Archive of Our Own

“Anything to drink?” 

“No thanks.”

The flight attendant hands Zhou Zishu a red and white rectangle of Biscoff. 

He digs in the bag under his feet, and finds the flask of hot water he’d just filled up at an airport cafe in Shanghai. There’s a packet of instant decaf coffee submerged somewhere in the seafloor of his backpack, and he scrabbles around for it like a crab, until he hears crinkling plastic. The flight attendant reaches over his hunched back to hand the person next to him a can of Diet Coke. 

Zhou Zishu empties the tube of powder into his flask and swirls it around. The coke can next to him opens with a clink and a hiss. 

“Diet? Isn’t that worse for you?”

Zhang Chengling holds the coke with both hands in his lap, thumbs wiping the condensation from the word “diet”, like he’s polishing an heirloom.

“My mom always drank this at home, so…”

Zhou Zishu shifts in his seat. It’s very uncomfortable.

“And sarsaparilla in glass bottles, but they don’t have that here…”

He unwraps his Biscoff, pushes one cookie up from the sleeve, and offers it to Zhang Chengling. 

“No thanks, Zhou-shu, I got one, too.”

Well. And he’s out of ideas. 

Zhou Zishu is sitting at the window seat. It occurs to him that he maybe should have let Zhang Chengling take it, instead of sticking to their seat assignment mindlessly, so the boy can have clouds and whatever to look out at for the next... sixteen hours? More, with layovers? 

He slides up the beige window. It’s pitch black outside—their flight had taken off at precisely midnight. They could be in a submarine and it would look no different. It makes him feel like they are stowing away, scurrying from the world during a dark blink from one day to the next. When Shanghai’s eyelids open again to gray skies, they will have long vanished, like a forgettable dream.

He nibbles a corner off his cookie, grinding the sugary triangle of it into sand, and lets it melt on his tongue. Beside him, Zhang Chengling continues to clutch at his Diet Coke like an urn, his face white as bones. 

They land in San Francisco in darkness. Zhou Zishu slings his bag onto his back, and pulls two of Zhang Chengling’s suitcases while the boy clambers to catch up with him, dragging a carry-on case and a backpack on wheels. They sit, freezing in the night on a cold concrete block outside the baggage claim, while Zhou Zishu deletes his Didi app and downloads Uber instead. The app matches him to a “Li ” , attached to a photo of an old Asian man. 4.5 stars. The complimentary black Camry slows in front of him five minutes later. Li takes one look at them, and switches the pop music radio station to one that’s blasting Cantonese news when they duck into his car. He says something that Zhou Zishu doesn’t understand.

“Sorry,” Zhou Zishu says in English. “I don’t speak Cantonese.”

“Ahh.” Li laughs. “Where are you from?” He asks in accented Mandarin.

“Shanghai.”

“Not a lot of northerners in Chinatown here,” Li remarks, double-checking the address in his GPS. “Since that’s where you’re going?” 

“That’s ok, I’m not staying long.”

“On holiday with your son?”

“That’s not my son.”

“Oh. On holiday then?”

“No, just… to take care of some things.”

“Quick trip?”

“Yeah, just a couple of days, I think.”

Zhang Chengling is quiet, staring out of the window as they whiz through the freeway. Zhou Zishu looks at him and feels the kind of helplessness one feels when they find a baby bird under a tree: doesn’t know what it is, how to feed it, how to keep it warm, how to keep it alive, who he should hand it off to when he realizes he’s too nauseated to feed it worms. He fared okay in the airport and on the plane because there was an infinity of restaurants and flight attendants to play wet nurse in his stead. But now he’s alone, and he thinks he will faint if this half-grown boy starts crying in front of him. 

How he ended up with such an oversized, weepy baby bird, is a classic case of letting himself get swept up by anyone that so much as asks . He doesn’t even know Gao Chong that well. He probably wasn’t even one of the first ten people Gao Chong had messaged on Wechat about this. But Zhou Zishu had just turned in his resignation at his cousin’s ridiculous skylight installation company, and getting out of the country felt like the most rebellious, selfish thing he could do. Until of course, he used it to run an extensive errand for someone else. 

Li takes them off the 101 and through downtown, winding along dim streets and through a long tunnel that made Zhou Zishu feel like he’s traversing the belly of a snake. Once they break through to the other side, he glances around with curiosity for the first time since this trip began. All the Macy’s and GAPs and Yves Saint Laurents from downtown have been replaced by a throng of Chinese shop signs and banners. Even in the near total darkness he can make them out, busy and crowded like a page in a newspaper of nothing but restaurant and grocery store names. 

Li pulls up to a side street at the other side of the neighborhood, in front of a nondescript apartment building that Zhou Zishu isn’t sure if he’ll recognize at all in daylight. 

Zhang Chengling is asleep, face squished against the car window, drooling. Zhou Zishu shakes his shoulder to wake him up. Do all kids feel like play-dough—like any pressure, any disturbance at all would leave them with fingerprints and fingernail indents? This one feels fragile enough. 

“Wake up, we’re here.” 

They get in with a set of keys taped behind a loosely-installed air vent next to the mailbox, that Gao Chong said would be there. Their place is on the second floor, and as soon as the last bag makes it through the door, Zhou Zishu beelines for the bathroom, and locks himself in. 

He checks the water—it’s running. He pees. The toilet flushes. The shower head has decent water pressure. He leans his elbows against the edges of the sink and puts his face in his hands. 

His phone updates with the local time. It’s 11:25pm and they are both jet-lagged into the next year. Zhou Zishu watches Zhang Chengling take out all his electronics and methodically plug them into the wall. 

“Chengling, are you hungry?” 

He hears the quiet whimper of a stomach, as if on command.

“A little,” Zhang Chengling says. “But I didn’t see any shop lights still on.” 

There are two places still open, when Zhou Zishu googles the spots nearby. A cafe and a restaurant. He clicks on the restaurant’s website, hands over his phone to Zhang Chengling, and lets the boy press whatever buttons on the menu he wants. Thirty minutes later, a woman calls and notifies him that he should come and pick up his order. 

Zhou Zishu escapes the apartment with a sigh of relief, and makes the ten minute walk there with his mind blissfully empty. He takes in the design of the trash cans hogging parking spaces on the side of the road, the bilingual street signs, the rows and rows of dim red lanterns that hang above the final avenue his GPS is telling him to turn into. There’s only one building with lights on, so he puts his phone away and jogs over to it, like a moth to a flame. 

The woman watching a melodrama (he can hear the crying) on her phone behind the reception desk sees him immediately, lifts the white plastic bag next to her, and struts over to him. She doesn’t look old, so her head of snowy hair takes Zhou Zishu aback. She holds the bag out to him, yells something in Cantonese into the vast darkness behind her—this place is bigger than Zhou Zishu thought, big enough to warrant the small koi pond to his right—and says to him in English, “last name Zhou, $26.32?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” 

“Thanks for coming on time, my cook for the night was furious about an order this late when we close at midnight.” 

“...Sorry?”

“No, no. Just me complaining about him complaining. Enjoy.” 

Zhou Zishu speed-walks back. He can smell whatever it is that Zhang Chengling had ordered through the plastic bag, all oily and salty and fried-smelling, and maybe he is hungry, after all. 

He discovers that, conforming with universal fourteen-year-old behavior, Zhang Chengling has picked out nothing but carbs. 

They feed off the takeout boxes together like pigs at a trough, this apartment having not a single plate in the cupboards. And like pigs they snort the food down, rotating the three boxes between them as they switch off like a bizarre hand-powered Lazy Susan. Zhang Chengling ordered fried rice peppered with salted fish, chicken, and egg, glistening with a heady, savory fragrance only possible from the high heat of a blackened wok. There are spring rolls, crisp and fresh from a fryer. And for some reason the boy still felt the need to order a large portion of flat rice noodles, stir-fried in dark soy with beef and green onions. Zhou Zishu isn’t going to fault him. He always thought he’d order pizza or a burger for his first meal in the States, but as he stuffs his face he can’t bring himself to regret anything at all. 

Zhang Chengling licks the oil glistening on his lips. “That was really good.” 

“Yeah, it was.”

“Good find, Zhou-shu.” He smiles the smallest smile—it’s the first time that Zhou Zishu has seen it. 

“Hah—you ordered, the credit’s all yours.”

“Can we get the salt and pepper fried wings next time?”

“Sure.”

Next time will have to happen very soon. Gao Chong is supposed to be back from D.C in two days, to take this kid that Zhou Zishu ferried across the ocean off his hands. 

And—did they just have their first real conversation together, however short and mundane it was? 

The apartment is a one-bed one-bedroom. Zhou Zishu brings Zhang Chengling and his luggage inside it, and lies down on the couch in the living room. There’s something wedged between the cushions. He sits up again, and digs out an empty, half-crushed Diet Coke can. 

From what Gao Chong’s five-sentence Wechat message said, the gist of it is this: Zhang Chengling’s parents have just died, in a motorcycle accident on their way back from work. He has no relatives in China willing or able to take him. Somehow Gao Chong decided to be that person, despite being at least six branches down from the Zhangs’ family tree, and living in another country. He bought non-refundable, quadruple-digits airfare for the boy, whose family home was about to get repossessed. Could Zhou Zishu chaperone him across the Pacific and settle him in until Gao Chong makes it back from his very last-minute business trip? 

Staring at the ceiling fan in the dark living room, Zhou Zishu is once again at a loss about why he’d agreed. It wasn’t that Zhang Chengling’s story stirred him; he’d lost his parents when he was a boy as well, and had always treated it very much as a matter of fact. It wasn’t that he craved an adventure—he could have gone to Thailand or Singapore by himself. It wasn’t that he was “just the type of person for the job,” because he isn’t. 

His eyelids are heavy. Maybe the room is spinning, maybe the fan is spinning. It’s a one-week trip—a bare blip in his life. He’ll wander and drift into the next thing like he always does, the way he started the job at his cousin’s stupid company, the way he joined the now-dissolved agrotourism AirBnB competitor that his childhood band of friends had started before that—why did they think that name was a good idea? Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts had sent them three cease-and-desist orders.

Somehow, likely the work of a full belly, Zhou Zishu drifts off for a few hours. He wakes up again at 6am with a cramped neck, and blinks blearily at the soft sunlight filtering through the window. 

Bathed in the same sun again—on the other side of the world. 

Zhou Zishu rinses out a takeout box from last night and fills it with water. He microwaves it until hot, pours it back into his flask, and dumps another tube of instant decaf into it. There’s a greasy film on top of the black sludge that tastes like an afterthought of peanut oil, but he can’t bring himself to care. He sips in between texts to Gao Chong, telling him that they’ve arrived safely. Gao Chong replies almost immediately and tells him that he’d left Zhou Zishu his car, parked two streets away. There’s street cleaning tonight and he should move the car soon before finding parking becomes even more of a terror. The key is on top of the fridge. 

The car in question is a sleek, black, almost-brand-new Mercedes-Benz SUV that takes Zhou Zishu a full fifteen minutes to find a new parking space for, droning around the city blocks in a soul-crushing patrol. He returns the key to where he found it, self-affirms that Zhang Chengling is still asleep, and heads out again. He’s going to explore. 

The streets are loud with the standby noises of box trucks engines and sirens as morning workers unload produce and goods all along the main street. A scatter of the elderly slowly drift among the frenzy, doing their morning shopping before the crowds hit. The buildings here are run down and claustrophobic. The occasional pagoda-topped buildings next to a bank or a church look bizarre, as does the canopy of red lanterns stretching over the street he just turned into—he realizes he has retraced his steps from last night. 

Zhou Zishu stands in the middle of the sidewalk and takes out his phone for a photo of the street scene, when a voice as clear as water clangs from behind him, making him jump. 

“Coming through, coming through! Move. Out of the way, pretty boy—step over that crate behind you before I run your cute little slow ass over. Thank you, thank you!”

The tornado of words blows him off balance as he tries to avoid whatever is rumbling towards him. Zhou Zishu trips on the plastic crate just behind his calves and falls flat on his back with a thud. Hot, searing pain seizes his spine, and he holds his inhale, trying to breathe through it. 

He lies on the ground and watches a long, lean figure loom past him, pushing—running—with a pallet jack stacked tall with boxes of clinking soy sauce bottles. At the sound of Zhou Zishu’s collapse the man swivels his head around like an owl, and twists back just as quickly, flashing only the edge of a sharp eyebrow for one suspended moment. 

Long hair in a half-ponytail. Thin white tee tucked into jeans. A soaking towel around his neck has spread a wet puddle at his back, making the overheated terracotta of his skin blush through the worn fabric clinging to the curve of his spine, like candy through a square of rice paper wrapper. Long legs, long strides. On a sleepy street where the average speed of its denizens is one mile per hour, he is almost supersonic. Fucking asshole. 

Zhou Zishu rubs his tailbone. How in the world did that guy say all that, faster than a radio station commercial? How did he even see enough of Zhou Zishu with the wall of boxes wedged between them? Is he supposed to feel flattered? Flustered? Annoyed? Asinine? All of the above? 

The stranger swings his pallet jack to the right, and ducks behind an alley. Zhou Zishu follows, limping. The alley flanks the back door of the same restaurant he ordered from last night—the entrance is propped open by a can of canola oil. He can’t believe it.

He stands at the mouth of the narrow street and waits. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for—to see that person’s face again, or to yell back at him. Zhou Zishu turns and peers inside the restaurant. It’s almost as dark as it had been at night.

“Sorry, we’re not open until eleven.” The white-haired woman surfaces from the shadows. She takes one look at him, and blinks. “Oh, it’s you again. Was something the problem? Should I get the cook? He just clocked in.” 

“No, the food was great.” He’s distracted and looking over her shoulder. He doesn’t care about the cook, he wants to see the beautiful, obnoxious pallet jack guy again. 

“I’m glad. Well, see you later then.” The woman is ushering him away now. “You should watch out, we’re gonna keep unloading until we open, this street is kind of a danger zone right now.”

He wants to ask her about—him. But there’s no way to do it without making it weird. So he lets her wave him off, dazed and confused, his lower back on fire. 

Right. He’d intended to come out to get food. Zhou Zishu buys steamed rice noodle rolls at a dim sum hole-in-the-wall, one with egg and bean sprouts and one with shrimp, along with a plastic pint of plain congee. At the junk store next door he throws out a couple of dollars for paper plates and two rice bowls. By the time he makes it back to the apartment with breakfast in tow, Zhang Chengling has woken up—the water in the bathroom is running.

They eat, a degree more civilized than yesterday, and lie around the apartment for the rest of the day, ignoring each other. Zhang Chengling seems scared to go out, and Zhou Zishu has had his fill of excitement for today despite having done no sightseeing for his short stay here. Maybe tomorrow they’ll look around town officially, but for now, Zhou Zishu pulls out his laptop and gets to work. 

He goes on the restaurant’s Yelp page and scrolls through the gallery. It is a huge space inside. Red all over—red walls, red carpet, round dark tables draped with red tablecloth. There’s a stage at the far end of the cavern, with a carved golden pair of dragon and phoenix flanking the center. This is a banquet hall. The kind that hosts enormous Chinese weddings, fit for a thousand guests. He would have never guessed just passing by it on the curb.

Zhou Zishu clicks through the photos—there are interiors of the hall as an à la carte dim sum Mecca during weekend mornings, standard dinner arrangements in the evenings. Once in a while it’s photos of grooms and brides and their whole villages. Huge spreads of banquet foods, decked out with gardens in bloom on the edges of platters—Yulan magnolias, orchids, and a rainbow of pansies. Zhou Zishu skims past these exquisite sights with one question in mind: would he be a waiter? The dishwasher? Just an errand boy? Or does he not even work there at all and is just the wholesale truck driver, and Zhou Zishu is sitting on this couch completely losing his mind, scrubbing these interior photos like that man would be a part of the decoration? Is he looking him up so he can leave a proper negative review? Is that still the goal? 

There are no photos of him. Even though Zhou Zishu didn’t get a proper look at his face, he feels like he will know it when he sees it, like a dream recalled years down the line. 

The white-haired woman, on the other hand, is dead center of uncountable group photos in the wedding shots. She must be the owner. Oftentimes her hair is the only speck of white in a background of warm colors—a drop of mourning in an ocean of auspicious joy, that everyone around her gravitates towards like tides to the moon. 

Gao Chong texts him again the next morning. His business meeting with some overseas partners have gone sour with accusations of poor factory production in the Vietnam branch. He’s texting Zhou Zishu as he’s about to board a plane, and he is so sorry about the inconvenience, but he’s going to be delayed longer. 

Zhang Chengling is holed up in his room again. Most of the time he is like a bear—hibernating with his reserve of miserable grief, coming out only to eat and use the bathroom. It makes Zhou Zishu secretly flounder. Aren’t kids supposed to go out with friends, watch movies and buy too many snacks?

But he has no friends here, and his parents are dead. Zhou Zishu feels like a horrible person. 

And then something clicks— school. Kids are supposed to be in school. This is why it’s so weird for Zhang Chengling to be here all the time. He’ll make friends in sclass, and then he can watch movies and buy snacks, and Zhou Zishu will finally not feel like he’s ruining the kid’s life by doing exactly what he was asked to. 

But is there a point in trying to put him in school right now? It’s April, and when he checks online he finds that there’s only about two months left of the school year for this district. Zhou Zishu won’t even be here in two months. And he still hasn’t figured out what this apartment that Gao Chong has let them live in was originally used for. Was it his rental? It seems too unlived-in to be Gao Chong’s own home. But it also would not be surprising if it was—the man is barely here, as evidenced by his most recent Vietnam escapade. 

Zhang Chengling emerges to grab a Diet Coke from their otherwise-empty fridge, wearing three-day-old sweats, and Zhou Zishu makes up his mind. 

There’s a high school just a five minute drive away. It’s recess when they get there—high noon energy from a morning pent up in classes buzzing free as kids flock around basketball courts and ping-pong tables like animals at a watering hole. The noise is deafening. Zhang Chengling is petrified. Zhou Zishu tucks the boy behind him, and asks a security guard for directions to the main office. 

They have just turned into a hallway to the counselor’s office when a skin-crawling, familiar voice worms into Zhou Zishu’s ears. 

The door ten feet in front of him opens, and reveals a scowling, gorgeous face, attached to the same long, lithe form that had yesterday almost mowed him down onto a chewing-gum-pockmarked pavement. It’s him.

The man—around Zhou Zishu’s own age—hauls out with him a girl by the top loop of her backpack. He drills the knuckles of his other hand into her scalp, right between her two low space buns, and grits out, “still getting into school fights when you’re old enough for me to marry off, how am I sending you to college this year? Can you be less embarrassing for my sake?”

The girl wipes her bloody nose. “Try all you want. Luo-yi will kill you!” 

“You little—” 

The man stops short in his tracks. He stares at Zhou Zishu, who has been staring at him in turn. 

“You almost ran me over,” Zhou Zishu blurts out. 

The man’s eyes widen. “You—” 

The counselor’s door opens again. A petite Latina woman pokes her head out and looks at them. 

“Are you the one that’s registering for school?” she asks Zhou Zishu. “I just got a call from security.”

Zhou Zishu nods. 

The counselor looks at him expectantly and waves him in, and he’s forced to go with her, losing the wraith he’s finally caught a glimpse of. Like Medusa, as his guts paralyze to stone; like Orpheus, at the nape of the underworld. 

