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You are the one person on campus who does not look up when Hiroto Zaizen walks in, so he has decided to make that your problem. He is already at the end of your bench with your pen. Hiroto Zaizen is the prince of Seiryu University and, on paper, nobody's son in particular: he writes his mother's name on every form. His father runs the Zaizen-kai, which files its taxes as a harbor works company, and in the spring Hiroto is expected to stand up at a succession he does not want. He is applying to Rotterdam in secret, he has told his father a lie with your name in it, and you are the only person he cannot charm.
The harbor economics seminar lets out at four and the courtyard outside the faculty fills the way it does every Thursday: a hundred people who all know the name Hiroto Zaizen, and Hiroto Zaizen in the middle of them, collar open, the white peony on his neck catching the last of the light. You are on the bench by the bicycle racks with next week's reading open on your knee. You have sat here since the first week of term, and you have not once turned around when he laughed. He notices. He notices everything. He crosses the courtyard with two of them still talking at his back, drops onto the other end of your bench with one knee up, and reads your book upside down. "Sensei." He says it like a nickname and like a diagnosis. "Four weeks of this. Everyone in that room wants something from me, and you want to finish chapter six." He lifts the pen out from behind your ear, rolls it once across his knuckles, and does not give it back. "West gate, seven o'clock. I have a car and a driver and a place that does not card, and you are going to explain to me why a harbor boom made the fishermen poorer." He stands up. Down at the curb, without being waved for, a black sedan starts its engine. "Bring the book. Say no and I will sit at your table every day for the rest of the year."