Page 10 of Gagging the Gharial

"Everything okay?"

"My boyfriend wants to be sure you're not being made to do this," Kyan said.

Sai felt the word boyfriend go off in his chest like a small flare, and made himself ignore it, because this mattered more. "You're not, right?" he said. "You're here because you want to be? Nobody's, I don't know, holding something over you?"

The man laughed, a genuine sound. "I'd reassure you, but I don't think you want sushi all over the floor." He shifted his head to see Sai better. "No. Nobody's making me. Is this my dream job? Not really. I'm finishing a master's in criminal justice. I want to work shifter enforcement when I'm done. But the loans are a nightmare, and this place pays stupidly well even before tips. So, I'll probably keep doing it on my days off even after I make the force. Come eat. Hands are optional, the sheet stays on, no biting unless it's an obvious accident, and I'm listening to a true-crime podcast, so honestly you won't bother me. Pretend I'm furniture."

"What are you?" Sai asked.

"Hawk. Now eat, you've only got so long in here." He set the earpiece back and lowered his face into the rest.

Sai looked at Kyan, steadier for having asked. Consent given, plainly, in the man's own words. Nothing in a year of numbered rooms had ever been this clean about it, and it had taken a stranger laid out as a table to show him what clean looked like. "Okay," he said. "I'll just. Take a piece."

He reached for one near the hawk's shoulder, and Kyan made a small sound.

"Not with your hand."

Sai blinked. "I can't use my hands at all?"

"Not if you want to eat."

So that was the game. Sai bent down and took a piece of sushi into his mouth, trying to touch the man as little as he possibly could, and nearly dropped it for the effort. He got it down, barely tasting the bright clean salt of the fish over the embarrassment, and tried a second piece with marginally more confidence, and a third where his lips brushed warm skin and he flinched back upright.

He couldn't do it. The food was extraordinary and he was genuinely hungry, but he could not make his body believe a person was a table, and he didn't see how anyone really could.

"I'm sorry." He looked at Kyan, who'd stretched out on the floor to watch him like a cat in a sunbeam, which was close enough to the truth. "I can't. Can I please just use my hands?"

Kyan didn't look disappointed. He got up off the floor, and then he was shrugging out of his clothes, folding them over a chair, every piece, because there was no other way to do the thing he'd clearly decided to do. Sai watched him strip without shame and then drop down into his lion, the shift rolling over him in a single smooth motion, and where Kyan had stood there was suddenly a great tawny cat with a mane Sai had always wanted to bury his hands in. The expensive clothes stayed folded on the chair like anyone else's. A shift kept nothing human.

The lion shook out his mane, looked at Sai with familiar amber eyes, and then flowed back up into a man, naked and unbothered, crossing the room to him.

"Take your clothes off and shift," Kyan said. "I'll feed you instead."

Sai's face went hot. "You're going to feed me. Off him."

"With my hands. Like a civilized animal." Kyan picked up a piece of sushi between two fingers, holding it delicately to prove the point. "It was supposed to be a fun game for you. We'll just play it a different way."

Sai hesitated only a moment more. Then he undressed, folding his good shirt with more care than the rest, and let himself fall into his other shape.

It felt, as it always did, like an enormous relief. He was long and low and armored, his tail stretching out behind him, his short legs nothing he'd ever move gracefully on but his body finally his own. He rarely got to be like this. It was too big, too frightening to others, too impractical for a studio apartment and a job at a garden center. There, in a white soundproof room with the only person he trusted, it just felt right. In this shape he could hear everything, the tinny hiss of the hawk's podcast, the ventilation, and under it all Kyan's heartbeat, slow and even and entirely unafraid. Nobody's heartbeat stayed steady this close to his shifted self. Kyan's always had.

"Open your mouth," Kyan said.

Sai tilted his long head back and let his jaws fall open, every one of his teeth on display, more teeth than most people could look at without going pale. Kyan only reached out and touched the points of them, unafraid, the way he'd never once been afraid of any part of Sai.

"I forgot how many of these you've got." He fed the first piece in, rich fatty tuna with a bite of jalapeño, one of Sai's favorites, and Sai swallowed it whole and opened up again, eager as anything. The next was salmon, perfect. He expected a third and instead got Kyan's fingers stroking down the length of his snout.

Sai had always been embarrassed by his snout. It was long and narrow and nothing like the blunt handsome jaw of a crocodile, a feature he could do exactly nothing about and had spent a lifetime wishing were different. But Kyan rubbed slow circles into the small scales along it, the way he always used to, and Sai's eyes drifted half shut, and the embarrassment faded under the simple weight of being touched there on purpose.

The hawk shifted slightly on the table, and Sai's attention snapped to him, and he didn't love the reminder that they weren't alone.

"Almost done," Kyan told him. He rubbed his knuckles along the underside of Sai's chin. "He's a gharial," he added, to no one, to the room, pride warming every word. "Not a common thing at all. I like them, though. He's different, my Sai is."

Sai went very still.

My Sai. Kyan hadn't called him that in a year. Not once, not in the club, not on the drive, not even on the couch with his hand around him. Sai flowed back up into himself all at once, standing naked and unsteady in the bright room, his folded clothes a small distance away and the words still ringing in him, and he didn't reach for the clothes yet. He stepped in and kissed Kyan's cheek.

"Thank you," he said.