Page 33 of Gagging the Gharial

"You have a whole room for the plants." Kyan stepped in behind him and gathered him back against his chest, chin hooking over his shoulder, and they looked at the green and the gold together. "Best room in the house, no contest. And I see you gave the fern the throne."

"The fern gets the throne." Sai leaned back into him, wet-eyed and not bothering to hide it anymore. "The fern's been with me through every bad thing. The fern does not move from that spot until one of us is dead, and it's not going to be the fern."

"It's a forever fern," Kyan agreed gravely. "It'll outlive us both and inherit the place. We're just its staff." He kissed Sai's temple. "Come eat. Amani ordered enough food to feed a wedding and Reza's threatening to start without you, which from Reza is not an idle threat."

They ate sitting on the floor of the new place, because there were no chairs yet and nobody cared, the whole loud family crowded into the gold main room with too many takeout containers, Amani's playlist, and a wall of windows full of slow evening light. Sai sat in the middle of all of it, his back against Kyan's chest, a plate balanced on his knee, and thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that the size of it was almost more than he knew how to hold. The having of people. The being in the middle instead of handed around the edge.

At some point the couch came up, the way Kyan had been promising for weeks it would. There wasn't one yet, only the loveseat Reza had hauled up the stairs out of raw determination, and Kyan announced to the room that he intended to buy a real one and that it would be leather. Sai said leather was cold in winter, sweaty in summer, and a crime against the act of sitting. The family took sides instantly and with total conviction. Amani came out pro-leather on the grounds that it looked expensive. Bethany came out anti-leather on the grounds that anything Kyan thought looked expensive was statistically likely to be a mistake. Nero said, around a spring roll, that he and Amani owned a leather couch and it stuck to their backs every July, and Amani abandoned his own position so fast that it took the room a full minute to recover from the betrayal.

Sai sat in the middle of the argument he'd personally started, leaned back against the man he loved, and understood, with a quiet that went all the way down, that he was going to get to have this for the rest of his life. Stupid fights about furniture, with people who'd spent their Saturday carrying his dresser up the stairs. He'd spent way too long certain this kind of thing only happened to other people, in other lives. It turned out he'd only needed to stop being too afraid to believe he was allowed to want it.

Later, when the food was gone and the family had cleared out in a long, noisy, hugging procession that took twenty minutes to get out the door, Sai drove back to the studio one last time.

He'd told Kyan he wanted to make the last trip alone, and Kyan had understood it without needing a word of explanation, and let him go. The studio was empty, stripped back to its nine steps and the bare window where the plants used to crowd the glass, and Sai stood in the middle of it a while in the gray light coming off the laundromat sign below.

It was just a room. He knew that. Cheap, small, and faintly water-stained at one corner of the ceiling. But it had been his when he had nothing else in the world, the one door he could lock against a city that kept handing him to strangers, the place he'd come home to and watered his ferns in on the nights he wasn't sure he was going to make it through to another week. He'd been so lonely inside these four cheap walls. He had also survived inside them. Both of those things were true, and both of them got to stay.

He crossed it one more time, wall to wall, the walk he'd made so many times, and it took nine steps, the way it always had. Funny, how many years could fit in a room he could cross in so few steps. Funny how fast a life could outgrow it, once the life finally got the chance.

"Thank you," he said, out loud, to an empty studio, feeling only a little ridiculous about it. "You held me. When nobody else was going to. You did your whole job and you did it right."

He locked the door for the last time, slid the key under it the way the landlord had asked, and went home. Home. The word still didn't sit quite right in his mouth, too big, too good to trust all the way. But he was learning it, one day at a time, the way he'd learned everything.

Kyan was waiting when he got back, sitting on the floor of the dark plant room with the overhead light off, just the city glow filtering in through the green, a beer in one hand and a second one sweating on the floorboards beside him, waiting for Sai.

"Figured you'd want a minute in here when you got back," Kyan said. "Saying goodbye to a place takes something out of a person. I didn't want you doing the goodbye and then coming home to an empty house with nobody in it. So I waited in the best room."

Sai sat down beside him in the green dark and took the beer. It was the cheap brand he'd been buying for years, which meant Kyan had gone out at some point and found it on purpose. He put his head on Kyan's shoulder, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all, just sat among the plants in a room that was theirs, in a home that was theirs, the whole rest of their lives stacked up around them in boxes nobody was in any rush to open.

"I said goodbye to the studio," Sai said at last. "Out loud. Thanked it for keeping me alive. I felt completely insane doing it."

"You're not insane." Kyan tipped his head to rest against Sai's. "That room kept you alive long enough to get to this one. That earns out-loud thanks. I put on a watch this morning and quietly thanked it for not being my mother, so I am the last person on earth who gets to throw stones about talking to objects."

Sai laughed, shaky and easy, and drank his beer in the dark plant room, and thought about all the rooms that had carried him there. The studio over the laundromat. The back rooms of a club that used to frighten him. A garden center that smelled like home years before he had one. And this. A green-dark room, in a house he owned, with a lion who'd walked away from a whole empire for the right to sit on the floor of it beside him in the dark.

"Best room in the house," Sai said.

"Told you," Kyan agreed, and they stayed there in the green dark with the city glow coming soft through the leaves, two empty bottles between them and the fern dark against the lit window, until the building settled around them and the new place quietly stopped being new and started, instead, to feel like home.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Kyan woke first, in a real bed, in their own home, and lay still for a long while just to feel it.

The bed was the one thing they'd bought new and bought right, the first big purchase of the new life, a real one, built wide and solid for two grown men who were staying. After months of folding himself around Sai in a frame meant for one optimistic person, the space felt almost obscene. He could starfish. He didn't. He stayed curled around the warm weight of Sai instead, because the time in the narrow bed had taught his body that close was the point, and the extra room was just there to make the closeness a choice instead of a necessity.

The light came in gold and slow through the bedroom window, through the green of the real tree outside it, and lay in a warm bar across the rumpled sheets. Somewhere in the apartment a plant was probably thirsty. There were still boxes against every wall. The kitchen had two forks, because they hadn't gotten around to buying more. None of it mattered. Kyan lay in the light in a bed that was his, in a home that was his, with a gharial drooling faintly on his chest, and understood that this was the richest he had ever been in his life, and that his mother, with her diamonds and her penthouse, had never once owned anything close to it.

He thought about the mornings he used to wake to. Cold rooms in cold light, an empty bed in two thousand square feet, a phone already buzzing with his mother's first demand of the day before he'd opened both eyes. He'd thought that was just what mornings were. Quiet, expensive, and lonely. He'd had no idea, none, that a morning could be this instead, a warm weight and a thirsty plant and light through a real tree, that he could wake up somewhere and the first feeling of the day could be glad. Thirty-one years old and he was learning what a morning was for.

Sai stirred against him, surfaced, blinked up at him with one eye.

"You're awake," he mumbled, accusatory. "You're awake and you're looking at me. It's weird when you watch me sleep."

"I'm not watching you sleep. I'm watching you drool on me, which is different and more dignified for both of us." Kyan kissed the top of his head. "Morning."

"Morning." Sai pressed his face into Kyan's chest and made a sound of profound objection to consciousness, and then went still in a different way, awake all the way, and Kyan felt the exact moment the morning tilted, the way it did between them these days, easy, after a month of learning each other's mornings.

"Hi," Kyan said, into his hair, lower.