Chapter Text
The rain drummed a steady, insistent rhythm against the awning of the convenience store as Akaashi Keiji stood just beneath it, phone pressed to his ear. His umbrella tilted against the wind, though the weather had already found its way in. Fine droplets clung to the shoulders of his coat. A few strands of dark hair had slipped loose and stuck to his forehead, damp and cool against his skin.
“It’s fine, Ukai-san,” Keiji said, his voice level, composed in the way it always became when someone else was apologizing too much. On the other end of the line, his manager coughed weakly, words crowded by embarrassment and fever.
“You really don’t have to do this.”
Keiji watched the street in front of him blur with passing umbrellas and bowed heads. Everyone moved quickly in weather like this. Eyes down. Minds elsewhere. “I don’t mind. The walk is good for me.”
Ukai made a soft, disbelieving sound. “You say that now.”
“The rain helps.” Keiji shifted his umbrella slightly as a gust of wind needled cold mist against his cheek. “No one is looking too closely. On clear days, someone always decides a phone camera is worth the risk.”
There was a pause. Then a tired laugh, quickly broken by another cough.
“You’re too calm about all this. Most people would send someone else.”
“Most people are not me,” Keiji said.
The answer came easily, dry and quiet, but not unkind. He had learned long ago that people often mistook restraint for ease. Calm was simpler for them to accept than weariness. It asked less of everyone.
“I’ll bring the order straight to the meeting,” he added. “Please go back to sleep.”
After one last round of weak apologies and reassurances, he slipped the phone into his coat pocket and stepped out from under the awning into Kyoto’s Saturday morning.
The city met him in shades of wet gray and softened color. Rainwater glossed the pavement until it looked lacquered. Reflections of signage and old storefronts rippled and broke beneath passing feet. Even in weather like this, Kyoto seemed to hold itself with an old kind of grace, as though it had long ago made peace with being watched.
Keiji followed the blue dot on his navigation app as it drew him away from the wider streets and into narrower ones. The polished fronts of boutiques and cafés gradually gave way to older facades, then quieter lanes where the city’s hum lowered into something more intimate. He walked without hurrying, umbrella balanced against one shoulder, mask in place, thick-framed glasses obscuring the lines of his face enough to dull recognition.
Disguise was often less about hiding completely and more about making people glance away fast enough.
It was working.
No one looked at him twice. No one slowed. No one whispered.
The anonymity settled over him slowly, like warmth returning to cold fingers. It should not have mattered as much as it did. But it did.
Then, as he passed the mouth of a side alley, something caught his attention.
A man stood just inside it, leaning back against the wall with an unlit cigarette resting between two fingers. At first glance, he seemed casual. On a second, he did not. The set of his shoulders was too deliberate. The stillness too aware. His gaze landed on Keiji and stayed there with the measured weight of someone who had already decided what he was looking at.
“You,” he called through the drizzle. “Here for the order?”
Keiji slowed. The umbrella tipped slightly as he turned his head.
The man was dressed in black, chef’s coat neat beneath a clean apron. Even from several steps away, Keiji could tell the fabric had been kept immaculate on purpose. Not a stain. Not a wrinkle left to chance. The effect was sharpened by the breadth of his frame. He looked strong in a practical way, the kind of strength built by repetition rather than display.
Gray eyes met Keiji’s.
Sharp. Cool. Alert.
Keiji had spent years training himself to take in details before other people had the chance to do the same to him. It had become instinct, a small private defense. Height. Posture. Hands. Voice. Expression. Where a person’s attention rested and where it slid away. This man did not slide away at all.
He was taller than Keiji by enough to be noticeable, broad through the shoulders, with a face that was handsome in a way that did not seem polished or curated. There was bluntness to it. Something unvarnished. The Kansai lilt in his voice only made the impression stronger.
Keiji adjusted the edge of his mask. “Yes.”
The man held his gaze for a beat longer, as if testing the answer for weakness, then jerked his chin toward the narrow passage between the buildings.
“This way. Try not to fall behind.”
Keiji followed.
Rain dripped from the edge of his umbrella and tapped softly onto the cobblestones. The alley smelled faintly of damp stone and cedar washed clean by the weather. Ahead of him, the chef walked with the easy certainty of someone who knew exactly how much space he occupied and had no need to apologize for any of it.
