Chapter Five - The Maneki Neko

I don't cook for people anymore.

I used to. In the early years with Vino I cooked constantly — elaborate, exhausting dinners for his colleagues and his mother and men whose names I've since let go, standing at the stove in heels because he liked me "put together" when there were guests. 

Cooking, in that house, had been a performance staged for an audience that never once cleared a plate.

Somewhere along the way I'd stopped. It was easier to let the kitchen become a room I passed through.

Food became something Wiwin arranged, or a restaurant delivered, or I ate standing over the sink at eleven at night reading a P&L.

So I don't fully understand why, three days after the picnic, I heard myself say into the phone: "Come over Friday. I'll cook."

Silence on the line. Then, carefully, like he understood the size of it: "You'll cook. For me."

"Don't make it a thing, Nik."

"I would never," he said, and I could hear that he absolutely was.

He arrived at seven with a bottle of wine he never mentioned again and a bunch of market flowers already in a jar — not wrapped, in a jar, so I wouldn't have to hunt for a vase or stop what I was doing. I noticed. I was starting to understand that noticing was simply the water he swam in.

I'd made soto tangkar. The real version, the one that takes half a day — the one I'd told him about in a hotel room in Singapore as a fact about myself, never imagining I'd be ladling it into bowls for him in my own kitchen a week later.

He stood in the doorway of that kitchen and looked around it slowly — reading it, cataloguing, the way he seemed to read every room he entered. And under his gaze I found myself seeing my own kitchen as if for the first time: beautiful and largely unused, marble and cold light and expensive appliances that have never quite lost their showroom sheen. A kitchen built to be seen, not lived in. Like the rest of the house. Like, for a long time, me.

"So this is you," he said quietly — and I felt oddly exposed, because I wasn't sure this house said anything true about me at all. It was a place I'd bought, not a place I'd become. And I think he knew that too.

Then he did the thing no dinner guest in this house had ever done.

He rolled up his sleeves and asked what he could do.

"Nothing. Sit. You're the guest."

"Sei." He was already washing his hands at my sink. "If I wanted to be a guest, I'd have booked a restaurant. Give me a job."

"I don't need help. I've got it."

"I know you've got it." He dried his hands on the towel over my oven rail, found it without asking, like he'd been standing in this kitchen for years. "That was never in question. Nobody thinks you can't do it alone. That's exactly why I want to do it with you." He looked at me. "Not for you. With you. There's a difference, and I think it's a difference nobody's ever bothered to show you."

I opened my mouth to argue and found the argument had no floor under it.

So I handed him the sambal ingredients, and told myself it was because it kept him out of the way.

It did not keep him out of the way. He worked at the island beside me, shoulder occasionally brushing mine in the narrow space, asking where I kept things and remembering after I told him once. We got in each other's way and it didn't matter. He tasted the broth off my spoon and declared it "aggressively better than mine," which I chose to accept. At one point he turned the music up and spun me once, badly, between the stove and the counter, and my hair came loose and neither of us fixed it.

And somewhere in there — steam on the windows, garlic and lemongrass thick in the air, a man laughing in my sterile showroom kitchen — the room changed. It stopped being a space I passed through. For the length of one evening, with two people cooking in it and getting in each other's way, it became the thing it had been built to look like and never been: a kitchen in a home.

We ate at the island, not the dining table — the island where I usually stood alone at eleven at night. He had seconds. He cleared the plates before I could, and when I moved to stop him he said, "You cooked. This part's mine," and washed up in my own sink while I sat, for once, on the stool, watching a man do dishes in my house, and felt something in my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with sadness.

This, I thought. This is the thing I stopped letting myself want. This. A Friday. Steam on the glass. Someone who stays to do the dishes.

Later, at the door — the ritual now familiar, him turning my wrist palm-up, his mouth against the pulse point beneath the bracelet — he straightened, and then leaned in and pressed a slow, warm kiss to my cheek.

He lingered there a breath longer than a goodbye required, his hand light at the side of my arm.

"You cooked for me in a house you'd stopped living in," he said quietly, close to my ear, "and somewhere around the second bowl it started feeling like a home." He drew back just enough to look at me. "I've had a lot of impressive dinners, Sei. I haven't had many Fridays like this. You've had a great many houses, I think — and not nearly enough homes."

I didn't trust myself to speak. I have never, in fifty-one years, cried because a man did my dishes and stayed to dry them, and I was not going to start on my own doorstep.

