in this drawer.

There is ginger peach. There is chamomile for evenings. There is a small handwritten label on every single box because of course there is, because he cannot do anything halfway.

You forget what you came to the kitchen for.

Behind you, on the couch, he says something quiet to Kano in the tone he uses when he thinks no one is listening. You hear the small snick of the clipper. Kano makes a sound of profound indignation and then settles.

You think about the past few months.

He is getting better.

You had hoped for this. You had not let yourself expect it. And now here it is. Not announced, not explained, just present, the way he is present, in a drawer full of carefully labelled tea on a Tuesday afternoon.

You take two ginger peach sachets. You fill the kettle. You stand there in the quiet kitchen while the cups steep and you let yourself feel it fully, the way you haven't allowed yourself to until now.

He is here. He is clipping the cat's claws on a Tuesday afternoon.

He is okay.

You pick up both cups and go back to the couch. You hand him his without a word and then arrange yourself across him in a way that makes room for neither the tea nor Kano nor any reasonable interpretation of personal space.

Hiromi intends to go back. He will return to the justice system. It is all he has worked so hard for.

But he is not in a rush anymore.

The world has held its breath these past few months. Or perhaps he has. It amounts to the same thing.

He has had time, these days. A strange and unfamiliar quantity that he has been learning, slowly, to use without guilt. Time to take half-empty midday trains to grocery stores. To visit bookstores and stay as long as he likes. To try new cafes and bakeries. Reading without a deadline waiting on the other side of it.

Time, most recently, to plant grape tomatoes in the backyard garden. The ones you mentioned liking, Hiromi noticed (of course he did) and ordered the seeds the following Tuesday.

They are coming in well. He checks them in the mornings now.

His steps are lighter than they have been in years. He is not sure when this happened exactly. He suspects it was gradual, the way most important things are.

Today he is carrying Kano to the local thrift store to find a bookshelf for the basement.

She is draped over his forearm with the sovereign composure of a cat who has decided this is her preferred mode of transport and expects it to continue indefinitely.

The elderly man at the counter smiles when they come in. At Hiromi first, then at Kano. He reaches out to pet her and risks losing fingers for it.

Hiromi walks the aisles.

He is not a fan of the smell, the particular mustiness of accumulated time but there are ways to address that. Airing. Beeswax. He has done it before with the coat rack in the hallway, which came from a place not unlike this one and now stands in the entrance.

Then, from the corner of his eye...a nightstand.

He stops. He knows the quality of the wood just by looking, the weight of it evident in the way it sits, made by someone who knew what they were doing and intended it to last.

He crouches to look at the underside, Kano shifting on his arm with mild complaint. The joinery is clean. The drawer slides smoothly despite the years.

He stands up. He tucks Kano more securely against his chest. "This one," he tells her, as though she has been part of the deliberation, which in some capacity she has.

Kano looks at the nightstand. She looks away. This is, he has learned, her version of approval.

He carries it to the counter under one arm, Kano under the other. The elderly man raises his eyebrows at the logistics.

Outside the afternoon is mild and bright and going nowhere in particular. He has no deadlines. No hearings. Nowhere to be until you come home.

The grape tomatoes need checking when he gets back.

On multiple occasions he has side-eyed your One Piece volumes with the particular undeserved ire. You suspect he will pass out in shock if he were to see your actual bookshelf. You have considered, on more than one occasion, photographing it and leaving the image where he will find it. You have not done this. Yet.

The prick himself prefers quality literature only. Reading snore-fests, the likes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and even non-fiction during the most horrid of days. You once watched him read a book about the history of civil procedural law for forty minutes with a pleasant smile. Almost. You think about this sometimes. Against your will.

One such evening, tired from your gallery shift, you board the train with your latest purchase, The Goblin Emperor, which you have been looking forward to all week...and he is not there.

This is fine. This is a perfectly normal and unremarkable thing.

You open The Goblin Emperor. You read the first page. You read it again. You look up.

You put The Goblin Emperor away.

This is, you tell yourself, because you are tired. Gallery shifts do that. Your feet hurt and your eyes hurt and you are simply not in the reading mood, which has nothing to do with the empty seat and everything to do with being tired, and you put your headphones in and look out the window and that is that.

It does not feel right to read without rubbing it in his face. You will not examine this further.

Instead you imagine him. It is a very good use of your commute. He is, in your imagination, in a bougie cafe somewhere with excellent lighting, reading over a single espresso. Or he is in his minimal high-rise penthouse, because he absolutely lives in a high-rise, you are certain of this, you have no evidence and require none. Or he is in a glass office somewhere, highlighting one-liners in the margins of Nietzsche for future use in evil monologues.