His tone had been rough. Borderline rude, if Keiji were being honest.
And yet the absence of effort in it felt almost startling.
There was no careful customer voice. No polished friendliness. No subtle strain of someone trying to decide whether they recognized him and how best to behave if they did. Just blunt instruction, offered without decoration.
Keiji found, to his own surprise, that he liked it.
There was a kind of relief in being treated as incidental. Temporary. Useful only insofar as he had come for a bag and would soon leave with it. No one was trying to flatter him. No one was trying to claim a piece of him with their attention.
For once, he was not being handled.
The side door opened, and they stepped inside.
Warmth wrapped around him at once, sudden enough to sting lightly at his rain-chilled skin. The air carried layers of scent that unfolded almost faster than he could sort them: simmering stock, steamed rice, fish meeting heat, soy, char, the faint mineral edge of wet metal. He had expected noise. A crush of shouting, clattering, frantic movement.
Instead, the kitchen breathed in rhythm.
Knives tapped against boards. Ladles moved through broth with soft, circular sounds. Oil hissed in bursts. The cooks spoke little, and yet their bodies seemed to answer one another without pause, each gesture anticipated before it became necessary. It was orderly without feeling rigid. Alive without chaos.
Keiji slowed despite himself, umbrella folded neatly at his side now, rainwater darkening the hem of his coat.
He had eaten in renowned restaurants in Tokyo, Paris, New York, Milan. He had been seated beneath flattering lighting and waited on with the kind of precision that bordered on choreography. But those experiences had always begun at the moment of presentation, when a dish arrived complete and beautiful and ready to be admired.
This was something else.
Here, beauty had not yet hardened into performance. It was still labor. Judgment. Practice. Heat. Here was the place where beauty had to earn itself.
His gaze moved over steel counters wiped to a shine, ceramic plates arranged in orderly rows, hands moving with exacting confidence over rice and fish and garnish. There was restraint in every part of it. Not austerity, exactly. Discipline. The kind that came from caring enough to repeat a motion until it became invisible.
He realized he had stopped walking only when the chef’s voice entered the space beside him.
“You’re starin’ like you just found religion.”
Keiji blinked.
Heat rose at once, faint but unmistakable, beneath the coolness still lingering in his skin from outside. He schooled his expression, but not quickly enough to stop the flush from reaching his cheeks.
“I doubt that,” he murmured.
The chef looked at him sidelong, amusement already building in the corner of his mouth.
Keiji let his gaze drift back to a sous-chef shaping nigiri. “Though I will admit,” he said, “it is distracting.”
“Distracting,” the man repeated, as if the word itself entertained him.
Keiji folded his umbrella a little tighter. “You all make it look simple. Which usually means it isn’t.”
For a moment, the chef said nothing.
Then his mouth twitched. “Most people just say it smells good.”
“It does smell good.” Keiji’s eyes followed the brush of soy over a slice of tuna, the measured pressure of fingertips against rice. “I just prefer understanding why something is good.”
The truth slipped out with more honesty than he had meant to offer. He felt it land between them, small and exposed.
Something in the man’s expression shifted. Not softened exactly. Focused.
“Do ya.” His accent curled warmly around the words. “So that’s why you were lookin’ like you wanted to memorize the place.”
Keiji let out a quiet breath through his nose. “Would that offend you?”
That earned him a low laugh, unforced and genuine. It moved through the kitchen more warmly than the hiss of steam.
“Come on,” the chef said, jerking his head toward a pair of polished wooden doors farther back. “You keep standin’ there like that and somebody’ll hand you an apron.”
Keiji followed him, though not before one final glance over his shoulder. Steam rose in disciplined white curls. A knife flashed silver under the lights, then disappeared back into motion. The room held him for a second longer than it should have.
The chef pushed open the door with one shoulder and held it there.
The bar beyond it was quieter, more intimate, and no less deliberate.
Warm light settled across lacquered wood and glass. Shelves of bottles caught amber reflections. The smell changed as soon as they entered, leaving behind the sharper heat of the kitchen for polished cedar, coffee beans, and something faintly sweet he could not place. If the kitchen had felt like a pulse, this felt like the space between beats. A place where sound lowered and attention narrowed.
The chef stepped behind the counter with the ease of someone crossing into familiar territory. He reached for a tin of beans and a grinder, draping a towel over one shoulder in the same motion.
