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When the next breath comes to him, stuttered through sleep, sort of humid and broken by someone’s loud groan, Phuwin is on the edge of the bed.
His head spins when he raises it, and like an immediate ricocheting bullet, Phuwin hisses. Hangover greets him with balmy hands and an uncomfortable lurch in his gut, bile at the back of his throat and hands trembling from exhaustion. He puts one under his chin, gurgling in pain, and the other goes to the empty space beside him, searching for his phone.
Fuck but it hurts.
Phuwin opens his eyes to a room, registers it as their hotel, recalls a series of dumb conversations that led to the hazy migraine in his skull, and finally rolls off on to the other side of the bed with his phone, now in hand. His body thuds against another body, warm and solid and sudden.
“Seven in the morning,” he mutters, going lax against Pond, who’s yet to stir from his deadweight-slumber; Phuwin snuggles into him a little.
He can’t remember the rest of his schedule: their flight back to Thailand is today itself, but years of being quick on his feet first thing in the morning now fail Phuwin.
Pond’s fading cologne gently crawls up under his chin and ears, and Pond turns, mumbling adorably; even half-asleep and squinting against a light headache, Phuwin breaks out into a smile. An arm comes to gather Phuwin close and Phuwin allows it, grumbling against the comforter tangled around their feet that restrains him from slinging his leg over Pond’s hip as he wants to. Pond shushes him in response, warm and close and lips dry against the tingling skin at Phuwin’s temple. Just like that, they fall back into slumber.
When they awake again, Phuwin knows by instinct that Pond is groggy but clear-eyed beside him on the bed, so he flings out an arm and raises the comforter above his head.
Pond tugs at it weakly, “Phuwin. Get up, we’ve got a flight.”
The darkness and warmth of his little temporary cocoon is nice but it can’t last long. Some more images filter through the haze of his sleep-baked brain: a call in the night, someone’s red sandals and … Pond pushing him on the bed? Phuwin squints against the last one but any further memory eludes him, mocking and dancing and trilling at the edges of his consciousness.
“Did we,” his mouth tastes of stuffed cotton, “do something last night?”
The blanket is pulled off him in that moment, and Pond’s tired figure looms, big eyes resting with a sleep-soft intensity on Phuwin’s bedhead, his wrinkled clothes, and finally, his exposed legs. “Well, you’re wearing my shorts, so make of that what you will.”
“I’ve never done that before,” Phuwin replies, thoughtful.
Pond sounds almost offended at the suggestion that Phuwin would drunkenly share clothes with any random bystander. “Of course you haven’t! Now get up and search for your own shorts, please. I’m running out of clothes.”
The bed is ruined, in a way, wrinkled to hell and back. Phuwin frowns at that as he’s getting to his feet, frowns at everything in the room as if accusing the walls of hiding an important piece of evidence that they were witness to last night. Suddenly, he stops, a half-formed thought pushing itself forward through the fog in his memory.
“Pond,” he begins slowly, “did we—did we kiss?”
Pond starts laughing, as if Phuwin has cracked a brilliant joke, but then he stops, too, as if Phuwin’s half-formed zombie-thought infected his brain as well. His eyes are comically wide, but he’s staring at the messy bed rather than at Phuwin. “Oh,” he says, weak and hushed, “oh shit.”
“You thought it was a dream, didn’t you,” Phuwin drones, raising an eyebrow at him judgingly.
Pond blushes, splutters, and eventually gives up. He’s locked himself in the bathroom before Phuwin can even think of anything else to say. Phuwin stares into the silence: it only highlights the pounding in his head. Well, he guesses, he won’t be the first to shower, so he might as well get his packing done and find something to wear, preferably something that might actually be his.
He shuffles weakly about the room, absently admiring the mess they managed to make of it in such a few days, picking up clothes and assorted items as the rain of the shower trickles in the background. There develops two piles on the bed, a ‘Phuwin’ pile to the left and a ‘Pond’ pile to the right. Towards the end, a ‘who the fuck does this Lone Black Sock number 7 belong to’ baby pile in the middle.
It’s as Phuwin is lifting his bag and light jacket from the floor, where he had inevitably dropped them upon their drunken return (the slam of a door, a hard surface against his back, giggles and softness, shimmers briefly, then vanishes) that a set of papers flutter out, scattering white brightness into Phuwin’s vision.
Phuwin blinks.
He sets down his jacket and gray bag on the desk chair next to him, carefully bending down to pick up the papers. They’re stapled in the upper right corner. There’s a fancy official looking letter head, the language unmistakably Italian. Phuwin’s mouth goes dry. He flicks through the papers and freezes at the last page.
