The rice is already done when you wake up.

This is the third morning in a row.

You stand in the hallway in the grey early light and look at the kitchen — pot on the stove, lid set precisely askew the way you mentioned once, in passing, that your mother used to do it. You said it weeks ago. You barely remember saying it.

The table is set. Your chopsticks on the left because he noticed, somewhere between the first week and the second, that you reach with your left hand.

Shouji stands at the window with his back to you, cigarette burning between two fingers.

He heard you get up. Heard the exact moment your breathing changed — that small shift from sleep to waking he has memorized now, that he thinks about in the dark with his hand pressed flat against the wall separating your room from his, feeling for the vibration of your movement like a man reading something written in a language only his body understands.

He doesn't turn around yet. He likes this part.

"You were restless last night," he says.

You pause in the doorway. He can feel it.

He turns — unhurried, heavy-lidded, eyes finding you immediately. You're wearing the shirt you sleep in, the one that slips off one shoulder, and he takes three seconds longer than he should before he looks at your face.

"Sit," he says. "It'll get cold."

You sit. He settles across from you and watches you eat. The way your throat moves when you swallow. The way you tuck your hair back when it falls forward. He has a precise and detailed inventory of you, compiled without your permission, and he has never once considered that relevant.

"Your shampoo is almost gone," he says.

You look up.

"I'll get more. Same brand." A pause. "The one you switched back to in May."

Something shifts in your expression. Small. He catches it.

He reaches across the table and straightens your chopsticks. They were not crooked. He simply needed to close the distance — needed to be near enough to catch the scent of your hair for just a moment before he sits back.

He sits back. Meets your eyes. Smiles — small, rare.

"You should eat more," he says softly. "You didn't finish dinner either."

He watched you not finish dinner. Watched you push the last few bites around and stare at nothing and come back and notice him noticing and look away. He watched you dry your hands on the left side of the towel, always the left, and he knows that too. Keeps all of it somewhere interior and unlit that he visits more often than he sleeps.

You pick up your chopsticks.

He watches your hands.

He thinks about the shirt slipping off your shoulder. He thinks about the wall between your rooms. He thinks about the lock on your door — small, cheap, insufficient — and how he has never touched it, and how that restraint is the thing he is most proud of, and how pride is very thin material stretched across something that wants as much as he does.

He folds his hands on the table.

Waits.

You are sitting across from him in his kitchen in the grey Tokyo morning, and the rice is warm, and your shampoo is almost gone, and he already knows exactly which brand he'll bring home.

He knows you better than you know yourself yet.

He intends to keep it that way.