Keiji took a seat at the bar, fingertips brushing the smooth wood. The surface was cool beneath them, perfectly clean. He was aware, suddenly, of the dampness in his clothes, the chill still trapped at the back of his neck, the slight ache in his hand from holding the umbrella too long.
“You’re waiting anyway,” the chef said. “Might as well have a cup. Unless you’re too fancy for decent coffee.”
Keiji looked up at that, and despite himself, his mouth curved.
“Not at all,” he said. “I think I’ll trust your judgment.”
“Trust, huh?” The man measured the beans with practiced ease. “That’s confidence.”
The grinder whirred to life, low and steady.
Keiji watched him work.
There was something quietly compelling about the way the man moved. Nothing wasted. Nothing ornamental. Even here, making something as simple as coffee, his focus was complete. Keiji had spent much of his life around people who performed competence almost as often as they performed charm. This felt different. Not displayed. Lived in.
He set his umbrella carefully against the bar and slipped out of his coat. The damp fabric brushed softly against the stool beside him. He folded it with habitual precision and laid it aside. Then came his scarf, dark and soft and expensive enough to invite assumptions he was too tired to correct. He unwound it slowly, feeling warmth reach the skin of his throat.
His glasses came next. He slid the oversized frames from the bridge of his nose, the world sharpening and opening a little as he tucked them into their case and set it on the bar.
Finally, his mask.
He slipped the loops free from behind his ears and laid it aside with the rest.
The sensation was so small and so immediate that it surprised him. The relief of cool fabric leaving his skin. The quiet vulnerability of being bare-faced in a room with only one other person. The absence of scrutiny where he had come to expect it.
For the first time that morning, he felt fully present inside his own body.
The grinder slowed to a stop.
“So,” the chef said, not turning around, “which rich bastard are you running errands for? Must be one hell of a boss to send you out in weather like this.”
Keiji blinked, then almost laughed.
The amusement rose from somewhere deeper than he expected. It had been a very long time since anyone looked straight at him and saw somebody ordinary first. Somebody useful. Somebody carrying out an errand because it needed doing.
It should have annoyed him. It did not.
Instead, something in his chest loosened.
He let the question linger a moment, eyes resting on the broad line of the chef’s back as he adjusted the machine.
There were easier ways to answer. A deflection. A joke. A smooth change of subject. Those came naturally to him. They always had. But something about the room made pretense feel unnecessarily loud. The rain at the windows. The bar’s warmth. The fact that this man had spoken to him with blunt indifference from the first moment and, in doing so, given him a kind of peace he had not realized he was missing.
“I suppose,” Keiji said at last, calm with the faintest edge of irony beneath it, “that would be me.”
Silence cut cleanly through the room.
The chef stilled with one hand on the machine and the other braced against the counter. Then he turned.
Recognition did not arrive gradually. It hit.
The half-smirk that had been sitting comfortably on his mouth vanished. His gray eyes widened, moving over Keiji’s face with open disbelief, tracing the features that had sold watches, suits, fragrances, whatever else his agency had put in front of him over the years. For one long beat, the man simply stared.
“You’ve gotta be joking.”
Keiji settled more comfortably against the stool and let himself have the smallest possible smile. “I’m not.”
The chef stared harder, as if that might somehow undo it.
Keiji watched realization move across his face in pieces. The mental backtracking. The remembered details clicking violently into place. Not an assistant. Not an errand boy. Not some anonymous underling sent to pick up lunch. Akaashi Keiji, seated in his bar with rain-damp hair and an unreadable expression.
The chef set the grinder down with a soft clink.
For a second, he said nothing at all.
Then, very quietly, “Well. Shit.”
He turned back to the machine before his expression could do anything more revealing. Keiji watched his shoulders rise and fall once, not quite a sigh, before his hands took over. Grounds tamped. Portafilter locked into place. The espresso machine exhaled, rich and dark into porcelain.
The motions were steady, but not as effortless as before. There was the slightest extra tension in them now.
Keiji should probably have looked away. Instead he found himself watching more closely.
Embarrassment sat plainly across the man’s back. Not because he had been rude, Keiji thought, though that was certainly part of it. Because he had misjudged the situation and had no graceful way to recover. There was something unexpectedly earnest in that discomfort. No attempt to charm himself out of it. No strategic smoothness. Just a man who hated being caught off guard.