There’s signatures—four of them, two of which are instantly recognisable. He turns the page to see the front again. The headline says Unione Civile.
Phuwin feels rooted to the spot, anchored by the boulder in his gut. The paper trembles as he pulls the last page forward again. Of the unfamiliar signatures, one is sharp, cursive, on the line marked with ‘officiante’. The other is messy to the degree of illegibility, but it’s there, existing, declaring itself ‘testimone’. Their own signatures are simply marked ‘Coniuge 1’ and ‘Coniuge 2’, and Phuwin’s stomach swoops.
The bathroom door clicks open and out comes Coniuge 2, one towel around his waist, another in his hands, drying his hair. “Oh, I feel so much better. Bathroom is ready for you now, Phu—” Pond stills, marble statue-like, as he meets Phuwin’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Phuwin forces his voice out. It’s barely a croak. “I think we fucked up last night, Pond.”
Pond discards the towel in his hands, approaches him slowly. His hair is a damp mess, droplets clinging to his broad shoulders with conviction. Phuwin witnesses every agonising inch between them decrease with inevitability. He sees Pond’s nerves and Pond’s delicate throat; he sees scenarios whirr in his frontal lobe, a rapid flickering until a stutter, a screeching halt.
Pond is in front of him now. “Did we have sex?” His voice is unusually high, cutting into Phuwin’s marrow.
“No, Pond, we didn’t have sex.” He’s pretty sure. Please, let him at least be right about this.
“Oh.” Pond’s voice cracks.
“I’m sorry. But I think it might be worse.”
Phuwin wordlessly hands over the papers. It’s the first time Pond looks down at them, gaze having been entirely focused on Phuwin’s until now. Seconds stretch to eons as Phuwin watches Pond carefully look over the papers. Watches him coalesce back into marble as he gets to the last page, the signatures.
“Phuwin.” His voice is gravel. He flips back to the front page. “What does ‘Unione Civile’ mean?”
“’Civil union’,” Phuwin replies in English. Then he repeats it in Thai.
“But that’s—”
“Yeah.”
Pond looks up at him, desperately searches, as if Phuwin has any answers at all. “Phuwin, did we marry?”
Phuwin breaks; a rush in his brain, his knees giving way under boulder pressure, vision tilting. Pond is there in a split second, catching, supporting his weight. Warm, alive, and fragrant from his shower.
Phuwin looks up at Pond from the strong hold of his arms. “I think we might have.”
Recovering from that poorly-timed blood pressure drop takes more than just an energy drink and Pond’s determined, grating silence on whatever transpired in the hotel room.
When they step out into the rush of the airport, a hoard of fans is there to greet them with flashing cameras and face-masks and occasional shouts of their name. Seeing it all after a night of making absolutely mental decisions, Phuwin almost collapses again. He dreads the churn of reality in his guts, but it’s slowly and surely catching up to him: this is what it’s like. These are the people that are real.
Strangely, it makes sense enough to stalk with a stiff body and clenched jaw past airport security, to avoid the gazes trained at him as if accusing him of taking something he doesn’t deserve to possess. Outside that room in Italy, away from the mainland, this is what it’s like—he’s not a stupid boy anymore and this is not a joke.
Reality, nauseous as it is, demands penance.
At least airport security is merciful. He catches Pond multiple times with his eyes trained on his phone, but a suspicion remains stuck in between the secretive pauses, like maybe Pond isn’t just watching his phone the whole time.
“You should get some sleep,” Pond’s low murmur is almost too kind to handle, but Phuwin braves it as well as he can, “you look like you run over a bus.”
Phuwin spares another glance, another secretive pause, “Don’t you mean that I got run over by a bus?”
“No.” Pond folds his arms, sunglasses digging into the skin above his sharp cheekbones as he presses himself back into the seat, “You run over a bus. Poor bus.” A closer look reveals slightly redder ears, and it seeps absurdly into Phuwin’s ribs: a faint echo of a previous life.
He doesn’t talk anymore after that, and Phuwin doesn’t try to make him. Instead, they sit side by side, breathing as if there are blocks installed in their windpipes, lips pressed shut and breathing slightly laboured, just shy of panicking. And Phuwin’s head still pounds, the blood refusing to settle in his veins as he tries to close his eyes and push everything else away.
Memories have a weird way of distancing themselves from the past: it’s almost as if they become fictitious as soon as time marches onwards and your brain takes a turn at poorly preserving whatever of it is left, corralling the past into small bite-sized pieces for you to digest. But Phuwin’s brain doesn’t even grant him that mercy; when he remembers—heart skipping and then resuming at a breakneck pace—another anecdote from last night (“I love you,” Pond says, his breath awful and warm and pushing through the dip of Phuwin’s tongue, before fingers reach out and push his black shirt—Pond’s black shirt—off of Phuwin), each of his nerve cells are already aching with the vivid details of non-fiction.
