Chapter 41 Episode 41: He’s Good Company

Akira’s POV

The guild business ran later than expected. That was pretty much the kind of thing that happened when a routine debrief encountered a councillor with questions and the questions multiplied the way questions did when someone had prepared them in advance.

I came out of the building into the early evening with the specific tiredness of someone who had been sitting in a room being questioned for two hours longer than planned.

I walked into the neighbourhood and met our neighbor downstairs who was on her way in when I reached the building entrance.

Mrs. Choi was seventy-three, had opinions about everything within a four-block radius, operated as an informal information network for the building with the dedication of someone who had turned observation into a vocation or a side hustle.

She greeted me with the warmth she reserved for residents she had decided to approve of, which I had apparently achieved sometime around the third week, and asked about my shoulder in a way that suggested she had noticed the bandaging and had been waiting for an opportunity.

The shoulder was fine. I told her so. She seemed satisfied with the reply.

Then, in the not so subtle way she transitioned between subjects, which was without transition; "Your friend came again on Thursday."

I looked at her. "My friend?" Sena was the only one I had tactically approved as one here.

"The tall one. Tailored suit, a freaking Greek god come true." She was oddly specific with her description. And I didn’t need a soothsayer to tell me who she was talking about.

"He’s been coming for a few weeks now. Always Thursday evenings, after the service closes. Your mother makes him tea." She tilted her head. "Very handsome with a serious face."

I stood in the building entrance.

"Thank you, Mrs. Choi," I said.

She said something else that I caught the shape of without fully registering her words before she went inside leaving me I standing at the entrance looking at the street, as I watched the evening was doing its ordinary thing around me while something rearranged itself in my understanding of the past several weeks.

Thursday evenings. After the service closes.

The Thursdays when Akira had guild business, or missions, or training that ran long. The Thursdays that were mine but weren’t, my schedule adjusted around the fourth floor sessions without anyone formally knowing what it was.

He had been going to the ramen shop on the Thursdays when I wasn’t there. Which meant he dedicated his entire Thursday’s to me and my mum.

The morning for me and the evening for my mum. I didn’t know what to make off the feeling brewing inside me so I walked to the shop.

***

My mother was behind the counter when I pushed the door open. She was wiping down the surface with the cloth she used for the end-of-day pass. The chairs were up.

The close-down sequence was done or almost done if I was to be honest. She looked up when I entered and her expression did that thing it did sometimes...

It was quite a smile, something more settled than that, the look of someone who had been expecting a particular visitor and found a different one but was not surprised by the substitution.

"He’s good company," she said and smiled.

She hadn’t greeted me. Hadn’t asked why I was there at this hour. She had simply delivered the sentence as if it answered a question I had walked in carrying, which it did, and she knew it did, and she had offered it because she was not a woman who withheld useful information.

I stood in the doorway and simply looked at her.

She looked at me with those steady eyes and said nothing more, which meant she had said the thing and was leaving the space for me to do what I wanted with it.

I came in and sat at the counter.

She made soup without asking, moving through the kitchen with the ease of someone whose hands knew the sequence well enough to leave her attention free for other things. The specific sounds of the shop at close... the particular knock of the ladle, the low hum of the ventilation, the way the street noise changed once the front door was shut behind me settled around us and I sat on the stool and let them.

The bowl arrived in front of me. She leaned on the counter across from me with her own cup and looked at me in the way she looked at things she was going to let reach their own conclusion without her assistance.

"Thursday evenings?" I asked. She already knew everything I needed to know.

"He likes the quiet, just like you." She sipped. "And the broth, though he’ll only admit it was edible. He drank two plates and took an extra"

Something moved through my chest at that. The precise word for it wasn’t available yet... it sat in the same vicinity as the corridor feeling and the stairwell feeling and the industrial district steps feeling, which were all variations on the same theme in different keys.

It was uncomfortable in a way that wasn’t unpleasant and yet warm in a way that was difficult to sit still inside. How do you even describe this feeling? For a guy no less.

