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Some years ago, on the day of their parents’ wedding anniversary, their father brought a gift home for their mother: a necklace, slim and golden in a velvet case. Their mother was busy setting the dinner table, but he insisted on putting it on her immediately. So she sat down at the dining table – places half laid out, still-warm dishes waiting in the kitchen – and kept perfectly still as their father’s coarse hands draped the chain around her neck.
Tianchen recognised that stillness. Prey-animal instinct: freeze, and the danger may yet pass. Provide no reason for an attack.
He was in charge of laying out the chopsticks that evening; he did so pointedly and gracelessly, ignoring his father’s self-satisfied words and his mother’s hasty agreement. Beside him, Tianxi laid out the spoons, glancing distractedly at their parents. All through dinner, the chain sparkled in the lamplight – an irritating flicker in the corner of Tianchen’s vision.
Their mother kept the necklace on the next day, and the next. For weeks afterwards, Tianchen couldn’t look up at her without noticing that glint of gold. Then one evening – after they were caught in the rain, and she’d taken an early shower before dinner – their father returned home to see her without it.
There was the usual shouting, and raised fists, and a yelled command to take Tianxi to their room. Their mother didn’t forget the necklace after that. But two weeks later, the delicate gold chain snapped in their father’s grasp, and they never saw it again. All it left behind was a raw red line around their mother’s throat.
Tianchen never learns the feel of a necklace in his hands. He learns, later, the coarse weight of rope in someone else’s. A neck going through the loop, instead. In the years afterwards, variations: hands around their owner’s throat, a makeshift self-garotte.
On the better days, he and Tianxi would head to town and find ways to spend Qian Jin’s money. Tianxi would linger over racks of accessories, deciding between rings and bracelets – a fox-face here, a paw motif there – but never necklaces.
It isn’t any specific one of these memories, exactly, that comes to mind now. The necklace catches Tianchen’s eye, all the same, gleaming silver against Liu Xiao’s all-black ensemble.
Liu Xiao notices. He always does. “Curious? You can take a closer look, if you want.”
The pendant rests lightly against Liu Xiao’s t-shirt. Two linked rings. Tianchen can’t see the secret of their construction: if they’re free to rotate and slip apart, or welded into place.
In the face of Tianchen’s hesitation, someone else might have picked up the pendant and held it out. Liu Xiao merely waits, smile velvet-soft. Everything feels like a test, with him.
Tianchen knows several different methods of strangulation; knows how a rope rests against a windpipe, what angle serves best to cut off the air. He could pull the chain back, even if not that far. Let it cut its pattern into pale skin. Or pull it forward, quick and sharp, so something snaps.
“I’m fine,” Tianchen mutters.
Liu Xiao lifts the pendant and eyes it carelessly; looks back at Tianchen. “Or would you like to try it on?”
Tianchen’s hands – buried deep and defensive in his pockets – tighten around nothing. Liu Xiao’s necklace is long enough that he wouldn’t have to undo the clasp to take it off. He imagines those slim hands lifting the necklace up, over his head; lowering it around Tianchen’s instead. A coronation. A rabbit in a snare.
Liu Xiao’s hand moves, as if to make good on the offer. Tianchen starts – says, with the hint of an edge: “I don’t need it.”
“Suit yourself,” Liu Xiao replies easily.
The pendant falls back down, bright against black folds of cloth, winking at Tianchen like an unvoiced joke. Tianchen knows that he’ll notice it, now, every time he looks at Liu Xiao.