Page 37 of Gagging the Gharial

"His ring is in a drawer upstairs," she said. "The children's father. My leopard, which in our family was treated as a scandal and which I never once cared about for a single day. He wore a band just like that one. Plain, heavy, nothing to catch. He used to say the best things a man owns should be built to still be there on the floor when he comes back up." Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. "I keep his upstairs because I throw away nothing I have loved, nephew. You'll have heard that about me. It's the thing my sister has held against me for forty years. She thinks it's weakness, keeping the broken in the building. She has never understood that it's the opposite. It's the whole strength of the thing. You hold on to what you love, in plain sight, and you let everyone see you do it, and you dare the world to call it soft." She sat back. "My sister collects things that make her bigger," she went on, quieter. "Holdings, alliances, a son she could mate off for the right bloodline. I have spent forty years collecting people the world had finished with and watching them turn out to be worth everything. Nero. Half my floor staff. A drinker nobody else would touch at his worst, two years sober now and building a good life on a ranch, who is still family every single time he walks off that elevator. And a Chicago nephew his own mother emptied her accounts to be rid of, who turned out to have the best head for numbers in the building and the spine, when it counted, to use it against the woman who raised him." She set her hands flat on the desk. "She thinks she won the boy and lost nothing. She lost the only thing either of us ever made that's going to outlast us, which is a person who got loved the right way. I intend to remind her of that at every holiday for the rest of our lives."

She picked up the box again, turned it once more, and handed it back for good.

"I am going to marry you to that gharial, in a garden, and I have done a great many things in this long life I'm proud of, and I want you to understand that this is going to be near the top of the list. Above the clubs. Above all of it."

Kyan had to look at the folders on her desk for a moment, because his throat had closed.

"You're the first person in my family who ever wanted me to keep anything," he said, when he could. "She raised me to need her and call it love. You hired me and called it a job and it's the most like a parent anyone's ever managed."

"Don't tell the staff I have a heart," Lady Leo said. "It's terrible for discipline." But she reached across the desk and gripped his hand once, hard, the way she did almost nothing, and let it go. "Now. Your cousin gets on a plane in days, and she has informed me, at length, that she will be flying back for this wedding even if I tell her not to, which I won't, because the day I keep Bethany from a thing this good is the day you can put me at the empty end of the table for real. So." She pulled a folder toward her, the audience as ever drawing to its own close on her schedule. "Marry him in the spring. Do it at that garden center of his, in the big glass house, where the morning comes up through the roof and everything he's ever kept alive is already growing. Bury it in his flowers, all of them, however many it takes to embarrass the both of you. And let me handle the part where I stand up in front of everyone I love and say words over the two of you that actually mean something, because I have been waiting a long time to get to do that again, and you and your gharial are the first thing in years worth doing it for."

"Peonies," Kyan said, thick. "Sai already picked. Enough to embarrass everyone."

"Of course he did." A fierce warmth crossed her face. "Go home, nephew. Go ask him properly, with the ring this time, on one knee like a romantic, the way you've clearly been dying to since the lobby. You already claimed him where the whole building could smell it. Now go be ridiculous and human about it on a kitchen floor." She slid her glasses back on. "And bring him Sunday. His chair's the one next to yours. It has been for a while now. I just hadn't told him yet."

Kyan stood, the box a small certain weight in his pocket, his whole life rearranged around him into something he'd chosen brick by brick. At the door he paused, the way he always did in this office and never once had in his mother's, and looked back at the woman who'd handed him a desk and a paycheck and, without ever once making a show of it, a family.

"Thank you," he said.

"You thanked me the first day I hired you, and I told you not to yet." Lady Leo didn't look up from the folder, but her voice had gentled all the way down. "You've more than covered the being-good-at-the-work part since. Keep up the other one and we'll call it even." She turned a page. "Now go propose to your reptile. Some of us are drowning on a schedule, and I'd like to get the crying done at the wedding, where there's catering."

Kyan went. The elevator carried him down toward the desert evening, the secondhand car, the drive home, and the whole way back he was aware of the small box riding in his pocket like a live thing, because for the first time in his managed, inherited, carefully arranged life he was driving toward something he had chosen all the way down, paid for himself, and could not wait to give away.

