The Prince and the Plant Whisperer

A Dinner, Where No One Is Jealous

[~Posted 8/05/21]

[A/N: JUST so you can see the guy that Kai sorta kinda secretly liked back in high school, here's a pic of Huw Richards. He's a real life Youtube gardening sensation. I'm sure Mr. Richards never in a million years expected to be part of some over-the-top Wattpad fanfic, hahahaha. But he's totally the kind of guy Kai would actually be crushing on. Not saying I like Huw Richards. Just saying, Kai does. Did, back in high school. ]

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Kai orders a plant-based burger off the menu. After watching her, Lukas does the same thing.

"What do you usually get here?" she asks. Like she's figured out that he doesn't always order a vegetarian burger.

"French onion soup," he confesses. "It almost hits the spot. When I crave ngau yok mein. Beef noodle soup."

He pushes the hair out of his eyes.

And he smiles at her.

His woman. Finally.

Her elegant frame, her delicate shoulders—right there, on the other side of the table he's sat at, so many times over the past two years. It seems absurd and miraculous.

Her eyes reflect the light from the candles between them. "It sounds like you miss home," she says. The way she looks at him, so openly, almost sends a shiver through him.

Thinking a bit, he looks wistful. He decides to talk honestly: "It just feels like I've been on a satellite for years now. First with boarding school. Now college."

It makes her sad. Suddenly she thinks, I'm looking across the table at a lost boy who has to order American foods which just barely, barely taste like all the Hong Kong dishes that make him feel at home.

But the next thing he says startles her: "This might sound weird—but I missed home even more, when you were gone."

"When I was gone?"

"Last month."

"Ah." An older sadness clouds her eyes.

His voice softens. "You said you had a family medical emergency. Is everything ok? What happened?"

An avalanche of her own questions is already building behind a gate, but she stops to think. He has questions too! Somehow that realization surprises her. He'd come to seem all-knowing, like a theater director in shadow backstage, watching his actors speak their lines.

Lost in thought, she plays with the candle on the table. She starts telling him about Nina. Her stroke, her condition. The long days in the hospital, buying sandwiches for the old woman from the canteen downstairs.

Suddenly, Lukas reaches to the middle of the table between them, and puts his hands around hers. She feels a healing warmth, from the candle between her palms, and from his reassuring hands.

"Nina has this one project," Kai says, looking into his eyes. "She's worked on it nonstop for a year. I feel like it's her last goal. She's cultivating a hibiscus that needs almost no light. I thought she wouldn't finish. I—I thought I'd have to finish it for her."

Kai's voice caught, as she remembered one day in that blur of days, when Nina had been in the hospital bed, eyes closed. A trail of drool had dribbled down one corner of the elderly woman's seasoned face. That was the moment Kai thought, the world is going to take every single thing from me. She pictured herself, going to the International Hibiscus Society conference alone, with a plant and a suitcase, feeling utterly adrift.