For reasons Keiji did not care to inspect too closely, he found that oddly endearing.
When the coffee was ready, the chef slid the cup across the bar with care and finally looked at him again.
“Guess I should say something,” he muttered, leaning one elbow on the counter. His accent thickened with nerves, roughening the edges of every word. “Spent the whole morning cursing under my breath because somebody called in a favor and threw off my kitchen so we could make special onigiri for some high-maintenance client.”
His mouth twisted. Not quite a grimace. Not quite a smile.
“Turns out that client is sitting right in front of me.”
It was not an apology in the clean sense. It carried too much pride for that. But the embarrassment beneath it was honest, and honesty had a way of mattering more to Keiji than polish ever did.
“So,” the chef added, rubbing at the back of his neck, “coffee’s on me.”
Keiji wrapped both hands around the porcelain cup. Heat seeped into his fingers, then through them. He took a careful sip.
It was excellent.
Not simply good. Not passable. The flavor was balanced and deep, made with enough attention that the care in it was obvious even before the taste finished unfolding.
“High-maintenance,” Keiji repeated mildly.
The chef groaned at once, dragging a hand down his face. “Please don’t.”
Keiji felt the corner of his mouth lift. He set the cup down and let the amusement ease from his expression.
“In fairness,” he said, “I should apologize too. My manager arranged the order. He said it would not cause trouble.” His gaze stayed steady. “If it disrupted your kitchen, I am sorry. That was not my intention.”
The sincerity in his own voice surprised him a little. He had not meant the words to come out so plainly. But once said, they felt right.
Across the bar, the chef blinked.
The reaction was immediate enough to tell Keiji it was not what he had expected. Perhaps he had expected defensiveness. Or indifference. Or the polite dismissal of someone accustomed to never hearing no. Instead, Keiji had given him the truth.
The chef clicked his tongue and waved a hand, as though batting away the weight of it.
“Hey. Don’t go doing that.” He shifted back against the counter, towel slipping slightly on his shoulder. “It’s not like you walked in here making demands yourself.”
He exhaled through his nose. “Takeda’s the one who called in the favor. I just had to make it work.” A beat passed. “Nothing new.”
His gaze moved over Keiji in a way that was different now. Less careless than before, but still free of that hungry, acquisitive edge Keiji had learned to brace for. Curious, maybe. Guarded. Trying to reconcile the public image with the person sitting in front of him.
“You didn’t ruin anything,” he said at last. “Lunch’ll go out fine. Staff’ll complain a little, but they always do.” He tipped his chin toward the cup. “If that coffee’s decent, we’ll call it even.”
Keiji lifted it again. Inhaled. Sipped.
“It’s more than decent.”
The chef looked mildly suspicious, as though praise from someone like Keiji ought to come with a hidden complication.
Keiji met the look evenly. “You work with precision,” he said. “That was obvious before I tasted it.”
He did not soften the compliment with humor. Did not dress it up. He simply offered the observation and let it sit where it landed.
That seemed to affect the man more than it should have.
His expression shifted almost imperceptibly, some defensive line in it loosening before he caught himself. Keiji recognized the feeling because he knew it well. The strange disorientation of being seen accurately by someone you had not invited close enough to do it.
The chef leaned his forearms against the bar and gave a short, self-conscious laugh. “Listen to me, hovering over you with coffee. Feels like I’m bartending again.”
Akaashi tilted his head. “You do have the air of one.”
That pulled a sharper grin from the man. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ask personal questions before the second sip,” Keiji said. “That suggests experience.”
The grin widened despite obvious attempts to suppress it. “Worked at a bar in Osaka when I was younger. Paid my rent. Fed me well enough.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t bad work. But I liked cooking more.”
His eyes drifted briefly toward the kitchen doors. “Pouring drinks feels temporary. Food stays with people longer.”
The words were casual, but something beneath them was not. Keiji heard it anyway. The seriousness tucked under self-deprecation. The way some people protected what mattered by speaking of it lightly.
“And now,” Keiji said, “you make onigiri important enough to disrupt an entire schedule.”
The man snorted. “Do not start with me.”
Keiji looked down into his cup to hide the faint smile that pressed at his mouth. The warmth in the room had reached deeper now, softening muscles he had not noticed were tight.
