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Phayu was convinced it went back, all the way back to that first moment with his boy, on the side of the road in the rain. Not when the window had first rolled down and he’d noted, even through the water-soaked dim, how cute the boy was. Not when their fingers had brushed as he’d taken his helmet back and his gut had given that tiny sparkling clench of interest.
No, it had happened when he’d first peered at him over his drenched gator, up at the boy who’d popped out of his warm, dry car with an expression brilliant enough to make rainbows in the dark, intent on getting drenched holding a useless umbrella for an already-soaked-to-the-bone good Samaritan in the cheerfully oblivious name of “helping.” A soft, gentle whisper of recognition. Not in his mind, because that would have been obvious; and not in his gut, because that had just been lust. It might have been in his heart, but Phayu thought even that would have been too close to the surface for him to ignore in the moment, and so he’d eventually come to think it was his soul that had given a gentle, relieved sigh and a barely-there murmur:
Ah, there you are. I’ve found you.
It had been so faint he hadn’t even noticed it at first, so much so that he’d let the boy go without the promise of any further contact. But when he looked back on it later—much later, after he’d almost lost his boy to a stupid rivalry with a stupid, spoiled rich asshole who had no worth of his own and so had to try and steal it from others—he knew what it had been, and he hated that it had taken him so long to recognize it. Even though he was sure he’d seen it before Rain had: how perfect they were, not because either of them was perfect, but because they fit together so perfectly.
His first relationship had been with a girl, when he was still much too young—not quite teenagers, both of them—and too stupid to even begin to understand what relationships were about. In what would turn out to be a pattern in his life, it had ended after only a month. The thing he remembered most about it was the way his mother had taken one look at him and seen how upset he’d been (even though no one else but ‘Fah could tell he minded at all). She’d sat him down on his bed, wrapped her arms around him, and just held him and rocked him. And then, after a while of that comfort, she’d told him, “Relationships aren’t just about taking, my darling son. They’re not even about giving, but about balancing what you take with what you give. Not the quantity, mind you, but the quality.”
For years and years, he’d misunderstood. For years and years, he’d thought the “giving” had been the things he’d liked doing: the taking responsibility for, the taking care of, the taking pleasure in giving pleasure, the utter satisfaction he took from providing. He’d just arrogantly assumed the things he was good at were always the “giving” part of his mother’s equation. And he hadn’t even been entirely wrong, which had just made his confusion over it all worse. Because most of the time, his partners had liked those things from him, sought them from him. And yet, none of them had stayed.
His dirtiest little secret, the thing not even ‘Fah knew for sure, was that he’d never ended a relationship, not even when it became hard; all of them had walked away from him.
Until P’Praew.
They’d both been the wunderkinds of their faculties: she was the goddess of the business faculty; he was the god of architecture. She was older than him by one year, which meant she would graduate from her four-year program two years before he finished his five-year one. They were both extremely attractive, kind, and generous, with the kind of mild-mannered aggressiveness about life and career people naturally admired rather than envied. They were both from wealthy families, confident enough to be with each other, very interested in sex, and even very interested in the same kind of sex. Both of their faculties had practically thrown a party when they’d started dating because they were both just so perfect, and therefore so perfect together.
But they were so much alike. Dating Praew had given him a glimpse of what it must have been like dating himself. She provided for her partners with money and sex and affection and control. Just like he did. She’d done so much of all of it, so well and with so much force and confidence, it had actually become a barrier between herself and her partners, and she had a trail of failed relationships littering behind her to prove it.
Just like he did.
Their entire relationship had consisted of them being too much of everything to each other, while also not being enough of something else. By the time he’d reached the major disagreement that finally made him walk away for the first time ever, it had already been mostly over. When she’d graduated and gone off to England to add a masters while also learning the family business in an off-branch, neither of them had cared about the split.
Still, he’d never held any particular animosity towards her. He was even grateful for her. Praew had taught him, finally, the lesson his mae had attempted to convey so many years before: that giving only what you wanted to give was actually a form of “taking”, and that the “quality” part of “balance” involved measuring what you were giving and taking by the person in front of you—not by yourself. It was something he’d had to stop and really contemplate for a while before he was able to take it in.
She was the last real attempt he’d made at a serious relationship. His every interaction since then had been deliberately and mutually casual, fun, temporary. People with complementary tastes and positions in life, and realistic expectations. He’d never even thought about sleeping with anyone from the architecture faculty, because while he wanted his partners to want him to lead, he didn’t want to start off on some stupid pedestal that would hurt him falling down when he inevitably made it crumble. More than anything, he wanted to be able to give to his partners not just what he needed to give, but what they truly needed from him—and he hadn’t even realized those two things were different things until Praew.
