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“Isn’t it weird? Dating your best friend? Someone you’ve known your whole life?” He had asked.
“Kinda was,” she had told him. Her eyes had flickered to her black-screened phone and, as if it knew, it had lit up. The lockscreen had beamed at him when he’d chanced a glance at it. “But, you know, it also wasn’t. Nothing had felt more natural for us. Best friends are just there, you know?”
He had looked over then, at Kao, and Kao had already been looking at him with that familiar shit-eating grin, and Pete had laughed.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Tuesday drips with butterscotch clouds. Kao is stuck with club activities in college, so Pete finds himself back home.
The shower water is miserably lukewarm as it sluices over Pete’s shoulder. Pete grabs his shampoo and squirts some into his palm. Every strand of hair makes itself known on his sensitive scalp. The headache nesting inside his skull stems from a lack of sleep, but every scrape of fingernails on his scalp feels divine.
Best friends are just there, you know?
He does know. He’s had his fair share of relationships and look at him now—people he had once considered important are long gone and his ‘this time I’ll really die’ heartbreaks have healed over. The one person who’s been with him throughout all of this…
Pete’s lips quirk up in a smile.
Best friends are great, huh?
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
They met in summer English tuition of all things. Pete was eleven when they met and twelve when they became best friends.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
The days were firmly clenched in the fist of summer. If he closes his eyes, Pete can practically smell that stale, sweaty prepubescent-boy stench that had infiltrated that too-small flat where he had gone for lessons. He can hear his own shaking voice, too, mortified, stumbling over his English words, hello, my name is Phubodin Rachatrakul and I’m eleven years old.
Their tutor laughed—which, in retrospect was shitty and hadn’t helped his fear of public speaking—and Pete remembers his ears going midday hot.
Kao didn’t stutter when he spoke. He also smiled too much. He smiled at Pete, too, despite Pete’s scowl and when they’d worked on their very first worksheet, Kao offered him a pencil before he even asked.
“I saw you didn’t bring one,” Kao said.
“I forgot,” Pete said, flustered and angry. He felt caught out.
“I know.” Kao cocked his head to the side. “That’s why I’m giving you mine.”
“You can only talk in English in this class,” the teacher, K’Marie, said loudly, eyes cutting across to the two of them perched at the far end of her plastic-covered dining table.
Pete caught Kao’s sunlit gaze then, across the dirty tablemats and the sprawled papers, and snickered.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Neither of them had been allowed mobile phones back then. Those sticky summer days were spent with manga stashed in backpacks, read over ice cream after English classes, and jokes exchanged in the margins of notebooks.
They read newspapers in class and circled unknown words and next to him, Kao coloured over letters to spell profanity. Pete, a little more restrained, drew over famous people’s faces.
“Pete! Kao!” K’Marie scolded shrilly.
“Sorry, teacher!” They chorused.
And later, Pete opened his pencil case to find Kao’s landline number jotted down on a torn off bit of comic strip.
Along with a crudely drawn dick, of course.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Unsurprisingly, they became really close really fast.
English tuition together turned into homework together in one of their houses turned into waiting for the school bus together (even if Pete had his driver take him to school). Kao always brought two mango candies—one for each of them—and held both of their sisters’ hands when they crossed the road (ever the responsible one between them). Pete poked and prodded Gift and Pear to go ask for extra money for snacks (‘because you have longer eyelashes so you look cuter!’).
Pete’s family fell in love with Kao. Which was what he expected, really. Kao was well-mannered, polite, and had good grades.
Kao’s family loved Pete too. Maybe Kao’s father not as much. It wasn’t anything obvious or outward, but he got a tiny sense that perhaps the man watched him with caution whenever he was over. A wary gaze whenever he shoved Kao a little too had when he was being annoying, a squinty frown when Kao would sulk and make them both MAMA.
He didn’t really understand why, so he didn’t let it bother him. After all, he was here to be friends with Kao, not Kao’s dad.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
“P’Peeete!” Pear’s shriek ricocheted up the stairs.
Pete’s head rang.
Being sick on the weekend was truly the worst. Not only did he not get to skip school, he was forced to spend his entire Saturday miserable in bed. His weak attempts to read the latest volume of Bleach he’d borrowed from Kao were thwarted by his mashed potato brain.
