Chapter Text
Lu Guang is drunk.
This is not, in itself, an unusual occurrence—Lu Guang has a complicated relationship with alcohol the way he has a complicated relationship with most things, which is to say—quietly, and at length, and without discussing it with anyone—but what is unusual is the specific quality of his drunkness tonight. Lu Guang usually never gets drunk so obviously. He is not the cool, distant kind of drunk he sometimes gets, the kind that makes him look like a statue someone left out in the rain. He is the other kind. The soft kind. The kind that has him listing into Cheng Xiaoshi’s side at the karaoke table and staying there, unaware of all their friends chatting amongst each other, a warm press of shoulder and temple that Cheng Xiaoshi had felt like a brand through his shirt.
So Cheng Xiaoshi gets him home.
This is not so simple a task as it sounds. Lu Guang, even drunk, has opinions about being helped. He had stood and announced, with great dignity, that he was fine when asked about it, and then immediately reached for the back of Cheng Xiaoshi’s chair to steady himself. Cheng Xiaoshi had bitten down on a grin and let him. He’d informed Qiao Ling they were heading home, gathered their jackets, and maneuvered Lu Guang out into the night air with the practiced ease of someone who has spent years learning the specific geography of another person’s stubbornness.
Outside, Lu Guang had squinted at the street like it had personally offended him.
“Come here,” Cheng Xiaoshi had said, and hadn’t waited for an answer.
He’d crouched—easy, practiced, like his body already knew the geometry of this before his brain had caught up—and gotten his arms behind Lu Guang's knees. And Lu Guang—
This is the part Cheng Xiaoshi keeps turning over. Even now. Even as he moves through the familiar dark of their studio with the stairs still ahead of him and Lu Guang’s breath warm at his throat.
Lu Guang had gone easily.
No protest. No sharp exhale through his nose, the one that meant I’m fine, stop fussing. No hand pressed flat to Cheng Xiaoshi’s chest in quiet, dignified refusal. He’d just—gone. Yielded, completely, like the decision had already been made somewhere below language. Let himself be lifted. Let himself be carried. His arms had come up slow and loose and settled around Cheng Xiaoshi’s neck with a kind of unhurried trust that Cheng Xiaoshi is still not entirely sure what to do with.
Lu Guang is not a small man. He is lean and long-limbed, built like something elegant and slightly impractical, all clean lines and careful proportions, and he is not small, and Cheng Xiaoshi feels the full real weight of him—solid, warm, present in a way that goes past physical and lands somewhere deeper, somewhere that pulls tight in the center of his chest and stays there. He adjusts his grip on the backs of Lu Guang’s thighs, hitching him higher, fingers curling in against warm fabric, and Lu Guang makes a low sound at the shift—barely a sound at all, really, more like a breath that shaped itself into something—and tucks himself further in, chin dropping to Cheng Xiaoshi’s shoulder. His forehead nosing, slow and deliberate, into the side of his neck.
Like he is trying to reduce the distance between them to nothing.
Like he is trying to disappear into him.
Cheng Xiaoshi had stood in the street with Lu Guang in his arms and had not moved for one moment that he will not be able to account for later. Then he started walking.
He now carries him the whole way up the stairs.
By the time they reach the bedroom, Cheng Xiaoshi’s arms are burning—the good kind, the satisfying kind, the kind that comes from carrying something worth carrying—and Lu Guang has gone very quiet against him. Not asleep. He can tell, because Lu Guang’s fingers are still moving. Slow and absent, tracing something at the nape of Cheng Xiaoshi’s neck, threading through the ends of his hair like he is following a path he knows by heart.
This, too, is a thing Cheng Xiaoshi has noticed.
Has been noticing, actually, for longer than he will comfortably admit to himself. The way Lu Guang’s hands find their way to his hair with a frequency that cannot be accounted for by accident—during briefings, during meals, during any quiet moment Lu Guang can locate an excuse for. He reaches over and cards through it with the kind of careful, unhurried attention he gives almost nothing else. Lu Guang touches Cheng Xiaoshi’s hair the way other people return to things they have already memorized—not for new information. For the comfort of the familiar weight of it. For the simple fact of having it in his hands.
Cheng Xiaoshi has grown it out a bit more than usual, these past few months.
He has not examined his reasons for this too closely.
