After Hours

Summary: Mimi returns home to realize her dream of opening an upscale coffeeshop bakery, with only two things in her way: the dive bar on its last legs in the basement, and its owner, who just so happens to be her college ex-boyfriend. Well, they won't stay long. One way or another, she'll get that space, too, and expand her culinary empire even further. Mimi guarantees it.

Remember the rooftop parties
Remember the friends
Remember the way I love you now
And the way I loved you then

("Now and Then" by Lily Kershaw)

now

The door's stuck, wedged by some small object Mimi can't quite reach around the sliver of a gap to pick aside. So she stands with a huff of annoyance, scanning the interior through the glass once more. Someone had to be here—the door ajar isn't the only such promising clue; a place like this just wouldn't be closed at this prime afternoon sales hour—but not a soul is in sight. All she sees are crafts and buckets and jars wrapped with newspaper, waxed sheets, and thin tissues delicately spun around a veritable rainforest of a floral bounty. Even from behind the thin gap of the door, she can smell its luxury.

And then—a head pops up behind a miniature stand of vivid morning glories, and Mimi shrieks, and the girl screams back.

She presses one hand to her throat to calm the heartbeat that's lodged there and the other to the glass door, tapping her palm furiously to the clear pane. "The door's stuck!" she yells, pointing to the bottom hinges, but the girl only stares back at her, mouth cutting a gaping frown as she recovers her own breath. Mimi gestures at her a few more times, her expression fixed into a warm, neighborly one, doing her best to channel all that her mother had ever taught her about grace under pressure, such as it were.

The child approaches the door, pulling it back.

Mimi speaks first, breathless. "You're Miku!" she exclaims, her voice squeaky and forced with cheer.

The girl's mouth smears into a thin-lipped frown.

"Oh, I'm not a stranger," Mimi adds, reassuring. "I—I actually am a friend of your mother's," she says. "In fact—and you, of course, won't remember this—I was the first person to change your diaper after you were born."

The child's face tightens, pink lips pinched. "What do you want, a thank you?"

"Miku!" The girl ducks, disappearing in a frantic escape to the back of the flower ship, nearly plowing her mother off her feet when she appears in the front room. But she's too quick, spritely, leaving Takenouchi Sora stumbling to catch her footing after she throws her arms in the air in exasperation. "Miku, get back here!"

But they both know she's gone, leaving the women to each other.

Mimi puts a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin. "She's…sharp."

"Don't be kind," says Sora, visibly frustrated. "She's been driving me crazy all morning. All week." She directs this last remark to the back of the shop, raising her voice.

"You should bring her to the café," suggests Mimi. "Not for the caffeine," she adds quickly, reassuring, as though she imagined Sora thought otherwise of her sense of responsibility. "Or the sugar…." She trails off, wondering what she had had in mind from the initial offer.

Sora, meanwhile, is gracious. "I promise we've been meaning to come by. I keep thinking I'd bring us over once the high season settled, but that's the thing about a flower shop—people are always having birthdays, weddings, or making mistakes they need to apologize for," she winks, and regrets it almost immediately. Mimi's wince is too pronounced to mask, and the other woman tries not to make it obvious what she already knows. Instead, she gestures for a hug herself, which Mimi obliges, relieved for even some semblance of normalcy, until Sora speaks again, getting straight at it. "Now, what's he done that I can help you with?"

Mimi balks, "Can't a person just come by to say hello?"

"A person can, yes, but you can't," says Sora with a laugh.

She grumbles in response, albeit good-naturedly, her friend's smile so contagious in its affection. Even so, distraction is her best bet. "Shouldn't she be in school?"

It's a good tactic, in the sense that now Sora's face has immediately transformed, but a sore move nonetheless, given the subject. She digs her fingers into the tufts of unruly thin wisps at her temples, shaking her head as she rubs her face hard. "She is, but then she got suspended. Did you know they even suspend first graders?" And with a sigh, Sora glances at the other woman, lowering her arms in a drooping surrender. "Don't have children, Mimi."

She blinks quickly, hearing how light and false her laugh sounds to her, even if Sora can't. "I'll remember that."

Sora shrugs, gesturing for Mimi to follow her to the window displays where they can continue their chat as she continues her work. She picks up a long-throated water can to reach the deeper vases. "Between you and me," she begins, as easily as though they've always talked like this to each other, an implicit posture that Mimi's chest swell with affection and guilt, "I'm thinking of having her homeschooled."

