Chapter Twenty
They looked at eleven places across most of three weeks before they found the one, and Kyan loved every miserable minute of it.
He hadn't expected to. He'd braced for house-hunting to feel like the dozens of cold transactions he'd run for his mother, square footage and comps and leverage.
Instead it turned out to be the most fun he'd had with his clothes on in years, because he was doing it with Sai, and Sai judged every property through the plants.
"No," Sai said, the second they walked into the fourth place, a slick downtown loft with a view and not one window that faced the right way. "North light. Everything would die slow. Next."
"We've been here ninety seconds."
"A jade tree would file a complaint." Sai was already walking back out. "I'm not raising children somewhere they'd be unhappy."
"The plants are the children now?"
"The plants were always the children. You're a recent addition and frankly you're on probation." Sai grinned and bumped his shoulder.
The fifth place had good light and a kitchen the size of a phone booth.
The sixth had a great kitchen and a bathroom that opened straight off the bedroom, which Sai vetoed on the grounds that guests would have to walk past their bed, and Kyan vetoed on the grounds that he had opinions now about guests and bedrooms he hadn't had a year ago.
The seventh smelled like a problem nobody had disclosed.
By the ninth, they had a system, and by the tenth, they had a fight about whether a fireplace was romantic or a dust trap, which Kyan enjoyed more than he'd enjoyed most things his mother had ever bought him.
The eighth place had been someone's grandmother's, and still smelled like her, lavender and decades.
Sai went quiet and gentle in it and said it deserved a family and not two men who'd fill it with grow-lights.
They left it for someone who'd love it the right way.
The ninth had a landlord who used the word "cozy" four times in one hallway, which Kyan had learned was real-estate for "you will not fit a couch.
" The tenth was the fireplace fight, which they were both still litigating in the car afterward, happily, Sai insisting a fireplace was a portal for cold air wearing a costume and Kyan insisting it was the single most romantic object a home could contain, neither of them giving an inch, both of them grinning the whole drive.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Bethany's flight got pushed again, some tangle of LA permits and contractors, and nobody in the family said out loud how little they minded the extra weeks.
Kyan kept a running list on his phone, the way he'd once kept lists for his mother, except this list had columns like fern light and is the kitchen a lie and would we host Sunday here.
He caught himself, somewhere around the eighth viewing, taking the whole thing more seriously than any acquisition he'd ever closed for Zahara.
Because those had been about winning. This was about the rest of his life, and the man standing next to a realtor saying things like "this grout situation is a personality" was the rest of his life, and Kyan had never once cared so much about getting a thing right.
The realtor learned fast not to oversell to them.
Sai could not be flattered about a property any more than he could be flattered about anything, and Kyan ran a comp in his head on every list price within ten seconds, so the two of them moved through showings like a polite wrecking crew, charming and unbudgeable, and by the end the realtor had stopped pitching and just started opening doors and letting them decide.
And then they walked into the eleventh, the listing Sai had pointed at from the studio floor, and both of them went quiet.
It wasn't fancy. It was the top half of an old converted house on a street with real trees.
Two bedrooms, a kitchen with room to be bad at cooking in, and a whole wall of south-facing windows in the main room, light pouring in gold and warm across the glowing hardwood.
Sai stopped in the middle of that light and turned a slow circle, the way Bethany had turned in the peony-filled club.
"Oh," Sai said quietly. "Oh, the plants would be so happy here."
"Yeah." Kyan watched him stand in the light and didn't look at the windows at all, looked at him. "They would."
"This is the one." Sai's voice had gone thick. "Isn't it. I walked in and I already don't want to leave. That's never happened to me. I've spent my whole life in places I could afford and made the best of. I've never once walked into a room and had it just feel like—" He stopped.
"Like home." Kyan crossed to him and took his hands.
"Yeah. I know. Me too. First time for me too.
" He looked around the glowing room and could already see all of it: a couch they'd argue about, a plant room, a bed built for two, Sunday dinners they'd host instead of attend.