You have a wild imagination.

The train reaches your stop. You get off. The Goblin Emperor stays in your bag, unread, which is his fault entirely and you will be telling him so on Thursday.

The train smells of sweat and humid summer heat. Hiromi is reading.

He is three pages from the end of a chapter and the argument in it is finally arriving at something and he would like.

Except you are in front of him. Sniffling. Wiping tears that are at this point falling directly onto the pages of your paperback.

Hiromi looks at you over the top of his book. He looks back at his page. He reads the same sentence three times.

"No, Kaladin," you sniffle, putting the brick of a book away as you stare up at the ceiling, tears flowing freely and without apparent embarrassment down your cheeks.

Then you are looking at him. Hiromi becomes suddenly aware of how long he has been staring at you.

He cannot entirely help it. The wet tear tracks glisten on your cheeks in the yellow train light, and the hurried way you wipe them with the sleeve of your hoodie rather than, for instance, a tissue. This he finds deeply unhygienic and somewhat baffling in equal measure.

He returns to his book.

"He cannot die." Your voice reaches him above the noise of the train. "Four books. Four books, and now...no."

This is the first real sentence you have ever said to him. He finds this, in some distant unexamined way, appropriate.

"He's had such a sad life. My man needs a reprieve. Seriously, what is wrong with authors? Why do they love making me cry?"

You say this to the train car at large. The train car does not respond.

Then you unceremoniously drop into the seat beside him. The seat is not large. Your shoulder settles against his and you do not appear to notice and Hiromi turns a page without reading a word of it.

"Do people die in your books?" you ask, with the tone of someone making perfectly reasonable small talk, as though you know even an inkling about him.

He should not answer.

"Only spiritual death," he says. "Mostly."

The first book he leaves you is The Catcher in the Rye.

Not given. Placed on the seat beside you one Thursday evening with no ceremony and no explanation, his bookmark still in it, his annotations cramped and precise in the margins in a hand that you will come to recognize as his. You pick it up. You look at him. He is already reading his next book.

You read it in three days.

It leaves you uneasy in a way you cannot immediately name. Listening to emo music on the commute home, staring at the middle distance, wishing you could climb into the pages and give Holden Caulfield a bloody damn hug and also possibly shake him by the shoulders.

"What the fuck," you say, handing it back. "How can you be normal about this?"

He takes it without looking up. "Caulfield is not meant to be comfortable."

In retaliation, you leave him your copy of Death Note.

You expect dismissal. You are prepared for condescension. You are braced for it.

He reads all twelve volumes in a week.

"Truly intriguing analysis of the justice system," he says, handing them back. His tabs are inside. Color coded. He has tabbed a Death Note manga with color coded tabs. You take them back in silence because there is nothing to say to this.

"Light Yagami," he continues, "makes the same error every idealist makes. He believes that sufficient conviction exempts him from accountability."

"He's also just a teenager," you offer.

"He is a cautionary tale."

You look at the tab. It is green. You do not know what green means in his system and you are not going to ask.

Did you both miss your stops? Yes. Regularly. With increasing frequency and decreasing acknowledgement.

Was that followed by dinner? Not quite.

Okay. Maybe. Once. The ramen place that neither of you planned and both of you stayed for, talking about Raskolnikov for forty minutes over empty bowls while the staff very pointedly stacked chairs around you.

How do you know he does indeed live in a high-rise? That is nobody's business.

Has Hiromi debated the politics of the Fae High Courts from ACOTAR with you at length and with great seriousness? Yes.

This requires context.

You left it as a joke. A deliberate provocation, tucked under his copy of The Brothers Karamazov one Tuesday. You expected him to leave it back unread. You expected, at most, the look.

He read it. He read all of them.

"The Night Court," he says on Thursday, with the gravity of a man delivering closing arguments, "operates as an benevolent autocracy dressed in the language of meritocracy. Rhysand's governance is fundamentally-"

"I need you to know," you say, "that I did not expect this."

"You recommended it."

"As a joke."

"It has genuine political complexity."

"It has a lot of smut."

"I am capable of reading past smut."

You stare at him. He straightens his jacket. You will think about this conversation for the rest of the week.

He had you read Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy to atone.

This is how you built it. The proud mahogany bookshelf that now stands brimming in your shared home.

It is simple. Mediocre at best for critics.

But Hiromi cannot help but lose himself in it.

He has been standing in front of it for longer than he intended. You are somewhere behind him, moving around the studio. The sounds are familiar.

