Chapter Sixteen
Kyan had been to the club hundreds of times. He had never once walked in with someone on his arm who belonged there because of him.
It changed the whole building, starting at the top.
Friday night, and they came in off the street into the big empty lobby, where Bethany sat at the front desk with a crossword she wasn't really doing, and she looked up and grinned wide instead of bracing for whatever sad errand he'd come to run.
She waved them to the elevator without a word, still grinning.
Then the doors opened below on the lights gone low and red, the bass turned down to a slow crawl under the floor, and Sai stepped out at his side in dark jeans and a good shirt.
Reza lifted a bottle in greeting from behind the bar.
Two regulars Kyan half-knew took in the gharial at his side, did the quiet math, and gave him the small respectful nod the club reserved for a man who came in claimed.
Nobody was going to hand Sai off to a stranger any more.
Every nose in the building already knew exactly whose he was.
Kyan watched it land on him in slow stages as they crossed the floor.
"This is so weird," Sai said under his breath, close to his ear.
"Good weird. But weird. I spent so much time walking into this exact room feeling like a cut of meat behind glass at a counter.
Same room. Same people. Same red lights.
And tonight it's just. Different. I keep waiting for the bad feeling to show up and it won't come. "
"That's because a year ago you came in alone and miserable. Tonight you came in claimed." Kyan steered him toward the bar with a hand at the small of his back. "Same room, completely different night. Drink first. Amani will hold a grudge for a decade if we don't let him perform for you."
Amani performed. He built Sai something elaborate and bright and alcohol-free, sliding it across the bar with a flourish while Reza pretended to find the whole production embarrassing, and for a while they just stood there and let the club be an ordinary loud warm place around them.
Bethany drifted over on a break to relitigate the send-off and veto three of Kyan's ideas purely on principle, then lit up despite herself when Sai said the word peonies like he was laying down a winning card.
Nero passed through on a slow circuit of the floor, took in the two of them at the bar, and offered exactly one dry sentence that landed somewhere between approval and a blessing.
It was, Kyan thought, the most ordinary he had ever felt in this building in his life, and the strangeness of feeling ordinary in a kink club on a Friday night was not at all lost on him.
Somebody behind the bar swapped the music for something slower, with a long low pull to it, and Amani flicked a bar rag at the both of them. "Go. Dance with your man. You're cluttering up my bar looking domestic and it's putting the customers off their kink."
Kyan took Sai by the hand and led him to the edge of the floor, where the crowd thinned and the red light went soft and warm, and drew him in close, one hand low on his back.
Sai stepped against him stiff for about four seconds, the way he always started, and then let go of all of it at once and folded into him, his face tucked against Kyan's neck like it had been built to go there.
They didn't really dance so much as sway, slow, barely moving, two men holding on in the half-dark while the bass rolled under them.
"I used to watch this," Sai said quietly, after a while.
"From the bar. Couples. The ones who came in together and clearly went home together.
I'd be waiting for whoever Amani had lined up for me, some stranger, and I'd watch two people just slow-dance like idiots and I'd feel it like a bruise.
Like that was a thing other people got and I'd missed the sign-up for.
" His hand tightened slow in the back of Kyan's shirt.
"I told myself I didn't want it. That I was here for the other thing and the dancing was for soft people.
I was lying. I wanted this so bad I couldn't look straight at it. "
"You're one of the idiots now." Kyan turned them in a slow circle, his mouth at Sai's temple. "On the list. Signed up. Front of the line."
"I'm one of the idiots now," Sai agreed, and Kyan felt him smile against his throat, and felt, too, the exact moment the last of the bad year went out of the man in his arms.
They stayed out there through two more songs, getting in no one's way, claimed, obvious, and slow. A couple of regulars gave Kyan that same small nod again. This time Sai lifted his head and nodded back, easy, like a man who knew he had every right to be exactly where he was standing.
Then the song ended, and Sai set his empty glass down on the nearest ledge, looked toward the dark mouth of the hallway where the private rooms ran, and the ease went out of his face.
Kyan knew that hallway. He knew what was down it. The same rooms where Sai had spent a year being handed off to people who didn't know him and didn't ask and never once slowed down. He watched the old weight climb back up into Sai just from looking at the dark of it.
"We don't have to go anywhere near there," Kyan said, quiet, only for him. "We can drink, dance, and go home to your bed. That's a perfect night. The rooms aren't the point. You're the point. They've always been the point exactly as much as you decide they are and not one inch more."
"No." Sai's jaw set, the same quiet stubbornness Kyan had watched him aim at Zahara across the club floor and at a vendor twice his size in a greenhouse.
"I want to. That's the whole thing. I want to walk down that hall with you and come back out with a good memory, in a place that only ever gave me bad ones.
I want the room back. I've been letting it own a piece of me for a year and I'm done.
" He looked up at Kyan, color in his face.
"Is that a deranged reason to want to get railed. "
"It's the least deranged reason anyone has ever given me," Kyan said, and meant it.
Room two was the one they'd used that first night, a few weeks and a lifetime ago, and Sai stopped dead in the doorway Kyan let him stop.
He didn't put a hand on his back and ease him through, didn't fill the silence, didn't rush a second of it.
He stood behind Sai with both palms resting light on his shoulders and let him look at the room for as long as he needed to look at it.
The low leather couch where Kyan had first put careful hands on him, a year late.
The sturdy table. The single lamp turned low.
The door that locked from the inside, only ever from the inside.
