Page 35 of Gagging the Gharial

They didn't have enough chairs. They didn't have enough plates. They had exactly two forks, a fact Amani refused to let die for the entire evening. The card table was borrowed from a neighbor down the stairs, the folding chairs matched neither each other nor anything else, and the roast was Kyan's, his first real attempt at cooking in his life, which came out of the oven looking confident and tasting like a brave first draft. The middle was nearly raw and the ends were nearly jerky. Nobody cared even a little. Luckily shifters had really amazing constitutions.

And Lady Leo had come. She had left her own building for it, a thing she did for almost no one and almost never, and was now holding court from the best of the mismatched chairs as though it were a throne, which, that night, it was.

The family packed into the gold main room of the new place, plates balanced on knees, wine in plastic cups, and it was loud, warm, far too crowded, and completely theirs. Sai stood in his own kitchen for a second, looking out at all of it, and had to grip the edge of the counter, because he was the one hosting. He was the one with the home that people came to. The card table was his. The too-small apartment full of family was his. He was standing in his own kitchen watching a roomful of people he loved fight over a roast in a home he owned, and he was the host.

"It is not done in the middle," Bethany announced, holding a slice up to the light like evidence. "Kyan. This is raw enough to file a missing-persons report."

"It's rare. It's meant to be rare."

"It's mooing, Kyan. I can hear it."

"Lady Leo. Back me up here."

"I would sooner die," Lady Leo said serenely, working her way through a well-done end piece like she meant it. "You are entirely on your own with that roast, nephew. We all start somewhere. My first attempt at hosting was a curry I am still, twenty years on, not finished apologizing for." She lifted her glass an inch off her knee. "It's a good dinner. The company is well worth the roast, and the roast will improve. To the cooks. One of them, anyway."

They got through the meal loudly and over the top of one another. Amani told a story about a customer at the club that made Nero put his whole face in his hands. Reza and Sai argued, with real heat and total goodwill, about whether a north windowsill could grow anything edible at all, a fight Sai was winning on facts and losing on volume. Clyce, who'd come with his bear and said almost nothing, ate three platefuls of the questionable roast without complaint and somehow made it the highest compliment in the room. And the light came in long and warm through the wall of windows they owned, and Sai sat in the middle of it with a plate on his knee and the man he loved heckled on all sides, and thought he could do this exact night a thousand more times and never once get tired of it.

When the plates were mostly cleared and the brave roast had been mostly forgiven, Sai caught Kyan's eye across the card table. Kyan gave him the smallest nod. Sai's heart climbed straight up into his throat and sat there.

Kyan stood, and tapped his plastic cup with a plastic fork, because the metal forks had been used for serving, and because that was how the head of this family called a table to order. Some things a man learned at somebody's table and carried to his own.

"So," he said. "We've got a thing to tell you. And we wanted to do it here, in our own place, in person, before Bethany gets on a plane and forces us to tell her over the phone like a couple of animals."

The table went quiet and alert all at once.

"We're getting married," Kyan said. "The human way. Rings, vows, the standing-up-in-front-of-people way, on top of the mating, because I want to belong to him in every way there is to do it, and I want to do it out loud, where all of you can hear it. Because you're the family I picked." His voice caught and he let it go rough. "I spent my whole life being told I'd be married off for power, to someone chosen for me, in a room full of people who didn't care. And instead I'm going to marry a gharial in a garden for no reason at all except that I love him more than I've ever loved anything. I wanted you to hear it from me, first, before anybody."

For one whole second, nobody in the room moved.

Then the whole room went off at once.

Amani made a sound nobody present had known he was capable of and shot up out of his folding chair so fast he sent it clattering over backward, which Sai understood, in the moment, he would treasure for the rest of his natural life.

"Married," Amani said to the ceiling, to the room, to nobody, like the word had arrived in a language he was still translating. "He's getting married. Shifters don't get married. We mate, somebody buys a round, that's the whole ceremony, and nobody in this family has ever once had a wedding." He rounded on the two of them, grinning wide enough to hurt. "And you're going to stand up and do the human paperwork on purpose. For love. Oh, she is going to hate this so much. This is the best news I have ever heard in my life."

Bethany burst into tears and laughter in the same breath, both hands clapped over her mouth. Reza started a slow clap that the bear picked up and turned into a fast one. And Nero, unflappable terrifying Nero, head of security, a man who rationed himself to one dry sentence an hour, went very still, and then turned his face away and pressed the back of one hand hard against his eyes, and Amani saw it and abandoned his own joy mid-leap to pull his mate into a hug. That nearly took Sai out at the knees right there in his own living room.

"He's misting," Bethany sobbed, pointing a wrecked, delighted finger. "Nero is misting again. That's the second time. We are going to lose this man completely at the actual wedding, there will be nothing left of him."

"It's the plants," Nero said into Amani's shoulder, with no conviction available to him whatsoever. "I'm allergic." And the entire room loved him so much harder for the size of the lie.

"I sent the text," Amani announced to Sai from inside the hug, wrecked and triumphant at once. "One text. This entire wedding is my work and I want a line in the vows."

"You sent a man one text," Nero said against his chest, recovering. "The rest was them."

Lady Leo didn't cry. Lady Leo set down her glass, folded her hands, and looked at the two of them for a long, quiet moment, her nephew and the gharial standing together at the head of a borrowed card table, and then she said, simply, "Well. I'll be officiating, obviously."

"We were hoping you'd say that," Sai managed.

"I wasn't asking, dear, I was announcing." But she allowed herself a small, fierce, wet-eyed smile. "I loved a man once. A leopard, which my family informed me was beneath a lioness's bother. I buried him far too young, and I never once got to stand up in front of anyone and say words over him. I have spent a good deal of the time since wondering whether I would ever get to stand up in front of people I love and say words that actually meant something." Her voice held perfectly level, which was somehow worse than if it hadn't. "So yes. I will marry you. In a garden, with the reptile's flowers, the boy my sister threw in the bin and the man who walked into the fire to catch him. It will be the finest thing I have ever put my name to. Finer than the club. We won't tell the club."

Sai had to study the ceiling for a moment.

Later, when the joy had burned down to the low warm hum of a family digesting the best kind of news, Bethany found Sai over by the windows, the way she always found him near something growing.

"Three days," she said. "I leave in three days, and now I have to go knowing there's a wedding coming I won't get to help plan. The cake. The guest-list fight. The part where Kyan tries to make it elegant and you quietly turn the whole thing into a garden center." She knocked her shoulder against his. "I'm going to be unbearably jealous from a state away. You understand that. I'm going to call constantly and have opinions."

"You're flying back for it," Sai said. "That was never a question. There's no wedding happening where you're not standing up front."