Page 22 of Gagging the Gharial

And when he finally pushed inside, both of them bare in a one-room walkup with the gray light pooling on the plants, Sai understood that this was the actual thing. Not the proposal in front of a dozen people with the cameras running. This. A lion writing his name into Sai's skin in a language only their kind could read, in a home Sai had built with his own two hands, choosing him slow and deliberate and on purpose, for love, exactly like the romantic he'd sworn to his mother he would be. Kyan rode him deep and unhurried with his face buried in Sai's marked throat, and Sai came around him with a shout he didn't try to muffle, and Kyan followed with his teeth set gentle against the scent he'd left and a groan that sounded like the end of a thirty-year sentence.

After, they lay tangled in a bed meant for one, both of them too hot and neither willing to move an inch apart for it, Kyan's nose still pressed to the curve of Sai's neck like he couldn't get enough of his own scent sitting there.

"You smell like me now," Kyan said, slurred and satisfied and halfway to sleep.

"Good." Sai stared up at his own water-stained ceiling and grinned at it like an idiot. "Don't let it wear off."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Kyan dragged him closer, somehow, in a bed that had no closer left to offer. "Welcome home, by the way. To your own house. I'm honored to be the lion underfoot in it."

Below them the dryer hummed, tumbled, and someone's quarters ran out. The fern reached for the laundromat sign. And Sai lay in his nine-step studio that was somehow the beating center of an entire life, smelling like a lion who'd given up a kingdom to fit himself into it, and thought that in a whole year of trying to feel safe in a room, he had never managed it once until right now.

They didn't sleep right away. There wasn't room to sprawl, so they stayed wound together, Sai's head on Kyan's chest, the soft hair under his cheek, the dryer ticking through its cycle below.

"So, what happens now," Sai said into the quiet. "Practically. You've got a job and a duffel bag and apparently a gharial. That's the whole inventory."

"That's more than I had a week ago, when I had a condo and an account and no idea who I was." Kyan's hand moved slow up and down Sai's spine. "I get paid Friday. Real money, your aunt-in-law doesn't believe in underpaying people, she says it's how you keep them. I'll get my own things out of the condo before it sells, which is mostly clothes and one good watch I actually bought myself. The rest she can keep. I never picked any of it." He paused. "I should probably warn you. I have never once cooked a meal, done laundry I didn't drop off, or kept a plant alive. I'm going to be useless in domestic ways that will genuinely shock you."

"You're going to learn." Sai grinned against his chest. "There's a whole laundromat right underneath us. It's basically a sign from the universe."

"I'm thirty-one years old and you're going to teach me to use a dryer."

"I'm going to teach you to use a dryer, and to water a fern, and which mug is the good mug." Sai tipped his head up. "You gave up a kingdom. The least I can do is make sure you don't kill my jade tree."

Kyan laughed, low, and kissed the top of his head. Then his hand stilled. "Leo wants us at dinner Sunday. To vet you. Properly, the way she did Nero, which by all accounts involved an interrogation that made a grown ferret sweat."

Sai's stomach dropped a little. "She's going to grill me."

"She's going to grill you," Kyan agreed. "And you're going to be exactly as honest as you were with my mother this afternoon, and she's going to like you, because the thing my aunt can't stand in this world is a person who shrinks. You didn't shrink today. I watched you not shrink in front of the scariest woman I know, and I have never been prouder of anyone in my life." He pulled back enough to find Sai's eyes in the gray light. "It's a different kind of family than the one I cut off today. You'll see. They vet you hard and then they hand you the keys. Other way around from the house I grew up in."

"Bethany's still leaving, though." Sai felt the small ache of it. "Right when I'm getting let into all this. She ships out soon, doesn't she."

"Next month. To go build something of her own, the way Leo did, the way you did with this place." Kyan settled them both back down, Sai's head returning to its spot over his heart. "We'll throw her a hell of a send-off before she goes. And then we'll drive out and visit her in that ridiculous city, in whatever beater I buy to replace the car my mother stole back. You and me. A road trip. Does the gharial do road trips?"

"The gharial never once let himself spring for one." Sai closed his eyes. "But I think I'm about to start a lot of things I never let myself have before."

Kyan's arms tightened around him, and below them the dryer buzzed and went quiet, and somebody downstairs started folding their warm clothes, and the two of them drifted off in a bed built for one in a room nine steps wide that had, against every odd Sai had ever counted, turned out to be home.

Chapter Fourteen

Lady Leo lived above her own club, in the family's quarters on the private floor over Kinky Kritters. Her sister would have found that beneath her. Zahara kept a different address for every season, each one gold and announced to the street and chosen for what it said about her to people who would never once be let inside. Lady Leo had simply built her home over the top of her life's work, floors above a kink club where the bass never quite carried, and she acted like there was nowhere grander a woman of her power could possibly live. The private floor was warm lamplight and big quiet rooms and the smell of something roasting, and the heart of it was a kitchen big enough to land a plane in and a long, scarred table that had clearly hosted plenty of arguments and outlived every one of them.

Sai brought a plant. A little rosemary plant he'd started from a cutting himself, potted that morning into a clean little dish, because he had no idea what a person was supposed to bring to a dinner like this one and showing up empty-handed felt worse than showing up wrong. He held it in his lap the whole drive over and turned the pot a slow quarter-turn every minute or so, which was the only tell he gave that he was scared out of his mind. Kyan let him turn it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would help, and because he understood it down to the bone. He'd been to a hundred dinners on his mother's side, and every single one had been a performance with a scorecard nobody admitted was being kept. He kept waiting for the old dread to climb his spine as they rode the elevator up to the family's floor. It didn't come. That was the part he was still getting used to. The dread had always been about Zahara, never about family, and he was learning, slowly, that for thirty years he'd been told those were the same word and they had never once been.

"Whatever she asks you," he said at the door, "tell her the truth. Even the ugly version. Especially the ugly version. She can smell a polished answer from the next room."

"That's reassuring." Sai's hand hovered short of the door. "I've never been good at meeting families. You know about the bathroom window."

"I've heard. The legend grows." Kyan kissed his temple. "This one's different. I promise. Knock."

The door opened before he could. Bethany stood there in an apron with flour on one cheek, grinning like she'd been waiting at the window.

"He came," she announced over her shoulder into the house. "The gharial actually came. I told all of you he had nerve, and nobody believed me, and now I get to be smug about it through the entire meal."

"I can hear you," Sai said.

"You were meant to." She caught him by the wrist before he could brace and towed him inside, and the warmth of the place closed over them both, garlic and roasting meat and something sweet baking under it, a radio murmuring low, Amani's laugh rolling out of the kitchen. "Mom's finishing the roast, Nero's been ordered to be charming and is losing badly, and there's wine that costs more than your car, no offense, Kyan, your new car is an embarrassment and I love it. Shoes off. The lion knows the rules."

Kyan did know the rules. He toed his shoes off by the door, watched Sai fumble to match him, and watched Bethany not let go of Sai's wrist the entire time, towing him along like he was already hers to tow. Such a small thing, and it landed on Kyan harder than anything his mother had said all week: the casual physical claim of it, a girl deciding a stranger belonged to her family before he'd been in the door thirty seconds. His mother had never touched anyone she hadn't first decided was useful.