now I lay you down to rest... WIP dump (layhan)

[warmboys]

spring cleaning! spoiler: luhan is always high, lay is always fat.

- City of Dreams, 1st person POV

“Listen to this one,” Lu Han says. I say, “Okay,” and click ‘Accept’ on the dialog box and watch the green bar get longer and longer. Outside the cat is moaning again. I’ve got my headphones in but they don’t make a difference. The cat’s pitches transcend slow-memory foam. I found these headphones in the attic when we held our garage sale last year, after Dad’s accident. We could’ve sold them for twenty yuan but I hid them behind my back when Mom did her hawk-eyed scanning of the room for valuables. She borrowed a pricing gun from one of the mahjong aunties who worked at the Big Mart in town. It spat out little pink tags and made everything look official, like Dad’s old wifebeater was actually supposed to be yellow and molding. No one bought it anyway. We cut it up into rags and are using them to wipe off the tables after closing hours.

I can’t focus because of the cat, also because I don’t “get” anything Lu Han sends me, and also because I’m part deaf in my left ear. In primary school I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the toolbox. I picked that phrase out of a book somewhere so I hope you understand. What happened was I got my head shoved down toilets on I wouldn’t say a regular but also not an irregular basis. Maybe every two to three days. Whenever the fancy struck the bigger kids. It wasn’t that easy for them because I was a lot fatter at the time and they had to flip me upside down to stick my head into the toilet. Water clogged up my ears pretty badly. I don’t know why the left is worse but I sleep on this side a lot more. It just feels better. I like to sleep against the wall, which is on the left, and sometimes Lu Han sneaks up behind me after climbing in through the window and I act like I don’t know he’s there because he likes feeling smart and I don’t mind giving him what he wants. Sometimes.

“What do you think?” he asks, with a bright expectant note in his voice, and I lie and say, “Um, it’s good.” I can’t tell if these are human or robot voices and if they’re supposed to be screaming at me or what they’re screaming. This doesn’t sound like Chinese or any of the other languages I’ve heard from pictures. When Lu Han hangs up, I click out of the song and open up the Box. The Box plays ocean sounds and bird songs and I close my eyes and pretend that I am wherever these exotic locations are. I pretend the cat is too.

I wake up and it’s already seven. Mom’s knocking on my door because the Aunties need to be entertained while she cooks. Mahjong House has been catching on in our town and somewhat in the outskirts too. You can tell if they’re from the outskirts by how even their hemlines are, and how clean their fingernails. Water here runs a light pee-yellow, the kind of yellow your pee gets when you drink a lot of water. But no one wants to drink water that looks like pee to begin with, so it’s a Catch-22. Which is another book I read illegally. Don’t tell. But in the outskirts they dry their laundry indoors. They have a machine that does it for you and they hang up paintings on their walls. Our walls are covered in mosquito stains. Some of them are mixed black, brown and red from the blood the mosquito sucked out of us right before we smacked them dead. Our family is different from Lu Han’s. Lu Han’s dad told him that when he was little he woke up to a portrait of his grandfather’s grandfather every single morning. Lu Han’s grandfather died of lung cancer before Lu Han was born. None of us knows what he looked like. Lu Han’s family was not like mine until the collectors came, and now we’re the same.

“Can he dance?” one of the Aunties is saying, pointing at me. She wears wire rings on her fingers made from unwound and rewound paper clips, as is the fashion among middle-aged women lately. I think they’re all listening to the same Box station, the one run by Popo, this sixty-year-old lady who can see into the future. She predicts rain every other Saturday and she is always right. Popo studied fashion design in a university outside of the City and that’s why everyone listens to her. She left and she came back and that says something. She is unmarried and has two cats that she talks about when she’s not predicting the future or telling people what to wear. That’s why cats are en vogue now too. We got ours off the street, right as it was about to get run over by a motorbike. Mom calls it fate and coddles it in a way that I don’t remember being coddled as a kid. Plus she didn’t have to pay for it the way she paid for me, she says.

“Yes,” I say. “I can dance.”

I start dancing, and the aunties are smoking and nodding in approval. One of them is asking Mom if she’s willing to sell me, which I think is a half-joke, but Mom says I’m not worth more than the cat, which is at least trendy nowadays. “All Yixing does is listen to music in his room and play with that haughty child of Lu. Mimi at least keeps me company, don’t you, Mimi? Mimi?” I’ve told Mom a thousand and one times Mimi is a boy and if we call him Mimi the other cats will never let him live it down. He’ll have his head stuffed into toilets. I didn’t tell her I knew from personal experience or that that’s why I am partially deaf. Maybe if I did she would stop joking about selling me. Tampered goods would not fetch as generous a price.

Also Lu Han is not haughty. He’s just wired all the time.