And now Pear was shrieking.
“Shut up!” Pete yelled back, wincing with regret immediately afterwards. His head hurt so bad. He pulled his blanket up with a groan. “Go away,” he added hoarsely as if she would hear it.
Thankfully, for once Pear was into not being a little shit and within seconds she had bounded straight up to his room in all her seven-year-old glory.
“P’Pete!” She said, “P’Kao’s on the phone an’ he wants to talk to you an’ I told him you’re sleeping!”
“Mrgah,” Pete said eloquently, followed up with an even more enunciated, “rrrgh.”
“When you die, can I have your room?” Pear asked him innocently.
“Is he still on the line?” Pete asked. Without waiting for an answer, he flopped a gelatine arm out of his blanket cocoon and fumbled for the connected landline on his bedside table. When he pulled it up to his ear, he could hear Kao scolding Gift.
“…work. I’m not gonna help you with it!”
“Blargh,” Pete greeted.
“Dude, are you throwing up into the phone?” Kao asked. “What happened to you? You didn’t come to tuition.”
“’m sick an’ I hate it. Come here.”
“Ew, no, your mom said that I’ll get sick too, so I shouldn’t.”
“Well, I’m bored. So come here.”
“Nope and you can’t make meeeee.”
“Kao.”
“What’ll you do? Hang up? That’s what I thought. Anyway, you know teacher Marie had a quiz today and you missed it and I had to sit next to Plus of all people and…”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
In the end, the Kao’s-father-doesn’t-like-me thing was also an easy explanation.
“He thinks that I do too much for you,” Kao told him one evening apropos of nothing at all. They were fourteen and Kao’s voice trembled with confused passion. Like he didn’t understand. Which was kind of funny, because between them he usually understood these things more easily.
The muggy evening air trembled under the weight of the summer heat. A halo of mosquitos circled Kao’s head. Pete had tried to clap them away, but all he was left with was mosquito bits on his palms that he not-so-discreetly wiped onto Kao’s t-shirt. The thick scent of jasmine hung in a persistent cloud over the swing.
“You do,” Pete agreed. He kicked his feet and pushed them both further back, easing into the next crest with lifted legs.
“Well, I like doing things for you.”
Pete tucked his legs on the next downswing. “I like it too,” he said. “But you’re also kind of a pushover sometimes, dude. He’s just worried about you. You do things for everyone and he doesn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I don’t do things for everyone…”
“You do. And people take advantage of that because you’re nice.” Pete twisted enough to point a finger at Kao’s mole-tipped nose. “Dude, do you know how many people I’ve threatened? So many.”
Kao’s face was plummy. Boundaryless shadows charted the planes of his face into uneven terrain. For a second, he looked like someone else. And then he was crossing his eyes to look at Pete’s finger, brows furrowed, and the streetlights washed him in white.
“If you get suspended, I’m going to pretend I never knew you,” Kao said.
“Screw you,” Pete said.
The girl had been chill. Pete hadn’t hung out with enough chill girls, unfortunately—his romantic partners tended to end things in more drama than he had ever wanted—so he remembered her well.
And she was dating her best friend.
Which she wouldn’t shut up about.
It was weirdly fascinating.
“I kind of realised it,” she laughed, cotton soft, “when I realised that my relationships kind of…revolved around her? It was a wake-up call.”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Am I the same?
Throwing his damp towel across the back of his desk chair, Pete plugs his phone into the charger before throwing himself into bed, wet hair and all. Every part of him aches with the lack of sleep. Kao was right when he had warned him not to stay out so late—but who the fuck goes to bed before eleven in college? That’s right, his dipshit friend, a.k.a. a loser.
Pete groans and nuzzles into his pillow.
He isn’t particularly introspective despite his insecurities and anxieties; that is left up to Kao. Pete is very much a barge-onwards-without-thought sort of person. (It’s a trait he pins entirely on Kao entering his life during his formative years—now he knows that there’s someone to think things through between them, so he doesn’t really have to do it as much.)
