Chapter Eight #2
"You're so impatient," Kyan said, low and warm against his ear. "Listen to me. Tap me once if you need to stop, for any reason at all. Doesn't matter where. We'll take a break, the gag comes out, we talk. Same as always. You've still got your word, too, the whole time. Okay?"
Sai lifted a hand out of the water and gave him a thumbs up, and felt Kyan's quiet laugh against his back.
"Good." Kyan dragged his thumbs across Sai's nipples and rolled them, and Sai arched into it with a muffled noise the gag turned to nothing but breath.
He was achingly hard, his cock jerking against his own belly under the water, and with the bit between his teeth he couldn't do the thing he always did, couldn't beg, couldn't tell Kyan to quit playing and just fuck him.
He could only feel it, every unhurried touch, strung tight as a wire, being made to wait building in him like floodwater behind a dam.
It was a struggle. Sai had never been good at holding still under the best of circumstances, and this was nowhere near the best, this was Kyan playing him by degrees with the whole of Vegas glittering past the railing.
But he tried. He laid his head back on Kyan's shoulder and closed his eyes and let himself be played.
Slowly, slowly, the fight drained out of him and something else took its place.
Kyan's hand closed around him at last under the water, and even then he kept it slow, a long lazy pull from base to head and back, slick and tormenting, just enough to keep Sai climbing and never near enough to tip him over.
Sai moaned around the bar, drool slipping past his lips, past caring.
Kyan answered the sound with a tighter stroke and a low filthy murmur against his ear, about how pretty he was like this, how good he was being, how long Kyan meant to keep him right here on the edge before he let him fall.
It was a conversation too, Sai understood dimly, a whole language of give and take that needed no words at all.
Slowly his body was learning to speak it fluently.
When Kyan finally moved them, it was without letting go, easing Sai up and forward until he was bent over the tiled edge with his knees on the submerged seat and Kyan rising broad and unhurried behind him.
Sai felt the blunt head of his cock press where he wanted it, felt the steady patient pressure as Kyan worked into him by degrees, the stretch and the burn giving way to the deep full ache he'd spent a year chasing and never once caught with anyone else.
Kyan didn't rush a second of it. He sank in slow and steady until he was buried to the hilt, until Sai could feel the whole hot length of him seated deep, and then he held there, just held, and made Sai feel every inch.
That part Sai knew. That part he'd always loved.
But it had never once felt like this, never so unhurried, never like being filled and held at the very same time.
"You can still tap me," Kyan said, a hand spread warm and certain on Sai's hip. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Sai didn't tap. He'd been good, so good, and Kyan was finally giving him what he'd been made to wait for, drawing nearly all the way out and driving home in long deep strokes that pushed the breath out of him each time, and he moaned around the bar loud enough that the suite below them could surely hear, and found he didn't care in the slightest. Let them hear.
Let the whole gleaming city hear. Kyan was his tonight, his again, fucking into him slow and deep with one arm locked tight around his chest, and Sai wanted the world to know it.
And here was the thing he hadn't seen coming.
It wasn't the gag, or the slow torment, or the strong hands holding his pace down to Kyan's chosen rhythm.
It was that underneath all of it, beneath the kink they'd spent the night building like a house, this was tender.
Kyan fucked into him deep and slow and patient and kept one hand splayed flat over Sai's heart the entire time, like he was holding far more than just his hips, and Sai realized with the gag wet in his mouth and his eyes stinging that he had never once in his life had sex that felt like this.
Every time before, with Kyan and everyone after him, it had been fast and bright and over, leaving him spent and a little hollow.
This was slow. This was somebody staying.
This was, he understood with a kind of wonder that didn't have a clean word, a lot more like being made love to than anything he'd ever known, and the joke of it, the gorgeous ridiculous joke, was that he was finding it out with a metal-cored gag strapped into his mouth.
He laid his head down on his own folded arms and breathed through the bar and let it happen to him, all of it, the pleasure and the tenderness both, and let his eyes run over freely because there was no one to see and nothing left to perform.
Kyan must have felt the change in him. He always could.
He bent low over Sai's back, pressed a kiss between his shoulder blades, and his rhythm shifted at last from slow torment into something with real intent, deeper, harder, snapping his hips up on every stroke until the water churned and slapped against the tile.
Sai climbed fast and helpless toward the edge he'd been held off for what felt like a beautiful hour, the scales flooding gold down his arms and across his back as the last of his control burned clean away, his untouched cock dragging against warm tile with every thrust. When Kyan reached around and closed a fist around him, it took three strokes.
Sai came so hard his vision whited out, a shout tearing around the gag, his whole body clenching tight around the thick length still buried deep and working him through it.
Kyan fucked him through every aftershock and followed a few strokes later with a low rough growl against Sai's spine, pulsing deep, his arm crushing Sai back against his chest. Then they were just two men breathing hard in churning water, the gold slowly fading from Sai's skin, holding on.
Kyan was the first to move. He eased back, slipping free, and reached up to unbuckle the strap and draw the gag out of Sai's mouth, gentle, and the moment it was gone he turned Sai around and replaced it with his lips.
Sai's jaw ached pleasantly and his mouth was his own again and he kissed Kyan like he was trying to climb inside him.
"Holy shit," Sai said when they broke apart, sinking back down into the water on unsteady limbs.
"Okay. The club was one thing. But that.
" He gave up on the sentence and scrubbed a hand down his wet face.
"I didn't know it could stay slow the whole way through.
I didn't know slow was the point. That wasn't a different night. That was a whole different life."
Kyan laughed, soft, and pulled him in against his side. "That's because before, I was hiding half of who I am from you. This is what it looks like when I'm not." He kissed the top of Sai's wet head. "You did so well. You were perfect."
Sai closed his eyes and let himself be held in the hot churn of the water, with the lights of a city he'd never belonged in glittering far below and a man he'd never stopped loving wrapped warm around him, and thought that he could die right here and call it a good and complete life.
Then Kyan shifted under him, just slightly, and Sai felt some of the ease go out of him, some thread of tension wind back into the body at his back.
"I need to make a call in a bit," Kyan said, lightly, too lightly. "Not now. In a little while. It's nothing."
But Sai had spent a whole night learning to read the truth under the easy words, and he heard the lie in it as plain as a bell, and his contentment cooled by one degree as he understood that the empire Kyan answered to didn't stop for hot tubs, or penthouses, or whatever this fragile new thing between them was just barely becoming.