In school they’re teaching us about circles again. I feel like I’ve heard this before, circles and squares. And triangles, but no one cares about them. Lu Han can’t seem to keep still behind me. I hear him clicking his pen and see his freakishly long arm extended all the way to the edge of my desk. Teacher Wang is outlining a giant circle on the blackboard and then drawing a smaller, but still big, one inside it. Lu Han is kicking some sort of beat into the back of my seat and humming into my neck and I’m nodding along with it because it’s all I can do to keep from laughing. My neck is my weak spot. It is sensitive like no other part of my body except for my ear and, and, um… that other place. Lu Han knows about this and uses it to his advantage even though friends are not supposed to manipulate you every chance they get. I would never do that to a friend, not even a cat. Lu Han, on the other hand, is always breathing down my neck like one of those bloodsuckers I’ve also read about. I know I seem like a rebel but I am actually very law-abiding. The Freenet is for porn, and that’s what I use it for most of the time. 50% of the time. It’s only the other 50% that I spend downloading illegal books and music like Lu Han’s angry robots and my bird songs.

“Eyes up here, friend Zhang.” Teacher Wang is frowning, and I eye the ruler in his hand with trepidation. So I straighten my slouch, which is genetic.

“What is this?” Teacher Wang has now arrived at my desk, slapping his ruler against the palm of his other hand. He then points at the blackboard with the ruler. I notice his palm is red.

“A circle, sir,” I respond with a straight spine.

He narrows his eyes and wrinkles his forehead at me, and I try not to stare at the hairy mole between his eyebrows. I fail. It is so prominent. Parts of his gums have disappeared, replaced by little black triangles between his teeth, which Mom tells me happens after a certain age. “Mine was immediately after I had you. You sucked all the nutrients out of my body,” she told me with her infinite wisdom. “Like a parasite,” I said, and she looked scandalized that I knew the word. I didn’t tell her I learned it off the Freenet.

“That is correct, friend Zhang,” Teacher Wang says. I can tell he was hoping I would say square or triangle. My memory is bad, but not that bad.

Lu Han whispers in my ear, “Close call,” and I do my best not to shudder. He is the worst kind of best friend.

Lu Han shows up in his festival garb. On his hands are bracelets made from pebbles picked off the riverbank, which I helped him whittle into beads with the small army knife Dad left behind. He strung them together with a thin thread from the seam of his trousers and now they are on his wrists. The t-shirt he is wearing makes him look exactly as thin as he is, which is very. It isn’t easy to take pride in being thin, so I admire him for it.

“How do I look?” he asks, checking himself out in the glass, and I say, “Famished.”

“Jackass,” he says, pushing me. I fall back on my bed. My chest is warm from where he touched it.

His eyes are rolling back already. I put his sunglasses on for him.

I surf the Freenet for hours, looking and looking. Sometimes I get an idea and it becomes a kernel, eventually a song. It’s a stupid hobby that’ll never earn me any rice bowls. This time my idea isn’t that interesting, but I hum it out. I write it down encrypted the way Teacher He taught me before, before he retired. Teacher He was the best teacher I’ve ever had. He gave different lessons every class.

When the day gets dark, the aunties begin filtering into the house. I put on my headphones and try to disappear into my kernel.

By the time Lu Han climbs through the window, it’s past midnight. I’m mostly asleep, but I hear him.

“How was it?” I ask.

The lamp clicks off, and I can barely make him out in the dark. But there are needlepoints of moonlight reflected in his eyes. “Amazing,” he whispers. Then he crawls into the bed with me.

He’s sweaty and his forehead is greasy against my arm. The breeze comes in through the window as hot as baby breath. Lu Han bends his knees and curls in on himself. He wedges one knee between my legs and rests his hand on my hip. It is tightened into a fist, like that of a stubborn child.

“You should’ve been there,” he said. His voice travels through my skin. “You’d get it, too, what it’s like.”

It scares me, but I don’t want to show him my fear. I take his fingers and unwind them, one at a time.

- excerpt from original, 3rd person POV

The last time Yixing could hear all six pitches in the hearing part of his annual physical exam was probably in elementary school. The following years saw a lot of eardrum damage while he tried to block out the constant level of noise in the house, a lot of the Box and shit Lu Han sent him that had no words, just beats that stretched out and wrapped around him like the all-encompassing overcast sky. Or an oversized coat, one of his father's that they'd sold in a garage sale after the accident, ten yuan for the leather and patchwork.

"You like it?" Lu Han asked with a bright expectant note in his voice and his eyes clear like Yixing hadn't seen in days.

Yixing swallowed his hesitance and said, "It's good."

He'd played them in succession until they began to sound the same to him, the synthesized drumlines loudening in a slow crescendo and pattering out as one long unresolved question, to which Lu Han knew the answer and he didn't.

Mahjong House was catching on in the neighborhood and even in the outskirts, where people dried their laundry indoors and hung up paintings on their walls. Once upon a time, Lu Han's family too had adorned their living room with portraits of their ancestors, before the collectors came, before Yixing knew Lu Han.

In the morning Yixing's mother called on him to empty out the ashtrays and wipe down the floors. The cinders told you how profitable the night before had been. Originally she'd filled them in a large urn, day after day, but one of the aunties pointed out that urns were bodies in which to keep dead people, not cigarettes. "Oh," said Yixing's mother. The lines around her mouth deepened when she said it. They stopped after that because everyone can be a little superstitious at times, especially those who think they need to be.

Noise traveled in and out of the kitchen. The movement of the celluloid tiles across a felt table underlay the fabric of Lu Han's music, placed it somewhere in the present. Yixing went to sleep with the thunder in his ears.

