The Book of the Flame

by Carrie Asai

  “I’ll be just one second,” I said to Masato. “I promise.” I turned to Detective Wachter. “I need…”

  “The motel number?” Detective Wachter guessed, fishing around in his pocket. “Hiro asked me to give you this when I spoke with him last night.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and took the scrap of paper down the hall to the pay phone, leaving my uncle and the detective to engage in no doubt awkward conversation.

  “Hello?”

  I caught my breath as Hiro’s sleepy voice came on the line. Over the last few days I’d pushed all thoughts of him out of my mind, trying so hard to simply focus on the situation at hand. I thought about what had happened in the hotel room in Tijuana and how it seemed so impossibly long ago that Hiro had first admitted he had feelings for me—and that I’d admitted the same thing to him.

  “Hello? Heaven, is that you?”

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said, before he could ask me anything about what I’d been doing for the last few days. “When we were in Yoji’s suite and he told you that if you worked for him, you could see your father again and live like a king and defend your family’s honor…were you tempted? At all?”

  I waited for Hiro’s answer. It all depended on what he said—it could go either way. For me, this was the root of the matter. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, and my heart raced faster and faster as the silence went on and on. And then, just when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore—

  “Yes,” he said, his voice defeated and lost. My first instinct was to argue with him, to make him take it back, but I knew, deep down, that he was telling the truth. I felt like I’d been hit in the belly with a bo stick—worse, really. That kind of pain wore off after a minute or so, but I knew that this kind of hurt would never go away.

  “Good-bye, Hiro,” I said, and hung up the phone. I leaned my head against the wall. Hiro and I were more alike than I’d ever imagined. We knew we shouldn’t want the things that crime had supplied us with our whole lives, yet a small part of us still wanted them. I was convinced that if we stayed together in L.A., if we stayed together at all, that eventually we’d talk each other into some kind of complacency. It would just be so much easier to give in to it together. How could we be warriors when what we really wanted was a life together? There was no room for that in the bushido. And even though Hiro seemed to think it would be okay to bend some of the rules, I wasn’t so sure about that myself. Besides, it was time for me to follow my own path. My family needed me, and my duty was to them.

  I took a deep breath and walked down the hallway to where my uncle waited.

  “All right,” I said. “Take me home.”