Page 7 of Gagging the Gharial

"Lioness." Kyan reached up and brushed his thumb under Sai's eye, catching the wet before it could fall. "It's yours now. Nobody can take it back."

Sai nodded, and held onto the word like a coin pressed into his palm, and then made himself keep going, because if he stopped to feel all of it he was going to cry in front of Kyan for an hour, and he wasn't ready for that yet. "Okay. What else. You said limits."

"Limits." Kyan settled back, giving him room, his voice steadying into something Sai realized he'd been starving for without knowing it, the sound of a person who knew the path explaining it patiently to someone who didn't. "Hard limits are the things that are off the table completely. Not tonight, not ever, not even if you're curious in the moment. You don't have to know all of yours yet. Most people figure them out over years. But you've got more than you think, because you've already been hurt, and hurt teaches fast. So. Tell me. What do you already know you never want?"

Sai thought about it. Really thought, instead of guessing at the answer a stranger wanted. "No sharing," he said slowly. "I don't want to be passed around. I'm not a thing that gets handed to the next guy." He watched Kyan's face go briefly murderous at the implication that anyone had ever suggested it, and went on. "No being left alone. Tied up and just left somewhere, like a coat on a hook. No." His voice dropped. "And no pictures. Ever. I don't want to find a piece of myself on some site I never agreed to. A blindfold, maybe, someday, but only with someone I'd trust with my whole life, because I have to be able to not see and still feel safe, and I'm not there with anyone."

"Those," Kyan said, and the pride in it was unmistakable, "are exactly the right answers. Those are the limits of a man who's actually been paying attention. Thank you for telling me." He said it formally, like it mattered, like Sai had handed him something valuable and he intended to be careful with it.

"What about yours?" Sai asked. "You don't get to just be the teacher. I want to know what you won't do."

Kyan considered, and Sai got the sense he didn't get asked this often, that men assumed a lion had no lines. "Blood," he said finally. "Knives, needles, anything that breaks the skin. I'm a predator, I know what I look like, but I don't want any of that and I never have. Somebody brings out a blade, I'm done, scene over, I leave. That's mine." He met Sai's eyes. "And sharing. Same as yours, from the other side. I have never once in my life wanted to watch someone else touch what's mine, and I'm not about to start."

Sai went warm all over at what's mine, at the easy certainty of it, at how much he wanted to still be inside that word. He'd spent a year trying to belong to a world. He'd only ever wanted to belong to one person in it.

They sat with it, the two of them, in the quiet room, and Sai understood that the ground had been laid. Not the fun part. Not yet. Something better than the fun part, the part nobody had ever bothered to give him: a word that was his, a set of lines that were his, and a man who'd asked instead of assumed. Whatever happened next, he would walk into it knowing how to walk out.

"Okay," Sai said softly, and found he was smiling, wet-eyed and ridiculous and steadier than he'd felt in a year. "Okay. I've got my word and my limits and yours. Now what?"

Kyan looked at him for a long moment, and the heat came back into his eyes, banked and patient and certain.

"Now," he said, "we find out what you actually like."

Chapter Five

Kyan had imagined this more times than he would ever admit out loud, and in not one of those imaginings had he been this careful. In the fantasies, the ones he'd shut down half-formed over a year of empty Chicago nights, he'd never had to think at all. Dream-Sai was just there, willing, easy, and already fluent, and Kyan got to be exactly as much as he was without measuring a single ounce of it. The real thing asked far more of him than any of that. The real thing was a man with a fading bruise on his jaw and a brand-new word in his pocket, sitting on a club couch trusting Kyan not to be one more person who hurt him by accident, and that man asked Kyan to slow all the way down to a pace the fantasies had never bothered with. Kyan found he wanted to. He'd spent the year thinking he missed having Sai. It turned out what he'd missed was getting to take care of him.

"I want to start with something simple," he said. "Something I already know you like, so you can feel the difference between this and whatever you've been letting happen out there. Is that okay?"

Sai nodded, then caught himself and said it aloud, the way Kyan had been modeling for him all night. "Yes. That's okay."

"Good." Kyan reached for the top button of the good shirt and stopped with his fingers resting on it. "I'm going to open this. You can stop me at any point. You've got your word now, and it works for anything, not just the big dramatic stuff. You don't like where my hand goes, you say it. You want to slow down, you say it. Using it will never disappoint me. Tell me you heard all of that."

"I heard it." Sai's voice had gone soft and a little wondering, like a man being handed something he'd been told all his life he couldn't have. "Lioness. I've got it."

"You've got it."

Kyan slipped the first button free, and then the next, and took his slow time down the whole row of them, because the taking of time was the entire lesson, the thing he'd never once gotten to teach Sai in all the months they'd been together before. He'd been so busy hiding what he was back then that he'd let their whole sex life stay quick and bright and surface-level, both of them rushing toward the finish like there was a prize for getting there. There was no prize. He understood that now. The prize was the part in the middle that he'd skipped.

The shirt fell open and Kyan eased it back off his shoulders. A year of trying not to remember this body, of failing at it nightly, and here it all was anyway. Smooth. Sai had always been smooth, not from any waxing ritual or careful shaving but because of what he was, the faint greenish-gold of scales living just under the skin where a gharial's nature ran close to the surface. His chest was hard and his shoulders were lean and his belly was the soft part, the one truly vulnerable place on him, the spot a saltwater croc would armor over and a gharial simply left tender to the world. Kyan flattened his palm against it and felt Sai's breath leap under his hand.

"You've gotten thinner." He didn't quite like it.

"I forget to eat when I'm anxious. I've been anxious for roughly a year." Sai's mouth tugged sideways. "I wonder whose fault that is."

"Mine. Part of it's mine." Kyan didn't dodge it. He let the hand on Sai's belly travel up his chest, over the steady drum of his heart, up the long line of his throat where the scales flickered when his thumb passed, and rested two fingers against Sai's lips. Sai kissed them without being told to, an old reflex, and the simple sweetness of it nearly broke the careful thing Kyan was working so hard to be. "Lie back for me. All the way down. Let me do the work tonight. You just feel it."

Sai went back against the arm of the couch and let his legs fall open, and Kyan moved with him, settling over him without putting any weight down, braced on one forearm so they lay chest to chest and Sai could feel the size of him without being pinned beneath it. He kept watching Sai's face for the flinch, the freeze, the place a stranger's hands had trained into him. It didn't come. Sai looked up with his whole heart sitting right there in his eyes, unguarded, and that was terrifying in its own way, because Kyan had spent twelve months deciding he didn't get to have this, and here it was being offered up like nothing had ever broken between them.

He thought about Sai's limits, the ones he'd named so clearly an hour ago. No being passed around. No being left tied and abandoned like a coat on a hook. Not one of those lines would ever get tested on his watch.

"Can I touch you?" he asked. "Properly. With my hand."

"You know you can."

"I want to hear consent every time tonight. That's the rule, just for tonight. I crossed a line with you once without asking, a long time ago, and we both paid for it for a year afterward. So, tonight I ask. You answer, Over and over, until the asking and the answering stop feeling like a ceremony and start being the air we breathe." He held Sai's gaze. "Can I touch you?"

Understanding, old grief, and a great deal of want crossed Sai's face all at once. "Yes," he said. "Touch me. Please."