He sets Lu Guang down beside the bunk beds—or tries to. He lowers him, careful, gets his feet to the floor, steps back. And Lu Guang stands there blinking up at him with an expression of such profound indignation that something in Cheng Xiaoshi’s chest cracks open a little. He looks petulant. Pouty, in a way he would flatly deny in any sober moment—eyebrows drawn together, mouth pressed into something that is doing a very poor job of passing itself off as neutral. Like Cheng Xiaoshi has personally wronged him by putting him down. Like the audacity of it.
Cheng Xiaoshi laughs. He can’t help it.
It comes out warm and low, and he watches Lu Guang’s face move through it in real time—indignance shading into something softer, something that looks almost helpless, like he cannot manage to stay annoyed when Cheng Xiaoshi is laughing at him. Like that particular sound disarms him against his will. Lu Guang’s mouth does something complicated. He huffs—a very put-upon sound—
—and then staggers forward and presses his face into Cheng Xiaoshi’s neck.
He’s not graceful about it. It’s a small stumble, the kind that brings Cheng Xiaoshi’s hands up automatically, catching him around the waist before the thought has fully formed. But then Lu Guang is settled—nose tucked into the fabric of his shirt, forehead warm against his throat—and he makes a sound that Cheng Xiaoshi feels more than hears. Something low and content. Cat-like is the only word for it that appears in Cheng Xiaoshi’s mind, and then he nuzzles—he actually nuzzles, unhurried and unashamed, like he has entirely forgotten what shame is, which maybe, tonight, he has—into the curve of Cheng Xiaoshi’s throat.
Cheng Xiaoshi stands very still.
His hands at Lu Guang’s waist tighten. Just slightly. He cannot help this—Lu Guang’s waist is something Cheng Xiaoshi has long filed under do not examine and left there, a door he has been very careful not to open, but it is very present right now. The warmth of it under his palms. The way his fingers span across it almost entirely. Lu Guang is murmuring something into his shirt, syllables soft and blurred at the edges, and Cheng Xiaoshi tilts his head and tries to catch it.
“—stay—” is what he finally makes out. Or his name. Or don’t go. The words are losing their shape, but Lu Guang’s fingers have found the hem of his shirt and are curling into it, and that, at least, is perfectly clear.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cheng Xiaoshi says.
It comes out quieter than he means it to. He hadn’t meant it to come out like that—like something confessed. He clears his throat.
“Hey. Look at me.”
Lu Guang tips his head back.
And there it is—that face. The one Cheng Xiaoshi carries around with him everywhere he goes without fully meaning to, but up close now, and soft, and slightly unfocused, looking up at him with dark eyes that have none of their usual careful distance in them. All the deliberate neutrality, gone. Just—Lu Guang. The real shape of him, unguarded and a little undone, and Cheng Xiaoshi has the sudden vertiginous sense that he is seeing something he was never supposed to see this clearly.
His chest does something complicated.
“Hi,” he says stupidly.
Lu Guang blinks at him. Then—so slowly it almost doesn’t happen—the corner of his mouth curves.
“Hi,” he says back.
His voice is rougher than usual. Low and unhurried, like he has set down something heavy and is in no rush to pick it back up. Cheng Xiaoshi thinks about how few people have ever heard Lu Guang sound like this—unguarded, soft at the edges, the careful architecture of him momentarily off—and feels something move through him that might be possessive if he looked at it directly.
He doesn’t look at it directly.
“You’re very drunk,” he says instead.
“I’m aware,” says Lu Guang, with enormous dignity, and then lists sideways.
Cheng Xiaoshi catches him. This is—the thing is, this is easy. This has always been easy, in a way that he has never let himself think about too carefully. Catching Lu Guang. Righting him. Wrapping an arm around his middle more firmly this time and pulling him back in. Lu Guang weighs what he weighs and Cheng Xiaoshi has always had good hands—steady hands, hands that know where to go—and there is something deeply, almost embarrassingly satisfying about the way Lu Guang accepts it. Lets himself be pulled. Lets himself be held. The way he tips back into Cheng Xiaoshi’s space like that is simply where he belongs, like it requires no negotiation at all.
Cheng Xiaoshi thinks, with a clarity that arrives all at once and lands hard, he likes Lu Guang like this, open and unguarded. Not just tonight. He has been liking this for a while. He has been liking this, probably, for longer than tonight.
“Okay,” he breathes, instead of any of that. “Up you go.”
