Pink Silk Ties

The rope was still warm from his hands when Hoshi started laughing.

Not the soft, breathy kind that meant *you're cute when you try*. This was the other laugh, the one that lived in his throat and came out sharp and serrated, the one that meant *oh, you actually thought that was good?*

Lien paused with the second loop half-tied around Hoshi's wrist. The bed creaked under his knee. Somewhere in the apartment, a radiator ticked.

"Something funny," Lien said. Flat. Not a question.

Hoshi's mismatched eyes, one black as tar, one pale as a blank page, glittered up at him from the pillow. He'd already kicked off his jeans. He was wearing the sweater with the hole in the elbow, the one he refused to throw away because it was, in his words, *the only thing I own that feels like me*. His hair fanned out around his head, black and choppy, and he looked like a small mean animal that had decided to die on this particular hill.

"You're doing it wrong," Hoshi said.

"I'm not doing it wrong."

"You're doing it *cutely*. That's worse."

Lien tightened the loop. Hoshi's wrist flexed against it, testing. The rope was good rope, soft cotton, the kind that wouldn't leave marks unless you wanted it to. Lien had bought it three weeks ago and had been waiting for the right night to use it, and this was not the right night, but Hoshi had started it. Hoshi had said, *you've never even tied anyone up, have you*, with that little smirk, and then he'd said, *I bet you'd do it like a Boy Scout*, and then he'd said, *it's fine, I'll teach you*, and now here they were.

"I'm going to untie you," Lien said.

"Good."

"And leave."

"Sure you are."

Lien sat back on his heels. The apartment was small, one room plus a kitchenette that had exactly two working burners and a fridge that hummed like it was thinking about dying. The lamp by the bed threw everything in gold. Hoshi's sweater was rucked up over his stomach, and his stomach was pale and flat and rising and falling with the slow rhythm of someone who thought he was winning.

Here's the thing about Hoshi. He was a brat the way water was wet. It wasn't a mood. It was a state of being. He had been kicked out of three different group homes before he was sixteen for reasons that ranged from *disrespectful* to *physically threatened staff* to, once, *set a small fire in the laundry room, motivation unclear*. He had a rap sheet of small cruelties and a soft spot the size of a fist that he guarded like a dragon. Lien had found that soft spot by accident, six months ago, in a bar, when Hoshi had been drunk and crying in a bathroom stall over a cat that had died when he was twelve. Lien had held his hair back. Hoshi had thrown up. It was not romantic. It had become everything.

Now Hoshi was lying on Lien's bed with his wrists half-tied and his chin tilted up, daring him.

So Lien did the thing he was good at. He changed the game.

"Okay," he said. He let the rope fall slack. "You're right. I'm bad at this."

Hoshi's smirk flickered. He hadn't expected agreement. Brats never did. They built their whole personality around resistance, and when you stopped pushing, they didn't know where to put their hands.

"You're bad at a lot of things," Hoshi said, but it came out slower. Less sure.

"I am." Lien leaned down. He put his mouth next to Hoshi's ear, close enough that his breath moved the hair there. "So teach me."

Hoshi went still.

That was the first real thing that had happened all night. The stillness. Lien felt it in his own chest, a little flare of heat that meant *there he is*. Hoshi could laugh and mock and call him a Boy Scout, but he couldn't handle being asked. He couldn't handle being handed the reins he pretended he didn't want.

"Teach you," Hoshi repeated.

"You said you'd teach me. So teach me." Lien pulled back just enough to look at him. Pink eyes, pink hair falling in his face, no smile now. "Tell me what you want. Exactly. Or I'll untie you and we'll watch a movie and you can think about how you had a chance to get what you wanted and you spent it being clever."

The radiator ticked. Hoshi's throat moved when he swallowed.

"That's not fair," he said.

"Nothing's fair. You know that better than anyone."

It was the wrong thing to say, or maybe the right thing. Hoshi's jaw tightened, and for a second Lien thought he'd pushed too hard, that Hoshi would do what he always did when he got cornered, which was bolt. He'd done it twice in six months. Once he'd made it all the way to the bus station before Lien found him, and Lien had sat down next to him on the bench and said nothing for twenty minutes until Hoshi had leaned his head on his shoulder and whispered *I'm sorry* into his jacket.

But tonight Hoshi didn't bolt. Tonight he looked up at the ceiling and said, very quietly, "Tighter. On the left one. And then you have to, you have to loop it under, not over, or it slips when I pull."

Lien's heart did something stupid.

"Okay," he said. He picked the rope back up. "Show me."

Hoshi showed him. His voice got lower, more careful, the way it did when he was actually thinking instead of performing. He explained the loop, the tension, the way the knot had to sit against the pulse point without cutting it off. His wrists were thin. Lien could feel the bones under the skin, the little ridge of tendon, the heat of him. When he pulled the second knot tight, Hoshi's breath caught, just barely, and his eyes went half-lidded.

"Good," Hoshi said. "That's. That's right."

"Was that so hard?"

"Shut up."

But he wasn't smirking anymore. He was looking at Lien like Lien had just done something impressive, which was a look Lien had never seen on him before, and it did something to his chest that he didn't have a name for. He filed it away. He'd need it later.

"You know what I think," Lien said. He ran one finger along the rope, from Hoshi's wrist up to his elbow, slow. Hoshi shivered, and tried to hide it, and failed. "I think you wanted me to tie you up so you could prove I couldn't. So you wouldn't have to admit you wanted it."

"I don't want it."

"You're hard."

Hoshi's face went red, fast, all the way to the tips of his ears, and he jerked his knee up to cover himself, which didn't work, which made it worse, which made Lien laugh, low and warm.

"I hate you," Hoshi said.

"No you don't."

"No. I don't."

And there it was, the soft thing, the thing under the armor. Lien leaned down and kissed him, and Hoshi kissed back like he was starving, and the rope held.