Chapter Five
Kyan had imagined this more times than he would ever admit out loud, and in not one of those imaginings had he been this careful.
In the fantasies, the ones he'd shut down half-formed over a year of empty Chicago nights, he'd never had to think at all.
Dream-Sai was just there, willing, easy, and already fluent, and Kyan got to be exactly as much as he was without measuring a single ounce of it.
The real thing asked far more of him than any of that.
The real thing was a man with a fading bruise on his jaw and a brand-new word in his pocket, sitting on a club couch trusting Kyan not to be one more person who hurt him by accident, and that man asked Kyan to slow all the way down to a pace the fantasies had never bothered with.
Kyan found he wanted to. He'd spent the year thinking he missed having Sai.
It turned out what he'd missed was getting to take care of him.
"I want to start with something simple," he said. "Something I already know you like, so you can feel the difference between this and whatever you've been letting happen out there. Is that okay?"
Sai nodded, then caught himself and said it aloud, the way Kyan had been modeling for him all night. "Yes. That's okay."
"Good." Kyan reached for the top button of the good shirt and stopped with his fingers resting on it.
"I'm going to open this. You can stop me at any point.
You've got your word now, and it works for anything, not just the big dramatic stuff.
You don't like where my hand goes, you say it.
You want to slow down, you say it. Using it will never disappoint me. Tell me you heard all of that."
"I heard it." Sai's voice had gone soft and a little wondering, like a man being handed something he'd been told all his life he couldn't have. "Lioness. I've got it."
"You've got it."
Kyan slipped the first button free, and then the next, and took his slow time down the whole row of them, because the taking of time was the entire lesson, the thing he'd never once gotten to teach Sai in all the months they'd been together before.
He'd been so busy hiding what he was back then that he'd let their whole sex life stay quick and bright and surface-level, both of them rushing toward the finish like there was a prize for getting there.
There was no prize. He understood that now.
The prize was the part in the middle that he'd skipped.
The shirt fell open and Kyan eased it back off his shoulders.
A year of trying not to remember this body, of failing at it nightly, and here it all was anyway.
Smooth. Sai had always been smooth, not from any waxing ritual or careful shaving but because of what he was, the faint greenish-gold of scales living just under the skin where a gharial's nature ran close to the surface.
His chest was hard and his shoulders were lean and his belly was the soft part, the one truly vulnerable place on him, the spot a saltwater croc would armor over and a gharial simply left tender to the world.
Kyan flattened his palm against it and felt Sai's breath leap under his hand.
"You've gotten thinner." He didn't quite like it.
"I forget to eat when I'm anxious. I've been anxious for roughly a year." Sai's mouth tugged sideways. "I wonder whose fault that is."
"Mine. Part of it's mine." Kyan didn't dodge it.
He let the hand on Sai's belly travel up his chest, over the steady drum of his heart, up the long line of his throat where the scales flickered when his thumb passed, and rested two fingers against Sai's lips.
Sai kissed them without being told to, an old reflex, and the simple sweetness of it nearly broke the careful thing Kyan was working so hard to be.
"Lie back for me. All the way down. Let me do the work tonight. You just feel it."
Sai went back against the arm of the couch and let his legs fall open, and Kyan moved with him, settling over him without putting any weight down, braced on one forearm so they lay chest to chest and Sai could feel the size of him without being pinned beneath it.
He kept watching Sai's face for the flinch, the freeze, the place a stranger's hands had trained into him.
It didn't come. Sai looked up with his whole heart sitting right there in his eyes, unguarded, and that was terrifying in its own way, because Kyan had spent twelve months deciding he didn't get to have this, and here it was being offered up like nothing had ever broken between them.
He thought about Sai's limits, the ones he'd named so clearly an hour ago. No being passed around. No being left tied and abandoned like a coat on a hook. Not one of those lines would ever get tested on his watch.
"Can I touch you?" he asked. "Properly. With my hand."
"You know you can."
"I want to hear consent every time tonight.
That's the rule, just for tonight. I crossed a line with you once without asking, a long time ago, and we both paid for it for a year afterward.
So, tonight I ask. You answer, Over and over, until the asking and the answering stop feeling like a ceremony and start being the air we breathe.
" He held Sai's gaze. "Can I touch you?"
Understanding, old grief, and a great deal of want crossed Sai's face all at once. "Yes," he said. "Touch me. Please."
Kyan got the buckle open one-handed, dragged the zipper down, and freed his cock.
Sai was already hard, his short, thick cock flushed dark and exactly as Kyan had remembered it on every night he'd sworn he wasn't remembering.
He wrapped his fist around the base and squeezed, slow, just to hear the pleading sound it pulled out of him, and got it, a punched-out moan that went straight through Kyan's chest and lower.
He knew this cock. He knew the vein on the underside that made Sai curse, the spot just under the head that jumped his hips, the exact grip that turned the man boneless.
A year apart hadn't taken one bit of it from his hands.
If anything they'd spent twelve months rehearsing.
He dragged his thumb through the precum that had begun to ooze at the tip and worked it down the shaft, and watched the scales flare gold along Sai's throat, the gharial in him rising to the surface the instant his control started to go.
Kyan had always loved that more than he could say.
The body that couldn't lie about how badly it wanted him.
He started slow. Slower than slow. A loose, teasing drag of his fist from root to tip, barely any pressure, more promise than friction, just enough to keep Sai hard and aching and nowhere near enough to get him there.
Sai's hips came up off the couch, chasing, fucking up into the ring of Kyan's fingers, and Kyan eased his hand back out of reach and clicked his tongue.
"Easy," Kyan murmured. "You'll get there. I decide when."
"That's new." Sai barely got the words out.
