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He came to in stages. First the stage of consciousness below awareness, a comfortable warmth he let himself sink into, and then slowly a burgeoning comprehension of the world around him. The low murmur of voices he could have recognised had he strained a little harder. A hand resting comfortably on his head, petting his hair. His body was placed unusually, he could tell--below him was not the bed but someone else's body, a heat source he curled into until it stiffened.
A door swung open and then closed and he took the time to open his eyes, which for once were not gritty with the sleep he'd lost but instead just reluctant to open and break whatever spell into which he'd managed to cast himself. "Did someone say brunch?" he asked, and underneath him Lucas said,
"You were dreaming. How long were you awake?"
"I wasn't." A pause. He thought about kicking his feet onto the floor, stretching, letting himself reclaim the luxury of full motion. Lucas was already extricating himself, leaving a devastating loss of warmth in his wake, and Hendery burrowed further into the blankets to make up for it. He cracked an eye open to see Lucas's arms full of clothes. "Wait, are you going to shower?" There was something weird in the way Lucas shifted from foot to foot. He was transparent, so it felt obvious, even to Hendery's sleep-laden eyes, that he was hiding something. "Did something happen last night?" He watched the heat creep up Lucas's chest to his neck and then his face.
"Uh--" He spun around on one foot, heading into the bathroom, and then, at the door, blurted out--"You might wanna check your phone." The door closed, and the hiss of the shower sounded.
*
The video was barely legible. Hendery famously got giggly when he drank too much, and Lucas was giggly enough without drinking; he was surprised it was stable enough for him to make out Kun crooning Boyz II Men as Ten watched in disgusted fascination, a hand ready to clamp over his mouth.
It was coming back to him now, in flashes that barely meant anything, that could have come out of a dream. Everyone else was drinking, but Lucas had refused every offer. He'd come straight from LA to Qingdao with no pause, and he was the kind of jetlagged that had his eyes red and shiny, his exhaustion making him sway even on the couch, jostling Hendery every so often. It was clear here too: the camera, as its lens traversed the room, hiccuped in its path, pausing on Ten's leering grin for a brief moment before moving on to Lucas's face out of focus because it was so close, then dipping down to his hands, where he was assiduously peeling an orange, fingers deft and careful with the pebbled skin.
"What--not now," Lucas whined, pushing Hendery's hand away so that the camera view blurred for a moment, blinded by the glare from the hotel TV. He wasn't so effective--he was always extra gentle--but it had its intended effect. Hendery didn't see it happen in the video, just the dip and disorientation of the view, but he remembered passing the phone to Xiaojun, who was on a chair near them and who kept filming, focusing in on Lucas feeding Hendery a slice of the orange. Was it just Hendery's paranoia in the light of day, or was the lens lingering too closely? On his mouth, opening for Lucas's fingers; on the pink flash of his tongue and of Lucas's teeth, gleaming white even in the darkness as he smiled too big; on the places that Lucas's hand settled on his neck and collarbone, covering them with ease. His hands were big, Hendery knew, but it was different to see it like that.
And then none of it mattered anyway, because even with the dark making blurry outlines out of them, even with Kun's singing growing increasingly shrill in the background, he could see Lucas lean in, and his own body mirror that action, until his mouth skidded clumsy and soft off Lucas's cheek. Even as he watched it his body pushed him into memory; it suffused him with sensation, a flush of heat running through him from head to toe. How had he forgotten? No wonder Lucas had run away.
It was there that the video ended. The thumbnail was just a dark blur, like one of the pictures in his camera roll he'd taken by accident when he pressed the wrong button at the wrong time; he stared at it for a moment and then deleted it without thinking. The heat was still saturating his body, the afterimpressions cooling him the wrong way.
There was another video in his camera roll, with an equally unassuming thumbnail, and some sick curiosity coupled with the material of the last one and the fact that Lucas was still in the shower led him to hit play. This one was harder to place; it was darker, and the angle was confusing. He couldn't figure out where it was or who was holding the phone and what was happening until he heard Lucas giggling in Cantonese, "Do you really have to look it up?"
