Chapter Two
Sai read the text four times in the back of the rideshare and still didn't believe it.
Your ex is sitting at my bar. He's stubborn and he hates crowds, so if you want to see him before the place fills up, you've got an hour. Less now. Amani.
He'd typed three different replies and deleted all of them.
In the end he'd just put on a clean shirt, the good button-down he never had a reason to wear, and called a car before the smarter part of his brain could talk him out of it.
The car was slowing in front of the unmarked door he'd walked through more nights that year than he wanted to count, and his hands wouldn't stop sweating.
A year. It had been a year since Kyan looked at him like he was worth looking at. A year since Sai had panicked and run and spent every month after wishing he hadn't.
He paid, got out, and made himself walk to the door.
Bethany wasn’t at the desk, but the bouncer knew his face and waved him toward the elevator without a word, and that was its own small humiliation.
Sai had become a regular at a club he'd never once enjoyed.
He stepped into the elevator, watched the doors close on his own reflection, and tried to read his face the way Kyan would.
Nervous. Hopeful in a way that embarrassed him.
The scales along his cheekbones kept threatening to surface, the way they always did when his body got ahead of his nerves, and he pressed his lips together and willed them back down.
The doors opened on noise and heat.
Kinky Kritters at opening was a different animal than the dead-quiet afternoon space the staff cleaned in.
The music hit him first, then the smell, fifty kinds of musk layered under leather, beer, and the sweet chemical bite of cleaning spray not quite finished evaporating.
Bodies were already filling the floor. Somebody laughed too loud near the bar.
A man in a harness leaned against a pillar like he was waiting to be unwrapped.
Sai hated it. He'd never stopped hating it. He'd kept coming anyway, because it was the only place he knew where men did the things he was trying to learn to want, and because it belonged to the family of the only person he'd ever loved.
And then he saw Kyan, and the hating went somewhere far away.
He was at the end of the bar with a scotch in front of him, half-turned toward the elevator like he'd been watching it without admitting he was watching it.
He looked the same. He looked completely different.
The flash had come off him somehow, the careful expensive polish Sai remembered, and what was left underneath was rangier, tired, and so beautiful that Sai forgot how to make his feet move.
A year of practicing what he'd say if he ever got the chance, and every word of it was gone.
His heart was going hard enough that he could feel it in his palms.
Kyan saw him. Relief hit his face first, fast and unguarded. Then the careful look came down over it.
Sai didn't get to study either one, because his legs were already carrying him across the floor without asking, until he was close enough to touch and didn't dare.
"Hi," Kyan said, soft enough that Sai felt it more than heard it under the music. "I wasn't sure you'd come."
"I wasn't sure I should." It came out honest before Sai could dress it up.
He leaned against the bar beside Kyan because his knees wanted something to do.
This close, under the club's many layered musks, he could pick out the one that mattered, warm amber and clean skin, the smell he'd been trying and failing not to look for on strangers all year.
"You didn't give me a lot of time to decide. "
"That was on purpose." A ghost of the old smile. "If I'd given you an evening you'd have found a reason."
He wasn't wrong. Sai licked his lips, felt the scales flicker at his cheek again, and saw Kyan track the movement and go still.
He'd forgotten Kyan used to watch for that.
He'd forgotten a lot of small things, or made himself forget them, and they were coming back now one after another, like furniture being unsheeted room by room.
Amani set a club soda in front of Sai without being asked and didn't comment on the choice.
A small mercy. The otter beside him was working the other end of the bar, and somewhere along the rail a man Sai half-recognized put a hand on the small of his back, the casual proprietary touch of a stranger who'd decided personal space was optional.
Sai flinched before he could stop it.
Kyan didn't say anything. He moved a half-step closer, let his shoulder come between Sai and the hand, and the man drifted off the way men did when a lion took up more room. Sai hadn't realized how braced he'd been until the bracing let go.
"You've been coming here," Kyan said. It wasn't a question but it wasn't quite an accusation either. "Amani told me."
"I have." There was no point lying about it. "Sometimes."
"Doing what?"
Sai looked at the bartop. The honest answer was a hard thing to say to the man it was secretly about. "Playing, I guess. That's the word they use. It's not really hooking up, but I guess it is too." He turned the cold glass in a slow circle. "Mostly I have no idea what I'm doing."
He waited for the disappointment. Kyan had always had a way of going quiet that was worse than yelling, and Sai braced for it the way he'd braced for the stranger's hand.
It didn't come. When he risked a glance, what he found on Kyan's face was closer to pain than judgment, and that was so much harder to bear that Sai had to look away again.
"Why here?" Kyan asked. "Of all the places. You hate crowds almost as much as I do. You used to leave parties through bathroom windows."
"I climbed out of exactly one bathroom window, one time, and you have never let it go." A laugh got loose from Sai before the weight came back and pressed it flat. "I don't know how to explain it without it sounding pathetic."
"Try me."
But this wasn't the place for it, with the music pounding and bodies pressed in on every side and a stranger already circling back for another pass at the gharial in the good shirt.