This is somewhat surprising, even to her, though Mimi thinks that if anyone could juggle so much all alone, it'd be Sora. "Really?"

"I mean, I was for a little while," the redhead admits. "I didn't take to it all that well, and then my parents—well, you know," and Mimi forces another sympathetic grimace. "But Miku's always been a bit different." She brings the watering can closer to her chest, hugging it tightly, the knuckles of her hands pinched white. "She's not very good at making friends."

Mimi glances into the back of the shop, its hinged, hanging stockroom door leaving glimpses into the dimly lit interior to the house-turned-business, where a radio has been turned on, an attempt to defer accusations of eavesdropping. She can recognize the gesture, as it's all too personal. So she clears her throat, speaking just a twitch too loudly, but not at a level to make Sora suspicious, either. "They just can't see how special she is. Not yet, at least."

Sora presses her lips together, biting a smile back. "Anyway, I'm thinking about it," she continues. "Hikari works for one, so we're meant to talk it over next month, at Takeru and Daisuke's." She glances at her, eyes sly. "You're going?"

"Have I got a choice?"

"Do the Motomiyas allow choices?"

She hides her giggle better than Sora, whose laugh is shameless. She returns the watering can to its stand and sorts out a pair of weeding scissors from a messy supplies drawer. "You know, I still remember that homecoming dance, in college—I think it was your last year, right?"

"Oh, God—the dance—,"

"And then Daisuke crashed the stage—,"

She's groaning, still struck by the secondhand embarrassment, nearly ten years on. "How many times did he demand a recount to that class election?"

"I just want to know why he insisted on making it a college-wide affair!" Mimi protests.

"Well, it worked," admits Sora. "I know more about their class than I do my own. Not that I had much of a choice, really, with you and Taichi being at each other's throats over your dad's campaign. A girl needed to make other friends to stay out of the line of fire."

She's dismissive, her penchant for nostalgic amusement always stopping just short of those last weeks. "Friendly competition is a good thing. He had no right to complain to you about what trying to one-up me got him."

"Actually," answers Sora, lifting the pair of scissors towards a particularly weedy orchid, "Taichi didn't really talk about you to me all that much back then."

She watches Sora shire off a rotten branch. "Ah. So, he draws the line at insider trading, I gu—,"

"No." Her interruption is as firm as it is gentle in its politeness. "He didn't talk about you the way you don't talk about a secret. Not a secret you hide," she adds, answering Mimi's next response before she can even think to make it. "One you want to keep, as long as you can."

When she does find her voice, it sounds tight, even to her. "Well. You and I remember that summer really differently."

Sora's discretion is unmatched. "Probably. Still, he's why you're here, right?"

She doesn't hesitate. "He told you?"

It's a useless question, a tactic to stall, and they both know it. "Some of it," Sora says, to be kind, or subtle, or just withhold, because hers wasn't the trust she was used to holding. "To be fair, it surprised me, too. I don't think I've seen Susumu since Miku was a toddler."

"Why?"

She smiles again, like she doesn't know what else to do with her face. Shrugging, she moves down the line of arrangements, readjusting heights and lengths of stems. "The problem with living in a smallish town when your mom's the mayor, is that nothing belongs to just you anymore. Everything about you belongs to everyone else. Some people are okay with that. They know how to handle it. You always did," she glances at Mimi, chewing on her lip. "But we didn't."

And that's when it all rises up again, this wall he'd always kept between them, the one with bright red hair and searing brown eyes. "I didn't always, either," says Mimi. "Why else do you think I left?"

Sora lowers the scissors before she can make another perfecting cut to a small lily plant. "I really would rather us argue about other things."

So she looks away, allowing herself the moment to cool the warm tinge to her skin. She observes the potted plants and freezers full of freshly delivered stems, the bouquets in different stages of organization and the selection of ceramic and glass vases that occupy the center table. Mimi purses her mouth, eyes narrowing. "You need more pinks."

Sora smiles, whether she wants to or not. "Miku said the exact same thing to me yesterday."

She can recognize the tone that settles around the shop then, and leaves it where it lands. Shouldering her purse a bit closer to her waist, she says, "Bring her to the café if you run out of things for her to do here, or if you just need a break. Kids like cooking."

Sora passes her a wordless glance of appreciation, only nodding in acknowledgement. Before Mimi can get all the way to the door, she calls after her, "He'd tell you everything, if you just asked him. You know that, right?"

Mimi holds the door open as she looks back at her. "You and I remember that summer really differently."