His very first relationship, though, now that he thinks about it, revolved around Kao.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Mint was the prettiest girl in all of tenth grade. (In retrospect, probably not, but Pete had been blinded by Hormones and Love and the rose-tinted glasses of a teenage boy, so.) She was smart, funny, and the smile curling around her lips was always sticky with pink lip gloss that called people to taste it. (It tasted like strawberries.)
Pete had gotten with her with ease—at fifteen he had started growing into his features and finally gotten rid of the shaggy mullet no one had discouraged him from. He had noticed the way more people looked at him and, with Kao’s encouragement, he had gotten with Mint.
Which was, in the end, a total shitshow.
Mint was too much like Pete: she was possessive and easily jealous. It had been okay initially—it fed Pete’s need for appreciative attention—but her slow, withering dislike of Kao started to become obvious a few months in. It was pay attention to me and stop texting him all the time and where are you where are you where are you.
Pete was protective of his freedoms. He was also protective of Kao. He bore with it for a month in suffering silence, apologising to Kao after every interaction his best friend had to suffer with Mint, and then he didn’t.
“There’s a time for everything!” Mint snapped, snatching at his phone. Pete, taller than her, hadn’t had any difficulty keeping his phone away from her pointy grasp. “A time for texting Kao and a time for paying attention to your girlfriend!”
And Pete, in all his fifteen-year-old pride and frustration, snapped back, “Maybe I wouldn’t be texting if you weren’t so shitty!”
The breakup was fiery. Pete had previously only seen this kind of drama in the shows his mom liked to watch, so when he found himself getting water thrown in his face in the middle of the street, he wasn’t sure how to react.
In the end, he ended up calling Kao.
And Kao had hugged him tight—right there in the middle of the street despite knowing how Pete thought showing neediness and vulnerability was uncool—and Pete had let him.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Pete shoves his head under his pillow. He wants to go to bed, but he doesn’t feel tired anymore; his relationships play out in slideshow of tragicomedy. Mint and her jealousy, Kwang and the time he didn’t even realise they were dating, Mint again but with cheating, Mai with her tendency to manipulate him with crocodile tears, Jin with that suffocating perfume, Anan who was the first guy he kissed…
Is there something about him?
There’s a constant undercurrent running through his relationships. When he picks apart the weave of them, he can see that more clearly. Everything was always half-sunlight. Not intentionally—fuck knows he’s never hidden himself before—but there nonetheless. Usually, the intensity of his own love; he’s seen more than a few people spooked from how quickly and hard he falls.
His phone buzzes on the bedside table.
After a few more seconds of moping, Pete reached a hand out to pull it under the bed with him, ripping the charger from the outlet along the way.
Kao: guess whos going to an intercollege robotics event
Kao: thats right
Kao: its me
Kao: [sent a sticker]
Kao: cant believe ill go to phuket first rip
Kao: ill scope the place out so we have things to do when we go >:D
Kao: hope youre asleep shithead
Pete watches his screen go black and muffles another groan. Setting it back on the bedside table next to the mangled charger, he decides that this can all be faced tomorrow. Today, he deserves sleep.
It had been a regular hot afternoon. They’d come back from a little photo excursion and Kao had been sprawled lazily halfway across the table while he waited for Pete to bring their drinks. And that’s when they’d met the girl—a friend of Kao’s ex who had remembered Kao.
Pete hadn’t really looked forward to the conversation; he didn’t particularly like any of Kao’s exes and had no care for their friends either, but Kao had given him that classic ‘play nice’ look and Pete had given in marshmallow soft.
Thankfully, she’d not really done anything except ask after Kao and then wax on about her own relationship.
“It’s like,” she had said without more of his prompting, “everything’s a continuation. There weren’t really many big steps because we’d already done everything before. Not—stop laughing, Kao—not like sex, you know what I mean. Sharing. Living together. We’re so used to each other that’s it’s just…not a surprise, y’know? We’ve already done that so the boundaries felt weird. It’s not like when you date a stranger.”
Pete had nodded because it made sense. Kao had only chuckled into his mocha.
“Distance too. It’s different,” she’d added. Her smile was fondly reminiscent. “It wasn’t that big a deal. Like, yeah, sure, I’ll miss her, but as best friends we’re used to it. We’ve spent time apart. We can live our lives outside of each other too, right? It’s not that hard… Am I making sense?”