Phuwin is trapped in his own contained reality. He’s scared of asking Pond how much he remembers, or if he remembers anything at all. But he wants to know, anyway. When he opens his mouth, it closes back up, as if trying to feel out the wetness of Pond’s kiss from the inside, trying to remember. He says, barely above a whisper, “Pond.”
“Mhm?” Pond’s head lists sideways, facing him, sunglasses slipping down the bridge of his nose just enough for Phuwin to meet his eyes head-on.
Phuwin grips the armrest, as casually as he can, “Have—Has anything—Have you recalled anything from last night?”
Pond is silent for a brief, painful moment, but at long last, he says, “I remember you throwing up all over your shorts.”
“Alright.” Phuwin throws his head back, gentle, colliding with the headrest in a physical equivalent of an embarrassed groan, “Fuck. Sorry.”
“I mean—It’s fine. Happens.”
“No, like, you know. You were most probably the one who had to clean that up.” The mental image of a drunk Pond taking care of Phuwin’s mess is vivid and unapologetic, and Phuwin wonders for a second how Pond managed to get them both clean at all, even in that state.
“I didn’t mind,” replies Pond, with an eerily tranquil expression.
Phuwin pivots. “I guess that explains why I was wearing your shorts, at least.”
“Right. I don’t remember that part.”
Phuwin sighs. “Me neither.”
After a slight pause, as if afraid of disturbing the universe, Pond adds, “Since you asked, I- There’s another thing I remember.” Phuwin watches him in silence, wrung out and still sparking like an exposed wire. “I remember... before the whole throwing up thing, obviously,” Pond takes a deep breath. “You tasted like mint, and citrus. But sweet.”
Phuwin blinks, a nauseating flush climbing up his spine, a new memory flickering. “Mojitos.” Right. "My lips were almost numb from the ice.”
Pond’s voice is croaky. “I think we fixed that.” There's phantom tingles on his lips that Phuwin wants to shake off, and Pond must see something on his face, some errant flash of raw emotion. “I’m sorry. Should I not have—it's just. You asked, and I—”
“Pond.” Phuwin’s headache is getting worse. “Stop.” Pond stops. He also gets smaller. Phuwin wants to puke again. "It’s okay. I did ask. Knowing is better. Knowing what each other knows is better. Instead of wondering.”
Pond’s eyes roam. “You sure?”
(Pond’s shoulder is as much a respite as it's always been.)
The surreal marriage left no evidence behind except warm breath and shaky hands on Phuwin’s body, intimately invasive of his personal space even without the documents in plain sight. There are no rings, no flowers, not even a shady clip on the internet—there are only missed opportunities.
Did we have sex? Pond’s phantom says into his ear.
Pond’s face in his memory from that morning is rough, unpolished, skin glowing from the shower but the raw edges of his beauty glint and twist in Phuwin’s gut, down his lower abdomen, drawing out an awed silence. A feeling so big it gets stuck in your throat. Pond’s presence, near, always near, ever-stretching into comforting touches that don’t mean anything.
No matter how long or hard Phuwin thinks about it, he sees no solutions and no recollections, not even a blip of a thought that might’ve spurred the night from drinking to marriage. He’s not even sure why he thinks that it matters now, that he know the chronological sequence of events that led up to him marrying Pond in Rome. Spilled milk and all that.
“Everything alright?” P’Jack’s face swims back into his focus, slightly glistening with sweat under the sudden heat wave of Bangkok. “God, I wish I’d just stolen the aircon from P’Tha.” He flaps his hand near Phuwin’s face, a poor imitation of a fan, “Look at you, poor boy, you look like a ghost.”
Phuwin has heard the sentiment repeated so many times that it has even started echoing down his dreams when he sleeps. Fitfully, he would catch the staff and their manager fussing over Pond, but much less than over Phuwin: for the most part, they try to give him space, only making sure he has the basic necessities at hand. Phuwin greatly appreciates it, to say the least.
P’Jack reaches out once again with this intention, an energy drink magically appearing in his hand, “Here, Pond. Your favorite flavor. It’s chilled.” Pond mumbles back something, but P’Jack cuts him off before Phuwin can make sense of it, “Oh, nonsense. We’re almost there, anyway.”
Under P’Jack’s overarching protection, Phuwin and Pond meet each other’s eyes, totally silent. A soundless understanding passes between them, but Phuwin’s skin prickles with unpleasant stress despite the reassurance of Pond’s company. He can’t predict what’s going to happen after this—and that scares him.