He found Sai in the plant room, repotting something into a bigger pot, a smear of soil drying on one forearm and the evening light going gold through the window behind him. He looked up when Kyan came in, and smiled, easy and unguarded, in a way the man in the back of the club a year ago never once had.

"You're home early. How was—" Sai stopped, because Kyan had not said anything, and because Kyan was getting down onto one knee on the plant-room floor among the bags of soil and the spare pots, and the look on his face was answer enough to a question Sai hadn't finished asking.

"I already asked you," Kyan said. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "In bed, with no ring, because I couldn't wait. You said yes. So, this isn't me asking whether. This is me asking right." He took the box out of his pocket and opened it, and the plain heavy gold caught the last of the window light. "I bought it with my own money, Sai. My own. The first thing I've ever paid for in my life that didn't start in her hand. And I picked one that survives the shift, so you never have to take it off to be the whole of what you are. It'll be there on the floor waiting for you every time you come back up. Same as I will." He had to stop a second. "Marry me. The human way, on top of the lion way. In a garden full of too many peonies. Say yes again, out loud, with the ring this time."

Sai was already crying, soil-smeared hands pressed over his mouth, and he got down onto the floor too because his knees had stopped holding him, down among the pots, until they were kneeling there together in the light.

"Yes," he said, laughing through it. "Obviously, yes, you ridiculous lion, in a plant room, of course yes." He held out his hand. It was shaking.

Kyan slid the warm gold band onto it, and it fit, and it would keep fitting, through every shape Sai ever took and came back from.

"It survives the shift," Sai said, staring at it, turning his hand in the light.

"You survive everything," Kyan said. "I just wanted the ring to keep up."

And Sai kissed him on the plant-room floor with dirt on both of them and the fern on its throne in the window over the whole of it, and somewhere two months out a garden was waiting, and a woman in a plain dark suit who threw away nothing she loved was going to stand up in front of everyone and say the words.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Bethany came by the new place the evening before her flight, when her whole apartment had already been packed into a truck headed west and her entire life had shrunk down to one carry-on and a coat over her arm.

Sai buzzed her up and met her at the top of the stairs, and for a second they just looked at each other, because there wasn't a clean thing to say. The next day, she finally got on a plane and became the woman who ran Los Angeles, and the front desk of Kinky Kritters would have somebody new behind it, and the building Sai had been afraid of for too long would have one less person in it he'd never been afraid of.

"So, this is it." She came in and turned a slow circle in the gold main room, taking in the half-unpacked boxes, the terrible loveseat, the plant room glowing green down the hall. "Look at you..A whole home. A room for the plants and a lion who can almost cook and a ring on your finger." She caught his hand and held it up to the light to look at the band, and her eyes went bright. "He did good. It survives the shift, doesn't it. Of course he found one that survives the shift, that idiot's been gone for you for a year."

"He did good," Sai agreed, thick already, and she was only just in the door.

He'd made tea nobody really wanted, and they sat with it on the floor because the loveseat only fit one comfortably and neither of them was willing to be the one who sat apart. And Sai had a thing he'd been working on all week, and he got up and went to the plant room and came back with it, a small clay pot, no bigger than a coffee mug, with a single rooted cutting standing up green and stubborn in the middle of it.

"It's off the jade," he said, setting it in her hands. "The one I grew from a single leaf eight years ago when I had nothing, no people, and a studio I couldn't really afford. I took a cutting and rooted it for you. It's small enough to go in your carry-on, and jades are almost impossible to kill, so even you can't manage it." He had to stop and clear his throat. "I wanted you to have a piece of it out there. Of home. Of here. Something alive that came from my place that you can put in a window in yours, so when you're a state away at two in the morning being sure you're failing, there's a thing on the sill that knows where you came from." He'd already wrapped the base in a plastic bag and a rubber band, travel-ready, because he'd thought of everything except how to say this part without his voice going.

Bethany looked down at the little pot in her hands, and for a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and Sai watched the woman who'd run a front desk through every kind of chaos without flinching lose the fight entirely.

"You can't just," she said, and stopped, and pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes. "You can't just say a thing like that to a person the night before they leave, Sai. That's not fair. I have to get on a plane tomorrow looking like a competent adult."