Chapter Text
Suguru Geto lounged as if the sofa had been upholstered to flatter the specific angles of his spine.
The Gojo drawing room wore its palette like an oath—blue walls a shade colder than a morning lake, white cornices crowded with frosted cherubs, silver leaf glimmering wherever a craftsman had wished to be remembered. Everything gleamed with that curated purity the old families favored. Less a room than a credential.
He approved. Rooms like this trained people to be grateful. Gratitude softened the neck.
Above him, a chandelier flung powdered daylight around the ceiling. Cut crystal—excellent cut, if no longer fashionable— hung with enough prisms to convince the unwary they were diamonds. Suguru counted the pendants anyway. Not because it mattered. Because numbers did what people could not: they stayed where you put them. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty—
The glint at the corner of his eye caught a gilt-framed mirror with two tiny nicks in its molding, the kind of careless knife-marks a gilder would make when no one was watching. Imperfection, haloed by excess. Comforting.
A console beneath the mirror displayed a procession of porcelain tea canisters, arrayed like civil diplomats in blue-and-white enamel: tiny cranes, waves, a silver-knobbed lid on each. Assam. Jasmine. Keemun. And a trendy interloper: Rooibos, politely labeled redbush in a hand that wanted you to notice its restraint. The world had decided red tea was charming this season. The Gojo household, which decided most things, had agreed.
Rooibos in a house of blue and white. A blush in a room that scorned cheeks.
Suguru tipped his head, studying the tin as if it might confess. He wondered how the red would look spilled across a tablecloth. Not from malice; from professional curiosity. Color was the most honest thing at a crime scene.
The mantel clock watched him with a Roman face. He had been waiting twenty-seven minutes. Waiting never annoyed him. It accrued value. The person still sitting when you returned was the person you were forced to return to.
The double doors sighed, precisely rehearsed, and admitted a maid balancing a tray of porcelain so luminous he could see the pale ghost of his fingers reflected in its curve. Nineteen, perhaps twenty, with neat hands and a stubborn curl that had outwitted her pins. Her apron bore a small silver-stitched white rose—the house crest, humbly executed.
“Mr. Geto,” she said, and dipped a curtsey so exact you could measure the angle with imported rulers. “Your tea.”
“Then today will not be wholly tragic,” he said, letting the words purr. He adjusted against the velvet and made room for delight. “I’m told the house keeps admirable standards.”
Pride lit her face. “We do try, sir. The Young Master says you are to be offered the very best.”
“He declares with enviable confidence?” Suguru slid upright and found the precise amount of attention that makes a servant feel seen without feeling summoned. “Your name?”
“Nao.”
“Nao,” he repeated, giving the syllable a polish. “Would you indulge me in a small rebellion? I’ve a superstition about pouring my own first cup.”
She brightened at once, as all sensible people did at the prospect of a gentle rule broken in a way that could not splash. “Of course, sir.”
She set the tray. White pot, delicate blue flowers, silver rim; two cups nested on their saucers like little moons. Steam unfurled and the air softened with a honeyed, nutty warmth. Rooibos. Domesticity cosplaying as fashion.
He took the pot. The stream left the spout in a clean line and widened in the cup to a garnet sheen, as if the room had learned to bleed politely. He watched the color settle. It was attractive, in the frivolous way of seasonal things.
“Sugar?” Nao offered, lifting a small silver bowl where neat cubes lay like proper bones.
“I never refuse generosity,” he said, and had the pleasure of seeing her ears pinken. She placed two on his saucer, steady as a nurse.
“The Young Master takes three,” she added in a whisper, as if sharing a felony.
“Does he.” Suguru raised the cup, inhaled carefully. The tea was gentle, sweet by nature, agreeable. “And he drinks this each morning, does he?”
“When he can,” Nao said. “Before breakfast with the family. He’s—” She searched for a safe adjective, then smiled with genuine fondness. “He’s kinder in the mornings.”
