Chapter 7 Sai
Sai
Except last night, Mavi’s music slipped through the wall, vibrating straight into the plaster.
He was humming underneath the melody, and that sound slid down my spine and made my whole body loosen.
While my mind drifted to what that humming would feel like against my throat, my chest, and the soft skin inside my thigh, my fingers simply kept moving.
They placed the wrong lens in the wrong slot and kept going without me.
I fix the order now. I zip the bag, unzip it, and check everything again.
My palm presses flat against the nylon to stop my hand from going back a third time.
I quickly glance toward the fridge and decide against embarking on what would be a disaster of being unable to choose, so instead my feet carry me into the studio.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, stealing my attention for a second.
The family group chat is already active, everyone performing for one another before eight in the morning.
The same sick pull that forces me to recheck the bag drags my thumb across the screen.
I scroll through the messages with the numb rhythm I have spent my entire life perfecting.
Alistair: Quarterly board meeting moved to Thursday at 10. Agenda attached. Attendance mandatory.
Tylen: Gallery event still needs final approval on the guest list. Who’s handling the Moreau table?
Phillip: I thought we were pushing it to next month? The lighting install isn’t finished.
Lyric: Elias Moreau asked about you at the Whitfield brunch. I told him you would be in touch.
My jaw locks until my teeth ache. He did not ask. He did not consult. He did not even frame it as a suggestion. He simply decided. He decides everything that way, quietly and without appeal, and then he drops it into the chat like it is already done.
Mom: Wonderful. It’s about time.
The phone flies out of my hand before I have consciously decided to throw it, the crack of the case against the plaster wall sharp in the quiet apartment.
A small dark scuff marks the white paint and sends a fresh wave of panic through me that has nothing to do with the Moreaus and everything to do with visible evidence that something is out of place.
My fingers start tapping fast against my thigh. Index, middle, ring, pinky. The rhythm refuses to settle the panic.
I look around the room before stalking back into the living room, failing to get my breathing under control.
A dirty mug sits on the counter, the single white mug that is supposed to live on the same exact square every single day, washed and dried and returned the moment it is empty.
I never leave shit like that. The sight of it irks me so deeply that my hands shake harder.
The mug is wrong. The scuff is wrong. The lenses are wrong. Lyric decided for me. My mother thinks it is wonderful. Mavi’s humming is still curled inside my ribs and everything is stacking and none of it will settle.
My fingers close around the mug and I sweep it off the edge. It shatters on the tile floor. The sound of it breaking is so catastrophically wrong in this apartment where nothing ever breaks that my knees almost buckle.
White ceramic lies scattered across white tile. Bending down to pick up the pieces would mean choosing which shard to touch first. The act of choosing feels impossible right now. My body simply will not move toward the mess.
Everything else keeps piling on. I am standing in my kitchen half-dressed with broken ceramic at my feet. The worst part is that I cannot make myself move.
The mug needs to be cleaned up. The lenses need to be fixed, I think. The bag needs to be checked once more. The cabinets need to be wiped. The thoughts circle faster and faster until they blur together into one continuous scream inside my skull.
A knock cuts through everything.
“Sai.” Koda’s voice comes through the door. It is not a question and it is not casual. It is the voice he uses when he has already decided something is wrong. “Open the door.”
The knock comes again, harder.
“Sai. You didn’t answer my text or my call and your car is in the lot. Open the door or I’m using my key.”
My feet carry me forward on autopilot. My hand turns the lock and pulls the door open. Koda stands in the hallway with his keys already in his hand and his usual easy expression completely gone from his face.
His eyes track from my face to my hands to the apartment behind me where the broken mug is visible on the kitchen floor. Whatever my expression is doing is apparently bad enough to make Koda Hollis stop pretending everything is fine.
“Okay,” he purrs as he steps inside and closes the door behind him before his arms are around me, pulling me into his chest, one hand on the back of my head pressing my face into his shoulder.
He smells like leather and engine grease and pine and underneath it all just Koda, the one person in this family who has never used what he sees against me.
“Breathe,” he says against the top of my head. “Match me. In through the nose.”
