Work Text:
“Just…you know. Karma. The good in me will seek the good in you, and that’s how we’ll meet again. I have faith in it.”
He is born in this life love-showered.
He is four and his mother tells him he’s very lucky, thumb brushing over the freckles dotting his skin, and Kao doesn’t know what a soulmate is, but if they make his mother smile that then they must be even better than shaved ice.
Phu’s breath smells like snakehead fish. When he kisses him on the nose, Kao wrinkles it.
“Your breath stinks.”
In retaliation, he receives another kiss to the tip of his nose and then three more, ending on the cheek. Kao is unamused.
“It’s not my fault you’re so cute,” Phu says. He hasn’t been doing much other than watching Kao pick apart the fish for him. (He doesn’t like fishbones.) “You scrunch your nose up—like this—when you focus. It’s really adorable.”
“Something’s wrong with your head.”
“Maybe it’s wrong with my heart instead, huh? Thought about that?” Phu laughs when he says it and, despite himself, Kao smiles as well. “Are you done yet?”
“Have this.”
There is no one to watch them apart from the herds of cows frolicking in the sweet grass. Kao’s fingertips touch a flake of fish to his lips. A shiver travels up his spine.
In the summer afternoon—humid and damp—when Phu’s tongue touches his skin, Kao thinks he knows something about love.
Statistically speaking, the chance of meeting one’s soulmate was very low. Less than one percent. Kao had once, when he was much younger, spent a whole evening sitting and scrawling the maths of it out on paper.
He is fourteen and he only looks at his eyes in the mirror.
The constellations on his face feel like chased shadows.
Phu is amused by the way he speaks. None of it is malicious—Kao has seen the way his eyes fixate on his mouth as he reads out texts; it always sends a sun down his spine.
“Read this out to me.”
The sun cusps the horizon. Aranya buzzes with the drone of mosquitoes. A field of red peonies stretches in front of them—bright and pulp-dashed and sun-kissed. The last oozings of the day drip hot little streaks down Kao’s spine, none as hot as Pete’s head laying on his thigh.
“Reeead,” Phu whines.
“Brat,” Kao says first—a habit—and then dutifully starts reading. “’A splendid wat here, bright and beautiful, the city’s pride, by the name of Rang Nua. Not seeing lovely you, my loving heart will wilt, fear-fettered in this world life-long until nirvana…’”
The taste of each word savoured under his tongue is the sweetest nectar. He tries to read as slow as he can, but Phu has always said he talks too fast; it is his southern way, after all. Tongue tripping, the words slip out of his mouth, cut, diced, shortened. Phu’s mimics are syrupy.
“’I cannot see the face of my beloved—I see only the emptiness of an abandoned monastery, where all is withered and dry. The deserted statues remind me of myself…’”
Overhead, the blazing red sky dips into purple and the sun is extinguished. The soughing conversations from people meandering between Kiet and Aroon break into their little bubble of quiet. Phu slaps a mosquito onto his leg. Dusk’s fingers gentle over the curves of his face and Kao has to focus harder on looking back at his book instead.
“Did you pronounce that with a rising or a falling tone?” Phu asks him.
The swell of his ribs is hypnotising when he breathes in. Kao is paralysed with the way his heart pulsates. Maybe it is exhaustion. And then Pete takes his hand and kisses the bone of his thumb joint—once, twice, four times—and Kao has to hide a kiss onto his dark-flecked eyebrow because he is too luminescent; he is gold lining.
“Well?” Phu prods around a laugh.
“Whatever it was, I’m in love.”
Phu’s lips curl, good and sweet against his hand, and Kao smiles helplessly into his forehead.
Whatever it was, he’s in love.
His mother has told him the value of karma from a young age like any good Buddhist. Kao has a long list of people and places he has helped at: there are animal shelters and free tutoring and paid tutoring and orphanages.
The good in me will seek the good in you, he remembers.
He doesn’t know if he cares enough about soulmates, but.
Well.
It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
The room is the size of a matchbox and the bamboo-lashed cot is small. They are expected to sleep together because they are women—gentle and unassuming and friends—but the heat of Pie is hot against her back. Her warm hands are hemp-sack-rough between her thighs.
Breath catching, Khaao squeezes her knees tighter.
“Your father is outside,” she whispers, hushed, and Pie laughs into her ear because she is always glib about this. As if they will be safe if they are caught. She is supposed to marry the lord’s cowhand’s son soon.
“He’s asleep.” A pair of lips press into her ear lobe—sweet as anything—and Khaao lets the words fade away as she’s kissed again, feathersoft. “C’mon. Just relax. Let me take care of you.”
Her ears burn.
On Thursday, the temperature is in the high thirties. The moment he is released from the snack booth, Kao takes a bottle of water and a lukewarm apple and bolts to the lone tree in the parking lot. He is exhausted. Everywhere looks red.
And his gaze falls on him, then. The sun catches his wrist and the whole of him glows searing sun white.
Something in his heart breaks and heals at the same time. It’s an implosion that sends him moving—running across the gravel of the parking lot in slippers that skid off the side off his feet until he’s running on hot asphalt. His half-eaten apple is icy in his fingers.
It’s so ridiculous, really. Who recognises someone by the mole behind the curve of their ear?
He sees him turn, just the slightest, but then he’s crashing into his sweaty back and panting into the gap of his shoulder-blades, suddenly afraid.
This isn’t a movie. It isn’t a show.
He turns in his arms and when Kao dares to meet his gaze, there’s a mole on his left eyebrow which gleams brown.
“Gotcha,” he says, like maybe he has been waiting too. There is so much air whipped into his voice he sounds like he could float. On his chest, his blood donation sticker glows bright red. “The good in me, huh?”
“The good in you,” Kao beams.