They spend three whole days looking for a time, and keep finding everything else instead.
Not metaphorical time—though that would be perfectly on brand—but a very specific, usable, lie-down-and-lock-the-door slot in the day when Sammi and Eriko could finally, properly, unequivocally be with each other.
A time without clients, without malfunctioning staircases, without monks dropping off warning cranes or the lake demanding gossip. A time when the building isn’t listening too loudly and the Su Causeway isn’t rattling on about traffic patterns in their ear.
“That one?” Sammi asks on the first evening, pointing to an hour hanging in the tailor’s window.
It’s a neat, folded little thing of dim golden light, sewn to a silk ribbon labeled: “One (1) Quiet Hour, Ideal for Studying or Crying Politely.”
Eriko eyes it critically. “Too fragile,” she says. “If the stove coughs, it’ll rip.”
“How about that?” Sammi nods toward the pawn broker’s memory rack, where a heavier hour swings like a pocket watch, its glass face clouded. “Untaken Opportunity: Lightly Used.”
“That’s cursed,” Eriko says instantly, because she has seen enough equations to recognize bad risk.
By the third day, they are both tired and a little ridiculous.
Sammi’s press has been productive but surly. Eriko’s notebooks are full of beautiful, useless diagrams titled things like Optimal Conditions for Kissing and Proposed Synchronization of Two Humans & One Hot Kettle.
They keep almost finding their time—on stair landings, in side streets, under low clouds—but then something intrudes. A cat knocks over a jar of ink. A client “just happens to be nearby.” A bell rings, and the noon crack opens under their feet and dumps them ten minutes ahead of themselves, breathless and laughing, but still not quite where they meant to be.
“Maybe the city’s mad at us,” Sammi says, sprawled on the floor one afternoon, panting from the latest inadvertent time-hop. The sunlight is at a slant that makes Eriko’s hair look like ink about to spill.
“Why would it be mad?” Eriko asks, though she’s frowning thoughtfully toward the floorboards.
“We convinced our building to talk back to inspectors,” Sammi says. “We’re a bad influence. Perhaps it thinks we’ll incite the furniture to unionize next.”
Eriko’s mouth twitches; her eyes stay serious.
“We do live on the Su Causeway,” she says. “It’s not just a stretch of stone. It’s a history project with opinions.”
The Causeway Gets Nosy
If you stand very still on the bridge at night, you can feel the Su Causeway thinking.
It thinks in slow, heavy pulses: the pressure of centuries, the weight of love letters engraved in its stones, the damp ache of old floods. It remembers poets and generals, market stalls and quiet moonlit walks. It remembers the person it was built for, the long-dead Thearch whose court and gardens once curled along the lake like calligraphy.
The Causeway is not jealous exactly—but it has standards.
So when it catches the reverberations of Sammi and Eriko’s quietly tangled longing (and you’d be surprised how far longing carries in stone), it decides to investigate.
The first sign is subtle. Every time they lean toward each other in the apartment—Sammi’s fingers brushing Eriko’s wrist, Eriko’s eyes going soft and complicated—the whole building gives a tiny, embarrassed cough. The floorboards creak loudly elsewhere, as if to say, Nothing to see here! Structural adjustment only!
“I think the house is chaperoning us,” Sammi whispers after the third interruption, half amused and half exasperated.
“You’re imagining things,” Eriko says, but the tip of her ear has gone pink.
Down below, the Causeway shifts its weight, listening carefully through the foundations. The building, being young as structures go and very fond of its tenants, sends back a nervous jumble of impressions: laughter, ink, steam; the press’s heart-beat thrum; the shy electrostatic crackle of two people not-quite-touching.
The Causeway considers this. It remembers courtly romances conducted in view of everyone and consummated mostly in glances. It remembers the Thearch’s favorite concubine slipping barefoot along it at night to meet a scholar. It remembers being the setting, never the accomplice.
It decides to test these two modern creatures.