In school Lu Han couldn't keep still, twirling his pen over and under his knuckles, leaning his head on his extended arm when the teacher scribbled across the blackboard. He kicked a heavy rhythm into the back of Yixing's seat and hummed into the nape of his neck, where the song nestled like a fidgety worm. Yixing nodded his head, going along with it, but when Wang laoshi turned around Lu Han tipped his seat back, four legs on the floor again. Only his foot kept tapping. The hairs on Yixing's arm rose until they were standing at attention.

"Eyes up here, friend." Wang Laoshi was frowning, ruler in hand.

Yixing straightened his slouch. Lu Han cleared his throat quietly behind him, just short of laughter.

- infidelity au, seluxing
i actually have no recollection of writing this

He doesn’t blame the old age, when it happens; he blames the donut of fat around his waist. He blames his back rolls and all the times Lu Han offered to drive to the pizzeria and he said “God, yes.” Why didn’t they walk? In the morning his reflection shows off a prepubescent type of corpulence, except this time around it could actually kill you. Choke in your sleep from a clogged artery, partner a warm unsuspecting lump beside you. Half an hour too late to the ER. Your feet are cold by then, all ten of your curled toes. And then after the two-week mourning period, the love of your life takes up with his playboy gardener. Actually they met in a swing-dancing class. The other man is still in his thirties. Say hi to that umbilical cord. They’ll sleep in your bed, he will rest his head on your pillow and shed short black hairs on it. The pillow will in time adopt his scent and mold around the shape of his head. He gets to wake up every morning and squint a sleepy eye at the face next to his, “G’morning gorgeous,” or something equally enraging. Fuck him. Fuck them.

“I’m not fucking dead yet,” Yixing says from the doorway when he catches Lu Han with the younger man in their kitchen. Lu Han’s wearing an apron tied around his waist that he doesn’t recognize, with a childish pink trim, and he drops his arms to his sides. He was hugging the man from behind, laughing and peeling potatoes together.

Lu Han’s mouth drops open and twists. His eyes go from dark to horrified to defensive. “How was chess?” His voice is light, still, and he moves quickly across the kitchen. What a pro, Yixing thinks. In the span of ten angry heartbeats he has become a bitter man.

“Who is this?” Yixing says, calmly.

“A friend,” Lu Han answers before he can even finish. “We met in class. I was going to tell you if I knew you wouldn’t fly off into a jealous rage.”

“Hi,” the fetus says. “I’m Sehun.” The guilt is plain in his eyes. He is feeling sorry for Yixing. The poor chump, the gullible fool. Yixing wonders if they’ve slept together yet. If Sehun’s lithe physique is to Lu Han’s liking. When they met, all those years ago, Yixing had owned a hard, efficient body, chiseled by thousands upon thousands of hours of dance practice. Lu Han had been impressed and then enamored and that gave them both something to work with. Lu Han was not his first. Before Lu Han there had been the Soldier, the Consultant, the ABC-half Russian, the on-off flirtations with bulimia. Then Lu Han came and distracted him from food. He became the new preoccupation. According to him, Yixing was his first.

Which meant Sehun, his second.

They have dinner, inexplicably. No one talks. In a motion of great foresight Lu Han had turned the TV up while they were cooking. Sehun watches the reality show with postured and then genuine interest and at one point laughs a loud stupid laugh. Lu Han scans Yixing’s face anxiously for a sign, but what Yixing feels at the moment doesn’t summarize in something as easy as a downturned mouth or a pair of angrily knit eyebrows. He is cold all over. His chopsticks are shaking in his hand.

His hands are still trembling as he throws items into a duffel bag, his suits, shoes, underclothes, and a jacket because it’s almost winter. Lu Han makes ineffectual pleas and promises beside him, but Yixing isn’t listening. He’s thinking about where he can go, who he can call.

- yixing's first time

Yixing wasn’t planning on it; it just kind of happened. “There’s three kinds of trips,” Kris had said. He ticked them off his fingers, and then pointed at the guy standing by the door laughing at what must’ve been a really funny joke. He wore beads on both his wrists. Everyone did. Yixing was wearing his only clean t-shirt.

“And then there’s Lu Han,” Kris said, solemnly. “He’s in his own category.”

“What about me?” said the guy by the door, raising his voice to be heard across two groups of people. He looked back and forth between Kris and Yixing and stopped on Yixing, grinning by way of hello.

“He’s going to touch you,” said Minseok, squeezing in between Yixing and Jongdae with a can of beer. “Last year he went up to this girl, like, average-looking, and started messing with her hair-she had a bun or something, a topknot, and it came loose because he straight up just went like-“ Minseok caressed Jongdae’s hair lovingly with his free hand. “She started screaming and then her boyfriend came. You’ll see,” he ended.

“I’ll watch out for you,” Kris said. “I watch out for everyone.”

“Kris is awesome,” said Lu Han, weaving through to their group. “Hey again.”

“Hey,” Yixing said. He didn’t remember meeting him the first time.

“We met at Sehun’s birthday party,” Lu Han prompted. “You were throwing up in the street, I held back your hair. Some of it came out.”

Yixing remembered now. The memory came to him with brilliant clarity. He wished it hadn’t. “Do you have a thing for people’s hair?” he said.

“What?” Lu Han said, puzzled. Jongdae was laughing. “No.”

