Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Focus. You’re gonna kill us all.”

Wen Kexing jerks the steering wheel to the left, and Zhou Zishu breathes again, until the next time their car scrapes dangerously close to the flank of the bridge, less than twelve inches from tearing the side of the vehicle into shreds and smearing Zhou Zishu like raw pizza dough against concrete.

“Stop. You’re doing it again. Switch into a middle lane if you’re going to keep veering right like that.”

“You know I’ve driven across the Bay Bridge since I was seventeen, yeah?” Wen Kexing fidgets in the driver’s seat.

“It’s the way he leans when he sits,” Gu Xiang supplies from behind them. “His weight distribution is off.”

“One year of college and you start saying things like ‘weight distribution.’ Just say I sit funny.”

“You sit funny.” 

The skin of the bay below them gleams in gunmetal; textured like supple, oiled leather, that stretches taut over the pregnant belly of the earth. The horizon curves suggestively if Zhou Zishu pays attention. He doesn’t, not really. He’s looking at Wen Kexing, who’s now overcompensating for his posture by slouching all the way against the left side of the car. His left elbow is propped up on the lip of the window, knuckle in his mouth, clacking his top front teeth against the gray tungsten on his ring finger. For a moment Zhou Zishu forgets all about dying like a dab of peanut butter on this loud, clanging bridge, watching him.

And it’s really loud. The sound of rubber wheels going over metal grates at sixty nags like a buzzing hive of hornets, stinging his ears. Zhou Zishu almost misses the quiet voice behind him, the crinkle of plastic packaging.

“Candy?”

Liu Qianqiao’s hand surfaces between his and Wen Kexing’s seat. She’s holding out a bright green bag of guava hard candy, half-full. The husks of the other half are littered all over his precious car—a secondhand Korean SUV, that he’d shelled out his own hard-earned money for after the owner of his last, fancy ride came back for the vehicle. He declines her offer. He will not enable a further mess. 

Wen Kexing takes one of the candies. He scrapes his teeth over the wrapper to force out the sweet inside and tosses the emptied packaging good-naturedly next to the cup holder. The roaring AC immediately whips it away and back into the abyss, depositing it somewhere on Zhang Chengling’s sleeping body, flopped over the entire third row of seats. 

Zhou Zishu had gotten an eight-seater with three things in mind. One: to replace the shitty diesel dump that Wen Kexing sometimes mushed around like a pneumonic malamute for deliveries. Two: to theoretically fit Gu Xiang’s piles of belongings between taking her from and to school in the summer and fall, though he belatedly realized that she barely had any belongings at all--there was no room for excess anything, when she practically lived in a shoebox for all her life. 

And three: on the off-chance that they would occasionally have enough reason to pile eight people to go anywhere. Zhou Zishu hasn’t gotten there yet, but he’s close. There are supposed to be six people in here today. They’re going to pick up the last. 

“Someone call Xiao-Xie and tell him we’re ten minutes away,” Wen Kexing yells, as they roll off the metal grates and onto blissful asphalt. 

Liu Qianqiao is the one who calls. Zhou Zishu huffs when she addresses their last passenger as “Xie Wang,” and hears Wen Kexing’s snicker next to him. She’s the only one to take that self-bestowed title seriously. Everyone else has organically demoted him to Xiao-Xie in telepathic consensus. Liu Qianqiao hangs up. 

“He wants us to go up,” she says. “He’s got a bunch of take out boxes that needs to go.”

Wen Kexing groans. “This guy never stops being annoying. Why does he even have them?”

“I think they were in his car. The one that got totaled?”

As they ease off the bridge and stream into Oakland, the landscape solidifies from cerulean sea to the gray rust of industrial, international trade. They slide along the port to get to the Chinatown on this side of the bay, and all around are menageries of shipping container cranes, towering and stoic, like hollow, steel safari animals, frozen in fright. Zhou Zishu runs the itinerary for the day through his head again. He wonders if the farm would have cows. 

They park a few blocks away, usher out Gu Xiang and Chengling with ten dollars to waste on sugar water at one of the dime-a-dozen boba tea shops littering the neighborhood, and follow the GPS on Wen Kexing’s phone to find Xiao-Xie’s apartment building. It’s a gray morning, and the storefront signages are bleached into desaturation. Zhou Zishu takes in the familiar skin of drab and ashiness to the surroundings: the navy bubble jackets and zipped-up red microfleece; the harsh overlay of fresh, nubile murals and Chinese-motifed road signs over dull, chipping stucco and cement. He’s been in this country for a year and the contrast still confuses him. Why bother? 

Xiao-Xie lives with two very scary women. The one with the ponytail and plaid immediately starts flirting with Liu Qianqiao, and the one with the bangs and exposed Victoria’s Secret rounds on Zhou Zishu like he’s a fresh steam pan of oysters at a Vegas buffet. Zhou Zishu rolls his eyes at the way Wen Kexing pointedly grabs his waist to steer him away, and at the protective eye Wen Kexing keeps on Liu Qianqiao as Ponytail asks her what she’s doing later. 

It’s not the first time he’s done this, whenever someone shows interest in her under his watch. The first time Zhou Zishu observed this phenomenon was when they spent a Saturday covered in rocky road ice cream drips in a park, as a Texan tourist in jorts tried to ni-hao her over the boom of someone’s Bose blasting euphoric Bill Withers. Too secure in Wen Kexing’s obsession with him to be jealous but greedy enough to be nosy, Zhou Zishu’d asked Wen Kexing why he hovered over a full-grown woman like that. Wen Kexing had put on a stupid grin at the question, and waited until Liu Qianqiao walked off with a frisbee and Chengling in tow before indulging Zhou Zishu with an answer—a long answer, that Wen Kexing had to quickly wrap up in one breath as Chengling limped back somehow with a bruise on his shin, playing a sport that only required arms. 

He was sixteen the first time the head chef taught him how to cut up a chicken—no, this is relevant, A-Xu, shut up and listen—and had immediately sliced his hand to the bone on an appropriately-named boning knife. Luo Fumeng was lured in by his howls, a clean kitchen rag was wrapped around his carnage, and he’s squashed into the ER room at SF General, regretting dropping out of school and poetry slams for this shit job. Twelve stitches and some sluggish ibuprofen later and he’s being ushered out again into the warm pee, applesauce, and antiseptic smell of a hospital hallway. And that’s when he and Luo Fumeng saw her. 

A young woman skimming twenty-four at best, a fat white bandage wrapped around the left side of her head, meekly silent at the receptionist’s desk as a blonde nurse in pink cat scrubs chastised that she could not be discharged if someone wasn’t there to pick her up in her condition. Wen Kexing had been moaning let’s go Luo-yi let’s go oh my god, but Luo Fumeng had leashed him in place by the back of the apron he’d forgotten to take off. Her hands were truly full, that day—dealing with a sulking, sutured teenager, ignoring a bombardment of voicemails about a shortage of sauce cups from her staff, and counting every minute before she needed to pick up Gu Xiang from kindergarten. Yet despite all this she walked up to the girl, and asked if she was okay in Cantonese.

“I think so?” The young woman looked at her, confused. 

The nurse immediately assumed they were together, and reprimanded the girl, “See? What’s this talk about having no relatives? They’re right here.” And then to Luo Fumeng she said sympathetically, “Keep an eye on her, the CT scans looked pretty bad, but she didn’t want to stay longer without insurance. So fingers crossed that the amnesia wears off.”

Outside the hospital, the girl studied Luo Fumeng and Wen Kexing’s faces, as if to cross-examine their phenotypes with her own. 

“We’re not your family,” Wen Kexing piped. “What, you got bonked in the head or something?”

Luo Fumeng called him a brat and to get in the car and call Gu Xiang’s teacher. He watched the two women talk some more in the parking lot as he reassured Ms. Audrey Lin in room 1B that yes, A-Xiang—Serena—is very much loved, but they will once again be late. And then the girl walked with Luo Fumeng towards him and parked herself into the right backseat.

That evening, they sat at the back of the banquet hall, and laid out everything in the girl’s wallet like puzzle pieces on the red tablecloth. It was the best they could do as she’d lost her phone and all the contacts in it. Gu Xiang wiggled in Wen Kexing’s lap as she tried to lunge at a colorful coffee stamp card with her Go-Gurt sticky hands, two more smudged blue strawberries until the free tenth cup. The address of the shop was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

The Californian driver’s license established the young woman’s residency, her name, and that she’s an organ donor. The food stamps card alluded that she probably had student loans. The smattering of gift cards revealed what kinds of holiday gifts she got. And then—a Harvard ID, red and gray. 

“What did you study?” Luo Fumeng looked at the newly-named Liu Qianqiao.

“J.D in Law and Social Change, class of 2006,” she said like clockwork, suddenly unfogged and surprising herself. She looked hardly out of undergrad, but apparently had a graduate jewel in her hand. 

“Me too. Class of 1994.” And all paid-for by Luo Fumeng’ estranged family, who could not fathom why she threw away the prestige to open up a restaurant that had her graying by thirty-five. 

Days later, they found out through word of mouth in the tight-knit, tightly-wound community, that a furious wife on the other side of the city had attacked the girl her husband was having an affair with, knocking her repeatedly in the head with a can of peaches from her shopping bag when she saw the girl leaving her house. 

Strangely enough, no one had turned up to ask after the girl’s whereabouts, and no one had stepped forth as family or friends. And since Qiaoqiao didn’t have anything better to do with herself after learning her own sob story she’d just stuck around as a paralegal with her stupid fancy degree. Okay A-Xu they’re coming back you can ask questions later, also you’re cute when you get jealous. What the hell happened to Chengling’s leg?

The amount of boxes that Xiao-Xie has hoarded away in his room for inexplicable reasons makes Wen Kexing’s mouth contort into a scowl. Xiao-Xie says that they’d been living in his car before this, he just forgot to restock them after the Sysco meeting. And then his car got totaled on the 101 North and that’s why they’re picking him up to begin with and also it made the news remember? The one that got hit by the minivan full of candles shaped like hands? 

The boxes are stuffed into the trunk, and Chengling is made to sit vertically so that their new passenger can reluctantly squeeze into the back with him. It’s already nine-thirty in the morning. They’re going to be late. 

“Call your farmer boyfriend and tell him we’re gonna be late,” Wen Kexing tosses behind at Gu Xiang. 

Gu Xiang flails like a fish in a frying pan. “He’s not—it’s his uncle’s farm! He just hangs out there during summers!”

Zhou Zishu enters the address on their GPS. It’s forty-five minutes to Petaluma. “Just fifteen minutes late,” he supplies. 

This whole idea had been Luo Fumeng’s, who had long been looking for an opportunity to find a more local wholesaler to source from. Conveniently the boy Gu Xiang met in college turned out to have spent his childhood summers playing camp at his uncle’s vegetable farm just north of the Marin, so a week and a half after school let off, and they’re driving up to check out the place and haggle out a contract.The swirling geography of the ride there, the carousel-spin of industry, sea, and rolling yellow hills, makes even being a passenger fun, though what Zhou Zishu really want to do is to take the steering wheel himself. Wen Kexing is driving too close to the edge again. More green candy wrappers blow towards the back of the car. While Zhou Zishu was away, the interior experienced a nightmarish flood of guava and White Rabbit wrappers, and sticky green apple residue all over the cup holder. The floor swims in mile-long CVS receipts for concerning quantities of peanut m&m’s. Zhou Zishu will admit he’s not anywhere close to being a germaphobe, but this is too much, if not also grudgingly predictable—Wen Kexing can be considered neat, except when it comes to anything of Zhou Zishu’s. He likes to wrinkle Zhou Zishu’s shirts and track water into his car, make a mess on his stomach and between his legs and suck copious disorderly bruises on the base of his neck. If Zhou Zishu gives him a tattoo gun for Christmas he’s sure Wen Kexing will graffiti all over his body, would shoot bullets of ink under his skin in every major and minor key of A-Xu that he can barely carry a tune to. 

The AC gets turned up twice. The temperature outside is tangible in the oversaturation of colors. The trees are too green, the lake they just drove past too blue, the parched hills too yellow. Or maybe Zhou Zishu is just so used to the grayscale of pavement and glass that his eyes are struggling to adjust. And then Wen Kexing pulls into a mile-long driveway and parks at the gravelly end of it and opens the door and suddenly Zhou Zishu’s nose is needing to adjust as well. It smells like hot dust and animal shit, and the vaguely sweet, fishy pungence of organic fertilizer that he remembers from his first time at a home improvement store in the city, putting a fern into his shopping cart for the new apartment he and Wen Kexing had just signed a lease for. 

No one else comments on it, so he doesn’t, as well. Their group of six suspends in the stink for a minute as Wen Kexing squints and scrolls through his contact list for the farmer to call. The hollow sucking sound of an emptied boba cup from one of the kids makes Zhou Zishu feel parched. Then there’s a scratch of footsteps from up the dirt road, and a boy no older than ten stops in front of them, muddy crocs on his feet and a basket of eggs on his elbow.

“You’re the restaurant people?” He asks in English.

Wen Kexing goes to grab the boy’s cheek, “you’re a little rude,” and the boy ducks away from him like a feral yard chicken.

“Uncle’s been waiting forever.” And he’s off on the way he came from, clearly expecting to be followed but not looking back. 

They round the row of ungroomed hedges, tripping on potholes. Zhou Zishu looks at the way Wen Kexing is examining the ground. “What are you thinking about?”

“About what to do if they don’t deliver. How I’m going to move stock with a dolly on this surface if it turns out they don’t have another way to drive in closer.”

An old man comes to greet them—the Fan Huaikong they’re looking for, who looks like a children’s book cartoon frog in a holey Old Navy long sleeve and straw hat. He takes the basket of eggs from the boy and ushers him away in what sounds like Taiwanese. Turning towards the group before him he switches to Mandarin, to Zhou Zishu’s relief—“You’re the folks Weining told me about? Come, let’s get you all out of the sun. Why are you all wearing long pants?”

“Ah.” Wen Kexing looks down at his jeans. “I always forget it’s hot outside of the city.”

Fan Huaikong walks them along the edge of his fifteen acres to the rundown farmhouse tucked into the edge of a grove of trees, flitting all over Gu Xiang and unleashing too many questions about school and hobbies and her precise opinions of his nephew on her. From this distance the rows of crops at the other end of the property are only shades of green strips, sporadically broken up by bands of flowers. There’s a handful of figures weaving along the warp of the landscape, likely workers. Between the agricultural land and them is half a football field of tall green hay, quivering in the breeze like fur on the back of a retriever. Zhou Zishu takes a dozen pictures and sends them on Wechat to Han Ying. 

Fan Huaikong sits them on the patio. “I’ll bring out some cold drinks, make yourselves comfortable! And Weining will join us later. He’s weeding carrots with the other boys right now.” 

Waiting with their mouths open while an old guy who just came back from field work makes them refreshments doesn’t sit well with anyone. Liu Qianqiao is the one to find the situation intolerable first, and slips behind the creaky door to help their host. Xiao-Xie follows her because he can’t stand being near Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing while he’s the singular other adult present. Gu Xiang takes the sudden disbandment as an opportunity to find her carrot-weeding boyfriend and runs off towards the row crops in the distance, wading through the hay and turning a blind eye to the perfectly fine dirt road at the edge of the field.

Chengling sneezes. And then again, and two more times. Wen Kexing pulls magical tissues out of his shirt pocket. “A-Xu, can you take his Claritin out from the car?”

Ah. Well. “I forgot it.”

“You forgot it? How could you? After the whole botanic garden thing last year?”

“I just got back into the country,” Zhou Zishu defaults to the multipurpose excuse he’s been using for a whole week. “Why didn’t you remember that his allergies are coming back? He’s legally yours, anyway. Not my problem.” 

Wen Kexing swats at him. “Don’t joke around with that, it’s mean.”

Fan Huaikong hobbles out with a tray of iced black tea, swirled with syrup, which Zhou Zishu drains an entire cup of in less than a minute. When the old man sees Wen Kexing look into the shaded living room to scout for his other companions, he tells him that they’d asked for work, so he’s having the two of them fix a leak in the bathroom sink and unclog the toilet—which pulls a guffaw out of Wen Kexing. 

Fan Huaikong points at Zhou Zishu as he leans slowly back onto a rocking chair. “So. Your colleague cooks as well?” 

“Oh, no. He’d never—for both those things.” Wen Kexing eagerly pulls on Zhou Zishu’s left hand and flops it in the air. “Not my colleague. My husband.”

Their wedding was on a Tuesday—the quickest they could make it happen, and the least busy day to justify privatizing the banquet hall with no profits. It was a fiery, whirling thing, and near-perfect in execution considering how rushed they had to be. The day before, Liu Qianqiao had gathered all the paperwork she’d sorted out for them over the weekend, and pushed them to the information desk at City Hall at nine in the morning, as soon as the security guard at the door looked away and stepped aside. They paid their $95, squiggled something shaky and criminalizing on the dotted line, stuck a ring on each other’s finger—the material of which they’d argued over for twenty embarrassing minutes at the jeweler’s, and Wen Kexing kissed Zhou Zishu for a disgustingly long time as Chengling kept taking photos with the flash on; until Gu Xiang clapped for Wen Kexing to quit it, there’s a couple waiting behind them. Then Liu Qianqiao drove them back to Chinatown, and still in her trance-like industrious state she rushed up to the office to start on Zhou Zishu’s I-130 and I-485 forms, groveling at the U.S government’s feet with over a thousand dollars in fees to beg if he could stay. 

“You know what I just realized—what are we going to wear tomorrow?” Zhou Zishu asked, sitting on Wen Kexing’s bottom bunk, watching him shrug out of the dress shirt he had on for a precious, precise seventy-three minutes, button up a white work shirt, and tuck his painstakingly styled hair back up with pins. Liu Qianqiao had herded the kids off to somewhere with a wifi connection to give them time with each other alone, but it looked like Wen Kexing was going to run off again. 