That evening, when Sammi and Eriko finally give up on buying time and simply declare an hour—closing the shutters, stacking books against the door, conspiratorially quiet—the Causeway calls in favors.
A tram derails its schedule by exactly eight minutes and squeals to a stop right under their window. Steam erupts, horn blaring like an outraged goose. Passengers spill out; someone starts arguing with someone else about ticket prices; three vendors arrive from nowhere smelling of fried dough and opportunity.
The building trembles. The window-eye swivels downward, irresistibly curious.
“Of course,” Eriko sighs, pulling away from Sammi as the noise swells. “Naturally.”
The next day, they try again in late afternoon, when the light turns almost amber and the cats become philosophical. They make it as far as the bed; Sammi’s hands are warm where they bracket Eriko’s hips; Eriko’s pulse is racing with that beautiful mix of anticipation and terror.
And then there is a clatter on the stairs like thirty sparrows falling down a well.
Brother Wei bursts in without knocking, halo spinning, panting something about a minor temporal implosion near the tea district. Could they possibly—?
“Later,” Sammi says through gritted teeth, shepherding him out and politely closing the door on his apologies.
The Causeway feels this slam all the way down its spine.
It huffs, a long exhalation that makes tiny pebbles skitter.
So they’re serious, it thinks, in its stone-slow way. They keep coming back to the same intention. They close doors in the face of monks. They deserve…something.
The Causeway considers itself a traditionalist. For most of its life, love has meant arranged alliances, glances over fans, tightly laced gowns. But the reality living in its ribs now is full of brass and machinery and women who print their own pamphlets.
And these two—one all spark and grin, the other a precise line of ink—are very clearly in love.
It decides to interfere one more time, just to be sure. Then, if they persist, it will help.
A Morning of Almosts
“Maybe we should schedule this like an important client,” Eriko says the next morning, in the tone she uses for complicated proofs. “A formal appointment. With agenda.”
Sammi laughs, all sparkles. “Minutes: 1) Kissing. 2) See where it goes. 3) Adjourn.”
“That is a very short agenda.”
“I’m hoping item two takes a long time.”
The Causeway hears this through the soles of their feet as they cross it—Sammi bouncing along, Eriko more measured but with a faint skip in her step that betrays her.
It makes the bridge deck just uneven enough that Sammi stumbles, colliding into Eriko, arms flailing. Instead of falling, she wraps herself around Eriko’s shoulders with an “oof,” chest pressed to back.
“Oh,” Eriko says faintly.
The stone registers the sudden, sharp spike of shared heat.
This, the Causeway notes, is not the clumsy flail of strangers. This is how people fall who already trust where they’re going to land.
It decides. Enough tests. These two are not dabblers but devoted nuisances, the sort it secretly likes. It will give them what assistance it can.
And as luck—and very deliberate timing—would have it, an opportunity is already rumbling its way along the lake road: the imperial palanquin of the Song Thearch himself, flanked by the full apparatus of spectacle.
The Thearch Takes the Bridge
The announcement comes at midday in the form of eleven gongs and a public crier whose voice has been slightly enchanted for distance.
“By edict of Heaven and the Ministry of Processions,” the voice booms from one end of the causeway to the other, “the August Thearch will traverse the Su Causeway at sunset today to inspect the prosperity of Hangzhou and the composure of its citizens. All households are advised to show respect and not to fall into the lake from excitement.”
The street erupts. Children start practicing synchronized bowing. Shopkeepers drag out their cleanest awnings. Someone tries to sell commemorative buns shaped like the Thearch’s face and is gently but firmly discouraged by uniformed officials.
In their top-floor apartment, Sammi and Eriko stare at each other over piles of paper.
“We’ll never get any work done,” Sammi says, delighted.
“We were not planning to,” Eriko reminds her, then blushes as the building gives an interested creak.
The round window-eye swivels back and forth between them and the commotion outside. Its brass rim twitches like an eyelid.
