Page 25 of Gagging the Gharial

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.

Chapter Sixteen

Kyan had been to the club hundreds of times. He had never once walked in with someone on his arm who belonged there because of him.

It changed the whole building, starting at the top. Friday night, and they came in off the street into the big empty lobby, where Bethany sat at the front desk with a crossword she wasn't really doing, and she looked up and grinned wide instead of bracing for whatever sad errand he'd come to run. She waved them to the elevator without a word, still grinning. Then the doors opened below on the lights gone low and red, the bass turned down to a slow crawl under the floor, and Sai stepped out at his side in dark jeans and a good shirt. Reza lifted a bottle in greeting from behind the bar. Two regulars Kyan half-knew took in the gharial at his side, did the quiet math, and gave him the small respectful nod the club reserved for a man who came in claimed. Nobody was going to hand Sai off to a stranger any more. Every nose in the building already knew exactly whose he was.

Kyan watched it land on him in slow stages as they crossed the floor.