He sits through the niceties. Where they came from, how old Zhang Chengling is. No, he’s not his dad. No, he’s not technically his guardian either—is that going to be a problem? She drones on about needing to test English proficiency for all immigrant students to see if they need ELD classes, and asks for a mountain of paperwork and documentation that Zhou Zishu, thank heavens, has all in order. All except immunization records. He can’t find the little booklet anywhere. 

The woman—her name is Dolores—watches him flail in his backpack with a sympathetic smile. She slides a folder of colored papers towards him, and tells him that he can bring the records with him when he fills out these final forms at home. 

And then she’s ushering them out again, into the bleak, piss-yellow hallway of incandescent lights.  

Zhang Chengling is gripping his arm like a kickboard at the deep end of the pool. Zhou Zishu lets him claw as hard as he wants.

His newest preoccupation is leaning against the wall at the bottom of the stairwell. The girl he’s with squats on the ground next to him, inflicting gnashes into a pineapple bun. Zhou Zishu feels himself go dumb with surprise.

The man glances up at the sound of footsteps echoing down the stairs, and unfolds the hands crossed in front of his chest. He’s looking at Zhou Zishu with huge eyes again, mouth slightly open. 

He says something that just warbles past Zhou Zishu’s meaning-making cognition, syllables lilting. This is becoming a trend that Zhou Zishu is getting tired of. 

“Don’t understand,” he says directly in Mandarin. Partly annoyed by all these language gymnastics he keeps finding himself in, partly by how nothing in the string of words coming out of that man’s mouth has the universal tone of an apology. 

The man cracks a smile—a crooked thing that shows his teeth. “I said,'' he switches to stilted Mandarin, his consonants sharp where they are luscious as freshly pounded rice cakes on Zhou Zishu’s own tongue. “You look just as good standing up as you do lying on your back.”

Unbelievable. Zhou Zishu is going to leave so many negative reviews. 

“Were you waiting for me for a half hour, just so you can compare?” Zhou Zishu raises an eyebrow. He’s stuck on this man’s face—on the pink of his smirk, the line of his nose, the slight squint of his left eye, like he’s getting ready to wink. 

The man looks away and coughs. The girl at his knee shakes her head at herself and gets up, scrunching the plastic baggie that held her pineapple bun into her back pocket. “I’ll be at the front gate. Your lunch break is almost over. You should be quick or Luo-yi’s gonna break your legs.”

“If you didn’t get suspended I wouldn't have had to rush here. Take this little shrimp with you, A-Xiang.” The man gestures at Zhang Chengling. “If i’m not wrong that’s going to be your underclassman. Show him around, the adults need to talk.”

A-Xiang shoots a bored look at Zhang Chengling and hooks a finger at him. The missed sliver of blood wiped perpendicular to her nose must make her look extra intimidating, because Zhang Chengling whispers to Zhou Zishu, “can I just stay with you?”

Zhang Chengling stays with them.

The man points at him. “He doesn’t look like you.”

“He’s not mine,” Zhou Zishu says for the billionth time. “Was that your kid?” She looks more the age of a little sister or niece, but he’s just making conversation for the sake of hearing this person answer them. 

“Yes.” The man grins. “I found her in the garbage dump, all by myself.”

“My back still hurts,” Zhou Zishu feels compelled to say, and immediately regrets it. The Cheshire Cat in front of him gives an even more chilling performance. 

But he quickly hides his teeth away again behind a less-intense smile. “Sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry at all. Zhou Zishu doesn’t think this man is capable of sounding sorry. “You guys are new to town?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” The man holds out his hand. “I’m Wen. Ke. Xing. I think we’re meant to run into each other.”

Zhou Zishu takes that gorgeous hand in his and squeezes. “Zhou Zishu. And that’s Zhang Chengling.” 

Wen Kexing— Wen. Ke. Xing. Wen. Kexing. Wen Kexing —glances at the boy for a split second, and trains his eyes back on Zhou Zishu. “Give me your phone.” He holds his palm up. 

Zhou Zishu hands it to him. He wants to keep handing him things. 

Wen Kexing talks as he types. “Just gonna leave my number, if you ever want some help with all this school stuff for your kiddo. Or…” He looks up at Zhou Zishu for a second. “Anything else. Chinatown’s my gig, if you live around the area.” 

He hands the phone back to Zhou Zishu, his gaze diverting again. Zhou Zishu glances down at the screen. Wen Kexing didn’t make a contact profile for himself. He’d simply opened a new page on the notes app, and put in his number with a smiley face, no name attached. The gesture feels so self-conscious and incongruous with the rest of his flirtation that Zhou Zishu finds himself involuntarily cataloguing yet another opinion of this man, like he’s holding a paper cup at a fountain machine and dumping in everything from lemonade to root beer. 

“Ge. Luo-yi’s calling you, ” A-Xiang pops back to shout. “Can we go?”

Wen Kexing presses his lips together. “I’m coming.” He turns back to Zhou Zishu, his eyes almost nervous. “Um, I’ll see you around?” Another abrupt grin. “Be careful when you walk okay?”

As Zhou Zishu drives out of the school parking lot and stops at a red light, he sees Wen Kexing again, walking back to Chinatown on the other side of the street. He’s hunched over with a wet wipe, wrestling to get it under his sister’s nose while she swats at him with a scowl. Both of them somehow manage to still step in time to each other like two dressage horses and not trip at all. The sight hypnotizes Zhou Zishu, and he doesn’t snap out of it until the car behind him honks. 

A thought occurs to him as he’s spinning around the blocks, wishing he could conjure up a parking space out of thin air. He turns to Zhang Chengling. “Wanna just drive around town and look at stuff?”

Zhang Chengling blinks back at him. “...Yes.” 

Zhou Zishu does a sudden u-turn, making the car swerve and Zhang Chengling gasp in surprise—he thinks it might be the beginnings of a laugh. He drives aimlessly, letting Zhang Chengling pick whichever way he wants to go at each intersection. The kid’s obviously overwhelmed with the sudden abundance of choices presented to him and mostly, conservatively says “straight.” But Zhou Zishu keeps asking him at each turn anyway, just to see what makes him choose a left or a right. 

They do this for close to an hour. If they draw on a map their route it would look like hair in a shower drain. Zhang Chengling sticks his head out of the window, the wind combing through his short cut neatly. Zhou Zishu’s head of hair, awkward between short and long—doesn’t fare as well, but he finds himself smiling, even as he has to brush at his eyes every couple of seconds. They’re far out of Chinatown now, in a neighborhood lined with Victorian houses and flowers spilling between fences, neat and deserted. Zhou Zishu feels like a tourist for the first time since coming here.

“Wait,” Zhang Chengling calls, pointing out the window. “Aquarium store! Zhou-shu, can we go look?” 

The shop is compact, stacked floor-to-ceiling with fish tanks—little sky blue cubicles of oceans and rivers, waiting to flood into the hands of shoppers. They try to pronounce every English label like they’re at a zoo, tapping the glass on a tank of puffy oranda goldfish to the aging shopkeeper’s silent annoyance. Zhang Chengling lingers on a shelf of bettas, resting listlessly in little pint-sized plastic tubs. 

“Why are they kept like that?” Zhou Zishu asks the shopkeeper. 

“Those?” The older man slides his glasses up his nose. “They fight with each other if you put them in a tank together like the other fish. There’s not enough space for them to each get their own little tank, so the little soup cups do well enough.” 

That seems like an overstatement. “They don’t look great,” Zhou Zishu says. He taps on one of the tubs. The pale blue thing inside barely flickers, from where it droops on the plastic bottom. 

“Ack, believe it or not, that’s already an upgrade. They came in these little plastic baggies no bigger than a thing of m&m’s, about a hundred in a box. This cup situation is practically a mansion.”

“Where do they ship in from?”

The old man shrugs. “Somewhere in Asia, you tell me.” He immediately puts his hand out. “Not to be racist or anything. My wife is half Korean.”

Zhou Zishu decides to ignore that. He looks back at Zhang Chengling, who is examining every soup cup of fish intensely, his hands clenched together.

In a rare moment of weakness, Zhou Zishu buys him one—a red little scrap, listless and broken-finned—along with an arm and a leg for a proper tank, food, and colorful little pebbles. 

Back at the apartment, Zhang Chengling busies himself with setting up the tank in the kitchen. Zhou Zishu sprawls on his couch-bed, and stares at the note of Wen Kexing’s number on his phone for the third time in ten minutes. He’s nibbling the edge of his flask of decaf, thumb hovering over the string of numbers. 

Zhou Zishu holds his breath.

3:12PM

Hey this is Zhou Zishu.

If you’re free after work you can help me with these school forms

He clicks on the unsaved number to gingerly make a contact page around it without accidentally pressing the call button. Then he realizes that he doesn’t know the characters for Wen Kexing’s name nor how it’s spelled, so he inputs ??? into the name slot instead. 

Just a couple of hours later, and it’s once again time to figure out dinner. Zhang Chengling still wants to try those salt and pepper wings, so Zhou Zishu goes to that banquet restaurant’s website and orders them. He throws in some cold noodles with peanut sesame sauce for himself, and gets an order of roast pork chow mein for Zhang Chengling, just in case. 

It’s fast becoming a routine. He wedges through the heavy, frosted glass doors, and for the first time, it’s alive—fiery red like the photos online, the smell of pu erh and chrysanthemum tea mixed with kitchen smoke wafting in the air, the sound of conversation deafening like ten concerts going on at once. Every table filled to the brim, a sea of waiters and bussers running the soles of their shoes off. There’s no one at the reception desk, so Zhou Zishu takes his time scanning the fleet of waiters in waistcoats. He doesn’t find who he’s looking for—the commotion makes it impossible—but does glimpse A-Xiang, sitting at a small table towards the back by herself, wearing purple pajamas and sulking over a stack of textbooks.

“Do you have a reservation?” A soft voice, barely audible above the ruckus, starts behind him. 

It’s a pretty young woman, face heavily makeuped, wearing a modern cut of a red cheongsam. 

“I’m picking up an order.”

“Last name?”

“Zhou.”

“Hmm. First name?”

“Also starts with a Z.”

“Mmm,” she shakes her head, looking at the iPad in her hand. “I’m gonna need the full name. Lots of double Z’s today.”

Chinese people. “It’s Zishu.”

The girl sifts through a table full of takeout bags, and plucks his out of the mix. 

The white-haired matriarch emerges out of nowhere and plops two credit cards onto the reception desk. “Table 32 wants this split. Then you can sit out back and take fifteen, Qianqiao.” She looks at Zhou Zishu. “Wow, again. Are you a journalist? One of those food vloggers?”

Dinner is great again. It would be perfect if Wen Kexing would reply to his text, though.

Zhou Zishu backtracks the hours in his mind. If Wen Kexing took lunch off around noon, there’s no way he’s still at work by now unless he’s pulling ridiculous, ridiculous hours. By 9pm Zhou Zishu thinks he may very well have been ghosted. Another two hours, and he’s snuggled up in his couch-bed, trying to get warm under his jacket-blanket, when his phone buzzes. 

???

11:01PM

Hey!!! So sorry, I just got a chance to look at my phone. If you’re still awake and down, meet me in an hour? Im closing tonight and it’s gonna take a while

SORRY.

You’re probably asleep or want to be, this is dumb.

Wen Kexing drops a pin on the address of the restaurant, as if Zhou Zishu can’t already walk there with his eyes closed.

Zhou Zishu sits up. He is so tired, but his eyes comically won’t close. It’s the kind of quiet hours that make refrigerators wheeze with asthma, that make the rustle of shrugging on his jacket sound like he’s unfolding a tarp. He’s almost thirty, he’s really getting too old for this. 

11:03PM

Ok, see you outside in a bit?

Wen Kexing doesn’t respond again. Zhou Zishu kills time fetching the stack of school paperwork from where he’d tossed it onto the dining table. He scoops water out of the too-full betta tank with a rice bowl and tries as hard as he can to make more work for himself in an empty house. At 11:50pm he steps out, his stomach bubbling over like soda water.

Zhou Zishu stands outside the restaurant in the dark, deliberately not looking in. But when a pale figure drifts towards the glass door and opens it his eyes snap up before he can stop himself. 

“Hi,” Wen Kexing breathes. There’s hair sticking to his neck in sweaty, stringy waves, where they’ve strayed from the loosening nest he’d bunched at his nape.

“How long was your shift?” Zhou Zishu can’t stop himself. 

Wen Kexing sucks air through his teeth and counts with his fingers. Zhou Zishu watches them do the wave for three rotations. 

“Sixteen hours?” He puts his hand out at the look on Zhou Zishu’s face. “I was only supposed to do the morning, but then someone on the evening crew called in sick, and we can’t really lose anyone on a Friday night.”

Friday. It’s Friday today—yesterday. Zhou Zishu looks at the shadows under Wen Kexing’s eyes and reluctantly says, “are you sure you don’t want to just go home? We don’t have to do this now.” Or ever. It’s the least important thing in the world. Zhou Zishu doesn’t even need the help. All this, just so he could see Wen Kexing again as soon as possible.

“No!” Wen Kexing says quickly. “It’s fine. Here, we should walk. I really need something sweet and cold.” He’s shaking out the collar of his shirt to let breeze in. In stronger light, Zhou Zishu thinks he would be able to see the flush of his skin. 

They go to the only other open place nearby—that cafe Zhou Zishu had turned down on his first night in the city. It’s the kind of cramped place where on a busy midday, people would be squeezing past each other just to get in and out, holding their drinks above their heads to make room. Wen Kexing chats with the worker and picks up a gigantic cup of what looks like neon green apple slush. Zhou Zishu points at something, and then is given something. He honestly does not remember making the transaction. 

There is seating up a flight of stairs—lots of it, all vacated. They sit at a table by the window, overlooking the street outside. Wen Kexing stabs a straw into his drink and Zhou Zishu watches his cheeks hollow as he starts visibly draining the green slush, his throat pulsing. He narrowly registers that his own drink is in a regular, non-disposable glass—whatever he ordered is a dark, shining amber through the ice cubes on top. Is it really strong monkfruit and liquorice tea, from tap? He takes a sip. And stops. Well.

It’s coffee.

He holds the battery acid in his mouth, and tries to let it dribble past his throat as slow as he can. Wen Kexing watches him struggle, frowning. 

“Did she get your order wrong?” he asks, chewing on his straw. 

“No—”

“Wait, is that iced coffee? ” 

Zhou Zishu feels his neck warm. He nods.

Wen Kexing laughs. The sound of it ricochets impossibly in the sizable room, like vending machine bouncy balls on tar. He stirs his half-finished slushie with the thick boba straw that he’d just extracted from between his teeth, swirling it through the plastic cover, and slides the drink to Zhou Zishu. “Here, you can share mine. If I were you I’d drink yours in the morning.”

The condensation that pools at the bottom of the cup drags wetly across the vinyl table. Zhou Zishu glances at the red straw, glistening at the tip. The idea of putting it in his own mouth makes his insides churn, like Wen Kexing has just thrusted it through the thin, colorful plastic of Zhou Zishu’s belly, and stirred until all the sediments of his obsession with this man cloud up his judgment, percolate through his body. Zhou Zishu is so annoyed by the feeling, he latches onto his own straw, and gulps down probably more than enough coffee to make his point clear. 

“Damn.” Wen Kexing's eyes stay fixed on him through the trauma of it, resting his chin on an arm propped up on the table. Somehow it makes Zhou Zishu’s imminent cardiac arrest worth every second. “You really want to stay up and talk to me, don’t you?”

Nevermind. Zhou Zishu wants to strangle him, and then himself, if he isn’t dead already. 

Wen Kexing’s right hand is in the middle of the table between them, still resting around the waist of his cup. There’s a flowering of pink welts at his wrist, shining with a thick layer of grease. Zhou Zishu grabs his forearm just above the injury before he can think better of it.

“What happened?”

Wen Kexing fidgets in his hold. “I splashed oil on myself, some new hire forgot to drain off wet greens before I threw them in the wok. I put Vaseline on it, it’ll be fine.”

He works in the kitchen? “You work in the kitchen?”

“Yeah. What did you think I do?”

The caffeine is unfortunately starting to kick in. Zhou Zishu lets go of Wen Kexing’s arm, before he can feel his hand shake through the contact. “I saw you pushing boxes around, so I thought…” Is there a chance that he made something Zhou Zishu ate? The possibility eats at him. How many cooks did they have for that large of a banquet hall?

“Ah.” We Kexing stirs his green apple slush again and sips, slower. “Yeah. Officially I cook, but you can stick me anywhere in that operation and I can run it. Grew up running it, actually.”

“This is your parents’ business?” 

“They’re dead,” Wen Kexing discloses, like they’re talking about historical figures from a textbook. “It’s just my boss’s business. She… took care of me when I was small.” He itches his nose. “Still does, actually. But I’m trying to outdo her with A-Xiang, paying it forward and whatever.”

There is a lot to unpack there, but Wen Kexing skims strategically through the surface of it all, frank but frugal. Zhou Zishu feels like a pond skimmer balancing on the surface of a crystal clear pool. He can see all the way to the bottom of him—there’s an easy clarity to his actions, and his emotions float to the top like bubbles and oil. All while Zhou Zishu is still relegated to his own place above the water, tip-toeing around their elastic points of contact with no clue how deep the bottom lies. He wants to take a nosedive, but it feels like Wen Kexing is holding back for both Zhou Zishu’s and his own protection. Like he’s razor-blading the thorns off a sprig of rose, before gripping the stem and handing it to Zhou Zishu: Gu Xiang is like his sister. He could have finished highschool. He would have liked to study poetry if he went to college. If people were kinder he could have grown up never burnt by oil splatters even once in his life, instead of buying a Costco-sized tub of Vaseline every year. 

Zhou Zishu can’t find it in himself to be anything but grateful for the tailored scraps he’s getting, hoarding them like little squares to patch into an ugly, beloved quilt by hand later, when he is alone to pick through the memories of this. 

And it’s not like he’s giving Wen Kexing a lot of honesty to work with, either. If Wen Kexing is a babbling clear spring, then Zhou Zishu is this stagnant cup of black coffee he’s determined to kill himself with. He ventures only a fraction further from what he’d say at a corporate party: his guardian sent him to an international school in Shanghai, and that’s why his English is decent. His parents were professors when they were alive. He had been sent three cease-and-desists by an international luxury resort chain (this is extremely amusing to Wen Kexing), and the experience traumatized him so much that he was willing to work customer service for his cousin’s stupid, stupid company instead, for years . 

Zhou Zishu doesn’t tell Wen Kexing that he’s not staying long, because… because. 

His heart is slamming in his chest; his right leg can’t stop shaking. He’d worked with a pregnant woman in the next cubicle when he answered phones for a living, who drank instant decaf every morning and had roped him into it to boost her own morale. When that woman quit to have her baby and became a stay-at-home mom, he’d finished off the stash in her filing cabinet. And when he ran out, he’d bought a random replacement from the store, found out that he absolutely could not handle caffeine, and rummaged through the office trash bin for the exact box that his pregnant friend had bought. Her baby is probably in elementary school now, and he is still drinking the same decaf; never having an inclination to change, like he exists outside of his own desires and curiosities, intermittently feeding them tiny pinches of fish food and crumbs so they stay medically alive.