“Listen,” Sammi says quickly, leaning against the sill. “Big spectacle. Very distracting. Ideal time for, you know—” She flaps a hand in a universal sign for Things One Does Not Discuss In Front of Windows.
The building makes a doubtful sound, like a bookshelf loaded with one more book than strictly appropriate.
Down in its foundations, the Causeway sends up a reassuring pulse.
I’ll keep the attention, it tells the building. You look away.
Look away? the building replies, scandalized.
You can stare at the Thearch like everyone else, the Causeway says patiently. Let them have their moment. Even palaces close doors.
The building hesitates. It does like the Thearch’s processions—so regular, so beautifully balanced. And there is something in the way its tenants’ hearts hammer that climbs its beams like music.
“Very well,” it groans at last, in a dusty whisper that rustles the curtains. “Forty-five minutes. No loud remodeling. And do not break any joists.”
Sammi has no idea of the negotiations that have just taken place on her behalf. She only knows that, for once, the stairwell falls quiet, the halting creaks smoothing into a satisfied hum.
“Sunset, then?” she says, turning back to Eriko with bright eyes.
Eriko’s hand closes around the handle of her mug, knuckles pale. She swallows, visibly.
“Sunset,” she agrees.
The City Looks Elsewhere
As the golden hour deepens, the Su Causeway straightens its shoulders.
It flexes minutely, adjusting stone and mortar to a dignified arch. It tightens railings, smooths potholes, settles its weight into the lakebed so securely that no one—not even the most anxious official—will worry about its stability. It has hosted the feet of emperors before. It will do so again. But this time, it has a double purpose.
All along the bridge, people cluster in dense, excited layers. Flags snap. Vendors sell skewers of something fragrant and unidentifiable. The tram lines shut down; the airships adjust course to drift overhead in aesthetically pleasing configurations.
Near the western end, an enormous clockwork dragon is warming up, gears clicking as its silk scales ripple. The Thearch loves dragons. The Causeway has learned to accommodate these preferences.
When the first drums begin—low, rolling, like someone knocking on the sky—the very stones thrill.
The palanquin appears at last in a shimmer of banners: lacquered wood, gold inlays, carved panels depicting the Four Seas in improbable weather. Eight bearers in perfectly synchronized steps. A fringe of bells that tinkle with each sway.
The crowd roars. Hats fly up. Children are hoisted onto shoulders. Even the magistrate’s cats sit up very straight, whiskers quivering.
Every eye turns.
Every window leans outward.
Every building along the Su Causeway shifts its attention, peering down with a rustle of tiles and a squeak of shutters.
Every building—except one.
High above the water, our round window-eye obediently swivels away from the scene, facing the hills and the first pricks of evening star instead. Its glass fogs slightly from its own flustered breath.
Inside, the light of the procession paints stray glimmers on the ceiling, but the room itself is oddly, beautifully calm.
For the first time in days, the world is not trying to climb into their space. All its noise flows past like a river diverted by skillful engineering.
Sammi locks the door.
The Glass of Wine
Eriko is standing by the little stove, back very straight, as if about to sit an exam.
On the table between them is a small ceramic bottle with a faded label: “Huizhou Chian: For Celebrations, Apologies, and Moments of Reckless Clarity.”
They’d bought it months ago and never quite opened it, waiting for the right night. Apparently that night has chosen itself.
Sammi uncorks it. The scent that blooms out is rich and dark, full of plums and something like smoke. She pours carefully into two chipped cups, hands one to Eriko, keeps one for herself.
“To… not being interrupted,” Sammi says, raising her cup.
Eriko’s mouth curves. “To… trusting the architecture,” she counters.
They drink. The wine is strong, with a tiny metallic tang, as if someone has stirred in a teaspoon of starlight.
Outside, the drums intensify. The palanquin has reached the middle of the bridge. Fireworks in careful, dignified colors burst above the rooftops. The crowd roars approval.