They were in one of the tents, and the heat was already turning everyone a different color. Yixing tapped his foot the first hour, staring at the back of Minseok’s and Jongdae’s heads. Lu Han was already dancing. It looked complicated, but easy at the same time. Yixing wasn’t feeling it, but Kris tapped him on the arm and led him out back onto the grass, into the long bathroom line. Yixing took his second half pill in the portapotty, his hands more nervous than he felt.

Lu Han was having a dance-off with Sehun, and some people had formed a half circle around them to watch. Lu Han’s t-shirt clung to the knobs of his spine, lending him the look of a malnourished dinosaur. Sehun’s mouth was tense and puckered in concentration. His legs were too long for him, Yixing thought. Behind him Krystal stomped her white fluffies like she was ready to join in at any time. She drew her long hair into a ponytail, chewing an elastic between her teeth. Mid-turn, Sehun pulled her in by the waist.

Lu Han bowed out gracefully, breathless and sweaty. He dropped his shutters over his eyes and fell into place beside Yixing. “How’re you feeling?” Yixing felt at a disadvantage, not being able to see his eyes.

“Good,” he said, but it was too early.

“Good,” Lu Han intoned near his ear, and slowly dragged both his palms down Yixing’s back.

It’s begun, Kris mouthed from Lu Han’s other side.

An hour later, they were holding hands. “I love this shit!” Yixing yelled, and Lu Han yelled back, “I know!” It was hard to talk while they were jumping. Kris had his arms folded, his head lolling back. Occasionally he raised a fist pump.

They left the tent for water, and everyone was beautiful. The grass was beautiful, a rich healthy green. Lu Han perched both hands on his shoulders, letting him lead. Yixing’s legs were too light for walking. They shimmied to the booth. “Sorry,” Lu Han said to the girl refilling their bottles with a water gun.

“Nah. Enjoying the day. Enjoying you guys,” she said, laughing, showing two pretty gap teeth.

“Close your eyes,” Kris said when they got back. He was talking to Yixing. “It’s better if you close your eyes.”

Lu Han hooked his shades carefully over Yixing’s ears. They’d left two parallel red indents along the bridge of his own nose, Yixing noticed, before blinking his eyes shut. Kris was behind him, his hands kneading into Yixing’s neck. “Relax,” he whispered, and nuzzled Yixing’s ear.

“Do me next,” Yixing heard Lu Han say. He winked an eye open and saw Lu Han staring, mouth hanging open.

He hadn’t eaten in twelve hours, but he wasn’t hungry. Lu Han, red-faced, pulled him out for a break, and they found refuge on a bench next to some kids who looked too young to be there. Girls with eyeliner that bled from the heat, boys with thin arms, stomachs concave under wifebeaters. The smell of weed hung damp and pungent in the air. Yixing leaned against Lu Han and felt the ground nudge his feet from below. “Is that a guitar?” he asked suddenly, cocking his head. It was unmistakable, the steely twang of acoustic strings.

“You’re fucking adorable,” Lu Han said and, squaring his shoulders, kissed him on the mouth. Yixing kissed back, without thinking. Everything about this was easy and obvious. Lu Han slipped a hand into the waist of Yixing’s jeans and rubbed his thumb against the jut of his hipbone. Thoughtfully. Like he didn’t know what else to do.

“Lower,” Yixing said into Lu Han’s mouth, and felt him suck in a breath, then laugh. His hair was sticking to his forehead when he pulled away. His eyes, too bright.

“Let’s do another half,” he said. Yixing had to look away from his red-stained mouth before nodding, “Yeah.”

- One Trick / A Cottage with a Sea View

It’s been raining for a week straight. Next month marks his five-year anniversary with this city but everyone who knows Yixing knows they’re brute-forcing this marriage. Beijing’s the overbearing wife who shaves a few years off your lifespan with her strategically pitched whine and Yixing can never get enough of playing the doting husband, the one who whips out his pocketbook and says, “Whatever you want.” He’s sick in love with this terrible place, its moods and people, ubiquitous dirt. And he needs it. The feeling, he understands, is not mutual. It’s got thousands of him. The relationship isn’t symbiotic, he’s actually a parasite. Luckily the host just happens to be kind of poisonous herself.

The tea kettle’s whistling its head off. Outside a cat has been mewing for the past hour. Yixing lives on the first floor and if he cranes his neck against the window he could probably see it. Poor thing’s probably drenched, he thinks, turning off the flame, but not before the inside of his wrist brushes against the hot steel and burns an instant painful pink. He’s always doing stupid shit like this. Verging on thirty and it’s like he’s never lived alone before.

He runs his hand under the faucet. Meow, goes the cat. Someday he’ll want one, a whole litter of them, soft-footed as they weave through the rooms of his spacious dream house. Keeping his daughter’s feet warm as she reads by the imitation fireplace.

It’s only eight o’clock. What if it has rabies? He could clean it up and send it back out on a drier day. He wonders if it’s a boy or a girl. On the news the anchorwoman’s launched into their new segment, highlighting random acts of kindness every Friday. Today a twenty-something-year-old guy found an elderly woman collapsed in the street and rushed her to the hospital despite already running late for his job interview. The camera zooms in on a balding white man assuring the folks watching that they’ll definitely be giving him a callback.

