Chapter Twenty-Six
Reza had clocked out at two. The cleaning crew wasn't due until later that morning. The club was theirs.
Amani slid off the bar.
He landed on his feet, his healed feet, the scars still there but the pain long gone, and stood in front of Nero in the empty club with no shirt and the amber light on his skin and he looked like someone making a decision.
He dropped to his knees.
Not with the measured caution that had characterized every physical gesture since the ranch.
He dropped to his knees on the floor of Kinky Kritters with the confidence of someone who had done this before and enjoyed it and was choosing to do it again because he wanted to, because it was fun, because the man in front of him had earned this and Amani wanted to give it.
Nero looked down at him. The amber eyes looked up. The grin was incandescent.
"This," Amani said, his hands already on Nero's belt, "is another thing I used to have fun doing."
"Amani—"
"Shut up and let me."
He opened Nero's belt with a bartender's hands, fast, sure, no fumbling.
He pulled Nero's cock free and looked at it with appreciation, hunger, the delight of someone rediscovering something they'd thought they'd lost. He was already hard just from the body shots, from Nero's mouth on his skin, from the feeling of standing shirtless in his own club and wanting someone instead of hiding from everyone.
He licked a slow stripe up the underside of Nero's cock from base to tip, the same deliberate intensity Nero's tongue had taken on his collarbone. Nero's hand shot out and gripped the edge of the bar behind him. The sound he made was immediate and wrecked.
"Tequila tastes better on you," Amani said, and then took him in.
Deep. He took Nero into his mouth with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and liked doing it.
His tongue worked the underside, his lips tight, his cheeks hollowed on the pull back, and when he sank down again he took Nero deeper, into his throat, and swallowed around him and the sound Nero made was something Amani wanted to record and play back on the club's sound system.
He was good at this. He'd always been good at this, a skill he'd been proud of before pride in his body was something the ranch had buried.
His mouth was hot and clever and he used his tongue the way he used it behind the bar, by instinct, by attention, reading Nero's body like a drink order.
The way Nero's thighs tensed told him to slow down.
The hitch in Nero's breathing told him the tongue was working.
When Nero's hips jerked forward, Amani took it, letting Nero push into his mouth, letting him feel the heat and the wet and the suction.
"Amani—" Nero's voice was shredded. "Your mouth. Fuck."
Amani hummed around him, pleased. The vibration made Nero's knees buckle.
His hand flew from the bar to Amani's hair.
Not pushing. Not guiding. Just there, fingers spread, feeling the movement, the rhythm, the deliberate bob of Amani's head.
The touch in his hair was safe. Still safe. Still not the other touch.
Amani pulled back. Looked up. Licked his lips with theatrical slowness, tasting Nero on them, letting Nero watch him do it. "You know what I want."
Nero's hand was trembling in his hair. His chest was heaving. His cock was slick, hard, and straining. His eyes were nearly black. The control that Amani had been cracking for months was barely holding. "Tell me."
"I want my Dom." Amani rose to his feet. He was hard, visibly, straining against his jeans. He didn't hide it. He stood in his mother's club and let himself be visible, wanting, and unashamed. "I want you on top of me. I want it rough. I want it here."
He walked to the bar. Reached behind it to the security panel near the register, the one he'd known about since he was sixteen, the one that controlled the camera system Nero himself had upgraded. He pressed a button. A small red light went dark.
"Cameras are off," Amani said. He turned back to Nero. The grin had edges, sharp, and wanting. "This room is ours."
Nero crossed the room in four strides. His hands found Amani's hips, spun him, and pushed him back against the bar.
His mouth was on Amani's. The kiss was not careful.
Not patient. It was the kiss of a man whose patience had been dismantled by a lion on his knees with a mouth like sin, and a grin like a dare.
Amani moaned into it. His back hit the edge of the bar, the same bar he'd been hiding behind, the same wood that had been his wall.
Nero's body was against his, pressing him into the wood with weight, heat, and intent.
The bar dug into his lower back. It was uncomfortable, and perfect.
Nero's hands were everywhere, his chest, his stomach, pulling at the button of his jeans.
"Off," Nero said against his mouth.
Amani shoved his jeans down. Nero stripped the rest of the way.
Then it was skin on skin, Nero pressing Amani into the bar.
Amani's legs coming up around Nero's waist. The strength in the ferret's lean body was real, wiry, concentrated, the power of someone who could hold a lion against a bar and make it feel like exactly where the lion wanted to be.
"Here," Amani said. Panting. "Right here. Against the bar."
