Run my chicken fingers through your hair (Lay/Luhan), Part 1/2

[warmboys]

Run my chicken fingers through your hair (1/2)
Lay/Luhan
~13400 words
R

Lu Han returns from a long sabbatical and hits up speed-dial #1.

For one_if_by_land, exoforsichuan ♥ thank you for being so patient over these last eight months ;;

Special shoutout to primroseshows & allegorein for the moral support ♥ in the battle of me vs layhan I happily admit defeat m(__)m

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 is not mutual. It’s got thousands of him, like little desperate parasites.

Luckily the host happens to be kind of poisonous herself.

The tea kettle releases a shrill, insistent whistle. 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 during the layover at Kuala Lumpur. 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 email chain. 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 Xing Mis 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 well.

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 two 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.

*

On the way to the supermarket Lu Han is jubilant, stepping into the street unaware of the speeding bicyclist ready to run them over. “Hey, good day to you too, man!” Lu Han does a half-pirouette and calls after the guy, who flips them off without even turning his hoodie. Kids these days. Yixing’s laugh gets swallowed in a big gust of wind and they march on in pursuit of restocking Yixing’s empty fridge.

The giant Carrefour takes up a whole block. Lu Han has stopped dead still in front of him, staring up at the massive red and blue logo overhead. Framed against the silhouette of the superstore, he’s a small, scant figure, a Lego person. Yixing could see it in a photo. Boy, eye of the storm, 20XX. “Nothing like homecoming, right,” he teases, pushing Lu Han into a column of shopping carts.

“You didn’t have to come.” They trawl slowly through the produce aisle. He turns to find Lu Han’s head hidden behind a cantaloupe, raised against the light as if he were checking it for deformities.

“It’s so… symmetrical.” Lu Han lowers the melon, eyes lit up. “Can we take it home?”

It goes into the cart. So does a box of some French imported cereal Yixing has never heard of that he didn’t even know the place had stocked. What happened to good old-fashioned Made In China everything? Where was their pride in the motherland? “I don’t even know you,” he says while Lu Han scans the nutrition facts on a bottle of Zico coconut water. “Can you even read that?”

“Sure,” Lu Han says smugly. “‘Nutrition facts.’”

Yixing starts a slow clap. Lu Han continues:

“‘All natural. Great for everything. Hair loss. Dick enhancement.’”

“I’m average-sized in some countries,” Yixing yells, raising a cucumber.

Zico goes into the cart.

“You really didn’t have to come,” Yixing says again while they’re waiting in line. Lu Han slouches beside him, sizing up everyone waiting in the other lines. He turns, wrinkling his forehead. “What was I gonna do, go through your DVD collection at home? I have your porn collection memorized by heart.”

Yixing freezes. Lu Han, capitalizing on the silence, begins ticking them off,

“‘Beauty and the Beast-man’, ‘Spongebob Strap-on’-”

Yixing almost breathes a sigh of relief. But the woman behind them with the little girl is starting to stare. “Hey.”

Lu Han steals a glance at the concerned parent and lowers his voice. “And then the one where they all dress up as Sailor Scouts and you can’t see the guy the entire time, except when the tip of his dick comes onscreen just as he’s about to leak on Sailor Mars’ fa-“

“Yeah, okay, I get it. You have a great memory when it comes to every video I’ve ever had illegally downloaded onto my laptop once upon a time, by the combined powers of Kim Jongdae and Kris Wu.”

Lu Han puts his hands up. “No judgment here,” he says, but his look quickly turns sly. “Okay, on a serious note, I remember you were always super vanilla about it. Like some of the guys would be going at it but you’d, you’d never put your hand down your pants or anything. You had to wait until everyone was gone to jerk off, you sensitive prick.”

A moment later they’re piling everything onto the conveyer belt. Yixing reaches for his wallet but Lu Han bats his arm away. “You can get dinner tomorrow. And everything else. Including me.”

He means, Including having to put up with me.

“Hey, slowpoke. Don’t think I’m gonna carry all this home by myself,” Lu Han starts, tapping on an invisible watch with his free hand. “Even though I could. You know. With my subtle but manly European muscles.”

“Those things? I thought they were animal balloons.”

Lu Han looks like he’s about to be offended but his eyes catch on a reflective surface by the cashier register. “Wait, is that Kris’ new rap single?”

*

In one of his untouched cabinets they find a rolling pin. Lu Han thrusts it under his chin and throws his hoodie up. "No diggity chicks my name is Kris ya dig my di-“

"Bling," Yixing corrects. "He said ‘bling.’ And the first line is 'kids' not 'chicks.'"

"Kris Wu, mom-panderer since 1990."

"He knows his demographic," Yixing says. "Moms and tweens."

