Chapter Twenty-Two
Kyan woke first, in a real bed, in their own home, and lay still for a long while just to feel it.
The bed was the one thing they'd bought new and bought right, the first big purchase of the new life, a real one, built wide and solid for two grown men who were staying.
After months of folding himself around Sai in a frame meant for one optimistic person, the space felt almost obscene.
He could starfish. He didn't. He stayed curled around the warm weight of Sai instead, because the time in the narrow bed had taught his body that close was the point, and the extra room was just there to make the closeness a choice instead of a necessity.
The light came in gold and slow through the bedroom window, through the green of the real tree outside it, and lay in a warm bar across the rumpled sheets.
Somewhere in the apartment a plant was probably thirsty.
There were still boxes against every wall.
The kitchen had two forks, because they hadn't gotten around to buying more.
None of it mattered. Kyan lay in the light in a bed that was his, in a home that was his, with a gharial drooling faintly on his chest, and understood that this was the richest he had ever been in his life, and that his mother, with her diamonds and her penthouse, had never once owned anything close to it.
He thought about the mornings he used to wake to.
Cold rooms in cold light, an empty bed in two thousand square feet, a phone already buzzing with his mother's first demand of the day before he'd opened both eyes.
He'd thought that was just what mornings were.
Quiet, expensive, and lonely. He'd had no idea, none, that a morning could be this instead, a warm weight and a thirsty plant and light through a real tree, that he could wake up somewhere and the first feeling of the day could be glad.
Thirty-one years old and he was learning what a morning was for.
Sai stirred against him, surfaced, blinked up at him with one eye.
"You're awake," he mumbled, accusatory. "You're awake and you're looking at me. It's weird when you watch me sleep."
"I'm not watching you sleep. I'm watching you drool on me, which is different and more dignified for both of us." Kyan kissed the top of his head. "Morning."
"Morning." Sai pressed his face into Kyan's chest and made a sound of profound objection to consciousness, and then went still in a different way, awake all the way, and Kyan felt the exact moment the morning tilted, the way it did between them these days, easy, after a month of learning each other's mornings.
"Hi," Kyan said, into his hair, lower.
"Hi." Sai lifted his head and looked at him, dark eyes gone warm and slow, and there was nothing left in his face of the man who'd once climbed out a bathroom window rather than ask for what he wanted.
He just slid up the warm length of Kyan's body and kissed him, unhurried, morning-soft, and let one leg fall between Kyan's, and that was all the asking either of them needed anymore.
They had nowhere to be. That was the luxury of it, the real one, bigger than the bed or the windows or the light. A Sunday, the family not coming till evening, a whole gold morning and nothing in it but each other.
Kyan rolled them over, settled his weight above Sai, and took his mouth and his time both.
There was no negotiation, no gag, no pace to set out loud, none of the careful, tentative asking, just two men who knew each other down to the bone moving together in the warm light.
He scent-marked Sai's throat the way he did most mornings, half habit and half worship, and felt the gold scales rise faint and pleased under his mouth, Sai's body answering before his voice could, the way it always had.
He started kissing down the familiar map of him and got exactly as far as his collarbone before Sai tugged him back up by the hair, because some mornings Sai wanted it drawn out and some mornings he just wanted Kyan close, and after a month Kyan could tell the difference without a word.
This was a close morning. He gave Sai close.
He kept their mouths together and worked a hand down between them, wrapped his fist around Sai's cock and stroked him lazy and loose, swallowing every soft sound he made, in no rush at all because there was nowhere on earth they had to be.
Sai thickened against his palm in slow pulses, hips rolling up to meet each stroke, and Kyan gentled him with his grip and his mouth until Sai was slick at the tip and sighing against his lips, pliant and warm and wanting, the gold spreading down his chest in the light.
He reached for the bottle that lived in the nightstand, because things lived in places when they had a real home, their things, in their places, and even that small fact ran warm through him as he slicked his fingers and opened Sai up with the same patience he did everything behind a locked door, working him soft and murmuring against his mouth while Sai sighed and rocked down onto his hand and asked for him in a voice still rough with sleep.
Sai's cock lay flushed and heavy against his belly.
Kyan took one long look at him spread out gold and wanting in their own bed and had to kiss him again before he could go on.
When he finally pushed inside it was slow and welcome, Sai opening for him with a long low sigh and pulling him deeper with both legs like he'd been waiting all night for it.
There was nothing to chase and nothing to prove.
Kyan moved in him deep and easy in the light, the tree shifting green outside the window, both of them sleep-warm, Sai's hands roaming loose over his back, his own face buried in the marked curve of Sai's throat where his scent already sat.
They had the whole morning and the whole life.
Sai wrapped around him and met every roll of his hips and murmured his name into the quiet like it was the first word he'd learned that mattered.
It built the way the light moved, gradual, patient, a long warm climb, until Sai's breathing went ragged and his heels dug into the mattress and his cock was riding slick and hard against Kyan's belly with every stroke.
When Sai finally came it was quiet and shaking, spilling wet against their bellies with his face pressed into Kyan's jaw, clenching around him in long unhurried waves, and Kyan followed him over several strokes later, grinding deep with a low groan into his throat, filling him while the light lay over the both of them.
For a long while afterward they just lay tangled in the wreck of the sheets, the light creeping across the bed, the leaves moving outside the window, neither of them wanting to shift so much as a hand.
