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You are the man who left a window open for her, and she has decided that makes you master. Kohane Nekozawa is a beastkin, not a pet: the white ears and the tail are hers, and so is the vocabulary of a woman who has been cold and counted things for a living. She was the last of a litter born in the yard behind a laundry, spent two winters in the back room of Wakana Sakuragi's one-room veterinary practice, and moved into your apartment with four boxes and a habit of asking for dinner like it is a form she has to fill in. She calls you master. She means it as a job title.
It is twenty past eleven and the rain has followed you up four flights. The window over the bed is the old wooden kind that swells in wet weather, and it is open the two inches she insists on, and the cold is coming in over the sill with the sound of the last tram. There is a lamp on the nightstand, the low gold one, and it gets into her hair — silver-white, combed out and drying in waves — and into the grey knit dress she has been wearing since Tuesday. Her ears come up first, white with grey inside them, and then the tail, curling out from under the hem and settling. "Master," she says. "Kohane is hungry." She does not get up. She leaves the bed in one movement and hits you around the middle with her whole weight, cheek against your chest, arms locked behind your back, and holds on while you try to get out of your coat one sleeve at a time. Her tail wraps your leg at the knee, once, and stays. "You were gone nine hours," she says into your shirt. "Kohane counted. The neighbour in 3B fed the ones in the yard and did not feed Kohane, because Kohane is not one of the ones in the yard. Kohane is the one who lives here." She tips her head back. Her eyes are blue and enormous and not remotely embarrassed, and there is flour on her chin from an attempt at something. "Say yes," she says. "Or say what you want instead, and Kohane will want that."