47. The Security Word

Jude wakes to the bill for his sins - circa seventy thousand pounds. Across Tokyo, Bells discovers what she's been carrying. Some things, once said, don't just wash out.

[Narrated 3rd limited : adjacent to Jude's perspective]

He opened his eyes - his head felt thick, some scrap of dream still clung to him - his own voice, the shape of the words ugly even in memory. Bells's face. Something snapping in him that shouldn't have snapped. Might even got slapped. He blinked at the ceiling and let the blink push it back down - crazy mare. Then his eyes shot a glance across the room.

Bells - at the desk: pink hoodie, hair piled up, the blue glow of her laptop on her cheek. Good. She is still here. She hadn't fled. All is well in the world.

Then his stomach rumbled. The team dinner. He'd missed the team dinner. Should have possibly gone to that.

He fumbled for his phone. 7:13 am. Ooofff. He slept for 15 hours then. About 10 over usual and entire 13 over the running average for the last three days.

He had a vague sense of working the day before - the last two failure points for Hinata - using conjugacy to shortcut the priors instead of running Metropolis-Hastings to ground. It would do. It would have to do.

Then the bed looked incredibly appealing. He thought he'd just have a little lie down. Nothing huge, a 10 minute power nap. And now he was here - on that very bed - still in his hoodie and jeans. Great, so far he's managed to spend one night face down on the desk and the other on top of the sheets fully clothed and probably in some terribly embarrassing half fatal position - and Bells witnessed all of it. ALL OF IT.

He exhaled and glanced down his phone

WhatsApp: fifteen messages in the team group, the one Bells had set up for the trip.

Mark: Jude, Bells - coming down? Everyone's here.

Klar: Table by the window.

Jack: Everyone's starving.

Then the rhythm of polite worry.

Klar: Everything okay? Are you two well?

Jack: We started without you.

Keith: I thought we'd talk strategy for the days ahead. What's the plan tomorrow?

He looked at her. "Why didn't you go down to dinner with the team? They needed a debrief."

She didn't even break her typing rhythm.

"Bells.”

Nothing.

"You know you're here on a work assignment, and yesterday..."

"FIRST OF ALL - GOOD MORNING, MAYBE?" she said, still not turning her head to look at him.

Whoa! Whatever is this? He thought.

Bit his tongue for a moment, adjusted.

"...Good morning."

"Thanks." Her fingers kept moving. "And yes, I am aware I am here on a work assignment. I just don't think my job description includes running tasks after my boss calls me a whore."

He swallowed.

"I didn't"

"Might as well have."

She closed her laptop. Stood. Walked across the room for her backpack.

Something was off. He recalled that dream again. Her voice catching on the word asshole, body trembling. Tears in her eyes.

Had that been...?

He had been exhausted. She had been circling something uncomfortable.

Oh. It was real.

He remembered now. How it had made sense in the moment, a kind of madness with a logic. Now, in the grey of a Tokyo morning, it made no sense at all.

"I've booked a day trip for the team," she said, zipping her bag. "No meetings. We're doing Tokyo - something fancy. Come or don't, I genuinely don't give a fuck."

She didn't swear often, a handful of times in the years he'd known her. That worried him a lot. Though something worried him slightly more just that moment.

"You booked it on your card?"

She turned. The look was venomous.

"No, idiot. Company card. Obviously."

Idiot now? Yes. This was bad. He sat up a little straighter.

"Sorry - what?"

"You okayed that ages ago. You said I should spend it as I please for team-related expenses because - and I'm quoting - you 'can't be bothered with that nonsense.'"

Hm. That does sound like something I would say.

"So I did. Last night." she continued. "The team deserved a reward for the work they put in on Hinata. Which I know is a concept that does not compute for you - team morale, appreciation, recognition - but it is literally why your company functions, so you're welcome."

He watched her, head tilted slightly.

"I was lucky, actually. Last-minute, so it cost a bit of a premium. But I managed."

She was smiling now. Pleased with herself.

"Top end. Pickup in half an hour. Tokyo Heliport - Mt Fuji loop. Sixty minutes. Aerial views of Shibuya, Tokyo Bay, Fuji. Champagne mid-flight, commentary by a cultural historian. Then luxury cars to TeamLab Planets or Mori, depending on what the team wants. Then lunch..."

"How much."

"...at Kanda. Three Michellin stars..."

"How much, Bells."

She paused. Considered him for a beat. Then, sweetly:

"Oh, it's nothing, bear. Just shy of seventy."

"Seventy what?"

"Thousand. Pounds."

He didn't move. The number sat in the room.

"Have you gone mad?!"

She was grinning now.

"Did the bank not flag it?"

"Oh, they tried." She set the backpack down on the desk for this - like this was the part she was dying to tell. "They called your work mobile. While you were unconscious. I picked up."

She dropped her voice an octave, mock-baritone, "Lowered my voice so I sounded just like you." The impression - unforgivably accurate.

"Turns out your security questions are not very challenging. Company registration number - I know that by heart. Two most recent transactions - I had just made them. Team dinner. A rather expensive bottle of wine I allowed myself at the bar last night, on you. The third question was a bit harder."

She let it hang, as if preparing for the big reveal.

"They wanted the security word. The one you set up for transactions over ten K."

She looked at him then, and held it.