The meadow does not ask anything of him. It simply is. Grass and weeds and sky, everything slightly more golden than it has any right to be. The world is beautiful from your sight. It is a soft, gentle place where fairies walk barefoot on dew.

It is worth saving. Worth protecting.

It fills Hiromi with unease and comfort at once. It simply isn't fair.

"Like it?" You wrap your arms around him from behind, your sleeves smudged with paint, your chin finding the curve of his shoulder. You smell of varnish and the bitterness of your coffee. "It will look great in your apartment's entrance."

He looks at the painting. He looks at the meadow. He thinks about his apartment's entrance, the bare wall, the coat hook.

"No," he protests in alarm. "Keep it here."

You lift your head. "Hiromi i-"

"Here." He does not elaborate. He is not sure he could without saying more than he intends to. He cannot fathom coming to detest this painting in the cold rooms of his apartment.

He does not want to return. Not to the empty rooms. Not to the office, the papers, the grey world of right and wrong.

His eyes are trained on the screen. Dry and aching. When you barge in with a picnic basket at 10pm on a winter night. Snow still caught in your hair. Cheeks bitten red by the cold.

"Dinner's ready, honey," you smile and peck his lips before settling down to lay out the spread. Lasagna, soft garlic bread, soup, all placed carefully on the table next to his consultation couches. You had packed it all. Wrapped each container. Carried it up three flights of stairs in the cold.

"Come eat." Your palm wraps around his wrist. It's all warm. Impossibly so, for someone who just walked in from winter.

"Did you speed again? I swear we just got winter tires for your car." He follows you, papers already forgotten.

"I did not speed willingly, honey," you grin impishly. "The ice on the streets made it practically impossible to be a normal driver."

He gives you a look. You give him one back. You win, as you always do.

He eats. You eat. The office is quiet in a way it never is during the day. No phones, no footsteps in the hall, no one needing anything from anyone. He is almost relaxed. He had forgotten what that felt like.

"Can you please drive me home?" You speak after shoving a mouthful of lasagna in. Not looking at him. Your hands were shaking. Hiromi could see it now.

Of course they were. You were afraid. Driving in bad weather did that to you. One too many family members lost to snowstorms and crashes did that to a person.

He sets his fork down. You had driven in a snowstorm. For lasagna. For him. "Yes," he says. Simply. No lecture about calling ahead. No remark about the weather app that exists on your phone for exactly this reason.

You look up. Something in you loosens . You nod once, and go back to your lasagna, and he goes back to his soup, and outside the snow keeps falling, indifferent and quiet.

He does not say you shouldn't have come.

You are actively choking on a bruschetta when Hiromi shows up.

It is not a dignified choke. It is the hand to chest, eyes watering, wine glass thrust blindly toward the nearest flat surface. The woman beside you takes a polite step away. You do not blame her.

"What the hell," you pant, clearing your throat. "You said you couldn't make it." You wrap your arm around his, looking around to see if anyone else had witnessed you almost die at your friend's exhibition.

"Things cleared up," Hiromi replies, already picking up a glass of wine. "And the train was right on time."

Despite almost dying, you find yourself smiling. "Well that is just perfect. Come, there is something in room three that looks just like you."

It is a ceramic reproduction of the Screaming Man. You look at him laughing breathlessly, very much pleased with your own joke.

You stand beside it. You look at Hiromi. You look at the ceramic. Then burst into another peal of laughter at his exasperation.

What you do not anticipate is him retaliating.

Room four. You are mid-sentence about a bronze abstract when Hiromi stops walking. Small painting on the adjacent wall — a round little owl, wings flung wide, eyes enormous and delighted, looking thrilled to simply exist. He looks at it. He looks at you. He says nothing.

"Don't," you say.

"I was going to say," he replies, with complete composure, "that Robin has a very distinctive motif."

You look around. There is another owl tucked into the corner of the same room. Small, round, easy to miss. You had walked straight past it.

"She never mentioned owls," you say.

"Perhaps she thought you would recognise yourself."

You point at him. He takes a sip of wine.

By the time Robin finds you at the end of the evening, coat already on, feet clearly aching, you have found eight owls between you. You are having the best evening you have had in a very long time.

"Out," Robin says. She kisses your cheek, shakes Hiromi's hand, tells him it's good he came.

Outside the air is sharp and clean. The street is quiet.

"You changed your suit," you notice, as the cool breeze wakens you from the lull of indulgent wine.

Not his work suit. This one fits better. He had gone home first. Changed. Then gotten back on the train.

He does not answer. He looks ahead at the street, hands in his pockets.