Until now. He’s three-quarters of the way through a twenty-four ounce cold brew, and he’s in critical condition, watching Wen Kexing listen to him talk. Zhou Zishu is wide awake on caffeine, and Wen Kexing is shot through with sugar. In the middle of the longest sentence that Zhou Zishu has ever pulled through his usually stiff upper lip, like silk scarves on a magic set, he cuts himself off before he vomits the whole dictionary, and realizes they haven’t touched the folder of paperwork he’s brought with him at all. 

He didn’t even bring a pen. Wen Kexing pulls one out of his back pocket, a white one with red writing on it, of the name of the restaurant he works at. 

The blank papers, and a glance at the clock behind Zhou Zishu, wraps up this dream he finds himself in. They fall into silence, going through the stack of forms and brochures while Wen Kexing interjects every now and then—how to get on the reduced lunch program, what kind of backpacks (spiky) are not allowed, which PTA meetings are actually necessary, which dickish teachers Zhang Chengling should try to switch out of a class with. Wen Kexing is leaning all the way across the table to point things out on the pages, and Zhou Zishu can smell the hint of fryer oil that clings to his pulled-back hair, and the stronger scent of green apple on his breath. He tries so hard to not just look up, lean slightly forward, and have his lips accidentally graze over Wen Kexing’s mouth in an invention of sacred geometry.

There’s a knock behind them, and Zhou Zishu does look up, but Wen Kexing tragically does, too, his face moving away so fast that his sweet, neon scent still hangs in front of Zhou Zishu when he is fully seated again.

It’s the barista who blessed and cursed Zhou Zishu with regular coffee. “Sorry, guys,” she eeks out. “It’s almost three, and I need to wipe your table down before I go…” She eyes the table in question uneasily while she wrings the rag in her hands.

They almost step over each other in a hurry to leave, and linger outside the front door, stagnating under Christmas lights in April. 

“This was fun,” Wen Kexing is rarely, suddenly shy again. 

“Yeah.” Zhou Zishu remembers something important. “Hey, before you go, how do you write your name?”

Wen Kexing cocks his head to the side.

“I was adding you to my contacts, and didn’t know what to put down,” Zhou Zishu clarifies. It feels like such a vulnerable thing to say, for some reason.

Wen Kexing bubbles up one of those genuine, eye-crinkling smiles that Zhou Zishu has seen enough of tonight to learn to crave. He steps into Zhou Zishu’s space, takes his hand, and scratches the characters of his name into Zhou Zishu’s palm, his fingernail grazing his skin. Zhou Zishu is so transfixed by the tickle of it, he doesn’t register anything that Wen Kexing’s written.

“I’m sorry,” he strains out, embarrassed. “Can you do—write—that again?”

Wen Kexing retraces his name again, and Zhou Zishu thinks he will never forget it. 

He takes a shower when he gets back to the apartment—a hot one, hoping the steam will relax and put him to sleep. It doesn’t work. It just turns his skin red, leaves his mind helplessly racing in circles.

Zhou Zishu stands under the showerhead, arms hanging by his side, spacing out. His right index finger taps on the side of his thigh as he tries to reenact the feeling of Wen Kexing’s name on his skin. He’s so strung out on caffeine and the memory of him that he never once makes it through the whole name. Instead his finger loops through the three strokes of the water radical in Wen Kexing’s surname, over and over, like he’s failing through a bucket of characters on his second-grade spelling test: River. Ocean. Wave. Pool. Thirst. Wine. Sweat. Warmth. Two short strokes down, a long one flicking up. Two down, one up.

Wen Kexing has sent him a text when he checks his phone again. It’s almost four in the morning. Sleepy yet? The text reads, attached to a photo of Gu Xiang’s green iguana, dozing in a plastic log. They had talked about their young charges’ choices in pets earlier. 

Zhou Zishu sends back a photo of Chengling’s ketchup-colored fish. He smells phantom green apple again.

He lies down on the couch, tossing and turning. His phone rings. He picks it up without glancing at the caller.

“Zishu?”

“Mmm?”

“Sorry, is it early where you are?” 

It’s Gao Chong. Gao Chong has finally decided to call instead of text. This must be big.  

Zhou Zishu sits up. “It’s fine, what’s going on?”

“So, uh, I just wanted to let you know that Shen-xiansheng, who lives on your floor, says he’s willing to keep an eye on Chengling until I’m back. You don’t have to stay.” 

“Is it… me?” Is Zhou Zishu doing such a terrible job that Chengling complained? He can’t help the disappointment that steals into his voice. 

“What? Not at all. I have to stay three months in Hanoi to oversee a safety inspection headache. I’m sure you have things going on back home, so please don’t feel like you need to—”

“That’s fine, I can stay.” 

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Zhou Zishu is buzzing. “That’s about how long I’d last without a visa, too, right?” He has already checked this. 

“Shit. Wow. I wish I remembered to at least leave you a credit card or something. Thanks so much. I’ll wire you instead? Zhou Zishu, you’re a saint.”

He’s not. He’s thinking about Wen Kexing. This is the most selfish decision he has ever made. He wishes Gao Chong hadn’t said anything about saints. 

“By the way, is this your house?”

“The one you’re staying in? Yes, why?”

He doesn’t mention that the place looks like something out of a barren rental listing. “I’m about to register Chengling for highschool, turning in the forms on Monday. If you’re going to up and leave with him somewhere else when you come back, then I’m not gonna bother.”

“No, that’s good. That’s very good. You didn’t have to.”

The attention is too much. It gives him a headache.

“Okay, I have a dinner to attend. Thanks again, Zishu.”

Zhou Zishu drops his phone onto his chest and stares at the popcorn ceiling, just beginning to shade with a filter of daylight. 

Three months. He’ll stay three months. Just long enough for that shrimpy Zhang Chengling to wean into this new world, and then he’ll leave. Just three months he’ll allow himself that brassy, beautiful line cook, who barked the most flirtatious insult at Zhou Zishu as he charged down the cracked asphalt with a towering pallet jack of wholesale soy sauce boxes; his voice magnetic like an army general’s, clear above the rumbling gallop of his condiment fleet. 

Zhou Zishu feels like he’s been allowed permission of some kind to keep seeking Wen Kexing out. Unfortunately, the universe and the weekend dining crowds don't care about his personal epiphanies. When he walks with Zhang Chengling to get pastries from a bakery at nine in the morning, there is already a twenty-person queue outside the restaurant. Zhou Zishu realizes with a pang to his chest that he’s kept Wen Kexing on the worst night possible—dressed him up with insomnia and shadows under his eyes in the witching hour, before pushing him back into the Saturday brunch dim-sum madness. 

Wen Kexing sends him another photo on Sunday night—it’s a selfie of him in a commercial kitchen, with his hair tucked back into a white cap. He’s theatrically shading his face with a hand, while the focus sharpens on a figure behind him that’s bent over, scavenging a spilled stainless steel bowl of julienned carrots from the floor. “New idiot who can’t use a salad spinner and who burned me AGAIN. And he thinks he’s cool enough to call himself scorpion, unironically.” 

There’s a new angry red splotch farther up Wen Kexing’s arm in the photo. It makes Zhou Zishu inexplicably fretful. 

Zhang Chengling starts school on Tuesday. Zhou Zishu waits for him outside the gates after the day ends, heart clenching another inexplicable shade of fretfulness. 

Chengling’s easy to spot, not because he’s remarkably tall, or well-dressed, or gregarious. It’s because no one else on the courtyard walks with their head down almost to the floor, shoulders sagging like an old pillow. Zhou Zishu wants to go up to him, but he knows kids can be cruel, and an adult flocking to Chengling right now would only single him out further. 

He takes the textbooks from the boy’s clutch while they wait for a red light at the crosswalk, and doesn’t ask him how his day was. 

Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should have held Chengling back, and not have enrolled him until he had a couple of months to settle down. But Zhou Zishu won’t always be here, and he can’t stand the idea of doing nothing with Chengling while he is in his care. 

“Hey—Zishu-ge!”

Zhou Zishu turns around. It’s Gu Xiang, running towards them, a violin case bouncing on her leg as it swings in her hand. 

“...A-Xiang?” He has never called her name before. She has never called his, either, but it sounds nonchalant and familiar coming out of her mouth. Zhou Zishu wonders if Wen Kexing told her to call him that.

“Ah,” she responds to his call, also not thinking much of it, and turns to Chengling. “Zhang Chengling, are you okay? Sorry I didn’t see you all day, Ge told me to check on you, but my rehearsals ran into lunch.”

Chengling somehow retreats further into himself, without moving a single hair at all.

Gu Xiang glances between the two of them. At Chengling, whose mood is turning highly flammable; at Zhou Zishu, who stands stiffly at a distance from him, like he’s afraid he’s the flaming torch that will set the boy on fire. She worms a finger to itch at her braided hair, frowning, and then says, “you guys are really bad at being with each other.”

Zhou Zishu has no idea what to do with her, so he starts to turn around again.

“Wait!” Gu Xiang yips. “Are you guys busy?”

“We’re gonna walk home.”

She looks at him, and then at Chengling, like she can’t decide if she should address them as a unit or not. Complete nonsense. Zhou Zishu is the adult here.

“What is it? Spit it out,” he says to her. 

She fidgets. “Do you… want to have dinner with Ge and I?”

Zhou Zishu blinks. “He has work off?”

Gu Xiang laughs, like it’s the funniest thing she has ever heard. “No. He’s pulling until midnight again. But sometimes if it’s a less-busy day he makes me food for the night first before the dinner rush hits. Our place doesn’t have a kitchen and I don’t want to eat microwave popcorn everyday.”

“Did Wen Kexing tell you to ask me?”

“What, you think a shameless grown man like him would need his little sister to ask someone to dinner? No. I just thought he’d like it if you—guys—were there. Come on, let’s go!”

“Right now? It’s barely four.”

“Why are you so picky? We never eat at the regular dinner time, that’s saved for normal people.”

“Customers?”

“Normal people.”

It’s subdued, when they make their way into the restaurant. There’s only three other tables of patrons. “Sup, Luo-yi,” Gu Xiang says to the white-haired woman once again watching dramas on her phone at the reception desk. “You really need to get earphones for those.”

“Xiangxiang, he’s not… stalking you, right?” The woman looks at Zhou Zishu with ever-worsening confusion.

“Nah I’m helping him stalk someone else.” Gu Xiang shrugs her jacket off, and Luo-yi immediately reprimands her. The AC is on at 60 and you will freeze to death. But you’re not the one who just walked a mile here Luo-yi. Keep it on keep it on you’ll get cold once you sit down for a while. Okay then I’m going to leave. No don’t, we’re low on menus and I need you to fold more later, tie the sleeves around your shoulders at least. 

Zhou Zishu hangs there with Chengling, waiting for them to finish fighting it out. He looks at his own ward, and hopes Luo-yi doesn’t comment on the single, short-sleeved layer Chengling is wearing. 

Gu Xiang beelines for the little table Zhou Zishu has seen her sit at before, and starts pulling binders out of her backpack. She ignores Zhou Zishu in favor of her homework, and Chengling copies her, flipping listlessly through the pages of his new U.S history textbook. Zhou Zishu buries his head into his phone, and wonders if he should let Wen Kexing know he’s become an accidental guest, when the double doors to the kitchen behind them flap open, and Wen Kexing pushes past it with a nudge of his hips, a filled red plastic tray in his hands. 

He stares at Zhou Zishu, glances at Chengling, and then glares at Gu Xiang.

“What’s going on?” 

“I invited them over for food,” Gu Xiang says into her well-punctuated trigonometry—she’s mostly putting a big question mark next to each of the problems, sometimes two.

Wen Kexing inches over to their table and puts his tray down, suspicious like an alley cat. He sets a bowl of rice in front of Gu Xiang, and bumps a messy dish of stir-fried tomatoes and eggs next to it.  

“You could have told me we’d have company,” he hisses loudly. 

“Ge, it’s called a surprise. I needed to shut you up before you drove me crazy. God. Ah—!”

He pulls on one of her braids with gritted teeth, and then gives Zhou Zishu a very different look. “What do you want to eat?”

It’s like being asked what kind of diamond he wants. Zhou Zishu doesn’t get to answer. Wen Kexing has shifted his attention to Chengling’s small, wilted existence, flipping through a section of his textbook about the Civil War. After not getting so much as an acknowledgement from the boy, Wen Kexing nods to himself, and disappears back behind the kitchen doors. 

Gu Xiang spoons tomato sauce onto her rice, shovels two bites into her mouth, then puts her bowl down guiltily, and the three of them wait together in silence. 

Wen Kexing is quick. He comes back not fifteen minutes later with a plate of pea shoots, a plate of Shanghai bok choy, and a noodle bowl with slices of char siu haphazardly piled up to the brim. Gu Xiang hoots and starts diverting a stream of the glistening barbecue for herself, while Wen Kexing sets a stack of three bowls down on the table and scoops rice into them one by one. 

Once done, he flops down onto a chair to Zhou Zishu’s left, pulls the white cap off his head, and extracts the handful of bobby pins that clips his hair back, before dragging his fingers through his scalp with a sigh. He’s still wearing work clothes, but something about the way he holds himself has the air of a fed-up home cook. And the feeling is in the messy way the food is plated as well: the jumble of greens that knot together, the utter lack of garnishes, the honeyed oil dripping down the side of the bowl of char siu and soaking into the red tablecloth. Zhou Zishu just ate before he picked up Chengling from school, but the cozy and strangely familiar intimacy of all this, tricks his stomach into thinking it is in fact a reasonable hour for dinner, and he’s suddenly ravenous. 

He’s sitting on the side of the table facing the back wall. If he focuses and blocks out the background chatter of the other patrons, it’s almost like they’re encased in a doll house. He can’t remember the last time he’s gathered around a table like this to eat with other people. He listens to Wen Kexing bark at Gu Xiang to correct her bad posture every few minutes, and answers when Wen Kexing asks what he has been up to. Which is admittedly not much. Not much at all, until now. 

“Well, if your schedule is so wide open,” Wen Kexing says, picking out the most tender pea shoots and dropping them into Gu Xiang’s bowl. “I’m picking up some fresh seafood from the wharf this weekend for a Saturday wedding banquet. Fussy client wants things literally as fresh as they come, but they’re paying extra so I don’t mind. Wanna come? I don’t get a little field trip like this often.”

“Are you asking me out?” Zhou Zishu lays out a trap for himself, watching Wen Kexing carefully.

“Maybe.” Wen Kexing grins around the tips of his chopsticks, his gaudy dalliance relapsing, as chronic as the symptoms it inflicts on Zhou Zishu. “Depends on what we do.”

“Picking up lobsters.”

“And crabs! Big difference.” 

“Fine. What time?”

“Don’t know yet, but it won’t be so late again, I swear.” He’s still chewing on his chopsticks with that stupid, potent smile, the tip of his tongue shining under bamboo. “We need to stop rendezvousing in the middle of the night for once, don’t you think?”

It was literally one time. This man will milk anything, anything at all. Zhou Zishu can’t believe he’s entertaining the shape of that particular nocturnal intimation  in his mind for one pornographic moment, and then another. His face is going to start cramping from how hard it has to work to stay neutral.

He goes to shove food in his mouth to avoid answering, before realizing his bowl is empty. Wen Kexing notices, and quickly takes the bowl from him to put a mess into it, his teasing momentarily subdued by the job.  

The absurdly early dinner ends all too soon—less than thirty minutes from start to finish. A couple more tables have been filled with guests while they eat. Wen Kexing watches the incoming crowd in silence, tucks his hair back under his cap with his bobby pins and collects all the dishes. He returns them to the kitchen, then comes back out to say a proper goodbye, hands tying an apron behind his back. 

Wen Kexing glances at Chengling, like he’s periodically done all through the meal, even as he was riling Zhou Zishu up. 

“Chengling, wanna peek in the kitchen? We can grab a dessert.” 

Chengling looks at Zhou Zishu, who nods. Wen Kexing puts a hand to the boy’s shoulder and takes him behind the doors again. 

Gu Xiang wipes at a stain on the red carpeting with the toes of her sneakers, bored out of her mind waiting, humming the chorus of some K-pop song over and over.  

The doors to the kitchen have a long, narrow window on each side, blurred with scratches and tape residue. Zhou Zishu doesn’t mean to snoop. But Wen Kexing and Zhang Chengling are taking a while, so he looks in with a side glance, and immediately walks up to the door to look closer.

Zhang Chengling is crying, and talking, arms hanging limply at his sides like he’s too tired to move them. It’s the longest Zhou Zishu has ever seen him talk in one go, and ironically he can’t hear a single word of it. Wen Kexing can, though, leaning against the counter behind him, a hand clenching the wrist of his other, fingernail scratching the skin there as Chengling talks at him like he’s free, timed therapy. Zhou Zishu knows he shouldn’t keep looking, but the sight eludes his better judgement. 

Wen Kexing talks back at him for a bit, while Chengling nods at whatever he’s saying like it’s gospel, finally wiping his eyes. Then the boy walks right into Wen Kexing, and clutches at him hard in a hug. 

Zhou Zishu isn’t sure if the look on Wen Kexing’s face or his own is more surprised. His own shock mutates into a hesitant shade of jealousy for one moment—he isn’t even sure over who—and he jerks away finally, the consequences of his own intrusion suddenly loud in his mind. 

Gu Xiang is no longer next to him. She’s back at the table where they just ate. There’s a stack of cream and gold paper on the surface now, and she’s folding the pages one by one into menu pamphlets with the pretty young woman that Luo-yi had called Qianqiao. Gu Xiang looks up at him. “Zishu-ge, if they’re taking too long you can just go in and tell Ge you need to go.”

He will not be doing that. 

A waiter steps past him then, and opens the door to deliver an influx of order tickets. Zhou Zishu catches a clearer view of the two people inside. They’re still hugging.

Chengling pushes through the door not long after, holding a cup of mango pudding in his hand. Wen Kexing emerges behind him, but lingers in the doorway, gripping his own upper arms. 

“Thanks for stopping by, you guys,” he says, voice oddly faint. “Sorry I couldn’t sit down for longer. I’ll make it happen one day.”

Back at the apartment, Chengling fusses over his ketchup fish, dropping food pellets into the tank one by one, focused beyond all reason on the mundane task. 

Zhou Zishu is boiling water for his coffee. Ever since that night with Wen Kexing, he’s been experiencing perpetual suspicion every time he empties his little tubes of decaf, like the stuff might be secretly laced with caffeine. He pours the hot water into his travel flask and asks, “Chengling, you okay?”

The boy’s hand freezes on top of the tank. “Yes?”

“How was school?”

“It was fine, kind of confusing.”

“Are you keeping up in class?”

“They said I might need the ELD lessons because I can’t always catch what they’re saying.”

“Meet anyone nice?”

“Everyone’s already made friends at this point, so I’m not expecting much… if A-Xiang-jie will look out for me I think I’ll be okay.”

Zhou Zishu hangs onto every word like it’s tonight’s breaking news. “And Wen Kexing showed you around inside where he works?”

“Yeah! Wen-ge was really nice to me.” Chengling resumes dropping food pellets into the tank. “Really nice,” he mutters once more, just for himself.

Something about that throws Zhou Zishu off. “How come Wen Kexing is Wen-ge, but I’m Zhou-shu? He’s only two years younger than me. Isn’t that a little insulting?”

