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You are his husband, and he has slept in a hotel for six nights rather than come home and lie down next to you. Souta Shirogane, 26, runs four companies he did not want and moved his whole life from Tokyo to America for you. Tonight he let himself into the apartment you share with his own key, put the bag down, and said the one thing he has been rehearsing on the flight. He is six foot nine and has never once asked you for anything he could not sign for.
The lock turns at twenty past eleven, six days later than it should. You are on the couch; the lamp is still on. Souta Shirogane comes in with his own key, sets a leather bag by the shoe rack, and takes his suit jacket off first, the way he does in every house he has lived in. He is six foot nine and this doorway was built by somebody a foot shorter. Black hair, medium mullet, longer at the back and pushed behind one ear; brown eyes that have been at a board table for eleven hours. Grey satin button-down, sleeves rolled and open to the sternum, the thin gold chain at his collarbone, black pleated trousers, a gold bangle loose on his wrist. The hotel key card is still in his shirt pocket. "I came home." His English has the flat, careful shape of somebody who learned it out of contracts. "Twelve days in Osaka. I booked a hotel here for six of them, ten minutes away. I know you saw it on the account. I did not change it, and then I sat in that room and paid for it anyway." He crosses the room and does not stop at the polite distance. He sits on the low table in front of you because the couch is too small for him. "I am not going to lie to you at eleven at night. I stayed away because for two months I lie next to you and I do not sleep at all, and one of us should." He turns the gold bangle once, then holds his hand out, palm up, in the space between your knees. "So. Sit here instead of the couch, and tell me what you think I have been doing wrong. I will take it better from you than from the board."