"Let's get it. Let's just get it. I ran the numbers six ways this morning before you woke up, because I'm a romantic now apparently, and we can do this. We can actually do this."
"With what?" Sai's laugh came out disbelieving even as his eyes stayed on the light. "You've had a paycheck for a month and I live over a laundromat."
"You live over a laundromat that costs next to nothing, and you haven't bought yourself so much as a bookshelf in eight years.
I handle our money now, remember. You've been quietly sitting on a down payment for half your adult life, Sai.
You just never believed you were allowed to spend it on yourself. "
Sai opened his mouth and closed it again, because the numbers were the numbers, and the man reading them out had built a career on being right about exactly this.
"You ran the numbers before I woke up," he managed.
"I ran the numbers in bed at six a.m. like a man in love with a spreadsheet and a gharial." Kyan kissed his knuckles. "Say yes. It's yours. It's ours. Say yes and I'll have an offer in before lunch."
"Yes," Sai said, laughing and wet-eyed at once. "Obviously yes. Yes to the light and the trees and the plant room. Yes."
The offer went in before lunch. It got accepted two days later, because Kyan was very good at the parts of this that used to make him feel like a weapon and now just felt like building a door he and Sai got to walk through.
And six weeks of escrow later, a realtor handed him a set of keys to an empty apartment full of gold afternoon light, told them congratulations, and left them alone in it.
They walked through it first, room by empty room, neither of them quite believing it belonged to them.
Sai claimed the second bedroom for the plants inside of four seconds, standing in the doorway describing shelves that didn't exist yet, where the fern would go, the seedling station, grow-lights for the dark months, a whole green nursery of a room, and Kyan leaned in the doorframe and watched him build it in the air with both hands and thought he could happily watch this exact thing every day for fifty years.
The kitchen was big enough to be genuinely bad at cooking in, which Kyan announced as a personal victory.
The bedroom had a window that looked straight into the green of a real tree, and they stood in it a while imagining a bed there, a real one, built for two people who liked rolling around, and didn't say much.
"I keep waiting for somebody to tell us we can't have it," Sai admitted, quiet, in the empty kitchen. "That there's a catch in it somewhere. That someone's going to walk in and say it was a clerical error, that we're not the kind of people who get this."
"There's no catch." Kyan came up behind him and wrapped him up.
"It's on paper. The light is legally ours.
Nobody's coming to take it, and nobody above us gets to change their mind, because there's nobody above us anymore.
That's the whole difference between building a thing and being handed it.
" He kissed the back of Sai's neck. "We're nobody's tenants. Not ever again."
And then they ended up back in the main room, in all that gold, the way they kept ending up back in it.
"It's ours," Sai said, like he was testing whether the words would hold weight. "There's no furniture and no plants and I don't have a single box packed and it's already ours. We own a wall of windows, Kyan. We own light."
"We own light." Kyan folded him back against his chest, both arms crossed over him, chin on his shoulder, and they stood there in the bare glowing room and let it be theirs.
He could feel Sai's heart going under his hands.
He could smell the joy coming off him, bright and warm, the gold already rising faint at his throat just from the size of the feeling.
"First place either of us ever picked. Nobody handed it to us.
Nobody can take it back. We stood in it and said yes and now it's ours. "
"Nobody's bed but ours." Sai turned in his arms, and his eyes had gone dark under the wet.
"No club. No penthouse. No studio I'm scared of losing.
Just ours, empty, waiting for us to fill it.
" He fisted both hands in Kyan's shirt. "We should christen it.
Before the boxes. Before any of it. I want the first thing that ever happens in our home to be this. "
Heat went down Kyan's spine, slow and certain. "There's no bed. No furniture. There's a hardwood floor and a wall of windows anybody walking past could theoretically—"
"It's the second floor and the windows face the trees and I do not care.
" Sai was already pulling him down by the shirt.
"Mark me in it. Right here, in the light, in the empty middle of our own place.
I want to walk in here every day for the rest of my life knowing the first thing that ever happened in this room was you claiming me in it. "