“I have an outfit in mind, but Luo-yi’s gonna hate it.”

“Why?”

“It’s red.”

“What’s wrong with that? It’s traditional. Lots of people wear red at their wedding.”

“Did you not check the Wechat group she made? She said, ‘no red’.” Wen Kexing put his hands up, slapped them back down on the sides of his legs. “Something about how she doesn’t want to learn Photoshop just to edit the colors, don’t ask me. It sounded like she’s holding a grudge against us. God knows why.”

Zhou Zishu knew why. He’s still having trouble looking Luo Fumeng in the eye. “There’s a group chat about my own wedding that no one told me about?”

“I just did. Anyway.” Wen Kexing put on a soft, worn flannel over his white shirt, shucked off his nice linen slacks and pulled up something indestructible in black polyethylene before Zhou Zishu got a chance to look at the pale of his thighs. “Let’s stop by the tailor right now, my shift isn’t until noon.” He kicked on his waterproof Chelseas at the foot of the door.

“Why are you even working today?” Zhou Zishu wanted to spend frivolous time with him. Grab brunch from some chic cafe in a neighborhood with pristine public petunias, some place that necessitated those eerily oval poached eggs, bird seed-inspired bread, and aristocratic quantities of truffle oil. People were supposed to celebrate after they got married. “Are you messing with me again? Wen Kexing, if you’re playing—”

“I’m working—” Wen Kexing grabbed him by the arm, dragged Zhou Zishu out into the cigarette smoke-stained hallway, and forgot to turn off the light. “—to prep for all the food tomorrow. Do you have any idea how much meat gets prepped for a two-hundred-seat banquet?”

“There’s two hundred people coming? Who even are they?”

“Oh, I don’t know. People just show up. You’re asking me a lot of questions right now! I like it.”

At the tailor’s in a damp alley across the neighborhood, Wen Kexing put on a red and golden thing in front of a cracked full-length mirror, turned this way and that, looking back at Zhou Zishu for a reaction. There’s a porcupine’s worth of straight pins pinching back every other seam, that betrayed the copious prior adjustments these fancy scraps of silk had endured. Fucking Wen Kexing, how long had he been tweaking this, while Zhou Zishu was preparing for the reality of having to leave him? But he looked his weight in gold, embroidered in shimmer even in the harsh, domineering glare of the strange, cyan, fluorescent tubes, and Zhou Zishu couldn’t find it in himself to do anything but let the four-foot-eleven granny wearing too much pink and green cloak him in a similar swath of crimson, stab him three times while she affixed pins onto his outfit, Luo Fumeng’s dress code already eroding to dust in his brain. There’s an old man hunched over a grainy Sino-Japanese War film in the fabric closet at the back, flicking a bowl of rice and bean sprouts into his mouth. Zhou Zishu watched the movie over his shoulders and waited for the torture to be over.

The tailor took almost two hours to tape and measure Zhou Zishu until he felt like a non-mathematical icosahedron. He endured questions about his preference in buttons, comments about how his left arm was definitely a half-centimeter longer than his right, and complaints made to Wen Kexing about how he never mentioned how skinny Zhou Zishu was. Did he even eat? At which Wen Kexing objected from his plastic chair on the sidelines, slightly offended, that yes, A-Xu ate but he was picky, and what did she imagine when he told her about the slim waist and long legs? A spider? 

Before they left, the woman lamented one more time about how hard they were making her life, expecting her to have both sets of clothes altered by tomorrow morning. Wen Kexing dutifully slipped a thick wad of cash into her obligatorily resistant palm, patted her liver spotted-arm like a grandson, and the deal was sealed. 

They stood outside the iron gate that shuttered right behind them, the open sign that flipped to closed . Zhou Zishu prepared to go, opened his mouth to say goodbye, but Wen Kexing reached for his hand. The new ring locked on his finger was cool on Zhou Zishu’s wrist.

“You should stay,” Wen Kexing said, soft and pulling. “It’s gonna be a slow day. I’ll make sure you’re out of the way?”

And so Zhou Zishu found himself on a sticky wooden stool in the uncomfortably warm restaurant kitchen, watching Wen Kexing’s cleaver axe a million chicken wings into drums and flats. Watched him devein four styrofoam boxes of shrimp, slice enough strips of pork and beef to feed the neighborhood. Wen Kexing talked as he worked, about how he’s deescalating the usual menu of sixteen dishes to twelve, on account of the short notice. How important it was that the menu be an even number. How there needed to be enough focus on meat and seafood to not look poor and shabby, but have enough vegetables as a palate cleanser—especially because it’s summer, and especially because it’s a Cantonese banquet. 

It’s never-ending. Wen Kexing’s affinity for poetry brimmed in the way he rattled off each auspicious phrase that went with the well-rehearsed dishes, like he had a larger audience than just Zhou Zishu and the two other cooks knocking out lunch tickets. The bluetooth speaker balanced above a tall shelf of grill foil got passive-aggressively yanked between Greatest Hits Live by Leslie Cheung and mid-tempo classical by the staff every fifteen minutes, but Zhou Zishu heard him loud and clear—warbling set phrases about magpies and mandarin ducks and fertility and about cursing brides with a soccer team’s worth of sons. It’s a little awkward, the way these default lines had to re-mold around them. But beneath the way Zhou Zishu squirmed, the easy magic of it all was nonetheless a thrill. That he got to have this at all was enough of a miracle. 

And it was a miracle that they made it through the next day in one piece. The usual all-day ordeal of this kind of event had thankfully been knocked back into what was essentially a private dinner service. Luo Fumeng’s face went tensely pleasant at the color of Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing’s clothes, as she crossed her arms over something in satin, gaudy deep purple. “How lovely, you’re both the same shade as the tablecloth.” 

They were dizzyingly heckled and spun, trophied around for a toast and a picture at each table; might as well had been coerced into having public sex on a Lazy Susan by their loving, ill-intentioned guests. Nobody knew or remembered that Zhou Zishu didn’t speak Cantonese, so he received incomprehensible, tipsy shovel talks and advise in perfect, blissful ignorance, leaving Wen Kexing to flail and honk at his side like a chased goose, a fifth glass of champagne flinging from his loose hand onto someone’s beige suit jacket. 

In the end they were the least visible in the photos as Luo Fumeng had lamentfully predicted—which was almost fitting, with the wedding becoming an excuse to gather—evidenced by the hundreds who didn’t even know Zhou Zishu, who only last saw Wen Kexing as a cracked-voice teen, or who were some distant acquaintance or another of a restaurant staff member. There was an obligatory part of the evening where they had to sing together on the glaring, enormous stage, squinting to seven different camera flashes. Liu Qianqiao turned on the music and Zhou Zishu was suspicious over her choice in Teresa Teng. When he caught her twinkling grin as he yelled out a chorus about metaphorical moons, determined to sing louder than Wen Kexing to cover up the way he reached for an octave just not meant for him, he’s grateful, and gave her a tiny wave.  

The beers and cigarettes came out after dinner for the stragglers. It’s excruciatingly late to keep entertaining these people, and Zhou Zishu intervened after an hour and a half, saying something about how Chengling had summer school the next day even though Chengling didn’t, he’d just be playing ten hours of the Build Mode on Sims 4 again. It was fairly obvious that everyone dispersed out of sympathy for his horrendous lying skills, and as long as he could leave, Zhou Zishu didn’t care much what anyone thought at all. 

He and Chengling had been living in two hotel rooms ever since Gao Chong returned and took his apartment back that weekend—but at least Gao Chong had agreed to pay for the rooms until Zhou Zishu found another place. It’s so natural to grab Wen Kexing’s lapels past the door and throw him down onto the queen-sized bed. Wen Kexing laughed, legs curling up. Zhou Zishu climbed in after him, whipped his pants and underwear off just past his knees and licked up the underside of his cock, like he’d wanted to do all evening. Then he was riding him, warm and full and happy, Wen Kexing setting an eager pace with his hands on Zhou Zishu’s hips.

“You know what’s funny?” Zhou Zishu asked, breathless. “I remember someone being really against hotel sex.”

“Wrong. It’s hot if it’s with my husband. ”

The shy, velvety way he’d said that word for the first time, his sweaty, flushed face hiding what Zhou Zishu knew had to be a blush—Zhou Zishu thought about it almost every subsequent time those two syllables came up. Including now, when Wen Kexing is spinning his arm like a monkey doll, flapping his wrist.

“Your husband?” Fan Huaikong says, politely cautious. 

“Yup.”

“What’s that ring made of?”

“Tungsten,” Zhou Zishu races to say before Wen Kexing makes this an opportunity for grievances. “So he doesn’t—so we don’t scratch it up.”

“Ah.” 

Gu Xiang is running back, pulling a boy behind her through the arduous, squashed hay again. He’s an average, baby-faced thing, doughy and doe-eyed, too porcelain-looking next to his brown, sun-beaten uncle. Fan Huaikong deals the boy a tongue lashing in Taiwanese, pointing at the dirt road that they didn’t use. Beside Zhou Zishu, Wen Kexing looks on with measured eyes, quiet as he examines his sister’s new boyfriend-situation; looks at the boy’s wrinkly UC Santa Cruz t-shirt, muddy shorts, the Nikes that used to be white. 

He introduces himself with a name borrowed from a Catholic saint. His uncle cuts in. “In this place you are Cao Weining. And no English allowed.”

Cao Weining reintroduces himself in Mandarin under visible pain. Apart from that he’s docile and polite. Liu Qianqiao and Xiao-Xie re-emerge in defeat and advise Fan Huaikong to call a plumber. While Cao Weining and the two of them exchange introductions again, Zhou Zishu pulls Wen Kexing aside. 

“Are you finding reasons to not like this kid?” 

“No. He’s fine. I just don’t get it.”

“I don’t think the old man gets us either.” Zhou Zishu squeezes Wen Kexing’s arm, amused. “I don’t think it matters if anyone gets it or not.”

“But that’s different. Us.”

“How?”

“Well, you know.”

“Do I? Did you ask him about it?”

“No. Fine.” 

“It’s cute, don’t you think?” Gu Xiang had called them to vent about it a month into her first semester: sneaking oranges out of the dining commons and getting caught by a lunch lady at the door; the boy behind her attempting to use her misfortune as collateral distraction to scurry away three slices of chocolate cake and getting shouted at anyway; waiting in an office that smelled of wet dishes and ham behind the kitchen as the Manager of the Day wrote up meaningless warnings for them—and then sharing the spoils of their war with dining administration by the bike racks outside, sickly sweet frosting making the citrus tang excruciatingly bright. 

“Kind of cute.” Wen Kexing moves closer. “But we still have the better story.”

Zhou Zishu licks his lips. “In which you half-ass hit on me while also trying to run me over?”

“Don’t be sassy, A-Xu. You ate it all up.” Wen Kexing leans in, but Zhou Zishu catches the blur of an approaching figure to their side, and moves his face away. Wen Kexing’s nose bumps into Zhou Zishu’s cheek. “A-Xu—the fuck? I said don’t be sassy.”

“Should we walk the fields?” Fan Huaikong interrupts from a wide ten-feet berth away, rubbing his dirt-stained hands together. “I’ll show you all what’s growing right now, and some new offerings that should be ready in a few weeks. You’re mostly looking to source greens?”

Wen Kexing blinks, like he’s just remembering again why they are here. “Yeah. Gai lan, choy sum, and a few varieties of bok choy would be nice. Fresh chilies and bitter melon, too, if you grow them. Oh, and sprouting cauliflower.”

Before they head out of the shaded porch and into the sun, Wen Kexing makes sure everyone gets hosed down with sunscreen, rubs at the back of Zhou Zishu’s neck like it’s a massage to smear away every last zinc-white streak. When Zhou Zishu turns around again he keeps his expression neutral at the streak of SPF on Wen Kexing’s cheek, haphazardly swirled in a white Oxford comma, waiting for a hand to finish spreading it thin. He looks funny. Zhou Zishu doesn’t tell him about the streak, and doesn’t try to wipe it away. 

This place seems to be populated by nothing but boys, he discovers, when they pass the hay via footpath and squelch onto the freshly-irrigated farmland. There’s two of them bent over a bed of tiny green peppers, another three flinging hoses around a stretch of low, vine-y, broad-leafed plants with tubular yellow flowers, that Zhou Zishu has no clue about the identification of. He asks Fan Huaikong about the peculiar demographics and learns that they are all nephews—from different, disparate branches of the family tree, all falling indiscriminately like ripe fruit onto this property every summer to alleviate the headaches of parents who suddenly have to deal with children who are never not at home. And to help him diffuse the pressure from the height of the growing season, the old man says, since it’s mostly just him and some part-timers for the rest of the year. Though considering the way Fan Huaikong corrects every other chore being done, whatever the boys are all alleviating is not a giant headache. 

There are at least ten species of insects trying to eat Zhou Zishu’s face. At the rear of the pack Chengling is still sneezing his guts out and Xiao-Xie is scratching at his neck like he’s caught fleas. Gu Xiang is stewing in something quiet and dangerous, insidiously wiping at her brows and faking idyllic serenity in front of Cao Weining, whose t-shirt is soaked in sweat and he somehow looks happy about it. Liu Qianqiao and Wen Kexing are the only other ones in a modicum of ease, as they hunch over a single eggplant while Fan Huaikong rattles off the ingredients in his fertilizer mixture, most of which send stomach acid up Zhou Zishu’s esophagus. 

A drop of sweat drips off Wen Kexing’s lashes into the soil, and it looks gross even on him. There’s a minuscule frown on his face that their host did nothing to provoke and Zhou Zishu knows that he’s jealous. That Wen Kexing is looking at this edenic abundance and thinking about their wilting cilantro on the kitchen window sill; about the terminal scallions supposedly immortal when suspended in a water bath, but that are still converting to slime by the day. And he looks cute when he’s mad and the cause isn’t Zhou Zishu, but Zhou Zishu is too hot to appreciate it. So when his phone buzzes he picks it up in haste, breathes out in relief when the contact on the screen reads “work”. 

“I gotta go,” he raises his phone to Wen Kexing, who rolls his eyes and flicks a hand at him, turning around again to be mildly envious over some tiny green tomatoes. Zhou Zishu would jog back to the house if he isn’t about to collapse from a heat stroke, so he speed-walks instead, picking up the call and immediately getting patched to a woman who implores him, in screechy Mandarin, to explain away her urinary incontinence to her English-only doctor. 

Once Gao Chong’s hotel grace period ended and the reality of apartment searching set in, Zhou Zishu had wired all his savings from his Chinese bank account to an American one, and the exchange rate had been slimmer than he’d liked. At some point he needed to fly back to China to grab all the cash from his abandoned condo, as well as what’s left of his parents’ money that had been sitting stagnant for years. But until his green card was processed, he was stuck here. He needed work.

Luo Fumeng offered two people’s pay for one person’s job—asked if Zhou Zishu wanted to take over restaurant communications and logistics from Wen Kexing. Too proud to be coddled into half of someone else’s job—no matter how dear he was to him, he’d swiftly declined. His other options were slim without identification—it was an even split between construction, restaurant, and grocery work. In the end he lucked out through word of mouth from the restaurant’s harem of yappy staff, and picked up remote interpreting work for a group in the East Bay that dispatched contracted interpreters for anything from understaffed hospitals to Catholic schools. He needed to pass Mandarin and English proficiency tests and those were no problem. He needed an ID, and they made that not a problem, too. And so he spent his days bumming around the new apartment and the restaurant in shorts and slippers, phone glued to his ear for a good portion of the day. He’d been riled up into artless hissing by Wen Kexing for so long that he almost forgot how decent of a professional talker he was—he’d gotten so many Shanghainese to break up their roofs for a skylight, in a city where the horizon was perpetually choked in smog. This was his thing. So as he got yelled at day after day by panicking, annoyed, depressed, lonely non-English speakers, he thought, he was happy. He wasn’t making much, but it was enough, and it helped scrape together half of rent and bills. 

“You know,” Wen Kexing said one morning, his face buried in a pillow, looking at Zhou Zishu with one sleepy eye. “You’re around the restaurant so much, you might as well be on the payroll.” 

Zhou Zishu rolled his eyes. “I don’t think I can stand working there. I just go because you feed me sometimes.”

“Very conflicting signals you’re sending to everyone, then.” 

Zhou Zishu rose from how he’d been lying flat on his chest, propping himself up on his elbows. “Do you ever think about leaving Chinatown?” It wasn’t that Zhou Zishu acutely wanted to leave. He was already the most content he’d been in a long time. But he’s keenly aware of the aging population here, and the way most under the age of fifty with the ability to had made the exodus to a less dense area. “Now that A-Xiang is taken care of, do you think of going somewhere else?”

“Maybe. But you can’t find cheaper rent in the rest of the city, not without connections like I have here. Plus, they need me.” 

“Your coworkers?” 

“My family.” 

“Your job is your family?” 

“My family is my job,” Wen Kexing corrected, shifting around. “And I should get paid overtime for how much of a fucking chore you are.” 

“Ha-ha.” Zhou Zishu pinched his shoulder hard, making Wen Kexing yelp and slap at him, arm lax and playful. 

All the tossing and turning stirred up a small mist of lint, floating in the hazy light like flotsam; settling into glitter on Wen Kexing’s hair, into nothingness on the golden expanse of his back. Mornings were new for them—amongst countless other things, like emergency contacts and two toothbrushes in the same glass. Luo Fumeng’s wedding gift had been lifelong banishment for Wen Kexing from working the hellish way he had been, employing instead an inefficient ensemble of three others to replace the force of nature that he’d been for the business. So now they did humanely-set alarms and breakfast and these soft, yellow mornings. In the elastic hours when public transport was still cool and desolate, when dreams were still fresh behind the eyes and no one was really sure what they were saying at all, Wen Kexing slurred sometimes about growing up. About all the origami frogs that jumped into a brimming kitchen sink, the neighbor’s dog that liked to herd him; about his parents—cardiothoracic surgeons who had come here from Jiangmen as first-wave recipients of the brand new 1990 H-1B visas, who birthed a son in the hospital they both worked at. About never staying after school for ping-pong or basketball with his friends once he was always running to pick up Gu Xiang from daycare, before he’d dropped out altogether. 