Her mouth parts as though she were ready to say it this time, but still something stops her. Her lips close tightly, just as Mimi waves her fingers, small, and steps down to the pavement, crossing the small parking lot to where she had left her car. It's only inside, the doors locked and the keys in the ignition, the engine humming low, that she looks back through her phone messages, debating to herself. In the end, she chooses to leave it alone, at least until she's back on her own block, seeing the light flicker on over the doorway to the basement bar under her front café stairs, and the graphic lines sketched roughly onto the paper that's stuck to the bar entrance.

Swearing, Mimi tears herself from the car and stomps across the street, snatching the flyer from the door once she reaches the bottom of the stairs. "Hey, asshole!" The pounding knock startles Taichi by its sharpness, less the insult that accompanies it. A glance disappears both reactions immediately, his lip curling in an annoyed grimace. She presses the back of a handwritten flyer to the window, the paper turned so he can see its depiction of a stick figure drawing with frizzy straw hair, a pink triangle dress, and snarling vampire teeth under the words, Do Not Admit. "Is this supposed to be me?"

He lifts his arms in an exaggerated shrug, the dishrag in one hand carefully twisted around just enough fingers to make his middle one all the more prominent. The flyer crumples in her fist, and she yanks on the handle, stomping into the barroom. "How many of these have you made?"

"They come in signed editions of ten," he says.

"Attempts to get my fangs right?"

He coughs to keep the smirk from his mouth. "What do you want?"

Mimi forces bitterly, "To eat a bit of humble pie, only to be attacked fresh again."

"I'm pretty sure this isn't the worst way I've drawn you."

She ignores this, or any hint of its meaning. "You've been avoiding me all week."

"Count your blessings—,"

"Will you just let me say sorry?"

"If this is an apology," and he waves his hand in a circle around her face, gesturing to her sour demeanor and begrudging posture, "try it on someone else."

"I'm saying sorry. I'm not apologizing," says Mimi.

His sigh is strained, exhausted. "Do you share the same plane of existence with anyone on this earth?"

"I saw Sora."

She's looking straight at him, unblinking, and he doesn't break. "Okay," he says, voice cool.

She turns her head, the strain of not rolling her eyes taking its toll on the wrinkle that presses tightly across her forehead. "There's no need to be cryptic, you know."

"I can't help what I excel at."

"Ha." She steps closer. "You're as bad at keeping secrets as I am."

He doesn't move. "False. I know plenty of things you don't know."

She reaches the bar by then, and, to his greater discomfort, takes a seat on a rickety barstool. Its creaking legs twang with disrepair, and he braces himself for a remark about the shabbiness, or the dull shine at the bar railing, or the spots that have stained the counters so darkly nothing could rescue the original color. Except no such comments come, but neither does she let her hands leave her lap. Instead, she says, "I don't believe that's true."

"You're not going to trick me into talking," he warns, while the again he should have added hangs between them.

Mimi purses her lips. "Talking isn't a trick." She pauses to let her temper even out amidst the back-and-forth, the only sort of verbal trap they ever seemed to set for each other. "And I had to talk to her, because you w—,"

He immediately turns around, moving down to the other end of the bar for an excuse to get away from her, from any of this, and she's bending over the counter, arm stretched out flat on top of it. "I told you to drop this."

"Taichi—,"

"Drop it—,"

"Tai."

"This is what you always do, Tachikawa," he says, voice raised sharply over her stubbornness, stopping to speak only after he's reached the other end of the room. "You bulldoze your way—do you hear me? Your way, because it's only ever allowed to go your way—through everything and over everyone, all because you think you know better than everyone else what they should be doing, or saying, or just being." He takes a breath, "That's not how normal people interact with each other—,"

"Who cares about normal?" she yells back, arms thrown up in the air in frustration. "You can't be normal and be me!"

"Jesus Christ—,"

She keeps going, animated, because an arrest of any kind has never occurred to her as a sensible course of action. "I shouldn't be faulted for my strengths just because they aren't strengths you have, or anyone else—,"

He suddenly slumps forward over the end of the bar to better cradle his forehead in his open palms. "It's like talking to a wall," he mutters loudly into his hands.

"A wall that has to do all it can to support all the other rooms in the house," she snaps back.

Taichi turns his neck to stare at her, blank. "Have you ever used a metaphor successfully?"

She feels her face grow hot, and sits back on the stool, stiff and straight-backed. "You know what I mean."

"Tachikawa, I am absolutely terrified of knowing what you mean." He straightens then, but still doesn't come back to her, only shifts his arms up to run both his hands through his hair. "But you do make trying to figure it out interesting."

