Chapter Fifteen
The garden center was busiest on Saturday mornings, which was Sai's favorite time to be there, because busy meant he didn't have room to think about anything but the work, and the work was the one place his hands always knew exactly what to do.
He moved down the long greenhouse aisle with a clipboard in hand, and a pencil behind his ear, checking the new citrus shipment against the order.
The world was arranged the way he liked it best. Warm.
Wet. Loud with sprinklers and the radio somebody always kept going by the registers.
The whole place smelled like soil, green growing things, and the faint sweetness of fertilizer, a smell he'd loved since he was a kid, the only thing that had ever reliably brought his heart rate down.
Up front, two of his people were arguing about succulent placement.
A delivery driver wanted a signature he wasn't going to get until the count was done.
Somewhere in the back, a customer had aphid questions that were going to eat twenty minutes of somebody's morning, and Sai already knew it would be his.
This was his. Not the way the studio was his, four walls and a lease with his name on it.
The way a place belongs to the person who builds it.
He'd come in eight years ago as seasonal help, a quiet guy nobody expected much from, good for hauling bags and not much else.
He'd stayed. He'd learned every corner of the operation, every supplier, every season and every way a plant could die.
Somewhere in there they'd made him manager, and eventually forty people clocked in against a schedule he wrote.
The whole place ran on a rhythm he'd set.
Nobody had handed it to him. No last name had opened the door.
He'd just been good, quietly, for a long time, until good had turned into his.
He was elbow-deep in the citrus when one of his cashiers came to find him, biting her lip like she was holding something in.
"Sai? There's a, um. There's a man up front." She lost the fight with the grin. "A really, really hot man. He says he's yours. He's holding two coffees and looking at the orchids like he's afraid of them."
Sai's whole chest went warm. "That's Kyan. He's allowed. Send him back."
Kyan strutted down the aisle a minute later carrying the coffees and wearing the faintly stunned look of a man seeing a familiar place at its real size for the first time.
Sai had to stop and just look at him, because a lion in a greenhouse turned out to be one of the more ridiculous and wonderful things he'd ever seen in his life.
"I have been here five times," Kyan said, "and I swear to you I have never once seen it. I was busy drowning a fig and staring at the register. There's a koi pond, Sai. This whole time there was a koi pond, and forty people, and all of it runs on a schedule you write. You have koi."
"Water feature department." Sai took the coffee out of his hand and kissed him, quick, in front of the citrus and anyone who cared to watch, which a year ago he'd never have done and now did without a second thought. "Hi. What are you doing here? Don't you have lion business at the actual empire?"
"Day off. My aunt believes in those, unlike my mother, who believed in them strictly for other people.
" Kyan turned a slow circle, taking in the long glass roof and the hanging baskets and the staff moving through it all like they owned it, which under Sai they sort of did.
"I wanted to see where you disappear to.
You've seen all of mine by now. The club.
The penthouse. The terrible family and the slightly-less-terrible one.
And I realized I'd never once seen yours.
" His voice dropped a notch. "I wanted to see you somewhere you're the one in charge. "
There was a weight under that last part that Sai meant to come back to, and then a problem ate the next forty minutes and he didn't get the chance.
They were a good forty minutes. Kyan trailed him through all of it, useless and delighted, holding the clipboard when Sai needed both hands, getting introduced to staff who plainly could not believe quiet Sai had a man who looked like that.
He held a bag of potting soil like he'd never encountered dirt as a reality.
He poked a Venus flytrap until it closed on his finger and made a noise that startled a nearby orchid customer badly.
He watched Sai talk a panicking first-time plant owner down off the ledge of a dying fiddle-leaf fig, patient and certain, walking her through light, water, and exactly where she'd gone wrong without once letting her feel stupid about it, and when she left with a healthier plant and a written-out plan and her whole face lighter than it had come in, Kyan was staring at Sai like he'd just watched a magic trick.
"What," Sai said.