About how his parents called him Yan’er, Xiao-Yanzi— Little Swallow— for as long as they were around to call him at all. How his maternal grandmother was wracked with superstition and insisted her daughter call the baby by an animal nickname, lest evil spirits came for the infant at night and ate his soul. So that all manners of ghosts thought the family had merely added animals to their household and not a boy. 

Most women in his mother’s position chose from the thick-boned, down-to-earth brood— Little Dog, Little Pig, Little Bull— but Wen Kexing’s mother had a genetic disposition for flairs. So she picked the Swallow—a fleeting, migratory scrap, tacking mud camps onto the eaves of human homes. A wild, transient thing, instead of village livestock. Small, unassuming, and plain, qualities which his father prayed regularly for Wen Kexing to grow into, as he learned to prance in a diaper and mouth off in toddler-speak. And it was here that his urbanite parents’ inexperience with rural fauna backfired—his grandmother lectured them over the phone from her village in China, that swallows were loud, loud, loud. If they wanted a quiet child, they couldn’t have picked anything worse. 

But his mother was undeterred. There was that nursery rhyme, Xiaoyanzi , about welcoming back swallows in spring to China’s urban, industrial progress, that she sang to him relentlessly. Little Swallow, why are you here? The last time she sang it was that morning she packed Wen Kexing’s school lunch with a secret Milky Way bar, nine hours before she ran into a fire, and never came out. 

In the mercifully cool interior of the farmhouse, Zhou Zishu schedules an appointment to the urologist for the woman on the phone, and then one to a cardiologist for her husband because why not, he was already on the call and the couple had the same incomprehensible Italian family doctor. He lets his call dispatcher know that he’s unavailable for work for today and tomorrow after the woman hangs up, tries to parse out the kid drawings on the yellowing fridge, the photographs of boys in a lake double-sided-taped around a fireplace stoked with Charmin. He finds Wen Kexing’s leftover iced tea and gulps down the rest of it. Then he looks out the window and sees that the group has now disappeared from sight, and he’s just some guy tagging along on this work trip so no one will miss him for sure, if he just took a nap on this couch, instead of marching back out into the sun.

There’s a quilt that smells like Tiger Balm and old, spilled juice, perfect and heavy for dozing under. Zhou Zishu passes out for half a lucid dream about buying antihistamines before something hard jabs him in the ribs and a voice barks in Mandarin, “Did you die? Who greets guests like this? I had to open the door myself.”

He’s ticklish so he bolts up in a jolt. There’s a man in white everything standing uncomfortably close to him, so that Zhou Zishu is at his crotch height for a bleary five seconds before anatomical etiquette catches up with him, and he scoots away. The man is holding a white umbrella—the object that had attacked his side. “What?” Zhou Zishu croaks. 

“You’re younger than you sounded on the phone,” the man says, leaning down to examine Zhou Zishu’s face. “Everyone says I look young for my age but whatever you’ve got going on is even crazier.”

“Sorry, who are you?”

“Who am I? Are you serious?”

“Are you looking for Fan Huaikong? He’s outside.” Zhou Zishu finally gets on his feet. 

“Oh.” The man frowns. “Then who are you?”

“Zhou—just a guest.”

“Hmm. I wasn’t aware he invited others, I was told this would be a private stay.”

Does Fan Huaikong run an Airbnb?   “I have no idea as well, we were told the same—that it would be private.”

“We? There’s multiples of you?” The man curls his upper lip. “And no, I’m not from Airbnb. I’m not some rando on vacation.”

Zhou Zishu is getting impatient. His telephone temperament never really translates well in real life. “Sorry, but I have no idea who you are?”

The man blandly pulls a magazine out from the messenger bag slung across his body and holds it to Zhou Zishu’s nose, stabs a finger at the cover photo of himself wearing the exact same plain outfit, his hands crossed and his face cut out of frame. It’s an April copy of a French-titled publication, the background dark and somber against all the white. Zhou Zishu reads the italic serif font at the left of the figure and rearranges a few syllables in his brain. “Ah… Ye-xiansheng?”

Ye Baiyi puts the magazine away, giving no reaction at the greeting, and Zhou Zishu wonders why he made such a big deal of carrying around his own faceless photo to show people, if he is going to turn his nose up when he gets called by name. He’s debating the ethics of playing the acting host when there are footsteps at the front of the house, and it’s Fan Huaikong tripping over his arthritis, Ye-xiansheng I thought you were coming next week oh no what happened. To which Ye Baiyi opens up an email chain showing that [email protected] did indeed confirm a visit for today. And at this point the rest of the crew has caught up, and Cao Weining takes one nervous look inside the house and turns white. It doesn’t take any prior knowledge of Taiwanese for everyone present to know that Fan Huaikong’s new verbal beating at his nephew has something to do with the email, and the two separate parties that have somehow gotten scheduled at the same time. Cao Weining takes it meekly, and Zhou Zishu can tell Wen Kexing is annoyed with the complacency by his deepening frown. 

Fan Huaikong negotiates what will happen now with a recount of the house layout—there are three bedrooms: one for him, one for Cao Weining, who’s the only nephew that stays here around the clock, and a guest room. He had planned on sleeping in the barn and making Cao Weining give up his room as well, so that his six intended guests could divide up the three rooms into doubles amongst themselves. But now Ye Baiyi is here and the old man’s groveling body language communicates that this guy is some sort of a big deal, so Zhou Zishu googles who he is while Fan Huaikong’s architectural descriptions continue, and finds out that Ye Baiyi is a food writer, known for being prolifically a dick and for being a certain prominent magazine’s new guest writer. He looks up at Ye Baiyi at the discovery of this last fact and can’t reconcile collaborative work with this scowling, unpleasant man.

“I’ll take the barn,” Zhou Zishu finds himself saying, and it’s too late to be surprised at his own forwardness. “And he will too.” He points across the room at Wen Kexing.

“Fine by me.” Ye Baiyi deems this a good resolution and rubs his dry, rustling hands together. “Which room do I drop my bag in?”

Fan Huaikong leads the way upstairs, while Cao Weining lugs a white briefcase up behind him and the guest. By the front door, Wen Kexing narrows his eyes at Zhou Zishu and slinks over to him. 

“A-Xu, if you want to sleep in a haypile, go right ahead,” he mutters. “Why drag me in? You could have taken Chengling instead.”

“Chengling’s got allergies. How could you forget? ” He mimics Wen Kexing’s tone from earlier, and gets a jab in the arm for the impersonation. “Chengling and Xiao-Xie take the couch and armchair, let’s give the hosts back at least one room,” he says louder for the whole group. “Qianqiao and A-Xiang take Cao Weining’s room.”

Fan Huaikong hobbles back down the stairs and apologizes profusely, explains to Wen Kexing that Ye Baiyi cannot be refused. The guy has been exclusively, rebelliously writing about nothing but tortellini and meatball subs since getting snatched up by his current boss and this was the first time he’s doing a piece with any diversity value at all--choosing to be annoying even then by picking a little produce farm as far away from Manhattan as possible to write about. So if he’s here because Cao Weining couldn’t schedule a calendar, then he’s so sorry, Wen-xiansheng, but Ye Baiyi will have to stay. 

Wen Kexing wipes the sweat off his forehead, face pleasant but posture stiff in a way that means he’s simmering inside, and Zhou Zishu decides then that he’ll neglect to tell Wen Kexing about his initial interaction with Ye Baiyi, lest he catches on fire on the door mat. Zhou Zishu walks over and touches his arm. “Where’d you guys go? I couldn’t see you.” 

Wen Kexing seems to remember something, pulling Zhou Zishu outside with him, where there’s two blue crates of produce wilting on the porch. 

“Wash shed, to clean these,” Wen Kexing says, depositing the much heavier crate at Zhou Zishu’s feet, and if this is punishment for sitting out from their earlier harvest then Zhou Zishu has no problem with being agreeable. There’s cucumbers and chili peppers inside, scallions and cilantro. Wen Kexing’s crate is full of strawberries. They put the crates on the kitchen countertop and Fan Huaikong moves onto the next phase of his apologies and offers to make lunch, because he couldn’t possibly kick two of his guests into a barn and then make them cook their own food as well. But Wen Kexing is already asking where they keep rice and then he’s rinsing out the milky water, flipping the switch on the rice cooker. Liu Qianqiao offers to help but Wen Kexing doesn’t need it, so she disappears into the bathroom to have a go at the leaking sink again. Xiao-Xie is flicking through Tinder on the porch’s rocking chair and the kids have all vanished. 

Ye Baiyi descends down the carpeted stairs, with shoes on. “Oh, good. Someone’s making lunch. About time.” 

By the grit of Wen Kexing’s teeth Zhou Zishu knows he’ll have nothing good to say if he doesn’t stop him in time. “Yeah, lunch. Lao Wen, what are you making?” He steers the conversation, hoping Wen Kexing gets the hint.

He probably got it, but then chooses to bash apart Zhou Zishu’s effort like garlic under his cleaver. “Doesn’t matter, he’ll eat whatever I make.”

“Hey hey hey. Watch your mouth.” Ye Baiyi jabs a finger in the air at Wen Kexing. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’d make a joke about your mom if I thought you deserved one.”

“Alright, I’m complaining to your grandfather.”

“He’s not my—A-Xu let me go!”

Zhou Zishu holds him back, keeping the knife in Wen Kexing’s hand within a two-inch range of the cutting board. “He doesn’t work here, he’s with me.” He smiles at Ye Baiyi, though his own pleasantry is waning as he watches Ye Baiyi displace half the strawberries into a bowl and eat them at a steady clip. 

“You should hit him a little so he behaves,” Ye Baiyi advises. “‘A-Xu?’ Which character for ‘Xu’? Like shhhh, to shut up? I think you should be the one calling him that instead.” 

“Ye-xian—“

“Look at him, so rude and ratty. What’s that on his face?”

Wen Kexing dabs at his cheek, and looks at Zhou Zishu with betrayal when the back of his hand comes away with sunscreen. “A-Xu you didn’t tell me!”

“Sorry,” Zhou Zishu mutters, and doesn’t point out that no one else has told him either, for a full hour.

Wen Kexing looks over Zhou Zishu’s head to target Ye Baiyi again. “At least sunscreen comes off. How many times have you gotten your nose done?” 

Ye Baiyi chuckles. “I’ll beat you up.”

The knife shoots up from the cutting board again and Zhou Zishu pins the attached wrist down onto the table. Thankfully someone else is coming down the stairs, and it’s Cao Weining, a cloud of Febreeze wafting around him. And the kid must really not be that bright, because he walks right up to the battle zone and asks Wen Kexing if he can help with anything in the kitchen, his eyes so desperate for approval and blind to danger, it’s pitiful to watch. 

Zhou Zishu says “yes absolutely” and Wen Kexing grudgingly holds out the knife to Cao Weining, orders the boy to cut up cucumbers. Ye Baiyi seems to find this turn of events incredibly boring and has sunk onto the couch, where he opens up his laptop and starts rattling away on the keyboard. 

Wen Kexing scrutinizes Cao Weining’s knife work. He’s unimpressed enough to not give him any compliments, but still deems the job satisfactory enough that he doesn’t intervene. He tips his head to his right, shifting his attention to Zhou Zishu, who is working his way through his own handful of strawberries as well—still warm from the sun, bright and sweet. “Come out with me for a second,” Wen Kexing says, pulling on Zhou Zishu’s elbow. 

The porch has emptied. Wen Kexing crowds Zhou Zishu against the wooden railing, kisses and licks into his mouth just briefly, the gesture purely investigative. There’s a charm in the spontaneity, this sweet intimacy from him after he’s just been boiling like hot sugar in a saucepan. Zhou Zishu looks at the residual frown on Wen Kexing’s mouth, pulls him down and kisses him again, deeper. 

“What’s all this?” He says into Wen Kexing’s mouth. 

“Nothing. Since the two people who don't do a lick of work around here chose to pillage the berries the rest of us worked hard to pick, I figured this is the only way I’ll get a taste before they’re all gone.”

“You are so melodramatic. I’ll choke you with them. As if you didn’t eat until you burst while you were picking them out there.” 

Wen Kexing pulls Zhou Zishu’s hand up to his face. “Wipe this away. Now.” 

Zhou Zishu holds back a grin, rubs his thumb over Wen Kexing’s cheekbone and finally lays that white Oxford comma to rest. Wen Kexing pouts. Zhou Zishu uses the lazy proximity to pinch his cheek, watches Wen Kexing struggle between a smile and a scowl. 

“Don’t fight it out with that guy if you still intend on sourcing from this farm,” he warns, patting Wen Kexing’s neck.

“Who cares, we’ve been using the L.A distributor for decades and we can keep doing it.”

They go back inside. The rice cooker switch flips and sings a little song. Cao Weining has produced a mountain of chopped cucumbers, which Wen Kexing tosses with the garlic, scallions, and fresh chilies he minced earlier, and then splashes into the mix soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, and sugar. He’s slamming rice into a stack of bowls like an aggrieved maid when everyone else begins to inexplicably filter back into the house, somehow all knowing that lunch is done. 

“What? That’s it?” Ye Baiyi consolidates two bowls of rice into a bigger soup bowl, and pours a flood of cucumbers on top.

“It’s a light lunch,” Wen Kexing grits out. “Cold dishes because it’s too hot, simple because I need to feed all of you fast. Go buy something in town if you want.”

He always cooks like this at home, too—simple, honest, quick. On his days off, when he doesn’t need to throw dinner together in the restaurant on his break, it’s the only option if he wants to be sure that Chengling is getting anything in addition to sodium and sugar. Wen Kexing’s mission to wrangle Zhou Zishu in front of a stove was short-lived. It wasn’t so much that Zhou Zishu was a complete invalid in the kitchen. He just didn’t see the harm in putting ham between bread and calling it dinner. And if they did reach a point of nutrient deficiency that required vegetal intervention, wouldn’t it be easier to just have Wen Kexing whip something up in no time, in a highly efficient, high-speed restaurant kitchen, where they don’t even need to buy their own produce—and can save money?  

To exacerbate this point, Zhou Zishu filled the fridge with beer and orange soda and Chengling’s cereal milk, removing the space and opportunity for more fanfare than hot sauce and a couple of takeout boxes. And this was the final move that wore Wen Kexing down, more so than the ramen cups and sponge cake wrappers he kept finding in the trash. So now he makes dinner at the restaurant and at home, and his home-cooking is nothing like his restaurant food: eggs whisked in water and chicken powder, steamed into a melt-in-your-mouth pudding with sesame oil pooling on top. Chicken marinated the night before, laid over softening, bubbling grains in the rice cooker, staining jasmine rice amber. Small chunks of spare ribs also marinated the night before, sitting in soy, Shaoxing wine, sugar, and slivers of orange peel, before he puts the plate on a steamer rack and into the wok he stole from work. All their utensils and appliances are stolen: the bowl that Wen Kexing uses for tomato and eggs, which is Gu Xiang’s favorite dish, scarcely for her now that she feeds off her university; the squeeze bottle of rapeseed oil he drizzles into the wok to wake up blanched broccoli, bok choy, choy sum, sugar snaps; the cooking chopsticks he flips around slices of fried Spam in. After the slices are brown and crisp he would drain the oil on a paper towel and lay them over a jiggly fried egg, press both between two pieces of buttered white toast slathered in spicy mayo, cut it in half and share it with Zhou Zishu, yellow yolk dripping onto fingers during the hand-off. 

This is Zhou Zishu’s favorite. And it could be all the antithetical monosodium glutamate and saturated fatty acids involved, or it could be the fact that they eat this almost exclusively after sex, especially for Saturday brunch. When Chengling leaves in the morning for his weekend fruit-drawing lessons after feeding himself cereal, oblivious to the suspicious, slightly loud R&B coming out of the other bedroom, Wen Kexing would draw his naked, lithe body all across the apartment like a victory tour, paint creamy skin over the back of the couch as he flipped on the TV’s morning drawl, and drape himself like a figure drawing by the gas stove on low, as he burns toast over blue flames for sandwiches. 

“You know I’m a food writer, right?” Ye Baiyi looks at Wen Kexing over the rim of his bowl, as he shoves white rice into his mouth. “That’s all you could throw together when I’m here?” 

Zhou Zishu is getting annoyed now. “Ye-xiansheng, no one’s forcing you to eat if you don’t want to. I think you’re just being rude.”

Ye Baiyi ignores him, goes to fill his bowl at the counter again, and piles it frightfully high with food. “You cook like you work in a restaurant,” he says to Wen Kexing again.

Wen Kexing looks up with suspicion from his bowl, into which Gu Xiang is dropping unwanted bits of chilies. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like you’re tired.” Ye Baiyi says this, and it’s somehow his least mean-spirited comment so far. “Like rehearsed chaos, with kitchen training. Am I wrong?”

“Hmf.”

“ Do you work in a restaurant?”

“What if I do?”

“What’s it called?”

“Doesn’t matter, you won’t know it. We don’t advertise to your kind.”

“My kind? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Gu Xiang elbows Wen Kexing and tells the name to Ye Baiyi, who as predicted says “don’t know it.” But then he says, “Where’s it at? I’ll check it out,” and Wen Kexing looks up again. 

“Only if you make dinner later,” Ye Baiyi adds.

“Why?” Wen Kexing stiffens further. 

“If you’re any good, I’ll save a line for you in whatever I’m writing on, for this old man’s farm.”

Suddenly gray with rancor, Wen Kexing goes to put his empty bowl in the sink and walks out, the gloom around him as palpable as the simmering heat. The energy in the room seizes, like he’s just taken its breath away with him, into white-hot tension.