Her lips curl. "A strength."

Taichi braces himself against the wall, arms folded across his chest. "Why do you always have to have the last word?"

"Because it makes you mad," says Mimi primly. "And you look stupid when you're mad. Your face gets all red, and you get all wrinkly around your mouth—,"

"You forfeited the right to talk about my face a long time ago." She purses her lips, the incredulity plain on her own face, and he lowers his arms. "I don't want to talk about my family with you. And not because it's you," he says quickly when her mouth opens again. She closes it with great regret, and he continues, "I just don't want to bring that stuff here."

Mimi's at a loss, somehow not expecting that—or this—to be a factor at all in this. She stares around the shabby, dim bar. "Wait, you mean, this…shithole?"

He doesn't correct her, merely clarifying, "You used to like this shithole."

"Everyone was stupid in college." She points to the ceiling, "Plus it was the upstairs that was the best part. The basement was always creepy. None of us hung out down here." He allows this comment to hang in the air for dramatic effect, and she's surprisingly slow to catch on. Her huff of displeasure is meant to foreclose any feeling of guilt, he suspects, and she doesn't at all seem to be bothered by the accusatory glance he gives her then, either. "Clearly, nothing about that part's changed," she says in the end.

"Plenty of people come 'round here still," he says with the false confidence of a losing bet.

She taps a finger to the counter, not bothering with looking about the room. "It's three o'clock on a Friday and I'm it."

Taichi mimes an open-faced "So?" with one hand. "Your point?"

She entertains the idea he's being flippant on purpose, but decides, from the hard bend of his jaw, that he really doesn't quite see it. She shakes her head. "Well, at least we can say business school would have been truly wasted on you."

He's smirking. "I did go to business school."

"No, you didn't," she scoffs, rolling her eyes.

"Except I did." He moves down the counter to the sink, and she stares at his attempts to keep busy by wiping the taps down with the rag he'd been using when she'd first walked in. "Night school, but still did it."

"You didn't," she repeats, slower this time. "I know you didn't."

"Sure. Say something three times, and it's bound to undo the fabric of reality and reset the world to your liking, why not?"

Mimi continues to stare at him. "Why do you do that?"

He doesn't raise his face, but his gaze still darts up, cool and dark. "Do what?" he says.

"Talk to me like I'm stupid."

He stops.

"Yes, you do," she answers the I do that? he can't quite say out aloud. "It's mean."

He pulls his lips over his tongue, pressing his mouth closed. "Yeah," Taichi admits in the end, chin dipped down, "I know it is."

She frowns, fingers lacing loosely together in her lap. Then she straightens, sharp, extra sarcastic in her miming, "If this is an apology—,"

"Okay, will you just—," and he cuts himself off, a soft smile on his lips as he shakes his head. He speaks softly, careful to look at her when she looks at him, this time, "Look, I'm sorry. I have never thought you were stupid."

She's still curt, sore. "I know I'm not. And I don't care if you do," she adds, clarifying the terms. "Just don't think I'm not going to be mean to you, too, when you deserve it."

He's rolling his eyes. "Sounds exhausting."

"It wouldn't be if you weren't being stupid so much."

"Well, we all give things up to get where we are."

"And what did you give up for all this?" Mimi dares, mockingly looking around the dim barroom, lip curling. Her gaze takes its time in its exaggerated sweep to return to him, but it does, and that's how she finds him, looking back at her, his whole face broken open.

"You know," he says.

Her tongue presses to the roof of her mouth, a trick she'd learned to keep it shut, protect herself from her worst habits. He seems to mistake the hardness of her expression for the same awkwardness he feels, too, and moves to retrieve a clean glass from the shelf. "I'm still technically on the clock," she says, observing the frothy ale of the second bar tap drain into the glass with some interest.

He slides the full pint across to her, and then makes one for himself. "Just take it."

She does but doesn't cheers him. Licking the sweet drops from her lip, she holds the glass between her hands on the counter and observes the back bar, its old wall hangings and picture frames, the bits of scrap paper tacked here and there with notes and numbers, the half-empty and full bottles of liquor, the shelves in need of a good dusting. But then, she's not sure she can remember a time it didn't look this way; all she can think of are all the times it had looked so much worse here, this dim dark. It was how he'd always kept the place, despite the number of times they'd tried to get him fix things up, spruce it up a bit, attract more patrons. A ploy, really, if she were honest, to keep the place theirs. To keep the developers out, the new tenants at bay, the change in the town that Mayor Takenouchi's election had promised—threatened—to bring back for just a little longer. But Hiroaki had never been interested in making this space anything but his, and just how he liked it.

