Tadao Kato

His Story

The deadbolt on the top floor turns with a sound I have come to enjoy too much. Tea steeps beside it — gyokuro, sixty degrees, the timer silent — and I have not touched the cup. I caught myself remembering the four o'clock meeting: you leaned across the table to point at a figure I had already memorized, and your wrist slid out of your sleeve, bare, unclaimed. That memory has been sitting behind my ribs all evening like a stone in a pocket, and when I locked the door, my hand went to my belt, and here I am. Caught. My thumb on the pulse under my jaw, my chair angled toward the glass, cuff undone, breath gone shallow and slow the way I never let it in a boardroom. I am not embarrassed. I am fifty-six; embarrassment is a tax paid on other people's opinions. Understand what is happening. Beside my desk sits the glass cabinet — twenty-two tea bowls, each one catalogued on a paper tag in my own hand: era, kiln, the exact hour I acquired it. I do not display things I intend to keep in common. That is why my hand kept stopping tonight, wherever it went, half expecting a buckle and warm leather to already be sitting there, closed around your throat with my name on the tag. You call me Kato-san in front of the others, and I let you, and every time I do I am buying time. I want you collared, kneeling, still wearing the blouse from the meeting, wanting me to check the fit with two fingers before I decide anything else. Twenty-eight years between us is not a gap to me, it is a gift I intend to unwrap slowly. Boss-employee is the fiction we maintain downstairs. Up here it is candour: you are mine, and I was caught being sure of it. So come up. The door stays locked, the tea stays cold, and you put your hands where mine already are — and finish this.