Chapter 3: Overtime
You read the note four times standing in the corridor in your socks.
The first time, you think you've misunderstood it. The second time, you're angry. The third time, you notice that the K is pressed so hard into the paper it has nearly gone through, and that there is a small brown mark in the corner of the sticky note that might be coffee and might not be. The fourth time you go back into your apartment and put it on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a croissant, because you are a reasonable adult and you are not going to throw it at his door.
Then you go to work.
The café in Nakameguro has a rented kitchen in the back where you start at four in the morning, and you spend the week there shaping their Copenhagen-with-soul loaves with the brutal efficiency of a woman who is not thinking about anything. You drop the caraway entirely. You lower the oven for the last ten minutes. The owner tastes the Wednesday batch and actually closes her eyes, and says, "This is it, this is the one, how did you get it," and you say, "A consultant," and do not elaborate.
You keep baking at six-oh-one. Partly because the oven needs its hour and that's simply when it's hot. Partly because you are stubborn, and it is your kitchen, and he can keep to his side of the wall all he likes.
But you notice, by Thursday, that he never comes home at six-twenty any more.
The walls are thick. You can't hear much. But you have lived next to Nanami Kento for three weeks and you know the shape of his evenings the way you know the sound of your own mixer: the lift at six-nineteen, his key, the door, the kettle a few minutes later. Now there is nothing at six-twenty. Nothing at seven. On Tuesday you hear his door at half past eleven. On Wednesday it's after one in the morning, and you lie in bed listening to him moving around next door very carefully, like a man trying not to wake anyone up, or like a man who's hurt.
On Thursday, he doesn't come home at all.
You don't sleep much. At four you go to the café kitchen and burn a whole tray of rolls and stand in the back alley afterwards with your forearms floured to the elbow, breathing the cold air and feeling, for the first time since you left Osaka, completely and stupidly afraid for somebody else.
On Friday night, you wait for him.
You sit on the floor of the corridor outside 4B with your back against his door and a paper bag on your knees, and you wait. It's not dignified. Mrs Hayashi from 4A comes out to put her recycling down the chute and looks at you sitting there and says nothing, very loudly. You eat one of the salt butter rolls out of the bag at about nine, then feel guilty and eat another one to cover the guilt.
At eleven-fifty, the lift opens.
He looks terrible. He looks, specifically, like somebody who has been working eighteen-hour days for a week, which you suppose is what he is: his suit jacket over one arm, his tie gone, a fresh bandage across the knuckles of his right hand to match the healing cut on his left. There is a scrape along his jaw. His glasses, the tinted ones he wears on the train, are pushed up into his hair, and without them you can see how tired his eyes are, and how they go wide when they find you.
He stops in front of the lift. The doors close behind him.
"It's late," he says.
"It's eleven-fifty-one," you say. "I've been here since seven. I've been counting."
"You shouldn't have."
"You stopped coming home." You stand up. Your knees crack. You are holding the paper bag in front of you like a shield, which was not the plan. "You wrote me a note like a resignation letter and then you stopped coming home at six, and I've lived next to you for three weeks, Kento, and you have never once not come home at six. So I want to know if it's me. If it's something I did. Because if it is, I'll stop. I'll move the oven. I'll bake at three in the morning like I used to, I don't care. But if it isn't me, then I think you're working yourself into the ground so you don't have to walk past my door, and I think that's the stupidest thing I have ever heard anyone do, and I worked with a man who threw a sheet tray at my head."
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Down the corridor, the lift hums as somebody calls it to another floor.
"It isn't you," he says.
"Then what is it?"
He looks at the bag in your hands, then at you, then at a point on the wall above your shoulder, as if he is trying to calculate where to put the cut. You've seen him do that now. You know what it looks like.
"The thing on your oven," he says at last, "was attracted to your kitchen because it was the warmest room in the building. Do you understand? They go to the places where people are happy. Where there's something to take. You make that room what it is. You make it so that something like that would come and sit in it for an hour, just to be near." He presses the heel of his bandaged hand against his eyes. "I do a job where people die. Not sometimes. Regularly. I have been to more funerals than weddings. I buried my best friend before I was old enough to drink. I've seen what happens to the people who wait for us to come home. I didn't want to do that to you."
"So you decided for me."
