Chapter Eight
The hotel was the kind of place Sai had only ever seen from the outside, through glass, on his way to somewhere he actually belonged.
The lobby was all marble, crystal, and hush, the floor so polished it threw the chandeliers back up at the ceiling.
Sai stumbled half a step crossing it because he kept looking up instead of down.
He felt like a smudge somebody had let in by mistake.
Only Kyan's hand around his, warm and certain, kept him walking toward the bank of mirrored elevators at the far end like the doors to somewhere even more expensive.
"Don't get skittish on me," Kyan murmured as the nearest one opened.
"It's just a little more than I'm used to.
" Which was the understatement of Sai's entire life.
His apartment was a studio over a laundromat.
He leaned into Kyan's side as the doors closed, and the mirrored walls caught them and threw them back, again and again, a hundred Kyans and a hundred Sais receding into a gold-lit forever.
Sai could have stood there all night, watching the two of them go on without end.
It felt like a promise the night hadn't actually made yet.
The elevator climbed for a long time. When it finally opened, it opened on the penthouse.
"Seriously?" Sai breathed.
"My mother only travels one way." Kyan gestured him out ahead, and Sai stepped into a room that cost more than he'd earn in a decade.
A crushed black velvet couch. The same white marble flowing up from the lobby.
Floor-to-ceiling glass with the whole glittering valley spread out below it, and past a set of French doors, steam rose gently off the surface of a private hot tub built into the terrace.
A phone on the side table rang, and Kyan crossed to it without hurry and picked it up.
"Yes. No, we won't be needing anything tonight.
Thank you for checking." He set it back in its cradle and shook his head, half a smile on him.
"The staff here would tuck you in and read you a story if you let them.
My mother tips like a miner discovering a mother lode, so they hover.
If everything isn't flawless, word gets back to Lady Leo's people, and they stop booking this place for the family's out-of-town visitors, and a manager somewhere loses sleep.
" He held up the small paper bag from the shop.
"I believe I said, back in that store, that I was done talking about my mother for the night. "
Sai's pulse jumped at the sight of the bag, want and nerves in equal measure. "You did say that."
"So." Kyan crossed back to him and stood close, close enough that Sai could feel the heat coming off him. "What do you say we try this thing out."
Sai swallowed and nodded, because at least this was a language his body had always understood, even when the rest of him was lost. Sex had never once been the hard part with Kyan.
He closed the small distance and kissed him softly, and felt Kyan's hand come up to the back of his neck.
"Sure," he said against his mouth. "Here on the couch? Or the bedroom?"
"Or the hot tub." Kyan tipped his head toward the French doors and the steam beyond them.
Sai pulled back and stared at him. "A hot tub. Why am I not surprised this place has a hot tub." Then the rest of it caught up. "Wait. You want to get in the water? You're a cat. I thought you hated water."
"You're generalizing about an entire family of animals, and it's beneath you.
" Kyan took his hand again and drew him toward the doors.
"Plenty of us like water just fine. I'm not going to live in it the way you could, given the chance.
But I'm good for a while. And I happen to know you've never once in your life had somebody stop and think about whether you might want to be touched in the water.
Which is a crime, frankly, given what you are. "
He was right. Nobody ever had. Sai had spent his whole life being a creature of rivers who got handled like he was made of the same dry land stuff as everyone else, and the simple fact that Kyan had thought about it, had booked a man into a penthouse and noticed the water and thought of Sai, was almost too much to hold on to.
Nobody ever had thought of the water. Kyan had noticed it and thought of him.
It was such a small thing. It took Sai a second to be able to speak around it.
"Get undressed," Kyan said, and kissed his cheek, and stepped back to give him room.
Sai started on his buttons, and got two of them done before he stopped to run his fingers over the soft hair on Kyan's chest, because he'd missed it, the give of it, how soft Kyan was where every man Sai had let touch him this past year had been coarse and cold.
"Did I tell you to stop undressing?" Kyan asked. The words were stern. The voice underneath them was anything but.