“I get it,” Kao had hummed.
Pete hadn’t, but Kao had always been smarter than him.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
The rest of the semester passes in a jaggery mess. Pete finds himself Thinking about that conversation with that girl a lot. It sticks in his mind like some songs do—in random fragments and looping obsessively, sometimes, for days on end.
He’ll be walking next to Kao and grab his bag and think, is this a boyfriends thing? Or Kao will bring him a coffee without him asking and he’ll wonder, what’ll change if we date, and at the same time he’ll make fun of Kao’s too-short bangs because he is secretly still five.
He’ll be over at Kao’s house—or the other way around—and he’ll see Kao’s blue toothbrush next to his (they’d long agreed on it: blue for Kao, any other colour for Pete) and he’ll automatically avoid it. Do we really share so much? He thinks, and then promptly forgets about it when he realises that he has to borrow Kao’s shorts tonight and they’re definitely going to be some awful animal print.
Kao ends up in Phuket for a few collegiate things—mostly his clubs—and Pete gets busy working with Young Gear in an attempt to save his grades. They’ve never been overly clingy (or at least Kao hasn’t), but Pete notices that he doesn’t actively miss him that much.
Kao has always felt like continuity. Even when he’s not there. He isn’t in Bangkok at all, but his bedroom smells like him and the curling sticky notes on his cork bulletin speak of plans when he gets back. Kao is return and belonging.
Pete pens in coffee for Wednesday and slaps it smack in the middle of Kao’s calendar.
Is this what she meant by distance is different?
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
When Kao finally returns from Phuket, he is panda-eyed with exhaustion. Pete picks him up at the airport because it’s less hassle. Kao doesn’t even bother asking him about the classes he’s missing; he is unspooled yarn in the passenger seat.
“Missed you,” Pete says as he backs out of the needlessly expensive airport parking lot that Kao will later scold him for. (He has long accepted that vulnerability and saying nice things can, sometimes, be cool.)
“Mrgh.”
“Say you missed me too.”
“I didn’t miss you at all,” Kao says. His voice rattles with the words. When Pete glances at him, he finds Kao half dead with his head pressed against the window. His limp hair leaves greasy streaks against the glass. “I’m so fucking sleepy. I hate everyone in my club.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
“Ohho? Someone I’m going to have to beat up?”
The sun is high-tide against Kao’s cheekbones like this. His albedo has always been high. Pete wants to turn the sun visor to block his stupid face, but then that would mean not seeing Kao, and he’s missed him, okay? Just a little bit.
“I’m going to murder First,” Kao yawns. “He was my roommate and…”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Kao had his first boyfriend in high-school. Pete could still remember the taste of orange in his mouth when Kao told him over English homework, words circled in a breadcrumb trail on the front page of the daily newspaper that was delivered to his house. After Pete digested the words, Kao scribbled the whole article out until it was nothing but a black box.
“Who is he?” Pete asked.
“Anan from—”
“From 9B?” A flash of wet kisses pressed behind a bus flitted through his mind. “He’s no good.”
“You don’t even know him,” Kao said, squinting, and Pete wondered whether it was okay to admit that he’d made out with…his best friend’s boyfriend?? Before? Was Kao the jealous type? What if he was? Was he supposed to take this to the grave? “He’s nice.”
“He’s shady,” Pete said. “I don’t like him.”
“You don’t have to like him. But at least play nice if you see him, okay?”
“I can’t guarantee that.”
“Pete!”
“What! I’m just telling you the truth. He’s no good, I’m telling you. Don’t date him.”
“It’s too late—we’re officially boyfriends!” Kao’s ears were red at the words. Pete remembers because he had thought it was the sun cupping the shells of them. “So be nice.”
Pete also remembers tasting blood. He’d punched Anan with so much fury he’d ended up biting his own tongue. Because Kao had been sad and cried over this pathetic little asshole who’d only wanted to soak up Kao’s love and attention before making off for his next target. Pete had been this close to punching the little dickweed’s next target too, but he had Priorities. Priorities whose name was Kao and who had pretended like his heart wasn’t absolutely crushed.
“I’m okay,” Kao told him, rosethorn smile pushing past his lips. He didn’t tell him off about getting into a fistfight that day.