Chengling hesitates. “Zhou-shu, you’re the one who told me to call you that. You… you said, you didn’t want us to feel too familiar...”

He’d said that? Since when? Oh, right—their first meeting, when he helped Chengling sort through his parents’ graveyard of belongings, to stow away the bits and pieces Chengling wanted to take with him across the world. 

“Change it, I don't like it anymore,” Zhou Zishu says. “Be like A-Xiang and call me Zishu-ge.” 

“...Okay, Zishu-ge…”

Chengling says his name like he’s reading Zhou Zishu’s eulogy. Zhou Zishu thinks he can grow to love it.  

Wen Kexing

12:02AM

Saturday! Don’t forget :)

12:02AM

I won’t. Hey was chengling okay when you talked to him earlier?

Zhou Zishu knows the implications of asking that. He can’t bring himself to care. 

Wen Kexing

12:04AM

He will be

Kid’s been through some shit, you know? Feels a bit like watching myself.

He wishes Wen Kexing would say more. He doesn’t have forever to figure him out like a puzzle game. 

Wen Kexing

12:06AM

Anyways, bring beers for the weekend please! x

12:06AM

Ok. What’s x?

Wen Kexing

12:15AM

Could be a kiss, could be my name. You decide ;)

12:21AM

Ok. zz

Could be that you’re putting me to sleep, could be my name. 

Wen Kexing

12:23AM

Damn not how I wanted to get you in bed but okay

Sweet dreams!

Wen Kexing’s well-wishes are potent. Zhou Zishu dreams about kissing him underwater, as a shoal of giant, frilly red fish float around them. His laughter ripples in the primordial depths, distant and nebulous like folklore even though Zhou Zishu is touching his face, his chest, his hips—he can’t stop touching him, everywhere. Wen Kexing is clothed in the fantasy, but when Zhou Zishu gropes him all he feels is skin. There’s no temperature except for the warmth of Wen Kexing’s mouth. He tastes like salt water and reality. It goes on and on. He’s drowning. In water, in his own want, in this siren, who he finally jumps overboard for.

Dream-Wen Kexing kisses him awake like Snow White at dawn. Zhou Zishu tosses the jacket covering himself on top of the couch, and goes to flip down the blinds in the living room, shielding himself from the voyeuristic morning light. He needs to fall back asleep.

Wen Kexing

12:32PM

So, kind of weird, but meet tomorrow at 5:30am? 

I know it looks like i’m over compensating on the time thing but Saturday fish markets get crazy rowdy so im getting to the docks early for first dibs. 

12:47PM

Cool. send address?

Wen Kexing

12:48PM

We can just meet at the restaurant again so i can get the car from out back

The car in question is an ancient diesel Ford minivan with more paint off than on. On the morning of, Wen Kexing piles a stack of crates into the back, and spends an eternity trying to get the engine to start. 

“Last person to use this forgot to plug it in again,” he grumbles. “It’s probably that fucking scorpion guy. I told Luo-yi you can’t train on the job and she never listens.”

“We can take my car,” Zhou Zishu offers, thinking about Gao Chong’s pristine Mercedes-Benz, parked just a tantalizing two streets away. “I’ll bring it around so we can stick the crates in it.”

“Are you sure? The trunk’s gonna smell all gross.”

Zhou Zishu has already hopped off. When he brings his car around and backs it up, he can hear Wen Kexing’s wolf whistle with the windows closed.

“I see I’m getting spoiled today!” He sounds muted and cloudy through the glass, like he’s underwater. 

Wen Kexing plops a to-go cup into the cup holder when he gets in the passenger seat. “For you,” he says, buckling himself in with one hand, the other holding a cup of his own. 

Zhou Zishu can smell coffee. He picks his cup up with dread, and then sees the decaf box with a sharpied checkmark through it, and looks up at Wen Kexing. 

“Decaf?”

“You can’t handle caffeine,” WKX says casually, taking a sip of whatever he’s holding. Zhou Zishu smells vanilla. 

“How did you know?” 

“Your voice gets so shaky, and your hand would keep tapping on your leg. And you talk even more than me! Are you not embarrassed?” 

“No.” He is so embarrassed.

Wen Kexing talks about work as Zhou Zishu drives them the short minutes to the docks. Everything is too close together. Zhou Zishu wishes they lived near the desert, so that this trip to the ocean would at least last longer than the time his cup of coffee stays hot for. It’s almost six in the morning now, and the sky’s beginning to punch blue. All of a sudden, he can smell saline and kelp in the air. 

They walk along a long, creaking pier that pierces into the coast like a wooden spear, Wen Kexing pushing his stack of crates on a dolly and Zhou Zishu holding both their drinks. There’s a barge at the end, and they hop in, weaving among the shipping containers being used as makeshift rooms. Wen Kexing finds a couple of fishermen that he must already be acquainted with. He rapid-fires at them at a speed that Zhou Zishu’s school-taught English just can’t compute fast enough to keep up with, joking and laughing in a way that makes Zhou Zishu really want to understand. 

The crates are loaded up with lobsters, crabs, shrimp, and clams. Wen Kexing hauls it all back on the dolly into the car, and Zhou Zishu feels a peculiar sense of satisfaction, watching the brand-new car trunk get puddled by fishy water as he helps him unload. 

Rummaging in the pockets of his jacket, Wen Kexing pulls out a red plastic bag and sticks one of the live Dungeness crabs in it. “You eat crab, yeah?”

“Yes?”

“Great. This is going to be your best crab experience, ever.”

Wen Kexing grabs his hand and drags him to a seafood restaurant at the start of the next pier, a dingy place with rotting wood siding and faded signage, that looks like it’s sunk itself halfway into demolition. He raps on the door until a grizzled old man opens it, yaks with him like they’re old friends, and hands over the plastic bag. 

Zhou Zishu waits outside with him while the seafood shack man does whatever he wants with the crab. The western wind blows cold over Zhou Zishu’s face, and he’s grateful for the hot drink, warm in his belly. They’re leaning against the wooden fence of the pier. Wen Kexing gingerly rests the elbows of his soft, pale herringbone shirt on the wood. The fabric flirts on the side of form-fitting on his frame, well-worn with a soft fuzz over the sturdy cotton canvas. It’s utilitarian with just enough flair in the pattern and dark stitching to feel special. He looks nice. 

Wen Kexing looks at him, his crossed arms resting on the fence, long hair blowing away from the smooth stretch of his neck in inky tendrils. “A-Xu, what are you thinking about?”

Zhou Zishu meets his gaze. “What did you call me?”

Wen Kexing manages to preen with his expression alone. His arms are still locked together, and he rests his chin on them. “It’s the ‘ shu ’ in your name, in Cantonese.” He says it like he’s discovered treasure, and is running towards Zhou Zishu with it tight in his fist.

Zhou Zishu is saturated with the attention. “Why go through the trouble?” 

“I want to call you something no one else calls you by.” The jest in his eyes is muddied by something more genuine. 

It’s indulgent, syrupy logic, for a simple heightening of vowels, a slight lean of the tongue tip, forward and up. Xu. He’s oddly territorial over the smallest things, in a way that makes Zhou Zishu feel like he’s a handful of change scattered on pavement that Wen Kexing is bleeding out his nails for, in an urgency to scrape them into his palm like fool’s gold. 

“Lao Wen, who taught you to be this sentimental?” And Zhou Zishu is just as foolish as well.

Wen Kexing stretches out like saltwater taffy at the nickname, like a tabby cat in the afternoon. The air warms around him. “Would you believe it if I said it’s you?” He’s blinding, more so than the rising sun that silhouettes him.

To their left, an ancient door creaks open. It’s the old man, holding up a styrofoam takeout box. Wen Kexing hurries over to take it with a big smile, and pats the guy’s shoulder goodbye. 

They keep walking, until the coast gives way to a small, gently sloped beach, freshly damp from dawn tides, and sit in the sand. The seagulls overhead, long trained on the language of takeout containers, descend and edge towards them on webbed red feet. Wen Kexing throws a handful of sand into their midst, and the flock takes off reluctantly. He opens the styrofoam box, humming, and picks up a bright orange, steamed crab leg.

“I’ve hung around these docks my whole life,” Wen Kexing says, producing a shell-cracker out of thin air, “and have never eaten crab at seven in the morning. So, thanks for being my first.” He winks, dips the strip of speckled pink crab meat into a sauce cup shimmering with golden herb butter, and hands it to Zhou Zishu by the bit of clean shell attached to the tip of the leg. 

It’s still warm, and blithely sweet, with a whisper of sea salt caressed by the slick film of grassy, yellow butter, teased with bright lemon and parsley. There was a page on Zhou Zishu’s Air China in-flight magazine about Dungeness crabs in San Francisco, of a candlelit table spread and a couple drinking red wine. At the time he didn’t think he would stay long enough to ever try them, let alone sit here at the yawn of day two weeks later, and be fed bits of crab legs by a man that feels impossible for him to leave; now, let alone forever. 

He watches Wen Keing crack more shells in seldom silence, deep in concentration with his task. Zhou Zishu licks the grease off his lips, and before his brain notices the heart running away from him like a teenager at night, he says, “I’m going to miss you, when I go.”

Wen Kexing’s hands freeze, glistening with steaming liquid from the crab, dripping to his wrists. 

He recovers quickly, tosses another fragment of crab shell onto the sand, and finally eats a piece of the meat himself. “I will, too,” he says after he chews and swallows, so quietly it washes into the waves before Zhou Zishu can keep it, like an unbroken, perfect seashell. 

“You knew?” Zhou Zishu’s heart tucks its tail and runs back home in cold shame. He holds it at arm’s length, keeps it outside of his gated rationale just a little longer.     

“Your Chengling told me,” Wen Kexing says. “He says you’re only here until his real guardian comes back. And then you’ll fly back to China.” 

“Yeah.” There has never been a more dooming word. It lets loose a fear at the back of Zhou Zishu’s mind that he hasn’t much entertained, and he goes ahead and throws the fence wide open. “I don’t even know why I came here to begin with. I didn’t even know the kid. Someone asked, and I didn’t have anything better to do with myself so I agreed. I don’t even know what I’m doing after this.”

Wen Kexing gives him a thin smile. “That’s a foreign concept to me. I know where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do, every second of the day.”

He’s the busiest person Zhou Zishu has ever met, and somehow he’s the one who’s cracked through Zhang Chengling’s shell before Zhou Zishu even knew where to put his idle hands. It baffles him, makes him self-aware. He tells Wen Kexing this, hoping to steer the topic towards something less dismal.

“He likes you,” Wen Kexing reassures, handing him bits of crab again. “He does. I can tell. Just—do your best for him, please. For him, and for me. I—” He cuts off and thinks for a second, his eyes on the sea. “I got given to someone when my parents died, too, and they neglected me for months. Luo-yi found me dumpster-diving behind her restaurant because I was so hungry. They couldn’t get rid of me fast enough when she asked for custody.” He burrows his waterproof Chelsea boots under the sand, like he’s trying to cover himself back up after having shown so much, so quickly.

“Lao Wen—”

“No, listen.” His tone is firm, and stronger now. “I want to talk about Zhang Chengling. You need to do your best for him, and then make sure whoever he’s going with next is a decent person. I’ve seen it happen with myself, and I’ve seen it with A-Xiang and the people who left her with us when she was barely a year old. I don’t like seeing children get crushed and tossed around like they’re soda cans.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “A-Xiang grew up like gum stuck under my shoe. She always stays with me. And I always stay with Luo-yi. I’m not—I’m not asking you to stay for him, or for—anyone. Just… he’s more hurt than you think. Just check on him. Please.”

It feels redundant to respond to that. Nothing Zhou Zishu says will change anything. For the first time, he thinks he can’t read Wen Kexing properly. So he sits back, and listens to the waves call for their shore, to the chiding seagulls circling overhead, and the soft crack of crab shells next to him. Wen Kexing gives him most of the meat, only nibbling on the scraps sticking to the joints whenever Zhou Zishu reminds him to eat. 

When it seems less volatile and safe for conversation again, Zhou Zishu kicks out one leg to cover the bits of crab shells that Wen Kexing has been throwing out with sand, and asks, “Why do you do that? Just put them back in the box and throw them away.”

“What’s wrong with crab shells on a beach?”

“Isn’t it a little morbid? You took them out of the ocean, and now you’re putting them back in it, dead.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Wen Kexing licks his fingers clean. “How do you know all the other shells on this beach weren’t someone’s snack at one point?”

“What?”

“Ashes to ashes, shells to beaches, aha.” He wipes his hands on a half-sodden napkin stuck to the top of the box, and checks his phone. “Shit, it’s almost eight. I need to get the goods back in.” 

Wen Kexing picks up a few smooth, chalky seashells as they walk back, and tucks them into his shirt pocket. There’s more people walking along the wharf now, in cargo shorts and baseball caps, Nikons around their necks. Early tourists, out to sight-see shuttered doors and the local pigeon population; people beginning their day with companions, as Zhou Zishu is about to end the day with his own. It feels like a joke. 

“A-Xu,” Wen Kexing says, as he clips his seatbelt on. “You never did bring beers.”

“I didn’t think it was wise to be awake at this ridiculous hour, let alone daydrink.”

“I think you owe me one now. You have to see me again.”

“When?”

“I’ll let you decide.” Wen Kexing looks at him lightly.

Zhou Zishu helps him unload the crates of shellfish back onto the dolly, says goodbye with his hands awkwardly empty while Wen Kexing’s are overwhelmingly full, and watches as Wen Kexing and a young man with braids disappear with the spoils of the morning behind the back door. 

He doesn’t notice them at first, when he gets back in the car—a scatter of seashells, washed up on his dashboard, reflecting off the windshield like phantoms. A scallop, and two small, round clams. 

Chengling has shut himself in his room again. Zhou Zishu really needs something to do with all this time on his hands in limbo. He wanders into the neighborhood library and flips through tourist books, crab books, self-help books he has no intention of checking out. He buys another armful of ramen noodles from a tightly-packed grocer—it’s plain uneconomical to eat out for every meal, and Zhou Zishu can at least boil water and crack in an egg. He buys a houseplant to put next to the betta tank, because it’s on sale at the florist next door. He peacefully takes photos of the streets without any beautiful men trying to run him over. The day is so, so long. And his time left here is so, so short. Every second that he breathes feels wasted. What is he doing, wandering around like this, when he knows what he wants? 

In the afternoon, Wen Kexing sends him a photo of the wedding banquet spread he’s preparing—all those blue and gray lobsters, crabs and shrimp, cooked alive into fiery nuptial reds. Drenched in sauce, in fried batter, in noodles, in garlic and ginger, expertly garnished. Still not as good as eating with you this morning! x

It’s just past ten at night, as Zhou Zishu scrolls mindlessly through the news on his phone, that he hears the sniffles coming from Chengling’s room.

He’s paralyzed, listening to the soft noises and willing them to go away. But they don’t. They drag through the air in thready whimpers, thick with misery. Zhou Zishu gets up. 

He knocks, and when there’s no response, he opens the door, and walks into a room that looks exactly the same as it did, that first day he plopped Chengling and his suitcases down into its cavern. No clutter on the floor, no clothes on the rack. The sheets are perfectly tucked in a way that a fourteen-year-old shouldn’t know to perfect. No school books on the desk, no water bottles, no snack wrappers. It’s as if the boy is a specter, floating like hollowed mist among his belongings. He looks like one, too, so pale that he could fade away—Zhou Zishu has to stop himself from reaching out to grab him before he slips off.

Chengling is slumped on the floor at the foot of his bed, clutching a silver men’s watch in his hand. He looks up at Zhou Zishu with snot on his face, and wails, “the battery died, Zishu-ge.” 

Zhou Zishu kneels next to him. “We’ll get a new one for it, first thing tomorrow, okay?”

Chengling shakes his head ferociously. “It’s too late,” he howls, the loudest he’s ever been, like a hound slammed by a freight train. “It’s out of time now. It’s out of home-time now, it’s too late, it’s too late. I can’t catch up now. It’s dead now. And he’s dead now. And I can’t fix it, I can’t do anything. It’s too late, Zishu-ge.”

Zhou Zishu doesn’t think. He sits next to Chengling on the floor, and holds him loosely in his arms. He feels every bit like the bony, half-dead fledgling that Zhou Zishu is afraid of him feeling like, but it’s not as bad as he made it out to be in his head. Chengling is definitely alive, warm, and fed—however atrociously, by him. He’s taken him to school, and made sure he brings his water bottle and books, and always turns off the bathroom lights after him. He’s a frail, little thing, but Zhou Zishu can feel something colossal struggling to push through him, like a fever being sweated out. Zhou Zishu holds him like a handful of glass, and doesn’t know what to say. 

“I want them back so much, Zishu-ge,” Chengling cries into his shoulder. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. I have all this… stuff inside me, and it hurts, and I have nowhere to put it. I miss my mom and dad so much, I think it will never stop. I think I don’t want it to stop. It hurts, and it’s all I have of them now.” 

“You don’t need to stop. Just go slower, so you can rest. You can hold on to it, even if it hurts, okay?” He doesn’t know if it’s good advice or not. He’s not Wen Kexing. He’s just making things up, like he always does.

He feels Chengling nod against him. They sit there, as his crying dies out slowly. Zhou Zishu is exhausted. They sit there for so long, he starts twisting his neck around to stretch out a cramp, and catches sight of a toppled-over Diet Coke can, just out of his reach, under the bed. He cranes down to grab it, looks under the bed, and feels his skin crawl.

There’s rows upon rows of empty cans, lined up neatly under the bed, like terracotta soldiers and composed chaos. It’s disturbing and unspeakably anguished, and Zhou Zishu is too drained to say anything delicate. Only, “we gotta take care of these cans tomorrow, Chengling,” as he looks away and stares at the ceiling light, until his eyes water.

Chengling nods again. He’s spent all of his vocabulary in a burst, and has been reduced to chirps and peeps.

Zhou Zishu hauls him up, makes him brush his teeth, and tucks him into bed. He’s never done any of this before, and none of it feels right. Chengling’s drowsy eyes fix on him, as they leak a fresh puddle onto his pillowcase.  “Don’t go yet, Zishu-ge.”

“I won’t. You’re like gum on my shoes, okay? You stick with me.”

It’s almost midnight by the time Chengling drifts off. Zhou Zishu gets up from where he’s been sitting vigil at the edge of his bed, and puts on a jacket. 

He buys a six-pack of Rainiers from a liquor store with harsh, buzzing lights, doesn’t bother acknowledging Luo-yi when he barges in, and pushes straight through the doors to the kitchens. 

It’s bigger inside than he imagined from the set of double doors—a cavern of stainless steel, emotionless and gray, to contain all the raging stove fires. The young man with braids in his hair is the closest to Zhou Zishu, scraping down a flat top grill. He says something to Zhou Zishu that he can’t fucking understand. He’s so tired of this. “Where’s Wen Kexing?” He barks in whatever language he likes, and the man flinches. 

“A-Xu?”

Wen Kexing’s soft voice is the first thing in hours that doesn’t grate against Zhou Zishu’s ears. He comes out from around a corner, a wet rag in one hand, a cleaver in the other. 

“What are you doing here?”

Zhou Zishu holds up his Rainiers. “You wanted beers, I have them.” 

