Page 29 of Gagging the Gharial

Sai's whole face went soft and bright at once. "I knew you would." He tangled both hands in the front of Kyan's shirt. "I told you. More than a few days."

"You told me." Kyan kissed him, and it started soft and did not stay that way. The relief and the pride and two sleepless days all rolled over at once into something hungrier, and Sai made a low sound against his mouth and pulled him in by the shirt, walking them backward toward the bed against the wall.

They didn't talk about pace, or words, or rooms. They didn't need to. Three weeks in, they knew each other in the dark the way a person knows a song they've sung a thousand times, and it was nothing like the careful negotiation of that first private room or the trembling weight of the claiming. This was easy, filthy, and certain. Two men who had finally stopped being afraid of how much they wanted each other, falling into a too-small bed in a small green-smelling room with the dryer humming its way through a cycle below them.

Kyan got Sai's shirt up over his head and put his mouth to the scent-gland beneath his jaw, scenting him slow and deep, the thing that always melted him, and felt the gold rise warm under his lips. He kissed his way down, unhurried, because slow was simply how he was built and Sai had learned to love him slow, and he stripped the rest of Sai's clothes off between kisses and laid him out across the narrow bed and took his time relearning every inch he already knew by heart. Sai arched, swore, and got Kyan's shirt off over his head before finally, finally burying both hands in the hair on his chest, the thing he always reached for first, like a man coming home to it.

"Want you," Sai breathed against his mouth, easy with it, not a scrap of the old shyness left anywhere in him. "Just you. Like this. No gag, no game tonight. I want to feel every bit of it. I want you to hear everything, the whole time."

"Yeah." Kyan kissed him deep and slow. "Yeah, baby. However you want me."

He kissed his way down the body he had memorized, slow, because slow was the whole gift and they both knew it, mouth tracking over the gold scales rising in the wake of it, down the flat of Sai's stomach, into the crease of his hip, taking his time, taking forever, until Sai was swearing and arching up off the mattress before Kyan had gotten anywhere near where he wanted him. And when Kyan finally took him into his mouth, slow and wet and unhurried, Sai's whole body bowed off the bed and both his hands fisted in Kyan's hair and the sound he made was the kind that used to need a bit of steel to keep it decent, and tonight got to fill the whole small room instead.

Kyan worked him like that until Sai was begging out loud with no shame left in it, gold flooded down to his thighs, hips chasing a rhythm Kyan kept just out of reach, and only then did he ease off and crawl back up the length of him and slick himself and settle in close, watching Sai's face the entire time, the way he always liked to.

"A year ago you couldn't ask me for a glass of water," he murmured, thumb stroking slow over Sai's hip. "Now you're spread out in your own bed telling me exactly what you want with your whole chest." He pressed close, right where Sai was aching for him. "Say the hearing-me part one more time."

"Want to hear you," Sai gasped, hips lifting to chase him. "All of it. The whole time. Don't you dare be quiet on me."

He took him slow and bare and unhurried, and there was nothing at all between them, no bit, no borrowed room, no audience, just Kyan working deep into the man he loved, the gold flooding down Sai's chest and his own name spilling out of Sai's mouth unmuffled, over and over, exactly the way Sai had asked for it. He scent-marked Sai's throat as he rocked into him, claiming him fresh and deep, and Sai dragged blunt nails down his spine and gave back every bit as good as he got, demanding, an equal, no longer anyone's quiet handed-around thing in a back room. He set a deep steady rhythm and built it, slow, until Sai was shaking under him and gasping his name like a prayer he'd given up on saying. When Kyan finally got a hand between them, Sai came fast and loud and utterly without shame, clenching tight and gold around him, and Kyan followed him over the edge a few strokes later with his face buried in the marked curve of that throat, groaning Sai's name into the scent like a man who'd finally found the door home and walked through it.

After, they lay tangled and wrecked and grinning at the water-stained ceiling, the watering can abandoned on the sill, the plants left thirsty and neither of them able to care.

"First thing that's all yours," Sai murmured, tracing slow shapes on Kyan's chest. "The Bethany thing. How's it sit."