Kael Vixar. In this shop. On Thursday evenings. Drinking my mother’s broth and calling it edible and sitting at this counter in the quiet of a closed restaurant.

The version of Thursday evenings I had been picturing was Kael in his office building or at a council meeting or doing whatever the most powerful hunter in the world did with his time when I wasn’t around to observe it.

That version suddenly changed itself around this new information and the revision produced something I needed a moment to locate.

Jealousy wasn’t the word. Jealousy required a specific kind of threat and this wasn’t a threat.

Something closer to... being last to know that something that had been happening without you, in a space that was yours.

And now discovering that the thing that had been happening without you was in fact something you would have wanted, and being unsure what to do with that combination.

"What do you talk about?" I said.

She looked at me. "Neighbourhoods. Jasmine prices. The gate monitoring post they’re building on the corner." A pause. "You most of the time."

"Me?" I somehow expected it.

"He listens well," she said, as if this answered the implied question. "Most people listen until they have something to say. He listens until he understands. It’s different."

The soup was good. It always was, but it landed differently tonight, maybe because someone else had had a taste of them before I did. The broth carried the jasmine scent at the right level, the pork tender, the bowl warm against my hands.

Two months of Thursdays.

The training room and the gate surveys and the perimeter checks and the days of me appearing in his vicinity with practical reasons that were real and secondary. All of that going in one direction, and this going in the opposite direction, and the meeting point somewhere in the middle where a closed restaurant on Thursday evening held both of us in different ways at different times.

He had been coming here when I wasn’t here. He had been coming here because he liked it here. Because my mother made ’edible’ broth and asked nothing of him except to be present and talked about things that weren’t concerning the council or the guild or the weight of everything he moved through every day.

The warmth in my chest did something it hadn’t done before in quite this way. It wasn’t the feeling I had in the corridor or the stairwell. Those had been immediate and specific and tied to proximity.

This was slower. It sat deeper. The warmth of understanding something about a person that they hadn’t told you directly, that you found through the shape of what they did when you weren’t watching.

He came here because it felt comfortable. I didn’t want to be a narcissist but I felt like it was also because of me. (Atleast you know that part ??. He’s finally gaining a bit of knowledge of Kael’s feelings??)

My mother watched me conclude this from across the counter, with the patience of someone who had been watching it develop for longer than I had and had no intention of rushing the conclusion.

"He worries about you," she said.

"I know."

"That’s not what I mean." She set her cup down. "Worry is when you check on something at a distance. What he does is different. He moves toward it." She looked at me directly. "There’s a difference between monitoring and reaching."

The stool was solid under me. The shop was quiet. Outside, the street continued its evening at the pace of a Thursday that had no particular demands on it, and I sat inside the close-down quiet with my mother’s soup and the understanding that Kael Vixar had been sitting on this exact stool drinking this exact broth on the Thursdays I spent elsewhere.

Something about that was arranging itself in my chest into a shape that didn’t have a name yet but was becoming clearer the longer I sat with it.

"He’ll come back next Thursday," my mother said, in the tone of someone communicating a fact rather than a prediction.

"I know," I said.

She looked at me with something that was the nearest she got to smiling when she wasn’t smiling. "Will you be here?"

The soup was still warm. The shop was quiet. The question sat in the air with the specific weight of a thing that already had an answer and was simply waiting for me to say it.

"Yes," I said.

She picked up her cup.

"Good," she said.

And that was the end of it. This was the exact way conversations with her ended when they had reached the point she had been moving toward. She went back to pack up the last items and I stayed at the counter and finished the soup.

My thoughts were filled with her words, about monitoring something and reaching towards it, the difference between the two and the specific image of Kael on this stool on a Thursday evening in the quiet of a closed shop.

The image sat with me the whole walk home. It was still there when I lay down. I was shocked that I wasn’t repulsed by the thoughts and feelings towards the idea of Kael.

It was, if anything, the opposite.