Someone’s at the door.

Yixing gets up from the couch. He hovers over the doorknob, wondering why he never had that peephole installed. “Who is it?”

The “meow” that answers him sounds at first ridiculously contrived and human, and then: summoned as if from a blocked memory.

“Uh, hey.”

Yixing has to look down to find Lu Han, crouched on the balls of his feet, petting a miserable black cat with the back of one hand, fingers curled into a loose fist on the other, about to knock again.

“Sorry I didn’t call first. My phone ran out of battery halfway through the plane ride, and then I didn’t have change for the payphones,” Lu Han says, wiping his wet hand on his wet jeans. His hair’s the shade of a breakfast hash brown and dripping rivulets into his eyes. Everything about him shouts cold and hungry and he carries the smell of a foreign country, like it got so attached it followed him home.

“And my luggage got lost. I gave them your address, is that okay?”

He’s leaking onto the placemat Yixing’s mother picked out for him, the one with the ugly chrysanthemums, now tracked with mud from Lu Han’s boots.

“Uh,” Yixing says again. It’s true, sometimes you can forget how to talk to someone if you go long enough without talking to them. Physical talking. They’ve emailed a few times. He retweets some of Lu Han’s weibos from time to time out of boredom and obligation. The boredom’s rarer. He’s got the other one in spades. “You wanna come in first?”

In that immediate post-disbandment period, the first ten months of emotional displacement, realizing they were without a job-it was the symbolism of the matter, not that they were actually financially wanting-EXO gained an average of five kilos per member. Kyungsoo, who announced he’d never skip another bowl of rice in his life, was bestowed upon with the promising beginnings of a potbelly. Most of them had offers, someplace else to go. Joonmyun and Jongdae had musicals lined up in the fall, Minseok was enlisting, Chanyeol had finally grown into his limbs and saucer eyes and was self-grooming to be the next Lee Seunggi in variety, minus the singing chops and plus a sort-of sordid past. It was okay; redemption was in that year. G-dragon had just gotten caught rolling E at an underground house party during New York fashion week and the media in an uncharacteristic move painted it in a pretty Western light, as a desperate call for help, stars led astray by the pressures of early fame. “So then he was like, ‘Let’s go with that,’ and we did,” Zitao mimicked in his best G-dragon drawl, which was not that great. By the time they disbanded Zitao had made the full transformation from EXO caterpillar to Big Bang butterfly, helping out with their tours, throwing around casual royal “we”s, blowing GD on the side (unconfirmed).

Lu Han tried the solo thing for two years and then the summer of 2018 cultivated a gentle beard and stopped responding to their group emails chains. A long-time fan spotted him trekking up Mount Hua in Xi An with a hiking staff. She could only make out a few features between the aviators and the new cat on his face, but “he looked warm!! ^^” “Let me know when you get out of your yeti phase,” Yixing had thought of writing him but instead wrote, “Hope you’re D.Oing O.K~” He left out the second period on purpose. This was what their friendship had come to. In his defense, Yixing had been a wreck scrambling to put out his second album. The desks at the studio were littered with half-eaten bowls of ramen and other putrifying takeout. The kimchi-flavored ones looked the grossest, crimson specks congealed and floating to the top. On more than one all-nighter Yixing had contemplated snapping a photo and sending it to Lu Han with the caption, “Red ocean…” but Lu Han and Jaejoong were actually friends now, he remembered, putting his phone away. Yixing also remembered being impressed, since one-sided creepy worship didn’t normally segue into a healthy working relationship. That was like Sehun dating one of his former noona fans. Jongin ragged on him for months, but they were all secretly jealous. Some weeks Sehun was gone for nights at a time, Baekhyun told Yixing, with an obnoxious post-it stuck to his door that read, “at my boo’s.” They took turns drawing hairy penises over it. By the time he got back the tiny square had multiplied into twenty and together they made an uncanny mosaic portrait of Sehun. Sehun squinted and pointed. “Are those dicks in my eye?” Jongin was especially proud of that one. “Next time we’ll do an infinity art piece. Eyes on the dick in your eye which is made up of more dicks with eyes.” There were moments Jongin-and-Sehun felt all too familiar, all too unbearably close except younger and thereby less complicated, less opaque.

The next year Yixing collabed with Han Geng and “zhang yixing han geng matching bald spots” shot up to #12 on Sina’s Most Popular Searches of 2019. Both parties’ publicists called foul play, blaming stage lighting. His most loyal fans, the Xingxings, took the defensive stance that the small white patch was actually a halo because Zhang Yixing was a certified angel. Hair products began arriving in the mail. No endorsements, advised his manager, that’s tantamount to admitting you are balding. On his birthday Lu Han shot him a quick international text: have you heard of this website? www.locksoflove.com. In reply Yixing instagrammed his middle finger and hashtagged it #dickhan. Two seconds later he deleted the photo and replaced it with a stuffed bunny Zhou Mi had sent him a week ago. Zhou Mi was always underestimating the speed of ground shipping.

“I CAN SUE,” came Lu Han’s second text.

Yixing’s thumbs couldn’t move fast enough. “What, do you think this is America?” He had to bite back the laugh bubbling up his throat against the clench of his fist.

