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Phaya sprawls on the sand, midday heat seeping through the seat of his black regulation trousers. The schedule today includes some rare downtime, and he’d meant to use it to go back to the dorms and catch up on sleep. Instead, he’s sitting on the beach watching Tharn practice-spar with Khem.
He’s going to get up in a minute. If he leaves soon, he can still catch a 20-minute catnap. Tharn is holding his own, taking advantage of his maneuverability to catch Khem in the ribs with a right hook. Phaya watches him move: quick strikes and quicker footwork. It’s impressive.
Then Tharn aims another hook at Khem’s face. Khem ducks and the momentum of the swing pulls Tharn off-balance, too much force connecting with nothing. Khem, staying low, swoops into Tharn, catching his chest with his shoulder and flipping him over his back. Phaya tenses as Tharn hits the ground with an audible wheeze.
Then he’s up again, taking Khem’s outstretched hand and laughing, all chest bumps and macho posturing. Phaya releases the breath he hadn’t known he was holding and asks himself, not for the first time, what the fuck.
The sound of throat-clearing behind him makes him tense again. He straightens and pivots, expecting Inspector Akk and his most beloved punishment: burpees until you wish you’d never been born.
It’s worse.
“Heeeyyy, Phaya!” Yai squats beside him, smug smile in full force. “What are you doing? Whale-watching? What’s so fascinating out there?” Mugging insufferably, he makes binoculars out of his hands and pretends to scan down the beach.
“Nothing… nothing… nothing… what! Could it be? It is! My dear bro Tharn. Not a whale, but quite a catch all the same, am I right?”
“Go away.”
“I don’t think I will,” Yai says. He collapses in the sand, flat on his back, limbs akimbo, grinning at the sky. “Don’t let me disturb you.”
“Bastard,” Phaya mutters, without much fire. Yai’s okay, really, other than his case of chronic dumbassery.
For a few minutes, there’s nothing but the sound of the waves and Khem and Tharn’s good-natured taunting filtering up the beach. Phaya tries to watch the waves — maybe he can just crash out here on the beach for a bit, sleep in the sand — but his gaze keeps drifting back to Tharn. He and Khem are now working through some drills. Jab, cross, hook. Jab, cross, hook. Khem pauses to correct Tharn’s stance, tapping Tharn’s hip to get him to spread his weight more evenly. Phaya tries not to think about what it would feel like to grab that hip himself, pulling Tharn flush against his body —
“How long have you known him?” he asks, much to his own surprise. He hadn’t known he was going to speak.
Yai, eyes now closed against the glare of the sun, quirks a single eyebrow. “Since we were kids,” he says. “Way back. I don’t even remember meeting him.”
In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Is he really a virgin?”
Yai doesn’t answer right away, but he does open his eyes and fix them on Phaya. “My nong has had some bad luck in love, you understand? Not my story to tell, but it’s made him … protective of himself. Like those little guys, you know? What are they? They live in the forest. With the scales?”
“… Pangolins?” Phaya’s no ecologist, but the parallels with Tharn are right there.
“Yes!” Yai claps his hands together, showering himself with sand. “Dammit. Yes. Those.”
Phaya rolls his eyes and offers Yai a hand up so he can get the sand off himself. Yai takes it and rocks into a seating position, brushing off his shirt.
“If that’s the appeal,” Yai says, “I can drown you now and save us all some trouble.”
It takes Phaya a minute to realize that Yai’s talking about Tharn’s virginity, not his resemblance to an endangered forest creature. “Fuck off,” he says. “I’m not like that.”
It’s a misstep. Yai grins, showing off every tooth in his head. “But you’re like something then.”
“Again,” Phaya says, “fuck off.”
Doubtful Yai has been fazed by being told to fuck off ever in his life; he just grins harder. Phaya looks away from him pointedly, watching Tharn bob and weave. Pangolin is too cuddly for him, really. If anything, Tharn puts Phaya in mind of a snake. Not a viper, nothing with venom, just one of those little dun-colored garden snakes that freeze when you look at them: cautious, wary, but predators, nonetheless.
Fuck, Phaya does want him. Badly.
“You know,” Yai says. “The way I knew Sand was The One was that I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. You know Sand, right? My girlfriend? The pretty one?”
Phaya closes his eyes, praying for patience. “Yes, I know your hot girlfriend. Everyone knows your hot girlfriend. You don’t have to specify.”
“Ah, but that’s the point!” Yai slaps Phaya’s back, as if this is a civil conversation. “It wasn’t just that I was oogling her. I mean, I was. But I also just… couldn’t stop watching her. And when she wasn’t around, I was thinking about her. Quick, what did Tharn have for breakfast this morning?”
“He didn’t eat,” Phaya replies automatically. “He grabbed a protein bar for later.”
“See?”
“I noticed someone grabbing a protein bar, and now he’s The One?” Phaya shakes his head and drags his right hand through the sand, making a deep furrow. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation.
In part, that’s because Yai’s a little too close to right. Tharn’s parked himself in Phaya’s brain, and Phaya can’t seem to dislodge him. It’s weird. They don’t know each other any better than Phaya knows Singh or Khem or even Yai, for that matter. But he does notice Tharn all the time, and he is thinking about him when he’s not around, and then there was the whole crazy thing with the girl in the water that he can’t even start to wrap his head around.
And that’s the other thing. There’s no fucking way to say to Yai, “Yeah, I’m not just into your little bro because he fights like a cobra and mouths off to me when I tease him and looks like that, to boot. I also think maybe, he’s like, my soulmate?”
Phaya knows from experience what it’s like to be called nuts.
Yai stretches, making a loud groaning noise like guys like him always do when they stretch. “I’m just saying,” he says. “I know Tharn pretty well. And I’d bet anything he remembers what you had for breakfast this morning, too.”
“Okay, now seriously, fuck off,” Phaya says, because he doesn’t believe that for a second.
“Suit yourself,” Yai says. He stands and flashes Phaya yet another disarming grin. “I came over to encourage you, by the way. I’m in your corner. SuSu!”
He shakes two fists at Phaya and then raises them over his head, pumping his arms as he runs down the beach toward Tharn and Khem. Phaya sighs and stands, too. He’s let it go too late for a nap, but maybe some time in the weightroom will clear his head.
As he leaves, he spares one last glance back at Tharn, who Yai has in an exuberant headlock. He breaks away, laughing, and Phaya feels a shock of familiarity. For a moment, he gets a flash of green and gold, a fragment of that same smile, like a forgotten dream. There’s a weight to the memory, as if he could reach out and wrap his arms around a warm body, squirming playfully to get away, as if he could strain just a little harder and hear peels of breathless laughter.
And then it’s over and he’s on the sun-drenched beach again, watching Tharn and Yai roughhouse and wondering if he’s losing his mind.