Log in to keep reading Dead Hours
You have read 1 of 18 pages of On the House. Log in to read the rest — or create a free Inkroost account, which takes a moment and opens every other free chapter on the site too.
Free to join. We will bring you straight back to this page.
Text Version A written companion to this chapter — for accessibility, screen readers, and search.
3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. A crate of tiny free drink samples arrives early with the morning stock, and the note taped to it says hand out every last cup before the morning delivery or log the rest as waste. Kaito — physically unable to bear either waste or a giveaway that never reaches zero — declares quiet war on an empty tray and resolves to get rid of all fifty samples before his shift ends, spiraling all night over how a thing given away for free can be so impossible to give away. All night the sliding doors ding and Kaito springs up, tray raised, 'On the house?' — only to deflate on the identical dead-eyed beat of a customer waving him off as he mutters '...still full.' A ladder of night-shift oddballs each refuse in a worse way: the tracksuit regular just lifts his clear bag of cans, a drunk salaryman downs a fistful and then tries to buy the whole crate, a cheerful jogger on a cleanse insists nobody wants free things at 3 A.M. — three verdicts nobody can verify, about a drink no one can even name. Rin quietly livestreams the whole vigil as 'Forcing Strangers to Drink at 3 A.M.,' with one flicker of near-sincerity — that he's the only person alive who'd take a free-sample count this seriously, and it's kind of admirable — before raising her phone again. Near dawn, hollow and defeated, Kaito finally stops offering and lowers the tray — and that is exactly when the tracksuit regular quietly returns and takes a cup, the running beat inverting into a serene, triumphant '...zero,' as an early-morning trickle empties the tray at last. Then the reveal Kaito half-saw in the first minute pays off: the morning-delivery driver slides the doors open into daylight and says the crate was mis-delivered — wrong store, never meant for them, here to be collected regardless — so the giveaway never needed to happen and his six-hour war emptied a tray that was going back on the truck full or not. Rin's silent 'six hours of a man begging strangers to take free drinks' stream hits four hundred thousand viewers; Kaito gets nothing, not even the last word. Dawn light fills the spotless store exactly as the night began — and on the freshly bare counter the driver sets down another crate, mis-delivered again, Rin's phone already raised, already live.
Page 1
A wide establishing shot looks across the empty convenience store at 3 a.m. — rain streaking the glass doors, a dark street outside, fluorescent light on the coolers and shelves. Behind the register stands Kaito, tired and deadpan in his striped store apron. Beside him, Rin leans on the counter glancing at her phone. On the counter sit a metal tray crowded with tiny paper cups and a plain cardboard crate. Kaito: "3 a.m. The dead hours. Finally quiet."