Inside, the sound comes muffled, as if the room were wrapped in cotton.
Sammi sets her cup down. Her hands are steady now, the earlier fidget burned away by purpose.
“Eriko,” she says softly.
Eriko looks up, and what’s in her eyes is more terrifying and wonderful than any official parade: a mind that has counted the risks and is choosing this anyway.
“I know,” Eriko says. “Come here.”
Consent, in Stereo
Later, Sammi will remember it less as a series of movements and more as a cascade of yeses.
Not one big yes, stamped like a seal, but dozens of them, each quietly affirmed.
“Is this okay?” she asks, when she steps in close enough that their breaths tangle.
“Yes,” Eriko says, almost inaudible, the word leaving a warm smudge on Sammi’s cheek.
“Here?” Sammi murmurs, fingertips grazing the curve of Eriko’s waist.
“Yes.” A shiver, not of fear.
“Tell me if you want to stop,” Sammi says into the hollow below Eriko’s ear.
“I will,” Eriko replies, and then adds, with a fierce little exhale, “I won’t.”
The Causeway, listening through foundations and up the spine of the building, feels this chorus of consent like a tuning fork struck true. It relaxes deeper into itself, ribs expanding. The lake, for once, holds perfectly still, reflecting the sky in unbroken bands.
In the street, people are cheering the dragon. Up here, two women are re-writing the local laws of gravity.
Genki Sammi, Thoughtful Eriko
Sammi has always moved through the world like a spark searching for dry tinder. She grins, she trips, she persuades printing presses and staircases to cooperate through sheer enthusiasm. She is bold when arguing politics, bold when jumping through noon.
With Eriko, she is bold and careful at once.
She kisses her like a question and a promise together, pouring all that genki energy into the touch while constantly, almost unconsciously, listening for resistance.
None comes.
Eriko, for all her reserve, responds like someone who has been thinking about this in long, careful equations and finally found the one variable she was missing. Her hands, initially tentative, map Sammi’s shoulders, her back, the line of her ribs. She pulls Sammi closer with a decisive little tug that surprises them both.
Sammi laughs against her mouth, giddy, then catches Eriko’s lower lip between hers in a kiss that makes the building’s rafters creak softly.
Outside, a volley of fireworks explodes in red and gold. Their light flickers through the curtains, laying shifting patterns on bare skin and rumpled clothes. For once, the theatrics belong entirely to someone else.
Sammi guides Eriko gently backward toward the bed, her hands sure now, her smile wicked and tender at once.
“Still okay?” she breathes.
“Yes,” Eriko says, eyes dark and clear. “Please keep asking, and please keep going.”
It is the most Eriko way possible to say: I want you, entirely.
Sammi obeys.
The Small, Keen Earth-Shake
Later, details blur into a warm, shimmering continuum: the way Eriko’s fingers clutch at the sheets, then at Sammi’s shoulders; the tiny, breathless sounds that escape her when Sammi finds exactly the right angle, the right rhythm; Sammi’s own surprised, helpless laughter when Eriko chooses a sudden boldness of her own in return.
None of it is visible from outside. The curtains, at the building’s discreet insistence, have drifted closed. The window-eye is resolutely turned away, pretending to admire the procession’s lanterns.
But the effects travel.
At the crescendo of their shared joy—when Eriko gasps out Sammi’s name in a tone halfway between a theorem proved and a prayer, when Sammi feels herself falling and landing and flying all at once—the building’s beams tighten like a spine curling in pleasure.
The Causeway, caught in the sympathetic resonance, gives a tiny, delighted buck.
It is less than an inch, hardly a movement at all. But when thousands of tons of stone shift even that much, the world notices.
On the bridge, the Thearch’s palanquin jolts.
The bearers stumble, then recover with admirable professionalism. The lacquered panels rattle. Jade tassels swing wildly. Inside, cushioned in silk and protocol, the Son of Heaven himself blinks and glances down.
