Work Text:
It was something that made the universe feel too big.
Pete knew, rationally, that the universe had no edges and no shape. It was just this concept—of something so vast and unfeeling—that made him feel small. And Kao not at his side, separated by cities and miles and time, made it feel bigger. What would happen if it kept expanding and maybe stretched the Earth as well, stealing Kao away from him? The night sky didn’t seem as comforting anymore with the knowledge that maybe he and Kao weren’t looking at the same sky after all.
There was a rainbow of Tupperware lids staring at him from the fridge—neatly stacked according to colour and size—and Kao was already in Seoul.
Pete imagined Kao making it for him after he had left for work, wearing that blue apron they had gotten as a housewarming present years ago, and tasting the food as he went. There would definitely be a spicy green curry somewhere in there, a favourite of Pete’s, and there’d be a glass of milk by Kao’s side to cool his mouth.
A small note read:
This is barely going to last you this week, so make sure you go shopping. I put soups in the fridge—make sure to ACTUALLY heat them up please. Don’t die of food poisoning before I’m back, people will really think I was a gold-digger all along.
Love,
Kao
Like a movie, Pete could imagine the scene playing out. He could see Kao’s smile as he wrote and the frustrated repeated movements where the pen stopped working and the tuneless hum of whatever song had caught his fancy sung under his breath as he tucked the containers into the fridge. Kao would have stolen a few grapes from the fresh bunch they had bought to share but hadn’t finished. There was packaged milk tea as well, from Kao’s favourite tea place, sitting unopened in the fridge.
The fridge beeped. His head throbbed and his eyes felt like they were going to sprout nails and Pete dug his heels into the sockets to keep them in.
Kao was two hours ahead of him and called every evening at seven on the dot. He was in bed each time, in warm pyjamas and a thick blanket to offset the residential hotel’s chill, and Pete set the laptop on the dining table while he ate so he didn’t feel lonely.
“My mouth feels sore,” Kao told him, stretching his jaw to prove it. “Speaking in English all day makes my brain melt.”
“Now you know how I felt,” Pete mumbled back as he drank the tom yum goong that tasted like Kao nudging him in the kitchen and pressing a kiss onto his cheek. “I’m glad I don’t have to anymore.”
“What if I forget Thai?” Kao asked. He rolled onto his back and Pete scraped the final slices of meat off his plate before pushing it away to watch him. “I’m Kao Phaa-noo-wut Cho-tee-wut.”
“I’ll teach you again.”
“You’re not a good teacher.”
“I’m not.”
Kao tilted his head to meet his gaze through the screen and Pete couldn’t help but swallow. He missed him. His heart hadn’t stopped aching since Kao had gone, for a week and a handful of days that could have been aeons. His eyelashes fluttered close and he looked like he had fallen asleep.
“I miss you,” Kao said.
“I miss you so much more,” Pete answered. He thumbed down the edge of his screen like he would feel the soft swell of Kao’s cheek and heaved out a ragged sigh. “I want you back home.”
“Let’s come to Seoul some day.” Kao opened his eyes and looked at him again. “Only us. It’ll be a nice trip. I’ll find us things to eat and places to see.”
“Okay.”
Pete had never been one to say no to him and he kept his thumb on the screen until Kao went to bed and he could only see his own reflection staring back at himself, puffy-eyed and exhausted.
They were both busy and busy and not able to talk in the day. Work was tough, lunch time was a fantasy, and it had been two weeks without Kao at his side and—
And their house was empty. Their kitchen was cold and the tiles bit at his feet with the promise of hypothermia. His heart trembled, quivered, waited for Kao’s comforting touch, and he made a beeline for the fridge.
The fridge was empty too. Of course, it was. Pete hadn’t been to the store and normally Kao would’ve stocked it, but Kao wasn’t there. He was in Seoul with the stars and with his workmates at some nice dinner that Pete had encouraged him to go to. A lump formed in his throat at the thought and he closed the compartment, opening the freezer door instead to stare at the single packet of frozen berries and Kao’s ice-lolly from months ago frozen to the end of the shelf.
He would not cry over this. No. A simple lack of food and Kao would not make him shed tears even though the creeping loneliness and desperation were trying to prove him wrong.
Pete slammed the freezer door shut and clattered his way through the cupboards, heat rising in his throat with each empty shelf he saw. He didn't know why he was still surprised—he hadn’t shopped for anything. There was no reason for there to be any food. Maybe he would truly die like this, choking on his need for Kao and his stomach acid eating him alive and—
His litany of complaints came to an abrupt halt when he opened the side cupboard, the one they left empty because Kao was convinced there was a ghost there and they should let it stay in peace, and found a sticky note peering at him from the edge of the shelf. A few packs of MAMA, Tom Yum flavoured, and two 100-baht notes.
