Chapter Twenty-Five
Bethany came by the new place the evening before her flight, when her whole apartment had already been packed into a truck headed west and her entire life had shrunk down to one carry-on and a coat over her arm.
Sai buzzed her up and met her at the top of the stairs, and for a second they just looked at each other, because there wasn't a clean thing to say.
The next day, she finally got on a plane and became the woman who ran Los Angeles, and the front desk of Kinky Kritters would have somebody new behind it, and the building Sai had been afraid of for too long would have one less person in it he'd never been afraid of.
"So, this is it." She came in and turned a slow circle in the gold main room, taking in the half-unpacked boxes, the terrible loveseat, the plant room glowing green down the hall.
"Look at you..A whole home. A room for the plants and a lion who can almost cook and a ring on your finger.
" She caught his hand and held it up to the light to look at the band, and her eyes went bright.
"He did good. It survives the shift, doesn't it.
Of course he found one that survives the shift, that idiot's been gone for you for a year. "
"He did good," Sai agreed, thick already, and she was only just in the door.
He'd made tea nobody really wanted, and they sat with it on the floor because the loveseat only fit one comfortably and neither of them was willing to be the one who sat apart.
And Sai had a thing he'd been working on all week, and he got up and went to the plant room and came back with it, a small clay pot, no bigger than a coffee mug, with a single rooted cutting standing up green and stubborn in the middle of it.
"It's off the jade," he said, setting it in her hands.
"The one I grew from a single leaf eight years ago when I had nothing, no people, and a studio I couldn't really afford.
I took a cutting and rooted it for you. It's small enough to go in your carry-on, and jades are almost impossible to kill, so even you can't manage it.
" He had to stop and clear his throat. "I wanted you to have a piece of it out there.
Of home. Of here. Something alive that came from my place that you can put in a window in yours, so when you're a state away at two in the morning being sure you're failing, there's a thing on the sill that knows where you came from.
" He'd already wrapped the base in a plastic bag and a rubber band, travel-ready, because he'd thought of everything except how to say this part without his voice going.
Bethany looked down at the little pot in her hands, and for a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and Sai watched the woman who'd run a front desk through every kind of chaos without flinching lose the fight entirely.
"You can't just," she said, and stopped, and pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes. "You can't just say a thing like that to a person the night before they leave, Sai. That's not fair. I have to get on a plane tomorrow looking like a competent adult."
"You'll be fine. Cry now, it's just me."
So she cried, a little, holding a jade cutting in a coffee-mug pot, and Sai put his arm around her and let her, the way she'd let him sit at her desk and be miserable many times over a year he'd rather forget.
"You know what I'm actually going to miss," she said, when she'd wiped her face and could laugh at herself again.
"Watching enormous scary predators be terrified of me.
I'm five foot four, I run a front desk, and I have personally made a four-hundred-pound bear apologize for his tone.
Nobody in Los Angeles knows that about me yet.
I have to build the whole fearsome reputation from scratch out there.
" She sniffed. "Remember the wolf who tried to argue the cover charge?
Stood at my desk ten minutes explaining why the rules didn't apply to a man like him? "
"You let him say the entire speech," Sai said. "And then you just said no and went back to your screen."
"And he paid. They always pay." Her grin was wet and bright. "That's the whole job, Sai. Half of running a place is being calmly unbothered at people until they remember their manners. I learned it behind that desk, one drunk shifter at a time."
"You made Harold apologize to a coat rack once," Sai said. "I watched a bloodhound built like a shed pick it up and tell it he was sorry, because you looked at him."
"Harold's a good boy." She said it fondly.
"He knocked it over again on his way out.
" The grin went soft. "I'm going to miss knowing everybody, though.
Out there I'm nobody yet. Here I watched half these people walk in broken and walk out family.
I know all the stories. I knew yours before you did.
But, I never once told you, because some things a man has to find out for himself or he won't believe them. "
Then she set the little jade down in front of her, careful, and the grin came off on purpose.
"I have to tell you something," Bethany said.
"And I need you to actually hear it, not do the thing where you decide you don't deserve it.
You spent a year coming into my club looking like the saddest man in Nevada.
Every time, that face like a man walking into a root canal, off to the back to get hurt by some stranger who didn't know what he had.
And I used to watch you go and I'd think, somebody is going to figure out what that one's worth, and when they do it's going to be the whole story.
And then it was. I had a front-row seat to the entire thing.
You went from the man who climbed out a bathroom window rather than ask for what he wanted to the man who stood in my mother's building and told Aunt Zahara to her face that he was going to give her son a person who'd never once needed his money.
" She gripped his hand. "I'm not going to be here for the day-to-day of it anymore.
The Sundays. The first time the lion floods the kitchen learning to cook.
I hate that. But I'm going to be a state away knowing the saddest man in Nevada turned into family, right in front of me, and got everything.
So, when I'm out there sure I'm drowning, that's the thing I'm going to put on my windowsill next to the jade. You. The proof that it works out."
Sai gave up on his own composure entirely.
"Can I give you one back," he said, when he could talk again.
"Since we're doing this on the floor like idiots.
You're scared about Los Angeles. I can see it under all the competence.
