But...how…?
In the end, she set the box at the back of the shelf and covered it with a steel tray, the way you'd cover a pot that only comes out on special occasions.
Meanwhile, the morning found its rhythm. Table-cloths smoothed with hands, napkins folded to perfection, chopsticks in pairs, the first customers at noon who would ask for "the usual." Aiko listened to the sounds like a conductor at the first chord: fridge, hood, water, radio, footsteps.
Finally, the bell at the entrance rang. Aiko looked up: the door was closed. A sharp, gentle knock. A ding with no person.
She hesitated for a beat, then went to the door. Checked the hinges, the seal, the doormat. Maybe the draft, maybe the difference in temperature.It happens. She left that sound behind, the way you leave a thought that hasn't found its footing yet.
At the register, the receipt printer coughed and spat out a slip of paper. Aiko picked it up between index finger and thumb: blank lines, no numbers, only an oval smudge, like a fingerprint. She held it up to the light. Nothing. She crumpled it — perfect shot into the bin. "Today we're trying not to be impressionable," she told to herself, smiling.
The maneki-neko on the counter — the small one, bought at the fair when she was a child — stopped waving its paw just as she looked at it. It froze mid-air, as if caught off guard. Aiko tapped it. "Come on, get to work." The paw moved again, slower, with a tic it had never had before.
She took two steps toward the kitchen. The bell rang again.
"Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"Did you open it?"
"No."
"Mom?"
"I'm in the kitchen."
Aiko bit the inside of her cheek. It wasn't fear. It was attention — the kind that lets you manage a packed room without losing sight of the details.
She opened her phone. Searched for the chat with Yuji. Uploaded the photos taken at dawn and added a new one: the box under the tray. She typed:
Aiko: Sending you my new guest. Yesterday "Maybe not" was on the shelf of things-that-aren't-needed-but-aren't-thrown-away, this morning it was at the register by itself. I put the box back where it belongs. Maybe Mom, maybe elegant ghosts. I'm fine. Working. I'll update you later.
She left the message in drafts. Looked at it for a moment, then didn't send it. Not yet. She didn't want to call him too soon. I don't want to bother him now, she thought. Not now.
She made a round of the tables like a captain before departure. Every chair in its place, every napkin like a successful origami, every glass clear. While she straightened the corner of a table-cloth, the water in two cups set aside began drawing concentric circles. No one touched them. The wood didn't vibrate. The air didn't quiver. The circles appeared, widened, vanished. She froze for about ten seconds.
"Are you ok?" asked her mother, passing behind her with a crate of vegetables.
"Yeah," Aiko answered. It wasn't untrue. She was fine. Just… sharper. Attentive.
She aligned the chopsticks at table four. When she turned back, one of the pairs was slightly out of line: one stick had slipped a few centimeters. Must have been me walking past, she thought, trying a smile. Her hands carried on, her mind took note. An invisible mark on a notebook.
The midday supplies arrived: shrimp, flour, birthday candles. The courier signed, said goodbye and left with the cheerful awareness of someone who never stays long enough to notice things. Aiko opened the box of candles: one, on top, already had a blackened wick.
"Very funny," she said to the cardboard. She set it down anyway near the register, for when it would be needed.
The bell rang for the third time. This time Aiko took a step toward the door calmly and opened it a palm's width. The air outside was damp, with that sharp smell of old rain and bus exhaust. No one on the sidewalk, no one in front of the door. The shop next door, still closed.
The small paper with the hours, in place, the pin holding firm. Okay, she told herself. Stay calm.
Then she went back to the counter. The steel tray, in the kitchen, had slid forward by a finger's width. She could tell from the mark in the flour underneath: a pale shadow now visible. She pushed it back again, centered. Took a deep breath. Then another.
Aiko realized she was laughing. Softly, to herself. Not out of fear, but because of that strange mechanism that switches on when the whole universe decides to play the fool just when you need to be serious. "Fine, tanuki. If it's a joke, you pull it after service. Until then, I don't see and I don't hear."
She took out her phone. This time she wrote just a few words and sent them.
Aiko: I'm fine. Password's 'steam.' Catch you later.