"You're good at that." Kyan said it almost to himself.
"You're really good at it. The slowing it down.
The making a person feel safe enough to try the thing they're scared they'll ruin.
" His mouth tilted sideways. "Where do you think I learned how to do it to you?
You did it to me first. Over a fiddle-leaf fig you probably don't even remember selling. "
"I remember selling you that fig." Sai felt the heat climb his face. "I remember you knew nothing about keeping it alive and bought it anyway, because I happened to be the one standing there selling it. And then I remember you came back four times in two weeks with questions about it."
"It was a delicate plant."
"It was a sturdy plant and you were drowning it on purpose.
" Sai pointed the pencil at him. "You overwatered a perfectly healthy fig, four separate times, to manufacture reasons to come ask me things you already knew, because you were too much of a coward to just ask me to dinner.
That fig died a hero and history should remember it. "
Kyan opened his mouth, shut it, and laughed, fully caught. "Okay. Fine. Yes. I committed slow murder against a houseplant in order to flirt with you. I have carried that shame for a year and will continue to forever."
"Good." Sai grinned. "You should."
Right before lunch, a problem found Sai the way problems always found him, and Kyan got to watch him solve it.
The citrus supplier's driver wanted a signature for the full order.
Half of it was substandard, leaves going yellow, a few trees stressed well past saving, and the driver was in a hurry and clearly counting on a busy Saturday to get a tired manager to scrawl his name and wave him off.
Sai didn't wave him off. He walked the pallet slow, turned over the bad ones, lined the rejects up in a row, and named the problem plainly, no heat in it and no give in it either.
He'd take the healthy trees. He'd photograph the rest, and the credit had better land on the next invoice, or the standing order went to the supplier across town who'd been courting him for a year.
The driver tried the busy-Saturday angle.
Sai let him try it, then said the same thing again, word for word, unbothered, until the man gave up and started reloading the rejects.
Sai finished lining up the rejects and signed for the half order, and only then let himself look at Kyan, who was watching him from feet away with a heat in his face that had no business in a greenhouse at noon.
Sai knew that look. He also knew, more or less exactly, what had put it there, because he'd worked the same thing out himself a few weeks back, lying awake gold and boneless and safer than he'd ever been: the voice he'd just used on that driver was the voice Kyan used on him behind a locked door.
Quiet, certain, no cruelty in it and no budging in it either.
He ran forty people and a supply chain on that voice all day, every day, and had for years.
The gift of his nights was never that he had no control to give.
It was that he had so much of it, carried so constantly, that getting to set it down for a few hours was the single sweetest thing anyone had ever offered him.
Kyan, by the look of him, had just arrived at the same conclusion.
"Stop looking at me like that," Sai said, not glancing up from the rejected pallet. "I'm working."
"Like what?"
"Like you just figured something out." The tips of Sai's ears had gone faintly gold. "You can figure it out at home. Right now, I've got a customer with aphids and a professional reputation to protect."
"Yes, boss," Kyan said, in a tone that meant he intended to revisit all of this at home, and Sai's ears went hotter still.
They took lunch in the little break room behind the registers, two folding chairs, a microwave, and a single window that looked out on the koi pond, and that was where the weight Sai had heard under Kyan's voice that morning finally came up for air.
He caught it because he'd gotten good, over this last year, at the exact moment a strong man's face slipped when he thought no one was watching.
Kyan sat with his coffee going cold between his hands, looking out at the slow orange shapes turning in the water, and the delight had drained out of him into something heavier that he was working to keep off his face and losing.
"Hey." Sai set his sandwich down. "Out with it."
"Nowhere. I'm fine." Kyan reached for the easy version and couldn't get his hand around it.
He set the cold coffee aside. "It's stupid.
I'm sitting in the middle of this whole beautiful life you built out of nothing but being good at something for eight years, and I'm having the worst possible reaction to it, which is that I don't have one.
Not a real one. I have a desk I've had for less than two weeks.