Sai felt the words crowding up in his throat and knew if he started here they'd come out wrong, in fragments, the way everything did when he got nervous and overwhelmed.
Kyan must have seen it. He always could read the moment Sai's wiring started to short.
"Amani." Kyan didn't raise his voice much, but his cousin's head came up from the register all the same. "Is two open?"
Amani's eyes went from Kyan to Sai and back, and whatever he saw there made him reach under the counter without a word and toss a keychain in a low arc. Kyan caught it one-handed.
"On the house," Amani said. "Don't leave it a disaster."
Kyan took Sai's hand, palm to palm, the simple weight of fingers Sai had held a thousand times and then not at all for a year.
He let himself be led off the floor and down the dim hallway past doors with numbers hand-painted on them.
Behind one of them somebody moaned. Sai kept his eyes forward and his hand in Kyan's, and the whole way down the hall he catalogued the grip like a man checking a lock he'd been dreaming about: warm, dry, careful, holding him no harder than a held hand needed to be held.
Every stranger this year had gripped like Sai might run.
Kyan held him like Sai could, and that was allowed, and he wasn't going to.
Room two turned out to be a square space maybe twenty feet on a side, a sturdy table, a low leather couch, not much else.
No restraints bolted to the walls, no rack of toys.
A room for people who brought their own, or a room for talking.
Either one worked. The door swung shut behind them and cut the music down to a muffled heartbeat through the wall, and the sudden relative quiet made Sai's ears ring.
"Sit," Kyan said, then caught himself. "If you want. You don't have to do anything I say in here. I just want to talk where you can hear yourself think."
Sai sat on the couch, then drew his legs up under himself the way he did when he wanted to be smaller. "Sorry. I'm jumpy tonight."
"You're jumpy every night you're in this building. I watched you flinch off a guy at the bar before he even touched you." Kyan didn't sit. He stayed standing a careful distance away, hands loose at his sides, giving Sai the whole rest of the room. "The men here. They get pushy?"
"Sometimes." Sai picked at a seam on the couch cushion.
"A lot of them, yeah. I say sure, I'll try something, because I want to learn and I don't know how to start, and then it's like flipping a switch.
They're snapping their fingers and pointing at the floor and suddenly I'm in trouble for not kneeling fast enough, and there's all these rules I never agreed to and never knew existed, and I just freeze.
I get lost." He made himself stop picking at the seam.
"I didn't mean it like you were going to be pushy just now.
I know you're not them. It's just my body doesn't always know the difference… yet."
Kyan was quiet for a moment, and Sai watched him working to keep whatever he was feeling off his face.
"You shouldn't be learning it like this," Kyan said finally.
"Alone, with strangers who don't care if you understand what you're agreeing to.
That's not how anyone should come into this.
You need someone watching your back. You need words, limits, and the right to change your mind out loud.
You don't have any of that walking in here by yourself. "
"I know that now." Sai's voice dropped. "I didn't, when I started. I really didn't know anything."
He hadn't meant to let that land where it landed.
Kyan went still in a way Sai recognized, the predator stillness, the pause before a cat decided what kind of animal it was going to be.
Then he crossed the room and sat, not on the table where he'd clearly been about to keep his distance, but on the couch beside Sai, close, the way they used to sit through a hundred slow Sunday movies.
He lifted his arm along the back of the cushions in the old invitation.
Sai didn't hesitate. A year of wanting had burned all the hesitation out of him.
He turned and lay back across Kyan's lap, and the warmth of him soaked in everywhere they touched, thighs under Sai's shoulders, a broad chest at his back, warm amber closing over him like water.
His body had spent a year braced in rooms like this one.
Piece by piece, against every rule he'd made for himself, it stood down.
For one breath the whole terrible year went quiet.
Kyan brushed his fingers down Sai's cheek to turn his face toward the light. It was a tender motion, and then it wasn't, because Kyan's thumb stopped against the curve of Sai's jaw and the ease drained out of him, every line of his body going hard and still under Sai's back.
Sai knew what he'd found. He'd hoped the dark would hide it.
The bruise was three days old and had faded to the dull bluish green of an old storm, low on his jaw where a stranger's grip had gone harder than Sai had known how to stop.
He'd told himself it didn't show. To a lion who could catch a single scale flickering on a cheekbone across a crowded room, it might as well have been painted on.
Kyan bent his head and pressed his lips to the spot, so light it was barely a kiss, and when he spoke his voice had gone low and rough and very, very controlled.
"What happened?" The question was somewhere between a growl and a hiss.
"It's nothing." Sai turned his head, chasing the shadow, hiding the mark. "Let it go."
That wasn't what Kyan had asked, and they both knew it.
The arm around Sai didn't tighten. The lion didn't snarl.
Kyan only settled back into the couch, drew Sai a little closer against his chest where the worst of the world couldn't reach, and waited him out with a patience that got further under Sai's skin than any demand could have.
"Tell me anyway," Kyan said.