Page 3 of Gagging the Gharial

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."