Kento.

I repeated his name once in my head while I shook his hand. His grip was firmer than I expected.  I had spent months calling him Coffee Guy, so having an actual name attached to him suddenly felt strangely significant.

Kento.

I looked at him again and immediately regretted giving myself permission to do that.

The light in the bar was much better than the alley. That was a problem.

His hair fell  straight past his shoulders, and my eyes stopped for a second on his diamond cut blouse. His collarbones were exposed, his skin light olive and I immediately jerked my eyes back up. Fuck…

His face was sharper than I had been able to make out from Toscana. Strong jaw. A slight shadow beneath his cheekbones. His nose tilted down at the end, and his eyebrows were dark and arched but not quite identical.

Then he looked directly at me. I looked down.

I released his hand and took my jacket off, mostly because I had suddenly become far too warm in it. When I looked back, Kento was still smiling.

His eyes were darker than I thought. Black, maybe. Very dark brown. Something between the two. Large and slightly heavy at the corners, giving him the strangest tired-looking gaze even when the rest of his face was animated. I had seen him laughing through the kitchen window before, but I had never been close enough to notice how much his expression changed around his eyes.

I looked away again.

Nari sat back down and I took the empty seat beside her. Unfortunately, that left Kento almost directly across from me.

I managed to look at him again. There was something I needed to clear up before I spent the rest of the evening wondering about it.

“Oh.” I rested my hands on the table. “I actually wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” He looked genuinely confused.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I think I scared you earlier… In the alley.” I hesitated. “Before work.”

“That was you?” He chuckled. “How did you even recognize me? I couldn’t see anything back there.”

“Your hair.” The answer came out immediately. Kento stopped, his eyebrow raised as he tried to understand what the fuck I just spouted.

I looked down at the table. “I mean…” I cleared my throat. “It’s long.”

I could feel Nari turn her head slowly to look at me. Everyone was looking at me. I wanted to disappear. But the important thing was to let Kento know that I was sorry and I was not following him around. 

“Oh my God, I would have cried,” Nari said after I finished saying my peace. “Could you imagine having this thing follow you in the dark?” She pointed at me.

“What the fu… Hey!” I squeezed my brows together and lifted my chin at her. She started laughing before I even finished protesting.

This thing. It was funny until it wasn’t. But Kento was laughing into his glass now.

That had been the actual point of bringing it up. I wanted to know if I had made him uncomfortable Thursday too. The whole thing had bothered me since he ran away the second time. I knew he didn’t owe me anything because I had given him a blanket, but I had thought our first conversation had gone well.

Apparently he hadn’t even known the idiot behind him was me.

“Yeah, you scared me good. Both times,” Kento added before taking a sip.

I looked down and rubbed the back of my neck again. “I was just trying to walk past you.”

“Walk past me?” His eyes dropped briefly before returning to my face. “Where?” He held his hands apart, measuring the alley. “You think you could squeeze past me in there?”

Nari snorted. I opened my mouth. Nothing useful presented itself. I could have walked past him, I was not that wide. That wasn’t the point…

“You probably have to turn sideways to get through doors,” Kento continued.

I scratched the back of my neck and crossed my arms again. I lowered my head, smiling despite myself. Wonderful. I had finally spoken to Coffee Guy properly and he was making fun of my shoulders.

Worse, I liked it. If I had not been so nervous I might have even flexed my arms a bit. 

The laughter eventually settled. I looked across the table again. Kento was still watching me.

There was something about his gaze that made holding it unexpectedly difficult. He could look half asleep while actively making fun of me. I liked his eyes.

I reached for my drink.

“Did you also give me the blanket?”

I nearly missed it. I looked at him.

Something in his expression had changed. He was studying me now, like head finally connected something.

So he hadn’t known. For some stupid reason, my chest sank a little.

Thursday had been nothing enormous. I knew that. I had handed a cold man a blanket and helped him with his lighter. We had spoken for a few minutes at most. Still, it had been the first time I had actually talked to him.

And Kento hadn’t even known tonight that I was the same man.

“Y…Yes.” My fucking voice cracked.

“Thank you,” Kento said. “I left the blanket to one of your coworkers.”

I closed my eyes “Yeah, he told me…”

The relief was immediate and embarrassingly warm.

