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The sneaking around is hard. In the beginning everyone takes bets—his friends from college, that whole WeChat group, his phone lighting up so much he has to mute the chat. “Over by the fall” is the unanimous consensus, recited again and again like a line from a Tang Dynasty poem.
“Have you no faith in me,” Xiao Zhan laments, baring his own poetic streak. But he has his doubts, too.
They last through the fall. His friends pay up, they take him out for hotpot, then KTV. Xiao Zhan isn’t allowed to sing any sad love songs. Xiao Zhan is a kept man now. Xiao Zhan, you cradle robber! That last one comes from a married professor friend with the perfect curated life. His two-year-old knows how to speak in full sentences and wipe his own butt.
Xiao Zhan’s drunk enough to not take the accusation seriously, but he does think about it afterwards, rolling the words around in his dizzy head on the cab ride home.
In Nanjing Yibo sneaks up behind him in the hallway backstage and whispers, “Hey, beautiful,” low enough to escape staff notice. The skin at his neck tingles with heat. It takes everything for Xiao Zhan to not turn around, pull down his pants and blow him right then and there.
The apartment he eventually returns to is a sad, dilapidated thing. Even Jianguo looks like she’s lost weight. Cold air sneaks in no matter how high he cranks up the heat. He lies shivering in bed, phone held between his ear and the crook of his neck. The good news is, phone sex comes naturally to him. He pitches his voice a half-octave lower, works in a throaty rasp, like he’s doing a bit. “Where do you want it,” he says. And, “god, you feel so good.” Yibo unfolds before him just like that, evident in the way his breathing intensifies and creates static over the phone line.
Yibo is easy. That’s the thing Xiao Zhan loves about him. He makes it all easy.
The days get shorter before they get longer. He goes to work on set, comes home, spends an hour talking to Yibo’s blurry face, each one of his exaggerated reactions a half second delayed. A whole shoe could fit in Yibo’s mouth when he’s surprised. And they said this guy was stoic? Xiao Zhan just wants to kiss him on the nose, sometimes, when he’s not distracted by those lips. Sometimes he just wants to give him a “boop.”
“You’re so fucking cute,” he says, and hopes that Yibo knows him well enough to not take that as an insult.
“Your dick is cute,” says Yibo. “I want it inside me.”
“God, stop. Jianguo can hear you.” The cat is curled up into herself, nesting on his feet.
Some nights they’re both too tired to talk. He perches the phone against a stack of mail on the kitchen table and slurps soggy noodles slowly into his mouth, his eyes half-closed. Yibo will just look at him, his head already on the pillow, not saying anything. Gravity pulls one side of his face down, making his cheek pudgy. Xiao Zhan doesn’t mind falling asleep to this version of Yibo. Quiet, curious, still.
On set during breaks he searches things like “how long does the honeymoon period last” and “first time butt plugs” and “how to search incognito mode on phone.” It’s not normal to be this happy, right? He’s become one of those people he used to secretly sulk about, people who call their lovers “baobei” and pretend to catch kisses in mid-air. Now he makes unironic little hearts with his fingers. His co-stars catch him humming in the dressing room and ask, “What song is that?”
He goes, “Have you heard of ‘EOEO?’”
*
February happens. It’s like if anything bad that could happen does. It’s like all of his nightmares joined forces and created another Avengers movie. It’s drinking yourself into a coma and waking up to thirty-four texts and twelve missed calls from your boyfriend who just wants to know if you’re alive.
Now go back to sleep and do that all over again.
He’s okay. He’s an adult. He’s known life before this, and understands, logically, that life will continue after this. He thinks about packing up all his stuff and moving back home. He thinks about finally opening up that bakery. Every day people tell him how much they love him, how much they hate him, how much he has changed their lives, how he should just go kill himself. After a while the laptop screen dims on its own. The calls from Yibo go unanswered.
When he finally does call back, he says, “This probably isn’t good for you either.”
Yibo yells. He’s never heard Yibo’s voice at this decibel before. He yells until his throat’s hoarse and tears are ripped out of his eyes. The thing about Xiao Zhan, though, is that he can be stubborn, too. Xiao Zhan lets him talk. But he’s made up his mind.
He knows himself—he can be cold and unrelenting. It’s like a mask that comes over him, pulled airtight across his whole person. He retreats into it, hugged by it.
The days feel stretched, like a rubber band. Time is warped. Where it was so scarce before, every minute a hurried gift, a seed of anxiety, now it is boundless. He does a lot of internet yoga, sometimes with his mother, working out the kinks in their lower backs together. After a few weeks he’s able to hold a two-minute side plank. Occasionally Jianguo joins him, crouching in the gap between his hip and the mat. He’s constantly wiping cat hair off that mat.
Every day the news is bad. With some perspective, his own problems seem miniscule in comparison.
He returns to something he knows. A pen, a piece of paper. He sketches for fun, characters that seem to develop themselves in his hand. An old man in a bowler hat and a funky beard. A young girl who loses the top off her ice cream cone. A boy who misses his pet rabbit, locked up in a cage somewhere else.
He falls asleep at his desk most nights. In the morning his fingers are sore in a way that feels productive and fulfilling.
It’s not so bad to be alone, he tells himself.
Meanwhile, his ex is everywhere. He can’t walk outside for five minutes without seeing Yibo’s airbrushed face plastered across the side of a bus. He finds Yibo at the local bank, on energy drink bottles, on tubes of toothpaste (lumpy-faced after a few squeezes—a man had to brush his teeth, pride be damned!). It doesn’t make the breakup easier, sure. But it’s tolerable. Seeing Yibo is better than not seeing him. Seeing him doing well.
Should that pain in his chest be attributed to heartburn or something else? When’s the last time he saw a doctor?
“You’re grieving a loss,” his friends say, sympathetically. They haven’t gloated, there’s none of that “I told you a six-year age gap would never work,” not even from his professor friend. The truth is, they all like Yibo, or, at least, the pixelated version Xiao Zhan has brought up on video chat during a couple group dinners. And everyone’s favorite was always Lan Wangji. Especially the guys.
At home he searches “how long to get over breakup.” The answers vary from a few days to several years. Everyone recommends porn. He takes the advice, locking Jianguo out of his bedroom as he sits in bed crouched over his laptop. It’s weird, getting hard without thinking about Yibo. It feels like he’s cheating.
He tries to focus on coming, ignoring the clawing sounds from behind the door.
Summer is here. People are walking around outside, business as usual, except with masks covering half their faces. It helps with the anonymity. He would like summer a whole lot more if he weren’t sweating all the time. But there’s something nice about it, still, maybe for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather. Maybe because of the distance, of the time that has passed. February feels like ages ago. Even though sometimes February still feels like yesterday.
He’s okay. It’s getting easier.
He sees Yibo on a billboard holding a phone that looks all but eclipsed in his massive hand. It makes him laugh out loud in the middle of the street.
*
On the fifth of August, just at the stroke of midnight, he composes a long, carefully worded text and, after some deliberation, sends it.
Yibo’s response is automatic. Yes. Of course. Always.