Chapter Three
Kyan had spent a year learning how to hold his lion still, and it took every hour of that practice not to go looking for whoever had put the mark on Sai's jaw.
He kept his arm easy around Sai's shoulders.
He kept his breathing slow and even, drawing each breath down into his belly.
He'd learned how the hard way. His mother had gotten tired of him snapping at board members and shipped him off to an expensive man in a quiet office, six months of it, all to teach him to feel the animal coming before it arrived.
Under all of it the lion paced, ears flat, wanting a name and a face and an address.
Kyan did the work of not feeding it, because feeding it was how shifters got thrown out of this club, and worse than thrown out.
He'd promised himself before he ever stepped off the elevator that he wouldn't be that lion, the one his mother always warned about, the one that proved every ugly thing people already believed about big cats.
He hadn't counted on a bruise to test it.
"Tell me anyway," he said again, when Sai didn't.
Sai sighed against his chest. The fight went out of him the way it always had, all at once.
"It was a few days ago. There was a guy.
Wolf, I think. He seemed fine. He said all the right things at the bar, asked what I was into, acted like he cared about the answer.
So we went into one of the rooms and it was okay for a while, and then it wasn't. He had his hand on my face and he kept telling me to be quiet.
I tried to say I wanted to stop. It came out wrong, too soft, and he thought I was playing along.
" Sai's jaw worked under Kyan's palm. "By the time I got loud enough that he understood, I already had this.
He let go the second he got it. He even apologized.
He seemed really sorry, actually, and that's the part that sticks.
He wasn't a monster. He just didn't know I meant it.
Because I didn't know how to make him know. "
Every word was a small stone dropped down a deep well, and Kyan listened to each one hit bottom.
His free hand had closed into a fist on his own thigh without thinking about it.
He looked down at it, at the white knuckles, at the place where the claws would come if he let them.
He forced the hand open, one finger at a time, and laid it flat.
There was nothing there to fight. The wolf was days gone and had stopped the moment he understood, which made him better than most but didn't help Kyan at all, because the thing the lion wanted to tear apart wasn't a wolf.
It was the last year itself. It was every night Sai had walked into this building looking for something and walked out hurt because no one had taught him how to keep himself safe.
"You didn't have a word," Kyan said quietly.
"A what?"
"A safe word. Something you say that means everything stops.
No questions, no negotiating, no maybe-just-a-little-more.
A word a scene can't talk its way around.
" He stroked his thumb along Sai's cheekbone, careful of the bruise, like a cracked thing he was afraid of finishing off.
"If you'd had one, and that wolf was any kind of decent, that's all it would have taken.
One word. His hands come off you. The lights come up.
You go home whole. You didn't have one because nobody gave you one.
You've been swimming in the deep end of this for a year with no one on the side of the pool. "
He felt Sai take that in. "Nobody ever told me there was a word."
There was a word. There was a word built into the bones of this building, and Kyan had known it the way he knew his own name since the day his aunt first laid it down.
His aunt had raised Kinky Kritters out of nothing so that every shifter who rode the elevator down could be exactly what they were without it costing them their safety or their dignity, and she'd set one word at the heart of it like a stone laid in a foundation.
Everyone who worked the floor knew it. Every regular learned it on their first night, or was supposed to.
Sai had been coming here for a year, getting handed off to strangers, and not one of them had thought to give a nervous reptile in over his head the single most important word in the room.
The thought put a fresh edge on the anger, and this time it wasn't aimed at any wolf.
It was aimed a lot closer to home, at a family that had built a safe place and then let a man Kyan loved fall straight through the gaps in it.
He didn't say the word yet. Saying it felt like something he wanted to do right, when Sai was sitting up and listening and not bruised and folded small in the dark across his lap. He set the want aside for later. He'd gotten too good at that.
He was still holding it when Sai spoke again, so quietly the bass through the wall nearly took it.
"Can I tell you something I should have told you a year ago?"
"Yes."
"That time you spanked me." Under Kyan's arm, Sai had gone very still.
"It didn't just startle me. It stung for hours after.
Sitting down stung. And I know it was light.
I know it was play. Yet I still couldn't tell you, because you'd looked so happy doing it.
I thought if I said it hurt then you'd finally see there was something wrong with me.
So, I didn't say anything. I ran instead.
That's the real story of how we ended. You never did one thing wrong except pick a coward. "
"Don't." It came out low and instant. "Don't ever call yourself that."
But the rest of it Kyan had to sit with, because there was no arguing with the facts of it. Only with the blame.
He'd left a mark on Sai once too.
Not like the wolf. He'd never grabbed, never held him down against a no, never done anything Sai hadn't laughed and agreed to first. But a year ago, in the warm dark of Sai's apartment, Kyan had let his hand come down on him once, playful, testing, hopeful, and Sai had gone still, strange, and quiet, and Kyan had brushed it off as nerves and never asked.
The mark had lasted hours. Sai had carried it on his skin and somewhere else besides, and Kyan had been so busy being disappointed that his vanilla boyfriend couldn't meet him that he'd never once stopped to ask whether he'd hurt him.
