Chapter Twenty-One
Moving day came with the whole family, because apparently this family did nothing quietly, nothing separately, and nothing without strong opinions nobody had asked for.
Sai had planned to do it himself, the way he'd done his whole life: rent a truck, carry his own boxes down his own stairs, not trouble a soul.
He'd mentioned the date once, in passing, at a Sunday dinner, and thought nothing more of it.
Then on Saturday morning a small army turned up outside the new place.
Amani arrived with coffee for everyone and a playlist no one had requested and would not be allowed to turn off.
Nero came with a borrowed truck and the grim, unhurried competence of a man who had clearly moved a lot of things in his life he did not discuss.
Reza was terrifyingly strong for an otter and carried a loveseat up a flight of stairs by himself out of what looked like spite.
Even Clyce came, dry and efficient, lifted the heaviest things without being asked, and accepted exactly one cup of coffee as his entire fee.
Kyan, it turned out, had never moved anything in his life.
Movers had always done it, the invisible kind his mother paid for and never thanked, and he approached a flight of stairs and a heavy box with total, doomed confidence.
He got himself wedged in the stairwell. He carried boxes by the wrong end and wondered aloud why they were so hard to hold.
He dropped a carton of his own shirts down three steps and looked so personally betrayed by the event that Reza had to sit down on the landing and recover.
Amani appointed himself Kyan's supervisor for the sole purpose of heckling him, and Nero, who said almost nothing the entire day, watched Kyan try to wrestle a bookshelf around the corner of the landing and offered one quiet sentence, "Other way, rich boy," that broke the whole stairwell up laughing.
Kyan took every bit of it grinning, and that was the thing Sai kept catching on.
The man had spent thirty years in cold rooms where every word was a transaction with a hidden scorecard, and here he was getting roasted by an otter and a ferret on a staircase, sweating through a borrowed shirt, dropping his own laundry, happier than Sai had ever once seen him.
Sai kept waiting for the old Kyan to surface, the one who'd flinch at being laughed at, who'd go cold and smooth to protect himself.
That Kyan never surfaced. He was just gone, left behind with everything else he'd walked out of, and good riddance to him.
And Bethany, with a week and a half left before Los Angeles, spent one of those days carrying Sai's furniture up the stairs.
"You did not have to do this," Sai told her, for the fourth time, as she backed up the steps with one end of his dresser braced against her hip.
"I absolutely did." She set it down in the bedroom, breathing hard, and looked around the place, the light, the green of the tree out the window.
"Listen. I'm not going to be here for the rest of it.
The first Sunday in the new house. The first time the oven catches fire because Kyan thinks he can cook now.
The first stupid fight about where the couch goes.
I'm going to be a state away missing every single piece of it.
" She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "So, I get to be here for this part.
I get to carry the dresser up the stairs of your first real home. Let me have the dresser, Sai."
So he let her have the dresser. And when she straightened up with her eyes a little too bright, he pretended not to notice, because he was learning that this was a thing the family did for each other: they let each other keep their dignity around the soft stuff, and just made sure to stand close while they did.
The plants came last, because the plants came carefully.
Sai wouldn't let anyone else so much as touch them.
He ferried them over himself in the back of his own car, two slow trips, the pothos, the citrus, the jade, and a dozen others belted into the seats like nervous passengers, and the fern, the enormous ancient ridiculous fern that had been with him longer than any human being in his life, rode shotgun the whole way like a large green dog who didn't trust the driver.
He set them up in the plant room himself, alone, while the family argued cheerfully about furniture in the other rooms.
It took him the better part of an hour. He'd been dreaming about this room without letting himself admit he was dreaming about it, and there it was, real, an entire room, his, the light coming in clean and bright through the tall south windows.
He placed each plant exactly where it would be happiest. The sun-lovers crowded into the windows.
The shade ones along the cool inner wall.
And the fern in the best spot in the whole apartment, dead center in the pour of gold, because it had earned the best spot a hundred times over and they both knew it.
He turned the pot a quarter at a time until its best side faced the door.
Eight years of hauling it between bad windows, and it had never once had a best side anybody would see.
It finally did. When he was finished, he stood in the doorway and looked at it, a whole room gone green and gold in the light, his plants with real room to grow for the first time in their lives, and he had to put a hand over his mouth.
Because eight years ago he'd been seasonal help nobody expected anything from.
And one year ago he'd been a man crying alone in a dingy studio over a dingier laundromat, watering a crowded windowsill because it was the only thing that reliably slowed his heart.
Finally, he had a plant room. A whole room, full of light, for the green things he'd kept alive through the years he could barely keep himself alive.
"Hey." Kyan appeared in the doorway behind him, quiet, sweat-damp and rumpled from the stairs. "You disappeared. You okay?"
"I have a plant room," Sai said, and his voice broke clean across it. "Kyan. I have a whole room. For the plants."
"You have a whole room for the plants." Kyan stepped in behind him and gathered him back against his chest, chin hooking over his shoulder, and they looked at the green and the gold together. "Best room in the house, no contest. And I see you gave the fern the throne."