Kinder before the performance began. Suguru hid the thought in his sip. “Then I shall be a morning man for his sake.”
Her smile tucked itself away, pleased to have been let out at all. He impressed two facts into her mind with the lightness of a fingertip—he’s polite; he sees you—then left them there to breed.
“How long have you served in this house, Nao?”
“Since thirteen.” The satisfaction of I belong here sat straight in her shoulders.
“Then you are the backbone,” he said gravely, and the word made her stand a fraction taller because that was how words worked on people. They fastened things.
The door sighed again. A tall man in white gloves and a neutral expression glided in, a geometry problem disguised as a butler. Mr. Finch, by the look—every house had one; this was simply the best version.
“Sir,” Finch said, which somehow contained I have cataloged all your faults and found them aesthetically pleasing. “Lady Aoi will receive you. The Young Master follows presently.”
Suguru set the cup down with a click no louder than a thought. “Then we must not keep winter waiting.”
Nao blinked. Finch did not. He led Suguru by an economy of gestures through a connecting door into a smaller salon that only deepened the house’s chromatic faith: blue carpet quiet as deep water, white paneling so crisp it made breath feel untidy, silver sconces with flames domesticated into narrow obedience. Portraits in oval frames repeated a particular family geometry—the cheekbones, the mouths, and above all the eyes, that refined and slightly absurd blue.
“Mr. Geto,” said Lady Aoi Gojo, from a chair that had decided it was a throne.
She wore white with the threatening serenity of a glacier; silver glinted where it would be most instructive; a net of pearls tamed hair that probably did not require taming. The ring on her index finger could have purchased a village and taught it Latin.
He bowed as if by error an inch shallower than etiquette required—the trick was to imply intimacy without presuming it. Her mouth was mastered; the eyes, briefly, were not. People always enjoyed being understood when they had intended to be intimidating. It made the intimidation feel more bespoke.
“Lady Aoi,” he said. “Thank you for permitting a stranger to pollute your air.”
“It is not winter,” she said.
“Then you have achieved it in defiance of the calendar.” He allowed a glance over the whiteness, the chill. “Remarkable control.”
Aoi lifted one hand; pearls chimed. “You have a way with flattery that threatens to be useful.”
“I prefer to be useful,” he said warmly. “Flattery is for amateurs.”
“Amateurs can be charming.” She did not extend her hand. This was the part where she shook the new toy to see if it rattled. “My nephew has been sole heir since birth. He is—”
“Talkative,” Suguru said gently. “Beloved. In need of someone who will not mistake laughter for permission.”
A tiny pause. Aoi leaned, almost imperceptibly, forward. “You presume quickly.”
“I prepare quickly,” he said, with the humility that maddened and soothed. “The difference is in the temperature.”
“You speak in weather,” she remarked.
“Only in homes that insist on climate.” He let his mouth bare a sliver of pleasant teeth. He was, objectively, very beautiful. It was not the most interesting thing about him. It was the most immediately useful.
“Very well.” She lifted her hand at last. He took it, kissed her knuckles with reverent accuracy, rose with theatrical modesty. She watched his face as a reader watches the last line for treachery. “Mr. Geto. You will find our household is governed by ritual. We prefer blue at table. We consider dawn to begin at the first bell, not the light. We entertain rumor as a guest and dismiss it before supper.”
“Rituals are the furniture of a proper life,” he said. “One leans on them, one does not sit too hard.”
“And you—do you sit too hard?”
“Not until someone invites me.”
Her smile was not visible on her mouth. It occurred at the edges of the room. “You have done this before.”
“Been received by formidable women? Frequently.”
Aoi folded her hands, amused in the bone. “And what rattles, when you are shaken?”
“I don’t rattle,” Suguru said pleasantly. “I hum.”
A slight crack in the iceberg; a bell-like laugh, brief and expensive. “See that you do not take up too much room humming. The house must breathe.”
“It will breathe easier with me in it.”
He meant the line as theater. He knew the danger was that it might become true.