“Let’s get coffee at Rain’s,” Pete replied. He didn’t particularly like Rain, but he knew Kao liked hanging out with Rain and he was willing to do his best to make Kao feel better faster.
“Oh, now I know I must look pathetic.”
“You really, really do. Get up. Let’s go.”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
“Did I ever tell you I made out with Anan?” Pete asks Kao.
The thought hits him when he’s settled into Kao’s bed, ready to ignore all his homework to just spend some time with his friend. Kao, unfortunately, is busy sorting out his tasks at his desk. Pete throws a pillow at his back.
“You what?” Kao doesn’t even look up from his desk.
“Anan. Your first boyfriend? I made out with him.”
Kao squints over his shoulder. Pete tells him to wear his glasses and gets flipped off in response. Rude.
“Yeah, I meant what the fuck? Like after we dated, hopefully? And not while?”
“Oh, way before, dude,” Pete assures him. He tosses Kao’s white teddy bear into the air and catches it. “That’s why I told you he was a little shit.”
“I swear if you’d ever mentioned you kissed him before, I wouldn’t have thought to date him, which leads me to believe that you didn’t,” Kao says. He pushes his calendar out of the way and Pete is delighted to note that his coffee note remains firmly where it had been. “Because we both know the people you’ve been with have been…questionable at best.”
“I didn’t tell you. Was pretty embarrassing, honestly. I got cornered into a bus? What the fuck—I’d never realised how being kabedon’d would feel. Would not recommend.”
“I think it’s alright.”
And then, Pete realises.
“Hey,” he says, “we haven’t kissed.”
Kao doesn’t seem to be following his train of thoughts. “And that’s related to this…how?”
“We’ve shared everything,” Pete tells him. The girl’s words echo in his head, bouncing around the insides of his skull. “Like, even a first boyfriend sort of.”
“You make it sound so fucking weird,” Kao complains.
“Shut the fuck up. All I’m saying is, we did all that and somehow haven’t kissed? Isn’t that weird?”
“No?” Kao pokes him in the forehead with a firm finger. “Earth to Pete Phubodin, are you okay?”
Is he okay?
Pete bites Kao’s fingertip.
The rest of the night devolves into playfighting and tussling like they’re thirteen again.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
It’s as if something unlocks after Pete has this realisation.
Suddenly, it’s everywhere in his thoughts. Not in a panicky sort of way, just in a ‘now I want to try that’ kind of way.
Kao leaning across the table to talk to him? His eyes inevitably dip down to Kao’s stupid chapped mouth and he wonders whether he still tastes like the latte they shared at lunch.
Kao paying attention to what he has to say, body turned to face him and everything? The tension in him rises.
Kao just minding his own business and rooting through his tote for his charger? Pete wants to yank him up by the chin and kiss him.
It’s just because, Pete had justified, that the girl and her girlfriend were like looking through a mirror into a distorted, alternate reality. One where it was him and Kao dating instead.
There were already jokes in their friend group about it—Pete couldn’t even count how many times people called them a married couple—and their explosive reaction to those words had long been weathered away.
Their unnatural fascination with the topic had been seen through instantly, but the girl had reassured them that she enjoyed talking about it. Her relationship. Her self-confessed favourite topic.
“It’s not like we needed to get together, you need to understand that,” she had explained, fingers splayed in front of herself. “She was already one of the most important people in my life. We didn’t need to date; it’s not the end goal of every relationship, you know? We could’ve stayed best friends for our whole life and it would’ve been fine. Girlfriend wasn’t a step above best friend—it’s just a step to the side.”
This time, Pete had understood from the get go.
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Kao told him he hardly ever feels lacking, but sometimes in the indigo night with nothing but his own thoughts for company, the days felt blade-edged. Pete didn’t know what to do with that information; Kao had always had more drive between the two of them.
“Stagnation,” Kao said in English.
His vocabulary was bigger by now. Teacher Marie would’ve been proud.
“Why’s that?” Pete asked him.
The queen-sized mattress wasn’t big enough for two college-aged boys. At eighteen they were both gangly-limbed and starting to get bulkier. When Kao rolled over onto an elbow to look at him properly, the mattress sank under his weight. Pete lolled into dip formed.
