Chapter Twenty-Four
Lady Leo's house on a Sunday afternoon.
Amani let himself in with his key and the first thing he heard was Bethany arguing with their mother about the curtains.
It was the kind of argument only these two women could have, high-volume, low-stakes, both of them entrenched in positions that were not actually the point, the point being that they were lionesses in the same pride and periodically they had to demonstrate that fact by snarling at each other over something meaningless.
"They're too long," Bethany was saying. "They pool on the floor."
"That's the style."
"It's dusty."
"It's dramatic."
"It's dusty and dramatic."
Amani came into the kitchen and dropped his keys on the counter.
Nero followed him, slightly hesitant, his hands in his pockets.
It was his first family dinner. Amani had warned him.
Lady Leo had invited them for Sunday brunch, which at Lady Leo's house meant Sunday lunch that started at noon and went until people stopped eating, and Nero had accepted because refusing an invitation from Lady Leo was something only people who didn't value their lives did.
"Amani," Lady Leo said, turning from the curtain debate. Her face softened. "And our chief of security."
"Just Nero, please. I'm not on duty."
"Nero," she amended. "Come in. Bethany, stop fussing about the curtains. They're staying."
"Fine, but we're getting them cleaned."
"That’s acceptable."
Bethany threw her hands up and came over to hug Amani, then stopped short of Nero and stuck her hand out instead, with a formality that was almost a joke. Nero shook it, and Bethany's gaze went to Amani over Nero's shoulder with a look that said we will be discussing this one later.
Amani pretended not to see it.
Brunch was frittata, because his mother had not yet forgiven Amani for his stated inability to cook anything more complicated than eggs, and was determined to continue demonstrating what a properly made egg dish looked like.
It was, as always, perfect. Bethany drank too many mimosas and got loud.
Lady Leo asked Nero three polite but surgically pointed questions about his childhood, his career, and his intentions, all of which Nero answered with the calm directness of a man who had faced down worse than a lioness matriarch and understood that the correct response was to tell the truth in a complete sentence.
After the third answer, Lady Leo set down her coffee and said, "You will do."
Amani choked on his orange juice.
"Mom."
"What? I'm approving him. I thought that was what you wanted."
"I don't need you to approve him, I need you to be polite to him."
"I was polite. I said he will do."
Nero's mouth twitched. He looked like he was going to laugh.
He looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh.
Amani kicked him under the table. Nero's expression flickered but didn't fully break.
Bethany, who had been watching this whole exchange with a grin, lost it and snorted mimosa out of her nose.
"I am surrounded," Lady Leo said, to no one in particular, "by children."
It was the best meal Amani had eaten in months.
After, while his mother and Bethany fought over who got to do the dishes, because at the Leo household even chores were competitive, Amani took Nero out to the back garden.
The garden was a small miracle of Lady Leo's making, a pocket of green in a city that did not reward green, shaded by mesquite trees and surrounded by stone walls.
A wrought iron bench sat in the corner. Amani led Nero to it and they sat.
"Your mother is terrifying," Nero said. “She’s almost worse at home than she is at work.”
"I know."
"She's going to be my mother-in-law someday and she's going to terrify me forever."
Amani went still.
Nero didn't look at him. He was looking at the garden, at the mesquite leaves moving in the slight breeze, at the small koi pond with two fat orange fish drifting near the surface.
He said it casually. Not a proposal. A statement.
The offhand acknowledgment of a future that he had apparently been thinking about for longer than Amani had realized.
"Mother-in-law," Amani said.
"At some point. Not soon. I'm not asking you anything. I'm just telling you what I've been planning around. Someday. When you're ready."
"You've been planning around it."
"Since about week three."
Amani looked at him. His man had been quietly building a future for them since three weeks into a relationship they had agreed didn't have a name yet, and was telling Amani, in Lady Leo's garden, with the sun coming through the mesquite and the koi drifting in the pond, with absolutely no pressure and absolutely no performance.
"You're very sure of yourself," Amani said.
"I'm sure of you."
Amani leaned into him. Shoulder to shoulder on the wrought iron bench.
Nero's hand found his and their fingers tangled.
Amani thought about what his eighteen-year-old self would have said if someone had told him he'd end up like this, not with a lion or a bear or a wolf but with a ferret cop who planned quietly around him and called it inevitable.
Eighteen-year-old Amani would have been offended. Twenty-year-old Amani was grateful.
They stayed in the garden for a while. Eventually Bethany came out and told them dessert was being served and if Amani didn't get his ass inside he wasn't getting any of the lemon tart, which was not a threat Amani was willing to test. They went back in.
Ate dessert. Listened to Lady Leo tell a story about a vendor who had tried to cheat her and learned, publicly, that this was unwise.
Bethany ate three slices of tart and complained about how she needed to go to the gym tomorrow and then ate a fourth.
Nero laughed. Actually laughed, loud enough that Amani heard it, watched it happen, cataloged the sound the way Nero cataloged everything about him.
A ferret laughing in a lioness's kitchen.
When they left at four in the afternoon, Lady Leo hugged her son for a long time. Longer than she usually did. Not the perfunctory touch but a real hold, the kind that said I'm still making up for weeks of wondering if you were alive. Amani hugged her back with the same intention.
"I love you, Mom."
"I love you too. Go home. Rest. Come back next Sunday."
"I will."
She held Nero's arm for a beat on his way out and said something to him that Amani didn't hear. Nero nodded. When they got to the car Amani asked what she'd said, and Nero said, "She told me if I hurt you she'd end me and no one would find the body."
"That tracks."
"I believed her."
"You should. She meant it."
They drove home. The afternoon was warm and the windows were down and Nero's hand rested on Amani's thigh while he drove and Amani watched the city slide past and thought about nothing in particular, which was itself the new miracle: that he could think about nothing now, that his brain could idle, that the constant vigilance had loosened enough that he could be in a car with a man he loved and watch Vegas go by and not be calculating anything at all.
***
That night in bed, after, curled against Nero's chest with the sheet tangled around them and the ceiling fan turning slowly above, Amani said: "Mars."
Nero made a sleepy sound. "What?"
"Mars. It's named after a god of war. But it's also the reddest thing in the sky, so the Babylonians named it after blood. That's what I was thinking about."
Nero was quiet for a moment. "Okay."
"I used to know a lot of astronomy. I haven't thought about it in months."
"Your brain is coming back online."
"I guess so."
Nero's hand moved lazily up and down his back. "Tell me more."
"About Mars?"
"About anything."
So, Amani told him. About Mars, and Jupiter's moons, and the way ancient navigators used Polaris to find true north.
About the club when he was a kid, how Bethany used to hide under the bar with him and make faces at the customers.
About the one time he'd tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner for his family and set off every smoke detector in his mother's house.
Nero listened. His breathing slowed. His hand got slower.
Eventually he was asleep. But, Amani kept talking for another few minutes, just quietly, because the telling was not really for Nero, it was for himself, the reassurance that he had things to tell, that his mind had not been scraped clean by the desert, that underneath the survival there was still all of him.
He fell asleep mid-sentence. In the morning he could not remember where he'd left off.
It didn't matter. They had time.