It took nine months for Zhou Zishu’s green card application to get approved. Wen Kexing loved to joke that this was their baby. The day Zhou Zishu got the notice in the mailbox he shouted, right there on the sidewalk, and then was instantly nauseous, as a boulder lifted off his shoulders and a new one immediately settled in—the weight of what it meant for him to be here making itself finally at home. When Wen Kexing came home from work that night Zhou Zishu could hear the unneighborly thunder of his boots racing up the stairs, and then the door flung open and he’s lifting Zhou Zishu off the ground. He’s still beaming when his legs were falling open later at night, ankles locking around the small of Zhou Zishu’s back to pull him in closer. “I’m the luckiest person ever,” he said, clutching Zhou Zishu’s shoulder blades and whispering into his hairline. “And you are, too! Less than a year—how incredible is that?”

Zhou Zishu was lucky. One of the waitresses at the restaurant told him she’d waited three years for hers after the USCIS misplaced her documents. All while her two children learned to walk and talk back at her parents’ village in China, forgetting all about her as they sprouted young roots in a place she’d soon tear them from. Zhou Zishu was lucky that his ordeal took less than a third of the time. That, and the fact that there wasn't much waiting for him in China, except for the cash behind a bookshelf, and the condo that he needed to empty out before the owner took it on himself to extend his lease.

It was early April, and it seemed like every Chinese person with a dead, buried relative was at a cemetery for the Qingming Festival. There was nonexistent high emotion and lots of low swearing, as Zhou Zishu wove the car among all the other families and double-parked vehicles, the smell of popping firecrackers seeping through the windows. Luo Fumeng and Liu Qianqiao met with them under a eucalyptus tree, holding plastic bags. 

“I grabbed the last duck.” Luo Fumeng held up one of the bags. “The barbecue place was swamped.”

They did what everyone else did: spread plastic in front of a grave, laid out fruits and pastries and poultry, poured wine into little cups and stuck incense in the burner. Chengling kept getting in the way trying to help with the arrangements and got kicked out to the perimeter, where he got tasked with burning billions of dollars in joss paper money over a metal can. Zhou Zishu stayed clear as well, bowing when he’s supposed to and hanging back the rest of the time.

It was mostly Wen Kexing’s own show. He wiped the granite headstone with a wet cloth and put out fresh flowers, which Liu Qianqiao spent a while picking apart from the rubber band cinching the stems together, so that they could relax onto the mouth of the vase. When Wen Kexing asked him to come closer and help him light the candles, Zhou Zishu got a chance to look closer at the photos on the gravestone. They were two halves of the same image, of a smiling young man and woman, split apart to go with names etched in white. The woman’s smile caught Zhou Zishu’s attention: it’s abundant and unrestrained, familiar and beloved. And as he pulled his eyes away from the déjà vu of her features to other details, he realized that the photos were two split thirds, rather—for around the neck of the man’s picture to the left is the soft arm of a child, and on the shoulder of the woman on the right slung a worn, stuffed bear. 

Wen Kexing crouched in the space between the photos, furious. The red candles wouldn’t light. The wicks were too caked with wax and the Bic lighter snuffed out every few seconds. And when it did catch into tiny flames the wind took them away. The lighter was getting so hot that it hurt Zhou Zishu’s thumb to keep pressing on it, but he held still and held his breath even stiller, curving his palm over the wick to ward off the breeze, as the rims of Wen Kexing’s eyes turned redder and redder, when the candles still refused to light up. 

Zhou Zishu looked behind for help. Luo Fumeng noted his panic, and jogged off to a family nearby. She came back and handed Zhou Zishu a new lighter. The candles finally caught fire, and Wen Kexing didn’t cry.

He’s cackling by the time they sat down to pick at the spread, when Zhou Zishu tried to peel an orange and squirted mist from the rind into his eye. Luo Fumeng chided them, long-suffering, about being an embarrassment in front of dead people, and was rampantly ignored. They watched the families who brought firecrackers stand in rains of gray ash and red shrapnel, the preschooler running with a swallow-shaped kite who tripped on a grave marker. A screeching pack of seagulls tore at the pulpy carcass of a left-behind offering, severing a wing in the grass and a flap of skin in midair, making Holy Communion for themselves. Zhou Zishu took a swig from the unmarked bottle of alcohol, and grimaced when he realized it was cooking wine. 

Wen Kexing handed him a half-finished can of Orange Crush. He watched Zhou Zishu drink while he played with the crumbly dirt by his feet, fine dust sticking to his duck-greased fingers as he stirred the grit. “I think this year,” he said, pensive, “I’m older than my mom was.”

It was another month before Zhou Zishu’s green card dropped into the mailbox/ He immediately put it into a ziplock bag with his foreign ID and passport. Wen Kexing held him tight from behind as they lounged against pillows, while Zhou Zishu scrolled through cheap flights to Shanghai on his laptop. 

“I’m only going for two weeks, at most,” Zhou Zishu said, slightly suffocating. 

“Then buy a round-trip instead of one-way.”

“I’m leaving it open for flexibility, but I’m sure I can take care of things faster.”

“And when you came here you thought you were going to leave in three days.”

Zhou Zishu could set the fourteen-days cap right then, and would have a chance at placating himt. But frankly even Wen Kexing couldn’t wear out Zhou Zishu’s stubborn streak once he was set on something—especially if it was something he’d planned and settled on by himself, that someone else expected him to change for them at the drop of a hat. So he worked around it—let himself get squeezed like prey by a python when he tried to shave in the morning; spent hours at the laundromat without needing to be asked and folding every last sock before he jammed everything back into the bag to take home. He thought he was doing enough. And then it’s twenty-four hours before he needed to head to the airport, and he had to ask Wen Kexing where he’d put Chengling’s suitcase from the year before. 

“Behind the cello case in his closet,” Wen Kexing said into his reading, from where he was folded like a dead spider on the couch, knees pulled towards his chest. The book was an old course reader from Gu Xiang’s creative writing class during her first quarter in college, that she’d spent twenty dollars on next-day shipping to send to him. 

Zhou Zishu hoisted the cello case out of the way, and then the pile of dirty clothes behind it as well. He grabbed the handle of the suitcase, which hadn’t been pressed down for a year, and felt a slight, thready resistance on his fingers. When he pulled the suitcase out he saw that it had been a web, constructed in the unfortunate rectangle of space his hand had just wrapped around, that his thumb had just jabbed into the center of like an old bruise, wrecking someone’s peace and carefully-woven home at one in the afternoon. 

He could sense Wen Kexing hovering at the doorway. When Zhou Zishu turned he was already gone, the bathroom clicking softly closed.

At night, sitting on top of the sheets, Wen Kexing slid the ring off Zhou Zishu’s finger and put it in his mouth. His jaw undulated as he rolled the jewelry around with his tongue.

“That’s gross.” Zhou Zishu pressed on his bottom lip with his thumb. “Give it back.” 

Wen Kexing played with his own deep, eerie silence, giving up only the muted click of metal against his teeth. On the dim street below, a Recology truck hissed and whirred as it ate garbage along the curb.

“Give it back.”

Wen Kexing tilted his chin up.

Zhou Zishu jammed his fingers inside Wen Kexing’s mouth and pulled on the back of his bottom teeth. There’s just the glistening, dark pink of his tongue, the black void of his throat. Zhou Zishu panicked. “What the fuck?”

Wen Kexing moved his tongue, and there’s that metallic gleam, tucked towards the back of his mouth between his molars and the inside of his cheek. He’s panting, hot breath blowing over Zhou Zishu’s knuckles, wet incisors cutting into his skin, and Zhou Zishu pulled harder on the ridge of his gums without thinking. Wen Kexing moaned, hoarse. 

Zhou Zishu yanked his hand away. “Give it back,” he said again, his voice shaking.

Wen Kexing wiped the trickle of spit off his chin and took the ring out of his mouth. He slipped it back onto Zhou Zishu’s finger, slobber still slick and warm, and went wordlessly to pick at the waistband of Zhou Zishu’s boxers. 

At the airport, Zhou Zishu unscrewed his empty flask at a Starbucks for a hot water fill. There was a peppermint tea bag sitting at the bottom of the stainless steel well. Zhou Zishu kept the teabag in, and asked the barista to pour directly on top of it, staple and string and paper tag and all. 

He sat at his crowded gate with the white tourists and the chatty international Chinese students, and burned his tongue on his flask of liquid toothpaste. Who drank this stuff? Why did it exist in his home? He called Wen Kexing on the phone.

“A-Xu.” Zhou Zishu could hear the clang of ladles and pans in the background; someone’s shout; the flat slam of a fridge door. He’d made it back to the restaurant in time. 

“That tea you threw in my thermos? It’s like mouthwash.”

“It’s calming and keeps your energy up. Are you at your gate?”

“Yeah, I just got here.”

“You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.”

“Well, I already finished it.”

And then Zhou Zishu got there— Shanghai, at a skittish, busy, five in the afternoon. His Alipay app took a comically long time to re-download as he stalled at the metro turnstiles. It should have taken less than thirty minutes to get from the airport to the French Concession, but someone walked into the train tracks three stations before his, and the whole train was emptied out so the gore could be picked from the rails. By the time he unlocked the door to his apartment and crushed face-down onto his dusty, unmade bed, his bones were so sore they sagged into the mattress, but he picked up his phone again.

“Lao Wen?”

“Mmm.”

Zhou Zishu rolled over in bed, propped his feet up against the cool wall. His back was killing him. “Hey, I just got here.”

“That’s great. I’m trying to sleep.”

“Shit. What time is it?”

“Four in the morning. What about you?”

“Seven at night.”

“That sucks so much.” Zhou Zishu could hear the edge of a chuckle. It made the space around him feel a little less real, like he was inside a dollhouse. 

Without meaning to, he ordered the exact same delivery for dinner that he used to whenever he worked overtime. After he ate, he did the first bit of work cleaning out the place, and lugged a few trips’ worth of stuff to the waste disposal down the street. In late May it was humid, the temperature stalling and waiting to rocket past thirty degrees Celsius. Two of the shops on his block had already turned over in his absence, replaced by a coffee chain and another coffee chain, but with outdoor seating. The dappled shadows over his shoes from the looming trees watching the sidewalks were still the same, as was the impersonal, white sky above the canopy. But then he caught a lilt of Cantonese from two tourists with shopping bags and turned by instinct. Even if this place wanted to remember him, he’s preoccupied with something else now. He sent a few photos of his Gallicized, buzz cut neighborhood to Wen Kexing, showered, and fell asleep by nine, soaking the pillow with damp hair because he forgot he never used to own a blow dryer. 

The money he put away, when he exchanged it into US dollars, was less than he liked, but still a solid top-off for his savings. His apartment took no time to clean out because he’d never been a hoarder to begin with, and there wasn’t much of sentimental value he wanted to keep. He set aside that one dress shirt he really missed, the scatter of immortal packaged snacks in his cupboards that he could still eat in thirty years, and three tattered albums of his mother’s old, peeling, laminated photos, that he couldn’t wait for Wen Kexing to make fun of him for when he saw the baby pictures inside. He couldn’t think of much else he’d want to grab apart from these faint sparks of his old life. He called the condo owner, who turned out to be away on vacation in Bali, and who told Zhou Zishu to handle everything about moving out with the building manager instead.

Every day was hot soy milk from a hole-in-the-wall for breakfast, FamilyMart sandwiches for lunch, and a rotation of delivery for dinner. In between this militaristic regimen he sorted out his finances, sold and threw away most of what he owned, and walked around bustling downtown, looking for things to buy and stuff into Chengling’s suitcase. He found the snacks the kid had said he missed and had written down for him to get. At a supermarket he bought ten boxes of the instant decaf he’d run out of by last July. When he walked past a state-of-the-art bookstore he went in and hovered around the burgeoning Chinese poetry section for an awkwardly long time, lost, until a clerk came up and asked him, what dynasty? Zhou Zishu said he had no idea, he just knew his friend was into literature, and the woman persuaded him to purchase all five thousand years of human artistry, up into a slice-of-life volume published just three months ago by a local fiction writer. 

The weight from all the bags cut into his palm, as he held on with his other hand to the overhead vinyl strap on the returning bus. Outside it was bleached—a frothy whisk of pale office buildings, white-collars trudging to lunch, and fleets of delivery workers weaving in and out of traffic on scooters and bikes. The sun surveyed it all in a lazy, urinary haze. There were still ten stops to his place, and already the floor space on the bus filled up with straphangers like himself. Zhou Zishu wiped his clammy forehead on the inside of the arm hanging onto the handhold, and shifted the weight of his shopping in the other. 

His phone rang. He relented, and finally set the bags on the floor. 

“Hey. What are you doing right now?” Wen Kexing launched right in, without greeting.

“Sweating?”

“Perfect. That’s hot.” 

The huskiness in his voice caught Zhou Zishu off guard. “Uh-huh.” He inched forward, so that the guy behind him could stop soaking sweat onto his back. 

“Your clothes. Are they on or off?” 

“On?”

“I think they should come off.” 

“In a minute.” This was not happening. 

“Tease. Alright, I’ll take mine off first.” There was a thump, like Wen Kexing had just set the phone down. Zhou Zishu wanted to listen to the rustle of his undressing, but the PA system was announcing the next stop. And then more people squeezed on, someone stepped on his foot with a high heel, and it hurt so much that he almost made a sound. 

“Should I touch myself with my underwear on or off? Would you keep the lights on or turn them off? 

On or off. On or off. Why were there so many options just to jerk off over the phone? “On. For both.” 

“Fine. If you were here I’d make you take it off me, though. With your teeth. Slowly. And then you’ll squeeze my balls so they kind of hurt but just a little. Are you undressed yet?” 

Zhou Zishu couldn’t stop smiling. From the absurdity of this, and from how audaciously Wen Kexing just said things like this out loud. “No. You sound like you’re doing fine even if I don’t, though.” 

“Hurry up! Fuck, I’m so hard already.” In person this would’ve been sexy, but across the ocean that edge was overridden, blanketed by the general novelty of his timbre. Wen Kexing could sit there reciting a dictionary and Zhou Zishu would still listen to him.“What about you? Should I talk more?”

“Yeah, um, I don’t think I can get it up to this,” Zhou Zishu whispered. But the bus was quieter. A girl looked up from her Rilakkuma-themed phone, and shuffled away from him quickly towards the front of the bus. 

“Why can't you?” Wen Kexing was quieter. Crestfallen. 

“Baby, I’m on the bus.”

“Oh!” His voice went high; louder, again. “Well, I still can.” He was so competitive, for no reason. 

“I don’t doubt it.”

“You could have led with that instead of letting me go on and on.”

“Well I wanted to see where exactly you were going, it was pretty riveting.”

“Shut up. Should I call you again when you get home?”

“No, stay on. I miss your voice. But let’s talk about something else.”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s stop. How was your day? What time is it? Have you eaten yet?”

“Not yet, I’m gonna buy lunch around the corner. It’s just past three. And my day’s been good. I got you and kids some stuff. I didn’t know A-Xiang was into… medicinal balms?”

Wen Kexing snorted. “They’re for her dumb boyfriend. Apparently his relative has terrible joint pain. And you need to stop eating out every single meal.”

“Whatever. Hey, did you have a bad day?”

“Huh. You could tell?”

“I don’t know, you sound tense. And you’re calling me past midnight.”

“Well, I feel better now. And before you ask—it’s nothing, I was just really swamped today. Hong Lu kept ringing in orders for stuff I eighty-six’ed hours ago. It’s so annoying.” Wen Kexing breathed out loudly. “But—I’m driving down to pick up A-Xiang for the summer tomorrow! I can’t believe you’re gonna miss it.”

They were still talking when Zhou Zishu got back inside, until he finished eating his next plastic-wrapped meal of the day. Wen Kexing fell asleep while their connection was still going, and Zhou Zishu may have kept the call going on speakers, while he organized all the shopping he’d done and flipped through a few of the books he’d bought. Just so he could have a passably insufferable conversation about them after Wen Kexing had read through as well. The call finally ended when the delivery girl with his dinner rang to say that she’d broken her hip in a bad bike accident. He’d have to wait an extra thirty minutes for another person to deliver now. 

Zhou Zishu was punctual—sometimes that felt like the only thing going for him, and it worked in his favor now. He’s a full three days ahead of schedule yet somehow it still felt like he was running late. He bought his plane ticket back to the States, bought bleach for the bathroom, bought an extra carry-on bag for all the gifts and knickknacks he’d acquired, unplanned. On his last full day in Shanghai, he took a train two hours upstream of the Yangtze River with incense in a backpack, two colorful bouquets sitting in the seat next to him. He’s so unusually scattered that he took the wrong train at the station and didn’t realize it for a full half-hour. And when he took the one going in the opposite direction to retrace his steps he missed another connection point, until the trip took closer to four hours instead of two, and he felt like he was losing his mind, lost in the bellies of underground serpents, with no way to resurface.

When he finally arrived, the cemetery was densely packed in with headstones, more so than the one he’d visited in San Francisco before he came here. Zhou Zishu combed through the stony rows of Lis and Wangs and Chens until he finally came up on the Zhangs. He set one of the bouquets down in front of Chengling’s parents and lit three sticks of incense with a brand new lighter, said a few thought-through lines into thin air about Chengling’s progress in school and at home and all of his terrible cello-playing, and it felt silly, like Zhou Zishu was just recapping the year to himself. Chengling couldn’t come as he was sitting through finals, and frankly if he had left the country with Zhou Zishu, Wen Kexing would have unraveled in that apartment by himself. So Zhou Zishu took out the sealed letter Chengling wrote and set it under a stone in front of the grave, and went on his way. 