"That's the whole thing. That's the part nobody bothered to show you.
" Kyan put his hand back and kept the rhythm even and merciless, twisting his wrist on the upstroke the way he knew Sai couldn't stand, dragging his slick palm over the head until Sai's whole body jerked, working him with the unhurried confidence of a man reading a map he'd never actually forgotten.
"Out there you've been letting men rush you, or you've been rushing yourself, getting it over with fast so you can leave a place you can't stand.
There's no leaving here. There's no hurry here.
I'm going to take so long getting you there that you forget there was ever anywhere else you wanted to be. "
Sai whimpered, and his hand came up like he meant to take over and drive himself, and Kyan caught the wrist gently and set it back down at Sai's side.
"Hands stay there," he said. "Unless you need them.
You always get to need them, that's what the word is for.
But if you're only reaching because you're impatient, then no.
The pace tonight is mine. The word is yours.
That's the trade. You keep the thing that stops everything. I keep the speed. Deal?"
He watched Sai weigh it, impatient and curious in the same breathless face, and watched the exact moment his ex-boyfriend stopped trying to grab the wheel and let himself be driven.
That instant was the thing Kyan got off on more than any single act in the world, more than rope or toys or any position.
The moment a man he wanted quit demanding his pleasure and started simply receiving it.
Sai's lips had been going tight with every swallowed go faster, and then they stopped.
His head fell back against the armrest. He let Kyan have it.
"You feel that?" Kyan breathed. "What you just did? You handed me something nobody could ever take from you by force. That's the whole secret. It was never me running you over. It's you choosing to give it."
Sai's eyes had gone wet at the corners again, and it wasn't grief at all. "Why'd you really come back?" he asked, ragged, while Kyan's hand kept up its slow unhurried torture. "To Vegas. The true reason, not the business one."
It wasn't fair to ask a man serious questions in this exact state, so Kyan answered with an unfair question of his own.
"The business is the reason on paper," he said.
"But I kept my place here when I left. I rent it out a few weeks at a time, that's all.
One phone call and it's empty again inside a week.
" He tightened his grip a fraction and sped a fraction, just enough to pull a gasp out of Sai and wipe his face clean of everything else, then drew it back before he could tip over. "Why. You asking whether I could stay?"
"Maybe," Sai gasped.
"Maybe's an honest answer. I'll take maybe." Kyan kissed the bruise on his jaw, featherlight. "Let's get all the way through tonight first. Then you decide whether you still want a lion underfoot, after you've actually seen what one is."
Kyan was hard enough to ache inside his own slacks, and he ignored it completely, the way he'd been ignoring it for an hour. That night wasn't for him. That was its own pleasure, one he'd teach Sai some other night, and holding it made every moan and whimper out of Sai's mouth land twice as hard.
He brought him to the brink and held him there, ruthless, fist tight, slick, and relentless, until Sai was shaking all over and the scales had spread in a gold flush down his throat and over his chest and his cock was leaking steadily across Kyan's knuckles.
Sai bit down on sounds that wanted to be begging.
He didn't beg. He took it, thighs trembling with the work of holding still, handing Kyan the pace even as it wrecked him.
Only when the trembling eased, when Sai quit fighting the pace and sank into it completely, did Kyan finally let him have it.
He pumped him fast and sure through the last stretch, thumb riding the head, and Sai came with a shout he made no effort to muffle, spilling hot and thick over Kyan's fist in pulse after pulse while Kyan worked him through every shudder and growled praise against his ear, telling him he was perfect, telling him he'd taken it so well, telling him every filthy tender thing a year of strangers had never once thought to say.
For a while afterward neither of them moved. Then Kyan reached for the good shirt, thought better of using it, found a clean towel on the room's small shelf instead, and cleaned them both with the same lack of hurry he'd brought to everything else.
"Okay, wow." Sai dragged a hand down his face. "We never did anything like that. Before, it was a handjob, in and out, lights off. That was... not that."
"That was barely the first inch of a very long ruler.
" Kyan got them both sitting up, Sai loose and warm and heavy against his side.
"And you took it beautifully. You wanted to know what you like?
You just learned one thing for certain. You like being slowed down.
You like not being the one in charge of how good it gets allowed to be. We'll write it at the top of the list."
Sai laughed, dazed and a little astonished, and the sound was the best thing Kyan had heard in twelve long months. Then Sai's stomach growled, loud in the hush of the room, and they both looked down at it like it had spoken out of turn.
"When did you actually last eat?" Kyan asked.
"I'd like a lawyer."
"That's what I thought." Kyan stood, put himself back together, and reached a hand down to haul Sai up off the couch. "Get dressed. We're going to get you some real food. Not a club soda and whatever sad thing lives in a vending machine."
"Right now?" Sai blinked up at him, still pink and not entirely steady on his feet. "It's the middle of the night."
"Vegas has never once cared what time it is. Up." Kyan tossed him the shirt. "I'm taking you to dinner. A real dinner."
Sai buttoned himself back together, slow and a little clumsy, and Kyan watched him do it and thought about phone calls and empty apartments and a thousand miles that had abruptly stopped feeling like geography and started feeling like a thing a man could simply decide to fix.
He kept all of it behind his teeth. It was far too soon, and he'd done more than enough deciding for one night.
Back at the hotel sat a folder of figures he was supposed to be rehearsing for tomorrow's sit-down with his aunt, the pitch he'd flown there to make, the whole reason for the trip. It could keep until morning. He'd spent his entire life being early to the wrong things.
"Where are we going?" Sai asked.
Kyan smiled and pulled open the door on the heat and the noise of his aunt's club. "You'll see. Trust me. It's right up your river."