Page 32 of Gagging the Gharial

He kissed Sai first, slow and deep, standing in the middle of the light, and felt him melt into it the way he always did once the bracing went out of him. Then he walked him backward into the light and took him down onto the warm wood, easy, the sun lying across both of them in a wide gold bar.

He took his time, because slow was the gift and the empty room had nowhere either of them needed to be. He got Sai's shirt off and put his mouth to the scent-gland under his jaw, scenting him deep and slow, working the claim in past where the days could reach it, in the home they'd just bought, and Sai arched up into it with a sound that filled the bare echoing room. The gold flooded down his throat and across his chest, lit warmer by the sun pouring through the windows they owned now, and Kyan kissed his way down all of it, unhurried, reverent, marking the inside of each wrist, the crease of each hip, until Sai was begging into the bright air with no walls of habit left to keep him quiet.

He stayed there, mouth and hands relearning every inch he'd long since memorized, until he had Sai writhing in the sun with both palms pressed flat to the bare wood because there was nothing else to hold onto. He got Sai's cock in his fist and then in his mouth and took him to the edge and held him there, drawing it out the way Sai had learned to love, sucking him slow and gripping tight at the base every time he got close, the empty room ringing with every sound Sai made because there was no gag and no neighbor and no reason on earth to be quiet in a home that was theirs. Sai begged openly, gold-flushed to the hips and chasing it, and Kyan made him wait, and made him ask again, and didn't give him more until he was shaking with it.

He laid Sai out in the light on the floor of their own first room and pushed inside him bare, slow, nothing between them. Just Kyan moving deep into the man he loved, in a square of warm sun, on hardwood that belonged to the two of them and no one else alive. Sai wrapped around him and held on and said his name into the empty room like he was teaching the place their names, and the windows poured gold over both of them. When Sai came it was loud and shameless, his cock gushing hot between their bodies, gold-scaled and shaking in a wall of light, clenching down so hard that Kyan lost his rhythm and followed him with a growl, grinding in deep, his teeth settling careful and sure over the gland at Sai's throat and holding while he filled him, setting the one claim that would never wash out, in a home that was finally, actually theirs.

After, they lay tangled and sweat-bright on the bare warm floor, no furniture, no plants, no boxes, just two grown men, a floor full of late sun, and the first memory their new home would ever hold.

"Mated," Sai murmured into his chest, dazed, one hand over the place at his own throat where Kyan’s teeth had gone in. "Actually mated. That one doesn't wear off."

"That one doesn't wear off." Kyan pressed the words into his hair. "Every mark I put on you after this is just me enjoying myself."

"Best housewarming this place is ever going to get," Sai mumbled into his chest. "Everything after this is downhill."

"We haven't even moved the fern in." Kyan pressed a kiss to his damp hair. "Imagine how good it gets once the fern approves of the light."

"The fern is going to lose its entire mind in here." Sai stretched, boneless, gold-flecked, and claimed, in the middle of the room they owned. He turned his head and looked at the wall of windows, the gold going long and amber as the afternoon tipped toward evening, the first sunset they'd ever watch from their own floor. "We don't even have a lamp," he said, wondering. "We're going to have to buy everything. Forks. A bed. A trash can. We own a wall of windows and just two forks."

"We'll buy forks." Kyan laced their fingers together against his chest. "We'll buy a terrible couch and argue about it for weeks, like I always wanted. We'll do all of it. Slow. Together. There's no rush on any of it, because nobody's going to take the place while we shop for forks." He kissed Sai's shoulder. "Welcome home, gharial."

"Welcome home, lion."

Kyan looked up at the ceiling of the first place that had ever, in thirty-one years, actually been his, lying in the light with the only person who'd ever made him feel like he belonged in a room, and thought that he had burned an entire inheritance to the ground to get here, to a bare hardwood floor and a wall of windows and a gharial, and that it had been, without contest, the best trade he would ever make.

Chapter Twenty-One

Moving day came with the whole family, because apparently this family did nothing quietly, nothing separately, and nothing without strong opinions nobody had asked for.