Another hour north and he was weaving through a forest of headstones again, but this time faint muscle memory propelled his feet to the right one, sitting among a sea of other Zhous. Here it was rural enough that the sky blued like love-in-a-mists, and the intervals between stone slabs widened. He sat in front of the piece of carved granite with his arms around his knees, and thought about Wen Kexing; about what’s wrong with him, that he’s thinking about Wen Kexing here; about the smell of mothballs on all of his mother’s cardigans; about the time his dad lifted him onto his shoulders to take down the clock at the front of his university lecture hall, so they could turn the hour hand back together for Daylight Savings. He’d gotten even worse at crying, somehow. He was just sitting and frowning. 

His parents had such unassuming, methodical deaths. Cancer for his father, rapidly followed by a debilitating sadness that consumed his mother, whose already-frail, snakeskin of a body didn’t consider her son enough reason to stay alive and functioning for, and had just snuffed out in sleep one night. And maybe that was why it never hurt as much as it should—that slow decay of their bodies, excruciatingly sluggish, giving Zhou Zishu ample time to callus around school and internships and for noncommittal triangulations around a few bars in the neighborhood, so that by the time they were both gone he had more or less already healed over, the scabs itching to be scratched off so he could move on with his life.

Wen Kexing was the complete opposite. It had taken him months, and a news story one evening about a senior center that had almost gone up in flames, to say anything about how he’d misplaced his parents at all. And he’d only said anything because Zhou Zishu finally mustered up the nerve to poke at that particular, apparently still-fresh wound. It had been a young craniotomy patient who went to make food in a staff kitchen, and somehow the room had caught on fire, smoke filling the halls not half an hour later. Wen Kexing’s father dove in to grab the man and then his mother went after to grab her husband, and as Wen Kexing ran over from the after-school kid’s playroom in the annex to try to grab the both of them, two of his mother’s coworkers grabbed him by his backpack outside the fuming South building while he choked on smoke and screams and a yank to the back of his shirt collar. But after the liability of charred children was eliminated, none of the doctors and nurses who used to pinch his cheeks in break room parties seemed to want to hold onto him anymore, and into foster care he went, until Luo Fumeng thought to grab under his arms and lift him out of the dumpster behind her restaurant.

“I met someone,” Zhou Zishu said out loud, just above a whisper. “Out of the country. I moved there for them.” He was rapidly running out of things to say. “Maybe I’ll bring them with me the next time I come back, but I don’t know when that’s going to be.” He couldn’t imagine borders and bodies of water mattering to the dead. He was just here, saying nothing to pass the time, until the incense burned out.

It was late by the time the train looped back into Shanghai. Zhou Zishu leaned his head against the glass window, nodding off to the monotone buzz of nervous electricity, the occasional chirp of the PA speakers overhead. There was a nondescript, anxious knot of nerves in his stomach, that frustrated him with its directionless cause and his own consequent lack of a remedy. Then all of a sudden the sequence of stops being announced sounded more and more familiar, and he remembered that this was the train he used to take to go home from work, when he still worked for his cousin. Something—maybe it was the dreariness of the day, mixed with a general urge to absorb as much as he could in his last hours here despite his exhaustion—propelled him to get off at the next stop and turn to the train at the other side of the platform, until he was climbing up into the swampy, thick night again, central downtown blaring around him in sirens and clopping footsteps. It was too bright—the bioluminescence of skyscrapers tunneled into the epipelagic smog, and orange phone screens tuned to Alibaba bobbed at ground level to the beat of rushing boots like swaths of fireflies. Zhou Zishu wove among the night commotion, ducked into a damp side street, and then he was there—the office he used to work at.

He stood in front of the business complex and stared at the vinyl sign on the fourth floor. The lights were still on, the sticker rendered into a dark silhouette. It was definitely still his cousin’s lair—still the same design, looking precariously like the old Microsoft logo, with a few striating rays of light projecting from the rippling squares to fight off copyright laws. But it didn’t seem like the same business anymore. The name had changed, and it was incomprehensible to Zhou Zishu what operation his cousin had turned the place into now. 

There’s the whir of an engine, as a delivery man pulled up behind him on a scooter. Zhou Zishu watched him walk up and press the doorbell, but no one unlocked the door. 

The man turned towards him. “Are you waiting to go up, too?”

“No, I think I’m going to leave now.”

“Ha. Been here too long?”

“In a way, yeah.”

There was a figure approaching from the dark depths of the building. The delivery man perked up. And then Zhou Zishu’s cousin’s square head and square frame surfaced from behind the dirty glass with the Wanglaoji ad, and it was too late to escape. 

His cousin saw him before he saw the delivery man. The insulated bag had to be half-pushed into his hand, as the guy was keen on returning to his scooter to truck away the next order. 

“Zishu?”

Zhou Zishu kept his distance and kept his hands in his pockets, but he nodded. 

“Where have you been? The guys were worried. I was worried. I knew you were pretty depressed when you left the company but then you just vanished, and we thought—Zishu where were you? Why are you here again?”

Why was he here? He just wanted a look, just to window-shop around in his own strange emotions. Not to actually see anyone and especially not this person. Now the only way that things could possibly get worse was if—

“We’re having a party upstairs,” his cousin said. “You should walk up. There’s some light snacks, and the catering should be coming in soon. Come on, indulge me a little.” 

And then Zhou Zishu was standing in the conference room, which was now an open-plan set-up sectioned off from the rest of the office by just a folding screen. There were olives, which he couldn’t stand. Raw oysters, that made him regurgitate just by lying on ice. Gift bags of artfully composed roasted nuts from the new trail mix company next door, that made him wonder what they could possibly be getting in return from… whatever this business was now. Zhou Zishu wanted to go home and eat fried spam and egg sandwiches over a paper towel. He wanted processed salt and grease and Wen Kexing’s haphazard three-ingredient home-cooking, and all of those flavors were extinct on this grape-colored cellophane tablecloth. He’d really just gone ahead and squandered his last day hanging out with dead people, and now with an office of workers who looked like they’d rather be dead as well. He could have been getting his last fix of midnight takeout Malatang, while he tried for the last time to scrub out the faucet’s hard water residue with unsafe chemical concoctions. But instead he was here. At the very least, he learned that this office was an app startup now. He thought the name “Armory” was a tad too macho, considering they were peddling cellular martial arts classes for kids, and the three-step login verification seemed unnecessary for now inane the contents were—animations of balloon people, doing inflated elbow strikes and straight punches. 

Some of the faces he recognized, a lot were new. Those that he used to work with rained questions down on him despite not having contacted him during his time away at all. Where had he been? Was he traveling? In Singapore or Hawaii? Where did he live now? Was he really okay? His answers were clipped cleaner than a suburban lawn, pleasant and vague about “needing a change of scenery”. But then his cousin walked back towards him from the folding table bar with a shot glass, and as soon as Zhou Zishu pulled his hand out of his pocket to take the drink he regretted it. As his cousin’s eyeballs fixed on the band of gray on his finger there was nothing to do but raise the glass to his lips in surrender, gulp down the searing mouthful of Maotai and plead for death. 

“You got married and didn’t tell me? What kind of American girl did you end up with, that you didn’t let anyone know about? Zishu, we're family .”

It was a terrifyingly fortunate linguistic feature, that pronouns in Chinese were not gendered in speech; that not one question emerged where his reciprocating sentence structure required the word “wife.” Somehow he survived the interrogations, survived even his cousin’s tantrum when Zhou Zishu refused to show him photos of who he’d married. Zhou Zishu was on his fifth glass of liquor and finally starting to loosen up against his will, when he sensed someone looking at him from the edge of the office, so he turned. 

He was still a skinny mess—that boy Han Ying from accounting, looking exactly the same as he did last year and almost as miserable as Zhou Zishu felt right now. Caught, Han Ying raised his hand in a static wave, and straightened up when Zhou Zishu approached.

“You’re still here.” What was he, twenty-two now? “Stuck around after you graduated?”

“Hi.” Han Ying smiled, awkward but genuine, not quite meeting Zhou Zishu’s eyes. “Jobs are kind of hard to come by right now, so yeah.”

He was a soft talker, and the weird techno booming from the sound system swallowed up everything he said. Zhou Zishu gestured towards the print room.

It was quieter there, but too quiet. They exchanged niceties and complaints about the party and that killed a couple of minutes. Zhou Zishu looked around them, antsy. “Doesn’t the door behind this photocopier lead to the stairwell?”

“Yeah, it does. I think we should take off. This party kind of sucks.”

They moved the photocopy machine out of the way and squeezed past the door behind it. On the way down they heard the buzz of the doorbell again and picked up their pace, in case they ran into someone coming to get the door for delivery again. Once they were a half-block away they stopped. Zhou Zishu leaned against the spackled wall, and just breathed.

Han Ying stood two meters away from him, holding his arms. “I heard from the others that you moved to the States. San Francisco.”

“Yeah.”

“I have family in Manhattan,” Han Ying offered. “Cousins. They left Fujian just a few months ago.” He told this to Zhou Zishu like he expected him to walk next door into New York and visit his relatives on the weekends, like all of America was this amorphous, geography-less fourth dimension of aspiration and desire, when in reality Zhou Zishu had barely explored outside of the bay in his year there. 

“That’s great. I hope they’re well. Are they working?”

“Yeah, in a restaurant.”

Zhou Zishu lit up. “Do they cook?”

“I’m not sure, I know one of them is a dishwasher, though.”

“Will you visit them?”

“Ah, when I save up enough for a flight, yeah. And I still have to take care of my grandma here, so.”

Han Ying rummaged in the back pocket of his pants, and came away with a bright red cigarette box. They were Shuangxi cigarettes, the character for Double Happiness pinched between his fingers as he held the opened box out to Zhou Zishu. “Sorry, this is the closest I have to a wedding gift. Congratulations.” 

Zhou Zishu huffed, in the closest approximation of a laugh for the first time all night. This kid was a mope most of the time, from what Zhou Zishu remembered from the two years he spent unofficially mentoring him. But once in a while Han Ying surprised him with how quick his wit twisted and turned. Zhou Zishu hadn’t smoked in ages, but he took a cigarette out of the offered pack and just held it between two knuckles. 

“The one you’re with. What are they like?” Han Ying wrung his hands together. 

“They’re—” Zhou Zishu searched for words to describe Wen Kexing, but couldn’t find any in him that didn’t sound generic. Caring. Thoughtful. Sensitive. Animated. It all didn’t feel enough. “Here—do you want to see a picture?” He said, already unlocking his phone. 

Han Ying shifted closer, and they huddled on the side of the street, facing the wall like they were sharing a secret. Zhou Zishu scrolled through his camera roll. There were the photos he saved from Wen Kexing’s texts last week, when he, Chengling, and Gu Xiang had stopped by the boardwalk on the drive down to fetch her from school. His selfies with someone’s dressed-up Pomeranians on the beach were cute, the ones where all three of them made faces in the blur of a moving roller coaster hazardous and ridiculous. Two days before that were photos of him and Chengling at a free day at the zoo, feeding carrots to a giraffe. But none of them felt right. It felt like Zhou Zishu would just be showing Han Ying some guy with some random kids. 

“Sorry, hold on. I’m looking for a specific picture—“ he scrolled faster, the months rolling back in a blitz of colorful squares. February. December. October. August. “—here, this one.”

He turned the screen brightness all the way up until the pink light of the photo hurt his eyes, and handed the phone to Han Ying. And while Han Ying looked, mouth open and quiet, Zhou Zishu finally noted his own racing heart. It thrummed in his eardrums, like he’d just sprinted up and down the block.

Han Ying smiled. “He’s beautiful.” 

Zhou Zishu felt something stunted blossom in him. The flowering crowded up his chest, making the tight feeling there even more pronounced. “Yeah. Yeah, he is.” Wen Kexing was always showing him off left and right, and now that he got a chance at it he was convinced of the opioid nature of obnoxious pride and affection. How it made his chest puff up a little to hear a friend call his love beautiful. 

“Where did you two meet?” Han Ying looked up at Zhou Zishu. 

“On the street.” 

“In San Francisco?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you go there for a job?”

“No, I’d only meant to stay for a few days.” 

“Oh.”

“It’s not—it’s not what it sounds like. I know it’s not like me, to do that. But I think I needed it. And him.”

“You sound happier.”

“Yeah. I think I’m alright now.”

Han Ying needed to finish up some computer work at home. And so Zhou Zishu earnestly asked him to write down his phone number—on paper—the only source on the both of them boiling down to the Shuangxi box, ripped and flattened, Han Ying rehoming the half a dozen cigarettes left into the pocket of his jeans to get squashed once he got on his motorcycle. The company ballpoint that Han Ying used was dried up, and he dug in hard with the pen tip, banking the paper up against the brick wall, leaving Zhou Zishu a string of numbers that was more indentations than blue ink, a whisper over the stationery determined to censor him. Zhou Zishu promised he’d keep in touch this time and meant it. They parted on some nebulous, unspoken, inebriated emotion, Han Ying waving and beaming as he went, all the way to the end of the block. 

Zhou Zishu was wide awake on the metro ride back to his condo. As he walked the three streets from the station back to the building, he looked at the photo he’d shown Han Ying again. It was from the week after the wedding, when Wen Kexing was still on his mandated, two-week break-slash-honeymoon, and they’d spent a whole day sitting at a bar in the Castro, knocking back cocktails with embarrassingly raunchy names until day drinking became just drinking. The rosy neon shone over the slopes of their faces like a blush of dawn. Their hands linked on the dewy glass table, halfway to knocking a glass of rum onto the floor. There’s an unmistakable geometric rainbow behind them and some old guy outfitted like a carriage horse. And Wen Kexing was kissing his cheek and looking into the camera, looking right at Zhou Zishu as he kissed him in another time, so unabashedly, deafeningly in love that it almost hurt to see the intensity in his eyes, even if a year later Zhou Zishu was no stranger to it. So as Zhou Zishu kept staring at the photo anyway he figured that no one in history who’d witnessed magic and myth had kept quiet about it so why should he? He uploaded the photo to his dormant Weibo account as he let himself into the lobby and pressed post with no caption, that cooing Sade song that Wen Kexing played softly in the bathroom at dawn enveloping Zhou Zishu’s walk up six flights of stairs, earbuds drowning out the immediate hail of notifications that assaulted his phone. He might be reckless enough to press post on a photo, but he was terrified of everything else.

Everything was already packed. He lined his suitcase and bag up by the door, poured hot water from the sink for a sleeve of decaf, since the single saucepan that he owned he had given away to the young couple next door for two days now. He lit the cigarette that’d been in his hand for almost an hour over stove flames, coughed as he tried to smoke and not wheeze from the walk up the stairs. In his pocket, his phone vibrated sporadically. Zhou Zishu slid open the glass door to his tiny balcony. 

The cantilever was just about the size of a twin bed, damp with evening humidity. He lied down, and looked at the muffled, muddy sky, dark violet with light pollution. It seemed strange now, to look up and never see stars. During Chengling’s astronomy unit in his overzealous, useless science class, he’d dragged Zhou Zishu to the roof of their building every night for a month to take notes on a night sky that looked to him exactly the same, day after day. The app they used for spotting constellations was still on his phone. He clicked it now, after swiping away the banners that paraded across the top of the screen, and an artificial star field blinked to life, projecting over the purple of Shanghai. There was Cassiopeia, instantly—hanging low on the horizon due north, the five harsh, glowing points of its “ W” in a lazy, loose wave, transfixed over the domineering glower of skyscrapers. 

Zhou Zishu put the screen down onto his chest. For a moment the glare from the phone lingered in his vision—a hypothesis by his retina—and the constellation panted in the smoky sky for a brief breath, before it died again, refuted and impossible. 

Maybe he was just tired from a bad night's sleep, with his neck cramped from lying on the balcony, but the airport seemed too bright. The lights inside the plane pulsated, fighting for his attention with the afternoon whiteness outside. While a flight attendant went over the motions of attaching an oxygen mask to prevent unfortunate suffocation, Zhou Zishu put on his earbuds. 

“You’re leaving now?”

“Mm.” 

“Did you have a good time?” After a few beats, Wen Kexing added, “At home?”

Zhou Zishu felt his throat constrict; felt something under tension shift inside him just a smidge, enough of a crack that his eyes started to think about watering as the pressure diffused. “I’m… not sure. I don’t think so.” He pushed the window up, watched the deceptively aimless wander of the aircraft around orange traffic cones. 

Wen Kexing was quiet for a while. “Well,” then he said, his voice sweet and sleepy. “you’re fifteen hours ahead. Wanna come back and spend it again with me?” 

Zhou Zishu breathed out, labored. “That doesn’t even make sense.” 

“It does if we make it so.” He sounded featherlight, veiled in frail fiction. 

The crawling roll of the plane suddenly jolted forward, earnestly in take-off. Zhou Zishu counted fifteen hours ahead from the current time on frantic fingers as he uh-huhed a reply. It was 3am in San Francisco. “Go to sleep, it’s late. Sorry for waking you.” 

“I wasn’t sleeping, but okay, I’ll see you soon?”

“Yeah.” 

There was that stomach-dropping feeling as the plane took to the air. The woman seated to his right eyed him disapprovingly, at his disobedience against divinely-ordained airplane mode. Zhou Zishu thought about Wen Kexing waiting for him on the other side of the ocean; of his parents, watching him leave on this side of it. 

“Are you going to hang up now?” Wen Kexing asked.

“Not yet.”

The city turned into miniatures, then into pixels.

“Hey,” Zhou Zishu started. “I love—”

The cell service was cut off. The flight attendant held out a dish soap-scented wet wipe for him, and asked if he wanted anything to drink. 

Wen Kexing’s hair flutters as he storms out of the farmhouse. Zhou Zishu is doing the thing where he holds his breath without realizing again, and he snaps out of it when Ye Baiyi says, “What’s wrong with him? That was a compliment. I just asked him to make dinner. Why is a grown ass man PMSing for sport?”

“Not just anyone can order my brother around like that,” Gu Xiang grumbles. She finishes her food, and goes to scrub her bowl in the sink, along with the one that Wen Kexing had left behind. “Especially to make them food. I thought he might like talking about it with you but I was wrong. Don’t bother trying to write Ge into anything if you’re just trying to get a column out of him, he doesn’t want it.”