The new, never-before-recognized need for balance had made him cautious and depth-shy. It had been the first and only time in his life he’d thought he’d understood a concept, only to realized he’d never even scraped the surface of understanding.
And then…his sunshine boy in the rain.
He’d made two enormous mistakes with Rain (three, if you counted the Stop Stupidity). The first one hadn’t been the letting him go in the first place, but in approaching him the second time as casually as he’d been taking everything else in the years since Praew. He’d sabotaged the car of a junior, soothing his own conscience about breaking his rule against getting involved with the architecture faculty by promising to fix it properly; the boy in the rain hadn’t been completely gone from his mind since that moment he’d looked up over his gator, and he’d just thought to rid himself of the mild obsession.
But he’d misread the boy in the rain completely, and for a little while, he’d thought: That’s what I get for breaking the rules.
But then Rain hadn’t left. He’d crawled right back into bed and snuggled in close. And Rain would never know how important, how monumentally soothing it had been to Phayu. Phayu did not fuck up often, but he was harder on himself about mistakes than he was on anyone else. That Rain, after his atrocious miscalculation, and then Rain’s stubborn unwillingness to admit he wanted Phayu’s touch (which, annoyingly, irritatingly, had turned Phayu’s mostly-honest and playful game into something potentially far uglier) and the subsequent harsh words between them, had still granted Phayu the kind of subconscious, open-hearted trust it took to sleep in someone else’s arms had been a small, joyful miracle. And everything he’d done after had just made Phayu more and more delighted.
“Chasing” Rain in those early weeks had been a bit like trying to tend a rosebush that grew legs and ran around like a child. Not only did you have to avoid the thorns, but it sometimes required chasing to water. Touch it just right, though, and with just the right care, and it gave the world’s most beautiful blossoms. Phayu had loved every challenging second of it.
His second mistake had been the word stupid. The night of the race, when Rain had been so unthinkingly reckless that he’d terrified Phayu into being harsher than he’d ever let himself be with any of his interests before. Ever. But it wasn’t Phayu at his coldest setting that had caused the harm. Rain had done with that what Phayu was starting to learn he did with most of the challenges in his life. He’d jumped at it like a tiny, vicious, adorable yapping puppy. He’d even bitten like one, which was something that still made Phayu laugh when he thought about it. Phayu had gotten something he wanted from it, so he hadn’t spared it more than a passing regret the next morning.
He hadn’t realized until later that it was the stupid that had stuck with Rain and haunted him like a ghost with his voice. Until the restaurant where he’d goaded his cute boy into a grand declaration the likes of which had never meant anything to him until that moment—and never would again unless it was Rain doing the declaring. But then he’d thrown that word around carelessly, and the hurt he’d ignored the night of the race (because the world didn’t care if you were hurt by something, it would still bulldoze you over if you made such reckless moves) came back and lurked in his boy’s gaze. And Phayu had recognized, maybe for the first time ever, the need to soften.
He never had, that early, with any of his previous partners. He’d made a habit long ago of making sure potential partners knew what they were getting with him, so if they couldn’t stick it out, they’d do so with minimal damage to him. He’d never really stopped to consider maybe he was doing unnecessary damage to them, as well.
But that time, with his mae’s words and the lessons from Praew churning somewhere deep in his subconscious, he’d softened the tiniest bit for the boy who’d been so persevering for him: he’d swapped out stupid for cute and the reaction from his boy had wiped the word nearly permanently from his vocabulary. Rain didn’t like it, so Phayu wouldn’t use it. Small price, big rewards.
And he’d finally, finally understood what “quality” meant in practice.
By the time he’d surfaced from the euphoria of chasing around a thorny little swift-footed rosebush, his boy had already instinctively found that one soft spot, knocked down every wall he didn’t know he had. Rain had climbed into his chest and wrapped himself around Phayu’s heart like a clinging vine, his sharp, greedy thorns sunk in tight and comfy. Phayu hadn’t realized it as soon as he should have, but he’d never truly been in love before Rain. And he had no intentions of ever moving on from it. The thought of ever being without his cute darling made his whole being ache, bone and sinew, marrow and soul. If there really were other lives, he was certain Rain was his and he was Rain’s in all of them, because he couldn’t fathom any other outcome.
And when he thought about it, back to that moment in the rain, staring up at a smile that might as well have been made of light, he swore—he was sure—he’d heard, in a soft, whispery ripple along his spine, the slide-turn-click of fate, and a murmur beneath the patter of the night:
Congratulations. You found him. Now never, ever lose him.