Nero lifted him. One arm under his thigh, the other braced on the bar. Amani's back was on the polished wood. His legs were around Nero's waist. The amber light was above him. The ceiling of KK looked different from this angle. Like freedom. Like his.
Lube from behind the bar. Amani kept supplies stashed everywhere, a habit from years of working in a kink club where someone always needed something.
Nero slicked himself and pressed two fingers into Amani first, working him open because Amani was already loose from that morning and impatient.
The sounds he was making were filthy and demanding.
"Nero, I swear to god, if you don't fuck me in the next ten seconds—"
Pulling his fingers out, Nero pushed into him and Amani's back arched off the bar and his mouth opened on a sound that filled the empty room. Loud, raw, real, and nothing like the silence of the ranch, nothing like muffled compliance. It rang off the walls of Kinky Kritters.
Nero didn't go easy. Amani had asked him not to and Nero honored the request with the precision he brought to everything.
Hard, deep, the rhythm relentless, his hands gripping Amani's hips hard enough to bruise.
Amani wanted every mark, wanted his body written on by his man in his room.
The bar rocked under them. A glass somewhere rattled.
The sound system was still on, the low ambient pulse of the closing playlist. The bass matched the rhythm of Nero's hips.
Amani laughed, breathless and wild, because the soundtrack to the most important sex of his life was the KK closing playlist. That was so perfectly, absurdly right.
"You're laughing," Nero said. Breathless too. His arms shaking with the effort of holding Amani on the bar and driving into him.
"The music—" Amani gasped as Nero shifted the angle and the new depth hit his prostate dead on and the thought evaporated. "Oh. Do that again."
Nero did it again. And again. Each thrust nailing that spot and Amani's legs tightened around his waist and his hands found the edge of the bar above his head and gripped.
His hands choosing the anchor, choosing the stretch of his body under Nero's.
The pleasure built in waves, each one higher.
Nero wrapped his hand around Amani's cock and stroked in time with his thrusts, his grip tight and slick, thumb dragging through the wet at the head, and Amani's vision went white at the edges.
"Nero, I'm going to—"
"Yes." One word. Permission and command at once. The Dom voice. "Let go."
Amani let go.
The orgasm tore through him with a force that bowed his spine off the bar.
His cock pulsed hard in Nero's fist, cum streaking across his own stomach and chest, his body clenching around Nero in waves that pulled a ragged shout from his throat.
It was every part of him, his body, his trust, his fear, his want, his choice.
All of it cresting, and breaking on the bar at Kinky Kritters with a ferret inside him who had come through a window to save his life and then spent four months earning the right to be there.
Nero slammed forward once, twice, buried himself deep and came with Amani's name in his mouth and his forehead pressed against Amani's chest and his whole body shaking.
They held there. Two bodies pressed together on a bar in an empty room with the cameras off and the music playing and the night going on outside the way Vegas nights always did.
Amani lay on the bar and stared at the ceiling and breathed.
Nero was leaning against him, his head on Amani's chest. The bar was not comfortable. The wood was hard against Amani's back and something, a cocktail napkin dispenser probably, was digging into his shoulder blade. He didn't move.
"We just had sex on my mother's bar," Amani said.
"Yes."
"She can never know."
"No."
"She would kill us both. She would kill you first and then she would kill me and then she would disinfect the bar and then she would kill us again."
"I'll add it to the security protocols. No one talks about the bar incident."
Amani laughed. Full and warm and unselfconscious, the laugh of someone lying on a bar with his boyfriend's head on his chest and a cocktail napkin dispenser in his back and absolutely nothing about the moment was a cage.
Nero lifted his head. He looked at Amani, the laugh still on his face, the amber eyes bright, the bare chest rising and falling, and his expression went soft in a way Amani had only seen a few times. The porch at Lady Leo's house. The bedroom their first morning.
"There you are," Nero said. Quiet.
Amani heard it. He knew what it meant. Not there's the old you, the fearless kid in tiny shorts who'd never been hurt.
That person was gone. What Nero was seeing was someone else.
Someone who wore hoodies and flinched at sounds and had scars on his feet and who had just been fucked on a bar by a ferret and was laughing about it.
Someone who carried the ranch in his body and carried other things too.
Warmth, sharpness, hunger, trust, the knowledge of what the world could do and the decision to be in it anyway.
There you are. Not the person before. Not the person during. The person after. The one who was still becoming.
Amani reached up and touched Nero's face. His thumb traced Nero's cheekbone. His hand was steady and his eyes were clear.
"Yeah," he said. "Here I am."