He remembered the blanket. He remembered enough of my face to recognize my eyes once he actually looked at me. He just hadn’t recognized me walking behind him in the dark.

“You’re welcome,” I said quietly.

When I lowered my hand, Kento was still looking at me. I looked away again. Jesus Christ. This was ridiculous. 

Conversation moved on around the table. For once, I was perfectly happy not being responsible for keeping one going. Kento did enough of that himself.

He was open. Much more than I expected. He spoke with his whole face, his eyebrows lifting when he disagreed with something, his mouth twisting before he laughed. Sometimes his hands joined in. He interrupted Romina, got interrupted back and continued as if neither of them had noticed.

Now that I could see him properly, I kept finding more things to look at. I stole a glance at his mouth while he talked.

Bad idea.

His lips naturally turned upward at the corners, and the piercings I had noticed Thursday sat against his lower lip. When he smiled, one of his canines showed slightly longer than the others.

At some point, Ray’s comment from earlier came back to me.

Have you ever seen me wear stuff like that?

I hadn’t actually gotten a good look at what Kento was wearing tonight. I had been too busy discovering that he was apparently terrified of me. So I looked. Briefly.

His clothes suited him. Obviously. Everything I had seen him wear seemed to suit him somehow. Without the Bella-Donna costumes, though, I could see more of what was actually his choice.

My eyes made it about as far as his shoulders before they went back up.

His face again.

I tried once more a little later. Same problem. There was no point. There. Fine. I liked looking at his face. 

I liked the way his eyebrows weren’t perfectly symmetrical. I liked the slight discoloration around his eyelids that made his already languid gaze look even heavier. I liked watching his mouth move when he talked and the brief flash of his canine when he laughed.

And, increasingly, I liked hearing him talk. Worse, I liked when he talked to me.  I must have been quieter than I thought because at some point, Kento pulled me into the conversation and asked about my work.

I told him about Toscana, expecting the subject to last for a minute or two before we moved on. Instead, he asked me something else. Then something about how long I had worked there.

His eyebrows went up. What I didn’t expect was for Kento to actually listen.

Not politely. He was looking at me the whole time. Oh. He was actually interested. I looked down at my plate for a second, smiling.

Well, that was nice. So I kept talking.

Probably too much, because at some point I realized I had gone from barely contributing to explaining something about the kitchen that absolutely nobody at this table needed to know.

“So… since you were twenty-six. How old are you?”

I was suddenly aware of being the older man at the table. With less confidence, I whispered “thirty-six.”

“Oh,” Romina interjected. “You look older.”

I laughed and picked up my glass. 

I knew I looked a little rough around the edges. Years in the kitchen did that to you. I had more grey hairs than I cared to count and enough lines around my eyes for Nari to occasionally point them out when she wanted to annoy me. Thirty-two  wasn’t ancient.

It did, however, suddenly make me wonder how old Kento was. I glanced at him over my glass. Twenty-seven? 

I had never really thought about it before. There had never been a reason to assign him a number. Now there was. For no particular reason, I hoped the number wasn’t too far from mine.

“The twenty-five group over here, bullying me.” I lowered my glass, shaking my head.

“Nope.” Kento shook his head. “Don’t put me in the same box with these old ladies. I’m twenty-three.”

My glass stopped halfway back to the table. Twenty-three. I looked at him. Kento looked perfectly pleased with himself for having separated himself from the old ladies.

Twenty-three. That was younger than I had expected.

I had been hoping for twenty-six. Even twenty-five would have made me feel better about the whole thing.

Twenty-three.

Kento was already arguing with Nari about being called an old lady, completely unaware that he had just aged me several years in my own head.

I picked my glass back up. Well. That was unfortunate. I looked at him again. Still pretty. Fuck…

We ate. Nari complained. Romina encouraged her. Kento insulted both of them whenever the opportunity presented itself. I learned quickly that giving him an opening was dangerous because he would take it, and unfortunately I started giving him openings on purpose. 

Then Nari and Romina started getting ready to leave. The evening had to end eventually. I watched Kento reach for his things and felt something in me resist the idea immediately.

I didn’t want this to be it.

I couldn’t exactly tell him I’ve had a crush on you for months and tonight made it considerably worse, would you mind giving me some way to see you intentionally instead of waiting for you to walk past my kitchen?

