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Sagawa grips her shoulder tighter, fingers carving shallow creases in the sleeve of her wool coat. He'd bought it for her, expensive, fashionable shit with metal buttons made to look engraved, because it's gotten too cold to walk even a block from restaurant to waiting car in the strapless black dress he likes to see her in.
The way he holds open the back door of a family black sedan for her, holds out a hand for her to grip as she steps directly from curb into back seat without her heels touching asphalt, it would all be charmingly possessive from someone else.
But her arms go from warm to cold, sweat seeping into the silk liner inside her sleeves as he shuts the door and crosses to the other side, stepping in and leaving the center seat between them.
On the nights he takes her out it always goes this way. He crosses his legs in the back of the car, murmuring the address of her apartment to the driver who's dropped her off there enough times to know it. She crosses her ankles and folds her hands, red nails tucked under her palms.
He's nothing less than a gentleman. It terrifies her.
He's never touched her. Never hurt her. Never fucked her. That's all reserved for Majima, for tiger, an ill-fitting nickname to remind him he still has more to lose, even stranded at the dry dirt bottom of a well like Sotonbori.
If he'd hurt her the same way she'd be safer. If he'd take a knife to her, or his bat, if he'd bend her over the back of a couch and screw her until she sobs Sagawa-han into the cracked pleather, she wouldn't be afraid of him. If he'd strip off her dress and call her a slut then she'd be invisible, just a new noose to hang Majima by.
She made a mistake, telling him her name the night he found her with her hair down, putting on lipstick in The Grand's dressing room hours after the staff had left. If she hadn't, he might have mistaken her for a party trick or a whim.
He'd met her eyes in the mirror before she could turn around in the vanity chair, stunned like prey while his surprise resolved into a smile in the doorway.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" He'd asked her as if she were one of the other young women alone after hours and caught in a man's crosshairs.
She shouldn't have told him.
Now he takes her out to dinner, the real theater, sometimes for drinks. He smiles. He treats her like a lady. He sees 𝘩𝘦𝘳, and she knows it's only until he works out some new, special way to control her too.
When the car stops outside the street behind her apartment, her cage above the river, he steps out, holds her door open, and offers his hand without seizing on her fingers. She's taller than him normally, and more so in heels, but it still doesn't feel like she's the one looking down on him as she tucks her hair behind her right ear and asks:
"Would ya like to come upstairs, Sagawa-san?"
She wants him to want that from her. She wants him to pull her hair and press his lit cigarette into her hip while the taste of his dick is still on her lips because a part of her already understands that part of him. She's ready to beg him. Maybe that's what he's been waiting for. It's her own shadow falling over his face, obscuring his eyes as she opens her mouth again, prepared to plead let me please you Sagawa-san.
Before she can, he has one finger on her face, the tip of his index sliding above her ear to free the hair she'd just put there. His grey eyes are still lost in the dark.
"I'm not the kind of man who rushes a woman," he says, a thing a kind man would say as a comfort but only frightens her further coming from him.
"I'm still just getting to know you, Goromi-chan."
It doesn't matter that neither of them know what he's threatening her with yet.