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He’s the sort of person that bleaches his hair blonde, and it brings out the hazel of his eyes. A foreigner's son, if he had to guess, but Zhou Zekai held his tongue like he always did, and silently admired his features as he immortalized them in paint.
The light of a Shanghai afternoon shines on his canvas, and he smiles a little bit as he dabs a spot of gold on the rough sketch of Sun Xiang’s cufflinks. He was like a field of endless wheat, a pale marble statue in an Italian museum— he would never be more beautiful as he was now, preserved on a canvas.
“How far along are you?” He asks, splitting the silence in two.
Zhou Zekai makes a shushing sound, and Sun Xiang closes his mouth, resuming the pose his painter was working so diligently on.
The minutes tick by, and the sky starts turning to gold. Zhou Zekai had since finished laying the base colors, and he gives himself a moment to truly look at Sun Xiang, illuminated like an angel.
Seven o’clock, and though he’d do a great deal to stay a little bit, a deal is a deal, and the young master probably has other commitments, so he wipes his fingers on a wet rag and packs up his paints, offering a short bow to Sun Xiang as he leaves the door.
The man lives in one of the grander, more western looking houses on the Bund— definitely rich, if he can afford an artist to paint his portrait, as opposed to a photograph as everyone does these days. A greater testament to one’s vanity, Jiang Botao would say, if they would sit for hours for a custom portrait in full color.
But, well, it shouldn’t really matter to Zhou Zekai, who profits exactly off this vanity. He doesn’t mind, and Botao, who shares the apartment with him, doesn’t either.
He arrives home at sundown, when the sky is starting to cast long shadows onto the ground and the lamps are just starting to shine. Botao is already waiting inside, nursing a cup of water.
Zekai sets down his things in a corner, and then pours himself a cup of hot water. He makes a questioning sound, and Botao nods, assuring him that his day at the temple was fine.
“Trances?”
“One.” He works as a spirit medium in the local temple.
“Go rest.” He murmurs, understanding how Botao’s visions always wore him out.
“I know.”
A blurry crescent moon shines from behind the clouds. Zhou Zekai gets the feeling it might rain tomorrow, and he reaches out to close the blinds before joining Botao in bed.
They’re something between lovers and friends, close enough to share kisses and tender glances but not so close that it would be a tragedy if one of them found someone else. Jiang Botao wraps an arm around Zekai’s waist, listening to his soft breathing for a moment before asking him about that new client of his.
“Beautiful.” Like an angel, when the sun just starts to set.
He hums, burying his nose in the painter’s soft black hair.
In the morning, dew drips down from the trees, and fog settles in the streets. Jiang Botao wakes first, and he crawls out of bed, careful not to disturb Zekai. They only have one umbrella, he notes, but it doesn’t seem like the rain would be too heavy. He leaves the apartment with a soft click of the door.
It starts drizzling, just a little bit when Zhou Zekai wakes, and he opens the blinds to watch the rain fall for a second. It’s a good thing he kept the canvas at Sun Xiang’s, so that it could dry.
A pity that today, Sun Xiang would be posing in cold light, he muses, as he walks on the cobblestone streets towards the Bund.
Sun Xiang meets him at the door in a smoking jacket, and while Zekai sets up in the library on the second floor he excuses himself to change.
The same suit as yesterday, he would guess it’s his nicest one, or the best one he looks good in. And he does, it flatters his slender shape, grounds him as something human though his features make him look like one of those British fey.
Despite the cold sun streaming through the fog, he paints him golden.
They take a break at noon for lunch, and Zekai almost heads out to buy some steamed buns from some nearby cart before his client asks him to lunch in the house.
He almost questions why Sun Xiang looked so terrified to ask him.
It was there that they talked over rice and cold beef, where Sun Xiang found that Zhou Zekai wasn’t shy, just quiet, and Zekai found that despite all that bravado, Sun Xiang seemed like a maiden trying to act normal around her first crush.
It almost made him ask. But there were servants around, and he didn’t want to risk his commission if his suspicions were wrong.
