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A thin band of of silvery meteorite, offset, surrounded on both sides by brushed titanium. Size ten. Nestled in the velvet of a deep blue box that makes a very satisfying snapping noise when it’s closed.
A box that Yin Yu has been carrying around in his pocket for three months.
Quan Yizhen will say yes.
He’s been in love with Yin Yu since Yin Yu was the TA in his freshman physics class. He stayed in love with him when he failed out of university and took his astounding spacial reasoning skills and became a professional welder. He was in love with him when they moved in together, and in love with him during that brief period when Yin Yu lost his mind and moved out. He has never stopped, as constant as the sun rising and setting each day.
Yin Yu has been as wavering as the moon. First it was because of their age difference. Then, it was because Quan Yizhen was highly successful at his job, while Yin Yu malingered as an adjunct, teaching freshman physics at one of the lowest ranking universities in the region for a pittance. That abysmal mental state, the blackhearted jealousy, it lasted for a long time. But now, both mentally and job-wise, he’s doing better.
Obviously he’s doing better, he bought a ring. It’s a beautiful ring, and it will look really nice on Quan Yizhen’s hand. It’s strong enough to survive the physical rigors of his job, and his general tendency to get into trouble. And it’s very handsome. Quan Yizhen will think it’s cool that the metal in his ring came from space. Yin Yu… thinks its romantic. He isn’t normally this confident, but he thinks he picked the perfect one.
Only, he can’t seem to give it to him.
He makes plans.
First, he does the right thing. It takes him four trains and a Didi ride to get to the apartment in the outskirts of Shanghai where Quan Xiu lives. The red envelope full of a substantial part of his savings is in his jacket pocket, next to his chest. He knocks on the door, worrying his lip for no reason, really. Quan Xiu loves Yin Yu as much as her son does, despite the few times he’s broken said son’s heart. When she opens the door, it’s with a smile on her face.
“I know why you’re here, Yu-er,” her voice is soft and warm, and Yin Yu breaks into a cold sweat. “What I’d like to know is what kind of devious lies you told my son to keep him from coming along?”
“I told him that I had an all-day work meeting, Auntie.”
“Should I be worried that you’re so good at lying to my son?” she asks with a teasing grin.
Yin Yu has known this woman for nearly eight years. She has seen him at his worst. She has seen him do his worst. He should not be as terrified as he is.
Sighing affectionately, Quan Xiu holds out her hand expectantly.
Nervously, Yin Yu tugs the red envelope out of his jacket pocket and hands it to her. “Auntie… Mother,” he chokes out, “I was hoping you would accept my offer to marry your son.”
The hug is sudden and takes him by surprise. She pulls him tight and she smells like something warm and comforting and motherly. Yin Yu’s parents are dead. This woman has been the closest thing he has to a mother for years.
“You don’t mind?” he asks, face in her hair.
“I would mind if you didn’t, you silly boy,” she says, tucking the red envelope back into his jacket. “Keep this,” she insists. “Save up for something nice for my Yizhen. For both of you.”
With that out of the way, all he had to do was ask.
Yin Yu has always been somewhat of a simple man, so he thinks a simple solution is the best option. At least it started out that way. Working up the courage to ask his boss — the CEO of the company that Yin Yu does research and development for — what his recommendations for a… romantic dinner in the city are, he finds himself with a list of fancy restaurants and a handful of gift cards worth at least a week’s worth of wages. Only after the fact does Yin Yu realize that Hua Cheng considers himself an authority on how to show a man a good time, and Yin Yu’s question flattered his boss to the core.
Several days later at Faigo Hotpot, Yin Yu’s palms are sweaty. He’s holding hands with Quan Yizhen across the table — a feat made possible by the fact that Yin Yu is left-handed. Quan Yizhen is shoving the expensive food in his mouth the same way he always does — with singleminded dedication. Yin Yu is watching him, though his mind is on the box burning a hole in the pocket of his slacks. He could do it right now, just stand up, get on one knee, open the box, and hold it out. He probably wouldn’t even have to say anything. But does he really want to say nothing when he asks the man he loves to marry him? Of course not.
The rest of the meal is spent with Yin Yu agonizing for the thirtieth time over what to say and Quan Yizhen, blissfully ignorant, eating more than his share of the hotpot. After paying with a gift card that has an exorbitant amount on it, they leave together, hands swinging between them. It’s a beautiful city night, full of the kind of night noises that Yin Yu, who grew up in the country, has always found extremely soothing. This would also be a perfect time. Yin Yu is almost ninety perfect certain of what he’s going to say. His hand hovers over his pocket. A few more seconds and he’ll have worked up the courage to just do it.
