Page 25 of That Defining Moment

The Richmond IKEA on a Saturday afternoon was a circle of hell that Dante would have lacked the imagination to describe. Hamish grabbed a trolley from the bay and steered them into the showroom.

Lysander abandoned the recommended path within forty-five seconds.

“This way’s quicker,” he said, cutting through a mock kitchen to reach the bathroom section, threading between a display island and a family of six who were blocking the aisle as they argued about drawer organisers.

“It’s not quicker.” Hamish reversed the trolley out of a dead end between two wardrobe displays. “They’ve laid out a path for a reason, Sander, and you’re forcing us to work against that logic.”

“The reason is to make you walk past three hundred things you don’t need so you buy a scented candle and a bag of tea lights on your way to the shower curtains.”

“Wrong. It’s about the logical product flow.” Hamish pushed the trolley back onto the main path with a pointed clunk. “Bathroom accessories are after textiles. If you skip textiles, you miss the towels, and then you’ll complain that we don’t have matching towels, and we’ll have to come back.”

“I have never once in my life complained about towels.”

“You complained about my towels on your second night here. You said they felt like sandpaper.”

“They do feel like sandpaper. Your bachelor towels are offensive to my skin.”

Hamish turned the trolley into the textiles section. “Then we’re getting new towels.”

They got towels. They got a shower curtain, three storage boxes, a desk lamp for Cassian’s room, and a set of kitchen canisters that Lysander picked out and Hamish approved on the basis that they matched the splashback tiles. Then Hamish steered them towards the restaurant on the upper level, because he’d promised lunch and because the meatballs at IKEA Richmond were genuinely underrated.

“Hot date,” he told Lysander, taking out a chair at a table by the window. “Only the finest for my omega.”

Lysander sat down, looked up at Hamish through his lashes, and deployed the Cassian. His chin dipped, his eyes went wide and liquid, and his voice climbed to a breathy, simpering register that was so pitch-perfect it was almost frightening. “Can I have a princess cake with my meatballs, alpha?”

Hamish bit the inside of his cheek. “Think big, Sander. You can have a princess cake and some of my almond cake.”

Lysander dropped the act and grinned. “My big alpha provider.”

The meatballs were excellent. The princess cake was lurid green and Lysander ate every crumb of it while scrolling through his mobile with one hand and occasionally feeding Hamish bites of marzipan with the other. The almond cake was dense and buttery, gone in four bites. Hamish looked across the table at Lysander licking cream off his thumb and felt that he could do Saturdays like this for the rest of his life.

After lunch, they loaded the car and drove to the Bunnings in Brunswick, because Hamish needed potting mix, seedlings, and a new pair of secateurs after Cassian had used his old ones to open a tin of biscuits.

Lysander trailed behind him through the garden section. Hamish stopped in front of a display of marked-down plants. The clearance trolley was filled with leggy petunias drooping over their pots, a rosemary bush that had gone entirely brown on one side, and a lemon tree whose leaves were curling inward.

He picked up the lemon tree.

“No,” Lysander said.

“It just needs a bigger pot and a good feed.”

“It needs a priest to read it its last rites, Hamish. Look at it.”

“It’s stressed, but far from dead.” He turned the pot in his hands, checking the root ball through the drainage holes. They were still pale and pliable. “See? The roots are fine. It’s been sitting in direct afternoon sun with no water and it’s root-bound. That’s all.”

Hamish set the lemon tree in the trolley and reached for the rosemary. Lysander put his hand over the pot.

“You are not bringing home a half-dead rosemary bush.”

“It’s only dead on one side. The other side is perfectly healthy.”

“That’s not how plants work.”

“That is exactly how plants work.” Hamish lifted the pot past Lysander’s outstretched hand and placed it beside the lemon tree. “Rosemary is incredibly hardy. A decent prune and some seaweed tonic, and this’ll be producing sprigs by Christmas.”

“You’re a plant hoarder, Hamish. You collect dying plants the way other people collect vinyl because you’re a soft touch.”

Hamish added a wilting basil to the trolley. “You love it.”