Lu Han didn’t respond after that. In a week his weibo was overflowing with pictures of Sydney, Australia, the creepy-faced entrance to Luna Park, his sand-soiled feet against a backdrop of algae-green water and a devastating cobalt sky. The rare selca revealed a pale pink blistered nose, baby stubble dotting the skin above his upper lip. Like shoulder pads and legwarmers and boybands, the beard had been just a fad. “A real man is a real man with or without facial hair,” he’d written on one particularly well-shaven morning, and Yixing was pretty sure he’d replied with, “A real man should come home every now and then.”

A year later, here he is, surveying the inside of Yixing’s modest bedroom. He chokes at the sight of the posters, grabbing onto Yixing’s arm for support as his chin retreats helplessly into his neck. “Seriously. Still?”

“JYP will always be one of my role models.”

“Your mancrush is surprisingly enduring,” Lu Han says with effort, uncurling his fingers and dropping his hand.

“What? I like the way he sings. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Ages ago. I didn’t think your boner would last into the next millennium.” Lu Han’s tapping on the dresser, jiggling his leg. He points at the bed. “Can I sit?”

“Go ahead,” Yixing says, distractedly. “Hey, JYP is a fine performer-“

“‘-and I like the timbre of his voice-‘“

“-and I like-hey.”

“Sorry.” It’s costing Lu Han a world of restraint to not grin. He pushes down on the mattress with his ass. “Bad habit. Go on.”

Yixing sits down next to him, feeling the bed dip below their combined weight. It’s easier when he doesn’t have to make eye contact. “I think every now and then I could use a reminder you don’t need to be a vocal powerhouse to be a decent singer, you know?”

“I think you’re a vocal powerhouse. Like a tiny, nasally one.”

“Ha ha,” says Yixing, landing a punch just below Lu Han’s bicep. Unexpectedly, he hits more muscle than bone. It kind of hurts. “You’re the true vocal powerhouse.”

“Nah.” Yixing feels Lu Han twist to look at him. “Let’s be real, if we’re splitting hairs here, neither of us really qualifies.”

On more than one occasion Yixing has had one of Lu Han’s singles come up on shuffle and paused whatever he was doing to listen. Hovered his fingers over the keyboard and forgotten the next word he was going to type. That kind of listen.

“There’s something to be said for the way you… move people.”

“I was a one-hit wonder.”

But still a wonder. The biggest wonder of all is probably that Lu Han believes the sort of self-flagellating shit that comes out of his mouth. “Yeah,” Yixing says, trying not to sound frustrated. “By choice.”

Lu Han scratches the back of his head, where his perm is drying in cauliflower clumps. He looks thoughtful, almost shy. But it clicks away the next second like a well-used light switch. His mouth curves up in a clownish half-grin.

“Well, you know what. You move me, too.”

A hand lands on Yixing’s thigh. Another around the nape of his neck.

For a moment Yixing is speechless. Then Lu Han closes his eyes and begins to lean in, still with that same perverted grin. He has a pimple on his cheek and the number of wrinkles mapping out from the corners of his eyes has doubled in the time he was away. Sunscreen is Yixing’s first incoherent thought, except it isn’t really. His first thought is a feeling, an unconscious awareness that his heart might have stopped, and soon after arrives the sinking reminder, a thudding wait; no; this isn’t it, a stone dropped into a dark and endless pit.

It’s enough for his motor reflexes to kick in. His hand grabs on to the nearest pillow and launches it gracefully into Lu Han’s stupid face.

In the morning he finds Lu Han at the kitchen table, scrolling on his phone and drinking coffee from Yixing’s favorite mug. His head tilts up at the sound of Yixing’s slippers shuffling into the room. “G’morning, dear.”

“Dear?” Yixing rubs gooey sleep out of his eyes. For a second he couldn’t even place this stranger in his kitchen. “You sound like Kris.”

The last consonant trails off in a stream of guilt; he forgot in his half-zombie state that this was taboo, talking about Kris. No one talks openly about Kris, or has in years, except when they’re asked in interviews. Joonmyun’s staunch answer had always been, we’re a twelve-man band. Just like Super Junior was always going to be an unwavering thirteen. It was the initial mold that mattered the most, not the later fallaway casualties. In a way Kyuhyun got lucky.

Lu Han doesn’t seem to notice. “How’s he doing?” he asks into the mug.

Yixing slides onto a stool and gently tries to goad the cup out of Lu Han’s hand. “I need it more than you do,” he says when Lu Han’s grip tightens.

“I’m jetlagged.”

“Sydney’s two hours ahead. C’mon, hand it over.” Yixing makes a quick grab for the mug, and Lu Han lets out a shrill yelp, covers it with his other hand and slides it horizontally across the table, stopping just short against the wall.

Yixing tries not to laugh. It’s just so silly. “I swear, if you play finger football with my favorite-“

“I’m exhausted on the inside,” Lu Han says with a straight face. “I probably won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.”

“There won’t be a tomorrow for you at this rate,” Yixing says. “Fine, take your dumb coffee. I’ll make my own.”

Lu Han hovers over him while he refills the tea kettle. His gleeful voice sends a puff of hot breath down Yixing’s back. “Your dumb coffee, you mean. But what were you saying about Kris?”

He wasn’t saying anything. The sound of water filling the pot overrides some of the tension in the room, imagined or not. “He’s okay, I think.”