“Who said I’m writing anything about him? I came here for the old man.” Ye Baiyi bites a strawberry, and throws the green top at Gu Xiang, like he isn’t at least twice her age. “You’re that little brat’s sister? No wonder you’re just as irritating.”

“ I’m irritating? You’re so irritating that Ge just got up and left! What’s the matter with you? Did no one teach you how to act right?” Gu Xiang wheels on Zhou Zishu next. “You too! Zishu-ge why are you still here? Go after him!”

Zhou Zishu blinks. “I’m just trying to give him space.”

“Wrong. How are you still getting this wrong?” It stings a little to hear her say this. Gu Xiang’s lamblike facade is sloughing off uncontrollably, and the snapping fox beneath it is parched for indiscriminate blood. “Why would he want space when you’re right there? What’s the point of you then? What’s the point of you coming back if you can’t even be—” she claps a hand over her own mouth, eyes wide, but the damage is done. Zhou Zishu walks out, stupefied. 

Wen Kexing hasn't gone far at all. He’s just sitting on the steps around at the back porch, peeling grass. Zhou Zishu touches his shoulder.

“Took you long enough.” Wen Kexing’s voice is tight.

Gu Xiang was right. Zhou Zishu feels so stupid. “Thanks for waiting.” 

“Can you sit?”

Zhou Zishu sits.

Wen Kexing wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “So over-the-top. I can’t believe I did that. Did everyone watch me leave?”

“They did, sorry.” Zhou Zishu pulls a tissue out of Wen Kexing’s shirt pocket and holds it under his nose, making him blow into it instead.

“I don’t know why that got to me. I don’t even care. I’m just living my life and then someone I don’t even know barges in and starts thinking I need their help. Who does that? I don’t need some fancy writer to do anything for me. I’ve never even thought of that kind of thing. I’m just a line cook. That has to be enough.”

“It is. I know that you know it.” Zhou Zishu rubs his back. “Give yourself more credit. You don’t just cook, you practically run the place. And Ye Baiyi wasn’t trying to play know-it-all, at least not about you and what you do. He was just curious. It doesn’t mean it needs to be anything more than making extra of the dinner you were going to cook anyway, if you don’t want it to.”

“He told you this?” Wen Kexing doesn’t look up, investing all his attention in digging out the dirt under his nails.

“Kind of.”

“Have you seen the way he eats? I’ll never keep up. He’s a rice combine.”

“I’ll help you cut up stuff later?”

“Ha-ha. As if.” Wen Kexing sniffs, and brushes strips of grass off his legs. He looks up at the cloudless, blue sky, his lash line balancing shine. “What if you get tired of me, doing this?”

There’s no more tissues. Zhou Zishu wipes Wen Kexing’s eyes with his hand. “Why would I get tired of something I’m not doing? We’re two separate people, Lao Wen.”

“What if you get tired of—never mind. I’m okay.”

Zhou Zishu turns Wen Kexing’s face towards him. “Hey. Look at me. We’ve just been through this. I’m back. I’m staying.”

“Okay.” 

“Seriously.”

“Okay.” 

Zhou Zishu hugs him, lets Wen Kexing tuck a soundless puddle of tears onto his neck. There’s a noise from around the corner of the house, and it’s Gu Xiang, her arm swiveling between a thumbs-up and thumbs-down position, her eyes cautious and expectant. Zhou Zishu answers with a shrug, and it’s a net-zero exchange of information that makes Gu Xiang roll her eyes and leave again.

The sweltering sun makes it impossible to hold each other without dissolving into sweat. Zhou Zishu tolerates it for five minutes, and then says, “I’m dying for a cold beer. Wanna drive out and buy a case with me?”

Wen Kexing nods against him. “And Chengling’s allergy medication. The poor thing’s going to sneeze his nose off by the time we leave tomorrow.” 

In some ways it had been the perfect trip. No hiccups, no delays. It was nine at night on the West Coast when Zhou Zishu finally encountered a slight inconvenience, in the form of a broken wheel on Chengling’s suitcase as it flopped onto the revolving carousel. And even that didn’t bother him—he was so close to not needing the suitcase anymore, that the extra effort it took to hobble it around didn’t affect his mood at all. This was good. If he had to add another emotion to the mix swirling in his belly, he might fizzle and combust. 

The freezing AC in the airport helped a little with the nervous fire over his skin, as he searched the quiet emptiness around him with his phone in hand, where a “seen 9:13pm” notification had just popped below his most recent text. There’s a buzz in his ears. It could be the background hum of the electricals. Or his own short-circuiting. He couldn’t find Wen Kexing, and at a frantic loss that he needed to do something, anything about, he walked away from the baggage claim door they’d agreed to meet at and towards the next one. 

The limping suitcase almost slipped from Zhou Zishu’s hand when he saw him, clutching a spare jacket and a bag of Skittles to the chest of his pajama shirt, under an orange scrolling LED panel that’s paging the most recently landed flight. Qantas Airways, hailing from Canberra. Everything else—the sticky carpet, the merry-go-rounds of luggage, the custodian snuffing out a cigarette in the water fountain—vaporized from Zhou Zishu’s vision. Everything else desaturated. 

Wen Kexing opened his soft, pink mouth. “Say you’ve missed me.” 

“So much.” 

“Say it, the whole thing.” 

“I’ve missed you, so much.” 

“Come here.” 

Wen Kexing kissed him. He tasted like green Skittles. Zhou Zishu felt like a burlap sack of candy, colorful and syrupy and about to burst, as Wen Kexing sliced free the days that parted them and poured Zhou Zishu down his throat, did something sloppy with his tongue that made Zhou Zishu sigh into his mouth. It felt so good to be consumed like this, to be wanted inside the rolling boil of another body and soul so desperately, like he was Eve’s apple, antidote, ambrosia. He couldn’t give himself away fast enough. He wanted to melt into molten molasses, and reform into whatever shape Wen Kexing’s palms took when he cupped his hands together. 

They broke away, and Zhou Zishu squeezed him tight. “Why are you all the way over here?”

“The vending machine was broken and I wanted sweets, so I walked around to find another one.” He wiggled out of Zhou Zishu’s hold and unfurled the jacket he was holding. “Here, put this on. Look at all the goosebumps on your arms!”

Zhou Zishu shivered when they went outside. Wen Kexing tsked over the broken suitcase and why no one should ever buy hardsides, and walked over to the passenger side of the car. 

“Can you drive?” He tossed the car keys at Zhou Zishu.

“Yeah. Why? Are you sick of it?”

“No. I want to look at you, not the road.” 

It felt good to drive after being at the mercy of public transportation for almost two weeks. They didn’t talk much; the sound of human and mechanical breathing filled the tiny space enclosing them snug enough. They were thirty minutes out from the airport when Wen Kexing asked, “Are you hungry? Wanna get pho? There’s a spot down the next exit, they don’t close until eleven.”

Steaming soup noodles. Zhou Zishu’s mouth watered. “Too much trouble. You can just throw together something for me at home.”

“Well, I don’t think I want to waste time cooking when we get home, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.” He had to swallow down the saliva collecting on his tongue. “Then pho is fine. This exit?” 

The restaurant was patronized by a group of teenagers reeking of Svedka, and a brown, weathered, off-duty construction worker, shaking a leg clad in sagging, paint-splattered denim as he polished off a trough of bún bò huế. Zhou Zishu got something safe with fatty brisket, while across from him Wen Kexing’s portion looked like the inside of an entire cow had been dumped into it. Zhou Zishu squeezed half a lime into his broth, and without missing a beat, Wen Kexing dumped the rest of Zhou Zishu’s unwanted garnishes along with his own into his bowl, wrestled to get all the spilling bean sprouts to turn and wilt under the rice noodles. 

The late night commotion made their quietness around each other seem odd. The teens two tables away were bleating about fucking bitches over the steady stream of Vietnamese pop from the speakers by the cash register, where the proprietress flirted with the construction worker as he paid for his meal and then a Thai tea to-go, running her fingers through her tight perm as she laughed with all her teeth out. Every breath was the smell of Thai basil, star anise, and simmered bones. The steam cleared the slight headache Zhou Zishu had been nursing since hours before he landed, and he felt unfogged enough to finally say something. 

“You’re being awfully quiet,” he said. “Are you alright?”

Wen Kexing looked up from his bowl. “Yes?” He fished for a mouthful of noodles with his chopsticks among the sea of bean sprouts. “I would ask you about your trip, but you already told me too much.”

“I guess you’re right.” Zhou Zishu hadn’t mentioned his last night in Shanghai.

“We can just sit and eat together, hmm? I’ve missed that.”

“Me too.”

“And when we get home I want you to fuck me until I pass out. Got it?”

Finally , they were at the same caliber as everyone else in this restaurant. Zhou Zishu chuckled, and felt more like a real person instead of a bag of rocks. “You don’t need to ask.”

“I know.” Wen Kexing closed his lips around the tip of his soup spoon, savoring it even though there wasn’t a single drop of broth in the cavity. “I just wanted to say it out loud.” 

“You should say it even louder, later.”

It should be impossible to choke on an empty spoon, but Wen Kexing made it happen, looking away and taking a sip of water. Whatever delicate tension between them eased a little, and it was always funny to see someone this brazen try to hide a blush behind glassware, so Zhou Zishu found himself stuck in a smile he couldn’t wipe away. 

“Finish your food.” Wen Kexing glanced at him again, still unsteady. “Let’s get out of here.”

The drive home was high-strung, dense with pounding blood. The thick fog suffocated the streets they drove on into a nearsighted, bad render, made it feel like the whole world had compressed into two bodies and the space of a vehicle around them. Zhou Zishu drove onto the freeway and the throwback station crooned, you’re listening to: Donna Summer , and they squirmed in the car going eighty-two on the two-eighty, enduring a woman moaning through the speakers by their knees about how she loves to love you, baby. The song was seventeen minutes long and the station played every last sultry onset and coda, like they’d run out of requests to fill and needed a break. Zhou Zishu was so turned on looking at Wen Kexing look at him through the bouncing reflection of the dashboard—amber glow pulsing over the planes of his upturned face at each punctuating overpass, glisten catching his eyes and the lips he kept wetting—Zhou Zishu might drive off into the graffitied concrete wall, and fuck him against the Boston ivy in the rubble if they make it out alive. 

“Isn’t it summer now?” He turned the heat on again. “It’s still so cold.”

“In a few weeks it will be, but it won’t be much warmer then, anyway.” Wen Kexing shifted in his seat and leaned further back. “You remember how it was.”

They almost never played with small talk—the words they threw at each other were always too incendiary, so these light, clammy observations about the way the fog blurred the summit swells of Twin Peaks and oh did you change out the air freshener? Change it back, felt immensely pointed and sexual. And now Zhou Zishu was too warm. The heat got turned off again. 

The closest parking was five streets away. Zhou Zishu had not missed this at all. He turned the engine off, took one shallow breath, unclipped his seatbelt at the same time that he heard the one next to his clink as well and then Wen Kexing was lifting himself off his seat and onto Zhou Zishu’s lap in one motion, bumping his tailbone into the steering wheel and not making a sound about it. Whether Wen Kexing’s hand landed on the lever that canted the seat all the way down accidentally or not Zhou Zishu didn’t know, didn’t care to know, all he cared to know was the way that Wen Kexing suddenly towered over him like an avalanche as Zhou Zishu’s back swooped down in the climax of a rollercoaster, the tips of Wen Kexing’s hair a pendulum grazing his chest, and he was so sensitive that he felt the butterfly tickles and tingles of it through two layers of cotton and polyester, pronounced as if they were fingernail scratches. And before he could think more Wen Kexing caught Zhou Zishu’s open, stunned lips between his own, base and grandiose, and Zhou Zishu finally remembered to use his hands to do—anything. Touch Wen Kexing’s anything. He’d dabbed something expensive on his neck, Zhou Zishu could smell it now—colliding spontaneously with the conflict of his shapeless, washed out sleep clothes, like an afterthought, or perhaps a panic. Something that smelled new and bright, unadulterated by the warmth and chemistry of skin, like it had just been applied. Something woodsy and dark with just enough jasmine to straddle the unisex row of a fragrance rack; that would have words like wild conquest and feminine energy written in serif, anchored on the same justified block in a glossy black box. Something tenfold more overwhelming than his usual scent of drugstore deodorant and fryer oil that screamed, smell me. Notice me. Want me, please. 

“Inside,” Zhou Zishu panted, two fingers lifting weakly for the door handle. 

“No, inside me. I already asked.” Wen Kexing played with the waistband of his pajamas. 

“No. Yes—no. Inside our room , idiot.”

“Oh.” Wen Kexing’s hand had already disappeared under soft heather grey. 

And even as Zhou Zishu objected to this course of events happening in the car, he pulled Wen Kexing’s hand away from himself and replaced it with his own, stroked the hard, warm length of him through fabric, until Wen Kexing moaned low and long, before Zhou Zishu reached for the door again and pushed it out, cold air rushing in. 

They’d made it ten steps onto the sidewalk, when Wen Kexing said “Wait,” and ran back to fetch the car keys that Zhou Zishu had forgotten about. As he returned at a light jog and jingle, he looked less a flaming ball of desire and more the man who had brought a spare jacket for Zhou Zishu to the airport again, and Zhou Zishu’s breath caught—held, and held, until Wen Kexing was in front of him once more. 

“You’d have no car tomorrow if I didn’t remember,” he said, dropping the keys into Zhou Zishu’s hand. “How did you make it two weeks without me?”

It was a legitimate question that Zhou Zishu didn’t know the answer to. He put the keys away.

The walk to their apartment was so deeply unsexy that Zhou Zishu wanted to laugh. The familiar, compounding century-old sag of Chinatown turned even stonier in his return, the establishments like murky fossils. It was comforting, in the same irrelevant, low-stakes way that sitting at the same seat on the train every day was. Wen Kexing found a shining quarter on the edge of a gutter and barked with delight. A rat scuttled across Zhou Zishu’s shoe and slipped under a crack in the rolled shutters of a grocery stand, followed by a cat, soon stopped short by the dimensions of its genus. Zhou Zishu did laugh, then, as the sullen tuxedo stalked off, and beside him Wen Kexing laughed something nervous and thin, too, and used the pause on their walk to lace his fingers in Zhou Zishu’s.

Inside, Chengling was still awake at the dinner table. They didn’t own a clock so Zhou Zishu didn’t know what time it was, but it was late enough for Wen Kexing to look stern when Chengling ran up to hug Zhou Zishu. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the time, because on the way up the stairs Zhou Zishu could smell the particular profile of clean sweat on Wen Kexing that usually surfaced when he was turned on and restless, and as Chengling released him to hug Wen Kexing in appeasement, Zhou Zishu was briefly anxious, and then thankful that only his nose was this sensitive and obsessed. The kid was just happy, oblivious to the searing way Wen Kexing looked at Zhou Zishu as he patted Chengling’s back, and then gently pushed him away. 

The door to their room clicked close. Zhou Zishu took his jacket off and tossed it on the floor, then thought better, picked it up and hung it properly over a hook. “Where’s A-Xiang? There’s no way she’s asleep before Chengling.”

“Sleeping over at a friend’s, from high school. A-Xu, can we please not talk about the kids?”

Zhou Zishu pulled Wen Kexing’s sleep shirt over his head and kissed his collarbone, his neck, in apology. “I’ll stop,” he said for good measure, and moved them back towards the bed, pushing Wen Kexing onto it and climbing on top of him. The unruly sprawl of his hair, even the rustle of sheets stoked his flammable arousal, the crisp slide of cotton on skin almost as prominent as the breathy, quiet moans that Wen Kexing cut into the cold air. Beneath the sweat and perfume Zhou Zishu could smell soap on his chest and stomach and it occurred to him that Wen Kexing was freshly showered, just before their reunion. Something about the fact that he’d prepared for this while Zhou Zishu was enduring the last ten minutes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua in his economy seat was unbearably hot, and he yanked down Wen Kexing’s sweatpants with one hand as he kissed him, his cock twitching when he grabbed Wen Kexing’s ass and had his palm full of cool skin. He didn’t even bother with anything underneath. Zhou Zishu wanted to eat him alive. 

“Get this off.” Wen Kexing fumbled around with Zhou Zishu’s pants, and Zhou Zishu sat back to take them off along with his shirt and underwear, before he wedged himself between Wen Kexing’s legs and kissed him again. 

His hand moved to the cleft of Wen Kexing’s thighs, and felt sticky, drying shine already. Zhou Zishu broke the kiss. “Did you…”

“Get a head start, yeah.” Wen Kexing reached between them and stroked Zhou Zishu’s cock, his grip firm. “I didn’t want to waste time when you got here, so stop wasting it now.”

“But it’s already been—”

Wen Kexing flipped them over and pounced on Zhou Zishu, fresh lube already dripping between his knuckles even though Zhou Zishu never saw the bottle make its entrance. He roughly worked on himself with too many fingers in too little time, lifted himself up and over and collapsed onto Zhou Zishu’s cock like he was so, so tired of being alone, and Zhou Zishu squeezed his eyes shut, overwhelmed with the sinewy, silicon-slick heat that surrounded him, with the vibration of high-voltage affect from this man above and around him, nuclear and imminent. 

Wen Kexing clenched tight around him, pressed his mouth stiffly over Zhou Zishu’s, less a kiss and more pinning him in place, crucifying him to the bed. The hard contact went beyond the softness of lips into a territory of discomfort where the shape of teeth made itself known. Zhou Zishu felt it was wrong to breathe, even through his nose. Wen Kexing loosened for one second to gasp “Could you not go, anymore?” And latched immediately back onto Zhou Zishu’s mouth, like the question was rhetorical. Hypothetical, precarious. 

