Chapter Six
Sai had left the club a hundred times with his head down, slipping out fast and ashamed after getting off with men whose names he forgot before the elevator reached the lobby. Leaving with his hand in Kyan's was nothing like that.
They rode up together, and Sai stood with his head high for once, which was a small ridiculous thing to be proud of and he was proud of it anyway.
Kyan took up the center of the elevator the way lions took up the center of everything.
He wasn't Amani, his family didn't own this place, but he was still a big cat, and it showed.
So, when a shark slipped in just as the doors were closing, broad and cold-scented and already letting his gaze travel slow over Sai, Sai felt his old instinct to make himself smaller, and didn't get the chance to act on it.
Kyan's arm came around him. Not grabbing, just settling, a warm weight across Sai's shoulders, and over the top of Sai's head Kyan bared his teeth at the shark in a flat, unhurried display that needed no translation. The shark found something fascinating to look at on the elevator wall.
Sai pressed his palm to the small of Kyan's back, thanking him without words. He hadn't thought the shark would do anything. He just hadn't had anyone stand between him and the possible aggression in a long, long time.
In the lobby, Kyan traded his arm for Sai's hand again, and led him out into the warm Vegas night and over to a car that made Sai stop walking.
"This isn't you," Sai said. It was a low, sleek convertible, the kind of expensive that announced itself a block away, and Kyan had always preferred his money quiet.
"My mother booked the trip." Kyan opened the passenger door for him, and those four words explained the whole car.
Sai had never met Zahara, only assembled her out of overheard phone calls and the few stories Kyan let slip, a woman built entirely out of diamonds and certainty, the sort who'd choose a car for the statement it made about her even when she'd never sit in it.
Kyan slid behind the wheel. "She doesn't travel any way but loud. "
"That explains the spaceship." Sai sank into a seat that probably cost more than his monthly rent and tried to look like he belonged in it. "Where are we actually going?"
"Sushi."
"You don't eat fish. Lions don't eat fish."
"Gharials do." Kyan pulled them smoothly out toward the Strip, the lights sliding gold across his face.
"Trust me. My mother staged this whole trip.
The hotel, the car, a standing table at every room in town she wants me seen in.
The reservations are the one useful thing which is the one useful thing she's done all week. "
Sai let it go and watched the city pour past the window, and tried not to read too much into a man driving him to dinner in the middle of the night like the last year had been a long drought that had finally moved on.
The restaurant, when they reached it, said one word on the front in plain letters.
Fish. Heavy black curtains hid the windows, and there was nothing about it that promised sushi at all, let alone sushi worth the drive.
Sai had walked past places like it and assumed they were fronts for something.
He kept that opinion to himself as Kyan handed the keys to a valet and walked them up to a host standing in a small room with a closed door behind him.
"Reservation?" the host asked.
"Kyan, lion. Sai, gharial."
Sai's head turned sharply. Nobody announced species out loud. Not in front of humans, not ever, because the entire unspoken agreement of shifter life was that everyone passed for human at all times, everywhere, no exceptions. The host only smiled and touched his own chest.
"Boa," he said. "Follow me. Your room's ready."
It was a shifter restaurant. Sai followed the boa down a corridor of stark white walls and hand-numbered doors, listening hard and hearing nothing through any of them. "Soundproofed," he guessed.
"For our guests' privacy. Though that's not the only reason." The boa glanced back at him, amused. Then a sound came from behind one of the doors they passed, a muffled animal screech that no human throat had ever made, and Sai jumped back into Kyan without deciding to.
"They're shifted," he breathed. "In public."
"You can shift here, if you want to." Kyan's hand found the small of his back and stayed there, steadying, as they walked. "It's the whole point of the place. Total privacy, every kind. A little alarm goes off when your time's up."
Sai had no idea what to do with that. He'd shifted maybe a dozen times in the last five years, always alone, always somewhere remote, because his other shape was enormous and graceless on land and made people who weren't expecting it afraid.
He hadn't known a place like this existed.
He hadn't known, until this exact hallway, how much he'd wanted one to.
The boa stopped at a blank white door and opened it. "Enjoy yourselves. Dinner's laid out." And he was gone back up the corridor before Sai could decide whether to thank him.
Sai stepped in, and his eyes went first to the sushi, dozens of pieces of it, jewel-bright and beautiful, and then to the fact that it had been laid out across a man.
He was on the table on his stomach, a sheet draped low over his hips and nothing else, his face down in a padded hole the way a person lies for a massage, headphones over his ears. The sushi ran in careful rows along his back and the backs of his thighs. He seemed entirely relaxed about it.
Kyan stepped toward him, closer than Sai liked, and Sai caught his sleeve and pulled him back. "This is too weird," he said under his breath.
"You don't want sushi?"
"I want sushi. I don't want sushi off a person." Sai kept his voice low, though the headphones meant the man probably couldn't hear them. "Who even is he? Does he actually want to be doing this? You can't just assume."
That was the thing he'd learned the hard way, over and over, in rooms with numbers on the doors. A yes couldn't be assumed. It had to be real and it had to be spoken, and every time Sai had gotten hurt was a time somebody had skipped that part.
"Then let's ask him," Kyan said, like it was obvious, and that was somehow the most reassuring thing he'd done all night.
He went and knelt beside the man and tapped his shoulder, and the man lifted his head and slid one earpiece off.
"Everything okay?"
"My boyfriend wants to be sure you're not being made to do this," Kyan said.
Sai felt the word boyfriend go off in his chest like a small flare, and made himself ignore it, because this mattered more. "You're not, right?" he said. "You're here because you want to be? Nobody's, I don't know, holding something over you?"