The door unlatched. The air changed. Not because anyone hushed; because attention, being an obedient animal, turned its head. The house’s colors seemed to deepen in anticipation, blue settling into its richest note, white sharpening like a clean blade, silver deciding it had opinions about light.
Satoru Gojo came in sideways to ceremony, as if he had been running and remembered at the threshold to stroll. He wore white without apology and blue like weather; the coat was cut within an inch of its sanity, a narrow line of silver at the lapel insisting on bloodline.
His hair—white as sifted sugar, artfully undisciplined—had been bullied into a style that promised it would misbehave at the first opportunity. The paintings in the corridor had been practice sketches for the eyes; the real ones were ungovernable, an endless cerulean that any lesser man would have gotten lost in.
He was—there was no point pretending otherwise—gorgeous. It was an unfair sort of gorgeous, the kind that looked like a rumor that had learned to be true.
“You,” Satoru announced, pointing a finger at Suguru with the spontaneity of a child and the grace of a trained swordsman. “Are early.”
“I am on time,” Suguru said, with the faintest bow not offered to Lady Aoi. The insolence was gentle; the room approved.
Satoru looked at Mr. Finch in open betrayal. Finch did not blink. “He is on time, Young Master.”
“Then the clock is early,” Satoru concluded, with the triumphant logic of a tyrant and the grin of a saint. He pivoted to Lady Aoi. “Aunt. You look like the first frost.”
“You are dripping on my summer,” Aoi replied without moving anything except the weather.
“It is my summer,” he retorted, then caught himself, grimaced, and rolled his shoulders with the theatricality of a man aware of his own audience. He turned again to Suguru so quickly the air struggled to keep up. The grin sharpened into something almost shy. “You’re very handsome,” he blurted, like a boy who had seen a comet and did not intend to be sensible about it.
Suguru elected not to laugh. He allowed the line to land and stepped closer. “You are very generous.”
“I am accurate,” Satoru corrected, and thrust out his hand with a flare of bravado a fraction too quick, as if temper had moved before grace. His palm was warm. His grip said I win while his pulse said please. He was obnoxious in the particular way of people who cannot help but be big in a room and have never been permitted to be small. It was… endearing. It would be useful.
Suguru lifted Satoru’s hand and brushed his lips across the knuckles, not lingering, just enough to make the skin remember. He looked up last. Satoru’s pupils kicked wider, then steadied into performance.
“Mr. Geto,” he said, and the honorific balanced for a moment like a tray he intended to set down. “Welcome to—” he glanced around, flung his free hand at the room, at the house, at the future— “to our home.”
How considerate, to include him in the pronoun. How reckless. How romantic.
“Thank you,” Suguru replied, as if gratitude were a language he spoke with native fluency. “It is a pleasure to finally meet its master.”
“Don’t call me that,” Satoru said instantly, temper flickering like the wick of a candle someone had breathed on. “I have no mastery at all. Ask anyone.” He rotated, including Lady Aoi, Mr. Finch, the chandelier, the moral law, in a single sardonic circle. “They spend all day telling me what to do.”
“Only because you insist on doing the opposite,” Lady Aoi observed, a snowflake with claws.
“Exactly,” Satoru beamed, unrepentant. The heat of him—bright, loud, eager—should have been exhausting. Instead it made the room feel less like a credential, more like a possibility. He reached for the tea tray, hesitated, remembered he was the sort of person others served, refused to remember it, and poured with competent hands. Three sugar cubes dropped—plink, plink, plink—with the self-assurance of habits practiced in defiance. He glanced at Suguru, chin tipped. “I am told this is vulgar.”
“It is,” Suguru agreed, and let the smallest of smiles emerge. “So is living.”
Satoru barked a laugh, genuine and delighted, and then colored—real, pink, human—because genuine delight had snuck past his guards. The combination was unfairly attractive.
“Do you hear that, Aunt?” he said, triumphant as a boy with a frog in his pocket. “He agrees with me. We shall be dreadful.”