The chef’s expression shifted again, amusement giving way to curiosity. “So tell me this, then. Why onigiri?”
Keiji’s fingers rested lightly against the cup.
He could have answered simply. Convenient. Familiar. Easy to eat during meetings. All of that was true enough.
Instead, what rose first was memory.
“They’re my favorite,” he said quietly.
The chef blinked. “Seriously.”
“Yes.”
Rain whispered against the windows.
The chef let out a disbelieving breath. “The man on every other billboard in the city prefers rice balls.”
Keiji looked up. “You are very attached to this narrative of me as someone who survives exclusively on expensive disappointment.”
That startled a laugh out of him. Real. Bright enough to momentarily clear the embarrassment still lingering around him.
Then he sobered.
“Why?” he asked again.
This time there was no irony in it. Only interest.
Keiji sat a little straighter without meaning to. His hands folded more neatly around the cup.
“My grandmother used to make them for me,” he said. “Salted rice. Nori. Sometimes ume, if she had it.” His voice grew quieter without becoming fragile. “They were never especially neat. She packed them quickly, usually while reminding me not to be late.” A faint warmth touched the thought before turning inward. “But they always tasted the same.”
The chef said nothing.
Keiji looked down at the coffee, watching the bar light catch in its dark surface. “Safe,” he said after a pause. “They tasted safe.”
He did not often speak that kind of truth aloud. Not because it was secret, exactly. Because it belonged to a softer part of himself that had learned to stay private. Public life tended to flatten anything tender into anecdote. He had no wish to turn his grandmother into a charming detail for strangers.
But here, in this quiet bar that smelled of cedar and coffee while rain pressed softly at the windows, the memory did not feel performative. It felt held.
“Even now,” he said, “I can eat in very beautiful restaurants and still find myself wanting something that asks less of me.”
That did it.
Something in the chef’s face eased fully then, the last of his defensiveness giving way to understanding. Not complete understanding. No one got that quickly. But enough to matter.
“Safe,” he repeated, more to himself than to Keiji.
Then he leaned back and rubbed at the back of his neck.
“For me, it was sort of the opposite.” His mouth curved faintly. “My mum’s onigiri were good. Better than good, honestly. But when I was younger, all I could think about was how I wanted to make mine different. Better fillings. Better rice. Better technique. I kept wanting to improve the thing instead of just enjoying it.”
His laugh this time held an edge of fond embarrassment. “There was a while where I thought I’d open an onigiri shop. Tiny place. Couple seats. Nothing fancy. Just me making them all day.”
His gaze moved around the polished quiet of the bar.
“Didn’t happen.”
The words were simple. The feeling beneath them was not.
Keiji heard the rest anyway. The roads that had bent. The compromises that had not entirely felt like losses but had left shape behind them. The quiet mourning people carried for lives they had once imagined with complete sincerity.
He knew something about that too.
“Perhaps that is fortunate,” Keiji said after a moment.
The chef looked at him.
“Otherwise,” Keiji added, lifting his cup slightly, “I might never have had this coffee.”
The smile that rose then was small, reluctant, and genuine enough to change the man’s whole face.
For a few moments, neither of them said anything.
Rain tapped softly at the windows. Warm light settled over polished wood. Behind the kitchen doors, life continued in its efficient, controlled motion, but here time seemed to thin and stretch, no longer measured by urgency. Keiji became aware of an unfamiliar reluctance pressing at the edges of him. Not the desire to stay forever. Nothing so dramatic. Only the simple wish not to break whatever this was quite yet.
Eventually, though, the chef pushed away from the counter with a sigh.
“Right,” he said. “I should get your order boxed up before your meeting starts without you.”
Keiji’s gaze dropped to the cup, still half full. He ran a thumb lightly along the warm curve of porcelain before setting it down.
“I should pay.”
The chef gave him a look. “For one coffee?”
“Yes,” Keiji said, reaching for his wallet. “Otherwise I may reinforce your first impression.”
That earned a quiet snort.
When Keiji held out his card, the chef took it. Their fingers touched in the exchange, only briefly, skin warm against skin.
The contact was incidental. Meaningless, on paper.
Still, Keiji noticed that neither of them moved especially quickly afterward.
The card was run through the register. The receipt slid across the wood.
“There,” the chef said. “Official.”
Keiji slipped the card back into his wallet and set it aside.