"Shut up!" That was him. He was giggling too, the way he only ever laughed when he was drunk or around Lucas. Hearing it sober made his ears burn. "Someone else must know what to do, right?"
He could tell what it was now; the phone was angled off the edge of the bed, facing towards the floor. Had he accidentally opened the video app instead of the search? What had they been looking for?
Lucas again: "It can't be that hard to figure out... Just come over here, stop looking at that thing." The phone was still facing the hotel carpet. There was a rustling of sheets, and then a sound that was, unmistakably, a kiss. And then another. And then more sheets, and what could only be called, from his own voice, a moan.
Without letting the video finish playing he deleted it, almost as a reflex. Then there was only a picture of Louis staring back at him. He could have recovered the file from the trash but did he even want to? How much had he had to drink last night? Did Lucas know about this part of it?
He texted Kun, can I shower in your room? Lucas is taking forever, and grabbed his stuff without waiting for an answer.
*
This time he knew it had to be a dream. He remembered all of this from a long time ago, a time before debut. It felt before memory now, like it had happened to a different person. The ugly fluorescents in the kitchen of their old dorm, and the shock of seeing Lucas's bulky figure at the table. The overhead light pulled his shadow ten times longer than his body, and this was what Hendery always remembered first about it: the long reach of his shadow, the way it fractured off into a thousand pieces and angles, and then the broad expanse of his back in a grey shirt. They hadn't known each other so well back then, and it was still an awkward encounter despite knowing that they were going to debut together. It turned out that even a year wasn't so good to get to know someone, even if you lived practically on top of them. For example, he'd known Lucas for a year but only now had he realised Lucas had a secret sweet tooth that he only indulged very late at night--or maybe he was overreaching, but what other conclusion could be drawn from the bowl of Oreo O's through which Lucas was currently plowing?
"Did you use up the milk?"
"Sorry..." He had a kicked puppy look. He was popular; they knew this already, but seeing him like this, so appealing despite the late hour and the absurdity of the situation, Hendery could understand why. His hair was rumpled and his face was puffy, but he filled the room. “Wanna share? I don’t drink all the milk.” He proffered the bowl; the spoon shifted and clinked.
"Then what are you so tall for?" But Hendery didn't want Lucas's cereal milk; that was weird. He sat down anyway, because he was there. Why had he come by? Really it was just because he'd been peeing and saw the kitchen light on. Secretly he'd hoped it was Ten, with whom he had a fascination for reasons he couldn't quite pinpoint. Sometimes he thought it was superficial--the shiny black hair, the pointed tip of his nose--and sometimes he thought it had nothing to do with Ten at all and was much more about him, his odd fixations, the obsessions over which he had no control.
Lucas only laughed and rubbed the back of his head. Now he'd pushed the bowl aside and was peeling a tangerine, one of the gifts he'd gotten during Valentine's Day, when everyone was scurrying from practice room to practice room hoping the managers wouldn't catch them carrying their contraband to deliver to people they hardly knew anyway. Hendery would never have put himself out there like that; he'd never had to before. "You want some? It's the last one." His hands were big, his fingers deft and capable even though just a few days ago Hendery had watched him destroy a charging cable by pushing into the phone too hard. Juice spurted out onto the back of his hand and he licked it off unselfconsciously.
"Weren't these a gift?" He knew, of course, but some part of him wanted to hear Lucas say it, to make sense of it out loud. Ten was one thing, but what did it feel like to be Wong Lucas? A boy whom everyone loved.
This was where the encounter shifted, changed. Lucas opened his mouth to answer, but the orange in his hands burst across the room, covering him in pulp. Hendery knew it hadn't been like this, that time--that he'd sat at the table alongside Lucas, both of them wan and pale in the washed-out flickering fluorescence of light at 2 AM, a picture of intimacy, and smiled at each other over a pile of growing peel. Here, instead, the scent was overwhelming. It filled him with sweetness. So did the broad white of Lucas's smile, which was coming closer, then his fingers, which filled Hendery's mouth until he bit down, expecting the strangeness of bone underneath flesh and getting instead a burst of cloying sugar syrup, a tangy red blooming from the whites of Lucas's eyes and his parted lips that made Hendery want to scream until he woke up, gasping, eyes gritty with the sleep he'd lost. In the bed next to him, Ten was snoring.
