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The sunlight from the window behind Xiao feels like it’s almost cutting through him, burning into his back. He should move, probably. But he’s frozen in place, staring at the two innocuous objects lying almost forlornly against the wall of his cramped entryway.
Shoes, Venti’s shoes. White, burning white, the white of bleached sidewalks and new paper, with white laces and thick soles slightly stained with dirt, bulky like running shoes even though Venti has professed multiple times that he’d rather die than subject himself to the torture that is sweating for sport while not really getting anywhere . Xiao doesn’t know why he’s standing here like this, transfixed by bleach-white footwear instead of doing something productive like moving out of the sun. Venti’s never left anything behind before, always leaving Xiao’s apartment with everything he came with, and sometimes more. A pair of Xiao’s old basketball shorts, too big on him but that he still insists on wearing because he says they’re more comfortable than anything else he owns. A book he spotted on Xiao’s bookshelf that a friend of a friend recommended, one he carefully slides from the shelf before plying Xiao for details. Xiao is always too happy to give, too willing to offer anything he can. Because Venti is the kind of person the world opens for, and Xiao is only a small part of that world, caught up in the tide.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Venti’s shoes are here, where they shouldn’t be, or maybe where they always have been.
Not for the first time, Xiao finds himself contemplating what Venti would do if he knew Xiao was in love with him. Let him down slowly, probably. Be secretly disgusted with how he kept silent for so long, definitely. There’s a glimmer of what if he felt the same but it’s quickly squashed by the bigger, more rational part of his brain that says of course he doesn’t because it’s simply not possible. Venti is content with whatever it is they have, he knows. He’s the only one who wants something more, and it’s just something he has to accept.
There’s a knock at the door, and Xiao starts before his brain processes the three soft knocks that always indicate Venti’s arrival. His heart leaps into his throat, renewed in its two-step beating. He peers through the peephole out of habit more than anything, catching a glimpse of black hair and pale skin before settling back down on his heels. His exposed shoulder blade is stinging in the sunlight that still cuts through his apartment, but he can hardly feel it anymore.
Xiao fumbles with the lock that always sticks, swings open the door. He steps back, allowing Venti all the room he needs to step inside.
And then Venti is standing in his apartment, stretching on his toes to peer over Xiao’s shoulder before settling down and looking Xiao in the eye in the way that always makes Xiao feel like he’s pinned to a wall even when there’s empty space behind him.
There’s a line between them, thankfully, delineated by the bright welcome mat Xiao had found at a dollar store. Xiao stands on the tile of his entryway and Venti over the center of a polyester daisy and all is quiet, but then Venti moves forward as he always does and the line blurs and disappears like pigment in water. Xiao steps back with him, almost over the caulked divide between the entryway and living room. He can’t get too close, not right now. The shoes in the corner are still unabashed in their whiteness, and he can’t think about Venti then because Venti is here now and wants something, and Xiao is always, always willing to give it to him.
“Hey.”
Xiao finally tears his eyes away from the shoes to focus on Venti. He has a crocheted bag over one shoulder that is weighed down to the hem of his shorts, the strap pinning one of his characteristic braids beneath it. Xiao wants to reach out and free it from its blue yarn prison, but doesn’t. Venti runs his thumb under the strap, adjusting it himself, and the braid falls free.
Xiao finally gets his mouth to move. God, how long has it been since he and Venti have been doing...whatever they're doing? And the sight of him still fills Xiao's throat so thick that he can't speak, fills his head with a thousand rushing thoughts that he can't form into words. “Your shoes.”
Venti looks down in confusion before finally noticing his white sneakers tossed in the corner of the entryway. He had left them there the last time he had come over, stepping on the heels to tug himself free of their white laces before pushing Xiao's hair away from the back of his neck to press a kiss to the ridge of his spine. Xiao doesn't know how it's possible to forget something as necessary as shoes, but he's learned that if Venti can forget something, he will.
Venti laughs, straightening and turning back to Xiao. He pulls his lower lip between his teeth, contemplative, before curling his mouth into a self-conscious smile that Xiao knows would taste sweet. “I can just leave them here, if that’s ok?”
His voice raises as if it’s a question. But Xiao knows he’ll just keep letting Venti do whatever he wants, make as large or as small of a space for himself in Xiao’s life as he pleases and Xiao will thank him for being there at all.
“Sure,” Xiao hears himself say. “That’s fine.”