The silence that followed was not awkward. It carried too much awareness for that. It felt suspended, lightly taut, as though each of them had arrived at the same thought and chosen not to name it.
He should leave.
He did not stand yet.
Instead, his eyes went to the watch on his wrist. Heavy steel caught the warm bar light and flashed coldly back at him. It was expensive in a way he had never personally enjoyed, a gift accepted with appropriate gratitude and worn more from obligation than affection.
Time, however, remained irritatingly indifferent to personal preference.
“I should go,” he said at last. “The meeting won’t wait.”
The chef nodded, but his jaw tightened just slightly before he could hide it. “Right.”
Keiji rose from the stool and reached for his coat.
He put himself back together piece by piece. Coat. Scarf. Glasses. Mask. Each item settled into place with practiced precision, familiar as ritual. The version of himself that belonged to the outside world returned in layers. By the end of it, he felt the same strange distance he always did, as if he had stepped half a pace away from his own skin.
The chef led him back through the wooden doors into the kitchen.
The steady rhythm met him again at once. Heat, steel, steam, the clean choreography of practiced work. Even now, on his way out, Keiji found himself slowing. His gaze drifted over the line of cooks, the plates, the measured arc of a wrist turning fish beneath a knife. He could feel the room drawing his attention like a current.
The chef noticed. Of course he did.
“Careful,” he said, voice low with amusement. “Keep looking like that and I’ll think you want the full tour.”
Keiji glanced at him. The mask hid his mouth, but not the slight change in his eyes.
“If you offered,” he said, “I would accept.”
The answer landed somewhere between them and stayed there.
By the side door, they paused.
The rain was audible again now, a softer hush on the other side of the wall. Keiji adjusted his grip on the paper bag he had been handed. The onigiri inside still held a trace of warmth through the thin paper handle. It pressed faintly into his fingers, grounding.
He turned his gaze back to the chef.
“Your name,” he said.
One dark brow lifted. “What do you need that for?”
Keiji held his eyes. Gray, steady, no longer unreadable in quite the same way as before.
“So that next time,” Keiji said, “I know what to call the man showing me around.”
There was just enough room in the sentence for possibility.
The chef seemed to hear it.
For once, he did not answer immediately. A slow grin tugged at his mouth instead, amused and slightly unsettled, as though the question had reached a little farther under his guard than he would have liked.
“Miya,” he said at last. “Miya Osamu.”
Keiji inclined his head, acknowledging the name with more care than the moment strictly required. But it felt deserved.
Osamu.
He stored it away at once, precise and private.
Then he stepped out into the rain, and his umbrella opened in one practiced motion above him.
Behind him, he could feel rather than see the other man still standing in the doorway.
The street had blurred again into wet stone, muted signs, moving shadows under umbrellas. The city resumed around him as if nothing had interrupted it. As if he had not stepped briefly into a room where he was not watched for what he represented, but for what he said. As if a stranger with sharp gray eyes had not unsettled him by being blunt, attentive, and unexpectedly kind all at once.
By the time he reached the end of the lane, the warmth of the coffee had faded from his hands.
The warmth of the encounter had not.
Behind him, Osamu remained in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, watching the tall figure disappear into the rain-softened morning. The umbrella moved steadily through the blur, dark and clean against the silver-gray street, until distance swallowed it.
Only then did he let the door swing shut and turn back toward the kitchen.
Around him, the rhythm of service carried on unchanged. Knives moved. Rice steamed. Orders were called and answered. Nothing in the room reflected the strange, quiet tilt inside his chest.
He had met celebrities before, in passing. Athletes. Actors. People with faces others pointed at. They usually arrived wrapped in the expectation of being recognized, or in the guarded irritation of wanting not to be. This had been different from the start. Akaashi had walked in looking like an errand boy and somehow worn that as naturally as the expensive watch on his wrist. He had taken bluntness without offense. He had apologized when he did not need to. He had looked at the kitchen like it mattered.
And when he spoke about onigiri, about safety, about his grandmother, something in Osamu had gone unexpectedly quiet.
It was ridiculous, really.
A customer had picked up an order. That was all.
Except Osamu knew that was not all.
Because even now, with work moving around him and lunch service refusing to care about whatever strange current had passed through the morning, one thought kept returning with stubborn clarity.
He had wanted Akaashi to stay.