Chapter Twenty-Three
The first dinner they ever hosted was a disaster, and Sai wouldn't have traded a second of it.
They didn't have enough chairs. They didn't have enough plates.
They had exactly two forks, a fact Amani refused to let die for the entire evening.
The card table was borrowed from a neighbor down the stairs, the folding chairs matched neither each other nor anything else, and the roast was Kyan's, his first real attempt at cooking in his life, which came out of the oven looking confident and tasting like a brave first draft.
The middle was nearly raw and the ends were nearly jerky.
Nobody cared even a little. Luckily shifters had really amazing constitutions.
And Lady Leo had come. She had left her own building for it, a thing she did for almost no one and almost never, and was now holding court from the best of the mismatched chairs as though it were a throne, which, that night, it was.
The family packed into the gold main room of the new place, plates balanced on knees, wine in plastic cups, and it was loud, warm, far too crowded, and completely theirs.
Sai stood in his own kitchen for a second, looking out at all of it, and had to grip the edge of the counter, because he was the one hosting.
He was the one with the home that people came to.
The card table was his. The too-small apartment full of family was his.
He was standing in his own kitchen watching a roomful of people he loved fight over a roast in a home he owned, and he was the host.
"It is not done in the middle," Bethany announced, holding a slice up to the light like evidence. "Kyan. This is raw enough to file a missing-persons report."
"It's rare. It's meant to be rare."
"It's mooing, Kyan. I can hear it."
"Lady Leo. Back me up here."
"I would sooner die," Lady Leo said serenely, working her way through a well-done end piece like she meant it.
"You are entirely on your own with that roast, nephew.
We all start somewhere. My first attempt at hosting was a curry I am still, twenty years on, not finished apologizing for.
" She lifted her glass an inch off her knee.
"It's a good dinner. The company is well worth the roast, and the roast will improve. To the cooks. One of them, anyway."
They got through the meal loudly and over the top of one another.
Amani told a story about a customer at the club that made Nero put his whole face in his hands.
Reza and Sai argued, with real heat and total goodwill, about whether a north windowsill could grow anything edible at all, a fight Sai was winning on facts and losing on volume.
Clyce, who'd come with his bear and said almost nothing, ate three platefuls of the questionable roast without complaint and somehow made it the highest compliment in the room.
And the light came in long and warm through the wall of windows they owned, and Sai sat in the middle of it with a plate on his knee and the man he loved heckled on all sides, and thought he could do this exact night a thousand more times and never once get tired of it.
When the plates were mostly cleared and the brave roast had been mostly forgiven, Sai caught Kyan's eye across the card table. Kyan gave him the smallest nod. Sai's heart climbed straight up into his throat and sat there.
Kyan stood, and tapped his plastic cup with a plastic fork, because the metal forks had been used for serving, and because that was how the head of this family called a table to order. Some things a man learned at somebody's table and carried to his own.
"So," he said. "We've got a thing to tell you. And we wanted to do it here, in our own place, in person, before Bethany gets on a plane and forces us to tell her over the phone like a couple of animals."
The table went quiet and alert all at once.
"We're getting married," Kyan said. "The human way.
Rings, vows, the standing-up-in-front-of-people way, on top of the mating, because I want to belong to him in every way there is to do it, and I want to do it out loud, where all of you can hear it.
Because you're the family I picked." His voice caught and he let it go rough.
"I spent my whole life being told I'd be married off for power, to someone chosen for me, in a room full of people who didn't care.
And instead I'm going to marry a gharial in a garden for no reason at all except that I love him more than I've ever loved anything.
I wanted you to hear it from me, first, before anybody. "
For one whole second, nobody in the room moved.
Then the whole room went off at once.
Amani made a sound nobody present had known he was capable of and shot up out of his folding chair so fast he sent it clattering over backward, which Sai understood, in the moment, he would treasure for the rest of his natural life.
"Married," Amani said to the ceiling, to the room, to nobody, like the word had arrived in a language he was still translating.
"He's getting married. Shifters don't get married.
We mate, somebody buys a round, that's the whole ceremony, and nobody in this family has ever once had a wedding.
" He rounded on the two of them, grinning wide enough to hurt.
"And you're going to stand up and do the human paperwork on purpose.
For love. Oh, she is going to hate this so much.
This is the best news I have ever heard in my life. "
Bethany burst into tears and laughter in the same breath, both hands clapped over her mouth.
Reza started a slow clap that the bear picked up and turned into a fast one.
And Nero, unflappable terrifying Nero, head of security, a man who rationed himself to one dry sentence an hour, went very still, and then turned his face away and pressed the back of one hand hard against his eyes, and Amani saw it and abandoned his own joy mid-leap to pull his mate into a hug.
That nearly took Sai out at the knees right there in his own living room.
"He's misting," Bethany sobbed, pointing a wrecked, delighted finger. "Nero is misting again. That's the second time. We are going to lose this man completely at the actual wedding, there will be nothing left of him."
"It's the plants," Nero said into Amani's shoulder, with no conviction available to him whatsoever. "I'm allergic." And the entire room loved him so much harder for the size of the lie.
"I sent the text," Amani announced to Sai from inside the hug, wrecked and triumphant at once. "One text. This entire wedding is my work and I want a line in the vows."
"You sent a man one text," Nero said against his chest, recovering. "The rest was them."