Venti tips his head, smile still pressing little wrinkles into the corners of his eyes, and Xiao’s breath catches. His heart beats uncomfortably against the cuff of his exercise gloves. All the moisture vanishes from his mouth, and he swallows thickly. They’re still standing in the tiny entryway of Xiao’s apartment, and Xiao doesn’t know what to do.
Venti does, apparently, because he snaps his fingers in the way that always indicates he’s finally remembered something. “I wanna ask you something.”
Xiao’s heart leaps into his throat even as he tries to shove it back down. Venti does nothing but ask questions. He’s one of those people that never grew out of the childish urge to question everything, unafraid to ask why or how to anything he doesn’t understand before listening intently to the explanation, or, more likely, to type it into the cracked screen of his phone when no one around him knows the answer either. He asks questions to Xiao, too, ones that sound like can I or may I and are accompanied by light touches, fingertips trailing down his spine, lips pressed to the hollow of his hip.
And, of course, the answer is always yes .
“Do you want one?”
The question doesn’t register with Xiao at first, but then his eyes fall from Venti’s shoulder to his outstretched arm and down to the golden fruit clutched in his hand.
Venti’s still talking. “And I always buy too much fruit, right, which drives Aether crazy because it takes up way too much space in our fridge but I always share with him so he never throws it out. I mean, it’s not like it’s a bad thing to buy fruit. Support local farmers. But I should probably learn to bake or something because the last time I bought this much fruit, half of it rotted before I got to eat it. Which was sad.” He takes a breath, eyes rising from the fruit to Xiao’s face. He’s closer now, even though Xiao never noticed him move. The blush-colored offering is all of what separates them, almost, all the air between them scented with its summer fragrance.
Xiao raises a hand to take it, but the cuff of his exercise gloves digs into his wrist and he remembers. “Let me just—” he glances to the side, as if an answer is written on the beige surface of his wall, “—uh, I need to change. But I do want the fruit.” Because he does. He can’t keep living on microwave ramen and toaster waffles forever, no matter how hard he tries. “You can leave it here. Or stay. Whatever you want.”
Venti’s laugh is a hush of air against Xiao’s cheek. “I’ll stay. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
Xiao swallows thickly, eyes falling to the floor as he steps back, wooden floorboards creaking under his feet. Venti brushes past him, his hand unconsciously trailing across Xiao’s waist. The touch burns beneath the fabric of his tank top, digging tendrils of heat into his abdomen. Venti touches him like it’s nothing. It should be nothing. But it’s not nothing, not to Xiao.
It’s the worst kind of cliché, to be in love with the person you’re just sleeping with. It sounds like something out of one of the terrible dramas Hu Tao forces him to watch, the ones that always end with both of them yelling at the screen as the characters make increasingly terrible choices. But he’s not a character, and this isn’t a drama, no matter how much he wishes this particular fact of his life was separated behind the multicolored pixels of a television screen.
Xiao slips into his room and carefully lays his gloves on top of a thick art history textbook on his dresser. Its cover is bent, the pages coffee-stained, but he can still trace the contours of an oil-painted pearl earring, still analyze the bright colors of a vase of sunflowers. He finds it fascinating how many different meanings one painting, even one brushstroke can have, even when the artist must have had only one in mind. There is a formula to the uncertainty, an analytical perspective on color and shape and form and time period that will eventually only leave one option. Xiao quickly discards his sweat-stained tank top for a clean one, casting a glance at his unmade bed before shutting the drawer of his dresser with a clunk and shuffling back into the main room.
The light of the late afternoon sun is an assault on Xiao’s eyes after the darkness of his bedroom. He squints, raising a hand to his forehead with a wince and casting a glance around his cramped living room. The sunlight falls in a thick golden band between a crack in his curtains, melting into the creases of his couch and against the far wall of the kitchen behind him. His shadow is the only thing that interrupts it, and he steps forward, letting the beam once again piece itself together.
Xiao half-expects Venti to be curled up in the sunlight on the couch, illuminated in gold as he always is whenever Xiao pictures him. But he’s not there, or anywhere, and Xiao’s heart falls into his stomach until he hears a tap on the sliding glass door. Venti’s face peers out, hand waving wildly.
The door groans on its track as Xiao tugs it open. Venti claps once, as if his appearance is some sort of achievement, the sound snapping abrupt across the street several stories below them before fading as quickly as it began. The metal of the fire escape cuts against Xiao’s bare feet, but he eases himself down next to Venti anyway. Venti hums happily around the peach already firmly between his teeth, and Xiao feels the vibration of it through the metal beneath his heels. With his free hand, Venti plucks a peach from his bag and holds it out. Xiao takes it, mumbling his thanks.
