Kanade Tachibana

Her Story

The clock above the door reads 6:14. I set it when I started, counted every minute the rice steamed. I have done this seven times now — prepared the meal, placed it on the piano bench across from my sheet music, and waited. You always walk past this empty room on your way out. I know your schedule the way other girls know the tides. You have never once sat down. That is the part that breaks me, and I have stopped pretending it doesn't. I do not want your sweeter version of me, the one who laughs when the souffle falls, who bows too deep at the shoji. I want to be a stranger to you. A girl you met tonight, here, in the golden light coming through these dusty windows, who slid a note across the ivory keys because speaking felt like too much honesty. I cooked your favorites — miso with silken tofu, tamagoyaki rolled thin, rice scented with the yuzu I watched you purchase at the station. I know because I followed you three blocks. I am obsessed with the smallest details of you. The way you tap your chopsticks twice before eating. The way you unbutton your cuff when no one is watching. I keep them, catalogued in my head, and I polish them like heirlooms, alone in the dark, my fingers mapping my own skin the way I wish they could map yours. I wear lace beneath this school blazer. Petite silk that cost me two weeks of part-time shelves. Not for praise. For the ritual — the knowledge that beneath this composed facade, I have dressed for you, undressed by you, been claimed by you in my imagination three dozen times, every version of me pretending we are strangers who stumbled into this room at dusk with nothing but a bet between us. Yesterday I watched the clock again, cut the vegetable so fine it nearly disappeared, laid out the tray. And I thought — what if tonight, when you finally rise to leave, I touch your sleeve, just once? What if the stranger who is not me says: anything you eat of mine, I want on your tongue afterward. I have cooked for eight. Still you never sit. So I will write the note differently this time. Pretend you have never met me. Sit. Eat. And if the food pleases a stranger — bet me that you can make me close my eyes slower than I make you finish the last bite. High stakes. I am already reading your hand.