I hung up the phone and tucked it back into my pocket, lacing my fingers together around her back. "What did you buy?"

"Is everything okay?" She ignored my question. "That phone call sounded serious."

I stole a kiss from her, since I was already obviously holding her against me in the sea of people around us. "Don't worry about it, we can talk about it later when we get home." I put my forehead against hers to force her to look at me. "Honestly it's nothing, okay? Oda-sama is just always intense to talk to."

"If you say so." She smiled wide before stealing the kiss back from me. She had draped her arms over my shoulders as I embraced her, but she suddenly retracted them, making a sound like she had remembered something important. "Obata-san, I'm sorry!" I couldn't help but laugh at her use of honorifics. "I'm getting too excited and forgetting we're in public. I'm acting like your real girlfriend or something."

"Akari. You're my real girlfriend."

It was as if she didn't believe anything I had said to her until that moment. With those few words, it was like I had given her permission to feel comfortable with me, to feel cared for without reservation. She held my hand tighter as we walked. She leaned into every touch I offered her. I learned in the way she reacted that I needed to give in to how badly I wanted to show her my desire for her, despite my instinct to withdraw to keep her safe.

The sun was beginning to set, turning the sky orange by the time we sat down in a tea house. I wanted to create an opportunity for her to remain at peace so I could start asking her questions. At the temple, Ito had bought a cat doll and a plaque to be blessed, and she took the doll out of the bag to admire it. I watched as I closed in on the table where I left her to place our order at the counter. I sat beside her instead of across the table from her, and she held out the doll so I could see it.

"Cute, isn't it?" Her smile as she expected a response from me was breathtaking.

"Almost as cute as you are when you're excited about something." I said as casually as I could. Her smile didn't dim as she took my intended compliment. I sipped at a glass of water I had brought to the table. "So." I said, giving her a side glance and smirk.

"So?" She was hooked.

"Who did you tell about us?"

I could tell my bluntness surprised her, but she didn't back down. "I didn't tell anyone. You told me no one can know. And I don't really have any friends that I talk to about that kind of thing anyway."

I nodded in understanding, finding her thigh under the table and letting my palm rest on it in a gesture of security. "Oda-sama called earlier because he was looking for you."

Her demeanor turned rigid, and she grabbed my arm, an equal returning gesture of security. "Looking for me? Am I in trouble? Did I get you in trouble?"

The tea set arrived at the table to break the tension slightly. "No one is in trouble." I said as I poured a cup for her from the pot. "He has a suspicion that someone is trying to use you to get to me. He was worried about you."

She touched the cup I set in front of her just with her fingertips, spinning it on the table slowly. She was nervous. "What does that mean?"

"It means someone has been watching you." I turned in my chair to face her, reaching around her thighs to encourage her to face me as well. Her expression was fearful, full of regret, and I could feel the emotion of it in my chest. I took her hand and brought it to my lips to kiss her knuckles. "Don't be scared, okay? I'm going to keep you safe. But I need to know if you have any idea who it might be that's been watching you."

She nodded without hesitation. I wasn't expecting her to have a response. "Genji." She said.

"Genji?"

"He's been following me for a while." I understood that her admittance of her previous relationship with Genji was only the first of many revelations I would encounter about her past. "When I broke up with him and ran away, he stayed away for a while. But then he found me again."

The way she talked about him was not with anger or sadness. It was with fear. And I also had something to think about it if it turned out that my old friend was indeed working for Abe-kai. "Just what happened between you?" I had a feeling all I had to do was invite her to tell me her story.

She took a look around her surroundings, holding her cup of tea close to her face with both hands. The tea house was mostly empty, as the day was coming to a close, and only a few of the older staff were seated at a table in the dining room while the younger staff prepared for closing.

"If you'd rather not tell me, or wait until we get back to my house, I understand." I offered her an out.

"No, I'll tell you." She didn't miss a beat. "It's important for you to know."

Our voices had become hushed to combat the looming the silence the place was taking on as the closing activities commenced. They would ask us to leave if we didn't take the cues, and I wondered how much time we had. "Did you know that I knew Genji when you met me? Did you know about me before?" I wanted to know just how deeply her involvement with the Abe-kai went. I wanted to know if Genji was associated with them before he met her, and if he had dragged her into anything that could make her a target.

She shook her head like she really wanted me to believe her. "I didn't know. I didn't know you existed until I met you at the martial arts club." Her eyes began to gloss over, and she pressed her lips together. "Please believe me." Her voice got even quieter. I had triggered something in her that I hadn't meant to, and I felt a tightness in my chest reacting to it. I had already experienced her breaking down, but I somehow wondered if she trusted me more.

I took the tea cup out of her hand and put it down on the table, reaching around her back to pull her against my chest. Her fingers curled into a hold on my shirt. "I'm not going to get mad at you, I just want to know." I learned something valuable about her in that moment. I pushed her back from me so I could see her face, and ran my fingers through the hair at the side of her face. "You have the worst ideas about men, you know that?"

"I'm not going to cry."

I put the tea cup back in her hand. "These guys are going to kick us out soon."

We stayed close together, sipping the tea, for another thirty minutes saying not much at all. The staff of the teahouse didn't ask us to leave, but I had a feeling we were overstaying our welcome. I tucked her under my arm as we stepped off the entryway stairs into the darkness. It had been a while since I had been outside at night in Setagaya, and I had forgotten how bright the lights in Shinjuku really were. No wonder no one could sleep there.

"Do you want to walk back? It's about twenty minutes from here." I asked her, making sure she was secure against me.

She nodded and leaned her head against my chest and shoulder, reaching around my back and holding my side. "It's a nice night." She said. It was a while before she spoke again. "Listen, the relationship I had with Genji was not good. It's hard to talk about."

"Not good?" She seemed as if she wanted to talk, like she had something on her chest that she needed to get out, and I had been the first person she felt comfortable talking to.

"I spent a lot of time just telling myself to stop remembering it. There was a lot of experiences with him I would rather not have had. Things related to his gang, which is actually how I got tangled up with him in the first place."

I couldn't help but see the irony in what she was saying. "The things you didn't like about him are a lot like the things about me that I told you to be cautious of before anything happened between us."

"No, this is still different. You're a gentleman." I watched as she smiled to herself distantly, and I could almost see the memories she was recalling as if she was projecting them. "You're honest, and kind, and only dangerous when you need to be. Genji was none of that. He was reckless and a show off."

"I used to be like that when I was younger." It wasn't that I was trying to convince her that she had wrong impression of her former boyfriend, but that I was trying to instill the more realistic impression she should have had of me. "The Yakuza makes proper men with manners and values, that's the difference. Genji is and always will be a delinquent on a motorcycle."  

It was getting late, and the dark was settling in thickly. The streets were empty, the houses quiet. She pushed herself away from me, but took my hand to remain in contact with me. I laced our fingers together, which felt more intimate than I had intended it to, but it was a gesture which I hoped she realized meant that I couldn't simply drop my hold on her. That I would remain tangled with her even if I loosened my grip until she desired to loosen hers as well.