The heat is thick on his skin as he bites into the peach. Xiao can already feel a cold sliver of sweat running down his back as the warm juice trickles down his chin, but whether it’s from the heat or Venti’s closeness is uncertain. All his nerves are on high alert, searching for touch they know will eventually happen, the hair on his legs standing straight up in anticipation. He doesn’t know what will happen after this, if Venti will leave a few peaches in his water-stained fridge and leave with nothing more than a smile, or if he’ll follow Xiao into his bedroom and begin the slow process of undoing him in the way only Venti can, mold him into the shape he wants because Xiao isn’t strong enough to resist even if he wanted to.
It’s the uncertainty that kills him.
Xiao makes the mistake of daring a glance at Venti. His chin is resting on one hand, elbow propped on a knee. The hem of his shorts slides up, revealing the edge of the vibrant tattoo encircling his thigh that Xiao has traced with his hands and lips too many times to count. He wants to touch it now, run a fingertip across the verdant line, finally memorize it instead of just bits and pieces. Venti’s lips glisten with juice, and Xiao wonders if he would taste like the peach sitting warm in his hand. He’s glowing in the sunlight, flyaway strands of hair backlit into strands of gold. Xiao could watch him forever.
“When’s the last time you had a peach?”
Xiao blinks. “What?”
Venti turns to him, widening his eyes in what must be an imitation of Xiao’s own expression. “The last time. You had a peach?”
Xiao furrows his brow, trying to remember. Actually, he can’t remember the last time he ventured beyond prepackaged berries in the produce section of the grocery store. The pyramids of fruit unnerved him with their mystery—which were best? Which would rot in a few days, and which wouldn’t ripen for weeks? He never attempted to find the answer, much less venture to the kinds of sunny farmers’ markets Venti frequents with a handmade bag over his shoulder. Places like that seemed reserved for the kind of people who would use whatever they bought for something instead of popping a few unwashed berries in their mouth before rushing out the door. The kind of people who delighted in the joyful spontaneity of finding the perfect peach instead of shying away from it. People like Venti.
“I can’t remember,” he finally admits, taking another bite of the golden fruit. The peach skin is rough under his tongue, rougher than he expected peach skin to be. Whatever that might have been.
Venti only nods thoughtfully. “Do you like them?”
Xiao stares at the half-eaten fruit in his hand, the brown edge of the pit only just now beginning to peek through the thick flesh. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Xiao looks back up in surprise. Venti’s face is inches away from his own, so close he could count his eyelashes. The sun must have been put in the sky only to make Venti beautiful, because its light melts against the contours of his face and makes Xiao’s heart stop for a second, dead. He wants Venti so badly it hurts, and knows he can have him. But never how he wants, all because of that maddening in-between where they’ve been doing whatever they’ve been doing for so long now that it would just complicate things to say anything. He’s ashamed, really, taking advantage of Venti like this, taking advantage of this beautiful, beautiful man who deserves someone so, so much better. Someone who isn’t afraid of uncertainty, of anything and everything that might throw his already precarious world off balance.
He scrambles for the right words, all the years of slowly accumulated language dropping out of his mind in a few seconds. “I—uh, they’re…sweet.”
To his surprise, Venti laughs, propping his cheek further up on his hand. Xiao’s afraid to look directly at him, as if he is as blinding as the sun. “Makes sense.” A pause. “Stop staring at it like that. It’s a peach , it didn’t kill your children or whatever.” Venti presses a fingertip between his eyebrows, smoothing out the crease Xiao didn’t know was still on his face.
Xiao raises his own hand, prodding at the spot. Venti takes this as an invitation to grab his hand with a smile Xiao can hear more than see, interlocking their fingers. His hand is sticky with juice, but it’s warm, the heat spreading up Xiao’s arm and through his chest. Venti hums, turning back to the peach in his other hand.
Venti doesn’t know what he does to Xiao’s heart and body and mind, filling up with nothing but his face, his voice, his smile until Xiao doesn’t know if there’s any of himself left. He doesn’t know how Xiao wants him so badly it aches , how the hand clasped in his feels more like a painful brand the longer their fingers stay interlocked. He doesn’t know how much of a coward Xiao is, keeping quiet the first, second, third time Venti came over, giving and giving and giving as much as he could because god he wanted to. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He wants and Venti doesn’t.