A beer. I could ask him for a beer. By the time I reached for my wallet to pay for Nari’s birthday, I had almost convinced myself. Then Nari stole my credit card.

I could have fought her for the bill, but there were limits to how much dignity I was willing to sacrifice in front of Kento tonight.

Cash, then. I opened my wallet. Kento was still there.

Ask him. I put my fingers inside the wallet and stopped.

It was one beer.

I pulled out the cash I needed. Ask him.

I folded the bills once. Maybe he had only been friendly because I was Nari’s brother.

I unfolded them. So what? Then he could say no. I looked at him.

“Maybe…” I cleared my throat. My eyes dropped to the money again.

“If you want, sometime…”

Just fucking ask him. My thumb rubbed over the edge of one of the bills.

“You can get me a beer.” There. I looked up for barely a second. “Then we’re even.”

Kento smiled. “Sure.”

Oh. I looked down at the money again. Sure. That was a yes. Not a yes, yes but a form of yes. That was enough to carry me through paying without feeling like a complete idiot.

There was only one small problem with that plan. I didn’t have his number.

That seemed fixable. Kento was still inside, and unless he intended to arrange our hypothetical beer through Nari like we were twelve, one of us would have to ask eventually.

I leaned against the wall and checked my phone, smiling to myself. I was waiting for Kento when a loud bang came from the restroom.

I straightened immediately. The door opened and Kento stepped out.

Everything pleasant in my head disappeared. Something was wrong. His expression was completely different from the man who had been laughing across the table a few minutes ago.

“What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Then the restroom door moved behind him. I looked past his shoulder. A man came out holding his cheek. There was blood beneath several scratches.

I did’'t know exactly what had happened in that restroom, but I knew enough. The man’s pheromones still lingered unpleasantly in the hallway, and Kento looked like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

By the time the police finally left with the man, Kento looked exhausted. One of the officers suggested fresh air. I followed Kento outside but stopped several steps away from him. The cold hit immediately.

I was so frantic, I don’t even remember what I said to him. 

“I just want to go home. I want to…” He stopped. “I want to shower.” His voice got quieter. “My pants are sticky. I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.”

For a second, I didn’t. Then I did. Oh.

“Okay, okay…”

I pulled out my phone. Think. There was apparently no one to call for him and his home was far away. Taxi. But what if the taxi driver was an Alpha or Kento passed out?

Then I thought about my apartment. “My apartment is closer.” The second the words left my mouth, I heard how they could sound.

Fantastic. A man had just cornered him in a restroom and now another Alpha he had properly met two hours ago was offering to take him home.

“I live in East Village,” I added quickly. “You could shower there. If you want. I can wait outside, or—” No. Stop talking. “Only if you’re comfortable.”

I wanted to help him. Badly. I wanted to get him somewhere warm and clean and away from this place. But I didn’t want him agreeing because I was standing there offering and he felt like he had to.

If he wanted Washington Heights, I would get him to Washington Heights.

If he wanted somebody called, I would call them.

If he wanted me to leave, I would leave.

Kento looked at me for a moment. “Okay. I’ll go with you.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Relief came first. Then immediate responsibility. Right. He was coming home with me. Under possibly the worst circumstances imaginable.

He ended up sleeping over. I offered him the bedroom, obviously. The couch was not uncomfortable, but I wanted it to be, honestly. I was staring at the ceiling for an hour, eyes closed, trying to fall asleep. My mind was keeping me awake and I didn’t like that. 

At first, I thought it was because of what happened at the bar. That made sense. I was still angry. Every time I remembered that man coming out of the restroom after him, I felt wide awake again. 

But it wasn’t that. Worse, I was thinking only about him. 

I remembered him leaning forward and laughing when he told a story. Then the blanket. The way his face had softened when I handed it to him. The smile after he realized I wasn’t some stranger trying to bother him. The raised eyebrow. His hair...

I groaned and pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes. I kept on tossing and turning, still thinking about how he smiled and laughed, frowned, moved his hand, touched his hair… 

The apartment was too quiet. And his scent was seeping through the bedroom doorframe. Was he feeling alright? His scent was that of… black tea and bergamot.