"The fern gets the throne." Sai leaned back into him, wet-eyed and not bothering to hide it anymore. "The fern's been with me through every bad thing. The fern does not move from that spot until one of us is dead, and it's not going to be the fern."
"It's a forever fern," Kyan agreed gravely. "It'll outlive us both and inherit the place. We're just its staff." He kissed Sai's temple. "Come eat. Amani ordered enough food to feed a wedding and Reza's threatening to start without you, which from Reza is not an idle threat."
They ate sitting on the floor of the new place, because there were no chairs yet and nobody cared, the whole loud family crowded into the gold main room with too many takeout containers, Amani's playlist, and a wall of windows full of slow evening light.
Sai sat in the middle of all of it, his back against Kyan's chest, a plate balanced on his knee, and thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that the size of it was almost more than he knew how to hold.
The having of people. The being in the middle instead of handed around the edge.
At some point the couch came up, the way Kyan had been promising for weeks it would.
There wasn't one yet, only the loveseat Reza had hauled up the stairs out of raw determination, and Kyan announced to the room that he intended to buy a real one and that it would be leather.
Sai said leather was cold in winter, sweaty in summer, and a crime against the act of sitting.
The family took sides instantly and with total conviction.
Amani came out pro-leather on the grounds that it looked expensive.
Bethany came out anti-leather on the grounds that anything Kyan thought looked expensive was statistically likely to be a mistake.
Nero said, around a spring roll, that he and Amani owned a leather couch and it stuck to their backs every July, and Amani abandoned his own position so fast that it took the room a full minute to recover from the betrayal.
Sai sat in the middle of the argument he'd personally started, leaned back against the man he loved, and understood, with a quiet that went all the way down, that he was going to get to have this for the rest of his life.
Stupid fights about furniture, with people who'd spent their Saturday carrying his dresser up the stairs.
He'd spent way too long certain this kind of thing only happened to other people, in other lives.
It turned out he'd only needed to stop being too afraid to believe he was allowed to want it.
Later, when the food was gone and the family had cleared out in a long, noisy, hugging procession that took twenty minutes to get out the door, Sai drove back to the studio one last time.
He'd told Kyan he wanted to make the last trip alone, and Kyan had understood it without needing a word of explanation, and let him go.
The studio was empty, stripped back to its nine steps and the bare window where the plants used to crowd the glass, and Sai stood in the middle of it a while in the gray light coming off the laundromat sign below.
It was just a room. He knew that. Cheap, small, and faintly water-stained at one corner of the ceiling.
But it had been his when he had nothing else in the world, the one door he could lock against a city that kept handing him to strangers, the place he'd come home to and watered his ferns in on the nights he wasn't sure he was going to make it through to another week.
He'd been so lonely inside these four cheap walls.
He had also survived inside them. Both of those things were true, and both of them got to stay.
He crossed it one more time, wall to wall, the walk he'd made so many times, and it took nine steps, the way it always had. Funny, how many years could fit in a room he could cross in so few steps. Funny how fast a life could outgrow it, once the life finally got the chance.
"Thank you," he said, out loud, to an empty studio, feeling only a little ridiculous about it. "You held me. When nobody else was going to. You did your whole job and you did it right."
He locked the door for the last time, slid the key under it the way the landlord had asked, and went home. Home. The word still didn't sit quite right in his mouth, too big, too good to trust all the way. But he was learning it, one day at a time, the way he'd learned everything.
Kyan was waiting when he got back, sitting on the floor of the dark plant room with the overhead light off, just the city glow filtering in through the green, a beer in one hand and a second one sweating on the floorboards beside him, waiting for Sai.
"Figured you'd want a minute in here when you got back," Kyan said. "Saying goodbye to a place takes something out of a person. I didn't want you doing the goodbye and then coming home to an empty house with nobody in it. So I waited in the best room."
Sai sat down beside him in the green dark and took the beer.
It was the cheap brand he'd been buying for years, which meant Kyan had gone out at some point and found it on purpose.
He put his head on Kyan's shoulder, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all, just sat among the plants in a room that was theirs, in a home that was theirs, the whole rest of their lives stacked up around them in boxes nobody was in any rush to open.
"I said goodbye to the studio," Sai said at last. "Out loud. Thanked it for keeping me alive. I felt completely insane doing it."
"You're not insane." Kyan tipped his head to rest against Sai's.
"That room kept you alive long enough to get to this one.
That earns out-loud thanks. I put on a watch this morning and quietly thanked it for not being my mother, so I am the last person on earth who gets to throw stones about talking to objects. "
Sai laughed, shaky and easy, and drank his beer in the dark plant room, and thought about all the rooms that had carried him there.
The studio over the laundromat. The back rooms of a club that used to frighten him.
A garden center that smelled like home years before he had one.
And this. A green-dark room, in a house he owned, with a lion who'd walked away from a whole empire for the right to sit on the floor of it beside him in the dark.
"Best room in the house," Sai said.
"Told you," Kyan agreed, and they stayed there in the green dark with the city glow coming soft through the leaves, two empty bottles between them and the fern dark against the lit window, until the building settled around them and the new place quietly stopped being new and started, instead, to feel like home.