"No." Sai pulled his hand back, biting down on a smile. "Sorry."
"Keep going. You can pet me all you want once you're out of those clothes. But I want to see you first." Kyan's gaze moved over him, slow and frank, and Sai felt his face heat. "Don't make me chew them off you. Denim is miserable to get out of teeth."
Sai laughed and stripped the rest of the way down, until he was standing nude and exposed in a room lit far too brightly for his comfort, every soft spot and small flaw he'd ever been self-conscious about laid bare under crystal and electric light.
"I'm nothing special," he said, because he needed to say it before Kyan could think it.
"It was dark at the club. Out here you can actually see me. "
"I can see you fine." Kyan's voice had gone low.
"I've always been able to see you. You're still standing there with clothes on in your head, and I'd like you to take those off too.
" His eyes finished their unhurried path up and down Sai's body, and without a single word being added Sai felt steadier in his own skin. Kyan nodded toward the tub. "In."
Sai stepped in and gasped as the heat closed over him, the shock of it, then the slow melt as his muscles understood what was happening and gave up the fight. He sank down until the water reached his collarbone and made a sound he didn't mean to make.
"Temperature all right?" Kyan was unwrapping the gag from its packaging, peeling the plastic away with those careful hands.
"It's perfect. It's a lot at first, then it's perfect." Sai watched him work. "Why'd you pick that one, anyway? Out of all of them."
Kyan came and sat on the wide tiled edge of the tub, his feet in the water, and held the gag out on his open palm. He didn't push it at Sai. He just offered it, there in the steam, the slim rubber length of it with its rings at either end. Sai touched it and didn't take it.
"It's got the metal core," Kyan said. "We talked about it.
You can't bite through it no matter what your body wants to do.
But it'll stay soft between your teeth the whole time.
It'll take everything you've got and never once hurt you.
" He turned it in his fingers. "I picked the one that could survive you and still be gentle. Felt right for a first."
Sai had to look at the water for a second before he could answer, and covered it by reaching out and laying a wet hand on Kyan's bare thigh.
"Okay," he said. "Not all of this is going to be my thing.
Some of it never will be, and I think you already know that.
But I liked it when you wouldn't let me touch myself back at the club.
I like it when you tell me what to do with that voice.
And I'm so relieved it's not going to be an all-the-time thing, where you pick my every move and I never get to choose anything.
I couldn't live like that. But this? Getting kinky with you behind a locked door? I'm all the way in for that."
Kyan leaned down and kissed him, slow and deep, the gag still in one hand. "We'll find the rest of what you like as we go," he said against Sai's mouth. "All of it. I promise you that. We've got time now."
We've got time now. Sai held onto the words. "So," he said, when he could. "When do I put it in?"
Kyan's mouth curved. "Now?"
Sai nodded, and tilted his head back, and opened his mouth, and let Kyan slide the bit between his teeth and draw the strap snug at the back of his head.
It wasn't painful. It was strange, the steady pressure of the bar across his tongue, the way it changed the shape of his breathing, the way it told his body without a single word that for the next while his mouth was not his to run.
He bit down experimentally and felt the rubber give and the metal hold, just as Kyan had said, and the last knot of nerves he'd carried in from the store let go.
Kyan slid into the water across from him, then reached out and gathered Sai in by the hands and brought him up over his lap.
Sai expected to be turned to face him. Instead Kyan turned him away at the last moment, settling Sai's back against his chest, and wrapped both arms around him under the water.
"Comfortable?" Kyan's hands moved over Sai's chest and belly, slow, mapping. He reached out and thumbed the jets on, and warm water began to pulse around them in steady waves.
Sai looked back over his shoulder and nodded.
He was. God, he was. He could feel the thick length of Kyan's cock pressed hard against the cleft of him under the water, and he ground back against it, eager, shameless, ready to get on with it the way he always wanted to, and Kyan's hands settled on his hips and held him exactly where he was, denying him even that.
Sai made a small frustrated sound around the gag and tried again, rocking back, and Kyan held him still with that easy, immovable strength, almost laughing.