When he started moving he was straightaway brisk, arms pulled up to the back of his head as he gathered his hair with the stretched-out turquoise hair tie on his wrist. Zhou Zishu fixed on the rippling line of his body—the pulse of his stomach, the swirl of his hips, the quivering acute angle of his cock between their bellies, the way the skin over his ribcage stretched thin over his frame with his arms raised, making the ridges of bones jut out. Zhou Zishu reached out and ran his fingers over those ribs, and wanted to tell Wen Kexing that he needed to remember to eat food, not just make it. But then it would kill the mood and Wen Kexing seemed fragile enough as it was, so he didn’t. 

When he looked up again, Zhou Zishu caught a hint of a wince as Wen Kexing lowered himself down, hard and cursory, and he grabbed him by his hips to hold him still.

“Stop. You’re hurting, I can tell.”

Wen Kexing ignored him. 

“Stop it, stop moving!” 

“It’s alright, I don’t mind.” He hadn’t said a word since begging Zhou Zishu to not go, and his voice cracked now. “What, are you scared? Am I in love with a big wuss?”

“Shut up. Stop hurting yourself!”

“What if I like it? What if I want to hurt? Are you going to deny me that, too, after you’ve left me here?” 

He could be so relentlessly nagging, so repetitive when his mind fixated on something, that it seemed like words just poured out of him without filter or thought, his tone flat not from a lack of emotion but an overload of it, weighing on his throat. What had Zhou Zishu ever denied him, if he could help it? And if he’d left Wen Kexing here, had he not come back and scooped him up again, just like he said he would? Zhou Zishu tried to push Wen Kexing off, and when he clamped down stubbornly with his thighs, Zhou Zishu toppled them onto their sides so he could pull out. 

Wen Kexing’s eyes were hard and shining. And as he gave out a whine of protest at Zhou Zishu’s desertion of his willing body, a teardrop slipped from him, ran over the bridge of his nose, and melted into the gray pillowcase under his cheek. He rubbed his eye, glaring. “Great. And now you’ve made me cry.” 

For how incandescently Zhou Zishu loved him, he did seem to be very good at that. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to get hurt.” 

“Well I did anyway.” 

And just like that, they weren’t talking about the sex anymore. He wiped Wen Kexing’s eyes with the heel of his palm, then smeared the tears away on his own leg. “I thought you were fine. You and the kids were having fun. I’ve wanted to go to that boardwalk for so long and you guys went without me.”

“I was miserable, you jerk.” Wen Kexing beat on his chest with his fist, until Zhou Zishu could feel the shake of it rattle his teeth. “You are such a fucking moron. It’s so much work to care for you sometimes.” 

“Thank you for doing it,” Zhou Zishu wheezed. “I was miserable, too, if it matters.”

After a few beats of tense breathing, Wen Kexing moved closer, shuffled around, pressed his lips against Zhou Zishu’s flaming breastbone and held himself there. “I don’t want to fight. I want to come, and then I want to go to sleep, because I have three college grad banquets to do this week. So are you going to keep fucking me or not?”

Zhou Zishu reached over Wen Kexing for the bottle that had rolled into the sheets. “Only if we slow down.” He unfolded Wen Kexing’s knees until he was on his back, and then Zhou Zishu got on his elbows, licked and sucked on the rim of Wen Kexing’s entrance while a small dip of lube warmed in his palm. Under coercion he put in two fingers at once, and despite Wen Kexing’s objections that this still wasn’t enough, his low, trickling moans said otherwise. And in the end it didn’t take long at all to get him properly relaxed—he had just been so impatient—so when Zhou Zishu pushed inside again Wen Kexing’s face stayed soft and open, and his arms went around Zhou Zishu’s shoulders to hold him close.

“You know,” Zhou Zishu said, as he unlatched his mouth from the fresh, slow bruise behind Wen Kexing’s ear. “You can only waste time if you think you’re going to run out. And we’re not going to, alright?”

“You don’t know that.”

Zhou Zishu held Wen Kexing’s face in his hands. “Well I know right now, and that’s all we have. And the only way I can show you that is by being here. So please, I just want to see you happy.”

“Kiss me,” Wen Kexing dribbled out with a sigh. 

Zhou Zishu did. He picked his pace up, eased one of Wen Kexing’s legs over his own shoulder. The talking having tapered off, he focused on Wen Kexing’s sounds, hiccuping with hitched breaths like a continuous buffer; the hot clamp of his body; the sticky hands that grabbed the back of Zhou Zishu’s thighs and pulled. Zhou Zishu dealt him a few dozen hard poundings over the inebriating escalation of his moans, and then resumed the slow, sinuous drags, licked the tips of his own fingers and stroked the head of Wen Kexing’s cock with them, until finally, he came on Zhou Zishu’s hand with a jerk of his legs. “A-Xu I—don’t stop.”

Zhou Zishu fucked him through it. He thought of swaying in a humid, crowded bus in Shanghai, listening to horny nonsense over the phone, reached down to cup Wen Kexing’s balls in his hand and squeezed. Wen Kexing contracted around his cock with a cry, and the orgasm that breached Zhou Zishu swept the strength from his knees in seconds, and he pitched downward, plastered to Wen Kexing’s hot, heaving body, saliva thick and stringy in his mouth like he’d just given him a thorough blowjob. 

“When we were talking, while I was on the plane,” Zhou Zishu panted into the softness of Wen Kexing’s chest. “I cut off before I could finish.”

“I love you too. What else is new?” Wen Kexing breathed ragged through his nose. “Go get me a clean towel.” 

Zhou Zishu turned his face into Wen Kexing’s sternum, and tucked a shaky, tugging smile into his skin. 

When he padded back from the bathroom with a warm washcloth, Wen Kexing had already fallen asleep. Zhou Zishu wiped the mess smeared between and around his legs, rearranged his posture more comfortably and tucked him under the covers. In the shower he rinsed the cloth out, and found that while he’d been gone Wen Kexing had finished their old bottle of body wash and bought a new, different one, warm coconut instead of orange blossom. Zhou Zishu had smelled it on him earlier. He used it generously now, inadvertently lathering it into his hair and not realizing until it was too late, reading the label in a trance while the stall steamed up like a sauna.

The street sweeper whirred faintly outside when he tiptoed back into their bedroom. Zhou Zishu watched it approach from down the street from behind a prodded gap in the blinds, the circular bristles on the sides of the looming, boxy truck scrubbing the gutters clean, ready for another day of plastic and vegetable remains. 

Behind him, swathed in their comforter, Wen Kexing muttered something in English about who dared to steal all the clean towels from his station again. When he talked in his sleep it was always either English or Cantonese, never Mandarin, and Zhou Zishu had only a fifty percent chance of understanding him to any degree, like he did now. It made Zhou Zishu simmer in quiet, smitten jealousy, listening to him, even though there was no logical person nor thing to be jealous over. That Wen Kexing could confirm his love and affection at all hours of the day in all manners of speech and action, but at night Zhou Zishu couldn’t even have the simple luxury of knowing him, unfiltered, made him hungry for some unidentified, all-consuming thing, like he was starving for Wen Kexing even after he’d just had his fill of him. 

Sometimes the syllables Wen Kexing slurred just sounded like disjointed noise to Zhou Zishu’s non-native ears. And at those times, when he couldn’t even tell what language Wen Kexing spoke, some prehistoric instinct in his brain always seized up, fearful and perturbed, of why he was exposed and lying with a creature he didn’t understand at all. 

Zhou Zishu shut the blinds, climbed carefully into bed, and curled up next to him. 

He woke up late the next morning to soft sunlight, the smell of coffee and smoked animal grease, and the grating rustle of paper. Wen Kexing was awake and sitting up, flipping through and marking up a binder that rested on his outstretched legs. His hair was damp and wavy, falling into his face, the occasional drops of water plopping onto paper, consecrating cheap ink into black dahlias. He smelled like coconut milk and tea tree oil—like Zhou Zishu. The scent of salt and grease was from the loosely-defined sandwich held even looser in his upturned hand, that looked like it was just a piece of white bread folded around bacon. 

“What’s that?” Zhou Zishu nudged his head against Wen Kexing’s thigh.

“Expense records. Trying to see if I can move some money around from the other distributors to afford pricier local produce.” 

“Why would you do that?”

“It’s that boy that A-Xiang’s seeing—his uncle’s family farm. Luo-yi coerced me into giving it a shot.” Wen Kexing bent down and nipped Zhou Zishu’s ear. “Good morning. Field trip next week to check the place out. You’re coming with?”

There’s dirt under Zhou Zishu’s nails. It will likely never come off. He’s horrified. All this work, for carrots . 

Ten feet ahead, Cao Weining has once again been assigned grunt work by his uncle to loosen the soil with a pitchfork, before everyone else pulled up the carrot tops behind him. It looks like the hardest job, all that dirt-stabbing and jumping, but Cao Weining’s hands are clean. The grime on Zhou Zishu’s feels like it’s trying to burrow under his skin.

There’s a slimy, cold feeling on the back of his hand. He looks down again and jumps. It’s a worm, writhing on him, faceless and legless and so fucking creepy and he flings his hand out, sending the slip of slime catapulting through the air. He’s about to dry heave. “What the hell?”

Beside him, smeared in dirt up to his elbows, Wen Kexing breaks into laughter. “I’m playing with you. It’s just a worm. ”

“Can the two of you not do that here? It’s nauseating.” Ye Baiyi doesn’t look up from his camera as he speaks. “And you’re ruining all the shots.”

Wen Kexing throws a broken carrot at him. “You better not post those online.”

“As if. I’m going to crop you out.”

“Hey!”

“What are you possibly getting out of this?” Zhou Zishu asks. “Your boss pays you to do this? Stand around and take photos of strangers?”

“I’m not sure what I’m gonna do yet.” Ye Baiyi clicks through his photos, frowning. “Maybe like a mommy blog post. Just to piss them off.”

Zhou Zishu pulls two more carrots and stops. “Okay, I’ve had enough.” He gets up, knees creaking. “I’m going to sit down with a beer.”

Wen Kexing grabs his arm--and now there’s dirt on an even wider surface area of his skin. “You’ve been doing this for less than ten minutes.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re not my boss.” Zhou Zishu wriggles away. “I just came here to hang out.”

Wen Kexing opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, and then closes it when he sees Ye Baiyi watching them. “Get me a beer, too,” he grinds out. 

In the late afternoon, Liu Qianqiao starts the grill outside the front porch and flops on a score of chicken thighs, brushing them with honey and soy at each flip. Xiao-Xie is walking circles out in the hay, barking through a phone call with Luo Fumeng about switching to recyclable take out containers. The teens have all inexplicably vanished again but are expected to come back by instinct at dinner, like village children. And inside the yellowing kitchen, Wen Kexing hands Zhou Zishu a cleaver. 

At the same moment his phone buzzes, and it’s the “work” number again, because the operator clearly forgot to pass on the memo that Zhou Zishu is unavailable for the day. Wen Kexing watches him hesitate with his thumb on the green button, his arms crossed. “You said it yourself, and I quote, that you were going to help me ‘cut up stuff’ today.” 

Zhou Zishu gives in, and puts the phone away. 

Wen Kexing shows him how to process each component of the dish patiently—finely chop the cilantro and toasted peanuts; julienne the scallions, the napa cabbage, the cucumbers, the god-forsaken carrots they’d pulled up earlier. And just to be annoying—Zhou Zishu is sure of this— chiffonade the basil, which requires stacking the infuriating leaves together and rolling them into a tube before slicing, to produce the most unnecessary ribbons of green. Wen Kexing dictates these French techniques in the worst French accent, just to be more irritable, as if Zhou Zishu haven’t seen him employ little more than Cantonese swearing, when the order tickets stacked up on a Saturday night and his favorite knife had been pillaged from the dishwashing rack again. 

Wen Kexing hovers for a few minutes, and when he’s sure Zhou Zishu will not bail, touches the small of Zhou Zishu’s back briefly, and strolls off to dunk bundles of soaked rice vermicelli into a pot of boiling water. 

Either he really doesn’t end up doing a terrible job, or Wen Kexing is just being terribly nice to him, but Zhou Zishu finishes the task unscathed, the vegetables looking like a suggestion of Wen Kexing’s demo piles. Liu Qianqiao comes in with a bulging plate of grilled chicken covered in foil and Wen Kexing is all Qiaoqiao that’s beautiful that looks so good the char on this is great. A-Xu slice these too please. And if Zhou Zishu rolls his eyes one more time they will fall back into his head, so he doesn’t, and carries on with his last task. Then the kids file in at once, their pants wet from the knees down from wading in a nearby lake. Chengling can’t seem to comprehend the sight of Zhou Zishu in front of a cutting board, and he has the gall to whisper, “Zishu-ge, are you okay?” as he snags a strip of chicken from the plate. 

Wen Kexing rinses the cooked vermicelli under the faucet, and then it’s assembly time.

A cupboard’s worth of sauces and oils go into a bowl, spiked with MSG, heavy on sesame and peanut sauce. The noodles are divided out into bowls—Wen Kexing doubling Ye Baiyi’s portion and not talking about it. He arranges all the vegetables and chicken that Zhou Zishu cut up on top, Gu Xiang hanging off him with her arms looped around his neck and her cheek against his back, and to finish, he drizzles sauce on top with a spoon. “Done,” he declares. “If you don’t take your bowls out of here in five minutes, I’ll gut you. I’m not bringing anyone food.”

By now it’s cooler outside than in, the wooden house trapping the day’s heat indoors, so they eat on the porch. Zhou Zishu mixes all the ingredients together with his chopsticks and takes a bite. 

“Lao Wen.”

“A-Xu.”

“Have you made this for me before?”

“I don’t think so? I don’t usually go out of my way to cook you cold dishes, it never gets hot enough for that back home.”

But it tastes so familiar, for some reason. Zhou Zishu wracks his brain in recall as he chews, but as hard as he tries he can’t remember associating this creaminess of peanut and tang of vinegar with Wen Kexing’s face, yet he can’t think of anyone else he would have had it from, because in the States he only ever eats Chinese food from their restaurant or at home, and it’s only Wen Kexing that cooks for him. It’s a little different: more stripped back, less heavily salted like Wen Kexing’s home-cooking usually is, and the bean sprouts are decidedly absent, because the farm doesn’t grow any. He keeps thinking about it while they eat, until towards the bottom of the bowl he finally gets it, and he tugs on Wen Kexing’s arm, unwittingly interrupting his conversation with Fan Huaikong about produce delivery times.

“Yes, A-Xu?”

“This was from before I met you, properly. I ordered it online. I think it was on my second day in the city.”

The flowering, marigold sunset turns one side of Wen Kexing’s hair russet, lining its shadows like copper gilding. He smiles, leans forward to peck Zhou Zishu’s cheek sweetly, and goes back to his conversation. 

Han Ying finally texts him back, about the photos Zhou Zishu had sent him in the morning. There are farms in America? 

After dinner there’s watermelon, thick slabs of flooding sweetness that hit the spot almost better than the afternoon beers. Fan Huaikong tsks at the way Cao Weining gets juice all over his cheeks, and painstakingly cuts the slices down for him without a word. There’s wine after the fruit, poured into opaque plastic cups, that Wen Kexing keeps downing like water while Gu Xiang drapes herself behind him again and pulls his hair into a braid. For someone who has a boyfriend sitting five feet away she is awfully clingy towards her brother. Despite the aloof show she put on during her first days home, she misses him. Zhou Zishu sees it in the way her fingers slow towards the tail end of the braid, as she reluctantly pulls the tie out from her own ponytail, and cinches it around Wen Kexing’s hair instead. 

At nine Fan Huaikong retires upstairs, and warns Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing that he’s cleaned up the barn, but to not expect much, he is so sorry. The rest of the group dwindles out one by one, rotating through the single bathroom. Zhou Zishu cradles the last three cans of chilled beer into a delightfully cold shower and takes turns between drinking and trying to kiss Wen Kexing under the water, as Wen Kexing shrugs him off over and over, too focused on pressing the new bruises mottling his knees from a day kneeling on the earth, and too determined to scrape the soil out from under his fingernails.

They’re walking off to the barn when Ye Baiyi’s voice starts behind them. “Zhou Zishu. You got space for one more in your car tomorrow?”

They do. But Zhou Zishu doesn’t respond, and looks at Wen Kexing.

“I’m not driving you all the way to the airport unless you pay me,” Wen Kexing says. 

“Who says I’m going to SFO? I haven’t even bought a return flight yet.” Ye Baiyi raises the wine in his hand. He’s drinking from the bottle. “I’ll go wherever you guys are going.”

“To my house?”

“Stop making this infuriating. I said I wanted to check out where you work, so don’t walk out on me again and just say yes or no like a normal person. I’ll pay you or I won’t pay you. Your choice.”

Wen Kexing breathes, slow and steady. “Be ready by eight in the morning.”

“Are you making breakfast?”

“No.”

The barn is a dark, hollow cave, a few of last year’s hay bales and bags of animal grain stacked on one end and otherwise filled with half-broken, rusty farm equipment. It’s sparsely lit. There are June bugs littered around the single dim Titian lamp in the center of the room, orbiting the burning light bulb and spinning on their shiny green backs on the wooden floor, dying. Wen Kexing stomps on one of them, and Zhou Zishu loves even this about him, too—his casual violence, contained to the mundane, reserved only for the shadows, after-hours, and Zhou Zishu’s eyes. The beetle flattens into a dark scribble and Wen Kexing whistles a song.

“Wow, the old man wasn’t kidding.” Wen Kexing examines the accommodations they’ve been left with: modular foam mats that look like the kind babies play on, with two quilts, two pillows, and a blanket folded on top. Wen Kexing unravels them one by one. “So much bedding. What are we supposed to do with all this? It’s still pretty warm here.”

“It might be nice and soft if we just sleep on top of them.”

“What if it gets cold later?”

“Why would it get cold?” Zhou Zishu steps forward, presses his mouth against Wen Kexing’s. “You have me here.” 

