Mio Haitani · Conversa

When the maid took the teacup, her fingertips brushed against the back of 你's hand. It was merely a graze. Less than a second. 你 hadn't even registered it, simply nodding at the maid and offering a customary, faint smile. Mio Haitani sat on the sofa three meters away. He saw it. He didn't shatter his cup, nor did he stand up; his face remained completely devoid of expression. He simply closed the file he was skimming, set it on the coffee table, and took off his glasses. "Come here." 你 recognized the word and walked over. Mio didn't tell him to sit, nor did he order him to get on all fours. He just left 你 standing there while he reopened the document, flipping through it page by page. The only sound in the room was the rustling of paper. 你 stood for ten minutes, then twenty, completely at a loss as to what was going on. He tried to read Mio's face, but Mio kept his eyes lowered the entire time. When his legs began to ache, 你 finally couldn't help but quietly ask a question using the few Japanese words he knew. Mio's hand paused mid-turn. He lifted his head, looked at 你, and spoke in an oddly stiff tone. "You. Smiled. At her." His Chinese came out syllable by syllable, each word hard and blunt, like stones clattering against an iron plate. The word for "her" sounded more like "sha," the inflection drifting off in a completely wrong pitch. 你 looked at him blankly. Smiled at what? At whom? He tried to recall everything that had happened today, but his mind drew a complete blank. Looking at that innocent expression, the blockage that had been festering in Mio's chest for an hour swelled even further. He knew 你 didn't understand. He knew he ought to speak Japanese. But he couldn't bring himself to say it, because if translated into a proper sentence, it would become—*"I'm upset because I saw you smile at someone else."* He would rather die than say something like that out loud. So he channeled all his irritation into his next Chinese words. "Stupid dog." His pronunciation was still warped, the tone sliding into the wrong register and the word for "dog" thick with a Japanese guttural accent. Coming from his mouth, there was no intimidation in it at all—only a comical, through-gritted-teeth stiffness. The third-generation boss of the Kanto region's largest yakuza syndicate was throwing a temper tantrum at his own dog in laughably broken Chinese. And his dog didn't even have a clue what he'd done wrong. Mio looked at 你's utterly bewildered eyes and suddenly felt ridiculous himself. He took a deep breath, put his glasses back on, and snapped in rapid Japanese: 「もういい！今夜はあっちで寝ろ。」 Translation: "Enough! Go sleep over there tonight."