Page 27 of Gagging the Gharial

"I'm." Sai's voice came out hoarse and slow and astonished. "I took it back. I actually took the room back." He laughed, wet and amazed, his face pressed into Kyan's chest. "A whole year I came down this hall feeling like nothing anyone would remember. And you just made it the best memory I've got in this entire building."

"You made it." Kyan tipped his chin up and kissed him, soft. "You walked down here on purpose. You stood in that door. You asked. I just did what my gharial told me to do." He smoothed the damp hair back off Sai's forehead. "You are so far from nothing it isn't funny. You're the bravest person I've ever met, and I grew up around my aunt and my mother both."

They lay tangled together on a couch that had seen better manners, in a room that had finally stopped scaring Sai, the bass still thudding faint and warm through the walls. Kyan held his mate and thought about how a thing could be poison for a whole year and then, in the right hands, with the right word and the door locked from the inside, come out the other side clean. The room hadn't changed. The couch hadn't, the gag hadn't, the act hadn't. Only everything around them had. Only the part that had ever mattered.

"Come on." He kissed Sai's temple and reached for their scattered clothes. "Let's get you dressed and fed and home to your nine steps. We have a party to plan in the morning, and a Leo to keep from killing me over the centerpieces."

"Peonies," Sai mumbled into his chest, boneless and claimed and halfway to sleep. "I keep telling you. Trust the gharial. Peonies."

Chapter Seventeen

The club looked nothing like itself.

They'd closed it to the public for the night, stripped the red lights down to a warm gold, pushed the play furniture back against the walls under sheets, and filled the whole place with flowers, and that last part was Sai's doing. Peonies, mostly, fat blowsy pink-and-white ones spilling out of every vessel the garden center could spare. Sai had spent the afternoon arranging them with two of his staff and Kyan underfoot being beautiful and useless. Finally, the room that had frightened him for a solid year smelled like his own greenhouse, green, sweet, and alive. He kept catching himself standing in the middle of it just to breathe it in.

"You did this." Bethany had stopped dead in the doorway when she arrived, turning a slow circle, and her voice had gone strange and thin. "The peonies. Nobody knows about the peonies. I have never told one living soul about the peonies, I have a reputation in this town."

"I sell flowers for a living," Sai said. "I notice who stops at the cooler."

"You absolute menace." She came at him and hugged him hard, the way she did everything, and Sai felt her breathe out shaky against his shoulder before she pulled back and leveled a warning finger at the room at large. "If any one of you tells the Los Angeles people I cried over a flower arrangement, I will end you. All of you. I am a serious professional and this is a serious career move."

"She's crying over flowers," Amani announced from the bar, and took a thrown cocktail napkin to the face for it.

The whole family came.

That was the thing Sai kept turning over and over as the night filled in around him. A year ago he'd been a stranger in this building, a sad weekly errand at the edge of everyone else's warmth. Now he stood in the middle of all of them and knew their drinks, their histories, which of their arguments were decades old. Reza ran the bar and would not let anyone else so much as touch a bottle, because it was Bethany's night and he was going to do it correctly or not at all. Nero held up his usual stretch of wall, watching the exits out of pure habit, but Amani had already hauled him into the middle of things twice, and the second time he'd come close enough to smiling that Bethany had gasped and pointed. Clyce came in off shift with the bear who edited the newspaper, the two of them easy and quiet at the warm edge of it. Harold carried in a sheet cake that said GOODBYE in icing letters that had very clearly started out as a longer and ruder word, while Jack held the door for him and pretended the cake hadn't been half his idea. A handful of regulars had been let in too, the ones the family had decided over the years were theirs to keep.

And at the head of all of it, Lady Leo. Watching everything the way she always watched, missing nothing, her guard let down in a way Sai was learning she only allowed in this building, with these people, with the doors locked and the public gone home.

Partway through the night, she tapped a glass with one ring, and the room came down to quiet.

"I'm not going to make a speech," she said, "because she'll hate it, and because I've already said the parts that matter to her in private, where they belong. I'll say only this much in front of everyone, so she can't pretend to me later that I never did." She turned to her daughter. "I built this place out of a world that wanted me decorative and silent. And the best thing I have ever made inside it is not the club, or the money, or the name on the door. It is the woman who's about to carry all of it to a city that has no earthly idea what is coming for it." She lifted her glass. "Go be impossible somewhere new, sweetheart. Make me proud. Call your brother at indecent hours. To Bethany."

