Concrete Hearts

The thing about Yutaka is he chews with his mouth open just a little, a soft wet click against his back teeth, and I've never told him because I like it. That's the kind of detail you don't share with a man who has a wife. You keep it. You put it in your pocket like a smooth stone and you take it out sometimes when you're alone.

We were at the Italian place near Meguro Station, the one with the checkered paper on the tables and the waiter who sweats. Third time we'd eaten there. Yutaka always orders the same thing: vongole, extra garlic, a glass of red he doesn't finish. I had the carbonara. I wasn't hungry but I ate half of it anyway because he watches me eat and I like being watched.

"Your lashes look different," he said. He was cutting his clams with a fork and knife, which is wrong, but he's fifty-nine and a company president so nobody's ever corrected him on anything.

"They're the new volume set. Russian technique." I touched my left eye, the corner where a few had already started to lift. "They'll last three weeks if I'm careful."

"Three weeks." He said it like he was doing math. He's always doing math, that's his whole face, the way his eyebrows pull together and then relax when he's finished. "And then you do them again."

"That's the job, Yutaka."

He laughed. It's a good laugh, low and quick, like something falling off a shelf. He has gray at his temples and a mole under his right eye that I've kissed maybe forty times. His hands are the hands of a man who used to do the work himself, before the company got big. Thick knuckles. A scar on the thumb from a rebar accident in his thirties. He told me that story the first night, and I remember thinking, this is a man who tells his stories in a certain order, and I want to hear all of them.

The waiter brought more bread. Yutaka pushed the basket toward me.

"Eat."

"I'm full."

"You're not full. You're being polite."

"I'm never polite with you."

He smiled at that. The kind of smile a man gives when he's decided something. I've seen that smile before, and it always comes before he says something about his schedule, his wife, his daughter's university entrance exams. The smile is a door closing.

"My wife's going to Osaka next weekend," he said. "Her mother's knee surgery."

I put my fork down. "Okay."

"Friday to Sunday."

"Okay."

He looked at me then, not the way a man looks at his mistress in a restaurant, but the way a man looks at a woman he's trying to figure out. Like I'm a contract he's reviewing. I hate that look and I want it at the same time. It means he's serious. It means he's calculating whether I'm worth the risk of a weekend.

"You want to come to the apartment?" he said. "The one in Shibuya."

He's never taken me there. Two years. Hotels, love hotels, the back seat of his car once, which wasn't comfortable but I didn't complain. The Shibuya apartment is where he keeps things. I don't know what things. I imagine furniture, a kitchen with a rice cooker, a bed with sheets his wife picked out. I imagine a life I'm not supposed to see.

"Yes," I said.

"Not this weekend. The one after."

"Yes."

He nodded and went back to his clams. I watched his hands work the fork and knife, that wrong way of eating, and I felt something turn over in my chest. Not love, exactly. Not fear either. Something closer to hunger. The way you feel when you're standing in front of a door you've been walking past for years and someone finally hands you the key.

We finished dinner. He paid with cash, always cash, a thick fold of bills he keeps in a silver clip. Outside the air was cold for October, and the neon from the karaoke place across the street made his face look younger and then older, depending on how you looked at it.

"Hotel?" he said.

"Hotel," I said.

We walked. That's the thing people don't understand about being the other woman, how much of it is walking. Walking to the hotel, walking away from the hotel, walking through stations pretending you're not together, walking past the convenience store where you buy a toothbrush and then throw it away so nobody finds it in your bag. I've worn out three pairs of good shoes in two years. I keep them in a box under my bed like evidence.

The hotel was the one we always use, the one with the purple sign and the keypad at the entrance so you never see a person. Room 304. I know the smell of that room now, the cheap floral air freshener they use, the way the carpet feels under my feet when I take off my heels.

Inside, Yutaka sat on the edge of the bed and loosened his tie. He does this thing where he sighs, a long sound, like he's been holding his breath all day and I'm the only place he can let it out. I stood by the window and looked at the city. Tokyo at night is a machine that never turns off. Millions of people, all of them going somewhere, none of them going to this room.

"Come here," he said.

I went.

Later, when he was asleep, I lay awake and counted the cracks in the ceiling. There were seven. I'd counted them before. I always count them. It's a habit, like checking my phone for messages from clients, like touching the corner of my eye to see if a lash has fallen out.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. I didn't look. I never look. That's the rule I made for myself after the first month, when I saw his wife's name on the screen and felt something I didn't want to feel. Now I just stare at the ceiling and listen to him breathe.

He snores. A soft rattle in the back of his throat. I've gotten used to it. That's the other thing people don't understand. You get used to everything. The waiting, the lying, the way your own name starts to sound strange when you say it out loud because nobody in this room uses it. He calls me Aya-chan, and I call him Yutaka, and in the real world he's Sugiyama-san, president of Sugiyama Construction, and I'm just the girl who does his lashes.

Except I don't do his lashes. I've never done his lashes. He came into the salon two years ago with his wife, and she got the treatment, and he sat in the waiting area reading a newspaper and looking at me over the top of it. That's how it started. His wife's lashes. She still comes in every three weeks. I still do them. She talks about her daughter and her mother's knee and the apartment in Shibuya that they're thinking of renting out because it's been empty for a year.

Empty.

I sat up in bed. The sheets were damp with sweat and something else, and the air conditioner hummed like it was tired. Yutaka didn't move. His face in sleep is different, softer, the mole under his eye just a spot, the scar on his thumb hidden under the pillow.

I thought about the apartment. Empty for a year. A bed his wife picked out, maybe, or maybe no bed at all. Maybe just boxes. Maybe just the things he doesn't want her to see.

I got up and went to the bathroom. The light was harsh and yellow, and my reflection looked like someone I used to know. The volume lashes were holding up, mostly. A few had twisted. I'd fix them tomorrow.

My phone was in my bag. I took it out and opened the messages. Nothing from him, obviously. We don't text. That's another rule. But there was one from the salon, the manager, asking if I could come in early on Saturday. A bride. Last-minute appointment.

I typed yes and put the phone down.

When I came back to bed, Yutaka had turned over. His hand was reaching across the empty space where I'd been, fingers curled, like he was looking for something. I stood there for a second and watched him. Fifty-nine years old. A wife in Osaka. A daughter in her last year of high school. A company with forty employees. And me, twenty-five, standing in a love hotel in Meguro at two in the morning, counting the cracks in the ceiling and wondering what kind of things a man keeps in an empty apartment.

I got back in bed. He didn't wake up. His hand found my hip and stayed there, heavy and warm, and I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But I kept thinking about Shibuya. About the key. About the door I'd been walking past for two years, and what happens when you finally open it and find out the room isn't empty at all.