*
Before they reached Bangkok he made Ten switch rooms with him so that Kun was with Lucas, and though both of them had given him a curious eye neither of them said a word, at least until Hendery woke up three times during the night and Ten fixed him with a steely eye in the morning. "You're avoiding him, aren't you?"
"I'm not!" he protested, though it sounded unconvincing even to him. What was there to say? The video spoke for itself, and even if it hadn't then Lucas would have: by now Hendery knew he remembered. It was obvious, what with the shrinking away when Hendery had approached the breakfast table yesterday morning and the conspicuous amount of space he'd put between them on the flight, grabbing Winwin to be his seat buddy when, Hendery knew, that pride of place was usually occupied by him. Really it was laughable for Ten to suggest that Hendery was avoiding Lucas. It was the other way around.
When he ventured to say as much, Ten said, cool and dry, "You leapt out of your seat yesterday on the plane when he passed by you to go to the bathroom and you literally used Yangyang as a human shield in the security line. Do you think I'm an idiot?"
So maybe they were both handling it badly.
It didn't matter, anyway. It was something they'd both get over eventually. Not like he could remember what Lucas's hands felt like, or how he kissed--slow, gentle, or maybe clumsy, the way he handled everything he was worried about. Not like a night was meant to change anything anyway; what did he have to compete with compared to girls with tangerines?
The issue was that the video kept playing in his head, and though he'd gotten rid of it in every way possible just the memory of hearing that kiss and then his own voice moaning made his dick hard. Sure, there had been a girl or two, but none of them ever made him feel like that--not just the physical reaction but the emotional one. For some reason he kept thinking about a few years ago, when he'd started pretending to be Lucas's girlfriend on lives. It was another one of his weird obsessions, he knew, the things he kept doing even though it made people look at him askance, that even though they laughed there was a part of them thinking: What's wrong with him?
And he couldn't have said, either, why he'd done it, except that it made Lucas laugh and that had felt, at the time, like the most important thing in the world. To see him laugh like that. Maybe it never stopped feeling like the most important thing. Maybe it never had to do with the girls or the tangerines, or maybe he'd wanted to give Lucas the tangerines all along and eat them together, over a messy kitchen table in the dark at 2 AM.
He was getting mixed up. The jet lag was frying his brain. But still, when Ten offered to show him around the city, he agreed, and the first thing he bought was a fruit gift basket, with strawberries and tangerines.
*
When they came back Kun was in his room. "He's sleeping," he said in response to the unspoken question. "Maybe the jet lag. Or he might be sick, but I don't think so."
Hendery could feel his heart pull at that. He didn't miss Kun and Ten giving each other knowing looks; the problem with knowing each other so well was that it was obvious when someone was being manipulative but that the manipulation still worked. "Fine," he said, hiding his irritation with false exasperation, tossing some aspirin and some vitamins into a bag along with the fruits. "I'll go check on him, since apparently you can't."
All this bravado faded when he got into the room and actually saw Lucas, who was covered with blankets and who tried and failed to blink his eyes open. "You're not Kun-ge," he mumbled in Cantonese, voice cracking halfway through.
"No, I'm Mario," Hendery said automatically, putting everything down on the table.
"Huh?" Lucas was too out of it for jokes. Hendery looked down at him. It was hard to make such a big man look pitiful, but that was the state he'd been reduced to. It wasn't the first time he'd seen Lucas sick, if he even was sick, but it was the first time post-emotional epiphany and maybe that was making all the difference. Nonetheless. It was a hotel bed, not their dorm, and Lucas had been gone for a long time, and now he was here, in a strange bed, his hair rumpled and his eyes heavy with sleep and exhaustion.
