Chapter 5: Paying the Price
The new shower door arrived on a Tuesday, carried by two men in matching gray uniforms who smelled of cigarette smoke and silicone sealant. The clinic had granted Shouta a late start, a professional courtesy for the “domestic emergency” he’d noted in the scheduling software with absolutely no further detail.
The men, Leo and Mike, were in their late fifties, with forearms like knotted ropes and the weary, knowing eyes of people who’d seen the insides of too many homes. Leo, the older one with a salt-and-pepper mustache, whistled low as he and Mike maneuvered the large, flat box of tempered glass through the front door.
“Nice place,” Leo said, his eyes scanning the living room, lingering not on the art but on the structural corners, the ceiling seams. A tradesman’s assessment.
“Thanks,” Shouta said, guiding them down the hall. “Bathroom’s at the end. The opening’s ready.”
The bathroom still felt like a crime scene, stripped and overly sanitized. The empty frame gaped. Shouta’s bathtub, now cleared of its glittering burden, stood as a stark, white testimony. The room smelled sharply of the industrial-strength cleaner Izuku had used in a fit of guilt-driven overkill.
Leo set his edge of the box down with a grunt and stared at the opening. He rubbed his mustache. “So. Full pivot, like the old one? Frame’s still good. Just need the glass unit and the hardware.”
“Exactly like the old one,” Shouta confirmed, leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his chest. The tattoos on his forearms—a geometric sleeve of interlocking lines and shapes—seemed to shift with the muscle underneath.
Mike, younger but with a permanent squint, was already unpacking tools from a heavy canvas bag. Wrenches, drills, a caulking gun. He glanced at the pristine tiles, the lack of any visible damage. “Tempered glass doesn’t just give up. Gotta be one hell of an impact. You got a rock-sluggin’ teenager with a baseball?” He chuckled at his own joke.
Shouta’s mouth quirked. “Something like that.”
Leo knelt, examining the tracks in the frame. “Nah. Look. No impact point on the sill. No chip marks on the walls.” He stood, wiping his hands on his thighs. His gaze landed on a single, almost invisible scuff on the wall tile about four feet up—the ghost of a slippery, water-slicked elbow. His eyes traced an imaginary trajectory: a body, pressed against the wall, losing balance, an arm shooting out for stability.
A slow, deep grin spread under the mustache. It was not a leer. It was the grin of a man who had seen it all, who could reconstruct a story from the faintest physical evidence. “Ah,” he said, the single syllable rich with understanding. He looked back at Shouta, one tradesman to another. “Slippery when wet, huh?”
Shouta met his gaze, unfazed. A slight, acknowledging nod. “A fundamental safety principle often ignored in the moment.”
Mike, still catching up, looked from the scuff to his partner’s face to Shouta’s calm expression. His own face went through a comical series of adjustments—confusion, dawning realization, then suppressed amusement. “Oh. Oh. Right. Okay then. That’ll do it.” He busied himself with unpacking the new door, the metal brackets clinking in the quiet.
Leo chuckled, a warm, raspy sound. “Seen it a few times. Not the whole door, usually. A shelf. A towel rack. Once, a toilet paper holder that was just… yanked out of the wall. Anchor bolts and everything.” He shook his head, taking measurements with a metal tape that snapped back with a sharp zing. “The things passion does to drywall.”
They worked with an efficient, wordless rhythm. Mike removed the pivot pins from the old hardware. Leo began applying a bead of clear silicone to the frame, the pungent, vinegary smell cutting through the lemon clean scent. The drill whined, biting into metal as they secured new brackets.
Shouta watched, a silent supervisor. This was the price of admission. The tangible cost of a moment’s loss of control. It felt fitting, almost pedagogical. The broken thing made whole again by professionals, while the amateurs who broke it lurked elsewhere in the house.
“Kid alright, though?” Leo asked, not looking up from his caulking gun. “No stitches?”
“No stitches,” Shouta said. “Just a severe case of embarrassment and a newly acquired respect for non-slip bathmats.”
“Good, good.” Leo smoothed the silicone bead with a practiced finger. “At that age, everything feels like the end of the world. A broken door, a broken heart. It all lands with the same weight.”
Mike snorted, hefting the new glass panel with Leo. It was heavy, a solid sheet of clarity edged in black. “My boy, when he was fifteen, he put his fist through his bedroom door because I told him he couldn’t go to some concert. Wood. Splinters everywhere. This…” He grunted as they guided the top pivot into place. “…this is a more creative form of property damage. Almost impressive.”
The glass settled into the frame with a solid, final thunk. It was done. A clean, unblemished barrier. It looked exactly as it had before, which was the point, and also the strangest part. It held no memory of the explosion.
