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“I had them put in after New York,” Xavier replied quietly. “They seemed to fit.”
The levity in his voice was gone as I turned back to him somewhat shyly. “Are you longing for anything now?”
He watched me carefully, sapphire blue eyes shining, as deep as an ocean and twice as opaque. “I think I’ll always long for you, Ces. Even when you’re right here.”
I opened my mouth, taken aback by the statement. I found I understood it, though. Maybe it was because, like me, Xavier understood the phrase that always rang through me like a bell, no matter how good things might be. That one single fear.
Not enough.
“It’s so…peaceful here.” I turned away from the camellia bush and his woeful expression, desperate to get away from that feeling. I’d been running from it my entire life—why confront it now and ruin such a beautiful night?
Instead, I focused on the rest of the garden, on the serenity laid out before me. But before I could take any more steps, a pair of hands encircled my waist, and I was tugged back against Xavier’s broad chest as he set his chin atop my head.
“Like it?” he asked for the second time that night. This time, however, the words were threaded with more than a bit of vulnerability.
I twisted to look up at him. “You are full of surprises, you know that?”
The shy, crooked smile that was quickly becoming my favorite version of Xavier’s rare grin made another appearance. “Got one more for you, if you’re willing.”
He led me through the garden to the very edge of the building, where eventually, I noticed steam rising into the night, directly from the leaves of a lush set of—or no, not from leaves at all. As we approached, I found, to my shock, that there was a pool out here after all. Of a sort.
“One of my favorite parts of Japan was the onsen,” he said. “The hot springs. There is something like twenty-five thousand of them, with bathhouses built around them where people can just…relax. When I came back and bought this place, I missed them. So I built one for myself.”
I blinked, taking it all in. It wasn’t a typical pool—smaller but looked more like it was built into the side of a mountain than an apartment building. The garden extended up the sides, which was framed by a variety of river rocks, complete with ferns and other sorts of greenery growing between cracks and crevices.
“You must have loved having that to escape to,” I said. “This is so beautiful.”
“They’re not all like this. And I wasn’t allowed to go to a lot of them, you know. Because of the tattoos.”
“Oh?”
My face heated at just the thought of Xavier’s tattoos, elegant and sharp, curving over his shoulder and neck.
“Tattoos aren’t very popular in Japan,” he told me. “For a long time, people assumed they were marks of the Yakuza, so a lot of the onsen don’t permit them at all, hoping to avoid that sort.”
“When did you get yours?” I wondered.
He’d had some when we met, though not nearly so many as he had now.
“Actually, I got my first, just these characters here on my shoulder, when I visited with my mum and we stayed with my grandfather. I was thirteen, I think?”
“You got your first tattoo atthirteen?”
I’d heard of kids doing that back home, but they were usually the kinds who were involved with a gang of some sort. Or maybe I was just too much of a prude to have known anything more.
Xavier just smirked. “Yeah. Far too young to be inked, but everyone thought I was older. Anyway, my grandfather and I got into some sort of fight. He said I was rude, disrespectful, no better than the criminals. So I decided to go out and mark myself like one just to spite him. It’s the characters for Sato, the family name.” He chuckled. “God, he was so mad. Said I’d dishonored the family by marking my skin. Mum was not pleased either.”
At the mention of his mother, all levity vanished.
“And the rest?” I wondered, hoping to pull him out of that sudden sadness.
“The rest I had done in America when I was at Dartmouth for a bit.” He gestured to his left arm, where I knew there was some kind of serpent ringing his biceps, attached to a much larger tattoo that crawled over his left collarbone and moved down his side. “The ones on my arm and wrist after I opened my first restaurant.” He shrugged. “Ojiisan was right, you know. I’m not a particularly nice man now, and at twenty, I was a right shit. I fought with everyone. Never stopped, really. I’m just as difficult at thirty-two as I was at twenty, wouldn’t you say?”
He seemed to find it funny. I had to be honest, I did not.
“You do fight a lot,” I observed.
Xavier looked up, humor gone once more. It wasn’t an opinion. He couldn’t really argue with it.
