Page 36 of Gagging the Gharial

"You try and stop me." She wiped under her eyes, laughing. "Family gets married, I get on the first flight. That's the whole policy. My cousin, in a garden full of the one flower I never told one living soul was my favorite, until some gharial figured it out off the way I slow down at a cooler." She leaned her head against his shoulder, this woman who'd watched him be miserable from a front desk for a year and had never once, not on his worst night, been unkind to him. "You still owe me Sunday dinner pictures, by the way. That promise transfers to this table. First one had better include the roast, for the historical record of how far he's got to go."

"Every Sunday," Sai said. "Roast included. No mercy."

"Good." She was quiet a moment. "You did good, Sai. You went and built the exact thing you were too scared to even let yourself want. I had a front-row seat to the whole turnaround. I am so proud of you I could be sick, and I do not say things like that, so you'd better write this down."

"I'll write it down," Sai said, and put his arm around her and held on, this sister of his now in every way that actually counted, three days out from a plane that would take her a state west. He looked out at the gold room full of the family he'd built without ever once believing he'd be allowed to keep it. The lion stacking plates and getting roasted worse than the roast. The matriarch who'd left her building for a card-table dinner. The misting ferret, still pretending it was the plants. The loud, bright, impossible, complete whole of it.

"Best dinner this place is ever going to host," he said.

"It absolutely is not," Bethany said. "The wedding is going to blow it out of the water. But it's a start." She squeezed him hard. "It's a really, really good start."

The family cleared out late, in the usual twenty-minute scramble of long hugs and forgotten jackets and one last story told from the doorway with a coat half on, and then the apartment went suddenly, ringingly quiet, and it was just the two of them and the wreckage of the first dinner they'd ever hosted.

Sai stood under the one lamp they owned and looked it over. Plates stacked on every surface. The card table still standing in the middle of the room. The brave roast sitting on the counter, two-thirds gone, which honestly counted as a triumph. Two forks in the sink. The tea light by the window had burned itself quietly out somewhere in the evening, the way it was supposed to, having done its work. He started gathering cups, and Kyan came up behind him, took them gently out of his hands, and set them back down on the counter.

"Leave it," Kyan said. "It'll keep till morning. Look at you. You hosted a dinner."

"I hosted a dinner." Sai said it slowly, tasting it, making it true. "I kept waiting all night to feel like a fraud. For somebody to glance around and figure out I wasn't supposed to be the one with the home, that there'd been a mistake. It never came. I just got to be the host. In my own place. For my own people."

"Because you are the host." Kyan turned him around by the shoulders. "In your own place, for your own people. Nobody is coming to take it back. We keep saying that and you keep half-believing it, and one of these days it's going to land in you all the way and stay." He kissed his forehead. "You fed eight people an undercooked roast. They cried at our news. Even Nero misted standing up in our living room. That's a home. That's a real one. You built it out of nothing, same as the plants."

"You helped." Sai leaned into him. "You made the roast. Such as it was."

"The roast was a journey and I will get there." Kyan wrapped him up properly, chin settling on the top of his head, and they stood together in the lamplit ruin of their first dinner with no urge at all to clean a single dish. "We're getting married," Kyan said, quiet, saying it like the first time all over again. "In a garden. My mother lined up a jaguar and a dynasty, and I'm going to marry you over a raw roast and two forks, and I have never once in my whole life been this happy."

"We need more forks before the wedding," Sai said into his chest.

"We need so many more forks," Kyan agreed, with total gravity, and Sai felt him start to smile against his hair, and they left the dishes in the sink and the card table standing and the brave roast going cold on the counter, because none of it was going anywhere, and for the first time in his whole life, neither was Sai.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The ring cost Kyan two weeks' pay, and it was the best money he'd ever spent, mostly because for the first time in his life it was actually his.

He stood at the counter of a small shop off the Strip that a coworker had pointed him to, the good kind, family-run, no commission sharks circling, and watched the woman behind the glass run his card, some animal part of him braced the whole time for the machine to spit it back, because thirty-one years of his life every card he'd ever carried had drawn on an account his mother filled and could empty between one lunch and the next. This card drew on a checking account with his own name on it and his own paychecks in it, earned at a desk doing work he was good at for a lioness who paid him fair and on time. The machine thought about it for a second and said yes. The receipt printed. Nobody's permission had been involved anywhere in the transaction. He folded the receipt into his wallet with a care usually reserved for legal documents, because he was keeping it, possibly forever, possibly framed.

He had to stand there a moment and just feel that.

Zahara had crafted him carefully. One comfort at a time, the condo, the car and the open accounts, each one a thread, so that by the time he was grown the net under him was made entirely of her, and the day he ever found the nerve to jump, there'd be nothing under him that was his. You have never earned a single dollar that didn't begin in my palm. She'd said it to him on the phone once, like the last word in an argument she'd already won plenty of times. And she'd been right, every time before. She wasn't right anymore. The first real thing he'd ever bought with money that started in his own hand and not hers was a ring to marry a gharial she'd told him to throw away.

He thought she'd have hated that more than all the rest of it put together, and he found the thought didn't sting at all. It just made him want to laugh.

He'd taken his time choosing it. Sai wasn't a man for anything that announced itself, so Kyan had steered clear of the bright cut stones and the things built to catch a room's eye, and gone looking instead for something Sai could actually live in. That had narrowed it fast, because there was a complication most grooms didn't have to think about and the two of them did. A ring had to survive the shift. Sai turned into twenty feet of armored river-bottom and back, and a shift kept nothing, took nothing with it, left every loose thing behind on the floor to be gathered up after. A stone in a setting would tear loose. A thin band would warp. So Kyan had asked the question out loud at the counter, plainly, the way Sai had taught him to ask for the thing he actually wanted, and the woman hadn't blinked, because she'd outfitted half the shifters in the valley and knew exactly what he meant. She'd brought out a plain heavy band, warm gold, thick enough to take it, smooth enough to wear under scales without catching. The kind of ring a man could turn into a twenty-foot reptile in and still find waiting for him on the floor afterward, whole.

It was, Kyan realized, first cousin to the chain he'd hung back on its velvet peg in the shop three doors down from Fish, months ago, before he'd been brave enough to have that conversation. He'd circled that exact idea once and flinched off it. He landed now. He paid for it himself, and he carried it out of the shop in his own pocket, and the desert sun felt different on him, somehow, than it had going in.

He drove to the club, because there was a person he wanted to show it to before he showed it to anybody, and she wasn't Sai.

Lady Leo was in her office with the door open and three folders going and a phone she set down the moment she saw his face. She'd gotten good, over these weeks, at reading his face. They both had. It had turned out, to Kyan's quiet astonishment, that working for his aunt meant being looked at by someone who actually wanted to know what she saw.

"You bought it," she said. Not a question. She held out one hand across the desk, palm up, and Kyan put the small box in it and let her open it.

She studied the ring a long moment, turned it once in the light, and then she made a small sound, low in her chest, that he'd never heard out of her before.

"You picked one that survives the shift," she said.

"I didn't want to give him a thing he'd have to take off to be himself."

Lady Leo closed the box, gently, and held it a second longer than she needed to before she handed it back. When she looked up, her face had gone softer.