[Completed]
As choices, rules, timeless deeds, and beginnings attract then push Zhan away between two peaks of bliss, he learns: It's easy to fall, but harder to love. It's one thing to spend a star-aligned winter, but something else to bear the war...
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IT WAS A LITTLE past the hour I usually got to bed, but my eyes seemed tobe in a protest against closing while Feng slept on my lap. He has somehow managed to curl up his long torso to fit into the couch, his curls messy on my thigh, hands hugged close in his own kind of peace he finds when he lets me stay close. The old heater his father put hear still worked fine, and the late winter night was serenely quiet; I should've fallen asleep . . . It's the way I'm sitting. It's a little uncomfortable. Just that.
Feng smelled of cigarettes and musk of sweat, and perfume failing to cover it. That explained what happened with his father. Feng is quite rebellious, and his father . . . aggressive. It's a fight that never ends.
I stroke my fingers through his hair, then caress them on his cheek—I can't remember when I started fantasizing about touching him this way, trying to accept that I'll never get to do that. But now I get to. Now Feng lets me. Sometimes, at least.
Are we lovers? No. Feng made it clear that night it all started.
I remember it vividly. Last fall. The start of my senior year. I spent most of my time at school or at our summer house reading through my violin scores while Feng updated his restarted photography collection.
Feng was on the couch, sorting through some polaroids. Right on the spot where setting sun rays crept in through the window to his face, doing magic on it. The square cheekbones, the fraction of a smile, shadows of the frames; he was a piece of art. It was a few months after he took his college entrance exams. I should have seen it coming. Feng so casually talked about his big college plans, about leaving it all behind, and my insides stirred.
The single year that Feng was older than me; he made sure I was well aware of that—people that surrounded him when I just entered high school, busying himself with exams, then with college-prep, night outs he came back drunk that I was never invited to, the way he acted like there's a part of him I'll never see—it was a gap I can't reach across.
And that evening, it felt like the last chance I'll run into.
What I cannot recall is what I was thinking when I reached over and kissed him, but I'll never forget how it felt when Feng kissed me back; either actually meaning it, or on impulse—it didn't matter. Because that day, I was swept into something so sweet, something so elevating, that the unfathomable definitions were to be damned.
When we'd come down, lying next to each other, with a head full of dopamine and a heart full of hope, I didn't have a reason to not say, "I like you." But I should have lived by the danger I knew of those words.
Feng was silent for a long while, and quietly said, "I'm not gay."
I thought he found it hard to consume everything all at once. I thought I knew because I've felt that before. So I kissed him again, certain that he will figure himself out eventually. That it'll make it easier for him with someone to hold him up.
