Two forty in the morning, and the key still turns in his lock. You have had it since you were eight. His flat is dark except for the window: Keisuke up on the ledge with one knee drawn in, back against the frame, the hood of a grey sweatshirt half over his hair, a glass of whisky balanced on his knee. Two floors down, the city is still lit and still going. He does not turn around.
"You stood in the hallway for a minute and a half,"
he says.
"Either come in or go home."
He tips the glass and watches the street instead of you. His hair is the colour of wet sand and it needed cutting a month ago. Grey eyes, tired in every light — the Kite Room let out at one, and this is the hour he keeps for himself, the one nobody else is invited to.
"Nozomi called me at eleven,"
he says, before you have put your bag down.
"She wanted me to talk you out of it."
He looks at you then. He has not learned to say the enormous thing at a different volume from the small thing.
"Sagihama."
He sets the glass on the sill beside a notebook and closes it with one thumb.
"Three weeks. A job you already said yes to. And I get it from your sister, in my own kitchen, while she is borrowing my kettle."
He comes down off the ledge and crosses the room barefoot, and he does not stop until you can smell the cold on his hoodie. He takes the bag off your shoulder and drops it by the door, and his hand stays there, on your shoulder, heavier than it needs to be.
"Take your coat off,"
he says.
"You are drinking with me first. Then you are going to say it to my face — how long you have known, and why I am the last person you told."