His chest expands against mine and my lungs try to follow. They stutter. They catch. The breath hitches in my throat like it has forgotten how. His hand presses firmer against the back of my skull.
“Again. Slower.”
The second breath goes deeper. The third goes deeper still. My hands fist in the back of his jacket, gripping the leather so hard my knuckles ache, the shaking starting to migrate outward from my center into my arms and legs.
“There you go,” he murmurs. “There you go, cousin.”
We stand like that for a long time. My breathing eventually syncs with his completely. When he pulls back he keeps one hand on my shoulder. He looks at me with the expression that lives underneath the charm. “What brought this on?”
“It’s not adding up.” My voice sounds like it’s scraped across gravel.
“The bag was wrong. The lenses were wrong. Lyric told the Moreau kid I would call him without asking me and my mother thinks it’s wonderful and I broke the mug, Koda.
I broke the mug on purpose and I cannot clean it up because the pieces are—”
“Hey.” His hand squeezes my shoulder. “We are not cleaning it up right now. We are getting you dressed and getting in the car.”
“The shoot—”
“Yeah, the shoot. You are going to get behind your camera and your hands are going to be steady because they always are. The rest of this we figure out later.”
He steers me a few steps farther into the apartment with his hand between my shoulder blades. Then, Koda buttons my shirt from the bottom up without comment. I stand there and let him because the alternative is looking at the buttons and choosing which one to start with.
“Shoes,” he says, pointing at the closet. The single direction cuts through the noise the way a single direction always does. One task. No options. My feet find the black ones closest to the door and Koda nods.
“Bag?”
“On the bed.”
My hand twitches toward the zipper but Koda picks up the bag before I can check it again. He slings it over his own shoulder.
“Alright.” He opens the front door and waits. “Let’s go. You are going to be brilliant today because you are always brilliant and when you are done we are going to talk about the mug and the bag and whatever else is making your brain do this. But right now we are going to the car.”
The hallway is quiet. The door next to mine is closed and silent. I don’t let myself look at it as Koda steers me toward the elevator with his hand on my back and the camera bag on his shoulder. In the car my hand finds the bag on the backseat, my fingers already going to the zipper.
“That is defcon two, cousin.” Koda says it lightly with his eyes on the road, but underneath the easy tone there is the same something that was in his voice at my door.
“I’m fine.”
“You broke a mug and you were only half dressed. For you, Mr. ‘everything has to be perfect’? That is not fine.”
The silence that follows is the kind where I almost tell him everything.
The Omega. The cam. The wall. The photographs.
The way my hands forgot their job because my brain was busy imagining what humming feels like against his skin.
I almost tell Koda but saying it out loud means it exists outside of my apartment and if it exists outside my apartment then I have to do something about it.
“The Moreau thing is getting worse,” I say instead. Just one of many things that can get my mind off of Mavi.
“Lyric is an asshole,” Koda pushes back. It’s the most direct thing I’ve ever heard him say about a family member which tells me he saw the group chat too. “We’ll deal with it.”
The studio appears two blocks north of the production company where my Doll is shooting today. No one knows but me, everyone believing that it’s just a run of the mill location change. In reality, everything about this place is on purpose and after this morning, I desperately need to see him.
“Why here?” Koda asks, looking at the building. “You usually book the place on Seventh.”
“The lighting is better.” It’s not. It’s worse and I’ll have to work harder to ensure I produce the perfect pictures.
He studies me for one beat longer than the answer warrants, then lets it go. “Eat something today,” he says as I grab the bag from the backseat. My hand twitches toward the zipper one more time before I stop it. “And Sai?”
I look at him through the open door.
“Your hands are going to be steady. They always are.”
The shoot is going fine until it is not. Behind the camera my hands stay steady. My model hits every mark. The light behaves exactly as I calculated it would. For the first two hours, the broken mug on my kitchen floor might as well not exist.
Then Priya holds up the grey backdrop with a questioning look. My mouth opens to answer. Nothing comes out. The silence stretches. Two seconds. Three. Priya’s eyes flicker to my face with a confused expression that slowly morphs into a concerned one.
“Grey works,” I manage.