Almost Completely
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 5: On Purpose Again
He was there when she came out at six-fifteen.
Not arriving. Already there, sitting on the low concrete step outside the smokehouse with a thermos and his jacket and the particular stillness of someone who had been there long enough to get comfortable. He looked up when she came out.
She stopped.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
She looked at him. He looked at her. The street was empty and dark and cold, the kind of November morning that hadn’t decided yet whether it was going to rain.
“You’re out early,” she said.
“I’m always out early.”
“I know,” she said, and that landed between them with a small quiet weight because it acknowledged something neither of them had said directly — that she knew his schedule because she’d been paying attention to it, which meant she’d been paying attention to him.
He looked at the thermos in his hands. “I made enough for two.”
She came across and sat down on the step beside him. Not close. Adjacent.
He poured and handed her the thermos cap, which was the cup, and she wrapped both hands around it the way she always did with coffee and took a sip.
It was not coffee. It was tea — black, strong, with something in it she couldn’t immediately identify. Warm all the way down.
“What is this?”
“Cedar tip tea. My grandmother makes it.” He glanced at her. “Too much?”
She took another sip. “No. It’s good. It tastes like the smokehouse.”
“Everything in my life tastes like the smokehouse.”
She smiled into the cup. He was looking at the street.
They sat there in the cold and the dark and the quiet and it was easy in that specific way that was becoming familiar — no performance required, no gaps to fill, just the two of them occupying the same space and the space being better for it.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you actually want to run it? The smokehouse. When your father—” She paused, making sure the question was framed right. “Is it what you’d choose? If it were a choice?”
He was quiet long enough that she thought she’d pushed somewhere she shouldn’t have. Then: “I don’t know if I’d know how to answer that. It’s always just been — what I am.” He turned the thermos in his hands. “My grandfather built it. My father kept it. If I don’t—” He stopped. “There’s no one else.”
“That’s not an answer though.”
He looked at her. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”
She held his gaze. He didn’t look away, and she felt again that thing from the parking lot — the stillness he made, the quality of his attention when it landed on her, like she had his full weight.
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