“I got in a fight at work yesterday,” Quan Yizhen tells him, completely out of the blue. “Broke the guy’s nose.”
Yin Yu’s hand retracts from his pocket. “You what?”
A fancy dinner is cliche, Yin Yu decides. Quan Yizhen is so busy eating anyway that it’s just not the right time for a proposal. Especially if afterwards they’re going to talk about Quan Yizhen’s unfortunate habit of fighting.
So he plans some more and makes the terrible mistake of researching marriage proposals. His first reaction is that straight people are insane, but the more he researches, the more same sex couples of questionable sanity he comes across. Proposing in the center of a heart made out of packages of crayfish? A fleet of luxury cars spelling out the word love? A man riding a dolphin across a marine theme park to propose to his girlfriend? The deed to a house? Brands new cars filled with ninety-nine iPhones? Who’s going to use ninety-nine iPhones? You only need one!
Confidence completely destroyed, Yin Yu tries to refocus. What does Quan Yizhen like? What’s meaningful to the two of them? Honestly, what Yin Yu cherishes the most are the little moments they spend in their apartment together, just doing mundane things. And of course, Quan Yizhen is guaranteed to say yes to anything. But Yin Yu has hurt Quan Yizhen enough. He deserves a really special proposal.
So Yin Yu takes him to the place they first met.
They cross the campus of Shanghai University, a school that, still to this day, Yin Yu does not understand how Quan Yizhen got into. Quan Yizhen keeps running back and forth, pointing out spots of interest that anyone else would find completely uninteresting, or even worse, the sort of thing that no one wants to remember.
“Yin-xiong, here’s the place we sat when you got mad at me that one time, do you remember?”
Yin Yu remembers very vividly — Quan Yizhen was failing out of school — but this is not the sort of thing that he wants Quan Yizhen to be thinking about before he gets proposed to.
“And over here! I broke your dad’s old bag and you got sad. I worked for a long time to earn enough money to get it fixed.”
“Ah yes, Yizhen, that was… unfortunate. But it’s fine now, thanks to the repair job.”
“And here, Jian Yu told me that you’d never go out with me and I should just give up.”
Through gritted teeth, Yin Yu tells him that Jian Yu was overstepping his boundaries, and he never wanted him to say such a thing.
“But you thought it, though,” Quan Yizhen says with uncharacteristic perception. “You thought I was too young.”
“I was your TA!” Yin Yu protests. “You were eighteen and I was twenty four!”
This is really not how he wants things to be going. There’s no rosy haze of nostalgia surrounding them. Just the scarred reminders of old clashes. The box is burning a hole in his pocket but he’s not sure if it means he should be using it or if he should be throwing it away.
“It’s okay. You changed your mind,” Quan Yizhen smiles sunnily and Yin Yu wants to scream that it wasn’t that simple, but he’s trying to propose to his boyfriend, not get into a pointless argument about the past. And it won’t even be an argument because Quan Yizhen doesn’t argue, he just responds in the most infuriating matter of fact, dumb ways!
“Do you want to go to our old building?” Yin Yu asks, trying to see this proposal through to the end.
“No,” Quan Yizhen says. “The only thing I liked about it was you, and you’re here with me now.”
“That’s fine,” Yin Yu sighs, leaving the ring to burn a hole right through his thigh.
They’re on a roller coaster. It’s climbing to the top and buckled in next to Yin Yu, Quan Yizhen is vibrating with excitement. He loves amusement parks, especially roller coasters. After their disastrous visit to Shanghai University’s campus, Yin Yu realized that maybe he was overthinking things. What better place to ask his boyfriend to marry him than at the top of of several hundred tons of steel?
Yin Yu has a PhD in physics and maybe because of or possibly in spite of that fact, he is terrified of roller coasters. He knows exactly how he could die on one, exactly how it could fail and send him and everyone else flying off of the tracks, victims of merciless gravity.
Despite all of Yin Yu’s help, Quan Yizhen failed physics. So he doesn’t know or care about his imminent death. Instead, he sits next to Yin Yu at the very front of the train, eyes wide, mouth shut with excitement.
The moment is perfect.
The ring has to stay in Yin Yu’s pocket so it doesn’t fly away when they start going down the track, but he has plans to pull it out at the end of the ride. Quan Yizhen will be flying high on endorphins and it’ll make the whole experience better than it would be if Yin Yu had just asked him on solid ground.
They’re approaching the crest of the track, and Yin Yu turns in his seat to face Quan Yizhen.
“Yizhen, I have something I want to—” he begins.
