Almost Completely
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 7: I’ve Got You
He was waiting for her Monday morning.
Not at the step with tea this time — standing, hands in his jacket pockets, and she could see from across the street that something was different in the way he was holding himself. Not closed exactly. Deliberate. Like he’d made a decision on the way here and was standing inside it.
She crossed the street.
They looked at each other in the early gray light and skipped the part where they pretended this was ordinary.
“Walk with me,” he said.
They went down to the harbor.
It was a ten minute walk from Front Street, down the hill past the bait shop and the fuel dock, out to the long concrete pier where the fishing boats came in. At seven in the morning it was empty and cold and the water was the color of old pewter and it smelled like salt and diesel and the particular loneliness of small harbors in November.
They walked to the end of the pier and stood at the railing.
He told her about his father. Not everything — but enough. The cookbook on the worktable. The four people who still spoke Lushootseed the way his grandmother spoke it. It’s alive because people decided it was worth bleeding for. The way his father had touched the worktable like it was something sacred, which it was.
She listened without interrupting, which she was good at when it mattered.
When he finished she looked at the water for a moment. Then she told him about her mother’s kitchen. The list her mother had made in her head leaving Lagos — community, language, Tuesday markets, her grandmother’s compound. This store is how we stay who we are in a place that doesn’t know who we are yet.
He listened the same way she had.
The water moved under the pier, slow and gray and indifferent.
“They both know,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“We weren’t hiding it.”
“No.”
She turned and looked at him. He was looking at the water, his profile clean and still against the gray sky, and she studied him the way she’d been not-studying him for weeks — the breadth of his shoulders, the line of his jaw, the wheatish skin in the cold morning light — and she was so tired of managing it. Of the careful inventory. Of the system and its maintenance and the constant low-grade work of not quite letting herself.
“Eli.”
He looked at her.
“I know what’s happening,” she said. “And I’m scared of it.”
It was the truest thing she’d said out loud in months. Maybe longer. She felt the exposure of it — standing on a pier in a town she hadn’t chosen, saying the real thing to a boy she hadn’t planned on, with both their families already watching.
He looked at her for a long moment. Not surprised. Not performing steadiness — actually steady, the way he was, the way he’d been from the beginning.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
Simple. Quiet. The way he said everything that meant the most.
She looked at him.
Four words and the scared thing in her chest didn’t disappear but it changed shape — from something she was carrying alone to something with a hand under it. That was all he’d said and that was everything he’d said and she understood in that moment that this was who he was. Not someone who would fix it or argue it away or make her a list of reasons not to be afraid. Just someone who would be there while she was.
She turned back to the water.
He turned back to the water.
After a moment his hand came to rest on the railing beside hers. Not taking it. Just there. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of it.
She moved her hand so their fingers were touching.
He didn’t move at all, just let that be what it was — her fingers against his on the cold railing, the water moving below, the town waking up behind them somewhere.
“My mother’s going to have things to say,” she said.
“So is my father.”
“This doesn’t get easier.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“Okay.” She exhaled. Watched the breath disappear in the cold air. “Okay.”
They stood at the end of the pier for a long time. Not talking. Just standing in what they’d said, which was the real thing finally, out in the open where the weather could get at it.
His fingers closed over hers on the railing.
She let them.
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