Chapter 23: A Question That Followed Me Home

POV: Hana Fujimoto

I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing until the elevator doors closed.

Only then did the air rush back into my lungs—shaky, unsure, as if even my own body couldn’t decide how to react.

My hands were trembling.

I pressed my palm to my chest as the elevator descended, my heartbeat sharp and unsteady, like it was trying to force its way out of me.

Kaito Minami—my employer, the heir to one of the biggest conglomerates in the country, a man who walked like gravity bent slightly around him—had just asked me out.

Not for cleaning.

Not for work.

For… that.

The moment replayed in my mind in too much detail.

His voice—quiet, steady, but not cold.

His eyes—focused in that way that made me feel seen rather than inspected.

The way he added, “It probably isn’t appropriate. But I still wanted to ask.”

Honest. Unfiltered. Almost vulnerable.

I’d never heard him speak like that before.

I clutched my cleaning tote tighter, as if the fabric might anchor me.

Why me?

Why ask me of all people?

A cleaning girl living alone in a six-mat apartment, buying discounted vegetables at closing time, sending most of her paycheck to her family two prefectures away. A girl who still couldn’t sleep without checking that the door was locked twice.

Someone like him should belong to boardrooms and international hotels, not dusty entryways and discount stores. He lived in a penthouse that looked like a magazine cover. I lived in a place where the walls whispered every conversation my neighbors had after midnight.

We weren’t from the same world.

We weren’t even from neighboring worlds.

And yet…

When he asked… I didn’t feel fear.

Just a sudden, startling warmth that had no right to be there.

The elevator reached the lobby. I bowed to the concierge without hearing whatever he said to me and stepped out onto the street.

Tokyo was loud. Cars, chatter, footsteps. Normal.

But nothing inside me felt normal.

I walked toward the station, hugging my bag against me. My footsteps sounded too light, too quick—like I was trying to outrun the memory.

Do you have time this weekend?

I swallowed.

Part of me had been waiting for something like this to happen. Not from him—not from anyone specific—but the way feelings sneak up on people who don’t want complications.

And I didn’t need complications.

Not when I was already stretched thin between work, rent, and sending money back home.

Not when my schedule depended on a company that could reassign me without warning.

Not when getting too close to someone like him could ruin everything if I wasn’t careful.

But then I remembered the way he looked at me before he turned away—controlled, but with a raw thread just beneath it, as if he had revealed something he wasn’t used to revealing.

Nobody had ever looked at me like that.

Nobody had ever asked me something with that mixture of restraint and sincerity.

A warmth crept up my neck.

I pressed my hand to it, willing it to fade.

I couldn’t let emotions—even good ones—cloud my judgment.

And yet the whole train ride home, I kept replaying his expression. The quiet anticipation in it. The unfamiliar softness I’d seen only once before—the moment we had both reached for the same fallen bottle of cleaner, hands brushing.

It had startled me then too.

By the time I returned to my apartment door, my thoughts were tangled, useless.

I stepped inside, locking the door behind me. Once. Twice. Habit.

My apartment was warm in that cramped, lived-in way. A kettle on the counter. Folded laundry on the futon. A single photo frame near the window—my family, smiling up at me from a world far away.

Somehow, that made the contrast sting even more.

I changed into comfortable clothes and collapsed onto the futon, staring at the ceiling.

I should say no.

It was the logical answer. The safe answer.

But the word wouldn’t come.

Instead, all I heard was:

“I still wanted to ask.”

Nobody had wanted anything from me in a long time that wasn’t my labor or my reliability.

Nobody had asked something for the sake of wanting me.

I covered my face with my hands.

I didn’t know what my answer would be.

But for the first time, part of me wanted to find out.

And that, more than anything else today, terrified me.