"Don't talk. Just go to sleep." He wanted to make it sound more snappy, the way Ten did whenever he wanted to convey that he cared but he was still being put upon, but it came out sounding gentle.
"This is what I get for...." Lucas's voice trailed off, his head lolling to the side.
"Are you even alive?" Hendery peered at him. It was a rhetorical question, but Lucas said,
"Yeah." He struggled onto his elbows and propped himself up against the pillows. "I wanted to ask you... But you kept going away."
Hendery couldn't help the nervous laugh that brayed out of him. "Maybe we should wait on questions until you can form full sentences again. Have you tried a full night's sleep?"
"I needed to ask," Lucas insisted. His voice faltered and then regained strength. "What would you do? If..."
Hendery stared at him. He wanted to puncture this intensity somehow, Lucas's sweet earnestness, but he knew that if he did he wouldn't be able to forgive himself. "If...?"
"If you weren't so afraid," Lucas finished. His eyes slid shut and then jerked open. He covered an enormous yawn behind one of his hands, which he had to extricate from beneath the pile of blankets.
"Maybe you should just go to sleep," Hendery said. It wasn't joking this time. He slid a hand over Lucas's hair, petting him until his eyes dropped closed in pleasure. After a moment, when he deemed it safe, he said, in a low voice, "I don't know. What would you do?"
"I would--" Lucas started, but his voice was only a mumble, and Hendery's hand, which had stilled out of surprise, started stroking through his hair again. "I would tell you... I wanted..." His words trailed off, and his head dropped to the side. Hendery watched him a moment longer. It wasn't hard to fill in the end of that sentence, knowing Lucas how he did, but it wasn't hard to catastrophise it either.
*
Now they were back in Seoul, and Kun had demanded a celebratory movie night. Hendery bowed out early, claiming a headache, which really existed but which had probably been amplified by having to be in direct sight of Lucas for this long. Tour was different, even with its proximity; there had been certain considerations he could make, concessions he accepted for the greater good. Now, in his own space, it felt unbearable: to be on a couch opposite Lucas, to see him toss popcorn in his mouth with the blue light from the TV screen illuminating the lines of his face. After tour, the mundanity was overwhelming and ugly.
In bed he rolled onto his front and slipped his phone between the mattress and the frame to discourage himself from scrolling through. He could feel the headache, which he'd hoped would disappear outside of the movie zone, pounding dully behind his eyes, and being able to hear everyone shouting outside the door maybe wasn't helping. Outside his window the Seoul skyline shone bright as ever, and with some effort he dragged his curtains shut to block out all the light.
When he heard the door open, he said nothing. He assumed it was Ten, there to grab a phone charger, but then Ten stubbed his toe on the bedframe and cursed in Cantonese and he realised it wasn't Ten at all. He rolled over, wanting to act sleepy but realising that it wasn't even an act; he had been close to slipping under, and Lucas had roused him from that state that preceded dreams, the twilight of consciousness where everything was blurry and hard to understand. So it was in the room, now that he looked around; Lucas had shut the door behind him. No wonder he had stubbed his toe.
Hendery sat up, conscious of the blankets slipping down around his waist, the thin tank top that did nothing to cover his collarbones or his shoulder and feeling ridiculous about it. It was Lucas, who'd seen him in every possible light--what else could he have to say? But the way Lucas's eyes slipped down his figure as he sat on the edge of the bed made him think maybe he wasn't so off.
In the dark he could barely make out the features of Lucas's face, just the whites of his eyes and the vague understanding of his mouth as he opened it to speak. "Do you remember a couple of years ago?" he started in Cantonese, and Hendery was so startled he said,
"Huh?"
"When you were--pretending." Lucas didn't make eye contact, not that it would have mattered. But he bowed his head, picking at a hole in his joggers. "To be--uh, when you were--in the lives--like a girlfriend."
It took him a couple more moments to get it. "Yeah..." he said in English.