“I don’t know,” Kao said. His irises were egg-white in the darkness. “I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“We’re only in first year—you can still change your major if you don’t want to do engineering.”
“I know that.” His voice was wound tight. Stretched. His fingers tapped restlessly onto the mattress, thump thump thump thump. “I don’t know. I have plans, right? I know what I want. But recently I’ve just been second-guessing what I’m doing. I don’t know why.”
Kao’s sigh drifted towards the ceiling. In the curling humidifier mist, the night felt blurred. Pete watched car lights zoom past the moon-bleached walls of his bedrom.
“You feel like you’re second-guessing?” He prompted after a length.
“Yeah. Chasing sunsets that I know I won’t reach. Like in a dream. You know, the whole ‘I’m doing my best to run to you but I won’t move from my spot’ kind. Am I making sense? I sound unhinged.”
“You always sound unhinged.”
“Fuck you.”
“What feels missing?” Pete asked, changing topics.
“…love?” Kao ventured. He dropped back onto the bed, chest rising and falling in slow sweeps. Pete knew the expanse of his ribcage well; he had mapped it extensively with absent touches and solid hugs. “I don’t know. I just want. I don’t know what it is yet. I just…sometimes want.”
Pete could understand that. He had wants like that too—ones that were wide and gaping and had no shape, just like the universe. Little wants and big wants that he had slowly learned to control into neat lists; which ones were attainable, which ones needed to be pressed down to make him palatable.
“I think,” Kao spoke slowly. The words clung to his lips like he was tasting every syllable of them. “I think it’s just that sometimes I think that maybe I’m not doing right by myself. You know, you know that I chose engineering because of the stability of it, right?”
“Yeah.” He had guessed as much.
“I didn’t really love it. Don’t,” Kao corrected, “don’t really love it. But, you know, I made myself love it. I taught myself to love it. Because I just want to be able to do more for everyone, you know? You included.”
“I don’t need you to do more for me,” Pete interjected, rote.
“I know that, dipshit, but I want to.” Kao spread his blocky navy fingers against the lighter ceiling. “And I don’t mind that on most days; I’ve learned to love the path I’ve chosen for myself. It’s what I want. But some days, I guess, I don’t know. Some days I just feel like maybe my whole life will pass by and I’ll have…lost myself?”
They were eighteen—well, Pete was—and Kao’s face was raw.
“I only have shitty advice,” Pete said. The vulnerable look in Kao’s eyes made that stupid, stupid anger enkindle in his heart.
“Shoot.”
“There are more important things that love.”
“Ohho,” Kao laughed, “look who’s saying that. Call the press: Pete Phubodin thinks there are more important things than love.”
“Shut the fuck up, asshole,” Pete grumbled. “You know what I’m saying, though. Like—I know everyone says ‘do what you love’ as if we all have those same privileges and the same timeline? We have loads of time. We’re only eighteen; in the grand scheme of it all, we’re just some worms rolling around in the dirt. I just think—I just think that it’s okay. Sometimes you have to prioritise other things over doing what you love. Sometimes dreams have to be postponed. And it’s okay, you know? You can come back to it later. You have the time.
“And you have me too, of course. So don’t worry about it too much—I’ll be here to make sure you don’t lose yourself.”
He wasn’t the best at these speeches; his mother wore words of encouragement and softness better. But July has always had a tendency to bring out the untethered in him. Kao, with his acne-spotted cheek and glistening eyes had the same, too.
“I love you,” Kao said, voice stitched in neat little sashiko patterns. It came from the soul of him.
And Pete smiles and said, “I love you.”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
“It’s already ten,” Kao says, kicking at his bare toes. “Go back home—your mom will be mad if you sleep over here again.”
“She doesn’t give a shit,” Pete complains.
“She does.”
The beer they’ve been sipping on is still warm in his stomach. Pete doesn’t really want to move. He catches Kao’s foot the next time it kicks towards him and tickles the sole, sorely disappointed at the bland ‘ha ha’ he gets in return.
“You’re an alien,” Pete accuses. “Whose foot isn’t ticklish?”
“Clearly mine.”
“Fuck youuuu.”