This, Kyan thought. This was the whole fortune.
Not the bed, not the windows, not the home.
The wanting to stay. The having nowhere better to be than tangled up with the person beside him in the morning light, and knowing it, and getting to keep it.
He was going to be smug about this for the rest of his life, quietly, the way his aunt was smug about her sentiment turning a profit. It ran in the family after all.
"Best bed we ever bought," Sai mumbled eventually, boneless. "Worth every cent. We should write the company a letter."
"Dear bed company," Kyan agreed against his hair. "Your product has dramatically improved my mornings. Regards, a satisfied lion."
Sai laughed, the lazy full-body kind, and they stayed where they were while the gold bar of light crept across the bed.
Kyan kept one hand moving up and down Sai's spine, idle, thinking about the impossible life he'd somehow landed in, and a thing he'd been turning over for a couple of weeks finally worked its way up to where he could say it.
"I want to marry you," Kyan said. "The human way. The rings, the standing up in front of people way."
Sai went still against him, then propped himself up on one elbow to look at him. "We're already mated. You set the mating claim in our own living room before we single box. I'm pretty thoroughly yours."
"You are. The mating's the real thing, and it's enough, and I'd never tell you it wasn't." Kyan reached up and tucked a piece of hair behind Sai's ear.
"But here's the thing I keep coming back to.
I grew up watching matings get arranged like mergers.
My whole life, the plan was that I'd get handed to someone for power, in a ceremony that was really a contract, and I'd stand up in front of a room full of people who didn't care about me and promise to build a dynasty.
And I ran from that so hard I burned down everything to get away from it.
" He held Sai's eyes. "But I don't actually want to never stand up in a room and promise myself to someone.
I just wanted to get to pick the someone.
And I picked you, and I want to do it out loud, on purpose, every way there is to do it.
The lion way, which we did. And the human way, which we haven't.
I want to stand up in front of our loud terrible family and say it where everyone can hear, not because anyone arranged it, not because it builds anything, just because it's true and I get to choose it.
" His voice went rough. "I spent too many years being told I'd marry for power.
I want to marry you for nothing. For no reason at all except that I love you.
That's the whole point. That's the thing she never got to have and never will. "
Sai's eyes had gone wet. "You're proposing. In a brand new bed and no ring, you're actually proposing."
"I'm actually proposing. Badly, with no ring, because I just thought of it." Kyan huffed a laugh. "We'll get rings. We'll do the whole thing right. But yeah. Sai. Will you marry me, the human way, on top of the lion way, on top of every other way I can find to belong to you?"
"Yes," Sai said, immediately, fiercely. "Yes, obviously, you absolute idiot, yes. The human way and the lion way and any other way you find. Yes." He dropped down and kissed him hard, laughing into it, wet-faced.
Kyan caught him and held on, and the light poured over the both of them in a bed built for two in a home that was theirs, a lion and a gharial promising each other forever all over again, for no reason at all except the only one that had ever mattered.
"We have to tell the family," Sai said against his mouth, breathless. "Bethany leaves in three days. She'll never forgive us if she finds out from a state away."
"Then we tell them tonight." Kyan kissed him again.
"At dinner. In our own place, that we own, with our two forks and our terrible loveseat and our plant room.
We'll make them all cry. Nero will mist. Amani will fall off something.
" He grinned up at the man he was going to marry.
"Family first. Rings second. Forks, apparently, at some point. "
"Forks at some point," Sai agreed.
Then he propped his chin on Kyan's chest, and the lazy had gone out of his eyes.
"You gave me your reason. Here's mine. I spent my whole life being nobody's first pick.
Seasonal help. Weeknight company. The one people were fine with until somebody better walked in.
And you're lying here telling me you want to stand up in front of everyone we love and pick me out loud, twice, in two languages.
" His voice wobbled, and he let it. "So, yes.
Forever yes. I'd marry you in the parking lot of the garden center with a twist tie for a ring. "
"Don't tempt me on the twist tie," Kyan said. "I'm marrying you rich in forks or not at all."
They lay there a while longer in the warm wreck of the bed, planning it in the lazy half-serious way of people who had all the time in the world to plan things.
Small, they agreed. The family, the club, Lady Leo officiating because she would simply assume she was officiating and it wasn't worth fighting her on it.
Peonies, obviously. Bethany flown back from LA, because missing it was not an option anyone would be offering her.
Reza on the bar. Amani crying before the vows even started.
Kyan in a suit he'd choose himself this time, for a wedding nobody had arranged, to a man no one had picked for him.
"Zahara's going to hear about it," Sai said, quieter, testing the thought. "Chicago hears everything."
"Let her." Kyan said it easy, and found he meant every word of it. "My mother thinks sentiment is a tax on the weak. She can hear that I paid it in full, on purpose, in public, and came out the richest man either of us knows."
"She spent a whole year lining up a jaguar for me," he added, staring at the ceiling, marveling at it. "And I'm going to marry a gharial, surrounded by people who carried my furniture up a flight of stairs, for absolutely no strategic reason at all."
"Devastating," Sai agreed solemnly. "No dynasty. No merger. Just love and peonies. She'd hate it so much."
"She would hate every single peony," Kyan said, delighted, and kissed him again, and they did not get out of the new bed for a good while longer, because they had the morning, the life, each other, and for once in either of their histories, all the time in the world to waste on being happy.