And then he makes the mistake of glancing down. The fall is so steep Yin Yu’s heart jumps into his throat. They’re just hovering there, waiting for the brake to let go so they can freefall.
“Yin-xiong?” Quan Yizhen asks, looking concerned.
Yin Yu swallows. His voice is weak. “Yizhen, I wanted to—”
The brake lets go and they’re falling. Yin Yu doesn’t scream at all, his mouth is clamped tight shut. Next to him Quan Yizhen is laughing like it’s the best day of his life. With the little brainpower Yin Yu has not yielded over to fear, he imagines what that laugh would be like if Yin Yu had just proposed to him.
At the end of the track, Quan Yizhen helps a trembling Yin Yu out of the train.
“Yin-xiong what was it you wanted?” he asks, leading Yin Yu away from the ride.
“Oh,” Yin Yu’s voice cracks, “I just wanted to know what ride you wanted to get on next.”
This is getting ridiculous. Three proposal attempts, three failures. Yin Yu realizes his problem. All of these situations easily diverted into something they’d normally do. Dinner became… dinner, they have dinner together all of the time. A walk on campus is a little weird but there was so much history there that Quan Yizhen could easily make it about old times in the worst way possible. The amusement park was a distraction in and of itself.
Yin Yu needs to pick an experience so singular that Quan Yizhen will wonder why he’s there and Yin Yu will have the opportunity to not mess up. It takes a few days of investigation, but Yin Yu thinks he has found the perfect setup where Quan Yizhen will be confused, delighted, and proposed to.
He makes all the arrangements. On a Saturday morning he rents a car and they leave early, trying to beat the traffic that is near constant in Shanghai. Quan Yizhen doesn’t ask questions, he’s had a long week at work and he sleeps quietly in the passenger seat for the first four hours of the trip. He’s sleeping when they arrive at their destination. Sleeping when Yin Yu parks and gets out of the car. Yin Yu lets him sleep and instead prepares himself for what he’s about to do.
Back turned to the car, he pulls the ring out his pocket. It’s lovely, as it always has been, and Yin Yu yearns to see it on Quan Yizhen’s hand. He touches the metal. It’s cool, despite being in the heat of his pocket near constantly.
“Yizhen,” Yin Yu murmurs to himself, “you have been at my side through the worst and the best of me. You never ask anything from me but my love. And I want you to have it. Forever. Will you marry me?”
The car door pops open and Yin Yu jumps. The ring falls out of the box and lands somewhere on the ground. Yin Yu’s chest collapses in on itself.
“Sunflowers?” Quan Yizhen asks sleepily and Yin Yu can hear the stretch of his arms in his voice, “why are we looking at sunflowers, Yin-xiong?” There it is, the confusion he was looking for.
Swallowing away the panic, Yin Yu says the only thing he can think of. The planned on truth, though with much less romance in the delivery.
“They remind me of you, Yizhen.”
“Flowers remind you of me?” Quan Yizhen steps forward until he’s in Yin Yu’s line of sight.
“Yes, they do,” Yin Yu’s voice is tight. He’s not saying what he’s supposed to be saying but the ring is lost. “They always have. Go… walk around them a little. There’s probably some frogs in there.”
Even with the distraction of frogs, Quan Yizhen seems to know that something’s up. “Don’t you want to come with me, Yin-xiong?”
“I want to see if I can uh… find you after you wander around a bit. Like a game, you know?”
Quan Yizhen shrugs. He doesn’t question why they are here at the edge of a sunflower field. He doesn’t questions why Yin Yu is being so weird. He just trusts and moves on. “Okay. I’ll yell for you in a little.” And then he steps into the sunflower field.
As soon as he’s out of sight, Yin Yu is scrabbling around the ground, looking for the ring. It takes him two eternally long minutes to find it, then he puts it back in the box and shoves it in his pocket. He collapses on the ground, breathing heavily, and that’s where he is when Quan Yizhen calls him.
“Yin-xiong, I found a cool bug!”
They spend a strange morning, playing around in some farmer’s sunflower field, catching bugs and even a few frogs. But there’s no proposals. Yin Yu is too shaken up to try. The flowers are facing an entirely new direction when they tumble into the car and drive towards the inn that Yin Yu reserved for the night. Where he reserved a couple’s suite for all of the romantic sex they were supposed to be having as a newly engaged couple.
Quan Yizhen falls asleep almost the instant the car starts, and he sleeps the entire way there. It’s good, because that way he can’t hear Yin Yu sighing every four minutes.