“You will be punctual,” Aoi said. “The chapel is ready.”
“Let it wait,” Satoru snapped, temper flaring once more with the speed of sugar catching fire. He saw Nao hovering anxiously by the door—saw her; it mattered—and softened immediately. “For five minutes,” he amended, contrite and unapologetic at once. “It can compose itself.”
Nao’s hands, which had been steady, relaxed another fraction. People did that around him. Suguru filed the fact where he kept his better knives.
Satoru took a sip, made a contented sound too unguarded to be strategic, and set the cup down un-drunk beyond the first taste. His fingers smoothed an already-perfect napkin into an even more perfect geometry. The trivial domesticity of it struck Suguru as louder than everything else. A man who tamed linen when nothing else obeyed.
“Will you—” Satoru began, then aborted, then tried again, braver. “Would you like to see something? Before we are drowned in cousins and breathless second aunts?”
“It would be my honor,” Suguru said, and meant: I will see whatever you want me to see, and the rest besides.
Lady Aoi made a noise like a winter branch considering whether to bear weight. Mr. Finch’s neutrality deepened to the color of pewter. Satoru ignored both with a grace that must have been learned in a nursery full of rules.
“Come,” he said, and the word contained invitation as well as command.
He strode for the side door and remembered, at the threshold, to turn and offer his arm. The awareness of gesture—theater trained into muscle—was as attractive as the arm itself. Suguru took it. Heat through fine cloth. It registered as truth. Then it became data.
As they crossed the threshold, the house gathered itself around them in blue and white and silver, a regiment in dress parade. The chandeliers raised their thousand glass eyes. The carpet gave, the way old money gives: not generously; inevitably. On a side console, the porcelain canisters kept their tranquil watch. The rooibos label caught a blade of light and glowed as if it found the whole performance amusing.
“Tell me something true,” Satoru said suddenly, quick mouth outrunning prudent mind. “Before we marry.”
Suguru selected from his private shelf of polished truths. “I am very good at remembering what people love,” he said. “And in giving it to them.”
Satoru’s eyes—those extravagant, inconvenient eyes—cut sideways as if consultative. For once he did not add laughter like sugar to the rim. “Then I hope you remember me,” he said.
The line was devastating because he believed it. Because he wanted it like air. Because he was, beneath the noise and the temper and the riches, starved. Of gentleness. Of permission. Of belonging that did not arrive with a ledger.
Suguru, who remembered everything, smiled as if the request were modest. “I will do my best.”
“Do better,” Satoru said, and it was almost a plea.
From somewhere behind, the chapel bell tested its throat with a single courteous chime. The room inhaled; the day changed key.
Satoru squared himself to it like a man preparing for rain. “All right,” he said brightly, obnoxiously, irresistibly. “Let us be excellent.”
He led; Suguru followed; the door admitted them like a mouth.
━─━────༺༻────━─━
The corridor Satoru chose to parade him down had been engineered to flatter him. The portraits—earls, admirals, one sulking bishop—hung a fraction lower than fashion, as if compelled by gravity’s politeness. At Satoru’s height. A small domestic scandal made permanent in blue silk matting and silver frames.
“Grandmother calls it vandalism,” Satoru announced, half-proud, half-boy. “I call it finally seeing eye to eye with dead men.”
“And do they blink?” Suguru asked.
“Only when Aunt Aoi visits.” He tossed the line over his shoulder like a bright scarf, then paused before a young ancestor whose painter had loved tragedy more than truth. “I like him. He looks as if he would have run away if he’d been allowed legs.”
“You have legs,” Suguru said.
“Too many opinions are nailed to them. Come, there’s a window I like to pretend I own.”
The window was a narrow oriel at the end of a blue runner—glass warped just enough to liquefy the city beyond into a pleasing watercolor. The light there was the pallor of peeled apples. Satoru leaned into it as if windows could be persuaded to sympathize.