They pile the bedding out into a lumpy, weird spread. And then the clothes come off quickly. Wen Kexing has the foresight to lay his flannel down before he presses Zhou Zishu back onto the quilts. He sucks him off for a few minutes, more leisure licking than anything else, and then he looks up. 

“Did you bring lube?”

“No I forgot.” Zhou Zishu rubs his face and groans. “Please stop asking me things.”

“You forgot lube and you forgot Chengling’s meds. What have you not forgotten?”

“By the way, we both forgot his meds the second time. You just grabbed two cases of Coors and ran to check out. And who just carries lube around for a single day trip? Isn’t that extremely presumptuous?” 

“You’re the worst.” Wen Kexing clambers up to fetch his daypack, from where he’s hung it over an empty hook on a tool rack. 

He comes back with the bottle, settles between Zhou Zishu’s legs and ducks forward, mouth open to resume his work, but Zhou Zishu holds his face away. “Hold on.” He pushes himself up and takes Wen Kexing’s hair down from the braid Gu Xiang had weaved. The soft waves it leaves his strands in don’t fit the angles of his face at all, and Zhou Zishu found it such a novelty that he grabs his phone to take pictures. 

Wen Kexing blocks his own face, toying at shyness, whining through a smile when Zhou Zishu pulls his hand away and holds it in his own, so he could take ten of the exact same photo. When Wen Kexing’s had enough he lunges forward and pins Zhou Zishu down, tries to wrestle the phone from his grip. Zhou Zishu lets him have it, laughing, and watches Wen Kexing scroll through the grainy pictures, the screen’s projection of his own body glowing on his face in blond, the soft smile on his lips genuinely shy, now. 

Wen Kexing puts the phone away and leans down, nestles his face under Zhou Zishu’s chin. “When’d you learn to be this much?” 

“I should take more photos of you.”

“What, naked?”

“That too.” 

Wen Kexing fake-whines again. He raises back onto his knees, pours lube on his hand. “I need to shut you up before you keep saying these things.” 

Zhou Zishu lets Wen Kexing’s long, clever fingers do their work and shut him up. And then Wen Kexing sinks into him and unravels all that effort, thrusting tight on the spot that makes Zhou Zishu cry out, louder here in a rare way that they both couldn’t be most of the time, with a kid at home. He’s luridly, idly talkative, playing with grammatical filth and a body he’s fucked and gotten fucked by hundreds of times now, like there are still new things to share and discuss. And then he slows, like he’s recalling something, holds Zhou Zishu’s face in his hands and holds himself to the hilt inside him, eyes round.  

“Remember when I bawled my eyes out while I was riding you?” Wen Kexing’s grin is bright and luscious. 

“What are these lies? You didn’t bawl your eyes out. And that was just last week, of course I remember.”

“I know. It’s crazy. What was I even going on about?”

He’s indulging in self-deprecation again. Zhou Zishu ignores it. “What are you going on about, now?”

“I don’t know, railing you? Being the best lay of your life?” He switches to the self-applause just as fast, and this, at least, is something that Zhou Zishu can tolerate much easier, especially now. Especially when, as if to reinforce a point, Wen Kexing starts moving again, fast, all skilled grind and rhythm. 

Zhou Zishu reaches out, runs a hand through the trail of hair below Wen Kexing’s stomach. “Yeah. Fuck, baby, you’re so—“ and he cuts off. He can never finish sentences like these. He just can’t do it, the easy way that Wen Kexing pours out an abundance of you have the prettiest dick and god your ass is so tight , like the radio looping through R&B top charts, day and night. Wen Kexing responds keenly with a kiss full of tongue anyway. He likes being called baby, among a smattering of other high-fructose concoctions of pet names, that Zhou Zishu vomits only when he’s truly delirious. He calls him Lao Wen in daylight, for god’s sake—like he’s a deadbeat old man in a Chinatown park, leaning over someone else’s gambling, cigarette hanging off his mouth and baijiu dangling between two arthritic fingers at 10am. And maybe Zhou Zishu had, in their early days of knowing each other, picked that dreary old nickname for such a boyish, vivacious young thing, to fruitlessly hold at arm’s length the frightening, overflowing feeling he’d first started nursing. But that terror had since settled into this steady, gurgling flow in his bloodstream, and it seems like he can manage and carry it indefinitely, now. 

Chirping. Above them, in the rafters—a clutch of baby birds, awake past their bedtime and still hungry for bugs. A rustle of feathers as a fork-tailed parent brings home a mysteriously squashed, shining green beetle, pre-killed for easy feeding. 

“Swallows,” Zhou Zishu murmurs. 

“A-Xu, I love you, but please don’t call me that.”

“Oh—sorry.”

The chirping intensifies, crescendos, and then quietens all at once.

Heady with his release, Zhou Zishu watches the dark shape of the nest on the wood beam and the fluttering silhouette of the barn swallow, as Wen Kexing breathes heavy by his ear, tenses, and twitches inside him. 

“Fuck—ah. That was good. How are you real?”

After a last patrol of the rafters, the bird’s shadow folds into the bulge of the nest, and turns in for the night. 

“I don’t know. I don’t feel real sometimes. You help, though.” 

Wen Kexing peppers kisses over his face, and lies on Zhou Zishu’s chest, until the weight of him makes Zhou Zishu close his eyes, and just breathe. 

The gap in the door gives a creaky yawn as a gust of breeze invites itself in and sighs, cool like a lick of water, on Zhou Zishu’s sticky thighs. 

“Hey. A-Xu.”

“What?”

“I’m so what?”

“I forgot. Ask me again tomorrow night.”

“Heh.”

Wen Kexing shuffles into his boxers again and wipes the sweat from his neck. Zhou Zishu watches him, eyes drooping. He’s got a good ache going. He will go to sleep.

“Get up,” Wen Kexing bends down and sticks out his hand for Zhou Zishu to grab.

“No.”

“Get up.”

“You wrecked me. I’m crippled. Leave me alone.”

“You loved it. Get up .” Wen Kexing hauls him up by the armpits, yanks Zhou Zishu’s shirt back on him again and throws his underwear at him. “I peeked outside. The stars look insane here.”

There’s a light breeze on the other side of the door, soft enough to stay pleasant, strong enough for a cooing whistle. It’s near pitch-black, the waning moon’s glow sponged up by inky foliage so that the crescent does nothing but hang there, a single, dull fingernail clipping tossed in a darkness otherwise freckled with stars, brilliantly. Zhou Zishu barely has a second to look, before he hears a rustle behind him, and it’s Wen Kexing, untangling a leaning stack of bikes against the barn wall.

“What are you doing?”

“Let’s go for a ride.” 

“Are you crazy?”

Wen Kexing dislocates one bike from the tangle, swings it in front of Zhou Zishu, nudges the kickstand down, and goes to yank out another.

“Lao Wen. I want to sleep.”

“Please, A-Xu?”

Zhou Zishu tries out the bike. 

“It’s too small.”

“It’s not. Just adjust the seat. I think the kids rode these out to the lake nearby earlier. I want to go find it.”

“There’s no street lamps here. It’s dangerous.”

Wen Kexing remedies the problem with the flashlight on his phone. They walk the bikes out onto the main road, and it’s an immediate cruise downhill. The wind roars in Zhou Zishu’s ears as they whiz away, cold funneling through his eyes and nose. Wen Kexing’s light only shines up five feet ahead of them, everything else in almost total darkness except for the occasional orange of a house window, up sporadic, quarter-mile driveways. Zhou Zishu keeps his breaks at a slight squeeze and prays to the first god he can think of. He focuses on the clicking buzz of their bikes as they coast, and thinks he finally understands why churches and monasteries all play music. 

They stop at the bottom of the hill, and Wen Kexing checks his GPS. “It’s just a mile away, no problem.”

When they get there, they lean their bikes on a tree in the turnout area and climb down a break in the foliage. Zhou Zishu can’t see the other end of the lake, but from the lack of lapping waves he deduces it to be mid-sized. Wen Kexing’s swiveling flashlight bounces as he jogs to the edge of the water, takes his sandals off and wades in, yelps and complains about how cold it is.

“Come back out,” Zhou Zishu yells. “What are you, five?”

“Whatever. It’s nice!”

His light blinks away. Zhou Zishu panics for a second, before he realizes that Wen Kexing has just turned the flashlight off on his phone, not drowned. Wen Kexing trudges in deeper, until the water comes up to his thighs—he’s still in his boxers, and Zhou Zishu is reminded that that’s all he has on himself, too, as he feels a mosquito bite behind his knee. In the obsidian swallow of waterscape around him, Wen Kexing seems barely there, like a wisp of smoke in the dark, like a promise in an ultrasound. Zhou Zishu wants him back on shore, right now. “Lao Wen. I’ll beat you up if you don’t come back.”

Wen Kexing’s ghost ebbs back towards him after a few seconds, silent except for a gurgle of water. And then he’s in front of Zhou Zishu again and takes his hand, and he’s so warm and alive and not at all the nothingness he’d looked just moments ago, that Zhou Zishu starts. Right before Wen Kexing tugs him towards the water. 

“What are you doing?”

“Come on, you’re already here. Just wet your feet.”

They start tussling, grabbing each other in turn by the waist and limbs in opposite directions. It’s kind of fun, when Zhou Zishu tempers his annoyance. And then Wen Kexing pushes him on the chest while he’s unbalanced on one leg, and Zhou Zishu stumbles backward and falls, right into the water.

“A-Xu—shit. I’m so sorry.” Wen Kexing falls with him on his knees and tries to pull Zhou Zishu up. “I didn’t mean to.”

The water is cold, but not as biting as Wen Kexing’s complaints have made it out to be. If Zhou Zishu steadies his shaky breathing he can parse out remnants of the afternoon sun in the clinging wetness of his soaked t-shirt, on the back of his thighs. It’s shallow, the water level barely skimming the top of his hands, which are digging palms-down into the gravelly silt. He stands up. 

“Do it again,” he says, and is not quite sure why he’s saying it.

Wen Kexing frowns. “What?”

“Do it. Push me again.”

Wen Kexing approaches him slowly, and makes a confused sound when Zhou Zishu walks backward deeper in, until they’re knee-high in water, and the itching new mosquito bite on Zhou Zishu feels a lap of relief. 

“Come on. Do it again.”

“A-Xu why are you—”

“Push me.”

Wen Kexing does, but on steady feet Zhou Zishu’s balance stays put. And true to form, Wen Kexing zeroes in on the slightest of challenges with cunning curiosity, and pushes Zhou Zishu harder. 

“Why won’t you fall if you want me to push? Are you trying to embarrass me?”

Zhou Zishu grabs him by the waist and throws himself backwards. Lake water closes in over him just as he remembers to hold his breath, and above the muting slosh of liquid Wen Kexing screams. It’s peaceful, despite the quacking ruckus, the water cool under Zhou Zishu’s eyes, the bubbles leaving his nose slightly ticklish. But he doesn’t want Wen Kexing to worry, and the yelling is getting obnoxious, so he lets go of Wen Kexing and pushes himself up. 

“—do that? I said my phone’s gonna die!”

Unbelievable. Zhou Zishu mops the wet hair away from his eyes as he watches Wen Kexing scrabble around the sand to fish out his phone. “What, you weren’t worried about me? ”

“Why would I? You’re the one that kept asking to get dunked. My poor phone didn’t.” Wen Kexing stalks back to shore, his hair dripping down his bare back. “Now we have no light to get back with. And I need a bag of rice.”

It’s too dangerous to ride in the pitch black, so they haul their bikes up the mile back, drying off on the walk. Zhou Zishu does truly feel bad about the phone now tucked in the pocket of his own shirt, so he holds Wen Kexing’s hand, and when he squeezes back Zhou Zishu is relieved, that maybe he isn’t too mad. 

Back by the barn, the bikes get tossed back onto the pile. Zhou Zishu thinks they must be done, now, but after Wen Kexing comes back from giving his phone the rice treatment at the farmhouse, he darts into the barn, unplugs Zhou Zishu’s phone from the charger plugged into the wall, turns on the flashlight and grabs Zhou Zishu’s hand. Wen Kexing pulls him into the waist-high sea of black grass. The beam from the phone sweeps like that of a lighthouse, turning dark, earthly hair into waving green tresses. 

“What is this, Hong Gao Liang? Are you going to seduce me in the red sorghum fields?” Zhou Zishu still feels too guilty to ask to leave. 

“This is hay,” Wen Kexing corrects him earnestly. “And I haven’t read that one yet, so we can’t talk about it.” 

“It’s also—never mind. Shouldn’t we not be stomping around in this?”

“A-Xu, everyone has stomped on it at this point. I’m doing it when the old man can’t see me, as a courtesy.” Wen Kexing lays down a blanket and sprawls in the hay, and because he’s still holding on to Zhou Zishu, Zhou Zishu has no choice but to follow. The accommodations are prickly and hard even through fabric, smells like a two-day-old mowed lawn, and drooping blades of leaves are snagging everywhere. Zhou Zishu hates it. He uses Wen Kexing as a free cushion and lies half on top of him, his back diagonal across Wen Kexing’s front. Wen Kexing complains that he can’t breathe. Zhou Zishu suggests they go back inside, which earns him a pair of arms locked around his stomach instead. And the little outing must have tired them both out, because they stop struggling, and just look up. 

“Can’t see Orion anymore,” Wen Kexing says. 

Zhou Zishu sifts through the stars for the slim, three-star midriff of the constellation. Once, he could find Orion in the southern sky in a blink, and jot down notes with Chengling just as fast. “Looks like it’s shifted away now.”

“Didn’t Orion get killed by a scorpion?” Wen Kexing hadn’t been scathe-free from participating in the weird high school homework. 

“Oh. Well. Let’s never mention that in front of Xiao-Xie.”

Wen Kexing shifts around under him. “That one—with my last initial. What’s that?”

He’s pointing above their heads, so that Zhou Zishu has to arch his neck backwards to follow the trace of his pointer finger. “Cassiopeia?”

Wen Kexing hmms. “That’s a pretty name. Cas-sio-pee-ah.”

Zhou Zishu remembers something, and feels his chest twinge at the memory. He can’t talk about it yet, but he can talk around it. He raises his hands to superimpose a photo frame over the constellation, and says, angling his hands, “In Shanghai it’s shifted this way.”

Wen Kexing cranes his neck to try to see inside Zhou Zishu handheld frame, and grunts something nondescript when he can’t. Some sights, some reveries—will only fit one person. 

“I bet it’s prettier here,” Wen Kexing compensates, overdoing it and letting unintentional vulnerability in. “Right, A-Xu?”

Zhou Zishu doesn’t care to tell him about the light pollution, about how Shanghai’s Cassiopeia was just a figment of his parched imagination, so he says, yes, it’s prettier here. Just to please Wen Kexing. And then, because Wen Kexing’s breathing really does sound labored,  Zhou Zishu rolls off him and surrenders to the prickly field of hay. 

“Come with me,” Zhou Zishu says. He’s been thinking about it for a while now. “Next time.”

“To—Shanghai?” 

“Yeah. Or anywhere. You can’t keep calling work errands ‘field trips’. Let’s go somewhere, for real. An actual vacation—for our anniversary next week. While we still have A-Xiang for a few months. We should do something nice with her.”

“That sounds...fun,” Wen Kexing mutters. “I’ll go wherever you want. Want me to go.”

“No, you should pick.”

“I’ll think about it.”

They look at the stars in silence. Zhou Zishu thinks he’s finally patient enough for this. It feels like visiting a friend’s place after they’ve redecorated—the arrangements have shifted, but the layout is still correctly anchored to muscle memories. The symphony of chirping crickets and warbling frogs surround them from all sides, quite carefree in volume when they aren’t talking over them. 

Wen Kexing fumbles in the dark, and gently sets the back of Zhou Zishu’s hand on his own chest, where his heart kicks like a dreaming rabbit. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“What I said before, the night you came back—about how I don’t want you to leave anymore. I take it back.”

“You want me to go?”

“No! Just—I don’t want that to be the reason you stay.”

“It’s not.”

“I want you to stay because you love me. And us, and—and being here.” 

“I do. All of it.”

Wen Kexing squeezes Zhou Zishu’s hand. “Okay. I’m really, really, thankful.”

“Don’t be.”

“Why not?”

“People are thankful for things they don’t think they deserve.”

“Then what should I be?”

“Happy?”

“Okay.” Wen Kexing rolls onto his side, presses his forehead into Zhou Zishu’s shoulder. “I’m really, really, happy.” 

[Qingyashan Seafood Restaurant - 1532 Photos & 314 Re…]

Plainwhitets8327 Y.

Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, NY

Impossible to get a table without booking in advance, if they aren’t already reserved for private banquets with zero communication about public availability. Don’t bother showing up on Friday nights. Either the best or worst decor depending on your relationship to gaudy opulence. Decent service for a Chinese restaurant if you’re an attractive male. Owner insisted that nothing is microwaved despite how fast orders came out, says that the kitchen is just “quick on their feet”. Take that with a grain of salt. Or not—the squabs were too salty. Portion sizes need improvement. This is a neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Not French dining. 

That being said, probably some of the best lobster noodles I’ve ever had. For delicate, sweet shellfish to hold up against strong personalities like ginger, scallions, and oily noodles without losing itself is no easy feat, but… [click for full review (2380 words)].

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Liu Qianqiao (FOH Co-Manager)

Hi Mr. Plain! (sorry, I don’t know how else to address you, since you wanted this to remain anonymous.)

Thank you for your kind comments. Regretfully, some of our staff have requested that you remove their identifying photos from this review, which I understand will be a pain, considering how many applicable images there are. They have requested that I delete this review from our Yelp page if this issue isn’t resolved within 24 hours, so I really hope that you encounter this message soon, because you’ve written some truly lovely things about us that we cherish, and would like to keep on the site. 

Sorry for the inconvenience. Come back to the west coast soon!

Take care,

Liu Qianqiao (FOH Co-Manager)