Chapter Thirteen
The club emptied out around them in stages.
Bethany hugged Sai so hard his ribs creaked, then hugged her cousin harder, then went back to her boxes with wet eyes and her chin up, because there was still a club to move to Los Angeles and she was not going to cry about a happy thing on company time.
Amani poured a round nobody had ordered and made a toast that was mostly swearing and still made Sai's eyes sting.
Reza drummed the bar top one more time, just because.
Even Nero, who Sai had privately decided did not come with a soft setting, clapped Kyan once on the shoulder on his way back to the monitors, which from a ferret like that was apparently the equivalent of a brass band.
And then, somehow, the floor was clear and the lights were still up high and it was just the two of them by the elevator, and the whole enormous day landed on Sai at once.
"You don't have anywhere to live," he said.
It wasn't romantic. It was just the first solid thought to surface once the adrenaline drained out of him, and it was out of his mouth before he could shape it into anything better. Kyan blinked at him, then laughed, surprised and tired and warm.
"That's where your head went? Out of everything that just happened?"
"Your mom listed your condo. Somebody's towing your car right now.
You've got a job and a duffel bag." Sai heard the panic climbing in his own voice and couldn't stop it.
"Where are you sleeping tonight, Kyan? You gave up your entire life in about four minutes, I watched you do it, and now it's actually tonight and you don't have a bed to go to. "
Kyan looked at him for a long moment, and his eyes went soft. "I was sort of hoping," he said, "that I'd be sleeping at your place. If that offer about a lion underfoot is still good."
It was the thing Sai hadn't let himself look at straight until it was standing right in front of him.
For a whole year he'd carried himself like the one who brought nothing to the table.
The studio. The plants. The man with no empire and no name and nothing behind him but a job he'd built quietly while everyone who mattered looked the other way.
He'd spent this entire night braced for Zahara to say it to his face, that he was less, that he was lucky, that he should be grateful a lion had stooped to him at all.
But Kyan had nothing anymore. Kyan had a paycheck and a bag and the clothes on his back.
And Sai had a home. A small one, sure, nine steps wall to wall, but it was his.
Paid for with his own money, warm, crowded with green growing things, and it was the one single thing in this whole story that nobody had handed out and nobody had taken away.
Not Lady Leo's to give. Not Zahara's to freeze. Just Sai's.
And now it was going to be theirs. For once in his life he was the one with the safe place. He got to be the one who took the lion in out of the cold.
"It stands." His voice cracked clean down the middle of it. "Of course it stands. Come home with me."
The studio was exactly as small as he'd warned him, and Kyan walked into it like it was the nicest place he'd ever been invited.
He ducked through the door and stood in the middle of the room and turned a slow circle, taking in the whole of Sai's life in one rotation.
The narrow bed against the wall, made up neat.
The kitchenette with two of everything and room for nothing else.
The window crowded edge to edge with plants, a pothos gone wild, a fern the size of a dog, a little jade tree Sai had grown from a single cutting, every one of them leaning toward the gray glow of the laundromat sign.
Books stacked on the floor because a shelf had never made the short list of things he let himself buy.
The hum and tumble of a dryer somewhere underneath them, a sound Sai had stopped hearing years ago and suddenly heard again, hard, because Kyan was here to hear it too.
"It's not much," Sai started. "I know it's not what you're—"
"Don't." Kyan said it gently, still turning, still looking.
"Don't you dare apologize for it. You built this.
Every plant in that window is alive because you kept it alive, through a year where you were lonely and miserable and getting hurt in a club you couldn't stand, and you still came home and watered your ferns anyway.
" He stopped and looked at Sai, and there was nothing in his face but the truth of it.
"My condo had a man who came twice a week to keep things alive for me.
I never learned his name. Or the plants' names.
I never learned anything in that place. This room has more life in nine steps than that condo had in two thousand square feet.
