Page 5 of Gagging the Gharial

"Don't." It came out low and instant. "Don't ever call yourself that."

But the rest of it Kyan had to sit with, because there was no arguing with the facts of it. Only with the blame.

He'd left a mark on Sai once too.

Not like the wolf. He'd never grabbed, never held him down against a no, never done anything Sai hadn't laughed and agreed to first. But a year ago, in the warm dark of Sai's apartment, Kyan had let his hand come down on him once, playful, testing, hopeful, and Sai had gone still, strange, and quiet, and Kyan had brushed it off as nerves and never asked. The mark had lasted hours. Sai had carried it on his skin and somewhere else besides, and Kyan had been so busy being disappointed that his vanilla boyfriend couldn't meet him that he'd never once stopped to ask whether he'd hurt him. He had. He'd been the first person ever to leave a bruise on the man, before any wolf, before any of this. He'd done it out of carelessness. Then he'd let it become the reason they ended.

So he was not, he finally understood, sitting in some clean high place looking down at a wolf. He was a man who'd left his own bruise and then run a thousand miles from the consequences.

"You went somewhere just now," Sai murmured.

"I did." Kyan pressed his lips to the bruise again, barely touching, and made himself surface. That was the part he'd known was coming since the elevator doors opened. He hated it. He was going to do it anyway, because the alternative was the selfish thing, and he'd spent a year teaching himself not to be selfish about Sai. He eased Sai up off his lap and around to sit facing him, so the next thing he said would land like the truth it was meant to be and not like a murmur into someone's hair.

"Sai. Listen to me. I want you to stop coming here."

Sai blinked. "What?"

"This place. This whole world." Kyan made his voice gentle and held it level, which cost him more than yelling would have. "You're not kinky. You never were. I spanked you one time, lightly, for fun, and it didn't just startle you, it hurt you for hours and you never told me until tonight. That's not nothing. That's your own body telling you something true about what you are. And what you are is someone soft and good who likes to wake up at two in the morning and curl into the person he loves, and there is not one thing in the world wrong with that. It's one of the best things I've ever known in my life. But it isn't this. It isn't rooms with numbers on the doors and strangers who don't care whether you understand what you agreed to."

"You don't get to decide that for me." Sai pulled back a little.

"I'm not deciding it. I'm watching it happen to you." He took Sai's hand, because he needed the contact even while he was using it to cut. "If you're a two, you shouldn't spend your one life trying to grind yourself into a six to keep up with somebody who's an eight. You find another two. You find the man who thinks you wanting his mouth at two in the morning is the sexiest thing he's ever heard in his life, not the one who thinks tying you up and taking you apart until you forget your own name is an ordinary weeknight. Those are different men. You deserve the first one. You deserve to be wanted exactly the way you already are, not graded on a curve in a room full of teeth."

He watched it land. He watched it do exactly what he'd built it to do, and he despised himself the whole time.

"And what about what you deserve?" Sai asked, very quietly.

The question went in under his ribs where he had no guard up. Kyan had the answer ready, the noble one, the one he'd rehearsed somewhere over Nebraska without admitting that was what he was doing. "I deserve to know the man I love is safe and happy. That's the whole of it. Even if safe and happy is somewhere I'm not."

"That's a beautiful little speech." Sai's voice had gone rough at the edges. "You've clearly practiced it. Did you practice it on the plane, or have you been carrying it around for a year waiting for a chance to use it on me?"

That was closer to the bone than Kyan was ready for, and his face must have shown it, because Sai's mouth twisted, not in triumph but in grief.

"Yeah," Sai said. "That's what I thought."

For a moment neither of them looked away. Sai's eyes were going bright and wet at the rims, and Kyan made himself watch, because turning from it would have been one more coward's mercy he hadn't earned the right to give himself.

Then Sai wiped his face with the back of his hand, fast and rough, and stood.

"Okay," he said. His voice came out steadier than Kyan expected, which was so much worse than tears would have been. "Okay. You've made yourself real clear."

And he walked out.

The door swung shut behind him and let the music surge up a notch, then sealed it back down, and Kyan was alone in room two with a couch that still held the warmth of him and a club soda going flat on the table.

He sat there and told himself he'd done the right thing.

He was good at telling himself things. He'd told himself it was healthy to erase Sai's number. He'd told himself the move back to Chicago was about his mother needing him close, and not about putting a thousand miles between his own heart and the man who'd run from it. He'd told himself, on every quiet night in a city that never quite turned into home, that wanting less was the same as needing less, and that a man could train himself out of a hunger the way he'd trained the lion to lie down on command.

He had believed almost none of it, and he had said all of it anyway, because saying it was easier than the truth.

The truth was that Sai had walked into this awful, beloved building over a year ago looking for something, and the something was him. Amani had read it off him from behind the bar in a week. A stranger's bruise on his jaw spelled it out in plain letters. Sai hadn't taken up a reckless hobby. He'd been running a search, and he'd been running it alone and badly and getting hurt, and Kyan had just looked the only man he'd ever loved in the face and told him, kindly, to give up.

The lion lifted its head.

Kyan stood. The flat club soda went in the trash and the keychain went back in his pocket. He stood in the middle of the small quiet room, listening to the bass come through the wall, and he would have bet the whole Chicago deal on exactly where Sai was right now: at that bar, ordering a drink he didn't want, because walking out the door meant it was really over.

He'd made himself real clear. That was the whole trouble. He'd been crystal clear about everything except the one thing that was actually true, and Sai was out there being brave about a kindness that was really just Kyan protecting himself, and there was still a word Kyan hadn't given him.