Chapter Twelve #2
Bethany stopped. Looked at their mother. Looked at Amani. Her mouth opened, closed, and her eyes went wide with the realization that she'd just spent two minutes telling the person who'd been kidnapped five days ago that his workplace was falling apart without him.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't—the club’s fine. Everything’s fine."
"The club is clearly not fine," Amani said. It was the first full sentence he'd spoken since thank you to the orange juice. "Marco is a bouncer, not a bartender. And Tommy can't pour because he's got the depth perception of a goldfish. I've told him a hundred times to use the jigger."
Lady Leo and Bethany exchanged a look. Quick, the silent communication of people who shared a bloodline, a business, and a lifetime of reading each other's faces.
Amani caught it because he'd been catching their looks since he was old enough to understand that mothers and daughters had a language that sons were only partially fluent in.
"I saw that," he said.
"Saw what?" Lady Leo's voice was perfectly innocent.
"The look. Whatever you two are planning, just say it."
Lady Leo folded her napkin. She did it with the precision of someone who believed that how you treated small things revealed how you treated everything. "We're not planning anything. We're just glad to have you home."
That was true. It was also a deflection.
Amani knew it. Lady Leo knew he knew it.
But neither of them pushed. The pancakes were still warm.
The orange juice was fresh and the morning light came through the dining room windows.
For a few minutes, they were just a family at a table, and the world outside could wait.
***
The second day, his mother hovered.
It started small. She brought him tea he hadn't asked for.
She adjusted the pillows on the guest bed while he was still in it.
She asked him three times between nine and noon if he was hungry.
When he said no all three times she made soup anyway and left it on the nightstand with crackers, a glass of water, and a note that said Eat something.
Love, Mom in her sharp, elegant handwriting.
He ate the soup because the note made his eyes sting in a way that had nothing to do with captivity and everything to do with the particular guilt of being loved by someone you've frightened.
She checked on him every hour. She tried to be casual and failed completely, passing by the guest room on her way to somewhere else, pausing in the doorway as if she'd just remembered something she wanted to say, finding small excuses to be in whatever room he was in.
She wasn't subtle about it. Lady Leo was never subtle.
She was a woman who believed that subtlety was what people used when they didn't have the authority to be direct, and she had plenty of authority.
But she also wasn't pushing. She wasn't asking questions about the ranch or the crane or the days in between. She was just being present, occupying space near him, keeping him in her line of sight, doing what lionesses had done since the first lion walked the earth: watching over the pride.
Amani understood it. He even appreciated it, in the abstract. In practice, by the fourth time she appeared in the doorway while he was trying to read, his nerves were scraped raw and the constant attention felt less like safety and more like surveillance. Like being watched.
Like being watched in a ranch house in the desert by someone who called him little cub and monitored his every movement and decided what he ate and when he slept and what he wore.
He knew the comparison was unfair. He knew it was unfair and it didn't matter, because the feeling was the same feeling and his body didn't care about fairness. His body cared about being observed. His body cared about the doorway and the figure in it and the impossibility of being alone.
The fifth time Lady Leo appeared, Amani put the book down and said, "Mom. I need you to stop."
She stilled in the doorway. Her hand was on the frame. Her expression didn't change but her mouth tightened, a recalculation, quick and painful, the realization that what she was doing to comfort herself was doing something different to him.
"Stop what?" she asked. Not defensive. Genuinely asking.
"Checking on me every hour. I can—" He stopped.
He couldn't say I can feel you watching me because that would mean explaining why being watched had become a thing that lived inside his body like a splinter.
He was not ready to explain that. Not to his mother.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. "I just need some time where nobody's in the doorway. "
Lady Leo was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded once. "I'll be in my office. If you need anything, come find me."
She left. The doorway was empty. Amani stared at the empty space where she'd been.
He should have felt relieved. Instead he felt the silence rush in like water filling a hole.
It was too quiet. The doorway was too empty.
He wanted to call her back. He didn't call her back because he needed to learn how to sit in a room alone without being afraid that the silence meant something was coming.
He picked up his book. He read the same page four times. He did not call her back.
***
Bethany came again that afternoon. She brought his laptop from his apartment.
"Your place is fine," she answered the question he hadn't asked. "I watered the plant on the windowsill. I think it might be dead already but I watered it anyway. And your fridge is empty which honestly isn't news."
"It had gelato."
"Ice cream isn't a food group, Amani."
"It's dairy and sugar. That's two food groups."
She snorted. It was a normal sound. A before sound. They both heard it. They both held still for a second, as if the normalcy of it was something delicate that might shatter if they acknowledged it too directly.
Bethany sat on the edge of the guest bed and pulled her legs up and for a while they just existed in the same room, the way siblings do, not talking, not needing to, just being proximate in a way that was different from a mother's proximity because it came without the weight of responsibility.
Bethany wasn't watching over him. She was just there.
"How bad is it really?" Amani asked. "The bar."
Bethany chewed her lip. "It's not great. Reza’s realized how much he relies on you, but he’s trying hard.
Marco can handle the basic stuff but half the regulars order things he's never heard of and he keeps having to look them up on his phone.
Danny ordered a Negroni last night and Marco made him a mojito. "
"Those aren't even close to the same thing."
"I know. Danny was very confused."
Amani pressed his palms against his eyes.
The bar was his. It had been his since he was sixteen, since Lady Leo trusted him enough to let him stand behind it and learn the craft of knowing what people needed before they asked.
He knew every regular's order, every allergy, every preference.
He knew who was drinking too much and who was nursing one glass because they were there for the community, not the alcohol.
He knew which Doms liked their whiskey neat and which subs would order something sweet and then stare at it for an hour without drinking because they were working up the nerve to go into the play rooms. The bar was the nerve center of KK and it was his and someone was making mojitos when people asked for Negronis and the thought of it made him feel something that was almost anger, which was the closest thing to his old self he'd felt in days.
"I'm going back," he said. "Soon."
Bethany's face went through a quick sequence: relief, then worry, then the careful neutral expression she'd clearly been practicing. "You should talk to Mom first."
"I'm not asking permission."
"I know. But you should still talk to her. She's got—" Bethany stopped.
"She's got what?"
"Ideas."
Amani's stomach dropped. "What kind of ideas?"
Bethany held up both hands. "I am not getting in the middle of this. Talk to Mom." She hopped off the bed and headed for the door. "I'm going to the club. Text me if you need anything."
She was gone before he could press her further, a move she'd learned directly from Lady Leo, equally infuriating in both of them.
***
The argument happened after dinner.
Lady Leo had made chicken. Actual, real, properly cooked chicken with roasted vegetables and garlic bread, and Amani had eaten more than he'd eaten at any single meal since coming home.
The food was good and the table was set with the regular plates, not the gold-rimmed ones.
His mother had kept her distance all afternoon.
He could feel the effort it cost her in the careful way she held herself, like someone standing at the edge of a pool trying not to jump in.
Over coffee, she'd made coffee, which she only did when she intended to have a serious conversation because Lady Leo believed that difficult discussions required caffeine, she said, "I've been thinking about the business."
Amani wrapped his hands around his mug and waited.
"Kinky Kritters is growing. We've been at capacity three nights a week for the past two months.
The membership waitlist is longer than it's ever been.
The financial side needs more attention than I can give it alone.
The vendor contracts, the licensing, the tax structure.
Bethany's been learning some of it but she's still at the front desk most nights. She can't do both."
She paused. Took a sip of coffee. This was the wind-up and they both knew it.
"I'd like you to move into a management role. The business side. You're smart, you know the operation better than anyone, and the work can be done from the office. You wouldn't need to be on the floor."
There it was.