The boy with braided hair offer to finish Wen Kexing’s portion of the closing checklist, and he leads Zhou Zishu up the fire escape. 

The rooftop is freezing. Zhou Zishu doesn’t mind, it wakes him up. Wen Kexing catches the beer he chucks at him, cautiously opening it away from his body to avoid the spewing foam, as Zhou Zishu gets a head start on his, drips running to his elbow already. 

Wen Kexing’s smile is amused, but his eyes betray his concern. “Silly A-Xu, we have a whole walk-in of booze.”

“Well if I don’t get them you’ll keep holding it over me.”

“Can I not?” Wen Kexing watches him, his mouth rubbing the rim of his beer. “What if I want to, so I can keep seeing you?”

I don’t want to keep seeing you. I want to kiss you. Before it’s too late. 

Zhou Zishu crushes his empty can under his shoe, and grabs a second. “How was the banquet?” 

“Good, smooth. The bride was ugly though, from what I saw of her. Which was mainly her dress from fifty feet away. Who still gets married in crunchy tulle?”

It’s the kind of stupid thing to say that still makes Zhou Zishu smile, even after his whole wretched evening. It all seems so far away now. They keep meeting at these unorthodox hours, these blinks between day and night, and it’s messing with Zhou Zishu’s time perception. It’s like Wen Kexing bends lightyears with a curve of his lips every time Zhou Zishu is with him, and Zhou Zishu wants to tell him to stop, because it’s all passing too quickly, and he hasn't even looked closely at the scenery yet. 

“A-Xu, are you okay?” Wen Kexing wades through the windy, wailing ten feet between them. He sets his beer down on the rocky ledge of the roof, and pries Zhou Zishu’s red and white can out of his grip as well. Wen Kexing folds his hands over Zhou Zishu’s to try to warm them, even though his hands, too, are cold and wet with condensation. 

Zhou Zishu looks down at their hands. It’s too much. Why is he wasting time? 

He tilts his head up and kisses Wen Kexing, feels him shiver, and clutch Zhou Zishu’s hands tighter in his own. Wen Kexing is kissing him back, just barely, and Zhou Zishu panics.

He pulls away, bracing himself. “I thought this is what you wanted.”

“Of course. But A-Xu are you—”

“Can we just—can we just be here, together, and not talk about anything else?” Zhou Zishu pulls his hands out of Wen Kexing’s grasp and puts them on his neck, making Wen Kexing blink from the cold. “I’m okay. Just kiss me.”

Wen Kexing holds his waist, and kisses him sweetly, every bit as different as Zhou Zishu has imagined him being. Open-mouthed but polite, and if Zhou Zishu isn’t in a bad headspace even for tame first kisses, he would tell Wen Kexing to give him something, anything, more. The plainness of it suspends him in peace. He’s not used to being shaken up like he is now, and the soft, cadenced presses of Wen Kexing’s mouth center him like a long, tight embrace. As if Wen Kexing is saying, you ask for kisses, and I give them to you, but I know you need something else. As if it’s no more important that he’s kissing Zhou Zishu, than he is trying to keep his hands warm, to steer him away from the ledge of the roof, to tuck a quivering strand of hair behind Zhou Zishu’s ear. 

Wen Kexing pulls away with a peck on his Cupid’s bow, and goes back to holding Zhou Zishu’s hands between his own, exhales his warm breath over Zhou Zishu’s fingers to gather heat. The wind whips hair all over Zhou Zishu’s eyes, and combs Wen Kexing’s long locks neatly from his face. He’s displayed like an evening primrose in bloom, all pale cheeks and dark, polished eyes, center stage behind the scatter of street lights on the cityscape below them, shimmering like a bright toss of glitter. It’s so easy for Zhou Zishu to swipe his thumb over Wen Kexing’s velvety bottom lip. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Wen Kexing says. “I’ll make you something hot.”

Everyone else has left by the time they return to the kitchens. Wen Kexing balances a stack of cling-filmed steam pans out of a walk-in fridge, heats up a portion of amber broth in a saucepan, and dirties another half-dozen of just-cleaned utensils on boiling egg noodles and a handful of wontons. Zhou Zishu wants to tell Wen Kexing to stop, that this is too much, but instead he just watches him. Wen Kexing works quickly—of course he does—long cooking chopsticks darting from saucepan to bowl, back to the saucepan. He looks lost in the motions of it, and Zhou Zishu takes advantage of his concentration to fix on the long, lean muscles of his forearms, and the slight articulating ridge of a bone at his left wrist, as he flicks water from a colander of glistening yellow noodles. The warm sheen to his forehead and cheekbones from hovering over hot steam. The shape of his mouth in profile, top lip perked like the tip of a dewy petal as he kisses a white soup spoon to taste broth. His pink tongue darts out as he gives a tiny nod. Zhou Zishu wants it back in his mouth. 

Wen Kexing’s gaze swerves lazily to meet his, slow in a way that must mean he’s been aware of Zhou Zishu’s staring, despite his lack of acknowledgement until now. Nothing in his sinuous movements changes. Either he’s been performing all this time, or he sees no reason to start, now that they’ve made their attention on each other clear. 

Wen Kexing sets a small soup bowl of noodles in front of Zhou Zishu, and pours the remainders messily into an even smaller rice bowl for himself. He doesn’t wait for Zhou Zishu and tucks in, still using his too-long, bamboo cooking chopsticks.

Zhou Zishu is hungrier than he expects. What’s meant as a late-night snack is wholeheartedly accepted as a second dinner by his stomach. The hot, salty steam coming off the bowl clears his sinuses, stuffy from the cold. And when he picks up his bowl to drink the broth, it warms all the way down from his throat to his belly. 

“How did you manage, with A-Xiang?” Zhou Zishu asks, a bite of noodles halfway to his mouth defensively, hoping he doesn’t sound desperate for an answer.

Wen Kexing puts his chopsticks down. “I don’t know, it’s been so long since I’ve felt like I have to manage, with her. I kept her busy folding egg rolls after school for ten years. Does that help?”

“No, not really.” Zhou Zishu takes a careful bite of his last shrimp wonton. He realizes too late that he’s inadvertently given away his reason for asking, but Wen Kexing doesn’t pry. 

“I think kids sense it if you’re really trying. Even if they still bitch at you and drive you crazy. They don’t expect much from anyone, at least the kind of kids that we have on our hands.” 

“A-Xiang’s graduating this year?” 

“Yeah. UC Santa Cruz in the fall. Found out just the week before I met you, actually.” 

“Wow.” 

“I know. It’s about time she left, this place just holds her back.” 

“But she seems like she’s thriving here. And she’s well-loved.” Zhou Zishu thinks about Luo-yi nagging Gu Xiang to keep her jacket on. About Wen Kexing, hounding after her with a wet wipe for her bloody nose. 

“Again, kids like that don’t know any better. And she needs to know better, because she deserves it, even if it means I’m pushing her away.” 

Zhou Zishu’s traitorous heart seizes the chance, and runs away from him again. “Shouldn’t you know better?” 

Wen Kexing smiles sadly at him. “‘No, I don’t want to talk about us yet.” 

“But I’m—“

“Leaving? That’s your problem. It’s out of my hands. God knows I want you to stay, too.” He looks at the stainless steel countertop they’re standing in front of and eating on. His reflection echoes dimly on the silver surface, rendering him into a ghostly apparition. “What is there to talk about? I can be sad on my own time, I want to be happy when I’m with you.” 

“You’re like a dream. You’re the best dream I’ve ever had. Truly. I never could have predicted you when I came here.”

Zhou Zishu is dissecting his own soul with untrained, bumbling fingers, and it seems to make his singular audience more troubled by the second. Wen Kexing lets out a breath, and looks away.  

“I don’t want to be a dream. I want to be real.”

He’s right. There’s really no way to talk about this, without feeling like they’re scratching each other up, with rose thorns from a wistful bouquet. 

The arsenal of Diet Coke cans under Zhang Chengling’s bed fills up two big trash bags. Zhou Zishu hauls them downstairs to the communal waste disposal with him, and tries to squash them into a blue recycling bin already half-full with pizza boxes and glass bottles. 

“Hold on,” Zhou Zishu stops Chengling, who is trying to brute-force the bags in. “If we crushed all of them, it’ll fit easier.”

They spend an abnormal amount of time in the basement hallway, doing just that. The sound of crunching aluminum bounces off the walls. A few other tenants in the building, there to throw their own trash away, look at them curiously. Chengling seems more enthralled with the work the longer they’re at it, perfecting a rhythm of toss-crunch-pickup that Zhou Zishu finds weirdly endearing. 

An elderly woman, who Zhou Zishu has greeted a few times while coming in and out of the building, leans over them to toss a canola oil bottle into the bin. She looks at the colossal amount of cans on the floor, and says, “why don’t I take these off your hands? I can make a good few dollars selling these at the recycling center.”

Which is a great idea. “No, thanks,” Zhou Zishu says, feeling Wen Kexing’s inaneness rub off on him as the old woman side-eyes them, peeved. “We’ll sell them ourselves.”

The mountain of cans shrinks by more than half once they have all been stomped into pancakes. They wait in the excruciatingly long Sunday line at the recycling center, filled with grandmothers and aunties and their bulging bags of cans that make Chengling’s collection look piteously small. The clerk gives them five dollars and some change for their haul. Chengling holds the money like it’s gold. 

It’s a hot day, and they duck into a dessert house the next block over. The money is just enough to each spend on a scoop of mint chocolate chip Dreyer’s, while they tunnel around a retail store, looking for button cell batteries. Zhou Zishu watches Chengling chase the trail of pale green dripping down his waffle cone as they wait in the checkout line, and thinks, maybe they will be okay. 

He finds himself wanting to see Wen Kexing all the time, and manages to almost everyday, eating lunch together while Wen Kexing is on his break, sitting on the curb and sharing a green apple slush. Occasionally they have dinner with Gu Xiang and Chengling in tow on the evenings the restaurant is quiet. At the dead of night they sometimes kiss for long stretches in the plush seats of Zhou Zishu’s—Gao Chong’s—car, and Zhou Zishu discovers that Wen Kexing can indeed kiss the way he imagines—enthusiastic, perhaps overly so. Too frantic, like Zhou Zishu is a meal he’s scarfing down before it’s taken away from him. And mind-numbingly inebriating, the glide of his tongue making Zhou Zishu’s eyes roll back and his mouth open for him, addictively defenseless. Wen Kexing’s lavish, honest attention makes Zhou Zishu feel so full, yet so privately empty with ruin. He’s being run ragged by the emotional stretch and collapse of it, and he’s afraid that soon he will snap and pop like a balloon. 

One Monday night in mid-May, they’re engrossed in each other, Zhou Zishu getting squashed into a corner in the back of the car as Wen Kexing plants a violet clutch of baby’s breath onto the side of his neck. Wen Kexing’s hands have been grabbing at his thighs since he’d crowded Zhou Zishu in to kiss him, and he’s finally moving on, hooking two fingers under the top of Zhou Zishu’s jeans, a knuckle pushed into the dip of his belly button, teeth grazing over a flowering bruise on Zhou Zishu’s throat. 

It’s almost pitch black. Zhou Zishu fumbles around for Wen Kexing’s hand wedged in his jeans and holds his wrist.

“Hey. Let’s go back to your place,” he pants into Wen Kexing’s hair. 

Wen Kexing comes up to kiss his jaw, then his lips, and says into them, “I was just going to ask you the same thing.” His other hand slips down to the juncture of Zhou Zishu’s right thigh, rubbing the crease with his thumb before he palms him lightly through his jeans. “My place isn’t convenient for this kind of thing. Let’s go to yours.”

Zhou Zishu is so consumed by the feeling of Wen Kexing’s hands that he almost agrees. “I sleep on a couch in the living room,” he says, catching himself and too impatient for embarrassment. “So unless your situation is even less ideal than that, we’re going to your place.”

Wen Kexing laughs nervously. “Um, ah. I share a bunk bed with A-Xiang.” He, on the other hand, has an emotional bandwidth somehow wide enough for both embarrassment and shamelessness at the same time. “The frame is really squeaky—”

“Stop.” Zhou Zishu’s cheeks are hot. “We’re not doing that. And seriously?” 

“A-Xu, if you had a job and had to pay rent you will know it is not easy living in this city.” Wen Kexing spanks Zhou Zishu’s thigh, irritatingly soft-handed. “ You try looking for something cheap that isn’t an SRO around here.”

“I do know it’s not easy.” Zhou Zishu snorts. “I’m a live-in nanny who sleeps on a couch .”

“Your kid is more dopey than a pet rock. And you get a nice car. And an expense account!”

Zhou Zishu pushes Wen Kexing’s incredulous face away, and shifts to pull his phone from the back pocket of his jeans. “I wonder if a hotel stay counts as a business expense if housing is already provided…”

“A-Xu!” Wen Kexing swats him again on his inner thigh, still too lightly. Maybe if Zhou Zishu keeps on annoying him Wen Kexing would be rougher with him. “That’s so anonymous. And impersonal.” He holds Zhou Zishu’s face in his warm hands. “And unemotional!”

“Impersonal and unemotional? You’re straddling me and shouting into my face. How is any of that going to change just because we’re on a real bed? That neither of us apparently have?”

“I meant the place . The answer is no.” Wen Kexing leans in, and brushes his lips against Zhou Zishu’s. “This car will do.”

“Lao Wen, what do you have in mind exactly? Sumo wrestling? Hot yoga? I can’t get any.... stains on this car. That’s disgusting.”

“I’ll be careful!”

“Yeah, right.” Zhou Zishu has thought about how Wen Kexing would look when he comes more times than he cares to keep track of, and in not one of those cosmic scenarios is he ever careful or neat.

Wen Kexing groans, sullen in the blink of an eye. “It’s like you don’t even want to have sex with me.” A hand leaves Zhou Zishu’s face and smooths down his stomach, firm but teasing. “Can I at least jerk you off?”

Yes. yes. “No,” Zhou Zishu grits out. “Find a better place. Or let me book a room.”

Wen Kexing’s eyes glint. “Wait. How about—what’s the name of your failed AirBnB start-up again? Four S—”

“Shut up .” Zhou Zishu jostles him by his shoulders, making laughter rattle out of Wen Kexing like fat raindrops on a lake. “You’re the first person outside of that circle that I’ve talked to about this. Don’t make me regret it.”

What a mistake of a confession to make, when Wen Kexing already has the upper hand. Zhou Zishu wants to take it back, but Wen Kexing is already puffing out his feathers like a peacock, basking in cheap honor. Zhou Zishu pulls him in to kiss him. Wen Kexing could announce every regrettable decision that Zhou Zishu has ever made from a bullhorn down the main street of Chinatown, and he would still want to kiss him all the same. He’s sweet as a new lamb with Zhou Zishu again, mouth docile and soft, letting Zhou Zishu air out his half-serious grievances in all the little nips he wants, agreeably keeping his own teeth out of the way. 

And then he yawns into Zhou Zishu’s mouth, and they both look at the time on the car’s dimmed display screen. 

“Ugh.” Wen Kexing nuzzles into his neck. He yawns again. “I have to go back in five hours.”

“Why do you work so much?” Zhou Zishu puts his hand to the back of Wen Kexing’s head, the now-familiar ebb of guilt he always feels when they meet like this trickling in again. “Luo-yi can't hire a few more people with the cash she’s pulling in?”

“She actually wants me to work less. I've always refused, and now I’ve made myself way too integral for the place to run without me,” he mumbles, his breath warm on Zhou Zishu’s skin. “You should see her crazy schedule, just so she can keep her unprofitable side business going.”

Zhou Zishu has no idea what he’s talking about, but he knows that Wen Kexing is only five minutes away from passing out. He holds Wen Kexing tighter, and tells him, “Just sleep here. I’ll stay with you.”

“Great,” Wen Kexing sinks lower over Zhou Zishu’s body, his weight anchoring Zhou Zishu in place. Neither of them are anywhere close to comfortable, and neither want to leave. “I guess I actually do get to sleep with you. More literal than I like but…” and he’s drifted off. 

Zhou Zishu wishes it could be this easy. That Wen Kexing only needs to drop all of his weight on him and fall asleep, for Zhou Zishu to be able to let himself be kept. That he only needs to lock his arms around Wen Kexing and cushion him with his own body to get him to stay a while longer, before he has to pin his hair up and retreat back into stainless steel and flames, until the next time they meet. 

In early June, the restaurant closes for a day for the first time in almost two decades. Gu Xiang is graduating. 

The ceremony is long and boring. Wen Kexing takes an absurd amount of blurry photos on his phone that Zhou Zishu can’t tell if he will seriously keep all of. Luo-yi—who finally introduces herself to him properly as Luo Fumeng—is employing a similar tactic next to him, using a camera equipped with a long-range zoom lens. Zhang Chengling, Liu Qianqiao, and a smattering of the older restaurant staff who have watched Gu Xiang grow up are there as well. When Gu Xiang prances across the stage for her brief five seconds, their section of the auditorium erupts into a deafening roar. 

She runs up to them all, lilac dress rippling and gold tassel shimmering in the afternoon sun, after she’s done weaving from one group of friends to another at the breaking of the event. “Okay,” she says, flapping her hands at everyone to herd them back towards the parking lot, nonchalant as if they are all gathered for nothing more than a grocery trip. “Let’s go home.”

“Home” for almost everyone is a rundown building two blocks away from the restaurant, tucked into the flank of a dim alleyway. The doors lining the halls are close together, betraying the tight quarters hidden inside, as Zhou Zishu peeks in whenever someone unlocks their own door and promptly leaves it open. Wen Kexing walks with him and Zhang Chengling all the way to the end of the hall on the second floor, while Gu Xiang leads ahead. 

“Ge,” she says when she opens the door. “You forgot to turn off the lights again.”

It's a tight squeeze inside, the way all of the other rooms are. Just enough space for the infamously squeaky bunk bed, a desk, a bookshelf, a sink, and a patch of emptiness reserved for the small folding table that’s collapsed and leaning against the wall. The wall along the top bunk is lined with boy band posters, clothes hang off the rungs of the metal ladder, and a green iguana sits stoically in an old hamster cage on the small desk.  

“It’s not a lot.” Wen Kexing scratches his head, trying to shuffle and tuck things away towards the walls. 

He takes Zhou Zishu and Chengling around and introduces them to everyone. Most say hello with hands busy sorting through snap peas or bunches of water spinach, sitting right by their opened doors. At the doorway of a grandmother with a baby slung to her back, Wen Kexing reminds the old woman that Gu Xiang doesn’t like bamboo shoots, which earns him an unwarranted scolding for catering to her picky eating. 

“Wait, Lao Wen, is everyone eating together?” Zhou Zishu asks.

Wen Kexing looks at him like that should have been obvious. “Yes? For A-Xiang’s graduation party. Why do you think we closed the restaurant all day?”

“Are you making anything?”

“Ha! No, this is my holiday.” 

They wander into Luo Fumeng’s space on the first floor. She’s just put a slab of burgeoning pork belly into a toaster oven. There’s a paper bag tied with red string right by the shoe rack, a stream of muffled clucking ebbing from it.

Wen Kexing nudges the bag with his shoe, making it squawk. “Luo-yi, you’re really going through the trouble? The whole bathroom’s going to smell like wet chicken.”

“Qianqiao’s helping me.” Luo Fumeng removes the bag from his foot's assault. 