Sai had planned to do it himself, the way he'd done his whole life: rent a truck, carry his own boxes down his own stairs, not trouble a soul. He'd mentioned the date once, in passing, at a Sunday dinner, and thought nothing more of it. Then on Saturday morning a small army turned up outside the new place. Amani arrived with coffee for everyone and a playlist no one had requested and would not be allowed to turn off. Nero came with a borrowed truck and the grim, unhurried competence of a man who had clearly moved a lot of things in his life he did not discuss. Reza was terrifyingly strong for an otter and carried a loveseat up a flight of stairs by himself out of what looked like spite. Even Clyce came, dry and efficient, lifted the heaviest things without being asked, and accepted exactly one cup of coffee as his entire fee.

Kyan, it turned out, had never moved anything in his life.

Movers had always done it, the invisible kind his mother paid for and never thanked, and he approached a flight of stairs and a heavy box with total, doomed confidence. He got himself wedged in the stairwell. He carried boxes by the wrong end and wondered aloud why they were so hard to hold. He dropped a carton of his own shirts down three steps and looked so personally betrayed by the event that Reza had to sit down on the landing and recover. Amani appointed himself Kyan's supervisor for the sole purpose of heckling him, and Nero, who said almost nothing the entire day, watched Kyan try to wrestle a bookshelf around the corner of the landing and offered one quiet sentence, "Other way, rich boy," that broke the whole stairwell up laughing.

Kyan took every bit of it grinning, and that was the thing Sai kept catching on. The man had spent thirty years in cold rooms where every word was a transaction with a hidden scorecard, and here he was getting roasted by an otter and a ferret on a staircase, sweating through a borrowed shirt, dropping his own laundry, happier than Sai had ever once seen him. Sai kept waiting for the old Kyan to surface, the one who'd flinch at being laughed at, who'd go cold and smooth to protect himself. That Kyan never surfaced. He was just gone, left behind with everything else he'd walked out of, and good riddance to him.

And Bethany, with a week and a half left before Los Angeles, spent one of those days carrying Sai's furniture up the stairs.

"You did not have to do this," Sai told her, for the fourth time, as she backed up the steps with one end of his dresser braced against her hip.

"I absolutely did." She set it down in the bedroom, breathing hard, and looked around the place, the light, the green of the tree out the window. "Listen. I'm not going to be here for the rest of it. The first Sunday in the new house. The first time the oven catches fire because Kyan thinks he can cook now. The first stupid fight about where the couch goes. I'm going to be a state away missing every single piece of it." She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "So, I get to be here for this part. I get to carry the dresser up the stairs of your first real home. Let me have the dresser, Sai."

So he let her have the dresser. And when she straightened up with her eyes a little too bright, he pretended not to notice, because he was learning that this was a thing the family did for each other: they let each other keep their dignity around the soft stuff, and just made sure to stand close while they did.

The plants came last, because the plants came carefully.

Sai wouldn't let anyone else so much as touch them. He ferried them over himself in the back of his own car, two slow trips, the pothos, the citrus, the jade, and a dozen others belted into the seats like nervous passengers, and the fern, the enormous ancient ridiculous fern that had been with him longer than any human being in his life, rode shotgun the whole way like a large green dog who didn't trust the driver.

He set them up in the plant room himself, alone, while the family argued cheerfully about furniture in the other rooms.

It took him the better part of an hour. He'd been dreaming about this room without letting himself admit he was dreaming about it, and there it was, real, an entire room, his, the light coming in clean and bright through the tall south windows. He placed each plant exactly where it would be happiest. The sun-lovers crowded into the windows. The shade ones along the cool inner wall. And the fern in the best spot in the whole apartment, dead center in the pour of gold, because it had earned the best spot a hundred times over and they both knew it. He turned the pot a quarter at a time until its best side faced the door. Eight years of hauling it between bad windows, and it had never once had a best side anybody would see. It finally did. When he was finished, he stood in the doorway and looked at it, a whole room gone green and gold in the light, his plants with real room to grow for the first time in their lives, and he had to put a hand over his mouth.

Because eight years ago he'd been seasonal help nobody expected anything from. And one year ago he'd been a man crying alone in a dingy studio over a dingier laundromat, watering a crowded windowsill because it was the only thing that reliably slowed his heart. Finally, he had a plant room. A whole room, full of light, for the green things he'd kept alive through the years he could barely keep himself alive.

"Hey." Kyan appeared in the doorway behind him, quiet, sweat-damp and rumpled from the stairs. "You disappeared. You okay?"

"I have a plant room," Sai said, and his voice broke clean across it. "Kyan. I have a whole room. For the plants."