“Acting cute isn’t going to work on me.” It never works on Kao. Which is really unfair—Kao is so soft-hearted with everyone except Pete. Pete makes sure to point this out. “Maybe because you’re annoying?”
Pete flops onto the bed in protest and stretches his limbs out. The drive to his own house seems insurmountable when his eyes are barely opening, body heavy with pasta and shitty beer.
A length of silence stretches out above them, lulling Pete into sleep, and then he hears his best friend sigh, and his lips perk up, because he knows what is going to happen. So, he lets himself be babied. He likes it, once in a while, being taken care of like that. He likes Kao dragging him down the stairs and Kao crouching in front of him to tie his shoelaces and Kao sitting in the driver’s seat of the cute little Mini he’s bought recently.
It’s around eleven at night by the time they leave, and the residential roads Kao winds them through are silent and empty around them. The streetlights dappled Kao’s profile every few seconds. Pete watches him through half-shut eyes. The way he is focused on his driving, carefully driving around potholes to not jostle Pete as much; the way his gaze lingers on Pete’s face, filled with treacle fondness; the way his bangs brush his eyebrows and gleam orange when they fly under a streetlamp; the way everything is quiet, and even Kao’s breathing is controlled, set to even, deep breaths that call Pete to match him.
He is everything he has ever wanted, and he’s his. In a way nobody has ever been his. He’s his outside his family and that knowledge, that there’s someone out there that has him as one of his top people, makes his heart ache. It’s not about wanting more, he realises with startling clarity.
That girl was right every step of the way: boyfriend is not above best friend, it’s a step on the left.
He doesn’t want more from Kao—he already had all of him to himself—but maybe they can just…shift their dynamic that little step.
Which they don’t have to.
It’s not the end goal of every relationship, you know? We could’ve stayed best friends for our whole life and it would’ve been fine.
He already loves him so much. Kao is where his eyes go whenever he has a thought—a default state, someone he seeks out naturally.
Without the ignition on, the silence feels even more pressing. Kao is carved out of golden light and the sienna shadows. There is something feather-soft about the way he looks like this and Pete is reminded of first year and bruised cheeks. (Kao had leaned in so close back then.)
“Aren’t you getting out?” Kao whispers.
If Pete had had this realisation then, would first year have been different?
Kao’s eyes drip honey. He has never hidden anything well. In the gaps of Pete’s life, he has always been overflowing—spilling love and you-don’t-need-to-hide by the gallon. Pete knows half-hidden well, but in front of Kao’s bare gaze…
He has forgotten how to feel on-display.
Pete sees that quiet joy in his eyes and thinks about maybe kissing him and waking up in the morning to this face.
They don’t have to (but maybe he wants to).
“How did you know then? If this was such a natural thing?” Kao had asked. He was always a bit nosier about relationships, more so than Pete.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think there ever was a specific point. I’ve known passion, but this wasn’t really that burning passion, y’know? Just, happiness? I don’t know.” She had laughed, with a hint of shyness. “I’ve always loved her, and then I began thinking it was okay to be with girls? That I could like girls, kiss girls, and the rest was just, I don’t know... If I can be with a girl, might as well be with the best girl. Y’know, the one I love the most already.”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Graduation is anticlimactic after everything. They dress up and wear their khruis and Pete sees Kao’s brilliant smile in every gleaming photo they take. Their families take them out to a celebratory lunch, then there’s a celebratory dinner with their faculty students at the beach, and then there’s light running down the edges of the rented motel wall and Kao is in Pete’s space again, make-up smudged. (He’s used foundation to cover old acne scars.)
“I didn’t bring makeup remover,” Kao tells him as they press side by side into the tiny bathroom and listen to the rain pounding outside. The roar of the sea is so subdued next to his heart. “Do you think this’ll just come off if I wash my face three times?”
“Make sure you don’t scrub yourself raw,” Pete advises.
His eyes keep slipping to the single drop of water that caresses Kao’s bottom lip, hanging off the precipice of it. He wants to lean forwards and kiss it off him. He wants, just a little bit, to lick it.
“Mm.”
