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The ring was a sanctuary for Song Lan.
Two years ago, had his shrink of a best friend told him that this was the endgame he was aiming for when he suggested that Song Lan try a full-contact sport—of all things—to combat his tendencies, Song Lan would have called him ridiculous and teased him about pandering to internet psychoanalysis. There was simply no way Song Lan would find going skin-to-skin sober with strangers inside a building filled with stale air of sweat and constantly smelled like musty old socks (and probably smegma) as something akin to heaven.
After all, sparkling cleanliness was next to godliness and all that.
But Song Lan did humor the suggestion. Or rather, Xiao Xingchen, who had a PhD in Song Lan Psychoanalysis, had dragged a very sober Song Lan to perspiration hell before he could protest, that he was left with no choice but to humor the suggestion.
On the upside, Xingchen had never been wrong about him, and failed him he never did.
So here was Song Lan exactly two years later, still idling in the gym even though his last sparring match for the day was long over and everyone but him and the new night shift had already clocked out. He had his naked back resting on the crusty cushion of a corner post, arms spread on chipping boxing ropes, hands getting clammy inside his equally clammy gloves, bare legs and feet planted on the damp canvas beneath him. He could smell the stale air of sweat and musty old socks (and probably smegma) that seemed to have stuck to the walls and equipment, but nothing could deter him from feeling like he fucking reached nirvana every time he stepped onto the platform, a rush instantly soaring through him and sustaining him on extended release.
Inside the ring, he was Song Lan but also not Song Lan.
The realization, when it came, was no epiphany; it did not hit him like a lightning and the ground beneath his feet did not move like tectonic faults were shifting. It came in small waves, tides slowly and gradually lapping at the shore, over the course of days bleeding into weeks, into months, into years, until he just knew: once started, breaking routines was always a struggle, like an endless internal tug-of-war, and even on particularly bad days he would be forced to drag himself just to fulfill them, lest the trepidation consume him—the fear, despite the irrationality of it all, of the nagging bastard doppelgängers of himself in the panopticon inside his head threatening him like gangster movie triads and making good of their promises. Once he had forced his own hand, he would find solace in friendly matches that gave rise to the roaring of blood in his ears, drowning all the thoughts and voices that ran amok across his synapses in every waking moment.
Inside the ring, amid non-stop jabs and parries and clinches, despite the accidental exchange of spittles and muck sweat and, gods forbid, snots, Song Lan did not dwell on the disgust and dread that gnaw at the back of his mind, did not give into the urges and impulses to rid himself of filth and impurities. He could not; he was never allowed to. At the cheers of his team, the ring would turn into a battlefield where there was no room for anything but survival because every (exhibition) fight must be won in order to protect his proverbial martial brothers—
Okay, perhaps Song Lan just held himself to a standard of perfection instead of grace, which he had yet to address, but still—it was helping. Without the one-track thought that outright forbade him from committing failures, he would not have found transitory freedom inside the barrier made of steel cables, on the twenty feet by twenty feet rubber floor where the presence of another should have felt like encroaching into his personal space but did not.
At last, he had found within himself a good, potent combination for once. Poisons, indeed, could be antidotes, too.
While now comparatively far and few between, crashes were still unavoidable on days the big lump of fat-muscle inside his skull decided to act more like an overgrown abscess than a brain; it would plummet from his transitory highs and exhilarations, causing all the rage that had accumulated and settled in his bones to spike through his veins and flesh. But spending all his free time in the ring had not been in vain; it taught him how to somehow take them in stride. Long gone were the days when he would inwardly scream at himself that he would rather choose sepak takraw on a dirt court than suffer the touch of another in boxing or his long-abandoned wushu sanda; when he could not escape the echoes of his own voices taking over his mind to the point of contemplating to bang his head against a wall in a desperate need to silence the dissonance; when his kicks and punches were driven by unfounded anger and frustration that seemed to live and slither just under his skin; when he had to wear himself out into exhaustion; when he thought he could die and still not achieve repose.
It took Song Lan a lifetime of reigning in his invisible madness to be this calm, and he would like to think that he was a well-adjusted better-adjusted man.
And so it never occurred to him that at the mere sight of one impressively punchable face, the illusory realm he had created for himself would come crashing down around him, all his hard work coming undone.
One morning more than two years ago, Song Lan woke up crankier than usual.