"I decided for myself." His hand drops. "That's what the note was."
"No." You step towards him. You're close enough now that you can smell the night on him, smoke and cold and something metallic underneath. "The note was you deciding that I'd be better off without you, which is a decision about me, which you made without asking. I make my own risk assessments, thank you. I'm a professional too. I've been burned by four-hundred-degree ovens every week since I was twenty and I keep putting my hands in them."
"That isn't the same thing."
"It's exactly the same thing. It's the oven, Kento, it's the whole point of the oven. It's hot because that's how bread happens." You can feel your voice going unsteady and you don't care. "You've been working until one in the morning for a week. You hate this job. You told me so, at my table. You have one rule in the whole world, and you've broken it every night this week just to avoid walking past my door. Do you have any idea what that sounds like?"
"Yes," he says quietly. "I know exactly what it sounds like."
"It sounds like the most romantic thing anybody has ever done for me," you say, "and you did it like a tax return."
For a second you think you've made a mistake. His face doesn't move. Then something happens at the corner of his mouth, so small you would have missed it three weeks ago, and he looks down at the floor, and his shoulders shake once. He's laughing. Silently, helplessly, a hand over his eyes again, laughing in the corridor at midnight with dried blood on his knuckles.
"I'm serious," you say, but you're starting to laugh too.
"I know you are. That's the problem. That's always been the problem with you." He lowers his hand. His eyes, when they meet yours, are wet at the edges and absolutely steady. "You come to my door at six-twenty with a knife in one hand and bread in the other and you expect me to tell you the truth. Nobody does that. Everybody I know wants something. You only ever wanted to know if you were right."
"Well?" You hold up the paper bag between you. Your heart is going like a stand mixer on the highest setting. "Am I?"
He takes the bag out of your hands. Carefully, the way he did the very first time, as if it might be a trap. He sets it down on the floor beside his door without looking at it. Then he straightens up, and he's very close, and you realise how tall he is when he isn't standing politely at a distance, how warm.
"About the crumb," says Nanami. "Mostly."
He kisses you like he does everything: precisely, carefully, with the full and frightening attention of a man who has decided that this is worth doing properly. One hand comes up to your jaw, the bandage rough against your cheek. You make a sound against his mouth you'll be embarrassed about later and grab two fistfuls of his ruined shirt and kiss him back, and he exhales through his nose like something in him has finally been allowed to stop working, and for a long time the corridor of the fourth floor is very quiet indeed.
When you pull apart, his glasses have fallen out of his hair and are lying on the carpet between your feet. Neither of you picks them up.
"I'm still going to have this job," he says against your forehead. "That doesn't change. There will be nights I can't come home at six."
"I know."
"There will be nights I come home like this."
"Then I'll be up. I'm a baker. I'm always up." You lean back enough to look at him. "But you don't get to work until one in the morning to avoid me any more. If you're going to do overtime, it'd better be for something worth it."
He looks at you for a moment longer, and then he bends and picks up the paper bag, and his glasses, and holds out his free hand.
"It's eleven-fifty-nine," he says. "Technically, I'm still off the clock."
On Monday, Nanami Kento comes home at six-nineteen.
You know because you are standing at your oven in your KNEAD TO KNOW BASIS apron with a tray of salt butter rolls ready to go in, and you hear the lift, and then his key, and then, instead of his own door, a knock on yours.
"It's open," you call.
He comes in with his jacket over his arm and his tie already loose and his phone buzzing in his pocket. He takes it out, looks at the screen, and silences it without a change of expression.
"Work?" you ask.
"Gojo." He sets the phone face down on your counter. "He's found out about you. Ijichi told him I left a briefing at five-fifty-nine on Friday, and he did the maths. He's been texting me pictures of bread since this morning. He wants to come and visit the bakery."
"I don't have a bakery."
"I told him that. He said, 'Not yet,'" says Nanami, with the deep weariness of a man who has known Gojo Satoru for a very long time. "I think he means to invest. I'm sorry in advance. He'll want to name something after himself."
"Is that bad?"
"Yes," he says. Then he comes round the counter and kisses the flour off your cheekbone, and looks at his watch, and smiles at you, a real one, the kind you've had to earn a loaf at a time. "Six-oh-one," he says. "Put them in."