“It’s the only place in the house where the air doesn’t taste rehearsed,” he said, and then, aware he had said too much, corrected his mouth with mischief. “Also it makes my hair look expensive.”
“It already does,” Suguru said, because it did and because accuracy was as effective as flattery when dispensed like medicine. “You look ruinously curated.”
“Good. Ruin is my favorite accessory.” He grinned at the glass, at himself in it, at Suguru’s reflection caught beside his shoulder. For a moment he was frankly, shamelessly pleased to be looked at by a man he found beautiful. The pleasure hit like sun on snow.
A cough upholstered in respect announced Mr. Finch at a tactical distance. “Young Master. The chapel inquires after your intentions.”
“To marry,” Satoru said, and rolled his eyes heavenward with such extravagant piety the cherubs on the cornice nearly blushed. “In five minutes. Tell them to begin tasting their patience.”
Finch’s neutrality did not blur. “The organist has been tasting for ten.” He angled his chin toward Suguru with a subtlety that could dust furniture. “Sir.”
“Mr. Finch,” Suguru returned, warmer than necessary because warmth was a leash that did not look like one. “May I confess a theft? I am minded to steal ten more minutes.”
“See that you return them with interest,” Finch said, and retreated at the speed of leaf-fall.
Satoru, who had just won an extra five minutes because someone else had asked for ten, threw Suguru a look of delighted conspiracy.
“You’re very good at people,” he said.
“They’re all I study.”
“Then diagnose me.”
“Loud,” Suguru replied, watching the way Satoru’s smile tightened a fraction. “Hot-tempered. Very charming. Skilled at appearing less intelligent than you are when the room becomes dangerous, because foolishness relaxes jailers.”
Satoru stared, then chose to laugh instead of flinch. It earned him a very small, very private respect. “I am intelligent,” he said, as if declaring a property line. “It’s only impolite to demonstrate it before luncheon.”
“Then we are safe until noon,” Suguru said smoothly.
A blue door—there was no other kind—opened to admit Nao as if she had been summoned by compliment alone. She had a boutonnière pinned to velvet, a white rose no bigger than a thumb joint with a silver-threaded ribbon to tether it to a lapel. Behind her trailed a second maid with the secretarial terror of one who has already misplaced two handkerchiefs and refuses to misplace a third.
“Mr. Geto,” Nao said, braver now. “Young Master. Lady Aoi requests—”
“—that my collar resemble a plan and my boutonnière resemble a threat,” Satoru finished, sighing theatrically. “Bring your needles, executioners.”
“Give it to me,” Suguru said, because he knew a stage when it asked for blocking. Nao surrendered the rose. Its petals were cold as porcelain. He stepped closer to Satoru—close enough to feel the body-heat that expensive wool preserved and expensive soap failed to disguise—and set the stem to silk. His fingers were careful. He had always been careful. About money. About lies. About touch.
Satoru held very still. It was the stillness of a skittish animal being brave. Up close, the face was obscene in its architecture—the sharp mouth, the ridiculous eyes, the cheekbones built for light. He smelled faintly of citrus and something like sugar. The pulse at his throat beat against the ribbon’s silver.
“Too high,” Satoru said quietly. “I like it lower.”
“I was taught to put it where it will be seen first.” Suguru shifted it a whisper downward. The petal brushed his knuckle. Soft. Annoyingly soft. “But preferences are the only real laws.”
“Exactly.” Satoru’s eyes were on Suguru’s face, not the rose, as if trying to memorize an answer key. “Do you always know what people like?”
“I make it my business.”
“And what do you like?” The question was bright and careless and not careless at all.
“Profits,” Suguru said blandly. “And shoes that do not squeak on marble.”
Satoru’s mouth did something between a grimace and a smile. “Coward.”
“I prefer the term practical.” He fastened the pin with a movement so clean it left no injury behind. The rose sat obediently against the lapel, a small white lie. “There.”
“You make even flowers behave,” Satoru murmured. “Dangerous.”