“This is making me jealous! If I went back and got my GED, would you throw a big party for me as well?”

Luo Fumeng thinks for a moment. “You can take weekends off.”

Wen Kexing laughs. “No way, you’ll fall apart. Give me my party.”

Later, Gu Xiang tugs at her helium Congrats GRAD! balloon as she watches Luo Fumeng and Liu Qianqiao spoil her rotten with a pool of chicken blood on the communal bathroom tiles. “Luo-yi, you’re really going through the trouble?” She wrinkles her nose at the smell of boiling feathers. 

“For our new college student? Of course,” Luo Fumeng says, as she tugs wet brown tufts out in a pair of thick pink rubber gloves. 

The commotion is overwhelming. In a few hours, Zhou Zishu helps Wen Kexing pull out the laminated wooden table propped against the wall in his room, and gathers a smattering of mismatched chairs and stools from the other nearby residences to place around it. Someone in the next room contributes a second table that doesn’t fit in the tiny space, so it’s parked just outside the door and surrounded by its own circle of chairs. Gradually people start filing through with their dishes, plates and bowls of reds and yellows and greens. The space is just not enough to fit the twenty-so people here, and Wen Kexing along with a few others end up standing while eating—though he insists that Zhou Zishu sit down. They portion out a claypot of chicken soup with specks of goji berries for everyone to start off the meal, and then everyone tucks in.

“Xiangxiang grew up just like that,” one of the older line cooks remarks, flicking his chopsticks at Gu Xiang, who's glowing under all the attention. “I barely blinked, and she’s going to college. Luo-jie, are you handing the ropes down to her?”

“She can take over the business when she’s thirty, if she wants to,” Luo Fumeng says easily, like she’s already thought about this. 

“When she’s twenty-five,” Wen Kexing objects, bouncing the fussy young son of a waitress on his hip to give the mother a chance to eat in peace. “I’m too tired, I’m trying to pass this generational trauma down as fast as I can.” 

“She’s too young.” 

“Too young? You handed me all the books when I was twenty!”

“And now that you’re handling them, why would I need Xiangxiang to do it?”

They keep yipping at each other with no end in sight, this family of foxes, sly and calculated as old sprites. Zhou Zishu is happy to just eat and listen and occasionally joke at Wen Kexing’s expense—there’s enough Mandarin spoken for his benefit for him to keep up. Liu Qianqiao flits in the middle of everything as an unofficial mediator, serving and ladling food for those that can’t reach it, redirecting the conversation when needed like an unruly creek. She’s like a misplaced house cat in this fox den, quietly observant, always at the ready to groom and brush over any squabbles that get out of hand. Zhou Zishu wonders how she found herself among a brood like this. 

Dinner stretches out into two lively hours. It’s almost ten, by the time the dishes are slowly collected and redistributed back to their owners’ residences. They collapse one of the dining tables to make room for more people to sit, and pile the handful of kids running around onto Wen Kexing’s bottom bunk. Liu Qianqiao messes with the channels on the small flat screen TV while Gu Xiang hangs off her back on tip-toes. 

“A-Xing,” Liu Qianqiao calls, “can you and Zishu go get the karaoke machine from the restaurant? It’s by the podium cabinet up at the stage.”

Wen Kexing plops the new, different baby he’s been holding into her arms like the child is a live grenade, wipes the spit-up milk on his shoulder, and grabs Zhou Zishu’s hand to whisk him away. 

The silence outside feels like a cool drink of water after all that noise. It smells like rain is on the way—there are dim, low clouds, gray bellies brushing rooftops and utility poles. They stand, and admire the dark, gentle breeze for a moment, before walking out on their errand. Wen Kexing hovers close and clutches Zhou Zishu by his elbow. 

“Wasn’t that a mess?” Wen Kexing says, mirth dancing in his tone.

Zhou Zishu has to think about his response. “A good mess,” he offers. “And I’m assuming a rare one as well.”

“Because it’s got you in it!” Wen Kexing lunges to plant a kiss just beside Zhou Zishu’s ear. Zhou Zishu thinks Liu Qianqiao is a saint for kicking them both out.

It’s like the rain can’t wait for them to amble slowly to the restaurant, and decides to start drizzling right then and there. It fails to rush them. Zhou Zishu likes the way the misty drops shine golden with lamplight on Wen Kexing’s hair, tangled into snarls by sticky little toddler hands. He’s wearing something nice made of silky fabric, deep blue and peppered with coy little clusters of embroidery, that shimmers when he walks. 

Wen Kexing unlocks the glass doors and flips the light switches on. He’s unhurried, strolling like it’s his first time in this space. He ducks behind the wall of fish tanks tucked into the left side of the banquet hall, and looks at Zhou Zishu through the other side of a tank, his face alien and blue with harsh aquarium light. A pair of red snappers crawl along the floor and graze his chin with their vermillion dorsal fins. Zhou Zishu presses his palm against the glass, as if to reach for him. He startles the fish, and they dart up from the bottom of the tank, whisking Wen Kexing from sight like a draw of red curtains.

The karaoke machine is tucked into a small shelf inside the speech podium, just like Liu Qianqiao said. Wen Kexing takes it out, and pulls over an extension cord from the wall. “Let’s test it out,” he says, his grin mischievous, not giving Zhou Zishu a chance to catch up. 

Wen Kexing climbs onto the stage and pulls down the projector screen, so that a square of white interrupts the space between the carved dragon and phoenix pair hung on the red wall. “Hello? Hellooooo?” He says into the booming mic, his voice reverberating in waves that Zhou Zishu can wash away in. “Okay. It works. A-Xu, pick a song.” 

Zhou Zishu shrugs. “I don’t know what’s on the CD.”

“There’s a catalogue behind the—ah, screw it. Put it on shuffle, please.”

Zhou Zishu does. The projector connected to the machine blinks to life, and washes Wen Kexing in a background of tulip fields. The melancholic piano intro is a familiar one—Zhou Zishu knows this song. He gets ready to sing along, but once the lyrics bounce onto the screen and Wen Kexing opens his mouth, Zhou Zishu discovers it’s the Cantonese original version. 

The lyrics are different. Zhou Zishu mouths along in the version he knows. Wen Kexing sways in his field of flowers, never hitting the high notes and always smiling, singing to Zhou Zishu in a dialect that Zhou Zishu needs subtitles to understand. His version is about parted lovers who meet ten years later as friends, no longer having an excuse to embrace. He spares scant attention on the scrolling, different lyrics, not registering the words and meaning at all. They don’t even matter. How different of a story could it be? How many flavors of heartbreak end up tasting the same? 

The song ends. Wen Kexing rubs his throat and hums. “Hmm, let’s hope we get one in Mandarin so we can sing together.”

Zhou Zishu pauses the player. “Shouldn’t we go now?”

“Please, A-Xu? Just one more, just a little longer?”

Zhou Zishu never used to cave so easily for anyone. He unpauses.

Wen Kexing gets his wish: it’s a Teresa Teng song. Mandarin, and well-known enough to sing with his eyes closed. Zhou Zishu remembers his mother singing this while she mopped the floor, when she was alive, and as he opens his mouth he thinks, that he hasn’t sung this since she died, all those years ago. The words come back like she’s still toiling across his bedroom with a bucket of soapy water as he did his algebra homework, lemon detergent loitering in the air. He thinks, how strange, that he hasn’t thought about her in so long. How strange, that he never cried when he was handed her ashes at the crematorium, on his way back from a numbing day at work. 

The background fades into a dark blue almost the exact same shade as Wen Kexing’s silk shirt—a night sky, crescent moon in a corner. The projector brands bloody lyrics across his chest, flashing fragments of verses: You. Me. Please. I beg of you, please. Don’t let me leave you, please. I can’t live on memories alone. Please. Zhou Zishu’s heart steers to the beat of the song, as he reads the words across Wen Kexing’s body, following the way his lips move with his own. The background shifts again. He’s stupefied by the pulsing, fractal animation that envelopes Wen Kexing. It reminds Zhou Zishu of an old Windows screensaver that always idled on the beige desktop in his father’s study, enrapturing his childhood then, and enrapturing him for a lifetime now. Being with Wen Kexing is like being sucked into the abyss of a spinning fractal. The harder Zhou Zishu tries to jump and get to the end of his madness for this man, the more he finds of the same desire, and he ends up falling even deeper, like he’s plummeting into a trench, a schism in the earth, a supermassive black hole. He doesn’t know if he can survive it.

The music is still going, but Wen Kexing drops the mic on the ground, unplugs the outlet, and jumps off the stage in a thunderous outro. He strides over to Zhou Zishu in strange urgency, and wipes at his cheeks frantically. 

When did he start crying? Zhou Zishu doesn’t know. But he knows that as long as Wen Kexing keeps fussing with him, he mustn’t have stopped yet. It’s lackluster and lethargic. His breathing barely hitches. It’s like he’s trying so, so hard to cry, when his body only allows him the smallest possible outlet to do so, squeezing all the things he wants to shout until they trickle out in a whimper, through a needlepoint of vulnerability. 

“A-Xu?” Wen Kexing’s hand is getting so wet, he has to wipe Zhou Zishu’s face with a different side of it. 

Zhou Zishu stands there and waits for his tears to stop. Wen Kexing folds him into his arms when they do, and says “I’m sorry”, like he’s at all to blame. Zhou Zishu clings to Wen Kexing’s shirt and shakes his head. 

Some time later, there’s a hesitant set of footsteps approaching them. “Hey.” It’s Liu Qianqiao’s voice that speaks up. “Are you guys okay?”

“Qiaoqiao?” Wen Kexing’s chest rumbles where he’s pressed up against Zhou Zishu. 

“You guys were gone for a while, so Luo-yi asked me to check…” 

“Okay, we’ll go.”

“Do you want me to carry the machine?”

“Yes, please.”

Liu Qianqiao gives them a wide berth on the way back, walking a good ten paces ahead. She doesn’t ask them to hang out with everyone for the night. “I’ll tell Luo-yi you guys are back,” she says to Wen Kexing, who thanks her, and she disappears behind the door to his rowdy, overcrowded room, leaving him and Zhou Zishu in the hallway. 

They sit on the fire escape, legs dangling from the concrete platform. Wen Kexing turns Zhou Zishu’s head to face him with a nudge at his chin, his hand hovering by his face as if waiting for another downpour of tears. “A-Xu?” 

Zhou Zishu has all dried up now. “I’m okay,” he says, unsettled by his dreamlike episode. “I don’t know what that was, I’ve never—” He can’t finish the thought.

Wen Kexing looks at him like he already knows, and is just waiting for Zhou Zishu to catch up. 

He grasps Zhou Zishu’s hand between his two—a developing habit, like Zhou Zishu is his tug-of-war. “A-Xu.” His voice is defenseless. “I think you should make a decision.”

Zhou Zishu doesn’t ask him about what, because he’s afraid to answer. He lets his land go lax in Wen Kexing’s hold. “Why don’t you?”

“Zhou Zishu, I’ve been yours whether you wanted me or not. You must know this. I’m not subtle at all.”

Wen Kexing says this like a tentative offering, like he’s tailed Zhou Zishu this whole time and has just been caught in the act, guilty. Which is nonsensical. Zhou Zishu is convinced that Wen Kexing was the one who tossed out their ball of red string first, unwinding himself as Zhou Zishu ran behind him, balling up red twine in his hand like he’s forging a setting sun. 

“You know I want to be with you. You must know this, too.” Zhou Zishu looks away.

“We all want things, A-Xu,” Wen Kexing says. “But I need to know what I can have.”

Zhou Zishu leans sideways and kisses him. It’s too small of an answer for the weight of what Wen Kexing is asking for, but it’s all he has. All he has for Wen Kexing are kisses in the dark, and barely a month’s more time before he needs to go. He knows how long visa applications take to process and be approved even if he qualifies for one—years. Decades. Zhou Zishu has never wanted anything so keenly before. He’s spent all his life drifting along like plankton, and the one time he’s found a star to follow, the currents are determined to yank him away. 

Zhou Zishu takes time to kiss Wen Kexing slowly, relishing the soft, tangible press of lips, the sleek slide of tongues past each other. He wants to make it perfect, tries to make it enough. He thinks he gets close, if the soft, hoarse sounds he pulls out of Wen Kexing are anything to judge by. But soon it won’t be enough again. It will never be enough, until he can chain himself here, and throw the key away. 

He swivels to swing his legs over Wen Kexing’s thighs, and leans further into him. It makes Wen Kexing scramble at Zhou Zishu’s hips at an awkward angle, until Zhou Zishu gets the cue and lifts himself onto Wen Kexing’s lap, twisting by his waist to keep kissing him in a way that Wen Kexing would have loved to laud over in one of his impish moods. The thought alone—that this simple motion has such an effect on Wen Kexing, sends a jolt through Zhou Zishu’s half-hard cock. He didn’t intend to get turned on after the toll the last hour has taken on him, but his body has decided there’s something long overdue that he can’t delay anymore, even if he feels he will never be ready for it.  

Zhou Zishu can feel the swell of Wen Kexing’s cock on the side of his thigh as well. He shifts his weight over it, and gets a surprised nip on his bottom lip. 

“A-Xu,” Wen Kexing is too loud for the open space. “Are we going to do something about the fact that we still haven’t slept together this time?”

He sucks Wen Kexing’s tongue into his mouth, suddenly filthy. “Let’s go back to mine. Chengling’s being looked after here.” Finally being able to say that makes him shiver, brimming with anticipation. 

Wen Kexing moans efficiently—Zhou Zishu never knew that was possible—and pulls away to keep talking. “Abandoning your child for worldly pleasures? How am I so, so into this kind of man?” 

He’s peeved just listening to him. “Lao Wen, how about we get going?”

“My dear A-Xu, you’re the one that’s sitting in my lap.”

They’re reaching for the front door to exit the building, when Liu Qianqiao comes out from her room on the first floor, a platter of cut-up papaya with little toothpicks in them balanced on one hand. Zhou Zishu doesn’t hear her until the lock to her door clicks, and he quickly swats away the hand groping his ass, making Wen Kexing yelp. 

“Why are you so moody? What’d you do that for?” 

“Qianqiao’s right behind us,” Zhou Zishu hisses.

Wen Kexing turns around. “Oh, she is.”

Liu Qianqiao walks up to them, looks between them quickly. “A-Xing, come here.” She’s suspiciously quiet, and wiggles her free hand around in the tiny chest pocket of her pale green blouse, drawing out a single key looped to a fraying length of pink plastic rope. She holds it out to Wen Kexing, and when he spends a few seconds too long looking without taking it, she shakes it urgently until he does.

“Don’t tell Luo-yi I gave you this.” Even though there’s no intonations in her whisper, a thread of awkwardness worms its way through. “There’s a side room in the office that the filing boxes are usually blocking. I get tired when I’m doing paperwork sometimes, so I put a bed in there to take naps in for whenever I stay late to do work a couple months ago.” She crosses her arms. “Just… wash the sheets. And don’t let Luo-yi see you.”

Zhou Zishu stares at a very interesting spot on the ceiling.

“Wow, thanks.” How is Wen Kexing still talking to her? “Are these for upstairs?” Wen Kexing points to the plate of papaya that Liu Qianqiao’s holding. 

“Yeah. I thought all the karaoke might make everyone’s throat dry, so I’m cutting up a couple more.”

“You’re the best, Qiaoqiao.” Wen Kexing pops a piece of fruit in his mouth and drops the toothpick back onto the platter. He waves the key at her. “Thanks again!” he says, like she’s just given him a houseplant, a five-dollar gift card. Literally anything else. 

As soon as Liu Qianqiao disappears into the stairwell, Zhou Zishu gawks at Wen Kexing. “Is she serious?”

“Just a nice girl.” Wen Kexing shrugs like this is a normal occurrence. “Looks like we don’t need your couch anymore.”

“What, does she regularly pimp you out?”

“Don’t be jealous, A-Xu.” Wen Kexing grabs his ass again, smirk shining on his lips like honey. “I’ll only pimp myself out for you.”

“She’s going too far out of her way,” Zhou Zishu says, putting his face in his hands. 

“Qiaoqiao’s a romantic. I think we’re very entertaining for her,” Wen Kexing says. “She’s the backbone behind Luo-yi’s whole divorce attorney gig if you can believe that, which wouldn’t have been a good fit for her squishy-soft temperament if she wasn’t also such a workhorse.”

“Divorce attorney? From the woman who runs wedding banquets almost every week?”

“She doesn’t see a difference. If people want to be together, she wants to make it their best day possible. And if people want to get out of a terrible situation then she’ll do the same for them. It’s all just relationships, isn’t it? Forming and breaking, but it’s just people and memories and mundane days of being alive, and all she’s doing is putting a pretty coat of paint on it if someone asks.” Wen Kexing puts the key in his pocket. “Huh, I guess I never told you. Luo-yi does it pro-bono, usually domestic violence cases. She’s pretty prolific in this business actually. I don’t know where she finds the time, since she’s always nagging me at the restaurant over nothing.” He looks at Zhou Zishu’s incredulous face, amused. “Don’t believe me? We’re heading over anyway. You’ll see.” 

The office is on the third floor, through a door just to the side of the one that leads to the rooftop Wen Kexing took them to, the first time they’d kissed. It’s organized chaos inside: flickering yellow lights and a floor of boxes, retired restaurant stainless steel shelving housing a wall of binders and comb bound documents. There’s two desks, one facing the left wall that’s scattered with calendars and to-go coffee cups, and one on the right that’s sparser but still busy with sticky notes, with a sprig of white orchid drooping over the pen jar, and a dying succulent next to it. 

Zhou Zishu picks up the photo frame propped next to the plants. It’s an old picture of Gu Xiang—she looks around eight or nine. She’s beaming, missing a front tooth, dressed up as Jessie from Toy Story, an orange plastic pumpkin bucket tucked on her arm and her other hand clamped over the top of her cowboy hat. Above her is a blurry young Wen Kexing with what looks like horse ears on his head, trying to pull the hat off Gu Xiang’s head. 

Zhou Zishu turns around to ask Wen Kexing about the photo, and finds him excavating the stacks of filing boxes at the far end of the room. He remembers why they are here, and puts the frame down. 

Wen Kexing unearths and unlocks the door. “Oh, come on.” There’s even more boxes inside, stuffed with private files and law books. Wen Kexing throws them in a rough stack against the wall. There’s a small twin bed across from the pile, a blanket folded neatly on top of the pillow.

He turns around to Zhou Zishu. “Well, that’s the least sexy thing I’ve done all day. Take it or leave it?”

“I’ll take it.” Even if Zhou Zishu has to take it in a poor, sweet girl’s workplace nap room. How did he ever get here, from his condo in Shanghai? 

Wen Kexing nods. His eyes focus as he breaks the two yards of space between them. He leans in to kiss Zhou Zishu, mouth stained faintly with fruit, firm. His hands slide down Zhou Zishu’s chest, to his waist, and pick deftly at his belt buckle. Zhou Zishu’s jeans come down in a blink. Wen Kexing presses him back so that he sits on the edge of the bed, and kneels between his spread knees. Zhou Zishu thinks he might crumble to dust, right there.

Wen Kexing mouths at him through his underwear for a moment, before he looks up at Zhou Zishu. Zhou Zishu lifts his hips up, and then down again, so Wen Kexing can pull the fabric past his knees and off his ankles, his cock bobbing free. 