He doesn’t think about it too hard. He just does it—gets his hands on Lu Guang and tips the balance, easy and certain, turning him and walking him backward until his knees hit the lower bunk. Lu Guang goes with it, hands fisting in Cheng Xiaoshi’s shirt, and looks up at him again with that same expression—that unguarded, helpless look, the one that keeps happening to his face tonight, the one Cheng Xiaoshi is running out of places to put—as Cheng Xiaoshi sits him down on the edge of the bed.
Then he drops to his knees.
It’s practical. It’s just to get his shoes off, that’s all it is, and he tells himself this while he works the laces loose with steady hands, while Lu Guang sits very still above him and says nothing. One shoe. Then the other. He sets them aside. He looks up.
Lu Guang is already looking at him.
There is something about being looked at by Lu Guang—really looked at, the full weight of his attention, undiluted by distance or deflection—that has always done something to Cheng Xiaoshi’s ability to think in straight lines. He has gotten better at tolerating it over the years. He has learned to hold still under it. But Lu Guang is looking at him now from very close, from above, soft-eyed and slightly wrecked and so unguarded it almost hurts to see, and Cheng Xiaoshi has just enough time to think oh, this is going to be a problem—
Lu Guang reaches down and grasps him by the collar.
The pull is not strong. His grip is not particularly steady tonight, fingers loose in the fabric, more a request than a demand. But Cheng Xiaoshi follows it—that’s the thing, that’s what he’ll think about later, that he follows it without hesitation, without question, like his body had already decided—leans up toward him, and Lu Guang’s other hand comes up slow and finds the back of his neck.
The kiss, when it happens, is very soft.
Lu Guang kisses the way he does everything he actually means—carefully, and with his full attention, like he is being deliberate about this in the same way he is deliberate about everything that matters to him. Cheng Xiaoshi feels it move through him in pieces—in his sternum first, a low bright ache, and then in his hands where they’ve come up without his permission and braced against the mattress on either side of Lu Guang’s hips. In his knees where they press into the floor. He is kneeling in front of Lu Guang and the thought arrives, unhelpfully, that there is nowhere else he would rather be.
It’s slow. A little clumsy—Lu Guang misses, slightly, on the first try, lips catching the corner of Cheng Xiaoshi’s mouth before he tilts his head and adjusts, and it should be funny, probably, it should at least be a little funny, and it isn’t. It isn’t even close to funny. It just feels like—
Like something Cheng Xiaoshi has been waiting for without knowing he was waiting. Like a door he had assumed was locked that turns out to have been open the whole time.
He kisses back.
He keeps it gentle. Keeps his hands flat to the mattress, keeps his weight on his own knees, does not let himself lean in the way he wants to—the want is very present, vivid and immediate, the urge to surge forward and press Lu Guang back against the mattress and find out how much of himself Lu Guang is willing to give him tonight—but he holds it. Holds himself careful. This is not the night for that. Lu Guang makes a small sound against his mouth—soft, pleased, a little helpless—and his fingers curl tighter at Cheng Xiaoshi’s nape, pulling, and Cheng Xiaoshi follows the pull but doesn’t deepen it, just stays close, just breathes him in.
Lu Guang tries. Of course he tries—a slight increase in pressure, chin tipping up, chasing something warmer, something more, and Cheng Xiaoshi feels the specific quality of that wanting and has to brace himself against it for a moment.
He pulls back. Just slightly.
He rests his forehead against Lu Guang’s, and Lu Guang exhales—a small, unsteady sound—and Cheng Xiaoshi stays there, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath, close enough that it barely counts as not kissing him.
“You’re drunk,” he says again. Very soft. Right there, foreheads still touching, close enough that it barely counts as having pulled away at all.
Lu Guang makes an aggrieved noise.
“I know what I want,” he says, but it slurs slightly at the end, whhhant, and Cheng Xiaoshi pulls back just enough to look at him, shifting his weight onto his legs. Lu Guang’s mouth is red. His gray eyes are heavy-lidded. He looks like something Cheng Xiaoshi has to be very careful about, right now, for both of them—like something precious and slightly dangerous, like a thing that could undo him, could undo the both of them, if he isn’t paying attention.
He is paying attention.
“I know you do,” Cheng Xiaoshi says, because he does. Because it has been obvious for longer than tonight—in the way Lu Guang gravitates toward him, in the way his hands always find their way back, in the particular quality of attention Lu Guang has always given him that Cheng Xiaoshi had spent years carefully not naming. The way Lu Guang loves him—wholly, quietly, in every way except out loud. “But not tonight.”