The man laughed, a genuine sound. "I'd reassure you, but I don't think you want sushi all over the floor.
" He shifted his head to see Sai better.
"No. Nobody's making me. Is this my dream job?
Not really. I'm finishing a master's in criminal justice.
I want to work shifter enforcement when I'm done.
But the loans are a nightmare, and this place pays stupidly well even before tips.
So, I'll probably keep doing it on my days off even after I make the force.
Come eat. Hands are optional, the sheet stays on, no biting unless it's an obvious accident, and I'm listening to a true-crime podcast, so honestly you won't bother me. Pretend I'm furniture."
"What are you?" Sai asked.
"Hawk. Now eat, you've only got so long in here." He set the earpiece back and lowered his face into the rest.
Sai looked at Kyan, steadier for having asked. Consent given, plainly, in the man's own words. Nothing in a year of numbered rooms had ever been this clean about it, and it had taken a stranger laid out as a table to show him what clean looked like. "Okay," he said. "I'll just. Take a piece."
He reached for one near the hawk's shoulder, and Kyan made a small sound.
"Not with your hand."
Sai blinked. "I can't use my hands at all?"
"Not if you want to eat."
So that was the game. Sai bent down and took a piece of sushi into his mouth, trying to touch the man as little as he possibly could, and nearly dropped it for the effort.
He got it down, barely tasting the bright clean salt of the fish over the embarrassment, and tried a second piece with marginally more confidence, and a third where his lips brushed warm skin and he flinched back upright.
He couldn't do it. The food was extraordinary and he was genuinely hungry, but he could not make his body believe a person was a table, and he didn't see how anyone really could.
"I'm sorry." He looked at Kyan, who'd stretched out on the floor to watch him like a cat in a sunbeam, which was close enough to the truth. "I can't. Can I please just use my hands?"
Kyan didn't look disappointed. He got up off the floor, and then he was shrugging out of his clothes, folding them over a chair, every piece, because there was no other way to do the thing he'd clearly decided to do.
Sai watched him strip without shame and then drop down into his lion, the shift rolling over him in a single smooth motion, and where Kyan had stood there was suddenly a great tawny cat with a mane Sai had always wanted to bury his hands in.
The expensive clothes stayed folded on the chair like anyone else's. A shift kept nothing human.
The lion shook out his mane, looked at Sai with familiar amber eyes, and then flowed back up into a man, naked and unbothered, crossing the room to him.
"Take your clothes off and shift," Kyan said. "I'll feed you instead."
Sai's face went hot. "You're going to feed me. Off him."
"With my hands. Like a civilized animal." Kyan picked up a piece of sushi between two fingers, holding it delicately to prove the point. "It was supposed to be a fun game for you. We'll just play it a different way."
Sai hesitated only a moment more. Then he undressed, folding his good shirt with more care than the rest, and let himself fall into his other shape.
It felt, as it always did, like an enormous relief.
He was long and low and armored, his tail stretching out behind him, his short legs nothing he'd ever move gracefully on but his body finally his own.
He rarely got to be like this. It was too big, too frightening to others, too impractical for a studio apartment and a job at a garden center.
There, in a white soundproof room with the only person he trusted, it just felt right.
In this shape he could hear everything, the tinny hiss of the hawk's podcast, the ventilation, and under it all Kyan's heartbeat, slow and even and entirely unafraid.
Nobody's heartbeat stayed steady this close to his shifted self. Kyan's always had.
"Open your mouth," Kyan said.
Sai tilted his long head back and let his jaws fall open, every one of his teeth on display, more teeth than most people could look at without going pale. Kyan only reached out and touched the points of them, unafraid, the way he'd never once been afraid of any part of Sai.
"I forgot how many of these you've got." He fed the first piece in, rich fatty tuna with a bite of jalapeno, one of Sai's favorites, and Sai swallowed it whole and opened up again, eager as anything.
The next was salmon, perfect. He expected a third and instead got Kyan's fingers stroking down the length of his snout.
Sai had always been embarrassed by his snout.
It was long and narrow and nothing like the blunt handsome jaw of a crocodile, a feature he could do exactly nothing about and had spent a lifetime wishing were different.
But Kyan rubbed slow circles into the small scales along it, the way he always used to, and Sai's eyes drifted half shut, and the embarrassment faded under the simple weight of being touched there on purpose.
The hawk shifted slightly on the table, and Sai's attention snapped to him, and he didn't love the reminder that they weren't alone.
"Almost done," Kyan told him. He rubbed his knuckles along the underside of Sai's chin. "He's a gharial," he added, to no one, to the room, pride warming every word. "Not a common thing at all. I like them, though. He's different, my Sai is."
Sai went very still.
My Sai. Kyan hadn't called him that in a year.
Not once, not in the club, not on the drive, not even on the couch with his hand around him.
Sai flowed back up into himself all at once, standing naked and unsteady in the bright room, his folded clothes a small distance away and the words still ringing in him, and he didn't reach for the clothes yet. He stepped in and kissed Kyan's cheek.
"Thank you," he said.
Kyan turned and caught his mouth properly, gentle. "For feeding you?"
"For calling me yours. Again. Like you used to." Sai's voice wobbled. He didn't fight it. "I missed hearing it more than I let myself know."
Kyan kissed him again, slow, and when he drew back his amber eyes had gone soft in a way the year apart hadn't managed to wear off them. "I missed getting to say it," he said. "Get dressed, gharial. Finish your dinner. Then there's one more place I want to take you tonight."