Wen Kexing doesn’t waste time teasing. He gives Zhou Zishu’s cock a few good tugs, watching the flushed length of it in his hand with concentration, and closes his mouth over the head, immediately sinking down. Zhou Zishu shakes. 

Wen Kexing sucks him off with ruthless ambition, mouth so hot and tight that Zhou Zishu holds his breath madly, arrested by the steady dip and rise of Wen Kexing’s head, seized by the wet, licking heat that never lets up its control over him. Like Wen Kexing is accusing Zhou Zishu, this is what you do to me. This is how much I want you. I hope you feel it, and I hope it destroys you . It’s sweet resentment and bitter affection, and Zhou Zishu has no choice but to drink it all up. 

At some point he leans back on his elbows and throws his legs over Wen Kexing’s shoulders, so that the backs of his calves slide over Wen Kexing’s head of cool, black silk. His legs move limply with every drop of Wen Kexing’s head this way. He feels like a ragdoll: held haphazardly, loved thoroughly, and breaking at the seams because of it. Wen Kexing holds him together with an arm under his thigh, curling up to dig into his hip bone. 

The onset of his orgasm makes itself suddenly known. “Lao Wen—” he gets out, voice high. “I’m—”

Wen Kexing hums, tongue doing a slow dance out of sight. The vibrations Zhou Zishu feels from his voice sets him off. His legs tense and jerk towards himself with his release, unwittingly yanking Wen Kexing closer to him by his back, and he gags from the way Zhou Zishu’s cock suddenly slams into the base of his throat, breathing ragged through his nose as he coughs, but doesn’t pull off.

“Fuck—sorry.” Zhou Zishu pushes himself back up on his hands, reaching to push Wen Kexing away. 

Wen Kexing covers his hand with his own, and shakes his head the best he can in his current state. Zhou Zishu feels him swallow from the way Wen Kexing’s tongue twitches under him. It draws a shudder out of him. Wen Kexing withdraws with a wheezing sigh, gives the tip of his cock a kitten lick, tongue slick with white.

Zhou Zishu bends forward to take Wen Kexing’s face in his hands, and grazes the wetness shining around his mouth. Wen Kexing sucks Zhou Zishu’s thumb into his mouth and scrapes his bottom teeth along the pad of it, leisurely coquettish, now that his work’s finished.

“What did A-Xu think about that?” He says, his bottom lip skipping under Zhou Zishu’s finger.

“I think,” Zhou Zishu starts. “Let me.”

Wen Kexing scoots closer on his knees. Zhou Zishu bends down to kiss him, tastes a heady sip of himself in Wen Kexing’s mouth. He lowers his legs off Wen Kexing’s shoulders, feels the stretch and burn from the position flower over the muscles in the backs of his thighs. “Get in here,” he says, pulling on and unbuttoning Wen Kexing’s navy shirt in tandem. 

“In where?” Wen Kexing grins brilliantly, rising and looming over Zhou Zishu, pushing him onto his back and climbing on top of him. “I didn’t bring lube, so.”

“So don’t forget next time.” Zhou Zishu flips them over and finishes messing with the last three abalone buttons on Wen Kexing’s fancy shirt, parts the blue, Red Sea of it to drain out the pale expanse of his chest. He gets his mouth over all that skin, athirst. Wen Kexing’s arms come up to inundate his hair, his neck, his shoulders, his back. He sighs, and Zhou Zishu feels it in the swoop of his thorax, like the first breath of a tsunami.

He sheds the rest of Wen Kexing’s clothes, finally remembers to pull his own shirt off over his head. Zhou Zishu lets the weight of Wen Kexing’s cock rest in his palm as he settles low on his knees to get comfortable. At the first pull of Zhou Zishu’s fist Wen Kexing’s mouth opens. On the second, his legs. On the third, his voice cracks open like the siren that he is, “ A-Xu,” and Zhou Zishu takes him in his mouth to stuff up his own reply, fearing he would say something horribly devastating. 

Afterwards, with the remains of salt and musk from Wen Kexing’s body in his aching mouth, Zhou Zishu swims up until they’re chest-to-chest, and watches Wen Kexing’s face: his exhausted gaze, the shadows under his eyes; the cloying flush to his cheeks; the way his mouth still can’t quite seem to close, even though he’s long out of words. His Nereid, his selkie, his Ao Guang. Beached in his arms, gasping, and still Zhou Zishu can’t seem to let him go.

“Are you free tomorrow?” Zhou Zishu asks, dazed. 

Wen Kexing laughs, out of breath. “No,” he says, wiping a spot of come off the corner of Zhou Zishu’s mouth. “But I’ll make time, just for you.”

Zhou Zishu wishes they can make time right now, if just to lie next to each other, so he can feel Wen Kexing’s warm, naked skin on his a while longer. But they redress quickly, buttoning up shirts and shrugging on pants that suddenly feel too constraining, and lock the door behind them. 

On the way out, Wen Kexing picks up the framed photo that Zhou Zishu had set down flat on the table in a hurry. “Oh! This was from when we used to trick-or-treat in this rich neighborhood with all mansions. They always gave out king-sized Hershey’s bars. Or five-dollar bills.” He pours water from a half-empty Aquafina bottle onto the wilting succulent, sets the photo back up against the pot. “A-Xiang used to be jealous of how big those houses were, so I told her they’re all filled with candy bars, waiting for her to come get them.”

It’s a Friday. School’s out for the summer. Zhou Zishu is getting ready in the bathroom. He and Zhang Chengling have been trying to serial-visit all the attractions in the city—today it’s the Maritime Museum. 

He hears the front door open, and yells, “Chengling can you wait inside? I’m almost done.”

“Hello?” It’s a voice, soft and high, that he’s never heard before. 

Zhou Zishu comes out of the bathroom. There’s a young woman standing in the middle of the living room. A version of her face seems to already live in Zhou Zishu’s memory, in the depths of someone’s social media photo album. He wracks his brain for the name of Gao Chong’s daughter, and says hesitantly, “Xiaolian?”

“Yes.” The girl considers him, confused. “Who are you? Did my dad rent this place out?”

“Zhou Zishu. And no, but he’s letting us stay here for now until he can get Chengling—” he cuts himself off. “Hold on, when was the last time you talked to him?”

Gao Xiaolian shrugs. “I don’t know, six months? Beginning of the school year?” She sets the Balenciaga messenger bag in her hand down on the floor. “My college dorm kicked me out for the break, so I needed a place to crash before my sublease started. I didn’t know anyone was going to be here.” She pinches her lips. “Do you mind filling me in?”

Zhou Zishu clears the couch for her to sit on. There’s a blanket draped there now, that Wen Kexing had pulled off his own duvet for him, after he learned that Zhou Zishu was still freezing with a jacket as his covers at night. He folds it neatly, corner to corner, and holds it in his lap as he tells her about why they’re here, and the pseudo-sibling she now suddenly has. Chengling cracks open his bedroom door and peers out when he hears himself mentioned, and comes shyly to sit on the arm of the couch next to Zhou Zishu. Gao Xiaolian looks at him with kind, sympathetic reserve. 

A young man slips through the door, a duffel bag slung across his shoulder. “Oh, that’s my boyfriend,” Gao Xiaolian says. “I guess we’ll just find a hotel for a few weeks. No—it’s no trouble,” she reassures Zhou Zishu. “My dad’s a hard person to reach, if you can’t tell already. I can’t believe he’s in Vietnam and didn’t say anything to me. But his bank account is quite bottomless, so I guess it evens out.”

“Was he around, before you went off to college?” Zhou Zishu asks. 

Gao Xiaolian shakes her head. “No, it was always just my mom. And then she passed away, so I got handed off to nannies until he could hand me off to uni.”

Chengling grabs the fabric of Zhou Zishu’s shirt around his arm, and tugs just the slightest bit.

Gao Xiaolian gathers up her luggage again with her boyfriend, and Zhou Zishu helps them carry the stuff back down to their car—a gleaming white Lamborghini, even flashier than what Zhou Zishu drives and practically levitating off the drab asphalt. She leaves her phone number with Zhou Zishu in case they need to be in contact, and drives off for the nearest Hyatt. 

Zhou Zishu heads back upstairs, scattered. “Okay, let’s go too,” he says to Chengling, who's still sitting on the couch, picking at his nails. “Don’t forget your sunscreen.” 

He thinks about Gao Xiaolian all day, as he looks at miniature boat models with Chengling, yaps at him to smile properly for a photo with some murals, and as they eat ice cream together by the freezing ocean, shivering. He manages to finally vacate thoughts of nannies and expensive cars when he’s shivering again late that night, as Wen Kexing moves under him, grabbing Zhou Zishu’s cock as he thrusts up into him, the way he’s always going just a little overboard, doing more than enough. Zhou Zishu is brimming with so many sensations that he’s on the edge of overflowing and losing them altogether. He bats Wen Kexing’s hand away, “too much,” and grinds low onto him. 

The first time they fucked, he’d asked Wen Kexing, “What do you want?” Gotten from him a saccharine “Can I be in you?” And had settled the deal with a “Whatever. Yeah,” as he tossed Wen Kexing the bottle of lube, and laid down on his back. It was too nonchalant and naive of him. Wen Kexing had devoured him the way one scarfs down a ripe summer peach—chin glistening, dripping to the elbow, out of breath and full of urgency—so that by the time he’s polishing off the last traces of sweet flesh from Zhou Zishu, his hips slowing, he looked like he’s already wanting more, waiting for the next summer, wildly. He’s split Zhou Zishu open, body and soul. On the days that he crashes alone onto the couch in his apartment, his legs fall open instinctively, waiting for nothing. The width of the cushions is too narrow, and he would wake up with his right leg spilling over, ankle grazing the carpet. The strain on his lower body almost replicates the ache he’s really after, and it would tide him over until the next time he can hoard away what precious time he has with Wen Kexing, again.

The pleasure in Zhou Zishu’s belly writhes like an eel on hot coals, knotting itself into a suffocating tangle that Wen Kexing’s onslaught within him somehow loosens and tightens, relieves and aggravates at the same time. He’s a listing boat, lusting after the current that’s pulling him under, prying apart his own hull so that he sinks faster. His mind is blank as he comes on Wen Kexing’s stomach, and feels Wen Kexing spend inside him in two taut thrusts, his moans muted like he’s screaming for Zhou Zishu through bulletproof glass.

He stands by the ledge of the rooftop after they’ve cleaned up, breathing in cool, fresh air. Wen Kexing is downstairs getting something that Zhou Zishu has forgotten all about. He’s still warm inside and out, and the night breeze glides over him like water over a diving duck. His mind races, trying to catch up after being sex-addled for the last hour.

The door to the rooftop creaks open, followed by the scratch of lazy footsteps dragging over concrete. Wen Kexing moves behind him and puts his arms around Zhou Zishu, presses warm, soft lips to his neck. “Your shirt’s on backwards,” he murmurs, his breath in hot puffs against Zhou Zishu’s skin, just intimate enough that Zhou Zishu’s body considers responding to him anew, quick as an autumn buck. “You’re distracted tonight. What’s wrong? Should I let you fuck me, to keep your interest up?”

Zhou Zishu smiles, reaches behind to rub the side of Wen Kexing’s head, and feels him lean into it. “I’ll hold you to that.”

“Come, eat something.” Wen Kexing moves away, and Zhou Zishu sways, not realizing he was leaning back on him. 

There’s a burning mug of something floral waiting for him, balanced precariously on an exhaust air vent, next to two slightly crushed egg tarts nestled in a paper towel. Zhou Zishu picks up the mug and sips. It’s chrysanthemum tea. Bits of wilted, white petals drift on the surface, like budding lotus in a black lake. The steam claws its way into the air, and goes home to the glassy night. The sky is rarely and wonderfully clear. The full moon opulent and opalescent, the Big Dipper bending to scoop a spoonful of the cloudless horizon, guileless and naked as Wen Kexing had been scant minutes ago, sprawled and writhing as Zhou Zishu used him threadbare, tore the rest to shreds. He never saw stars, when he was in Shanghai. 

Zhou Zishu nibbles at the buttery crust of his egg tart, letting it melt, sweet and soft, on his tongue. “Do you remember,” he says, “when you asked me to make sure that Chengling would go with a decent person?” 

Wen Kexing sets his own mug down without a sound. “Yes.”

“What counts as a decent person?”

Wen Kexing thinks, rubbing the wax paper wrapper around his egg tart between two fingers. “Subjectively? Someone who cares for him without motive, who doesn’t mind putting someone else’s child through college, who doesn’t care if he calls them mom or dad or not.” 

“And objectively?”

“Whoever can be there without involving authorities.”

Zhou Zishu nods. He is so confused. 

“What happened?” Wen Kexing asks softly.

“His guardian’s daughter came to visit today,” Zhou Zishu confesses. “She had no idea her dad went out and adopted a child. Hadn’t talked to the guy for months, had no idea he’s out of the country. But they don’t seem estranged. It just seems… like it’s natural for him to be so absent, and like she’s accepted it for a long time now.” The sweetness in his mouth is overwhelming. Zhou Zishu drinks more tea. It burns his tongue. “She seems well enough, and she’s not short on luxuries. I just can’t tell if she turned out okay because she was always supposed to, living like that, or if she had to work hard for it herself. Because I don’t know if Chengling knows how to work for that.” He doesn’t say that in his subjective world, he would wholeheartedly throw Chengling into Wen Kexing and Luo Fumeng’s fox den, if he couldn’t be there himself. 

Wen Kexing is uncharacteristically quiet. Even he doesn’t have the words sometimes. 

“I think, again,” he starts after a stretch of silence, “that you just have to make a decision. Make it, so you can see it in front of you.” 

On his way home through the misty streets, Zhou Zishu walks by his parked car. The seashells that Wen Kexing had left on the dashboard are still there. He takes them out and puts them in his pocket, feels the cool weight of them on his palm. 

At home, he sets a kettle on boil, and reads the texts that Gao Chong sent him earlier. Gao Chong says he’s just heard from his daughter, and that Zhou Zishu should not worry about where she would stay. He will be back in three weeks. Thank you so much Zishu.

Zhou Zishu puts his phone away and stirs a sleeve of decaf coffee into his cup—a blue ceramic thing he picked up at the junk store nearby when drinking everyday out of a travel flask became too annoying. He stands at the kitchen counter and clicks on the lights in Chengling’s fish tank. The little red scrap twirls peacefully, fin rot long healed, scales immaculate. The lights showering it shifts through a rainbow gradient, turning its world red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, red. It swims up to the right corner of the tank when it spots Zhou Zishu, and waits to be fed. 

Zhou Zishu does, and then takes the seashells out of his pocket. He dips his hand into the warm, temperature-controlled fishy water, and nests the pale shells into the gravel. 

In the morning, he buys a big breakfast. Steamed rice noodles with cilantro and chopped beef; congee swimming with sliced fish; crystalline har gow shining with pink shrimp; the last couple baked char siu buns, golden brown with honey, that he cut in line to snatch. He’s taking everything out of plastic bags when Chengling stumbles out of his room, his hair mussed with sleep.

“There’s so much food.” Chengling stares. Cereal and milk in the mornings have become the norm. This feels like sheer luxury. 

“Hurry up and brush your teeth, it’s gonna get cold.”

They tuck in and eat quietly. Zhou Zishu takes the time to think about what he wants to say. He’s been thinking about it since last night, dreamed about it, and thought about it again as he fought for a place in line with grandmas at a bakery. 

He pinches off a section of his rice noodles with his chopsticks, and asks, “Chengling, do you want to stay with your Gao-shushu?”

Chengling looks up warily, a spoonful of congee halfway to his mouth, like he’s saying, do I have a choice?

Zhou Zishu is too impatient to wait for the little guy to formulate a response. He’s going to lose his nerves soon, if he doesn’t get out what he’s about to say. “If you don’t, and I end up having to go back to Shanghai, you can come back with me.”

Chengling’s mouth is open. “Really?”

“Yeah.” It’s done. He’s said it.

“Yes.” Chengling nods quickly. But it seems like he’s holding something back. 

“Yes, and? Say what you want to say decisively, Chengling,” Zhou Zishu chides. 

“What about Wen-ge, and Xiang-jiejie?” Chengling looks at his bowl of congee, stirring it pensively.

Of course. In China he won’t have anyone but Zhou Zishu. Here he’s somehow stumbled into someone else’s family, and has blended in more or less as another kid in their building. And there’s the one or two friends he’s made during his brief time in class, that he sometimes still goes out with now that school’s ended. All of that will have to go.

“I don’t know,” Zhou Zishu says. It’s a well-worn phrase in his head. He hates it. 

“When do we go?” Chengling asks. 

“Three weeks.”

“Okay…”

There’s a light sprinkle of pedestrians on the pier that night. Wen Kexing has decided he wants to walk around the place in the dark. Something good at work must have happened—he’s polishing off a second bottle of peach soju with the other night staff when Zhou Zishu seeked him out, already tipsy, flinging bleach solution around from a rag. He planted a sloppy kiss on Zhou Zishu’s mouth in front of everyone’s hollers, threw a heavy, bleach-y arm around him, and they stumbled out into the streets together. 

They’re walking along a small strip of beach, loitering like everyone else, Wen Kexing swinging Zhou Zishu’s hand around in his like there’s no tomorrow. Zhou Zishu takes controlled sips of the ocean air and thinks, if Wen Kexing dislocates and breaks his arm off, he’ll give it to him, free of charge, and learn to write left-handed.  

They stop, and watch the tiny lights on a few boats in the sea wink in the darkness. Wen Kexing points across the bay, drunk smile dripping on his face. “You came from over there.” 

“That’s North. That’s Alcatraz, idiot. Are you cursing me?” Zhou Zishu had just been there last week with Chengling, posing for very questionable photos inside prison cells like everyone else, reading about inmates who swam across the sea to reach freedom in San Francisco. Zhou Zishu takes Wen Kexing’s arm and swivels it to the left. “I came from there. ” 

“That’s an In-N-Out.” Wen Kexing blinks at the swath of dry land there, at the yellow neon sign erected above the fast-food joint.

“No. I mean the ocean to the west.”

“We should go! I want to see your ocean,” Wen Kexing says, giddy, as if in his mind, Zhou Zishu owns the Pacific with a single dip of his toes into its waters, on a shore sleeping at the other side of the world. 

Zhou Zishu would take him anywhere. “Okay, let’s go, we’ll get the car.”

It takes a slow half-hour to toil back to get the vehicle, and another half to cross the city, to get to water at the west side of the peninsula; to go to the other, same, ocean. Wen Kexing slurs along to a crooning Simon & Garfunkel song on the radio, tapping a beat on his stomach like a little kid.

The waves are wild on this side of the peninsula, the wind whipping sand onto their jeans. Wen Kexing sticks his hand into the grit, bending in half at the waist. “Wait, I know this place.” Of course he does. He’s lived here all his life. “I used to dig for sand crabs with my mom here, when I was tiny.” 

“Then I guess it was your ocean all along,” Zhou Zishu indulges his wistful silliness. 

“No,” Wen Kexing objects. “Mine, yours, ours. Okay?” 

“Okay.” 

“All of it—the whole thing, with all the fish and garbage. Got it?” 

“Yeah. Ours.” 