Lu Han scrunches up his mouth, then releases, like relaxing a prune. They might’ve had a couple drinks after dinner. A bottle of wine lies prone on the table, just a splash left lining the sidewall. "What's yours? Let me guess… Starry-eyed late blooming virginal high schoolers about to embark on their next adventure in life. Whatever your latest album's called-‘Resurrected to Love’? with a glittery cross for the 't’-that can be the BGM to the scene where they walk up the steps to their university library and suddenly turn their heads and look-GAZE-meaningfully upon the vast green courtyard behind them and all the symbolism, all the opportunity that awaits them in one full sweep-" Lu Han mimics the zipping motion of a dolly shot with his hands, a moving frame centered on Yixing's baffled face, "-a sweet, sad smile if it's a girl, a subtle... fist pump if it's a guy... maybe over the ending of that song you worked with Henry on. I think violins are a good way to go, real punchy and dramatic."

Cramped into a corner of the couch, Yixing realizes he is holding his breath. Lu Han's hands are still in the shape of a rectangle, centered on his face. "I was going to go with, coffeeshop frequenters, or ex-Edison Chen fans." In the back of his mind he's thinking, how many times have you listened to that album? It dropped while Lu Han was still in Europe. On Christmas, Yixing remembers, because they'd popped open a bottle of champagne in the record studio and he'd reflected, at the time, over his third glass that this was quite possibly the loneliest he'd ever been on a Christmas Eve, and that was saying a lot.

"Hey," Lu Han says, defensively. "Everyone deserves a second chance. It's not like Edison wanted the whole world to know he made it with three-quarters of the HK entertainment industry. Maybe he took those photos for himself, you know, you get what I'm saying. And what do you mean, 'ex-'? Have you heard his latest single? Wait."

Lu Han holds up a hand, his eyes widening behind five fingers. "Hang on. Are you saying you wrote some of those songs for me?"

Panic is quick, like a needle to a dilated vein. Yixing gets a stroke of it injected into his spine, shooting straight up to the back of his neck, distilling the mild alcoholic stupor. "All my songs are for you," he says the next moment. His voice doesn’t even sound like his. "Lost souls like you. Kids who don't know how to find their way home."

But Lu Han is undeterred. His grin carries a thousand and one lewd suggestions. "I see. So I'm your muse. I inspire you."

Yixing rolls his eyes; at least that doesn’t take effort. "Yeah, okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves here."

Lu Han leans his greasy face in closer. "Wanna take a photo of me and set it as your cell phone background?"

"You're disgusting," Yixing says, shaking his head.

"I love when you talk down to me," says Lu Han, scrunching up one eye into a wink and blowing him a kiss.

*

As trainees they had taken a class on it, and while many things might not have come naturally to Yixing he had no problem gazing into the handheld mirror and carefully smiling one eye shut while keeping the other as friendly and focused as possible. Two rows ahead Lu Han kept swiveling in his seat, appealing to his neighbors for help. “It doesn’t look right when I do it,” Yixing heard Lu Han complain to Baekhyun, who agreed that no, it really didn’t. Lu Han’s wink was either an involuntary tic or an evil-eye. “Maybe you should just smile normally. Yeah, like that.” Baekhyun’s suggestion was hardly comforting because having a pleasant smile was the most standard baselines for aspiring idols. Many things could be manufactured but a nice smile was harder to fake, particularly one that invited you in and beckoned, it’s okay to look at me, like me, fall in love with me. A good smile was like an outstretched hand, with gently calloused fingers, the kind of hand that touched big money and remained clean.

Before Lu Han arrived rumors traveled of a fair, pale Chinese boy joining the company, with a face that bore the echoes of past sunbaenim, someone destined for acceptance. Yixing doesn’t remember the day he was first introduced, but details are for later invention. He does remember Lu Han’s stringy frame and the mullet perm, the astonishing bright eyes before his first unaccented “Hi.” Later, Lu Han joined his dance class and proved to be, if not a natural, then pretty able. He wasn’t awkward or floppy, and where he lacked in power and control he made up for with borderline athletic instinct. He knew his body, just not the angles. “Focus,” Yixing would order quietly, just loud enough for Lu Han to catch under the booming music. Because Lu Han was an easy subject, it took only one word for muscle memory to kick in, and he’d invariably snap into place.

All the sleep deprivation in the world couldn’t distract them from one thing. Most of them were teenagers, give or take, priming for a stage that would never wholly belong to them. While other kids their age were already drafting up amateur resumes, Yixing’s only bulletpoints were “D-list child celebrity” and “exceptionally hard worker,” neither of which translated into immediate marketability. The facial enhancements helped, though. The new nose brought out a confidence in him he hadn’t even known he’d been lacking. But Lu Han, for all his untarnished Korean and sunlit doe eyes, was twenty. In the modern day few twenty-year-olds got to this age without a backup plan.

So they figured he must’ve been rich. “Little Chinese prince,” they teased him, without malice because Lu Han was easygoing and likable and understandable. When he spoke Koreans thought he was one of them. In the same way that his soft Mandarin brought tears to the eyes of some. “You’re going to make it,” the Chinese kids told him on their darkest, most abject days. “If it’s going to be any of us, it’ll be you,” their voices twinging with hopelessness, pride, envy.