"Go in," he said gently, letting me off the hook the way he always seemed to know how. "It's late. Sleep well, talk soon."

I flew to Tokyo the next morning, and for the first time in my adult life, I did not want to get on the plane.

This was new information about myself and I turned it over the whole way to the airport, faintly alarmed. I have never resented a business trip. Business trips were where I was most myself — competent, in motion, unreachable, useful. The plane was a place no one could ask me for anything except the thing I was good at.

But that morning, buckling into 3A, I felt the pull of a kitchen with steam on the windows and a man who did the dishes, and I resented the eight hours and the meetings and the entire nation of Japan for standing between me and a Friday I wanted to have again. I texted him from the runway — Wheels up. I already want to come home — and was mildly horrified at myself for the word home, which I had never once used about the house I was flying away from.

His reply came before I'd switched to airplane mode.

Then come home safe. It'll be here. So will I.

I put the phone away and looked out at the tarmac sliding backward, unsettled in a way I couldn't name, softened somewhere I usually kept armored — and I think, looking back, that is why I ignored the first ache in my side when it came two days later over lunch.

I remember the pain creeping in slowly, and then hitting all at once.

A grueling day of back-to-back meetings in Tokyo was exhausting enough, even without the sharp, stabbing ache in my lower right abdomen that had been bothering me since lunch. As a CEO, I was heavily trained to ignore my body's distress signals for the sake of professionalism.

Ignoring physical boundaries was an old habit. Years ago, pregnant with Arga, I had refused to leave my desk until my water broke in the middle of a board meeting. I was back running the company a week after giving birth, taking calls with a newborn in my arms.

I was a woman who did not stop. So I endured, masking the pain until the final handshake with our Japanese partners, and finally sank into the car back to the hotel.

I remember stepping out at the hotel driveway. I remember Wiwin's faded, distant voice reading tomorrow's Jakarta schedule. But I wasn't listening; my entire universe had narrowed to the agony in my gut.

I remember the lobby spinning, blindingly bright. I remember the exact second the dull ache mutated into a violent twist. My knees gave out.

Then, pitch black.

When I woke, harsh white fluorescent light pierced my eyes. Strangers spoke rapid, anxious Japanese I couldn't comprehend.

It was only the next morning, through Wiwin's tear-eyed explanation, that I learned the chronology. I had collapsed. The hotel staff called an ambulance, and within the hour I was on an operating table with acute appendicitis — caught just before rupture, removed through three keyhole incisions. Lucky, the surgeon had said. Lucky was not how my abdomen felt.

I woke from anesthesia to a crushing, constant throb, as if someone were standing full-weight on my incisions. My mouth was parched, my head spinning.

"Bu," Wiwin whispered, holding a straw to my lips.

"Where... are we?" My voice sounded foreign.

"St. Luke's, Bu. I canceled our flight because of the surgery." She bit her lip. "Your phone kept ringing all night, and I panicked, so... I answered a call from Mr. Nikau. He asked exactly which hospital—"

Before she could finish, the phone on the nightstand buzzed. A video call. One name: Nikau.

I stared at the glowing screen, fully aware of how I looked — wild hair, pale bare skin, barely lucid from sedatives. The absolute antithesis of the steel-plated CEO. Yet, pulled by something unfamiliar, my finger slid across the screen.

Nikau's face filled the display. A controlled, fierce intensity in his gaze made my throat tighten. Not loud panic — a heavily anchored worry.

"Hey, you." His baritone rolled out incredibly soft. "You okay?"

"Alive," I managed, a hollow crackle. "But it feels like someone kicked my stomach with a boot."

He let out a short, quiet laugh — more released tension than amusement. "Good to know your sense of humor survived, Sei."

"Nik..." I closed my eyes. "Where are you?"

"I'm at Narita."

My eyes snapped open. "What?"

"First flight I could catch after Wiwin called." His cadence was completely steady. "Waiting for a car now. I'm on my way to you."

"Why? It's minor surgery. I have Wiwin, you didn't need to—"

"Sei." That single word cut through my defenses. "I know I don't have to. I want to."

Tokyo traffic being Tokyo traffic, it was mid-morning before I heard his deep voice echoing down the corridor — speaking smooth, practiced Japanese to the nursing staff. Years of Pacific-rim clients, he'd told me once. It showed.