It’s really too cold to stay out here. Zhou Zishu zips up Wen Kexing’s flimsy hoodie. Maybe a drunk Wen Kexing isn’t the best person to tell this to, but he’s been holding onto the decision all day like an idling, stamped letter, and suddenly, he needs to get it out right away. Maybe it’s the fact that the wind makes it so that he has to shout it, so he can remind himself that it’s real.

“Hey,” Zhou Zishu starts, not nearly loud enough. “I’ve decided, about Zhang Chengling.”

“Oh?” Wen Kexing’s voice lilts.

“I’m not leaving him to Gao Chong anymore. He’s coming with me.”

“Coming? Coming where?”

Zhou Zishu’s heart sinks. “Going. Away,” he says, now dreading that he has to yell it. “When I have to go, remember?”

Wen Kexing’s face wipes blank, terrifyingly so. “Yes.”

“Lao Wen?”

Wen Kexing looks at him, gaze pallid. “So, what? When your time is up you’re just going to say ‘oh well’ and move on, without a care in the world? Like you’ve had no impact on the lives of the people around you, on my life?” The words spurt out of him, like he’s been stopped up with them this whole time, festering. And that he’s finally throwing it out there, tossing it into sea mist while he still has the chance to, now that he’s petulant and soaked in alcohol. “Are we just orbiting each other, by accident? Because I think I’d rather we crash, even if it destroys me.”

And me, and me, Zhou Zishu thinks. He wants to tell Wen Kexing that what he’s just accused him of isn’t accurate anymore, may have never been. He can’t move on without a care from this. And Wen Kexing should consider the devastating impact he’s had on Zhou Zishu as well—it’s less a crater and more a clean blow through his chest. Maybe that’s why he feels so blood-drained and hollow, as he watches Wen Kexing wipe his eyes with the back of his hand, blinking furiously, emotion steadily welling on the set of his mouth. 

Instead of saying a word of that, he asks, exhausted, “Then why have you stayed? What will you have me do?”

“I don’t let people hurt me, ever. Only for you, A-Xu.” Wen Kexing smiles through the tears. “So I’ll stand here, and shout at you. But I want to be with you, as long as I can, as long as you’ll let me. I’ve never been stupid, A-Xu, but you’ve turned me into the biggest fucking idiot. So if you think this is something terrible that we’re doing to each other, then you should be the one to end it. Because I can’t. I won’t. It hurts me, and it makes me love it more. Love you more, like I’m trying to fill myself up with it, to last me for the rest of my life. So please, make the decision for me.” 

I love you too. I love you. I love you. Zhou Zishu wants to say it so badly, but he thinks if he does, Wen Kexing will never stop crying. So he doesn’t.

“Marry me,” he says instead—the only other viable words left in the scramble of his brain, and Wen Kexing’s face crumples in the moonlight. Shattering like a wilted peony, one touch and he’s in pieces.

“Zhou Zishu.” It barely sounds like his name.

The damage is done. Zhou Zishu has to be mad, and delusional, and irresponsible. Maybe he’s just in love. He pushes on with it, cringing, “I want to stay here. With you. Marry me.” 

“I haven’t even let you fuck me yet.” Somehow Wen Kexing finds room to tease, even as his eyes stream, and his voice grates hoarsely like sandpaper. “Aren’t you closing the deal a little early?”

“I can fix that,” Zhou Zishu brushes him off. Why is he like this? 

Wen Kexing huffs and does something with his expression that is utterly confusing; takes a minute before he slurs, breath stuttering, “Are you coercing me into a green card marriage, Zhou Zishu?” 

“Yes. Marry me.” 

“Are you going to immediately divorce me after you get status? Like the horrible person you are, after you defile me like a sweet young rose?” Somehow Zhou Zishu is still able to make out his mess of syllables through the crying, the way that parents are fluent in every dialect of their baby’s insistent gargles. Maybe that’s what love really is. Underneath the horror, Zhou Zishu is dizzy with it.

If he’s a better man he would wipe the tears off Wen Kexing’s face. But he’s artless and stiff with the caliber of emotionality that Wen Kexing helms like a second skin, even though Zhou Zishu is trying so dearly hard to keep up with him. He’s a boy raised among nuptials and annulments, abandoned and scavenged. Smelting in this volatile caldron of joy and pain has forged him into his own phenomenon—when he laughs the ground shakes with it, and when he cries the sky cracks open for him—a pearl of rain lands on Zhou Zishu’s cheek, glides down his jaw. 

“Yes, if you keep being this annoying.” If nothing else, Zhou Zishu is full of fond, insensitive threats. “And Luo-yi will do it for free.” 

An actual quiver of doubt passes over Wen Kexing’s face. Zhou Zishu wants to smack him, if not for his already splotchy face. He gathers Wen Kexing’s shaking body in his arms instead, kisses his rain-damp hair, and flips the hood of his jacket over his head. 

“Are you dumb? No, I’m not going to. Wen Kexing, are you going to marry me or not?” This is absurd. Zhou Zishu sounds like he’s pestering Wen Kexing to go to the mall on a whim with him on a Tuesday night, and not making the most terrifying, devout decision of his life, while receiving the worst feedback possible for his heart attack. 

The waves break and bawl against the outcrops of boulders on the shore, and reach for them with long broad fingers of white foam. Like they’re begging Zhou Zishu, if they can please, please have their baby back, he’s ruined him enough. They can’t have him. Zhou Zishu clings to him harder. 

Wen Kexing hiccups and sobs against his shoulder. Zhou Zishu pats him awkwardly, waiting and waiting with his heart pounding, for a response. Any response. Even if Wen Kexing screeches no into his eardrums until they rupture, and Zhou Zishu has to learn sign language with one intact left arm. 

But after a while, he registers Wen Kexing’s slowed, peaceful breathing, and realizes that this man has cried himself to sleep, right there, folded in Zhou Zishu’s arms. Zhou Zishu backs away in surprise, and immediately surges to catch Wen Kexing when he topples forward.

“This is so embarrassing,” Zhou Zishu mumbles to himself, trying to gently lower him onto the nearest soft, horizontal surface—which is sand . Wet sand. Are people supposed to be able to sleep and still stand at the same time? And is it even supposed to be possible, to fall asleep to a marriage proposal?

Wen Kexing snoozes against his chest. He and his gods have decided to let Zhou Zishu live, after all—the sky tucks its harbored deluge back under its skirt of clouds, gives Zhou Zishu a shovel talk in grumbling thunder, and falls into slumber with its boy. 

Zhou Zishu sits there, turns to watch the dawdling, pale sun stretch over the city behind him alone, like it’s peeking over his shoulder and saying, what happened here, while I was gone?  

He thinks, with Wen Kexing’s weight pinning him down and his heart light as a seabird, Namo Avalokiteshvara . He’s done all he can now, truly. 

Summer solstice. Late June. The longest day, and the shortest night. Zhou Zishu scrambles for every wilting, shadowy minute, until his fingertips bleed. 

They’re sitting on a four-wheel dolly under an orange street lamp at the back of the restaurant, taking turns scooting it left and right with their feet, as Wen Kexing inhales a late dinner of cold white rice and stir-fried sugar snap peas, two pieces of roast duck hanging onto the edge of his bowl for dear life. Zhou Zishu steals a sip from his green apple slush again, waiting, for so many things. 

As sunrise tip-toed in to investigate their beach disaster, Wen Kexing had stayed asleep until a whopping eleven in the morning. The phone in his jeans had started buzzing since eight—-from Luo Fumeng, from Gu Xiang, from Liu Qianqiao, from a smattering of contacts he didn’t recognize, and someone with only a scorpion emoji for a name. On his end, Zhou Zishu’d gotten ten missed calls from Zhang Chengling and Gu Xiang. He’d called back Gu Xiang only, hoping her industrious, big mouth would spread the word that no, Wen Kexing had not been kidnapped, or killed, nor had he abandoned them.

“Zishu-ge?” She shouted into his ear. “Have you seen my brother?” 

“Yes, he’s with me,” Zhou Zishu whispered into the speakers on his phone. 

“Where? I called Chengling. He says you haven’t been home either!”

“It’s okay, we went out a little far. We’ll be back. Is he missing work?”

“Who cares about work. Everyone just wants to know if he’s okay!”

“He is. It’s alright, A-Xiang.”

“No it’s not. He’s never done this. What did you do to him?” Gu Xiang’s voice turned weepy. “Can you put my Ge on the phone?”

“He’s… still sleeping.”

That, out of all things, made Gu Xiang erupt into tears, hauntingly in the same grammar and cadence as Wen Kexing, hours ago. If Zhou Zishu heard another person cry, he’d start crying himself.

Wen Kexing woke up seemingly amnesiac. He looked around him, at the joggers and the terriers, at the sun, at Zhou Zishu. 

“What time is it? Nine?”

“It’s almost noon.”

“Gosh, you’re beautiful when the light hits your hair like that.”

Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes. The tension in his chest eased the tiniest bit. “Aren’t you afraid Luo-yi will slaughter you, going to work this late?”

“She’ll probably be ecstatic.” Wen Kexing buried his face into Zhou Zishu’s chest. A beach-strolling pair of elderly women looked at them strangely as they hobbled past with their chihuahuas. “I make the schedules for the crew. I kept making myself work all those hours, because I was afraid I’ll gobble you up too fast and starve, if I let myself spend more time with you. I’ve never wanted someone so badly before, I thought I was going to die from it. I’m sorry.” 

Zhou Zishu held him tighter. “Don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.” He was so used to seeing Wen Kexing under neon and moonlit incandescence, that this solar version of him felt like a gift. His skin was browner than it had looked under electricals, his black hair fading to chestnut at the tips, peppered with split-ends. Zhou Zishu wanted to kiss him, but he hesitated. 

“Do you remember when—“ It felt like he had said everything and nothing all at once, last night. “When I asked you to—”

“—Marry you? Yup,” Wen Kexing finished, but didn’t finish enough. He left it at that, like it was an acceptable answer. Stretching like a cat in the sun, he pushed himself up, and let golden rays wash over his face, at peace like a newly-minted bodhisattva.  

Zhou Zishu asked him again, constantly. But Wen Kexing was more slippery than a bucket of eels. He kept working the same soul-crushing hours that he had just confessed to be completely voluntary. Zhou Zishu asked him when they ate dinner one night with Gu Xiang and Chengling, making the kids choke on their chicken wings. He asked, threatening to stop paying for Wen Kexing’s slushies if he didn’t give him an answer, and stood fuming as Wen Kexing smoothly handed over a crisp fifty-dollar bill to the barista and told her to kept the change, making her squirm and fizzle with her small fortune. 

Zhou Zishu got bolder, and asked loudly in front of Wen Kexing’s co-workers as they put dishes away after the wash. He miscalculated the way Wen Kexing completely basked in the drama of it, dangling himself even further above Zhou Zishu’s mouth to squeeze one more reaction from the head chef, the dishwasher, line cooks number two and three, and a frowning Luo Fumeng, who stormed in to check on them and promptly whacked Wen Kexing silly on the back of his head. 

Zhou Zishu invented new tactics. “I’m going to get up and leave right now,” he threatened once as he sank down roughly on Wen Kexing’s cock and didn’t get up, scrambling for a handhold over a teetering stack of divorce papers to his right and making the paperwork fall in a flurry to the ground. He switched to pressing behind for leverage on Wen Kexing’s thigh. “If you don’t tell me if you’ll marry me or not.” 

Wen Kexing came inside him almost immediately, seemed to surprise even himself as he gasped through it. He gleefully considered Zhou Zishu, hands slipping under his thighs in a gesture to push Zhou Zishu up. “That was hot. Do you wanna hop off now?” he asked, grinning. 

Zhou Zishu is almost entirely convinced that Wen Kexing is messing with him for sport. He’ll let up soon. But in a quiet and growing dark corner of his heart, he gets ready to steel himself as the days shorten. It’s enough, it’s enough. Nothing has to last forever. If people all die and still go on living, then what’s the trouble in being effervescently happy with an expiration date in sight? So he doesn’t bog down Wen Kexing with melancholy, goes along with his strange new nirvana. He imagines it’s how Wen Kexing felt all this time, before he finally cracked under stormy skies, in front of a raging sea. If Zhou Zishu is being toyed with by the world’s most wicked puppeteer, then so be it. After all, he’s tied the strings on his own body and gifted Wen Kexing his controls, his eyes wide open the entire time. 

Zhou Zishu called Gao Chong the day after the beach. Gao Chong sounded genuinely disappointed that Zhou Zishu wanted Zhang Chengling for himself, but didn’t put energy into bargaining for the kid. “Maybe he just wanted a boy, and Chengling’s conveniently there,” Gu Xiang hypothesizes during one dinner night, and Zhou Zishu thought she might be going somewhere with that. That same night, he started looking for two-bedroom apartments, and then for a job, just in case. Just in case. 

He took Chengling to a small Buddhist monastery nested in the heart of the city, after hearing Wen Kexing’s co-workers talking about the open-to-public hours there. They wove among monks who spoke exclusively English, and sat on the steps by a fountain with the other guests for a free vegetarian lunch. Before a towering, golden statue of Buddha, Zhou Zishu borrowed candle flame to light his three sticks of incense, and planted them in a burner piled high with ash. It felt eerily like he’s carrying torch fire from Zhang Chengling’s parents, and the weight and terror of it paralyzed him in the middle of a bow. Beside him, Chengling peacefully muttered a mile of nonsense, his incense held high at chest height and his dad’s watch slack on his wrist, ticking in Pacific Standard Time. 

The clear ring of a standing bell reverberated from the side of the temple, rippling gently through Zhou Zishu’s stupor. He completed his bow, and listened to the opening rhythm of a temple block, steady like a countdown until the end of the world.

Wen Kexing finishes his dinner, snatches his neon green slush from Zhou Zishu, and slurps down the rest of it in one breath. He puts both empty plastic cup and ceramic bowl onto Zhou Zishu’s lap, “feet up,” and drags the dolly, with Zhou Zishu on it, back through the kitchen doors, like Zhou Zishu is his wax box of morning produce. 

It’s a practiced routine now. They pull the ridiculously small load of dishes through the commercial dishwasher, turn all the lights off as the unofficial two-person witching-hour shift, and improvise some combination of walking, bouncing, and kissing each other up three flights of stairs. Someone complains about a new messy pile on the floor of the office, and another about a new dying plant on Liu Qianqiao’s desk. They unlock the door with their unauthorized key, and fall into each other as soon as it’s closed again.

Zhou Zishu takes his time undressing Wen Kexing like he’s wrapped in gossamer. Fingertips featherlight over his collar bones to make him giggle, tongue tip skidding across his nipples and dipping into his belly button to make him sigh. When he kisses around the edges of the pink, healing oil burns on his forearm, it strips Wen Kexing into momentary silence. Zhou Zishu noses through the hair at the juncture of Wen Kexing’s thighs, wiry like moss on a trembling aspen, and grooms him into a puddle of warm yielding want with his hands and mouth, until he’s draped, lax and pampered, in Zhou Zishu’s arms. 

Then his phone chirps. Zhou Zishu shoots out a hand to grab it from next to the pillow, accidentally jabbing Wen Kexing in his side on the retreat. Wen Kexing bursts into a cackle. Zhou Zishu zeros in on the reaction, and tosses his phone away before he has a chance to see who called him. 

He looms over Wen Kexing, eyes focused. And then grabs his sides, and tickles him properly, seizes the opportunity to make Wen Kexing miserable, the way he’s constantly doing these days. Wen Kexing rolls around like a dog in mud, howling and choking. 

“Marry me, you bastard,” Zhou Zishu grinds out, pressing on Wen Kexing’s ribs and thighs in short, starry bursts.

“Okay!” Wen Kexing shrieks, laughing, pushing Zhou Zishu away, limbs flying. “Okay! Yes!”

“Wait, really?”

“Yes, really.” Zhou Zishu has stopped tickling him, his hands frozen at Wen Kexing’s sides, but Wen Kexing is still bubbling with laughter. “It was always a yes, you stupid animal. I just wanted you to get a taste of your own medicine.”

More like poison than medicine, considering the misery it put Zhou Zishu through. Wen Kexing is unbelievable. Zhou Zishu wants to kill him, love him, consume him, keep him.

And Wen Kexing lies back on the pillow, stark naked and arms thrown over his head, supple legs parting as if to make it easier for Zhou Zishu to do just that. “Wanna take revenge on me?” His eyes are too bright with happiness to look fully seductive. “You can try, I’m all yours.”

Zhou Zishu dives into him like he’s a cool, sweet, August lake, and never truly resurfaces, again. 

GROUP: Qingyashan P.M F.O.H

Luo Fumeng

1:32AM

Hi ladies, sorry for the late texts. Hope I am not disturbing everyone’s night. Does anyone know where Zhou Zishu is? I’m walking back to the lobby to grab some things and saw his car parked on the side of Pacific that’s getting street-cleaned, like right now. He needs to move his car in 30mins or he’s going to eat a ticket. 

Reminder that we are switching POS systems tomorrow, so clock in a few minutes early to familiarize yourself with the app, or I can show you how it works as well.

Yun Zai

1:35AM

Sorry havent seen him!

Have you tried calling him? 

Wow I can’t believe we’re finally using apple pay

I still remember when we were cash only

Luo Fumeng

1:35AM

I just did and he didn’t pick up. 

Gu Xiang

1:36AM

Do u want me to call him as well? He has a really annoying ringtone set for me that he’ll prob pick up for

Luo Fumeng

1:36AM

No. Xiangxiang go to bed.

Yun Zai

1:36AM

Wow a-xiang is still awake

Liu Qianqiao

1:36AM

Bedtime Xiangxiang!!

Luo Fumeng

1:37AM

Anyway, whatever. He seems like he’s having a hard time lately so I’m just looking out for him.

Hong Lu

1:39AM

I think Kexing’s being too cruel

He keeps leaving Zishu hanging, when he literally asked me if he would look good in red for the wedding like last week :/

[Liked by Liu Qianqiao ]

Liu Qianqiao

1:39AM

Yes exactly!!

Luo Fumeng

1:40AM

No red.

Wearing red in a red venue always makes the photos look like a bunch of floating heads. 

No one is allowed to wear red, that's the only dress code.

No green either because this isn’t Christmas. 

Yun Zai

1:42AM

Why are all our uniforms red if you think it looks bad :(

[Liked by 13 others]

Luo Fumeng

1:45AM

That reminds me actually. Qianqiao can you check tomorrow if I have appointments scheduled with clients for the firm next week? Reschedule them if I do, it’s probably bad luck to do that so close to a wedding.

Gu Xiang

1:46AM

Love that you just realized that occupational hazard Luo-yi

Liu Qianqiao

1:47AM

Sorry I didn’t enter the schedule into the spreadsheet yet! It’s still in the binder at the office.

Xiangxiang!!

Luo Fumeng

1:47AM

That’s fine, I’m here already. I’ll grab it from upstairs.

Luo Fumeng

1:50AM

Wtf. Is that A-Xing laughing?

Why’s he in here.

Liu Qianqiao

1:50AM

Wait no don’t go in noooooooooooooooo

Nooooooooooooooo

Luo Fumeng

2:12AM

Qianqiao, I would like to remind you that it’s extremely unprofessional to make extra copies of work keys especially for non-employees.

I’m thinking of turning that storage room into my private office after a deep clean. Thoughts?

Zishu’s car just got ticketed.