It isn't a step down for me, Sai. It's the first real place I've ever stood. "
Sai didn't try to answer that with words. He crossed the nine steps and kissed him, and Kyan caught him by the back of the neck and kissed him back like he had all night and nowhere else he'd ever have to be.
It was different than the club. Different than the hotel with its hovering staff and its skyline.
There was no audience, no storm coming, no mother on the other end of any phone.
There was just a small warm room and a man who'd burned his whole inherited life down to standing height to be inside it, and Sai kissed him slow and felt, for the first time all day, that they had actually made it to the other side.
"I want to mark you," Kyan said against his mouth.
Sai pulled back just enough to see his face. "Mark me how?"
"Scent-mark. It's a lion thing." Kyan's hands had come up to frame Sai's jaw, thumbs tracing the line of it.
"It's a claim. I work my scent into you, here, your throat, the insides of your wrists, and for a while after, anyone with a nose knows you belong to someone.
It wears off in a few days. I'd just do it again.
I'd keep doing it for the rest of my life.
" His voice had dropped into the low register that Sai felt behind his ribs.
"I have never once done it to anybody. Never wanted to.
I want to do it to you so badly right now I can hardly think.
And I'm asking first, out loud, because you're the one who taught me that's how this is supposed to go. "
Sai's heart was slamming. "What do I have to do?"
"Nothing. You let me." Kyan pressed his face into the side of Sai's neck, slow, and breathed him in deep, and a sound rolled out of his chest that was more lion than man. "You just let me have you. Can I?"
"Yes." It came out shaking. "God, yes. Claim me. I want to walk around smelling like yours."
Kyan made that low sound again, and Sai felt it in his teeth, and then Kyan was walking him backward toward the narrow bed, unhurried, his mouth dragging a slow burning path up the side of Sai's throat.
Where his jaw moved he left heat behind, the rough deliberate press of scent and intent, marking him an inch at a time.
Sai had been touched a hundred ways in the last miserable year.
He had never once been touched like something worth keeping alive.
They came down onto the bed together, too narrow for two grown men and neither of them caring.
Sai got Kyan's shirt off and finally, finally buried both hands in the soft hair on his chest, the thing he'd been wanting since the hot tub, since the club, since a year and a heartbreak ago.
Kyan let him have a long minute of it. Then he gathered both of Sai's wrists in one hand and pinned them up over his head into the pillow, gentle but immovable, and Sai's whole body lit at the easy unhurried strength of it.
"Still your pace?" Sai breathed.
"Still mine. Your word still works, gagged or not, here or anywhere.
Use it for anything at all." Kyan dragged his open mouth down the center of Sai's chest, scent-marking as he went, jaw and cheek and the hot drag of his breath, and Sai felt the scales come up gold along his arms before Kyan had even gotten his pants undone.
His body always told the truth first, before his mouth could catch up.
Kyan watched the gold spread across Sai's skin and made a low pleased sound.
"That," he murmured. "That's the part of you that can't lie to me.
I love that part. I love every part, but I love that one the most."
He took Sai apart the slow way, the way he'd promised back in that first private room, his hand and his mouth and the relentless patience of him.
He scent-marked the soft inside of one wrist and then the other.
The crease of Sai's hip. The thin skin over his hammering heart.
He kept Sai right at the edge with a tight slick fist and would not let him tip, drawing it out until Sai was strung gold, shaking, and begging out loud, with no gag in his mouth to turn the begging into breath, just his own ragged voice asking for it.
Only when Sai went still under him, all the way down, surrendered, did Kyan give it to him.
And when he finally pushed inside, both of them bare in a one-room walkup with the gray light pooling on the plants, Sai understood that this was the actual thing.
Not the proposal in front of a dozen people with the cameras running.
This. A lion writing his name into Sai's skin in a language only their kind could read, in a home Sai had built with his own two hands, choosing him slow and deliberate and on purpose, for love, exactly like the romantic he'd sworn to his mother he would be.