"Last year these rooms scared me every time," Sai said. "I'd stand right here and make myself walk in."
"It doesn't get to scare you anymore." Kyan turned him gently by the shoulders until they were face to face, and drew the gag out of his jacket, the one they'd bought together, the steel-cored one that had never been in any mouth but Sai's.
"So, here's how tonight runs, and it's different from every night you spent down here before.
You set it. Every part of it. Anything you want, you say it, out loud, with your own voice, because asking for things is the thing you learned how to do.
And the instant any of it stops being good, even a little, you have the word, and the word ends the world. "
"Lioness."
"Lioness. Stops everything, no questions, no matter how deep in we are or how good it's going.
" Kyan brushed his thumb slow across Sai's bottom lip.
"So. The man who couldn't ask me for a glass of water a year ago.
We're standing in the room that used to own you.
Tell me what you want me to do to you in it. "
And Sai, who had spent a year silent, handed around, and afraid in this exact place, looked his lion dead in the eye and asked for it.
Out loud. Plainly, then less plainly, then filthily.
The gag. Kyan's hands, and nothing faster than Kyan chose.
"Keep me right on the edge until I can't stand it," Sai finished, steady even with his face burning, "and then make me cum.
" Every word of it went through Kyan like a struck match, because there was nothing in the world hotter than the man he loved standing in the room that used to frighten him and asking, in his own voice, for what he'd been too scared to want.
"Good," Kyan said, gone rough with it. "That's so good, baby. Open for me."
Sai opened, and let Kyan settle the bit between his teeth and buckle the strap snug at the back of his head, and the second it was seated his whole body dropped and changed, went loose and pliant and waiting the way it only ever did for Kyan now.
The gold came up his throat before Kyan had even gotten his shirt off him.
The scales never did wait for permission.
Kyan gave him exactly what he'd asked for, in the room that used to hurt him, and rewrote what the room meant one minute at a time.
He marked him first. Jaw to the gland beneath Sai's ear, then his throat, then the soft inside of each wrist, working his scent down into the skin until anyone with a nose anywhere in the building would know him claimed, until Sai was already moaning low and broken around the gag just from the marking.
He got him naked on the couch and kept him there with one wide hand splayed flat on his chest, and used the other to bring him up to the edge and hold him at it, that long lazy tormenting drag Sai had asked for out loud, over and over, until the gold had flooded all the way down his arms and his thighs shook with the work of staying still and handing Kyan the pace.
Sai didn't tap. Sai never once tapped. He took it, and begged for more with his whole gold-flushed body, drool slipping past the gag, past any thought of being embarrassed, and Kyan fed it to him an inch at a time, drunk on the trust in it.
When he finally pushed his cock inside, Sai's spine arched up off the cushions and his eyes rolled and the sound he made would have been a sob without the gag to catch it.
Kyan set a deep unhurried rhythm with one hand still spread over Sai's hammering heart and the other working his cock in time, until the begging behind the bit went wordless.
He drove into him slow and deep. He watched the man he loved let go completely in a room that had only ever taken from him.
He bent low over the marked throat and gave him the only thing that actually mattered.
"This is yours now," he said against Sai's ear, hips snapping deep and slow.
"This room. This club. Me. Every bit of it belongs to you.
Nobody hands you off ever again as long as I'm breathing.
You walk in on your own feet and you choose, every single time, and tonight you stood in the door of the worst room in your year and you chose this.
You chose me." He felt Sai clench around him, right at the edge, gone.
"So take it. It's yours. Cum for me, gharial.
Let me feel you take back what's yours."
Sai came with a shout the gag barely swallowed, his whole body going tight and gold and shaking around Kyan, and Kyan followed a handful of strokes later with his face buried in the scent he'd left on that throat, pulsing deep, holding the trembling man through every aftershock like he was the single most valuable thing in a building full of expensive things.
After, he eased the gag off gently, wiped Sai's mouth with his own discarded shirt, and gathered him up against his chest on the couch, both of them exhausted, slick, and breathing hard.
He pressed slow kisses to each mark he'd left and murmured low nothing-words while Sai came back to himself in pieces.
"You with me?" Kyan said. "Talk to me. How are you."
"I'm." Sai's voice came out hoarse and slow and astonished.
"I took it back. I actually took the room back.
" He laughed, wet and amazed, his face pressed into Kyan's chest. "A whole year I came down this hall feeling like nothing anyone would remember.
And you just made it the best memory I've got in this entire building. "
"You made it." Kyan tipped his chin up and kissed him, soft.
"You walked down here on purpose. You stood in that door.
You asked. I just did what my gharial told me to do.
" He smoothed the damp hair back off Sai's forehead.
"You are so far from nothing it isn't funny.
You're the bravest person I've ever met, and I grew up around my aunt and my mother both. "
They lay tangled together on a couch that had seen better manners, in a room that had finally stopped scaring Sai, the bass still thudding faint and warm through the walls.
Kyan held his mate and thought about how a thing could be poison for a whole year and then, in the right hands, with the right word and the door locked from the inside, come out the other side clean.
The room hadn't changed. The couch hadn't, the gag hadn't, the act hadn't.
Only everything around them had. Only the part that had ever mattered.
"Come on." He kissed Sai's temple and reached for their scattered clothes. "Let's get you dressed and fed and home to your nine steps. We have a party to plan in the morning, and a Leo to keep from killing me over the centerpieces."
"Peonies," Sai mumbled into his chest, boneless and claimed and halfway to sleep. "I keep telling you. Trust the gharial. Peonies."