Venti is rubbing circles into the back of Xiao’s hand with his thumb and his knee is pressed against his own. He can feel the peach juice drying in a sticky sheen on his chin, the entwined rhombuses of the fire escape stairs digging into the back of his thighs. And suddenly, it’s all too much.
“Venti,” Xiao hears himself say.
Venti pauses, his hand stilling. “Hm?”
Xiao’s heart is pounding in his ears, the rushing of a river to the edge of a waterfall. He’s screaming at himself to stop, stop while he can, because he’s not ready for anything Venti might say. But his actions are out of his control now, like he’s watching his body from someplace above instead of piloting it. “So…”
He pauses, mouth suddenly devoid of any moisture. God, he can’t even do this .
A shuddering breath, four quick heartbeats. “I like you.”
Venti doesn’t say anything.
Xiao can’t look at him, favoring the remains of the peach in his hand. “Like, in a more than friends way. Which—which is bad, because we’ve been doing all this stuff and I had, I don’t know, feelings about it. And you don’t. And I never stopped you. God , I’m pathetic.”
The rushing river in his ears has plunged over the waterfall. His face is painfully warm, probably bright red. It’s strangely cathartic, though, to have all the words he’s never yet voiced out of his head and into the air between them, hanging suspended in the late afternoon heat. The question is what Venti will choose to do with them.
The silence continues.
Xiao’s heart is pounding painfully in his chest, but slower now. “I’ll just…go, I guess,” he manages, getting to his feet with the wrinkled stone of the peach still pinched between his fingers. Before he can begin to contemplate the absurdity of that statement (this is his apartment, where would he go?) Venti’s fingers tighten in his own where he still hasn’t let go.
“Xiao, wait. Xiao, god. I like you too.”
Xiao freezes, finally looks back. Venti’s standing too, a blush blending in with the freckles Xiao has always quietly marveled over. “What?”
Venti is looking everywhere but him, and Xiao didn’t know it was possible to make Venti flustered but apparently he has. “I—I like you too. I return your feelings. I—god, that sounded so stupid, right? I don’t even—I feel bad, like, how did you confess before me? That’s totally off brand.”
The words I like you too are still playing on repeat in Xiao’s head like a broken record. “You…”
Venti’s face is definitely flushed, and it’s definitely adorable. “Like you. Yes . I was planning to tell you, but you beat me to it, I guess.”
All the strength rushes out of Xiao’s limbs, and he stumbles against the brick wall behind him, huffing a laugh. Venti mirrors his laugh, grinning in that confused-incredulous way that asks how are we such idiots and stepping forward to wrap his hands around the back of Xiao’s neck. Xiao doesn’t shy away. Because Venti is illuminated in the light of the setting sun behind him, making a halo of gold, and he is beautiful.
Xiao lifts his hands to Venti’s waist out of habit more than anything, the high of acceptance still ringing in his ears. Venti tugs him forward, gently, and then there is negative space between them and if he concentrates he can feel Venti’s heartbeat beating rabbit-quick in time with his own. He rests his chin on top of Venti’s head, untamed flyaways tickling his nose, and breathes in.
It’s late when Venti finally leaves, carefully unwrapping his arms from around Xiao’s waist on the couch and stretching, blinking eyes bleary from the foreign films he always forces Xiao to watch. Xiao blinks up at him, tracing the curve of his body illuminated by the blue-white of the glowing screen of credits written in French that has replaced the light of the sun long disappeared beneath the horizon. Aether’s gonna kill me , Venti sighs, snapping fingers clumsy with tiredness. I said I’d be back by…I don’t even remember. But he’s still gonna kill me .
I won’t let him, Xiao says, reaching up to tug at the hem of Venti’s shirt. His side is cold where Venti was pressed against him.
Venti laughs, leaning down to press a kiss against Xiao’s neck. That’s sweet, but I really do need to go. See you tomorrow, okay?
Xiao hums in agreement, tugging himself upright and walking Venti to the door with a hand pressed against the small of his back. See you tomorrow.
Venti smiles, and then he’s gone, leaving Xiao alone in his apartment to contemplate whether any of that was real.
He turns, eyes catching on the white shoes still shoved in the corner of his entryway. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. He doesn’t know why. His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he fumbles it out.
Venti: im here to stay >:3
Venti: good luck getting rid of me <3
I never wanted to , Xiao says to the quiet darkness of his still apartment.