He thinks maybe that’s that but Lu Han plants an elbow on the kitchen counter, spinning his torso to give Yixing his full exaggerated attention. Only he could pull off mock irreverence like that, playful and innocent, entirely free of bitterness. “Yeah? When’s the last time you talked to him?”

Yixing closes the lid on the kettle and turns on the flame. With his wet hand he flicks water in Lu Han’s face. “New Year’s? I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you don’t wanna say? Hey, it’s alright. We’re all over it now.”

But they weren’t. Yixing knew for a fact they weren’t. At the last EXO reunion he’d overheard Joonmyun speaking to Jongin in a hushed whisper, “When height is your most marketable attribute-“ He broke off when he saw Yixing, slipping into his practiced Suho smile instead. They discussed safer topics like Baekhyun’s upcoming wedding, and whether it was normal to get arthritic knees in the winter, “or those toe warts, you know, on the flat underside of your-“ Chanyeol chimed in, which was when Kyungsoo put down his plate of foie gras. It was fun, really, and normal, and they reminisced over the missing members-Minseok, on the last two months of his army stint; Jongdae, touring through South Asia; and Lu Han, god knows where-and pretended they hadn’t seen Kris’ face plastered all over every entertainment news outlet, acting opposite Kim Minjung in a new drama about a cross-cultural period romance. Historians were going to be weeping tears of blood over this one, but Kris was slowly winning back Korean fans, one skincare commercial at a time. “So bubbly,” he enthused in a neutral voice, piercing you with his ice cold glare before dragging one mammoth hand down his foaming face.

Kris was okay. Is okay. Last Yixing heard, he was banging a half-Russian model who just turned twenty and considered himself in love. Maybe. Then he had to hang up because they were going to glue on his wig and that included painting over his ear. “Miss you, man!” The last part hissed with crumply static; it sounded like he was yelling from the other end of a tunnel. Probably someone had wrestled the cellphone away.

Yixing doesn’t say any of that. He glances down at Lu Han with guarded interest. If they can’t talk about it now, they’ll never talk about it. “Are you? Over it, I mean.”

Lu Han regards him carefully, and lets out a small smile, just as wary. “Sure. My grudge lasted maybe ten seconds max. And honestly? It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever been mad about.”

Yixing tries not to smile back. “Ah, so you were mad.”

In the days preceding Kris’ decision to leave, the M dorm was imbued with a sick, putrid tension. Finally Lu Han confronted him, and the first thing he said was, “Look, I’m not mad, but-“ which was a terrible, transparent lie, because you knew just from hearing the quiver in his voice. His mouth was a thin uncertain line. Yixing was listening to music in his room. He turned it up, then he turned it down. The thing was, Kris had gone to Yixing first, and Zitao second. Asked if they’d support him in this-asked if they’d go, too. Yixing had happened first, months before the actual paper-signing, and Kris made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Lu Han. With Zitao they’d gone into his room and closed the door behind them. A moment later, something hard hit the wall. The whole dorm shook. Minseok stirred from his afternoon nap, lifted his head, went back to sleep. When they came out Zitao was staring at his feet, his hands hidden in his jean pockets, and Kris was blinking a lot. Jongdae unplugged an earbud and looked back and forth between them but no one answered when he asked what the hell was wrong with them two, could someone tell him what was up?

“If you want to know why I didn’t ask you,” Yixing heard Kris begin to say. It sounded like he’d reached the end of his patience, this was a fight they’d been having for days without either of them speaking up-the Krishan Cold War.

“That’s not what I said,” Lu Han said quietly.

“-I don’t think you’re ambitious enough,” Kris finished. And there it was, out in the open now. Too late to retract. Yixing wished he hadn’t heard anything, but there probably wasn’t a single person in the dorm who hadn’t heard it.

“Okay,” said Lu Han. “I wish you the best in your future endeavors.”

According to Zitao, he’d stuck out his hand, which Kris stared at in bewilderment. Was he fucking kidding him? No, he wasn’t. Basically, Lu Han was saying, I’ve written you out of my life. Thanks for all the good times.

“I know now he was just being smart. It’s not selfish to look out for yourself. This life is too short for regrets.” Lu Han slips back onto a stool and folds his arms behind his head. “I don’t know why I took it so personally.”

Yixing doesn’t say, “I know why,” even though he does. It’s the same way he felt for the three years Lu Han spent traipsing around the globe, leaving only vague hints on weibo as to his whereabouts. A corner of sky here, a patch of moss there. Dirtied up Keds, or his long tanned arm pointing into the distance. From the top of his luxury hotel that one time in Greece: a sprawl of clean white stucco houses and lilac domes, a reflection of his hand in the dusty window glass.

“You’re so wise now” is what Yixing says instead, as he gets up to brew his coffee.

“Are you looking for a place to stay?”

Lu Han perks up, showing a string of perfectly lined teeth. “Are you offering?”

“No.” The force of Yixing’s conviction surprises even himself. Lu Han looks almost hurt. “I mean, you’re welcome to stay for however long you need to…” get your shit together. “…figure things out. But I don’t think this would work as a permanent, you know. Arrangement.”

“Aw.” Lu Han makes a sad face. “Why not, boo?”