Yin Yu hasn’t seen the stars since he moved to Shanghai when his parents died. But they’re far enough from the city and all its light and air pollution to see them out here. Quan Yizhen grew up in Shanghai. Yin Yu’s honestly not certain if he’s ever left it. Has he ever seen the stars?
At dusk, they take a walk outside of their rustic inn, meandering through the small village that is kind of full of tourists, but still nice. They wander around the houses and shops until they find a small bank where they can lie down and watch the stars come out.
Quan Yizhen collapses on the bank like a pile of bricks, and Yin Yu sits down gently beside him. Quan Yizhen reaches for his hand and holds it tight. He doesn’t say anything, just holds on. Yin Yu wonders if he’s worried at this strange trip to the middle of nowhere.
But he doesn’t say anything, so it’s probably okay.
Yin Yu’s not sure how to count the years they’ve been together. From their first kiss? From the first time they’ve slept together? From when they decided to move in together? It’s hard to be sure. But it’s been six years at least, if not closer to eight. Quan Yizhen was not particularly good at picking up on Yin Yu’s emotions, and as a result, Yin Yu couldn’t commit. But they figured things out in the end. Yin Yu is glad. He would never want to be with anyone else.
“Look Yizhen,” he says softly, squeezing his hand, “the stars are coming out. Have you ever seen them before?”
“Nuh-uh,” Quan Yizhen says quietly.
“They’re the only thing I miss, living in the city,” Yin Yu tells him. Above them, star after star comes out, splashes of white across the sky.
The moment feels right.
“Yizhen, I wanted to say that I couldn’t imagine doing this with anyone else. I don’t want to do it with anyone else. You’ve seen me at my worst, and at my best. And all you’ve ever asked of me is my love and I—”
At his side, Quan Yizhen snores softly.
Yin Yu laughs to himself. Then, gently so he doesn’t wake him, he curls into Quan Yizhen’s side and watches the stars come out.
They’ve been home for a few days. Quan Yizhen has been abnormally busy at work, doing lates nights, so Yin Yu has spent a lot of that time alone. But tonight they’re together. They just cooked a meal and now they’re cleaning up. Yin Yu is tying the garbage bag closed and lifting it up to take it to the garbage chute when Quan Yizhen is standing in front of him looking at him very intensely.
“Yizhen, what’s wrong?” Yin Yu asks.
Quan Yizhen fiddles with his pocket, pulls something out, then drops to one knee.
Yin Yu lets go of the garbage bag and it falls back into the can with a crash.
“Yin-xiong, I’m not good at talking. But I love you more than anyone or anything in the whole world and I want to keep loving you forever. Will you let me? Can we get married?”
His velvet box is maroon, and he opens it, revealing a black ring with a band of small square diamonds alternating with long rectangular amethysts in the middle. It’s stunning. It’s what Yin Yu would have picked out for himself if he was bold enough to love himself fully.
Like Quan Yizhen does.
Yin Yu falls on the floor, laughing.
“Yin-xiong?” Quan Yizhen looks confused, almost hurt and Yin Yu needs to remedy this immediately. He reaches into the pocket of his slacks and pulls out the blue velvet box, opening it to show Quan Yizhen.
“I tried,” he gasps for air, “I tried to propose to you five times and you… you did it over the garbage?”
“Did I mess up Yin-xiong?”
Yin Yu holds out his hand for the ring Quan Yizhen is presenting to him. Quan Yizhen puts it on his finger and it fits perfectly. He has no idea how Quan Yizhen pulled that off.
“No, it’s just… really funny. It’s perfect Yizhen. I’ve been trying to give you the most perfect proposal but it didn’t matter when or what I did. All that mattered was you. Will you marry me?”
“You didn’t say yes to me yet,” Quan Yizhen says.
“Yes, yes you dummy I’m wearing the ring what do you think it means?”
Eagerly, like he’s opening one of his birthday presents, Quan Yizhen reaches for the ring Yin Yu is holding out. Yin Yu pushes it over his thick knobby knuckle and it fits perfectly. It better, for all the times Yin Yu tried to get his measurements while Quan Yizhen was sleeping.
“I’ll marry you, Yin-xiong,” he says and there are tears in the corners of his eyes.
Scrambling to his feet from his spot by the garbage, Yin Yu reaches for Quan Yizhen. He pushes their lips together, sloppy at first, but then they pull themselves into a long, searing kiss.
“I love you, you dummy,” he murmurs into Quan Yizhen’s mouth.
“I love you, Yin-xiong,” Quan Yizhen tells him in return. He breaks the kiss, twines their hands together, then pulls Yin Yu into their bedroom.
They never do finish cleaning the kitchen.