He had. He'd been the first person ever to leave a bruise on the man, before any wolf, before any of this.
He'd done it out of carelessness. Then he'd let it become the reason they ended.
So he was not, he finally understood, sitting in some clean high place looking down at a wolf. He was a man who'd left his own bruise and then run a thousand miles from the consequences.
"You went somewhere just now," Sai murmured.
"I did." Kyan pressed his lips to the bruise again, barely touching, and made himself surface.
That was the part he'd known was coming since the elevator doors opened.
He hated it. He was going to do it anyway, because the alternative was the selfish thing, and he'd spent a year teaching himself not to be selfish about Sai.
He eased Sai up off his lap and around to sit facing him, so the next thing he said would land like the truth it was meant to be and not like a murmur into someone's hair.
"Sai. Listen to me. I want you to stop coming here."
Sai blinked. "What?"
"This place. This whole world." Kyan made his voice gentle and held it level, which cost him more than yelling would have.
"You're not kinky. You never were. I spanked you one time, lightly, for fun, and it didn't just startle you, it hurt you for hours and you never told me until tonight.
That's not nothing. That's your own body telling you something true about what you are.
And what you are is someone soft and good who likes to wake up at two in the morning and curl into the person he loves, and there is not one thing in the world wrong with that.
It's one of the best things I've ever known in my life.
But it isn't this. It isn't rooms with numbers on the doors and strangers who don't care whether you understand what you agreed to. "
"You don't get to decide that for me." Sai pulled back a little.
"I'm not deciding it. I'm watching it happen to you.
" He took Sai's hand, because he needed the contact even while he was using it to cut.
"If you're a two, you shouldn't spend your one life trying to grind yourself into a six to keep up with somebody who's an eight.
You find another two. You find the man who thinks you wanting his mouth at two in the morning is the sexiest thing he's ever heard in his life, not the one who thinks tying you up and taking you apart until you forget your own name is an ordinary weeknight.
Those are different men. You deserve the first one.
You deserve to be wanted exactly the way you already are, not graded on a curve in a room full of teeth. "
He watched it land. He watched it do exactly what he'd built it to do, and he despised himself the whole time.
"And what about what you deserve?" Sai asked, very quietly.
The question went in under his ribs where he had no guard up.
Kyan had the answer ready, the noble one, the one he'd rehearsed somewhere over Nebraska without admitting that was what he was doing.
"I deserve to know the man I love is safe and happy.
That's the whole of it. Even if safe and happy is somewhere I'm not. "
"That's a beautiful little speech." Sai's voice had gone rough at the edges. "You've clearly practiced it. Did you practice it on the plane, or have you been carrying it around for a year waiting for a chance to use it on me?"
That was closer to the bone than Kyan was ready for, and his face must have shown it, because Sai's mouth twisted, not in triumph but in grief.
"Yeah," Sai said. "That's what I thought."
For a moment neither of them looked away. Sai's eyes were going bright and wet at the rims, and Kyan made himself watch, because turning from it would have been one more coward's mercy he hadn't earned the right to give himself.
Then Sai wiped his face with the back of his hand, fast and rough, and stood.
"Okay," he said. His voice came out steadier than Kyan expected, which was so much worse than tears would have been. "Okay. You've made yourself real clear."
And he walked out.
The door swung shut behind him and let the music surge up a notch, then sealed it back down, and Kyan was alone in room two with a couch that still held the warmth of him and a club soda going flat on the table.
He sat there and told himself he'd done the right thing.
He was good at telling himself things. He'd told himself it was healthy to erase Sai's number.
He'd told himself the move back to Chicago was about his mother needing him close, and not about putting a thousand miles between his own heart and the man who'd run from it.
He'd told himself, on every quiet night in a city that never quite turned into home, that wanting less was the same as needing less, and that a man could train himself out of a hunger the way he'd trained the lion to lie down on command.
He had believed almost none of it, and he had said all of it anyway, because saying it was easier than the truth.
The truth was that Sai had walked into this awful, beloved building over a year ago looking for something, and the something was him.
Amani had read it off him from behind the bar in a week.
A stranger's bruise on his jaw spelled it out in plain letters.
Sai hadn't taken up a reckless hobby. He'd been running a search, and he'd been running it alone and badly and getting hurt, and Kyan had just looked the only man he'd ever loved in the face and told him, kindly, to give up.
The lion lifted its head.
Kyan stood. The flat club soda went in the trash and the keychain went back in his pocket.
He stood in the middle of the small quiet room, listening to the bass come through the wall, and he would have bet the whole Chicago deal on exactly where Sai was right now: at that bar, ordering a drink he didn't want, because walking out the door meant it was really over.
He'd made himself real clear. That was the whole trouble. He'd been crystal clear about everything except the one thing that was actually true, and Sai was out there being brave about a kindness that was really just Kyan protecting himself, and there was still a word Kyan hadn't given him.
He opened the door.