“Expedient.” Suguru stepped back. The air cooled a degree, which he did not register.
Nao offered a tiny paper packet. “Sugar, Young Master?”
“For the walk?” Satoru brightened in instantaneous, boyish greed. “Yes, I’m nervous; I need fuel.”
“I was informed you were powered entirely by vanity,” Suguru said.
“Both,” Satoru said cheerfully, and tipped two cubes into his palm. He popped one into his mouth with the pietistic seriousness of a sacrament. The sugar made a brief architecture under his cheek. He sucked it down, eyes fluttering shut, then opened them with a shiver that was almost indecent. “I adore absurd things.”
“Fortunately,” Suguru said. “So does your household.”
Nao’s gaze flicked between them, alight with relief at how grown men could be managed by sugar and praise. “The chapel doors will open on the quarter, sir,” she reminded, the precise steward again. “Lady Aoi says the silver candles have been lit.”
“Blue, white, and silver,” Satoru muttered. “If I wear red socks, do you think I’ll be disinherited on the spot?”
“They will simply deny seeing your ankles,” Suguru said. “It’s a polite house.”
Satoru laughed, then caught the sound in his teeth as if it might run away. He tugged his cuff, discovered nothing wrong with it, and tugged again. It occurred to Suguru that the temper—that quick flare he threw at anything that threatened to pen him in—was not a flint struck at others so much as at the walls. He sparked to mark where the cage was.
“Walk with me,” Satoru said, suddenly, as if in danger of asking for something else and choosing movement instead. “I need to practice not tripping over the rest of my life.”
They took the long way, which is to say the wrong way with intention. The staff parted without suspicion. Why should they suspect? The new groom was courteous and beautiful and knew how to leave furniture untroubled and servants seen. He radiated good sense in the way of men who have learned it as a second language.
“Left foot first,” Suguru said amiably, because men with swords liked rules disguised as jokes. “Then right. Alternate until applause. If anyone weeps, I accept full responsibility.”
“Terrible,” Satoru said, delighted. “Say it again.”
“Left foot first. Then right.”
He did not look at the mouth that repeated the rhythm under its breath. He did not need to.
They passed the preserved white rose in its bell jar—the one Satoru had confessed to liking because it did not live. The glass warped their reflections into two men with rain for faces. Satoru touched the bell with one knuckle; it chimed a tiny, contained note.
“Do you believe in luck?” he asked.
“I believe in arrangement,” Suguru said. “Luck is what people call competence they did not witness.”
“That sounds like luck’s enemy speaking.”
“Enemies are merely honest critics.”
Satoru considered that with genuine attention, as if turning a coin to inspect its seam. “Then—how will you arrange today?”
“I will be convincing,” Suguru said. “You will be adored. The room will forgive us both for everything.”
“And after?” Satoru asked. His voice was very light. The question was very not.
“After?” Suguru echoed, giving the word a satin finish and no content. “We will be congratulated in every register. We will be fed.”
“And after that?”
“Left foot first,” he said softly. “Then right.”
A muscle jumped in Satoru’s jaw—temper arriving, recognizing it could not claim this field, and consenting to sulk elsewhere. “You’re insufferable,” he informed him.
“I am useful,” Suguru corrected.
“Today I require both.”
A blue velvet rope barred a short passage to the antechamber behind the chapel. Mr. Finch lifted it with the gravitas of a drawbridge. A fringe of silver trembled. Someone on the far side of the door was tuning a violin; someone else was rehearsing sincerity. The air smelled faintly of beeswax and lilies—that expensive funeral of a scent people insisted on for joy.
“In here,” Finch said. “Two minutes.”
“Treason,” Satoru muttered, and then, paradoxically obedient, ducked into the antechamber.
It was small and very white, with a mirror that forgave no one. A narrow table had been set with a traveling tea service—white, of course, with a blue thread at the rim and a handle the shape of ridiculousness. The pot breathed steam; someone, somewhere, had remembered what Satoru needed when cornered. Nao’s competence again, no doubt.
