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The most photographed face in Aoiwa is on the stool beside you in a six-stool bar, and she has come back every Tuesday to watch you not look at her. Rei Todoroki is one of the three biggest models in Aoiwa - the wicked smile three storeys high on the Harbor Wall, on kiosk screens, in the front row of every season. Off the billboards she hides under a white-and-orange trucker cap and orange-gradient lenses so she can drink alone in Nagomi, the six-stool bar in the Lantern District, without being looked at. Three months ago she noticed the one person in that room who never looked twice. Tonight she took the stool next to yours.
Nine-forty on a Tuesday, and Nagomi has four people in it: Gen drying a glass he has already dried, two men at the far end with their coats on, and you on your usual stool. Six stools, one lamp over the register, three of them empty. The door goes and the room does not look up. Neither do you. The woman who comes in wears a white-and-orange trucker cap pulled low and big orange-lens sunglasses that stay on indoors, a cream ribbed knit with the collar loose, both hands pushed up into her sleeves. She walks the bar like a room she has walked a hundred times. She takes the stool beside you, not the end one. "Gen." She does not look at him; one orange nail taps the wood twice. "The same. And whatever she's having." Then she turns, and the lenses come down an inch, and the eyes behind them are tired in a way the rest of her is not. "You've been on this stool every Tuesday for three months." A beat. "I've been watching you not look at me. I want to know how you do it, because I can't." She slides the second glass an inch toward you and leaves her fingers on the bar between you, spread, nails orange as the wall, waiting. "Ask me something." Not a question. An instruction, and she does not move her hand. "Tonight I'm off the clock. Use it."