Twice Loved
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 11: Games People Play
It started, as the historical record must reflect, with Parisa — and it started innocently, which is the only way Parisa starts anything.
Forty-eight hours into residency, she walked from her bedroom to the refrigerator in her bra and underwear, poured a glass of water, and walked back, exactly as she had done at home every morning of her life. This was not a statement. This was a woman in her own home, where she had been comfortable precisely one other place on earth, getting water. She probably did not register Brent at the kitchen counter at all.
Brent registered Parisa.
I was in the doorway of my own room with a clear view of both parties. My sister — five foot five of her, all leg, jet black hair sleep-wild to her waist — crossed the kitchen, and my boyfriend looked up from his laptop and watched her go, the whole way, coffee suspended halfway to his mouth, with the open unhurried appreciation of a man admiring weather. When she padded back past him he said, “Morning, Parisa,” in a voice you could have spread on toast.
“Morning,” she said, thinking about water.
She disappeared into her room. Brent’s eyes came to the doorway where I stood, and found me watching him, and the man did not have the decency to look even slightly caught. He raised his coffee a quarter inch — a toast, to the morning, to the household, to the view — and went back to his laptop.
Standing in my doorway, I made a decision I will defend to my grave: if that was how the table was set, I was going to deal myself in.
For science.
Understand the distinction, because the household’s legal history turns on it: Parisa wore her underwear around the apartment because it did not occur to her not to. I wore mine deliberately. The third morning I came out for water in a bra and underwear with my hair down — the full black yardage — and crossed the kitchen at parade speed.
And Brent Saunders, who any reasonable woman would have expected to study his laptop, did no such thing. He leaned back against the counter, folded his arms, and watched the entire procession with frank enjoyment, and as I passed him on the return leg his hand came out and gave my backside one unhurried, proprietary pat.
“Hydration’s important,” he said.
I want to record my reaction honestly, because this memoir runs on honesty: I had planned that walk as a test of his composure, and instead I returned to my room with my own composure lightly handled, holding my water glass, thinking — oh. Oh, he plays.
Of course he played. A middle schooler knows what partial nudity in a shared kitchen means: the game is on, and you’re invited. We had dealt him in the moment we started padding past his coffee in our underwear, and Brent — who reads every room he has ever stood in — had simply accepted the invitation at face value and anted up.
What followed, over that first September and then over four years, was not a siege of his virtue. It was a game — the oldest one, the push-and-pull that close people in love have played in kitchens since kitchens existed — and we played it daily, all three of us, with escalating skill.
The game had rules. Nobody wrote them; everybody knew them; in four years nobody broke them once. That is how you know a game is love.
Rule one: the wardrobe was ours. What we wore — or didn’t — was the move we made, and it set the table stakes for the day. He played to the level we set and never past it.
Rule two: his hands stayed proportional. A pat, a pinch, a brush — over the fabric, in passing, brief as punctuation. He would pick a piece of lint off a bra cup with two fingers and surgeon’s focus, flick it away, and return to his eggs. He would reach across Parisa at the stove for the salt and let his knuckles graze, unhurried, across the front of her, and acquire the salt, and season his eggs like a man at peace with all his choices. What he never did — ever, in four years — was undo, remove, or pull aside. The bra stayed hooked. The waistband stayed put. Our wardrobe was our move, and unmaking it was a move that belonged to us alone, and his perfect observance of that line is precisely why the game stayed a game, and why we kept playing, and why the calligraphy over the sofa never had grounds for a formal complaint.
Rule three: everything was answerable. Tease and be teased. Goad and be goaded. The game ran both directions or it didn’t run.
Within those rules, the man was shameless.
The signature exchange of the entire era happened in October of freshman year, at the stove, on Parisa’s cooking night.
She was minding a pan in a demi bra and very small underwear — her standard Tuesday, by then — and Brent reached across her for the salt, and the reach took the scenic route: a slow graze of knuckles across her bra, completely unhurried, completely deniable, completely deliberate. He acquired the salt. He seasoned. He returned the salt by the same scenic route.
Parisa did not move. The banked coals do not startle. She kept her eyes on the pan, and after a moment she asked, in her driest register:
“Are you having fun?”
“Very much, my little pretty.”
“Mm.” A flip of whatever was in the pan, executed flawlessly. “Maybe I’ll start charging a fee per feel.”
“I’d run up a tab.”
I was at the kitchen table with my biology notes, and I want it recorded that I heard the whole exchange and had to put my pen down. My sister — the quiet one, the contained one — had just been brushed at her own stove, declined to blush, opened negotiations, and been counter-offered, all without her dinner so much as browning unevenly. Brent went back to setting the table wearing the expression of a man who knows exactly how good the company is.
“The tab,” Parisa said to the pan, “accrues interest.”
“Send the statements to my room.”
“Oh my God,” I said, to my notes.
From that night forward, the fee schedule was canon. “That’s going on the tab,” became household law — announced over a shoulder after a passing pinch, muttered when the lint inspection ran long, invoked solemnly by Parisa whenever the salt traveled. By senior year the tab was, by her meticulous accounting, into five figures. He never disputed a line item. “Settle it at the wedding,” he said once, and the kitchen went quiet for a moment in the way of a joke that had stopped being entirely a joke, and then Parisa said, “With interest,” and turned back to the stove, and the matter was entered into the record.
There was exactly one attempt, that first September, to invoke higher authority — and it came from him, and it failed magnificently.
Fifth morning of my water campaign. I crossed the kitchen; he watched with his customary appreciation; and as I reached the refrigerator he said, conversationally:
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