Chapter Twenty #2
Kyan went still over him, one hand braced flat on the warm wood, because there was asking and then there was this, and he wanted no mistake between them about which one it was.
"Say what you mean," he said, low. "I've marked you a dozen times.
It fades in a few days and I do it again, and I'd do that forever and be glad.
But there's one that doesn't fade. The mating claim.
The lion way, the no-takebacks way, the one I promised you in front of my mother and the whole day staff.
If that's the one you're asking for, I need to hear you ask for it. "
"That's the one." Sai's voice didn't waver at all. "Mate me, Kyan. Right here. Make it the one who stays."
And Kyan, who would have given that man the actual moon if he'd asked for it in that voice, did exactly that.
He kissed Sai first, slow and deep, standing in the middle of the light, and felt him melt into it the way he always did once the bracing went out of him. Then he walked him backward into the light and took him down onto the warm wood, easy, the sun lying across both of them in a wide gold bar.
He took his time, because slow was the gift and the empty room had nowhere either of them needed to be.
He got Sai's shirt off and put his mouth to the scent-gland under his jaw, scenting him deep and slow, working the claim in past where the days could reach it, in the home they'd just bought, and Sai arched up into it with a sound that filled the bare echoing room.
The gold flooded down his throat and across his chest, lit warmer by the sun pouring through the windows they owned now, and Kyan kissed his way down all of it, unhurried, reverent, marking the inside of each wrist, the crease of each hip, until Sai was begging into the bright air with no walls of habit left to keep him quiet.
He stayed there, mouth and hands relearning every inch he'd long since memorized, until he had Sai writhing in the sun with both palms pressed flat to the bare wood because there was nothing else to hold onto.
He got Sai's cock in his fist and then in his mouth and took him to the edge and held him there, drawing it out the way Sai had learned to love, sucking him slow and gripping tight at the base every time he got close, the empty room ringing with every sound Sai made because there was no gag and no neighbor and no reason on earth to be quiet in a home that was theirs.
Sai begged openly, gold-flushed to the hips and chasing it, and Kyan made him wait, and made him ask again, and didn't give him more until he was shaking with it.
He laid Sai out in the light on the floor of their own first room and pushed inside him bare, slow, nothing between them.
Just Kyan moving deep into the man he loved, in a square of warm sun, on hardwood that belonged to the two of them and no one else alive.
Sai wrapped around him and held on and said his name into the empty room like he was teaching the place their names, and the windows poured gold over both of them.
When Sai came it was loud and shameless, his cock gushing hot between their bodies, gold-scaled and shaking in a wall of light, clenching down so hard that Kyan lost his rhythm and followed him with a growl, grinding in deep, his teeth settling careful and sure over the gland at Sai's throat and holding while he filled him, setting the one claim that would never wash out, in a home that was finally, actually theirs.
After, they lay tangled and sweat-bright on the bare warm floor, no furniture, no plants, no boxes, just two grown men, a floor full of late sun, and the first memory their new home would ever hold.
"Mated," Sai murmured into his chest, dazed, one hand over the place at his own throat where Kyan’s teeth had gone in. "Actually mated. That one doesn't wear off."
"That one doesn't wear off." Kyan pressed the words into his hair. "Every mark I put on you after this is just me enjoying myself."
"Best housewarming this place is ever going to get," Sai mumbled into his chest. "Everything after this is downhill."
"We haven't even moved the fern in." Kyan pressed a kiss to his damp hair. "Imagine how good it gets once the fern approves of the light."
"The fern is going to lose its entire mind in here.
" Sai stretched, boneless, gold-flecked, and claimed, in the middle of the room they owned.
He turned his head and looked at the wall of windows, the gold going long and amber as the afternoon tipped toward evening, the first sunset they'd ever watch from their own floor.
"We don't even have a lamp," he said, wondering.
"We're going to have to buy everything. Forks.
A bed. A trash can. We own a wall of windows and just two forks. "
"We'll buy forks." Kyan laced their fingers together against his chest. "We'll buy a terrible couch and argue about it for weeks, like I always wanted.
We'll do all of it. Slow. Together. There's no rush on any of it, because nobody's going to take the place while we shop for forks.
" He kissed Sai's shoulder. "Welcome home, gharial. "
"Welcome home, lion."
Kyan looked up at the ceiling of the first place that had ever, in thirty-one years, actually been his, lying in the light with the only person who'd ever made him feel like he belonged in a room, and thought that he had burned an entire inheritance to the ground to get here, to a bare hardwood floor and a wall of windows and a gharial, and that it had been, without contest, the best trade he would ever make.