Lady Leo didn't cry. Lady Leo set down her glass, folded her hands, and looked at the two of them for a long, quiet moment, her nephew and the gharial standing together at the head of a borrowed card table, and then she said, simply, "Well. I'll be officiating, obviously."
"We were hoping you'd say that," Sai managed.
"I wasn't asking, dear, I was announcing.
" But she allowed herself a small, fierce, wet-eyed smile.
"I loved a man once. A leopard, which my family informed me was beneath a lioness's bother.
I buried him far too young, and I never once got to stand up in front of anyone and say words over him.
I have spent a good deal of the time since wondering whether I would ever get to stand up in front of people I love and say words that actually meant something.
" Her voice held perfectly level, which was somehow worse than if it hadn't.
"So yes. I will marry you. In a garden, with the reptile's flowers, the boy my sister threw in the bin and the man who walked into the fire to catch him.
It will be the finest thing I have ever put my name to.
Finer than the club. We won't tell the club. "
Sai had to study the ceiling for a moment.
Later, when the joy had burned down to the low warm hum of a family digesting the best kind of news, Bethany found Sai over by the windows, the way she always found him near something growing.
"Three days," she said. "I leave in three days, and now I have to go knowing there's a wedding coming I won't get to help plan.
The cake. The guest-list fight. The part where Kyan tries to make it elegant and you quietly turn the whole thing into a garden center.
" She knocked her shoulder against his. "I'm going to be unbearably jealous from a state away.
You understand that. I'm going to call constantly and have opinions. "
"You're flying back for it," Sai said. "That was never a question. There's no wedding happening where you're not standing up front."
"You try and stop me." She wiped under her eyes, laughing.
"Family gets married, I get on the first flight.
That's the whole policy. My cousin, in a garden full of the one flower I never told one living soul was my favorite, until some gharial figured it out off the way I slow down at a cooler.
" She leaned her head against his shoulder, this woman who'd watched him be miserable from a front desk for a year and had never once, not on his worst night, been unkind to him.
"You still owe me Sunday dinner pictures, by the way.
That promise transfers to this table. First one had better include the roast, for the historical record of how far he's got to go. "
"Every Sunday," Sai said. "Roast included. No mercy."
"Good." She was quiet a moment. "You did good, Sai. You went and built the exact thing you were too scared to even let yourself want. I had a front-row seat to the whole turnaround. I am so proud of you I could be sick, and I do not say things like that, so you'd better write this down."
"I'll write it down," Sai said, and put his arm around her and held on, this sister of his now in every way that actually counted, three days out from a plane that would take her a state west. He looked out at the gold room full of the family he'd built without ever once believing he'd be allowed to keep it.
The lion stacking plates and getting roasted worse than the roast. The matriarch who'd left her building for a card-table dinner.
The misting ferret, still pretending it was the plants.
The loud, bright, impossible, complete whole of it.
"Best dinner this place is ever going to host," he said.
"It absolutely is not," Bethany said. "The wedding is going to blow it out of the water. But it's a start." She squeezed him hard. "It's a really, really good start."
The family cleared out late, in the usual twenty-minute scramble of long hugs and forgotten jackets and one last story told from the doorway with a coat half on, and then the apartment went suddenly, ringingly quiet, and it was just the two of them and the wreckage of the first dinner they'd ever hosted.
Sai stood under the one lamp they owned and looked it over.
Plates stacked on every surface. The card table still standing in the middle of the room.
The brave roast sitting on the counter, two-thirds gone, which honestly counted as a triumph.
Two forks in the sink. The tea light by the window had burned itself quietly out somewhere in the evening, the way it was supposed to, having done its work.
He started gathering cups, and Kyan came up behind him, took them gently out of his hands, and set them back down on the counter.
"Leave it," Kyan said. "It'll keep till morning. Look at you. You hosted a dinner."
"I hosted a dinner." Sai said it slowly, tasting it, making it true.
"I kept waiting all night to feel like a fraud.
For somebody to glance around and figure out I wasn't supposed to be the one with the home, that there'd been a mistake.
It never came. I just got to be the host. In my own place. For my own people."
"Because you are the host." Kyan turned him around by the shoulders.
"In your own place, for your own people.
Nobody is coming to take it back. We keep saying that and you keep half-believing it, and one of these days it's going to land in you all the way and stay.
" He kissed his forehead. "You fed eight people an undercooked roast. They cried at our news.
Even Nero misted standing up in our living room.
That's a home. That's a real one. You built it out of nothing, same as the plants. "
"You helped." Sai leaned into him. "You made the roast. Such as it was."
"The roast was a journey and I will get there.
" Kyan wrapped him up properly, chin settling on the top of his head, and they stood together in the lamplit ruin of their first dinner with no urge at all to clean a single dish.
"We're getting married," Kyan said, quiet, saying it like the first time all over again.
"In a garden. My mother lined up a jaguar and a dynasty, and I'm going to marry you over a raw roast and two forks, and I have never once in my whole life been this happy. "
"We need more forks before the wedding," Sai said into his chest.
"We need so many more forks," Kyan agreed, with total gravity, and Sai felt him start to smile against his hair, and they left the dishes in the sink and the card table standing and the brave roast going cold on the counter, because none of it was going anywhere, and for the first time in his whole life, neither was Sai.