At nineteen Yixing was coming to terms with a lot of things, like the critique he’d received as a hopeful child performer. He Jiong had once knelt down and taken Yixing’s hands in his and said, “Listen, kiddo. You’ll probably never be the best at anything, but please don’t stop wanting to.” The whole time Yixing thought, didn’t his knees hurt? But He Jiong was right. Yixing couldn’t always reach the low notes, but he could croon out those accessible to him in perfect pitch. His wire-thin voice would never be his number one asset. And he probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, either. This was it. This was Zhang Yixing, for better or worse. The kind of boy who could break up with the girl he loved for an impossible dream.

Lu Han never gave him time to become jealous. After dance class he’d run after Yixing with an extra bottle of water, hugging a towel around his neck. Sometimes he tied it in the front, and it made him look like he was wearing a bib. He slipped into Chinese when it was just them and Kris, and together they complained about everything from the casual bullying to the quality of snacks stocked up in the vending machine outside the cafeteria. “Branch out,” Kris said from above on one rare free afternoon, the only visible part of him being his leg, hanging off the top bunk. “Try one of the fruity nut snacks.” He was starting to grow hair everywhere. Yixing watched with fascination and found that Lu Han, lying beside him and breathing softly, watched, too.

Winter came. In self-preservation they discovered alcohol. Yixing, who abstained from most vices, enjoyed pouring a tall glass of beer and allowing himself to be warmed from the inside out. He was a secret hearth, burning where no one could see. Beside him in the cramped food stall Lu Han pounded his frosty glass and confessed, unprompted, unseemly secrets. It wasn’t Zitao who peed in the pool that one time. After a nasty fight with his parents he’d once prayed, dear god, let me be Korean. He tried shaving his pubes for fun and went commando for a week. He’d never been in a relationship.

“I mean, I’ve liked someone before. Really, really liked her. But it didn’t work out.”

The word for it in Chinese was an lian. Love in the dark. Because a one-sided love wasn’t open or happy. It was brooding and hard, and you wished it away while simultaneously willing it to stay, for the other person to not just look at you but in the way that you wanted them to. Yixing stared at the veiny cracks in the wooden table while Lu Han spoke, a small headache blossoming beneath his temples. He felt hungover, but also sympathy, and an urgent need for Lu Han to know that he understood. Wordlessly he slung an arm around Lu Han’s neck, tender and hot against the softest part of his skin.

“It’s embarrassing, saying this, but I’m actually pretty devoted when I like someone. Like, I commit.” The only time Lu Han ever complimented himself was when he was drunk. His eyes rolled lazily upwards until he frowned and blinked them back into focus. “None of that half-assed horseshit.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” With an unsteady hand Yixing filled up both their glasses. “No point otherwise.”

“No point otherwise,” Lu Han agreed. He lifted the glass and paused, for a split second, to look at Yixing. With no escape route, Yixing looked back. Lu Han’s eyes were cloudy from the drinking, red-rimmed from the not sleeping, and in them Yixing detected some apprehension, a glowing repressed fear of something. Up close he was extremely boyish, in a way that always surprised people, as if they expected only eyelashes and smooth skin and the thundering of their own pulse. The reality was razor bumps, his bottom lip chapping viciously from the unhumidified air of their dorm room, and a boy who wasn’t drunk enough to not look away. Averting his eyes, Lu Han pressed his lips to the glass, large enough to cover his face and thereby distort it.

*

It takes a week for Yixing to bring up the topic.

“Are you looking for a place to stay?”

Lu Han perks up, showing a string of perfectly lined upper 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 says. “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 is regretting the bluff. “Well,” he stutters, already off to a rocky start. He’s as shitty a liar as shitty liars go. “You… smell.”

Lu Han smelled normal for someone who showered once a day, if that. In reality Yixing was the one with a problem. Once they found him in the shower, slumped against the faucethead, water dripping into his nostrils and his slightly parted lips. He was snoring. Lu Han’s “Jesus fucking Christ” woke him up. The first thing he saw were those large concerned eyes. Kris threw him a towel and said, “Clean yourself up, man,” as if he were disgusted. “He’s too clean,” Lu Han said, shaking his head. “He needs to be a little dirtier.”

Let’s get you into bed, Lu Han said after Kris left, manhandling Yixing into his unmade sheets. Yixing felt unusually exposed in just a pair of patterned boxers, standing in front of what was probably his closest bandmate and friend at the moment in terms of both emotional and physical distance. Standing so close he could smell the faint boy smell on Lu Han, nothing that could be described vividly or even warranted describing, but still very distinctly Lu Han. Something he could close his eyes to and say, yeah I know who this is.

Lu Han was pushing him into bed, pulling the comforter over his bare chest. Then, after a beat, he pressed his lips against Yixing’s forehead. Sweet dreams, you little brat.

“I’m just kidding,” Yixing says at the look of horror on Lu Han’s face. “You’re free to stay until, you know, whenever. However long you need.”

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