You've run one desk your whole adult life, and now you're building a club out of what your aunt left in a city that's never heard your name, and some part of you is certain you'll get out there and everyone will figure out you were only ever good at the one thing.
" He held her eyes. "I know that fear down to the floor.
I lived inside it forever. But here's what I watched, from the cheap seats, the whole time I was being miserable in your club.
You didn't just work that desk. You held the entire front of that place together with your bare hands, every single night, drunk lions, arguing sharks, and scared reptiles who climbed out windows.
You never once dropped a single one of us.
That's not a desk trick. That's just who you are, and it gets on the plane with you tomorrow whether you pack it or not.
They'll be terrified of you in LA inside a week.
I'd bet money on it, and you know I don't have any. "
Bethany laughed, wet and startled. "Look at you. Handing me a pep talk. The saddest man in Nevada, reassuring me about my own life."
"Not the saddest man in Nevada anymore," Sai said. "Somebody went and figured out what I was worth. You told me that yourself, about four minutes ago, so you have to believe it now. Those are the rules. You made them up."
That got a real laugh out of her, the kind that pushed the last of the crying out sideways, and she leaned her shoulder into his and let it.
They sat on the floor of his gold-lit living room a while longer, the tea going cold, and didn't talk about the flight, because there was nothing useful to say about it and they both knew it.
She made him promise to send pictures of the wedding planning, all of it, the cake fights, the guest list, and the part where Kyan tried to make a garden elegant.
She made him promise to keep the family loud while she was gone, because somebody had to and Amani only counted for half.
She made him promise to water the rest of his jades like they were hers too.
And then it was late, and she had an early flight, and she stood up and gathered her coat and the little clay pot, holding it carefully against her chest like the one fragile thing in her whole packed-up life.
Kyan came out of the bedroom then, where he'd been pointedly giving them their evening, and Bethany took one look at him and held up a warning finger. "I already cried. You get a hug and no speech."
"Hug and no speech," Kyan agreed, and folded her in, and whatever he said quietly against her hair was short, and whatever she said back was shorter, and neither of them repeated it.
"Two months," she said at the door. "I'm flying back in two months and watching my mother marry you two in a garden, and I am going to ruin my makeup and I do not care.
" She pulled Sai into a hug fierce enough to bruise, the jade pot held off to the side so it wouldn't crush between them.
"Look after my idiot cousin. Look after yourself, which you're worse at.
And don't you dare get married before I land, I will know. "
"I'll be here," Sai said into her hair. "Right here. When you come back. We all will."
"You'd better be." She pulled back, eyes bright, chin already coming up, deciding to be brave about it. "Okay. I can't do a long one. Long ones kill me." She squeezed his hand one last time. "Bye, Sai. Thank you for the jade. Thank you for everything, honestly."
And then she went, down the stairs with her coat and a piece of Sai's oldest plant held against her chest, off home to sleep a few hours before a morning that belonged to a story still ahead of her.
Sai stood at the top of the stairs and listened to the street door open and close below, and didn't follow her down, because she'd said she couldn't do a long one, and the kindest thing left was to believe her.
He was still standing there when Kyan came up behind him and wrapped both arms around him from the back, chin on his shoulder, the way he did when he'd read the whole of it off Sai's spine before a word was said.
"She's not gone," Kyan said quietly, against his ear. "Just went home. The plane's not till morning."
"I know." Sai leaned back into him. "I gave her a cutting off the old jade. For her windowsill out there." His voice wobbled. "I don't know why it's hitting me this hard. She's flying back in two months. It's not even goodbye, not really."
"It's the first one to leave." Kyan pressed a kiss to the side of his neck.
"You just got the whole family. You just got let all the way in, the keys, the Sundays, and the chair with your name on it.
And now the first piece of it is moving a state away, and even though it's a happy thing and she'll be back, some part of you is bracing for the rest of them to go too, because that's what your whole life taught you to expect.
People you love leaving." His arms tightened.
"She's not gone. She's an eight-month build and a phone that's always on and a plane ticket back here in two months to watch us get married.
Nobody's leaving you, Sai. Not anymore. This family doesn't do that.
You're going to spend the rest of your life finding that out. "
Sai turned in his arms and pressed his face into Kyan's chest, into the soft warm familiar smell of him, and held on, and let the lion hold him up the way he'd been learning to let him, one hard thing at a time.
"Two months," Sai said into his shirt. "And then a garden."
"And then a garden." Kyan rested his cheek on the top of Sai's head.
"Peonies everywhere. Your aunt-in-law crying into a microphone.
Me, marrying the man who taught me how to ask for what I want, in front of every single person who chose us back.
" He drew back just far enough to find Sai's gaze.
"She left you a sad night, the night before a happy thing.
That's just what loving people costs sometimes.
The night's the price. The garden's the rest of it. "
Sai nodded against him, steadier, and let Kyan walk him back inside, into the gold-lit home that was theirs, past the plant room where the old jade stood a little lighter for the cutting it had given up, and thought that he'd spent his whole life learning to brace for the door, and he was going to spend the rest of it learning, slowly, that this time nobody was walking out of it for good.