Chapter 11: Hakone

The banquet hall of the Hakone inn held thirty people at low tables.

Iwase had seated Nanami at the head of the room beside himself.

Aya was four seats down, glaring.

Nanami had a plate of cold tempura and a small cup of barley tea, because she refused to drink anything she had not poured herself.

At eight o'clock, under the long table, a hand came down on her thigh.

It was warm and damp.

It squeezed once, and then began to slide up the inside of her skirt.

"You've been avoiding me, Hoshino," Iwase said, pleasantly, to the room. His lips barely moved. "I'm hurt."

Nanami looked at the hand.

She thought of a genkan door, a pair of small cool hands and a voice that said, Put him down.

She took his wrist in two fingers and lifted his hand off her leg.

She placed it on his own knee.

"Please don't touch me," she said.

She said it in her regular voice, not loud.

But the hall was full of paper walls and the room was quiet, and it carried.

Twenty-nine heads turned.

"Hoshino," Iwase said. His smile held, but a muscle in his cheek twitched. "Don't make a scene."

"I'm not."

She stood up, bowed to the room, and walked out between the tables.

She heard Aya's chair scrape and then stop, because Aya had seen her face and knew better.

She walked down the corridor and through the lobby and out the front door of the inn into the cold mountain night.

Her hands were shaking, and her eyes burned, and she had never felt so tall.

A taxi stood at the curb with its lamps lit.

The back door was open, and a small woman in a long cream coat leaned out of it.

"Get in," said Ria.

"I have booked a room next door. It has a private bath on the terrace, and I have not eaten in four days."

"You followed me to Hakone."

"I followed your anger from the roof of the building. It smelled like burned sugar."

Ria's eyes glittered gold in the dark.

"It was magnificent. Get in, Nanami."

Nanami got in.

The room was in a small old inn built into the hill.

The terrace behind it held a bath of dark stone the size of a double bed.

Steam rolled off the water in the cold, and red maple leaves floated on its surface.

A paper lantern hung from the eaves, and above it the mountains stood black against a sky full of stars.

Nanami stood at the edge of the terrace in her coat, looking at the water, and her hands would not stop shaking.

Ria untied her coat for her, and her scarf, and her skirt, and let each one drop.

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