“Tea?” Suguru asked, because rituals were ropes and men liked to be tied with silk. He poured without waiting for permission. Rooibos ran into the cup like a rumor spreading. He set it in Satoru’s hands. The skin-to-porcelain exchange reset something in the shoulders.
“Three,” Satoru said automatically, and then, with sudden perverse courage: “No. Two.”
“Heroic.” Suguru dropped two cubes, listened to their small drowning. Satoru took a sip and made a face he could not commit to.
“Still sweet,” he said.
“It is sweet by nature.”
He set it down and did not drink again. There are some mornings that cannot be sweetened. Even by nature.
“Tell me a lie,” Satoru said abruptly, eyes on the mirror, on himself as the world would have him on display. Hot-tempered, yes, but also earnest in ways that would get him eaten if he picked the wrong table. “A good one.”
“We are the first men to think we are the first men,” Suguru said.
Satoru’s mouth curved, unhappily amused. “I said a good lie.”
“Then—” Suguru stepped behind him, to the side, precisely positioned so the mirror showed them aligned, as if habit had already moved them there. “—then this: my heart has never done this before.”
Satoru met his eyes in the glass. Something in him went quiet. Not silenced. Quiet as in listening. “That is almost cruel,” he said.
“It’s almost true,” Suguru replied, which was the same thing as a lie in the right lighting.
The door whispered. Lady Aoi slid in on a current of silver. The mirror approved of her; most mirrors did. She scanned Satoru, corrected his tie with a touch that would have broken any less expensive thread, and lifted his chin with one finger in a gesture both maternal and sovereign.
“Smile,” she said.
“I am,” Satoru said, and was.
Her gaze moved to Suguru. It softened, fractionally. “Mr. Geto,” she said, as if discovering a favorite piece of porcelain had been fired to the correct gloss. “You improve the air.”
“That is the only reason to be invited,” he said.
“Quite.” She stepped back. “We are ready.”
Mr. Finch’s voice, from the other side of the door, acquired the clerical quality of a man who had been baptizing grooms since before the concept of youth. “On my count. Three. Two—”
Satoru reached out as if to steady himself, then stopped inches short of Suguru’s sleeve. He did not touch. Politeness, or pride, or fear that contact would convert him to something he did not yet know the name for. He looked instead, hard and close and unamused, at the man he was about to make his anchor and his actor.
“Left foot first,” he said.
“Then right,” Suguru agreed.
“And if I trip?”
“I will be gravity,” Suguru said.
Satoru’s laugh escaped him in a single bright note and left the air sweeter than the tea. He turned to the door, to the performance, to the ocean of blue and white and silver waiting to be convinced. The temper—quick, hot—flashed one last time as he squared himself against expectation. Then the other Satoru—the romantic, badly hidden, badly trained, irrepressibly alive—took the stage of his own face.
“Ready,” he told Finch.
The latch lifted.
Sound swelled through the seam—a polite gasp, the tuning of applause, the first plucked strings. Satoru stepped forward, then stopped with comic timing, spun back, and, in the single most ruinous moment of the day, slid his thumb across Suguru’s lower lip as if erasing a nonexistent smudge.
“There,” he said, and smiled like a man who knew how to start rumors without words.
Suguru felt the touch like a sentence in a language he should not learn.
Then Satoru was gone into the narthex, into the blue-and-white hunger of the room, into the sugar-bell of his name. The door widened like a mouth deciding to eat its favorite meal first. Lady Aoi followed with the calm that had colonized centuries. Mr. Finch inclined, a hinge in human shape.
Suguru stood alone for the measure of a breath. The travel cup of red tea steamed faintly on the table, unsipped past the first taste. On the saucer, a smear of dissolved sugar glistened like a promise someone had already broken.
He adjusted his cuff, admired the moderation of his pulse, and smiled at his own reflection exactly as much as necessary.
Left foot first.
Then right.
He stepped into the waiting light.