Page 24 of Gagging the Gharial

"You wept openly into the green beans," Bethany said. "We have witnesses. It was the most beautiful thing any of us had ever seen and we’ll never let it go."

And just like that the table broke wide open again, loud and overlapping, Amani crowing and going to dig out the spare key, Bethany reaching clear across the pie to grip Sai's hand, Nero defending his honor in his allotted dry sentence and being shouted down with love. Sai sat in the middle of all of it looking like a man who'd walked in braced for the worst and stumbled into a homecoming instead. Across the noise, Lady Leo caught Kyan's gaze and gave him a small, deliberate nod, the kind with a whole paragraph folded inside it, something close to well done, he'll do, and your mother is a fool who threw away gold. Kyan nodded back and didn't trust his voice to attempt anything more.

Later, down on the quiet street outside the club, walking to the secondhand car Kyan had bought that morning to replace the one his mother had had towed out of a valet lot, Sai stopped and looked back up at the building, at the warm lit windows of the family floor high above the dark club, the family still loud and golden behind the glass.

"That's what it's supposed to be," he said quietly. "A family. That's the whole thing she never gave you, isn't it."

"That's the whole thing." Kyan took his hand. "I had to lose the counterfeit one to find the real one. Took me thirty years and a gharial in a bad shirt to manage it."

"Hey. This is a good shirt. It's my fourth-best shirt."

"It's a terrible shirt and I'm going to be buried in it." Kyan looked up at the building one more time, thinking of the people Lady Leo had gathered up out of her own hard years and handed keys to one careful soul at a time, and of the man beside him who had just, in front of all of them, earned his.

"Worth it?" Sai asked.

"Every inch of it," Kyan said, and drove them home to their nine steps and their crowded window and their bed built for one.

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.