Pete, the sticky note read in neat handwriting, I bet you forgot to buy food. This is only to tide you over, okay? Eat something proper. Order in. Love you, Kao <3
—and, and.
The loneliness was suffocating. Had been for days now, ringing in his ears, an undertone that punctuated every silence no matter who he was with. Sandee told him he didn’t look as pathetic as she had thought he would, but she didn’t know. He felt stuffed full of wet cotton, like an empty juice-box abandoned on a picnic table somewhere, and sad. An open hand just waiting for someone else’s fingers.
His face felt too hot and the rock lodged in his throat had managed to double in size and how could Kao make him miss him so much? They had been apart before, longer than this, and they were grown men, and here Pete was, ready to cry in the kitchen as he stared at packs of MAMA and a single sticky-note that barely clung to the shelf.
He ordered himself a meal on autopilot—Kao’s favourite—and his fingers slipped on a tear and accepted Kao’s call before he could think of wiping his eyes.
“Hi,” Kao greeted, tipsy and bright and all of ten pixels. “Did you have dinner?”
“Kao,” was all he managed.
It wasn’t fair to Kao. He was so far away, so worried, and Pete’s throat was clogged with heartache and misery and he couldn’t get any words out. He wiped desperately at his eyes, crumbling to the floor, and leaned against the cold cupboards that were a poor substitute for Kao’s body.
“Hey.” Kao was back in the hotel now, walking through familiar winding corridors that looked the same no matter which direction he went and Pete though, for a second, about the universe again. What if Kao got trapped there, unable to find a way out? He wiped the blurriness out of his eyes as Kao crystallised into something that wasn’t an impressionist painting. “What happened? Who do I have to hurt?”
Haha, Pete wanted to laugh, you don’t even know how to punch. But the words stuck in his throat like flies on flypaper and Kao’s face looked like he was about to cry himself. This was why he tried not to breakdown—he’d never know how to apply the brakes.
“I just miss you,” Pete admitted on ragged breaths that rang too loudly in the silence. It was the fatigue, he convinced himself, that made him miss Kao so much. He wasn’t usually this needy, this longing—like the want would eat him up whole and then maybe the universe as well. “I miss you so much.”
“It’s been two weeks,” Kao said, but his voice quivered as well and his face crumpled when Pete looked up at him. “If you cry like this now, how will we make it two months?”
“I won’t make it,” Pete sniffed. “I’ll wither away and you’ll become a widower.”
“Don’t say something like that.”
The last of the golden sunlight of the day slunk out of the kitchen window and Pete stared hard at his bare feet, wiggling his toes so he wouldn’t have to meet Kao and his concerned gaze and pouty lips. He would miss him more, he knew, and how was he supposed to survive that when he was already so glum? But he couldn’t resist it and he looked up anyway, drinking in the downcast eyes and the sad curl to his mouth and the way his hair was limp after a night spent outside and the way his weariness transcended the internet. Pete wanted to squeeze him in close. He would smell like barbecue because that’s where he had been, and maybe soju. Pete had only had soju once.
Mostly, his heart ached.
“Kao, I miss you.”
“I miss you more,” Kao mumbled, burying his eyes into his palms and whining. “It’s only forty-seven more days. Then I’ll be right back.”
Pete wasn’t sure who it was supposed to comfort, but it made him smile a little past the throb in his chest. He curled his body around his knees, head settled on his knees, and watched Kao look back up with a redness to his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“That’s a lot of days.” He mustered up a smile. “Kao.”
“Yeah?”
Pete swallowed, insides twisting in the same way they did whenever he felt fit to bursting with love and had to tell Kao whether it was through gentle words or a desperate kiss. “Thank you. I love you.”
Kao huffed a small laugh, wiping at his eyes, and Pete could almost feel the way he’d bump their shoulders together shyly. “I love you, Pete.”
He bought a small calendar with Digimon on it just so he could put it on his desk and cross days out. Kao had laughed when he showed it to him during his lunch break, taking silly selfies with it in the safety of his empty office.
Patamon is just a rip-off of a Charizard and Raichu merged together, Kao told him seriously through mouthfuls of gimbap. Imagine if they actually bred.
I don’t want to, that’s gross, Pete said back and wished he’d been there to kiss the rice off his lips.
Video-calls crackled their voices and Kao’s pants sounded like they were right next to his ear as he touched himself. His eyes looked extra-dark in the grainy videos and Pete wished he could hold him, just a bit, and press into his rosy skin and hold him down and drink the sounds spilling from his lips.
Three weeks became one month and Pete had gotten used to how the bed had become an endless ocean without Kao there. He sprawled across the middle of it to feel like he was drowning and buried his face into Kao’s pillow, washed his hair with Kao’s shampoo when he wanted to remember him some more.