He stepped inside, his massive frame made larger by a heavy winter jacket, eyes slightly bloodshot from the overnight flight. A wave of self-consciousness hit me, and I pulled the blanket up to my chin.

"I look like an absolute disaster," I mumbled.

Nikau approached without a sound. He set his bag down, stepped to my bedside, stroked my head, and pressed a warm, lingering kiss to my forehead. Then he sat in Wiwin's chair.

"Why are you hiding?"

"I'm a mess, Nik."

"How is a woman recovering from emergency surgery supposed to look, Sei?" A small smirk. His hand enveloped my fingers with agonizing care, slowly pulling the blanket down from my face. "It is what it is. In front of me, there is never a single thing you need to hide."

I stared at him. No judgment, no awkwardness. Only acceptance.

"You flew eight hours just for this," I whispered.

"Yeah." His thumb brushed the back of my hand, rhythmic, grounding.

"Why?"

He let the quiet ward hold us before answering. "Because you had emergency surgery alone in a foreign country, Sei. And I didn't want you waking up in a strange room without a single familiar face."

My tongue went dry. Instead of answering, I squeezed his fingers with whatever strength I had. And somehow, the burning in my abdomen felt lighter.

He gently but firmly sent Wiwin back to the hotel for proper rest and took the night watch. In the chilly, sterile room he worked quietly on his laptop, looking up every few minutes to make sure I was resting.

Around two in the morning, the pain flared. My slight shift woke him instantly.

"Hey." He closed the laptop. "Pain?"

He pressed the nurse call button, then sat on the edge of my mattress, wrapping his large hand around mine. "Nurse is coming. Hold on, okay."

"You should be sleeping, Nik," I said, though my fingers clung to his.

"I'll sleep when you sleep."

"Now I just feel guilty for being a burden."

"I chose to be here, Sei." A soft, exhausted smile. "I chose to fly eight hours because I was worried sick about a woman I've known for three weeks. I chose to sleep on a hospital chair. It's all on me. Don't feel guilty."

The nurse administered the analgesic through my IV. As the burning receded into heavy drowsiness, he never let go of my hand.

"Go back to sleep, Sei," he whispered against the dark.

"You too..."

"I am here."

And he was. His solid silhouette stayed steady as I drifted off.

Three days of recovery in Tokyo turned into a surreal, gentle memory. Nikau handled everything with quiet efficiency — the doctors, the insurance, even a small eatery nearby that made the softest porridge.

On the third day I was cleared to fly home, on strict conditions: rest, and room to stretch.

"Nik, that's unnecessary—" I protested when he handed me a first class boarding pass.

"You need the space. This isn't luxury, it's medical." Entirely unyielding.

I didn't have the energy to fight. And for the first time in my life, I didn't want to win the argument. I leaned into the safety of being cared for.

Mid-flight to Jakarta, tucked beneath a blanket he had personally wrapped around me, I watched him from the corner of my eye. He held a book but wasn't reading. His focus kept returning to me.

"Nik," I called softly.

"Dalem, sayang?" He closed the book immediately.

"Thank you. For everything. For taking over the chaos, sleeping on that terrible chair... for never making me feel like a burden."

His eyes darkened with something unspoken. "You will never be a burden, Sei. I told you — I want to be here."

Hours later, in the hazy threshold between sleep and waking, I felt a cool touch at my left wrist. I cracked my eyes open. Nikau was leaning over, meticulously snapping something onto the chain, moving with extreme care not to wake me.

"What is that?" I mumbled.

He caught his breath, smiling. "Hey. Did I wake you? Sorry."

I lifted my wrist. A fourth piece: a tiny golden cat, one paw raised in a cheerful wave, beside the airplane.

"A maneki-neko," I murmured. "I love it."

"Yeah?"

"But why?"

The raw intensity in his gaze snapped me fully awake.

"I know what happened in Tokyo looks like terrible luck," he whispered, dense with sincerity. "You fell sick, and that sucks. But because you did, I was given the chance to show up for you. Your misfortune became my luck."

I looked down at the tiny shimmering cat against my skin, then back at his steady face. For the second time on this journey, I felt completely seen — valued as a woman, deeper than anything in the last two decades of my life.

"Go back to sleep, sayang." His large hand swept the stray hairs from my forehead. "I am here."

I closed my eyes and surrendered, the tiny lucky cat clinking softly over my warm, steady pulse.