She slipped the phone back into her apron. Returned to the broth, the seaweed, her father's knife, the rhythm she had always known. And yet, inside herself, she left a small room with the light on, ready to welcome everything she didn't understand that morning — without letting it become the master.
When they opened, the first customers came in with midday laughter. The Tramonto Rosso took on its usual speed of a ship: orders, glasses, footsteps, the radio changing songs without asking. Aiko moved in those water like a swimmer without waste, correcting small accidents that weren't accidents at all: a candle that went out on its own and relit with a breath that wasn't hers; a soy bottle that shifted one notch toward the edge and that she pushed back to the center with a finger; the maneki-neko's little paw that stopped from time to time, as if to listen to something before starting up again.
She didn't say anything to her family. She didn't want to add weight where, perhaps, there was only air. But when she passed through the kitchen again, she made sure the tray covered the box well and tied it with a piece of string they used for take-away parcels. A simple, firm knot. It'll be impossible for it to come undone on its own — someone would have to do it, she thought.
The bell rang one last time, during a burst of laughter. No one noticed. Aiko did.
Later — not right away — she would take out her phone, send Yuji the photos and a couple more lines. Not an alarm, a request whose answer she already knew: Tonight, if you can, come by after closing.
For now, though, she kept the tempo. One hand on the dining room, the other on the mystery. And everything, strangely, was in its place. Almost everything.
***
The evening shift started quietly, as it always did at the beginning: pots on the stove, tables set, the smell of porcini mushrooms slipping slowly under the doors. Aiko checked the row of glasses for the third time — all perfectly straight, yet the water inside still traced those thin ripples, like a lake at dusk.
At 8:25 p.m., the bell rang; this time the door actually opened. Yuji walked in alone — red hoodie, hair still damp from the shower, that smile that seemed to draw light from some secret place only he knew. He was carrying a bag of cookies, badly wrapped.
"Special delivery for the waitress," he said in a half-voice, as if stealing the moment from the rest of the world.
Aiko felt something melt between her sternum and her throat. "I'll put you in your usual corner, spoon-kunai?"
"Just put me down as 'the waitress's boyfriend' behind the column. That way I won't be in the way."
"The waitress's boyfriend is a bother by default," she shot back, but brushed his hand as she passed, a gentle spark of electricity.
She seated him at the table in the back, the one beside the empty aquarium (Aiko's family was getting it ready for carp). Yuji set down the bag and followed her with his eyes as she walked back to the kitchen. That look alone was enough to make her forget, for a moment, the ripples in the water and the maneki-neko's paw frozen midair.
Ten minutes later the others arrived: Nobara pushing the door open with her hip, Megumi behind her with the calm air of someone hoping for a calm place, and finally Gojo, punctual as out-of-season thunder.
Aiko placed them at the same table as Yuji and that corner filled with voices, the snap of chopsticks, jokes falling like confetti. But at the center of it all, for her, was Yuji's posture: broad shoulders, head tilted each time he looked for her, as if he were listening to music the rest of the restaurant couldn't hear.
"House fish-lake broth?" she asked.
"Make it two lakes — I've been swimming a lot and I'm starving," Yuji replied.
Nobara teased him, Megumi rolled his eyes; Aiko pretended to slip the joke into her pocket, like hiding away a charm.
The oddities returned while she was setting up the trays: the bell rang with no hand on it, the receipt printer spat out a slip of paper damp at the center and on the shelf the tanuki's box slid forward a single centimeter — just enough to be noticed by someone watching closely.
Aiko didn't flinch. She set down the tray, breathed the code word to herself — steam, steam, steam — and walked toward the table with the professional smile she had learned as a child.
She served the friends first, then Yuji: a steaming bowl of fish broth. As she leaned down she whispered: "Later I'm stealing you away to the kitchen, just for a minute."
He nodded, looked at her, and gave a mischievous smile.
"No, not for that" she shot back, hand on her hip, head tilted, serious.
"Ugh…" Yuji groaned, then pinched her cheek.
He sank his chopsticks into the broth like someone completing a ritual. Aiko went back to the kitchen, leaving the dining room to fill with that chatter that makes restaurants livelier than markets.