It felt weird not seeing Kao’s mug set out on the drying rack everyday, and not seeing his shoes kicked off in the garden, and not washing for two people. He played recordings of his husband's voice because he could—blasted them from his laptop until his soft words and laughter were engrained in his heart—and wore his clothes when he had to go out shopping just to see if anyone would notice.
“You’re holding up well,” Sandee told him over lunch, passing him her coffee because he wanted a taste. “Come out clubbing; June’s girlfriend’s birthday is coming up and we need to figure out what to get her.”
“Sure,” Pete agreed.
Sometimes they didn’t talk for days. The anxiety that simmered had settled somewhere along the way and Pete left stickers and voice messages for Kao to check when he had the time to.
This is Chalk, the fat bastard I told you about, with a photo of the most recent stray his coworkers had dragged him to. Or, this noodle cart just opened up, we’re going here when you come back. Or, I miss you and so does N’Bear.
Kao sent him pictures of places and maps and subway maps that looked like the lines of his palms and sent him a video of him eating a giant plate of dumplings all by himself. Pete told him he would throw up and Kao proudly called him at night with an, “I didn’t so there.”
Pete had the last laugh when Kao spent the next day complaining of food poisoning.
“What’d you do without me,” Kao teased him, smile wide and toothy.
It was meant to be teasing, but Pete was living with the thorns of loneliness and he wasn’t about to entertain a thought that made him more miserable than he already was. His anxiety churned his stomach at the thought—of airplanes cracking open like a can and spilling people like silverfish, like comets to make wishes on as they fell and burned through the air—and he sat up. Kao sat up as well.
“Don’t joke about that,” Pete told him firmly.
“I’m sorry,” Kao replied. His hand was touching the screen and Pete wished he could feel the warmth of his against himself. “Bad joke.”
“It was.”
“I’ll be back in three days though. Don’t worry. You can punish me all you want then.”
Heat licked idly at his stomach and Pete made a face at him. “You can’t use sex to get out of this.”
“Can’t I?” Kao’s teeth glittered and Pete wanted to lick them and into his mouth. “Fine, I won’t. I want fried chicken when I come back.”
“You’ll be lucky if you get pad kee mow.”
“Peeeeete, I’m your husbaaaand. Be nice to meeee.”
Kao was…beautiful. He was haggard and the mask he was wearing was hooked under his chin as he looked around eagerly. It felt like he hadn’t seen him in years.
“Kao!” He called, catching his husband’s eye, and his feet were carrying him around the people waiting and towards his husband who flew straight into his arms with a thump. He hadn’t been running, not quite, but his pace had been quick and his body knocked the air out of Pete’s lungs.
“You have work today,” Kao mumbled against his sweaty neck, pulling away to look at Pete’s face. He smelled like the airport and travelling and too many people, but he also smelled like Kao. Like the gentle woody perfume he liked and something clean. “Why are you here?”
“To punish you,” Pete said breathlessly, letting his hands flow over Kao’s sturdy shoulders and neck and cradling his jaw tenderly. Kao’s spine melted like sunlight and his eyes dropped close and when had Pete ever refused him of anything?
He took the invitation, kissed the words he wanted to say and let them trip into Kao’s mouth with his lips, and felt his skin spark with Kao’s fingers digging into hair and lighting up his whole body like a city on fire. They pulled away before they burned alive and Pete gave him a final kiss to the mouth—firm and chaste—and Kao stared at him.
“I love you,” Kao said.
Pete grinned at him and stole the suitcase out of his hands while he was distracted, taking the shoulder bag as well. “You’re a brat. Let’s go home.”
“Say you love me,” Kao complained. His fingers were warm and fit perfectly around Pete’s, curled right into the gaps like he’d never let him go again, and the sun seemed to shine brighter now. Perhaps it was the universe snapping back a little, not as stretched out now that they were together again. “Or I’ll go right back in and catch a flight to Tokyo.”
“I love you. Don’t you dare.”
There was a take-out container of fried-chicken on the passenger’s seat and a cold bottle of grape juice and Pete was yanked across the console to be kissed and the world came together until the pieces all fit where they were supposed to and his jaw had melted into Kao’s gentle palms.
“Thank you for the food,” Kao said between kisses. “Thank you for picking me up.”
“Let’s get home,” Pete murmured back.
Kao’s voice was a comforting bubble between the general Bangkok traffic and even the hour-long red-lights felt like nothing with Kao’s grease-covered fingers wrapped in his own and grape-juice-flavoured kisses lingering against his tongue. Pete squeezed the fingers in his, sunburn hot and blazing in love, and let his soul settle.