Page 14 of Gagging the Gharial

Sai lifted a hand out of the water and gave him a thumbs up, and felt Kyan's quiet laugh against his back.

"Good." Kyan dragged his thumbs across Sai's nipples and rolled them, and Sai arched into it with a muffled noise the gag turned to nothing but breath. He was achingly hard, his cock jerking against his own belly under the water, and with the bit between his teeth he couldn't do the thing he always did, couldn't beg, couldn't tell Kyan to quit playing and just fuck him. He could only feel it, every unhurried touch, strung tight as a wire, being made to wait building in him like floodwater behind a dam.

It was a struggle. Sai had never been good at holding still under the best of circumstances, and this was nowhere near the best, this was Kyan playing him by degrees with the whole of Vegas glittering past the railing. But he tried. He laid his head back on Kyan's shoulder and closed his eyes and let himself be played. Slowly, slowly, the fight drained out of him and something else took its place.

Kyan's hand closed around him at last under the water, and even then he kept it slow, a long lazy pull from base to head and back, slick and tormenting, just enough to keep Sai climbing and never near enough to tip him over. Sai moaned around the bar, drool slipping past his lips, past caring. Kyan answered the sound with a tighter stroke and a low filthy murmur against his ear, about how pretty he was like this, how good he was being, how long Kyan meant to keep him right here on the edge before he let him fall. It was a conversation too, Sai understood dimly, a whole language of give and take that needed no words at all. Slowly his body was learning to speak it fluently.

When Kyan finally moved them, it was without letting go, easing Sai up and forward until he was bent over the tiled edge with his knees on the submerged seat and Kyan rising broad and unhurried behind him. Sai felt the blunt head of his cock press where he wanted it, felt the steady patient pressure as Kyan worked into him by degrees, the stretch and the burn giving way to the deep full ache he'd spent a year chasing and never once caught with anyone else. Kyan didn't rush a second of it. He sank in slow and steady until he was buried to the hilt, until Sai could feel the whole hot length of him seated deep, and then he held there, just held, and made Sai feel every inch. That part Sai knew. That part he'd always loved. But it had never once felt like this, never so unhurried, never like being filled and held at the very same time.

"You can still tap me," Kyan said, a hand spread warm and certain on Sai's hip. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

Sai didn't tap. He'd been good, so good, and Kyan was finally giving him what he'd been made to wait for, drawing nearly all the way out and driving home in long deep strokes that pushed the breath out of him each time, and he moaned around the bar loud enough that the suite below them could surely hear, and found he didn't care in the slightest. Let them hear. Let the whole gleaming city hear. Kyan was his tonight, his again, fucking into him slow and deep with one arm locked tight around his chest, and Sai wanted the world to know it.

And here was the thing he hadn't seen coming. It wasn't the gag, or the slow torment, or the strong hands holding his pace down to Kyan's chosen rhythm. It was that underneath all of it, beneath the kink they'd spent the night building like a house, this was tender. Kyan fucked into him deep and slow and patient and kept one hand splayed flat over Sai's heart the entire time, like he was holding far more than just his hips, and Sai realized with the gag wet in his mouth and his eyes stinging that he had never once in his life had sex that felt like this. Every time before, with Kyan and everyone after him, it had been fast and bright and over, leaving him spent and a little hollow. This was slow. This was somebody staying. This was, he understood with a kind of wonder that didn't have a clean word, a lot more like being made love to than anything he'd ever known, and the joke of it, the gorgeous ridiculous joke, was that he was finding it out with a metal-cored gag strapped into his mouth.

He laid his head down on his own folded arms and breathed through the bar and let it happen to him, all of it, the pleasure and the tenderness both, and let his eyes run over freely because there was no one to see and nothing left to perform.

Kyan must have felt the change in him. He always could. He bent low over Sai's back, pressed a kiss between his shoulder blades, and his rhythm shifted at last from slow torment into something with real intent, deeper, harder, snapping his hips up on every stroke until the water churned and slapped against the tile. Sai climbed fast and helpless toward the edge he'd been held off for what felt like a beautiful hour, the scales flooding gold down his arms and across his back as the last of his control burned clean away, his untouched cock dragging against warm tile with every thrust. When Kyan reached around and closed a fist around him, it took three strokes. Sai came so hard his vision whited out, a shout tearing around the gag, his whole body clenching tight around the thick length still buried deep and working him through it. Kyan fucked him through every aftershock and followed a few strokes later with a low rough growl against Sai's spine, pulsing deep, his arm crushing Sai back against his chest. Then they were just two men breathing hard in churning water, the gold slowly fading from Sai's skin, holding on.