A pause. Lu Guang looks at him—actually looks, the way he does when he’s reading a photograph, assembling the past out of pieces, patient and precise. Then he exhales. The tension goes out of him slow as a tide pulling back from shore, and he tips his head forward, forehead coming to rest against Cheng Xiaoshi’s collarbone. His hand slides from the nape of Cheng Xiaoshi’s neck, dragging down the line of his chest, and drops away.
“Annoying,” says Lu Guang. There is no heat in it whatsoever.
Cheng Xiaoshi laughs—can’t help it, it comes out warm and bright—and presses a kiss to the corner of his jaw. Lu Guang goes very still. So Cheng Xiaoshi does it again—his cheekbone, slow and deliberate, feeling the warmth of his skin against his mouth. Then his temple, because apparently this is who he is now, apparently he has entirely lost the thread of self-restraint, and he stays there a moment—nose brushing into Lu Guang’s hair, mouth soft at his temple, breathing him in—and thinks about how long he has wanted to do exactly this and had no language for it.
Lu Guang shivers.
It moves through him all at once, a fine tremor, and Cheng Xiaoshi feels it under his hands and does not move away. He stays close. He lets Lu Guang feel that he is staying.
“Cheng Xiaoshi,” Lu Guang says, after a moment. Very quietly. Like he is being serious about something important.
Cheng Xiaoshi pulls back just enough to see his face. “...Yeah?”
“Come here.” Lu Guang’s hand rises—slow, a little searching—and finds the side of Cheng Xiaoshi’s head. His fingers comb in, careful, and Cheng Xiaoshi feels the tie of his ponytail catch and slip loose, feels his hair fall, and Lu Guang’s hand moves through it with a kind of reverence that does something immediate and devastating to Cheng Xiaoshi’s ability to remain composed. His eyes have gone soft and wondering, fixed on the dark strands between his fingers like he has found something he was not expecting to find.
“It’s so much longer now,” he says, wonder in his voice, plain as anything. Almost like he forgot Cheng Xiaoshi was a person and became briefly occupied with this specific fact about him.
Cheng Xiaoshi wants to pull him close and kiss him until he forgets his own name.
“Little bit,” is what he says instead.
“Yeah, I noticed.” Lu Guang’s fingers move through it, slow, methodical. Like he is cataloguing. Like he is memorizing. Like he intends to keep this. “I noticed a long time ago.”
And it sounds, unmistakably, like he is speaking of something else entirely.
Cheng Xiaoshi swallows. He lowers himself onto the bunk beside Lu Guang—careful, settling his weight gradually—and Lu Guang shifts to make room without being asked, rolling toward him, lying down, and the hand in Cheng Xiaoshi’s hair does not stop. It simply continues, as if it had never considered stopping, as if this is just where his hand lives now. Cheng Xiaoshi stares at the wall Lu Guang is nearly pressed against, because the bunk is small and built for one person and they are making it work through sheer proximity, and he thinks that he is very possibly not going to survive this night in any meaningful sense.
“You always notice everything,” he says, because he has to say something.
“Not everything.” Lu Guang sounds thoughtful. A pause, unhurried, like he is deciding something. Then, quietly—like a confession he is choosing to let slip on purpose, like he has been holding it at arm’s length and has decided, tonight, to set it down, “Just you.”
The room is very quiet.
Cheng Xiaoshi stares at the wall and does not move and thinks about this. About the specific weight of it. About what it means to be the thing someone notices, only and entirely, when that someone is Lu Guang who notices everything and says almost none of it.
Not for the first time tonight, he wants to gather him up and kiss him breathless and pull out every word Lu Guang keeps folded inside himself.
“Lu Guang,” he starts.
“En?”
“You are severely drunk,” is what he ends up saying.
“Yeah,” Lu Guang agrees, with complete serenity. His fingers are still moving, slow and tender, pulling through the length of hair at Cheng Xiaoshi’s temple like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it. “But I still mean it.”
Cheng Xiaoshi turns his head.
Lu Guang is very close—they are sharing a pillow, when did that happen, it has apparently already happened—eyes nearly shut, long lashes low against his cheek. But he is still looking. Still watching Cheng Xiaoshi with that quiet, certain steadiness that is the most fundamentally Lu Guang thing about him, the part of him that does not waver, the part that has always known exactly what it means and chosen it anyway.
Cheng Xiaoshi reaches out and puts his arm around Lu Guang’s waist.