"Like the start of something." Kyan caught his hand and kissed the knuckles, one at a time. "Turns out I'm good at building things up. Nobody ever bothered to find out, including me. All it took was someone letting me pick the aim and a gharial to come home to after."

"The gharial part stays non-negotiable," Sai said, smiling against his shoulder. "You're stuck with that part for good."

"Best clause in the whole contract." Kyan kissed the top of his head. "We should water your plants. I drowned a fig once, I know what neglect looks like, and that fern's judging us."

"Let it judge." Sai didn't move, boneless and claimed and warm against his side. "I'll water everything in the morning. Tonight you found four months of runway for your cousin and built the first thing that was ever yours, came home, and fucked me in our own bed. The fern can wait one night."

"Our bed," Kyan repeated, quiet, turning the word over. A month ago it had been Sai's bed in Sai's studio that Kyan was visiting. Somewhere in the last few weeks it had quietly become ours, and neither of them had announced it, it had just happened, the way the good things were starting to.

He pulled Sai closer in the dark, the green, with the steady hum of the dryers below, a man who'd spent thirty years getting used as a weapon learning, slow, in a bed too small for the both of them, exactly what he could build once he finally got to choose the aim himself.

Chapter Nineteen

Kyan's entire life arrived in four boxes on a gray weekday morning, and not one of them fit anywhere.

The condo had sold fast, the way places sold when they were staged and gleaming and priced by people who didn't need the money in any hurry, which was a quiet joke all by itself. A moving company Kyan had hired and paid for himself, because his mother wasn't paying for a single thing of his anymore, had boxed up whatever he'd asked them to keep and trucked it across town. The four boxes sat against the wall in Sai's nine-step studio, and there was nowhere else to put any of them.

"That's it?" Sai stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the stack. "That's the entire condo? Two thousand square feet?"

"That's the entire condo." Kyan nudged a box with his foot. "And honestly, three of these are clothes." He said it light, but Sai had gotten good at hearing the weight that lived under Kyan's light voice. "Here's the thing nobody tells you. When I went through that place and pulled out what was actually mine, things I'd chosen, things that meant something to me, it came to four boxes and most of it is shirts. The furniture came with the unit. The art was an investment my mother picked. The wine was for clients I didn't like. Two thousand square feet, and almost none of it was ever mine. I was a tenant in my own life."

"That's not a sad number." Sai crossed the studio and put a hand flat on his chest. "That's a clean one. Means you get to fill the rest with things you actually want this time. We'll go pick them out together. Slowly. Badly. We'll argue about a couch for a month."

"I'd like to argue about a couch for a month," Kyan said, and meant it, and some of the weight went out of him. "I keep waiting to mourn two thousand square feet of things that were never mine, and it won't come. I miss the idea of it more than I miss any of it. The idea that I had a life. Turns out the life weighed four boxes and I'd already left the good part of it in this studio."

They opened the boxes on the floor, because there was no surface in the place big enough to do it on, and it was exactly as advertised, mostly shirts. A handful of books Kyan had genuinely chosen for himself. A good watch he'd bought with his first real bonus, the one object in the whole haul his mother had neither purchased nor had a single opinion about. And at the very bottom of the last box, folded inside an old sweater like something hidden, a single framed photograph.

Sai watched Kyan go completely still over it.

"That's me," Kyan said. "And her. I'm maybe seven." He turned the frame so Sai could see it. A small, serious boy in an expensive coat, and beside him a younger Zahara, glamorous even then, one ringed hand resting on the boy's shoulder, the both of them looking into the camera like it was an appointment. "I don't even remember it being taken. I found it in the back of a drawer when I was packing, and I couldn't make myself put it in the donate pile. I have no idea why. She never displayed it. She isn't sentimental, she'd tell you sentiment is a tax on the weak. But she kept it in a drawer for thirty years, and now I've got it, and I couldn't throw it out." He set it down on the floor, careful, face up. "That's it. My whole childhood. One photo I'm not smiling in, that my mother kept in a drawer and never once looked at."

Sai sat down on the floor beside him and didn't reach for anything clever, because there wasn't anything clever that belonged here. He just set his shoulder against Kyan's and let him look at it as long as he needed to look.