Kyan was the first to move. He eased back, slipping free, and reached up to unbuckle the strap and draw the gag out of Sai's mouth, gentle, and the moment it was gone he turned Sai around and replaced it with his lips. Sai's jaw ached pleasantly and his mouth was his own again and he kissed Kyan like he was trying to climb inside him.

"Holy shit," Sai said when they broke apart, sinking back down into the water on unsteady limbs. "Okay. The club was one thing. But that." He gave up on the sentence and scrubbed a hand down his wet face. "I didn't know it could stay slow the whole way through. I didn't know slow was the point. That wasn't a different night. That was a whole different life."

Kyan laughed, soft, and pulled him in against his side. "That's because before, I was hiding half of who I am from you. This is what it looks like when I'm not." He kissed the top of Sai's wet head. "You did so well. You were perfect."

Sai closed his eyes and let himself be held in the hot churn of the water, with the lights of a city he'd never belonged in glittering far below and a man he'd never stopped loving wrapped warm around him, and thought that he could die right here and call it a good and complete life.

Then Kyan shifted under him, just slightly, and Sai felt some of the ease go out of him, some thread of tension wind back into the body at his back.

"I need to make a call in a bit," Kyan said, lightly, too lightly. "Not now. In a little while. It's nothing."

But Sai had spent a whole night learning to read the truth under the easy words, and he heard the lie in it as plain as a bell, and his contentment cooled by one degree as he understood that the empire Kyan answered to didn't stop for hot tubs, or penthouses, or whatever this fragile new thing between them was just barely becoming.

Chapter Nine

Kyan waited until Sai's breathing had gone slow and even against his chest before he made himself move.

He'd carried Sai from the hot tub to the enormous bed, both of them still damp, and Sai had curled into him the way he always used to, one leg thrown over Kyan's, his face tucked into the curve of Kyan's neck. For a while Kyan had let himself lie there and believe the night could simply end like this, on the high of it, with nothing owed to anyone and no one's voice in his head but Sai's. But the phone sat dark on the nightstand, and the call was a stone in his gut, and a stone didn't dissolve from being ignored. It only got heavier the longer it sat.

He eased out from under Sai, tucked the duvet up over his bare shoulder, and pulled on a pair of shorts from his suitcase. Then he carried the phone out to the far end of the penthouse, past the velvet couch and the wall of black glass, to where the city burned cold and bright a long way down and his voice wouldn't carry back to the bed.

It could have waited until morning. He knew it could. But the afterglow was still moving through him, loose and warm and braver than he was in the daylight hours, and some reckless part of him wanted to have this out while he still felt like a man who might win it. In the morning he'd be his mother's son again, careful and folded and good. In that moment, with the taste of Sai still on his mouth and we've got time now still ringing in him, he felt like someone who could say a true thing to Zahara and survive it. He found her name and pressed it before the feeling could drain away.

She answered on the second ring, which meant she'd been awake anyway, working some angle in the dark the way she always was. "Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Not really." It was dark out and his heart was going hard, and that was all the time he had a use for. "Nighttime. I didn't check."

"Of course you didn't." Zahara sighed, the long-suffering sound she'd been aiming at him since he was a cub small enough to fit under her arm. He could picture her with no effort at all, propped against silk in whatever suite was hers this season, a sleep mask shoved up into hair that never frizzed because she would not have allowed it, every ring still on because she removed them for no one and nothing. "So. How is my sister's little dungeon. Did you get anywhere with her. Tell me you got somewhere, Kyan, because I did not charter you a convertible and a penthouse so you could soak in a hot tub and run up a tab on my name."

"I haven't talked numbers with Aunt Leo yet."

"You've been there how long?"

"A day."

"A day is plenty to open a door." Her voice honed itself to the edge he'd grown up stepping around. "She is drowning right now, which is the entire point. A drowning woman signs things she'd never sign on dry land. Bethany shipped off to Los Angeles to play executive, a whole second build bleeding money out west, the whole operation stretched to the snapping point. Leo does not have a single ounce of attention left over to fight me on a second Chicago club, and you are meant to be standing in her office spending that to the last cent. Charm her. Now, while her hands are full. That is the whole of your job this week and you are botching it in a bathrobe."

There it was, stripped of even the pretense of decency. His mother had looked at her own sister buried alive under a crisis and seen a soft place to put the knife. Kyan had known the plan before he ever boarded the plane. Hearing her say it plainly, while Lady Leo was a few miles across the valley holding her whole life together with both hands and lifting her daughter up to stand on her own, still sickened him in a way he hadn't braced for.