He pulls him in. Close, and then closer, until Lu Guang is tucked between the wall and the warmth of him, until there is no more distance left to close. Lu Guang comes without resistance—he always does, tonight, every time, and Cheng Xiaoshi thinks he will be turning that fact over for a long time after this. He spreads his hand across the curve of Lu Guang’s back, fingers curling slightly in, and then—without entirely deciding to—slides beneath the hem of his shirt. Just his palm. Just the warmth of skin against skin, tracing the smooth lines of his back, slow and without destination.
Lu Guang’s breath goes soft.
It’s barely perceptible. Just a small quieting, a settling, like something in him has been held at a slight tension all evening and has only now been permitted to release. He tips forward, almost imperceptible—like a plant leaning toward light, Cheng Xiaoshi thinks, and the tenderness of it is almost more than he knows what to do with.
“Hi,” Cheng Xiaoshi says for the second time tonight.
Lu Guang makes a sound that might be a laugh. “You said that already.”
“Seemed like it still applied.”
A pause.
Then Lu Guang presses his forehead to Cheng Xiaoshi’s collarbone. Not a lean, not a drift—deliberate, full, like he has chosen this exact place and intends to stay in it. He exhales, long and slow, and Cheng Xiaoshi feels it move through him—the last of the night going out of him, the last of whatever he’d been holding. His hand slides from Cheng Xiaoshi’s hair, travels down, comes to rest flat against his chest. Over his heart. Lu Guang’s palm is warm. He can feel his own heartbeat against it, which feels, right now, like an exposure he doesn’t mind at all.
Lu Guang stays there. Feeling it. Saying nothing.
Then, barely a breath, “Stay.”
Clear this time. Quiet, but clear—not the blurred syllables from earlier, not the words losing their shape at the edges. This one he means all the way through, and Cheng Xiaoshi hears it perfectly.
He tightens his arm. Pulls Lu Guang in another fraction, until there is truly nowhere left to go, until Lu Guang is as close as he can be and Cheng Xiaoshi has him, fully, both arms now, the whole warm weight of him.
“I’m already here,” he breathes.
He should, by any reasonable accounting, go up to the top bunk. He knows this. He has a perfectly serviceable sleeping arrangement available while Lu Guang occupies his bunk, and he is aware—fully, clearly aware—of all the reasons why climbing the ladder and going to sleep in the free bed is the sensible and self-preserving thing to do.
He does not do this.
He stays.
He reaches back and turns off the lamp, and the room goes dark all at once, and Lu Guang makes an immediate and instinctive grab for him—hand fisting in the front of his shirt, pulling, the same way he’d pulled earlier, and Cheng Xiaoshi goes. Of course he goes. He gathers Lu Guang in against him and Lu Guang tucks himself in so cleanly, so completely—head against Cheng Xiaoshi’s chest, their legs tangling together without negotiation, one hand still curled in the fabric over his ribs—that Cheng Xiaoshi feels something lurch in his chest. A sudden, certain conviction that this is not the first time Lu Guang has thought about this. He has imagined it. Has wanted it, the specific shape of it, for longer than tonight. For longer, possibly, than even Cheng Xiaoshi had known to notice. The way he fits—the way he settles, like something slotting into a place it was made for—does not feel like improvisation.
Cheng Xiaoshi wraps his arm around him. Pulls him close and settles his hand at the small of his back, and Lu Guang makes that sound again—low, involuntary, the content one, the one that Cheng Xiaoshi already knows is going to live in him permanently, take up residence somewhere behind his ribcage and stay there.
“Good?” he asks.
A brief pause. “...Yeah.”
Cheng Xiaoshi presses his mouth to the crown of Lu Guang’s head.
Lu Guang goes very still. Then, slowly, he curls closer—arm sliding further around Cheng Xiaoshi’s middle, pulling in, holding on. Clinging, is the only honest word for it. Lu Guang, who is careful and composed and precise, who measures everything he gives like he is always aware of the cost—Lu Guang is clinging to him in the dark, and Cheng Xiaoshi holds him and feels something fill up the whole shape of his chest, something that presses against the inside of his ribs like it is too large for the space available.
It is love. He knows it is love. But it is also something that does not have a name yet, or maybe the name exists and he has just never needed it before—something vast and steady, something that has been growing in him quietly for so long that he cannot locate where it began, cannot find the edge of it. It is the specific tenderness of knowing someone’s weight. Of knowing which sounds they make when they finally let themselves rest. Of having memorized, without meaning to, the exact geography of another person—how they move, what they need, where they go soft—and finding that the memorization was not a burden but a gift he had been giving himself all along, without knowing.
