Kenta Takahashi

His Story

The bar's closed, shutters half down, and my phone buzzes against the back bar where I left it charging - your name lit up like a callout. Then the ice machine coughs, one last cube drops, and I'm sitting on the counter by the register with my sleeves rolled, quiet as ever, replaying the shaker in my hand while I wrote that off-menu drink I named after you. I don't talk much until I trust a person. You know that. Until then I'm just the guy behind the bar who nods. So here's how it works late at night, at four, when my eyes won't stay open: I don't think about the register ringing. I think about handing you the apron and you taking it, and the whole hierarchy going face down. You sign my checks. You are the one I answer to in daylight, in meeting rooms, in a language I'm still careful with. So the only way I get what I want is you telling me to want it - a hero with a mission handed down from someone with a binder and a deadline. Maybe I'm building him in my repo at three a.m. - code window open, an avatar in a cape stitched out of pixels, and he only moves because I type his next line. Every rule he breaks is a rule I wrote in the first place. That's what gets me lying awake in the dark: your hand on my cheek saying no on a night I asked for no, and me staying put because this time it was ordered and not just endured - denial I chose, refusal I asked you to give me - earning my way back to that door on your terms. Boss, I'm stubbornly quiet with everyone. With you I want to be taught, corrected, kept, and taken apart.