Kyan rode him deep and unhurried with his face buried in Sai's marked throat, and Sai came around him with a shout he didn't try to muffle, and Kyan followed with his teeth set gentle against the scent he'd left and a groan that sounded like the end of a thirty-year sentence.
After, they lay tangled in a bed meant for one, both of them too hot and neither willing to move an inch apart for it, Kyan's nose still pressed to the curve of Sai's neck like he couldn't get enough of his own scent sitting there.
"You smell like me now," Kyan said, slurred and satisfied and halfway to sleep.
"Good." Sai stared up at his own water-stained ceiling and grinned at it like an idiot. "Don't let it wear off."
"Wouldn't dream of it." Kyan dragged him closer, somehow, in a bed that had no closer left to offer. "Welcome home, by the way. To your own house. I'm honored to be the lion underfoot in it."
Below them the dryer hummed, tumbled, and someone's quarters ran out.
The fern reached for the laundromat sign.
And Sai lay in his nine-step studio that was somehow the beating center of an entire life, smelling like a lion who'd given up a kingdom to fit himself into it, and thought that in a whole year of trying to feel safe in a room, he had never managed it once until right now.
They didn't sleep right away. There wasn't room to sprawl, so they stayed wound together, Sai's head on Kyan's chest, the soft hair under his cheek, the dryer ticking through its cycle below.
"So, what happens now," Sai said into the quiet. "Practically. You've got a job and a duffel bag and apparently a gharial. That's the whole inventory."
"That's more than I had a week ago, when I had a condo and an account and no idea who I was.
" Kyan's hand moved slow up and down Sai's spine.
"I get paid Friday. Real money, your aunt-in-law doesn't believe in underpaying people, she says it's how you keep them.
I'll get my own things out of the condo before it sells, which is mostly clothes and one good watch I actually bought myself.
The rest she can keep. I never picked any of it.
" He paused. "I should probably warn you.
I have never once cooked a meal, done laundry I didn't drop off, or kept a plant alive.
I'm going to be useless in domestic ways that will genuinely shock you. "
"You're going to learn." Sai grinned against his chest. "There's a whole laundromat right underneath us. It's basically a sign from the universe."
"I'm thirty-one years old and you're going to teach me to use a dryer."
"I'm going to teach you to use a dryer, and to water a fern, and which mug is the good mug." Sai tipped his head up. "You gave up a kingdom. The least I can do is make sure you don't kill my jade tree."
Kyan laughed, low, and kissed the top of his head. Then his hand stilled. "Leo wants us at dinner Sunday. To vet you. Properly, the way she did Nero, which by all accounts involved an interrogation that made a grown ferret sweat."
Sai's stomach dropped a little. "She's going to grill me."
"She's going to grill you," Kyan agreed.
"And you're going to be exactly as honest as you were with my mother this afternoon, and she's going to like you, because the thing my aunt can't stand in this world is a person who shrinks.
You didn't shrink today. I watched you not shrink in front of the scariest woman I know, and I have never been prouder of anyone in my life.
" He pulled back enough to find Sai's eyes in the gray light.
"It's a different kind of family than the one I cut off today.
You'll see. They vet you hard and then they hand you the keys.
Other way around from the house I grew up in. "
"Bethany's still leaving, though." Sai felt the small ache of it. "Right when I'm getting let into all this. She ships out soon, doesn't she."
"Next month. To go build something of her own, the way Leo did, the way you did with this place.
" Kyan settled them both back down, Sai's head returning to its spot over his heart.
"We'll throw her a hell of a send-off before she goes.
And then we'll drive out and visit her in that ridiculous city, in whatever beater I buy to replace the car my mother stole back.
You and me. A road trip. Does the gharial do road trips? "
"The gharial never once let himself spring for one." Sai closed his eyes. "But I think I'm about to start a lot of things I never let myself have before."
Kyan's arms tightened around him, and below them the dryer buzzed and went quiet, and somebody downstairs started folding their warm clothes, and the two of them drifted off in a bed built for one in a room nine steps wide that had, against every odd Sai had ever counted, turned out to be home.