Page 2 of Gagging the Gharial

"What's he doing here?" The question came out rougher than Kyan wanted. "Sai doesn't belong in a place like this. He's the least kinky person I've ever met. I spanked him one time, for fun, and he looked at me like I'd grown a second head and then he didn't look at me at all."

"Mostly he gets tied up and spanked, from what I've seen." Amani said it carefully, watching him. "Plays with strangers. He's not very good at it yet."

Kyan's knuckles had gone white on the bar. He made himself spread his fingers flat against the wood, one at a time, until the urge to do something with his hands went somewhere it couldn't break anything. Sai. Soft, easily startled, allergic to chaos. Sai, who'd flinched the one time Kyan had let his hand come down. Sai, letting men he didn't know tie him to things in a room full of strangers.

"And you let him," Kyan said.

"Let him." Amani's brows went up. "He's a grown man. If he wants to learn something the hard way, that's his to want. I'm not his keeper, and I'm not yours." He leaned a hip against the counter. "But I'll tell you what I've noticed. He comes in, he plays, and he never once leaves looking happy. He looks like a man trying to teach himself a language by reading the dictionary out loud. And I've wondered, more than once, who he's trying to learn it for."

That landed somewhere Kyan didn't want it to. He looked away, at the elevator, at the lights, at anything.

"I don't have his number anymore," he admitted, which was as close as he could get to saying the rest. He'd erased it. He'd erased all of it, scrubbed Sai out of his phone and his contacts and his recent calls in one brutal afternoon the week he'd packed for Chicago, because keeping any of it had felt like keeping a knife pointed at himself. At the time it had seemed like the healthy thing. Most of the worst decisions of his life had seemed like the healthy thing at the time.

"I have it," Amani said.

Kyan's head came up.

"Now, normally," his cousin went on, in the unbothered way that had always made Kyan want to throttle him affectionately, "I would never hand out a patron's number to some lion who wandered in off the elevator. People trust me with their privacy here. That matters." He let it hang. "But this isn't some lion. This is you, and it's him, and the two of you didn't end in fire. Hurt feelings, sure. No one got hurt the way that needs reporting. Did they."

It wasn't really a question, but Kyan answered it anyway, because the alternative was unthinkable and he needed it said out loud in his own voice. "No. God, no. I never touched him in anger. Not once."

"I know." Amani's voice gentled. "I had to hear you say it. That's all." He pulled his phone out of the hoodie pocket and held it loosely, thumb hovering. "So here's what I'll do. I'll text him. I'll tell him his ex is sitting at my bar and he's a stubborn man who doesn't like crowds, so he'd better hurry if he wants to see you before the room fills up. And then it's out of my hands, and out of yours, and it's his to decide. That work?"

So much for simple.

He should say no. The smart play was no. See his aunt, run the numbers, charm a signature out of Lady Leo, fly home, and let Sai go on fumbling through a language Kyan could have taught him in a single quiet night if he'd ever been allowed to. Wanting Sai had cost him a year of his life already. Wanting him from across a bar would cost more.

"He's got an hour," Kyan heard himself say. "If he wants to see me at all, he's got an hour. I'm not sitting in this crowd past that."

Amani's tawny brows climbed. "Someone's impatient."

"Someone remembers what this place turns into at full volume." Kyan finished the scotch and slid the empty glass across the bar. "Send it."

His cousin was already typing. Across the room the ferret's dark gaze flicked over, registered nothing alarming, and moved on. The bloodhound started another slow circuit of the floor. The elevator hummed to life and began delivering the night's first customers, sent down by whichever of Bethany's hand-picked replacements was working the desk upstairs. Amani thumbed the message away and looked up. He wasn't bothering to hide the hope.

Kyan asked for another scotch, because his hands needed the glass, and turned on his stool to watch the elevator he was already pretending he wasn't watching.

Chapter Two

Sai read the text four times in the back of the rideshare and still didn't believe it.

Your ex is sitting at my bar. He's stubborn and he hates crowds, so if you want to see him before the place fills up, you've got an hour. Less now. Amani.

He'd typed three different replies and deleted all of them. In the end he'd just put on a clean shirt, the good button-down he never had a reason to wear, and called a car before the smarter part of his brain could talk him out of it. The car was slowing in front of the unmarked door he'd walked through more nights that year than he wanted to count, and his hands wouldn't stop sweating.

A year. It had been a year since Kyan looked at him like he was worth looking at. A year since Sai had panicked and run and spent every month after wishing he hadn't.

He paid, got out, and made himself walk to the door.

Bethany wasn’t at the desk, but the bouncer knew his face and waved him toward the elevator without a word, and that was its own small humiliation. Sai had become a regular at a club he'd never once enjoyed. He stepped into the elevator, watched the doors close on his own reflection, and tried to read his face the way Kyan would. Nervous. Hopeful in a way that embarrassed him. The scales along his cheekbones kept threatening to surface, the way they always did when his body got ahead of his nerves, and he pressed his lips together and willed them back down.

The doors opened on noise and heat.

Kinky Kritters at opening was a different animal than the dead-quiet afternoon space the staff cleaned in. The music hit him first, then the smell, fifty kinds of musk layered under leather, beer, and the sweet chemical bite of cleaning spray not quite finished evaporating. Bodies were already filling the floor. Somebody laughed too loud near the bar. A man in a harness leaned against a pillar like he was waiting to be unwrapped.

Sai hated it. He'd never stopped hating it. He'd kept coming anyway, because it was the only place he knew where men did the things he was trying to learn to want, and because it belonged to the family of the only person he'd ever loved.

And then he saw Kyan, and the hating went somewhere far away.