What started as a directionless itch he could not quite chase off followed him through his day and turned into a familiar but unwanted feeling that sat heavy and painful and low in his stomach, similar to but not quite the same as what he felt when he had the misfortune of eating bad raw fish salad; or when he first met Xingchen’s overprotective little sister who greeted him with a swift kick to the nutsack; or when images and stimulations just were never enough to send him over the perfunctory edge.
There was no other way to put it except that he was horny but in a way where his blood thrums eagerly in his almost violent yearning for intimate contact and release, the intensity of which he hadn’t felt since he was a teen, and it would not allow itself to be suppressed.
Jonesing, he thought, was a word that encapsulated it quite well, and the only way to get it out of his system was to indulge it.
Without much thought, not with his head muddled and his groin aching, Song Lan ended up downloading some seedy application on his phone and going on a spree; what he once swore he would not touch with a ten-foot pole he practically touched with his bare hands. He was expecting it to end once he came down from the high end of libido or he naturally fell out of his routine of non-relationships with strangers, whichever came second.
Except neither came.
Not like usual, anyway.
It was toward the end of his hunts—he knew it was, given how cranky he was getting again, eager for the chore to end—when it caught his eye: a shit-eating grin plastered on a very punchable face. Sure, the guy was attractive, if you like the type; his mug and build were the kind that would grace young adult book covers and drawing guides, all symmetry with feline grace and untamed charm. Song Lan did not care much for symmetry as much as he did for cleanliness and perfection, but he could appreciate it when he saw one.
For sober Song Lan, however, the guy was the type that got under his skin for simply existing. The smirk on the smug bastard’s face could create a magnetic and almost supernatural connection to his fists, and Song Lan had no qualms ruining some symmetry if he got to reshape it to his satisfaction.
Their eyes met, but instead of his fists, it was his mouth that smashed against the other man’s.
Because Song Lan was never sober then, not when he was out to find release, and he hated the fact that the alcohol-addled, dick-for-brain version of himself wanted to fuck him more than beat him bloody.
Introductions came later, once they had calmed down a bit, panting and cleaning up on a hotel bed. No longer gasping and moaning, Xue Yang’s lips defaulted back to his signature smirk, and it ticked Song Lan off. Song Lan dove down, wanting to wipe it off that face, and he was not sure if it was a smack or a kiss with how it hurt. Xue Yang returned it with matching fervor, anyway.
In Song Lan’s usual fashion, it became a routine: the alcohol and the excuses he said to himself, the hotel meetups, the kisses like they always had a score to settle, the sex that progressively got more intimate than he would like to admit, the conversations and banters, and then more sex. At every chance they got, without fail. Song Lan was too aware of the shifts in his mind and body to not notice it: that the itch was no longer just an itch to be scratched; that the somebody beneath him was not just a somebody without a name or a face he sought to get the chore over it. There was now pleasure in and a willing subject of his lust.
So when Xue Yang asked, months into their non-relationship, to do it bare—something Song Lan, sober or otherwise, would find revolting—Song Lan did not stop to think twice, did not ask the questions he knew he should, and just went with it. The word disgusting did not even cross his mind.
For as long as he could remember, he had a tendency to go for the extremes: to eat simply for survival or to overeat; to start a book from the very first letter to the last or to not read it at all; to abstain from contact and sex or to get down and dirty in cheap motels with people whose names and faces he would soon forget.
But just because he was a slave to the dissonance in his mind did not mean he was at the mercy of it. He still possessed something akin to an approximate of sanity, which was how he survived this long. He knew what Xue Yang’s request entailed when he agreed. He knew what it meant when he stopped using alcohol as an excuse and started bringing their non-relationship home, in his own bedroom, on his own bed.
(Just because the reason for the affection was born of coping mechanism does not make it any less real, Xingchen had too accurately supplied.)
Song Lan should have known, however, that he and Xue Yang were too alike; after all, dissembling was how they found and connected with each other.
It was an accident. That night, they had driven themselves to exhaustion of the euphoric kind where they only paused their lazy kisses for air and Xue Yang refused to let go even after Song Lan had softened inside him. Song Lan did not know who was the first to drift off, but when he woke in the middle of the night uncomfortable and sticky, Xue Yang was deep in slumber beside him. It did not occur to him then as he cleaned them up and snuggled back in bed that it was the first time he actually had seen him asleep.
Xue Yang would stay for food or shower, but he never stayed the night.
And when Song Lan woke again in the morning, Xue Yang had disappeared from his life.
In their second first meeting, Song Lan’s fists finally connected to Xue Yang’s impressively punchable face, but his mouth did not lag behind for too long, eager to lick the blood off the wound he created himself.