I have a studio that's actually yours. I burned my entire life to the ground.
I don't regret it. Not for a second. But, here's the thing nobody warns you about cutting off your whole family.
" He stopped. "It's still your whole family.
She called me her ungrateful boy and emptied my accounts before lunch and I chose this over her.
I'd make that choice again every single morning.
And I still woke up at three a.m. wanting to call my mother.
The only one I've got. The bad one." He huffed something that wasn't a laugh.
"Tell me that's not the most pathetic thing you've ever heard. "
"It's not even close." Sai reached across the tiny space and gently took the cold coffee out of his hands and folded his own around them instead.
"You're allowed to grieve her, Kyan. You can know she's poison and still miss her.
Both things get to be true at once. You lost something real when you walked out that door, even if the thing you walked out of was hurting you the whole time you were inside it.
Nobody on earth gets to tell you it doesn't count, least of all you. "
Kyan looked down at their stacked hands. "The whole last year, I was the one who knew what to do. With you. The pace, the word, keeping you safe through it. I was good at being that." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "I don't have the first idea how to be the one who needs it."
"Then that's the next thing you learn." Sai squeezed.
"Right alongside the dryer, the ferns, and which mug is the good mug.
You held me up for a year, lion. You can let me hold you up for one lunch.
I've got you. You're not falling. And you're going to build your own thing here in time, with people who hand out keys instead of taking them back, but it takes longer than a week, and you've been free for a few days.
Give it more time before you decide you've got nothing. "
Kyan's shoulders came down, and he turned his hands over under Sai's, and held on. They sat that way for a while in the little break room, a man learning at thirty-one how to be the one who got taken care of for once.
"You're good at that too, by the way," Kyan said eventually, thick. "The slowing it down. Making a person feel safe enough to try the thing that scares them."
"Yeah, well." Sai smiled at him across the folding chairs. "I had a good teacher. He drowned a fig to come find me."
Kyan laughed, properly this time, the heaviness easing back off his face, and stole the second half of Sai's sandwich because lions had no manners. Sai let him, because that was apparently his life now.
"Okay. New subject, before I get maudlin in your break room." Kyan pointed the stolen sandwich at him. "Bethany ships out in twelve days. Leo wants a real send-off at the club, the whole family, and she's put me in charge of it, which I'm fairly sure is a test."
Sai nodded. "It's definitely a test."
"It's definitely a test. Which is why I need you.
" He said it lightly, but he meant it, Sai could tell.
"You're going to help me plan a party for a woman who has loud opinions about everything and will hate anything that smells like fuss, while also secretly wanting the fuss, because she's a Leo, and they all want the fuss.
I cannot do this alone. I'll get it wrong and she'll bring it up at every holiday for the rest of my life. "
"You want me to help plan your cousin's going-away party.
" The warmth of it landed all through Sai, the easy assumption folded inside the ask, the plain little we of it.
A month ago he'd been the man who got handed off to strangers in the back of a club.
Now a lion was drafting him to throw a family party like he'd been family the whole time.
"Yeah. Okay. Obviously. Together." He thought about it.
"She likes peonies, by the way. She'd die before she'd admit it, but she slows down every single time she passes the cut-flower cooler in here.
I'll bring peonies. Enough to embarrass her. "
Kyan looked at him for a long second, gone soft again, the good kind this time. "See. This is exactly why I keep you around."
"You keep me around because I'm devastating in a good shirt."
"That too," Kyan said, and finished Sai's sandwich.
When lunch was over he walked Kyan back out through the greenhouse, past the orchids and the citrus and the staff who waved like they'd known him for years, and at the door Kyan kissed him slow and unhurried, and then folded himself into his embarrassing secondhand car and drove off toward the empire that wasn't quite his yet.
Sai went back to his shipment with his hands steady and his chest full, and thought that he'd spent his whole life waiting to be somebody's safe place, and it had turned out, in the end, to be the thing he was best at.