“Because? When’s the last time you’ve lived with someone?”

Lu Han rolls his eyes up to the ceiling in consideration. “Do hostels count?”

“…”

“Oh, oh. In Rome I had a one-night-stand with this woman I met at the hotel bar who then put me up in her nice villa for a week. Well, she was gone during the day, but that kinda counts as cohabiting with someone, no? It was fun playing with her dogs.”

“I can’t tell if you’re on your side or my side but it sounds a lot like you’re on my side.”

“I’m saying,” and Lu Han sidles up to Yixing, loops his arm in Yixing’s, “I’d make a great roommate. Do you want a dog?”

“It’s not a good idea,” Yixing says, squirming away. It’s too warm in here, but Lu Han won’t let go.

“Why not?” Lu Han asks more seriously, still not letting go. “The dog or us? If us-we did it once before. For years. I hope you remember.”

“Which is why I know how annoying you are,” Yixing lies. “Trust me. The list of grievances I drafted up from that era of our lives runs as long as the Yangtze.”

He waits for Lu Han to laugh, but Lu Han doesn’t laugh. Instead he releases Yixing’s arm and tucks his knees to his chest. “Really? Hit me.”

“What?”

“What were some of your, what was it-grievances? Let’s hear them.”

Lu Han props his elbows up on his knees and sets Yixing with an intent look. He doesn’t seem upset but genuinely curious. Yixing wants to murder himself for the bluff. “Well,” he stutters, already off to a rocky start. He’s as shitty a liar as shitty liars go. “You… smell.”

Really distractingly good. So good sometimes Yixing had to duck his head under the covers and pretend it was natural to want to jack off to nasty thoughts of your best friend. That was when he’d given up being in denial about what it was-who it was-he’d wanted to jack off to in the first place. At first it’d been “the stress,” or “pent-up sexual frustration,” not being able to go out when he liked, with whom he liked, not being able to have a crush on a girl because there were no girls aside from ones he’d never date. Yeah, he was old-fashioned. He just wanted to be with someone normal. But also someone who’d get it, this whole celebrity thing. Because that part wasn’t going away anytime soon.

“I smell?” Lu Han is evidently horrified. He pulls his collar over his nose and takes a deep whiff, then takes turns checking each armpit. “Since when? Oh God. Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t want to be one of those people no one wants to be around because of their stinkin’ B.O.!”

Since when?

It might’ve been Shanghai, or maybe Nanjing. He and Jongin were especially keyed up that night, about to perform a remix of “Two Moons” that involved Zitao doing a backflip over their crouched bodies right before the end. Yixing rolled back his shoulders one at a time and couldn’t crack his knuckles enough. A hand pressed down at the nape of his neck moments before they were set to go out, and Lu Han’s voice said, “Hey, if Huang Zitao crushes you tonight I’m setting my MCM bag on fire.”

Yixing didn’t turn around, so Lu Han couldn’t see his first smile of the night. “I still want to be buried in mine.”

“Nope. Setting yours on fire too. The twins can’t survive without each other.”

His smile grew bigger. “So if Taozi hypothetically crushes me, you’ll hypothetically ask him to crush you, too?”

Lu Han flicked the back of his head. “I was talking about our backpacks. I still have a long life ahead of me, alright.”

The choreography went without a hitch. The heel of Zitao’s boot just barely grazed the top of Yixing’s head, but they pulled it off. Backstage he swept Lu Han up into a breathless, sweaty hug. It was as extravagant a gesture as gestures went, if he didn’t know it at the time. They spun and spun until Lu Han slammed into a wall, and when he laughed Yixing felt it like a string vibration shaking his own lungs. “Geez, Yixing, can you at least wait until we get back to the hotel?” Yixing cleared his throat. Yes, people were watching, but mostly just the coordis, and half of them were on their phones.

Lu Han was red-faced when he pushed Yixing away. “Geez,” he said again, grinning. His brow shone with what might have been Yixing’s sweat. It should’ve been disgusting, but instead it made Yixing pull him into a second hug. He closed his eyes and realized he would never be able to hug Lu Han again without reliving this moment: the mingle of sweat and hairspray, the heat of Lu Han’s cheek against his own, the way their skinny bodies moved to accommodate the other. Most of all, how he wanted to be closer, closer than they already were.

“I feel really great,” Yixing remembered saying, in a lame whisper, and Lu Han probably patted his hair, maybe kissed it, agreed, “Good” or “Me too.”

He couldn’t take it back, now, or unsee what he saw, unfeel those horrible feelings. There was a line, and he crossed it. Like, tenfold. Maybe he hadn’t done anything, but he’d thought it. Understood it in his bones.

Afterwards he watched Lu Han climb up the back of the stage in his white costume. Jongdae was on the other side in black, a top hat slanted over his eyes. Lu Han flashed everyone behind him a thumbs up and made direct eye contact with Yixing before he turned towards the lights. His shoulders had broadened over the last year into the breadth of a normal guy’s shoulders. Even in the dim light Yixing could make out the newly defined cords of muscle under his white t-shirt and he had the insane thought of smoothing his own hands over them, feeling them clench and quiver. He was messed up. There was something wrong with him.

“You okay?” Zitao nudged him in the side. “You’re sweating like a pig.”