When the next broth was almost ready, the bell rang again — too loud — and the maneki-neko's paw froze, pointing straight at the friends' table. Aiko lifted her gaze: Yuji was already looking at her, his back straight, one eyebrow raised as if to ask everything okay?
She nodded and tilted her chin toward the kitchen. He set down his chopsticks, said something to the others that sounded like any casual excuse ("I'll check if the shrimp are singing in C"), then joined her behind the swing door.
---Behind the divider...---
The kitchen was thick with the warm breath of the stoves when Aiko lifted the tray. The twine around the box trembled like a shamisen string; a thin, sticky ribbon of shadow leaked out.
"Again with this box. This morning by the register, now here…" she muttered.
"Persistent little nuisance," Yuji said. A flash of quick, steady seriousness flickered in his eyes — not frightening, just focused.
He pulled the cloth back. The shadow shot out, black smoke with dust for teeth. Yuji clenched his bandaged fist; a crack of blue light, a sharp snap. The thing shattered, collapsing into soundless ash. No explosion — only the knives on the wall rattling together, like they'd all felt the strike of a tuning fork.
"Finished," he said simply. He closed the box, tied it with a double knot, and shoved it under the heaviest metal counter. "Let it sleep here until I take it away."
Just as she took a step to thank him, the swing door creaked open and Aiko's parents walked in: her mother with hands still damp from the sink, her father holding a basket of vegetables like a shield.
"Everything okay?" her mother asked, taking in the scene — the lifted cloth, Yuji caught looking like the guilty-but-charming culprit, Aiko with a floury fingertip resting on his cheek.
Aiko's heart jumped. She turned, drew a breath. "Yes, Mom, Dad, everything's fine. He is…" Her eyes flicked to Yuji, who was waiting patiently, half-smile in place. "This is Yuji Itadori. My boyfriend."
A long beat of silence. Her father raised an eyebrow, her mother's lips parted just slightly — not surprise, not judgment, only that quiet acceptance that children's lives are always one step ahead.
Yuji bowed deeply, almost to the floor. "It's an honor, sir, ma'am. Honestly, your fish broth has already won me over more than any speech I could give."
Her father cleared his throat, but a smile tugged at his mouth. "Well then, you'll have to win us over with your appetite. Around here, anyone who eats without making a fuss is always welcome."
Her mother gave Aiko a gentle pat on the shoulder. "About time you introduced him, sweetheart."
Aiko blushed all the way to her ears, but slipped under Yuji's arm as if she'd always belonged there. "I was just waiting for the right moment. And right now the broth's about to go cold."
"Hey, I eat fast!" Yuji protested, flashing a grin wide enough to catch them all in it.
Her mother shook her head, amused. "Then get back out there! I'll whip up a little surprise that could give any restaurant in town a run for its money."
Yuji winked at Aiko. "Looking forward to the taste test."
They slipped back into the dining room: she with the steaming tray, he right behind her, the spark of shadow already forgotten. What lingered was the scent of seaweed, the hush of knives finally stilled and the warm afterglow of a proper introduction — good noise, as Aiko liked to call it, the kind that drowns out every curse.
Yuji slid back into his seat, dipped his chopsticks into the second bowl of broth, still steaming. Nobara teased him for his timing; Gojo declared himself "emotionally moved"; Megumi only asked to eat in peace.
Aiko watched them as they sipped, as they laughed, as Yuji sent her a photo of his half-eaten cuttlefish with the caption: "happy stuffing heart." Around them, the restaurant played the right music again: glasses clinking, voices rising, the steady tick-tick of the maneki-neko's paw back on perfect time.
Curses are loud, she thought, but love — the real kind — makes an even louder noise. Only you don't hear it outside. You feel it inside, and it forces you to smile even with flour on your hands and broth on your shirt.
The tanuki rested in the dark, the ripples in the glasses had turned into vibrations of pure joy. And Aiko, at the heart of the hive, knew with unshakable clarity that nothing — not even shadows — could steal that rhythm from her. Not tonight. Tonight was theirs, seasoned with broth, pasta and laughter so bright it became light.