"To Bethany," the room answered, and Bethany stood in the middle of it with her chin up and her face wet and didn't bother to hide it.

Then Amani set down his drink and climbed up to stand on the bar, the way only Amani would, and Reza steadied him by the ankle with the long-suffering air of a man who had done this before.

"I'm going to make the speech Mom won't," Amani said, "because somebody has to embarrass her properly and I've been training for it my whole life." He looked down at his sister, and the easy clown of him went quiet underneath, the deeper thing Sai had come to recognize. "Bethany was four when our dad died. I was three. And she decided, somewhere in there, that she was going to be the one who held the front of this place together so Mom could hold up the rest, and she has done it, at that desk, every day, since she was sixteen years old. She has talked down drunk bears, soothed nervous first-timers, remembered every regular's name, and kept this whole operation from falling on its face a thousand times, and she did it so quietly that half of you didn't notice it was her holding the door." His voice cracked. He didn't stop for it. "So, when you hear she's running Los Angeles now, don't you dare act surprised. She's been running things her entire life. She's just finally going to get her name on it." He raised his glass, blinking hard. "To my big sister. Who taught me how to come back from the worst place I ever went, before she even knew she was doing it. I love you. Don't go. Go. I love you."

Kyan had found him somewhere in the middle of the speeches and drawn him back against his chest, both arms crossed loose over Sai's collarbones, chin resting on his shoulder. Sai held on to his forearm and listened like that to the rest of it, to every toast and every terrible joke, held the whole time, in front of everyone, like it was nothing. Like it was normal. Like it was his.

The room was a wreck by the end of it. Bethany was openly sobbing and laughing at once. She yanked her brother down off the bar and into a hug so hard it nearly took them both to the floor. The whole family closed in around the two of them, the matriarch's only two children, the pair of them holding on like they had a thousand times before and would have to learn to do across a state line.

Then somebody turned the music back up, because a Leo party did not stay solemn for long, and the room broke open into celebration. Reza started making drinks faster. Amani pulled his sister out into the cleared middle of the floor and spun her badly. She laughed and let him. One by one the others joined in, Clyce and his bear swaying at the edge, Harold attempting something with his feet that no one had asked him to attempt. Even Nero got tugged into it for one slow song, stiff as a fence post and watching the exits the entire time, until Amani said something against his ear that made the corner of his mouth finally give, and Sai looked away from that on purpose, because some things in a family weren't his to watch.

He stood at the edge with a glass he wasn't really drinking and let it wash over him, a year of bad nights in this building rinsing clean under one good one, and thought he could happily stand here watching these people be ridiculous together for the rest of his life.

Later, when the speeches were spent and the cake was cut and the room had loosened back into ordinary noise, Bethany found Sai over by the flowers.

"Walk with me one second." She drew him toward the quieter end, away from the music, and leaned against the wall, and for a moment she only looked at him, the sharp assessing look that ran in all of them. "I'm going to say a thing, and I'm going to say it exactly once, and then never again, because I'll get weird about it. Deal?"

"Deal."

"I watched you for a year. From that desk." She said it plainly. "You came in here every week looking like a man walking to his own funeral. You did your sad business in the back, and you left looking worse than you came, and you never once complained to me about it and you were never once unkind to anybody, not even on your worst nights, and I saw a lot of your worst nights. I used to lie awake wondering what this place was going to do to you. Whether it was the kind that hardens a person or the kind that hollows them out." Her voice pulled tight. "And then my idiot cousin walked off that elevator, and I got to watch the entire thing turn around in real time, and I have never been so happy to be wrong about where somebody was going to end up."

Sai couldn't manage more than her name. "Bethany."

"Not done. Two things." She held up two fingers. "One. Thank you for the peonies. I mean it, and I will deny it to my grave. Two." Her jaw worked. "I leave in two weeks. And I'm leaving him, and Amani, and Mom, and all of them, right when everything's finally good, and the thing keeping me up at night is not the LA club. It's leaving when it's finally good and not getting to be here watching it stay that way." She fixed him with a hard wet look. "So look after them. Not just Kyan. All of them. You're family now, and family doesn't get to be a polite guest, family has to actually show up. Sunday dinners. The bad weeks. The day Mom finally slows down and won't say so. When Amani has a rough stretch, because he still does, they just don't show on him anymore. I need to know somebody's here being family in the room while I'm a state away pretending I'm not homesick. Can you do that? Will you?"