Leo was wiping his fingerprints off the glass with a soft cloth when a shadow fell in the hallway.
Izuku had emerged from his cave. He was dressed for lounging, not for company: tiny, silky black shorts and a threadbare crop top that showed a sliver of his flat stomach. His long, black curls were a messy cascade over one shoulder, and his face was still soft with sleep. He held an empty glass in one hand, aiming for the kitchen. He froze when he saw the two strangers filling the bathroom doorway, his brain visibly scrambling to process the scene.
Shouta saw him. A slow, deliberate smirk touched his lips. “Speak of the devil,” he said, his voice carrying down the hall, dry as dust, “and he shall appear.”
Izuku’s eyes, wide and suddenly very awake, darted from his father to the two repairmen—who had now turned, with polite, curious interest—to the brilliant, flawless, and undeniably new shower door being finalized behind them.
A deep, rosy flush ignited at the base of his throat and swept upwards, flooding his cheeks. It was a blush of pure, unadulterated mortification. He understood the scene immediately: these men knew. They could see the ghost of the event in the empty frame, in his father’s tone, in his own rumpled, just-rolled-out-of-bed appearance that now felt obscenely telling.
“I said it was an accident!” The words burst out of him, high-pitched and defensive, a teenager’s universal shield against adult knowingness. He didn’t wait for a reply. He spun on his bare heel, the empty glass forgotten in his hand, and stomped down the hall towards the living room. Every line of his retreat screamed theatrical wounded pride. The silky shorts did little to diminish the effect.
Leo watched him go, then let out a quiet, warm chuckle. He shared a look with Shouta, a look that transcended client and contractor. It was a father look. A weary, amused, I-have-survived-this look. “Spirited,” he observed.
Mike was grinning openly now. “Yep. There’s the culprit. Can’t stay mad at a face like that, though.”
“You stay mad at the credit card statement,” Shouta replied, but there was no heat in it. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “Glad my kid ain’t fifteen anymore,” Leo said, accepting the check Shouta had already prepared. He tucked it into his breast pocket without looking at the amount. “Mine’s twenty-eight. Has a kid of his own. Now he calls me when his toilet’s overflowing. The circle of life.” He zipped up his tool bag with a definitive rasp. “Door’s solid. Give the silicone twenty-four hours before you use it. Try to keep the… acrobatics… to a minimum until it cures.”
“Noted.”
Shouta saw them out, the front door closing on their murmured conversation and the rumble of their truck engine. The house settled back into its quiet. But it was a different quiet now, charged with the aftermath of the intrusion and Izuku’s humiliation.
He found his son in the living room, but not on the couch. Izuku was on the floor, curled on his side on the large, plush rug, his back to the room. Bastet the cat was nestled in the curve of his legs, purring like a tiny engine. He was pretending to be asleep. It was a terrible pretense; his shoulders were too stiff, his breathing too controlled.
Shouta walked over and sat on the couch directly above him. He said nothing for a full minute, listening to the cat purr and the faint, stubborn hitch in Izuku’s breath.
“They’re gone,” Shouta said finally.
“I know.”
“The door looks good.”
A muffled sound, half-groan, half-snarl, came from the floor. “I don’t care. They knew.”
“Of course they knew. They’re installation professionals. They diagnose cause of failure. A detached towel bar tells a story. A shattered shower door writes a novel.”
Izuku rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. His eyes were bright, but not with tears. With a kind of furious, prickly shame. “It’s none of their business. You didn’t have to say anything. ‘Speak of the devil.’ You’re such an asshole.”
“I stated a fact. You appeared. The causal link between discussion and your appearance is a basic principle of quantum mechanics.” Shouta leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You think they were judging you? Leo has a grandson. Mike’s kid punched through a solid wood door. You think our little shower incident even registers on their scale of domestic disasters? They’ve seen sinks pulled off walls during marital fights. They’ve seen holes in drywall from flung gaming consoles. You are a footnote in the grand, stupid epic of people losing their temper or their balance in their own homes.”
Izuku blinked up at him. The fury was cooling, replaced by a sullen absorption. “They laughed.”
“They smiled. There’s a difference. It was a ‘kids will be kids’ smile. It was a ‘been there’ smile. Not a ‘your son is a slut’ smile.” He used the word deliberately, cleanly. A clinical term in this house, stripped of its pejorative weight. “Though, for the record, sluts should have better balance.”
A startled, wet laugh punched out of Izuku. He clapped a hand over his mouth, as if to trap it, but it was too late. The tension in his shoulders broke. He swatted at his father’s leg without force. “Shut up.”
Shouta didn’t shut up. “You’re embarrassed because it was sexual. You wouldn’t be this