"I kept thinking about how I wanted it for real." The words came out in a rush, like he was pushing himself to say them, and so Hendery didn't fully process until he'd gotten over how unusual it was to hear Lucas sound so nervous. Maybe Lucas interpreted the pause as a rejection, because he started to rise from the bed, saying, "Anyway, I just wanted to say that. Since... in Qingdao..."
"I wanted it too!" Hendery said. Lucas, who had been ready to unfurl his long body, froze and then dropped himself back down with a thump, looking at Hendery with wide eyes. If there had been any doubt in his mind about what Lucas was saying, whether he was serious, it would have disappeared now, with that look on his face, the shock, the tenderness, the hunger all in one. Lucas wasn't good at hiding, anyway, not in general and especially not when it was about Hendery. He said it again, a little lower. "Back then. I wanted it too."
"So then, if I--if--" Lucas stopped, faltered, trying to put the pieces together. Hendery watched it flit across his face.
"If you wanted to try it again," he said, "I wouldn't stop you."
Lucas hesitated. "Like, theoretically?"
"Like, right now."
The speed with which Lucas flung himself across the bed would have been funny if Hendery hadn't understood it too--the desperation, the desire for closeness. But just when he thought Lucas was going to devour him he stopped, looked down at him with a crooked grin, hands on either side of Hendery's face. Lucas was clumsy, but he could be gentle too. With tangerines or with maidens' hearts. He raised an eyebrow.
Hendery didn't say anything. His heart was hammering in his chest. The air of the room was cool, bringing goosebumps to his shoulders and arms, but Lucas's hands were hot and clammy against his face. A little light had cracked through the blackout curtains, leaving a sliver of neon light over Lucas's face. He leaned in, conscious of how Lucas was positioned on the bed.
It was clumsy. What else had he expected? But it felt good, it felt familiar, and it made something open in his chest, bright and clear. From this close he couldn't make out any of the features of Lucas's face, and then he realised it was weird to have his eyes open while kissing anyway. It didn't matter; Lucas pulled back.
They looked at each other for a second, and then Lucas leaned back in. This time it was smoother, more practiced; maybe all those tangerine girls had taught him something. A hand slipped down to his shoulder, eliciting goosebumps, and another to the small of his back, where Lucas pulled him in, and this felt good too. He hadn't realised: that he wanted to be cradled. He didn't care if he were one in a long line of girls; he wanted to be one of them too. To be taken care of, to be treasured. To have Lucas disarm him, disrobe him, completely, peel off his layers with those deft fingers, reveal the vulnerable softness underneath. It made him sigh into the kiss.
Then there were steps coming down the hall, and Ten's voice sounding strident into the hush that had fallen around them. Lucas drew back entirely, until they weren't touching at all, and Hendery could feel the imprint of his hands acutely still.
"Did you guys make up?" Ten said, poking his head into the room.
"Yes," Lucas said. He was probably acting completely normally; Hendery couldn't tell.
It was hard to make out from the way the light from the hall blocked his face, but Ten was squinting suspiciously at them. He tended to be like this: he wanted to orchestrate grand schemes but he didn't understand their outcomes. "Well... good," he said. "Hendery, are you still feeling sick?"
"Yeah." It probably helped his case that his voice came out sounding froggy. He had to clear his throat. "Yeah, a bit. I'm gonna just sleep now, I think."
"I'll stay with him until he falls asleep," Lucas said. Ten nodded and closed the door.
"I don't want--" Hendery started. Lucas didn't look at him, but he reached back and grabbed his hand, putting an end to what Hendery was about to say. "Are you really going to just stay here until I fall asleep?"
Lucas still didn't look back. He was facing the door, but Hendery could see the edge of his face, and thus the curve of the huge, helpless smile that stole across it. "Yeah. Is that okay?"
He settled himself back onto the bed, still holding Lucas's hand. He wanted to wait longer to answer, to keep Lucas on his toes, but what did he even have to lose now? All his cards--his gifts--were on the table. "Yeah. I think it'll be good."