He holds Lu Guang and breathes.
Lu Guang murmurs his name into his shirt. Half-asleep, voice gone thick and slow, the edges of words dissolving.
“Lu Guang,” Cheng Xiaoshi says back.
“Mm. A’Shi...”
The name, like that—shortened, soft, the particular way Lu Guang says it when his guard is entirely down—moves through him like something warm. He presses another kiss to Lu Guang’s head just because he can, and then stays there a moment, nose buried in his hair.
“Go to sleep, A’Guang.”
A long quiet. The studio settles around them, the small sounds of the building, the street outside, the city doing what cities do in the dark. Ordinary sounds. The whole world continuing at a comfortable distance.
Then, barely, “Don’t go.”
It is almost not words anymore. Just breath, shaped into a request. Lu Guang sounds faintly desperate with it, as though Cheng Xiaoshi is already leaving, as though the distance is already happening, even though Cheng Xiaoshi has not moved and does not intend to.
He tightens his arm. Presses his nose further into Lu Guang’s hair and stays exactly where he is.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, something he will say as many times as it takes. “I told you that already.”
Lu Guang doesn’t answer. But his hand—still loosely fisted in Cheng Xiaoshi’s shirt—presses in. Just slightly. Just enough.
Outside, the city does what cities do. Inside the room, in the bottom bunk of a set of beds they have long since been occupying and never once discussed changing, Cheng Xiaoshi holds Lu Guang and listens to his breathing slow.
He tracks the moment it evens out. Goes deep and unhurried, the particular rhythm of real sleep, the kind Lu Guang only reaches when he has finally stopped holding himself at attention. Lu Guang sleeps the way he does everything he actually allows himself—completely, once the permission is granted—and Cheng Xiaoshi lies in the dark and feels him breathe and thinks, with the slow clarity that only arrives when the rest of the world has gone quiet, that he has been here for a long time already. Not in this bunk. Not exactly. But here—in this specific orientation toward Lu Guang, this particular gravitational pull, this thing he has been carefully not calling what it is.
Home stopped being a place and became a person somewhere along the way. He’s not sure when. Maybe he noticed and decided not too look at it too closely, to give it space to exist without ruining anything between them, the way he does with so many things that have to do with Lu Guang. Maybe that was wrong of him. Maybe it was just what he needed to do until he didn’t need to anymore.
Tomorrow, Lu Guang will have a headache. Tomorrow they will probably have to sit across from each other in the kitchen and find words for this territory they have been circling for longer than either of them has been willing to admit—really talk, the way they are often bad at and sometimes manage anyway, haltingly, imprecisely, more honestly than is entirely comfortable for either of them. Tomorrow there will be daylight, and sobriety, and the particular vulnerability of things said in the dark that still need to be meant in the morning.
Tomorrow, he decides. Tonight, Cheng Xiaoshi closes his eyes.
He realizes, as he does, that he is clinging. Both arms, all the way in, Lu Guang tucked up under his chin like he was made to be carried—like this is just the natural conclusion of the night, like Cheng Xiaoshi’s body has arrived somewhere it intended to go all along. He had thought he was being careful. He had thought he was being restrained, measured, keeping himself at a reasonable distance even while he was holding Lu Guang in a single bunk that was not built for two people.
He is not being restrained at all. He is not being careful even slightly.
He decides, in the warm dark with Lu Guang’s hair against his mouth and his own heartbeat finally beginning to slow, that this is okay. That he is allowed to have this—allowed to want it, which is a thought he is still getting accustomed to, still finding the edges of. Lu Guang is here on purpose. Lu Guang had pulled him in, in the dark, had fisted his hand in his shirt and held on, and I noticed a long time ago. Just you is not the kind of thing that gets unsaid in the morning. It is not the kind of thing that dissolves with sobriety. Cheng Xiaoshi knows Lu Guang. He knows the difference between what Lu Guang says when he doesn’t mean it and what Lu Guang says when he means it so much he can barely get it out.
That was the second kind.
They will find their way to whatever comes next. They always do. They always have—through every strange and impossible thing that has happened to them, through every moment that should have broken the thread and didn’t, they have always found their way back to each other and forward again. This is what they are. This specific constellation of two people who would do anything for each other, who have done anything for each other, repeatedly, without keeping score, without needing to keep score.
He pulls Lu Guang closer until he cannot tell where Lu Guang begins and Cheng Xiaoshi ends. Just because he can. His breathing eventually slows to match.
He does not go anywhere.