For a heartbeat, he feels something very strange: not threat, not collapse, but a kind of…exuberant shiver in the structure beneath him. As if the bridge is laughing.
“An omen, Your August Majesty?” murmurs one of his ministers, pale with concern.
The Thearch considers. He has walked this causeway since he was a child, long before the brass pipes and clockwork additions. He knows its moods: its sulks in typhoon season, its smugness in harvest festivals.
This—this feels like joy. Small, sharp, entirely sincere.
“Auspicious,” he declares at last, settling back as the palanquin resumes its smooth glide. “The bridge approves of our reign.”
The minister exhales in relief, already composing a proclamation about how even stone celebrates the dynasty.
The Causeway, who has not been consulted, hums thoughtfully. It is not actually thinking about reigns at all. It is thinking about two specific humans in one specific room and how their shared tremor made all its centuries of being walked upon feel newly worthwhile.
Aftershocks
Up in the apartment, Sammi and Eriko lie tangled in a heap of limbs and blankets and satisfied exhaustion.
The last fireworks crackle themselves into silence. The drums fade. The crowd’s roar recedes into the general murmur of night.
Their breath slowly slows.
“Did you feel that?” Sammi asks at last, voice hoarse from laughter and other things.
Eriko, still catching her own breath, blinks. “The fireworks?”
“No, the…little lurch. Like the building jumped with us.”
Eriko thinks about the moment—the way the mattress had quivered, the way a stack of books on the bedside table had slid half an inch, the way her whole body had seemed to ring like struck glass.
“I did,” she says softly. “I thought it was just me.”
Sammi grins, propping herself up on one elbow. “Oh, it was definitely you,” she teases, then yelps as Eriko swats her with a pillow.
Outside, the window-eye, curiosity finally overcoming discretion, swivels cautiously back toward them. It sees only two figures wrapped together, peaceful, and a room that looks as if joy has walked through it and rearranged the air.
The building sighs. Its sigh sends a faint, warm draft over them, smelling of old wood and new beginnings.
“Well,” it creaks down to the Causeway. “They didn’t break anything.”
They fixed something, the Causeway replies, still feeling the faint echo of that keen little quake rippling along its arches. They reminded us all that being crossed is not the only way to be used. Sometimes we are here to hold.
The lake, which has watched the whole business with professional detachment, gives a small approving ripple. No lies were told in that room. The green glow on its surface tonight is unusually dim.
Night on the Eye
A little later—after water and more wine and the kind of half-dazed laughter that feels like rediscovering one’s own voice—Sammi and Eriko curl under the duvet, shoulders touching, hands linked loosely between them.
Their bodies are pleasantly tired. Their minds are oddly clear.
From the street, snatches of conversation drift up: someone exclaiming over the dragon, someone speculating about the tremor, someone already trying to turn it into a ballad.
“You topped an earthquake,” Eriko murmurs at last, eyes closed but smiling.
“I had an accomplice,” Sammi says. “Two, if you count the Causeway.”
They lapse into comfortable silence.
This, Sammi thinks, is the time they were looking for: not just the sharp, bright peak of passion, but the soft landing afterward, the way their breaths fall into the same rhythm without effort. The small aches that say you were here, in my arms, real.
Outside their round window, the stars arrange themselves in whatever patterns they please. The Thearch’s palanquin disappears into the palace compound. The city slowly folds itself into night mode: some shops closing, others waking, gears ticking in quieter tempos.
On the Su Causeway, the stone feels very slightly lighter, as if it has set down a burden it hadn’t realized it was carrying.
In the top-floor apartment, on a bed warmed by hidden pipes and miracle, two women sleep with their fingers still loosely intertwined.
Somewhere between them and the foundations, the building dreams. In its dream, staircases learn to creak in encouragement instead of interruption, and every window-eye in the city knows when to turn courteously away.
The earth, having shaken just a little to make room for them, settles back with a contented sigh.
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