When he comes home to Jiang Botao, he’s unnaturally eloquent, babbling about angels and faeries, hazel eyes and bleached hair that glowed golden in the time before sunset.
And Jiang Botao presses a soft kiss to his head, then starts, like he wanted to ask something, but decides against it and goes to sleep.
The next day, it drizzles a bit more fiercely, and again Botao takes the umbrella. Zhou Zekai doesn’t mind, believing his loved one to have more delicate health than himself, and he walks again to the Bund, this time stopping to buy a few almond cookies from a nearby bakery.
Sun Xiang seems more distressed than the day before, like he’s holding his breath and doing all it takes to not spill something, something terrible. Zhou Zekai pretends to not notice, and presses the small bag of cookies in his hands.
Something about it made Sun Xiang’s ears flush red, and for a second he looked like he was about to faint.
It rains when seven o’clock comes, and he presses an umbrella in Zhou Zekai’s hand, unwilling to see him off unprotected by the elements.
Jiang Botao smirks when he sees the umbrella in his hand. Zhou Zekai flushes, but makes no comment and instead silently tends to the bruises on Botao’s shoulders.
The painter comes back to the Bund with a different umbrella than he left with. Sun Xiang raises an eyebrow, and Zhou Zekai mumbles an explanation of “my housemate,” and leaves the conversation dead.
He asks Sun Xiang to assess his work, having laid down the flat colors and the roughest of shading. His client studies it in silence, and then quietly comments on its beauty before Zekai shooes him back to his spot of the library.
That night, Botao confesses that with all the things Zhou Zekai is saying about bleached hair and faerie-like features, he thinks he’s starting to fall a bit in love with Sun Xiang’s beauty.
With each day nearing the portrait’s completion, the more grim Sun Xiang looks, until he’s absolutely grieving, shaking with apprehension as Zhou Zekai adds the finishing touches. The rainy spell has lifted, and again a misty fog has settled on the street.
He adds a final dab of white, accentuating the hazel of Sun Xiang’s eyes, and he stands, beckoning him to come over and see.
Sun Xiang stares at it with mournful eyes. “I’m sorry.” He whispers.
“Hm?”
“I’m sorry, that I can never again be the one in this portrait— that this can’t last, but I wished dearly that each day could last like a year— because I think I love you, okay? I-I think I fucking love you. And I’m sorry for trying to keep you here, though you have someone else at home, and I’m sorry if you’re disgusted with me—”
“But-but why are you sorry...?”
“Because just having you around isn’t enough,” He tries to breathe deep, but all that comes out is a choking sob. “And this pining is killing me, because I can’t have you now, and someday I’ll have to marry some girl, and I can’t have you then , and I fucking hate it! I’ll never be as beautiful as I was in that portrait, I’ll age, I’ll die, and I’m sick of it—”
“Hey.” Gently, Zekai takes his hand. “Me. Who said you couldn’t have me?”
“You.” He seems to calm down a little, though his voice is bitter. “You have someone you live with. You loved them enough that you would go out under the rain— I used to think you just didn’t have an umbrella, but you do, just not enough.”
“I never said it.” Quietly, he presses a soft kiss to Sun Xiang’s hand. “He fell in love, too.”
“Him?”
“Both of us.”
On the rare day Jiang Botao can get time off from the temple, he accompanies Zekai on a walk to the Bund, to one of those grander, western-style houses.
To him, Sun Xiang was as golden, as delicately beautiful as Zhou Zekai described, a little shy like a maiden in love. With the door closed behind them, he takes one of Sun Xiang’s hands and kisses it, and Zekai kisses the other.
He almost laughed when Sun Xiang recounted, rather bashfully, the outburst he had when Zekai finished his portrait, now hanging above the mantle in the library. “Like that British novel— Dorian Gray,” He said, and Zekai almost wanted to ask how he knew about things like that. “Like Dorian Gray, fearing so much for your beauty, but you never had to— you always, are never so beautiful as you are now.”
And Zhou Zekai, a part of him wished he could preserve them in a canvas, the three of them, immortal in their peace.