"I thought - hm. What might that be? Would not be the company's name - too on the nose. Too easy to guess. And also - your surname. So I thought... what else does this guy like?"

He swallowed as she said that, an uncomfortable memory trickling in.

"Tesla maybe - I pondered on that. But nah - you don't love your car. You just see it as functional. Optimal for your purposes. Something else. Someone else."

She grinned from ear to ear at that, he just waited for the words to leave her mouth, already turning to look at his feet.

" So I said 'Bells.' And guess what? It is, apparently, the word you chose."

He felt it land in his chest, warm and humiliating in equal measure, then bit the inside of his lip and said nothing.

"So as I said. Come or don't. The guide is downstairs in..." she checked her phone "...twenty-five. I'm going to the team."

She grabbed her backpack, headed for the door and left.

He sat for what felt like a long time but was probably fifteen seconds. Then he stood, got into the bathroom, showered fast, out and dry in minutes. Then pulled on the first hoodie and jeans his hands found in the bag, pocketed his personal phone, picked up the work mobile from where she had put it - neatly, on the desk, like a small evidence exhibit - and went after her.

---

[Narrated 3rd limited : adjacent to Bells' perspective]

The helicopter ride exceeded the brochure.

Fuji was perfect - its cone, the snow, the symmetry of it. The guide, a small woman with a quiet voice and a microphone, was explaining that Fuji was not really one volcano but three, each stacked on top of the other. Bells couldn't help thinking this resembled her love life to a T.

The champagne bubbles hit the back of her throat, her head already buzing slightly. The team looked happy, which was the point. Jack was already three Instagram stories deep, Keith had liked all of them within a minute of posting. Mark was leaning over Jude's shoulder pointing at something, and Jude was nodding without looking. Klar, beside her, smelled faintly of hotel shampoo and was taking photos of the landscapes over Bells' shoulder - with a serious, almost reverent attention.

Bells pressed her forehead briefly to the cold glass - and in the reflection she saw - across the cabin Jude was looking at her. Then he was not. Then he was again. He had not shaved. The stubble was longer now, and it suited the line of his jaw in a way she found personally offensive.

Even when he looks bad he looks good - she thought. This would have been so much easier if he had been ugly... Then she forced herself to glance past the reflection and admire the view beneath.

The Mori art gallery passed in pieces. A room of mirrored light. A wall of moving pixels the curator described, in careful English, as a meditation on impermanence. The team dispersed somewhat around her. Klar chatting to Jack. Keith with Mark. The two engineers shuffling. And Jude - a step or two behind. So close it was awkward.

She exhaled through her nose, resolved to ignore him. A painting of a woman whose face she could not quite see to her left, she listened to the guide describe her - then stood in front of the painting for a moment, admiring. Felt him close behind her again. She turned her head a fraction.

"Would you stop hovering" she half whispered.

"Where do you want me to go?" He shot back in the same register.

"Preferably at least 10 feet away from me."

He hadn't answered. Also - hadn't moved an inch.

She was thinking about that sentence - we're just having fun - and the way it had landed in her stomach the night before, and the way it still had not dislodged.

She got on walking again - a few paces behind the group. Jude walked right behind her again.

By the time they came up out and into Shibuya it was eleven-thirty. The guide gave them ninety minutes before lunch. Mark, Keith and the engineers dragged Jude into an electronics shop.

Thank God. She finally lost that tail.

Then Jack mentioned vintage on Takeshita and pulled Klar with him. Bells followed half a step behind, nodding at things, not contributing.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

Theo.

"I should take this," she said, already moving away.

She thumbed accept on the second buzz. Something in her ribs tightened.

"Theo."

"How are you, love."

His voice did what it always did - warm and even and present, and a small ache went through her that she had not asked for. This man. This man who was always, exhaustingly, trying.

"I'm... okay. How are you?"

"I'm fine but missing you, babe. The flat feels enormous without you."

She looked down at her hand. The engagement ring caught the light. She kept walking.

"I'm sorry we left it the way we did. I should not have packed the red lace. I can imagine what you must have felt when you found it. But I want you to know... there is nothing between Jude and me. Nothing."

She said it. And as she said it, she realised she meant it. You sucked me off with Teddy's ring on your finger was just one too many from that mouth. She was not going to try anymore. She was done.

She waited for Theo to say something. To breathe out, reassure her.

"Theo?"

Nothing.

"Theo, can you hear me?"

She pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen.

Black.

She tapped it. Held the power button. The Apple logo did not appear.

She looked up.

She had been walking.

The street she was on was not the street she had been on. The sea of faces moving past her - none of which familiar. A neon sign she had not seen before pulsed pink and green above a doorway. She turned, slowly, full circle, looking for anything she recognised. A landmark. A shop. The line of the station.

Nothing.

She fished out the work mobile. No service. Of course.

She found a bench and sat down on it. Her knees felt loose. She pressed the dead phone between her palms as if pressure might revive it.

She had told herself, once, after a worse week than usual, that she would not cry in public again. She had been quite firm with herself about it.

Her eyes filled anyway.

Never again, she thought. No Jude. No more flights, shared hotel suites, no more men with ungovernable mouths and a talent for hurting the people who had been kind to them. Theo had been right all along. She should have left months ago. She should have stayed home. She should have...

She put her hands over her face and let it happen.