She takes a breath, hands closing tight around the beer glass. "Taichi, I want to buy the bar."

He puts own drink down, bracing himself with both hands on the bar railing. "Mi."

She pushes her glass aside to lean closer to him. "You know I'd take care of it. I wouldn't—I won't do anything he wouldn't have liked—,"

"That's not the reason."

"Then why not?" Her impatience makes the syllables stretch, unattractive in their petulant tone. "I'm good at this, Tai. I can—I could really turn this place around. And you wouldn't have to stay," she adds, seizing the next trick up her sleeve when the doubt casts even more darkly across his face. "You could get out, you know, like you always said you would if you didn't have—,"

"I'm here because I choose to be here," he interrupts, quick. "Okay?"

But it isn't, to her. She argues back, "Only because you wouldn't let yourself admit there are other choices—,"

Taichi backs up again, moving down the bar and dragging his drink with him. She turns on the barstool, gripping the railing with one hand. "When are you just going to admit that the only roadblocks you keep seeing here are the ones you put up for yourself?" she demands.

"That's the difference between you and me," he snaps back. "I don't see my family or my friends or my town as a roadblock, because I like where I'm from—,"

"No, you're just more scared of where you could go." When he doesn't respond, Mimi draws her hands back to her lap, fingertips tapped together to give herself a moment to breathe again. "How do you think she'd feel," she begins, speaking carefully, "if she knew what she kept you from?"

Taichi shakes his head. "Sora never kept me from anything."

"So she knows what you did for her?"

The doubt in her voice, her lack of faith in his honesty then, and the truth of all of it, turns something dark he doesn't think to stop.

"More than Yamato ever did for you," he says, low.

Her face turns white, tongue frozen. He bites his own too late. The stool slides back against the wooden floor, heels landing hard on the ground. She snatches the clutch from the counter, wrenching it open, and it's only after she's wrested a few of the bills that he's found his voice again. "Don't—come on, stop. I don't want your money. Stop—,"

"I might be mean," she interrupts, voice thin, "but I am not cruel."

He stands straight, palms braced on the ledge of the shelves behind him. "Mimi—,"

"I'm going to take this place," she promises him then. "I'm taking everything."

He's silent, lips still parted, and watches her storm through to the back of the bar, finding the doorway to the basement corridor after the stockroom. The slamming of the door jolts him back, making him suck his breath, furious with himself. He grips the bar counter and hoists himself over the railing, stumbling to catch his footsteps without toppling the barstool she'd shoved back in her exit, and takes the rear staircase two at a time to get to the bakery's kitchen. "Mi, wait, please—,"

"That's a new one."

Damn.

He immediately redirects, attempting a distractedly casual posture. "Ah, yeah, h—hey, Miyako. How've you been?"

"Good," the young woman answers, bright. "I'm really good." She repeats, blushing. "Um," and, dusting her floured hands off on her apron, she gestures to the cannisters along the table next to her. "Do you want some tea? Or coffee? I can make you a—,"

"Uh, okay—wait, no, sorry, I mean, I'm okay for now, thanks," he interrupts himself, and she lowers her hands, visibly confused by his awkwardness in the strange moment. He steels himself, trying to keep his head from ringing. He stops, restarts, and hates how he sounds throughout all this, "Listen, did Mi come up this way?" Miyako just stares back, her expression utterly blank. Taichi retracts again, bracing his tongue between his teeth, and then forces out, "Is Mimi here?"

"Oh!" and she points to the café interior. He offers a brief twitchy smile of thanks and strides awkwardly forward. "But, actually, now's not—," and a loud squeal interrupts both of them, sounding from the café interior over Ken's low voice echoing Mimi's chatter.

"It's okay," Taichi doesn't give any of it attention, determined. "I just need a second with her abou—,"

He stops himself, standing at the kitchen entrance with the door only just ajar. Miyako quickly comes up next to him, peering out at the scene. "Isn't it crazy, a real life celebrity in our store?" she whispers, jittery.

Taichi stares at them, at Mimi's bright laughing face pressed into Catherine's long, thin neck, her arms tightly swung around the dancer's frame. They're swaying a slow circle with their excited embrace of each other; on one turn, Mimi sees him through the doorway, her hazel eyes slick with tears. She blinks them back, and he ducks before Catherine can see him. "Yeah," he says, breath quickening. "Crazy."