They end up in bed because Kao has firm boundaries about tertiary drinking rounds, and Pete listens to the clamour of their classmates—ex-classmates now, he supposes—gathering each other up for another round downstairs. Kao lies on his stomach next to him, propped on his elbows as he plays a match on his latest MOBA of choice on his phone.
“I hate noobs,” Kao says.
Pete props himself onto an elbow and watches the match. “Why do you keep playing rank when you always get paired up with them then? You know our server is filled with trash.”
“I’m a masochist, clearly,” Kao groans. In response, Pete smacks his ass. “Fuck off.”
“I’m going to go to bed,” Pete tells him, smacking him on the ass once more before flopping onto his back. “We’re going back tomorrow morning, right?”
“Mmhm. Hey.” Kao looks up from his phone, then, and the sudden intensity in his voice makes Pete raise his head to meet that fond gaze. “Congratulations.”
The word isn’t something new. Everyone’s been congratulating him all day on his graduation. But coming from Kao…coming from Kao in English… Pete’s heart thumps. He has always been needy for validation and pride bestowed upon him and Kao holds so much power over him, fuck.
Fuck.
“Thanks,” Pete croaks. His neck hurts. His heart too, just a little. “Thank you.”
“I can’t wait to take this next step with you,” Kao beams. “We’ll finally be flatmates, hey?”
“Yeah.”
And then, like he hasn’t completely rearranged all of Pete’s organs with tender fingers, Kao ducks his head back down to his phone and wails, “Fuck, I died again!”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Pete wakes up on the lumpy motel mattress with all the blanket—when did he get that? Kao’s the hog between them—and a pillow tucked under one arm. Kao’s pillow. It still smells like the woody 2-in-1 shampoo he likes using, the one which has a stupid name like Forest Man or Grizzly Wilderness or something. Digging his nose into the fluff, Pete relishes the rare feeling of waking up after Kao; as much as he loves Kao, the man cannot wake up on time.
“Wake up!” Kao’s footsteps come to a standstill next to his bed, teetering and Pete rolls over only to get hit in the face with a newspaper.
A newspaper?
“What?” He asks, not bothering to get the thing off his face.
“Read it,” Kao says.
Pete pulls the wrinkled sheet off his face and blinks blearily at the—
At the—
He is reminded of being in English tuition all over again. Mango summer afternoons, that sweaty smell, the way their sticky skin caught under the rickety dining table as they tried to focus on English worksheets. Kao’s handwriting is much better than it used to be. The thick smell of whiteboard marker is familiar, though.
Will you kiss me already, read out the black circled words, and, I love you letterboxed by black squares.
It’s the entertainment column.
Pete looks up and—
And—
For once those red ears are for him. By him. Kao’s cheeks drip red the longer Pete gapes.
“Are you going to kiss me?” Kao says, embarrassed.
And Pete is made heat-seeking. He discards the newspaper somewhere—off the bed to be grabbed later, when he wants to marvel at it again—and rolls off the bed. Kao, graciously, approaches him and Pete holds him by those rambutan-sweet cheeks and presses his lips to Kao’s.
Kao has always felt like return. The first time that they kiss, Pete feels like his soul has known this his whole life. He is made into summer and he is made into dragonfly wings and he is made into pulpy mess that melts into those calloused palms that cradle his skull. He drinks the language out of Kao. The breaths that fall against his nose are checkered.
“I love you,” Pete gasps, and Kao kisses him because he’s beautiful and fearless and because he can give all of himself to Pete with only one word.
“I know,” Kao laughs against his mouth. “I love you.”
⌜ • ° + ° • ⌝
Later, once they’re both calmed down, Pete will pick up the newspaper and touch along those thick black lines with a sense of awe. Because Pete’s always been the more adventurous of the two, but Kao has been braver about some things.
“I’m going to put this in my scrapbook,” Pete will tell him, waving the newspaper. “We’ll display it when we get married.”
“Who said I’m marrying you, dipshit?” Kao will ask back because he’s mouthy and annoying, and Pete will kiss him until he’s breathless. (Now he knows the feeling of that plush mouth—and Kao definitely needs more lip balm and water.)
“We’ll see.” It won’t be cryptic, but Kao will laugh, tickled, and Pete will allow himself to be rolled over and kissed all over because he thinks—
He thinks that girl was right after all.