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The fireworks haven’t started yet but Cheng Xiaoshi can feel them coming the way he feels thunder before it arrives—a pressure in the chest, a held breath in the city outside. The window is doing that thing where it glows without a source, the sky over their studio bruised orange-purple, light pollution and cold air pressing flat against the glass.
He’s been awake. Of course he’s been awake. He’s always been the one who stays awake.
Lu Guang fell asleep at ten-thirty. Maybe ten-twenty. Cheng Xiaoshi had been talking—he’s fairly certain he’d been in the middle of a sentence, actually, something about the year and how weird it had been, something that was trying to be philosophical but kept getting distracted by itself—and when he’d looked over, Lu Guang’s eyes were closed. Not drifting. Closed. Breathing even. Already gone somewhere Cheng Xiaoshi couldn’t follow.
“Unbelievable,” he’d said to no one.
He’d let him sleep.
The thing is, Cheng Xiaoshi has been watching the clock on his phone for the last twenty minutes with a kind of helpless, stubborn sentimentality that he would die before admitting to out loud. The numbers feel significant in a way he cannot justify. 11:41. 11:47. 11:53. Each one a small closing door. He knows, logically, that midnight on New Year’s Eve is arbitrary. He knows the year doesn’t actually end, that it just keeps going, continuous, one second bleeding into the next whether or not anyone is watching. He knows this.
He still wants to be awake for it. He still wants Lu Guang to be awake for it.
He looks at him.
Lu Guang has somehow migrated to Cheng Xiaoshi’s side in his bunk during the course of the evening, which—okay, this is a pattern. Cheng Xiaoshi has noted the pattern. He doesn’t bring it up because he likes the pattern, likes that Lu Guang’s body unconsciously seeks warmth whenever Cheng Xiaoshi is close, seeks him, and saying it out loud would make Lu Guang do that thing where he goes very still and says something measured and careful that doesn’t address the point. So—the pattern stays unspoken, and Lu Guang keeps drifting toward him in his sleep, and Cheng Xiaoshi keeps not minding.
He’s on his back now, one arm thrown over his eyes in the way that means he’s deeply, genuinely under. His breathing is slow. His mouth is soft. He looks younger when he sleeps, which isn’t something Cheng Xiaoshi lets himself think about very often because it does something complicated to his sternum.
11:58.
Cheng Xiaoshi closes his phone. Opens it. 11:58 still. He closes it again.
Outside, someone sets off an early firecracker. A pop, distant and sharp, and then another, like punctuation in an argument. The city is restless. The city has been holding something all night and it’s starting to let go.
One minute.
“Lu Guang.”
Nothing. The slow chest-rise, the arm over the eyes.
“Lu Guang.” Softer this time, which is backwards from how it usually goes—usually he gets louder when ignored, just out of principle. But there’s something about the room right now, the strange amber quiet of it, that makes him want to stay inside the softness. He reaches out and touches Lu Guang’s shoulder. Just his fingertips. “Hey. Wake up. It’s almost—”
“Mm.” Not a word. Barely even a sound.
“It’s almost midnight. Come on. One minute.”
Lu Guang makes a sound that might be leave me alone compressed into a single syllable. His arm doesn’t move from his face.
Cheng Xiaoshi looks at his phone. 11:59.
“Lu Guang.” He shakes him, gently, the way you shake something delicate. “Sixty seconds. You can go back to sleep in sixty seconds, I swear, I’ll tuck you in myself, just—open your eyes for a second. Come on.”
A long pause. A breath. Lu Guang’s arm shifts, just slightly, uncovering one eye. The eye is barely open. It finds Cheng Xiaoshi with the slow, underwater focus of someone surfacing from very far down.
“...what time,” he says. His voice is completely wrecked with sleep, low and rough-edged, the consonants not quite assembled.
“Fifty seconds,” Cheng Xiaoshi says. “Forty-eight.”
“That’s.” Lu Guang closes his eye. “That’s still technically next year’s problem.”
“It’s really not.” Cheng Xiaoshi laughs, quiet, helpless. “Lu Guang. Forty seconds.”
Something shifts in Lu Guang’s face. A small decision being made somewhere beneath the surface. He moves his arm, fully this time, and his eyes open—both of them, slow, the long light fringe of his lashes catching the orange window-light. He blinks. He looks at Cheng Xiaoshi.
Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t check his phone. He forgets to check his phone.
“Hi,” he says instead.
“Hi,” Lu Guang says back, a little roughly, a little like he’s still only half-here.
Outside, the city begins.
It starts the way it always starts—a few scattered bursts, someone who couldn't wait, and then suddenly it's everywhere, it's all of them at once, the sky cracking open in gold and white and red, the window going bright-bright-dark-bright in a rhythm that has no rhythm, just explosion after explosion rolling over the rooftops. The sound hits a second later. It always does. Cheng Xiaoshi has always loved that—the gap between the light and the sound, the proof that they are seeing something from a distance, that they’re both close enough to see it and far enough to still be safe.
Lu Guang watches the window.
His face does something. Something unguarded, the way faces go in the first seconds of waking up when the usual careful arrangement hasn’t been put back on yet. He watches the light move across the glass and his expression is—
Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t have the word for it. Doesn’t need one.
“Happy New Year,” Cheng Xiaoshi says.
Lu Guang turns from the window and looks at him.
And Cheng Xiaoshi—
Cheng Xiaoshi just goes for it. It’s midnight, it’s new year, the city outside is coming apart at the seams with joy, and Lu Guang is warm and sleep-soft and looking at him with both eyes open. He leans in.
The kiss is slow.
It has to be slow. Lu Guang is still half asleep, his mouth barely responding at first, just—there, present, warm, accepting. And then something catches up to him, some part of his brain coming online, and his hand comes up—clumsy, heavy with sleep—and finds the side of Cheng Xiaoshi’s face. His palm is warm. His thumb rests against Cheng Xiaoshi’s cheek, not quite a hold, more like just... a point of contact. Like he’s making sure this is real. Like he’s reading it through his fingertips.
Cheng Xiaoshi’s hand finds his waist. The fabric of his shirt is wrinkled from sleeping. He can feel the warmth of him through it.
The fireworks go on outside. Probably. Cheng Xiaoshi isn’t tracking the fireworks anymore.
The kiss is unhurried in a way that most of their kisses aren’t—they’re usually working around something, the quick-bright urgency of their lives always pulling at them, always the next thing and the next thing—but there’s nothing to work around right now. It’s midnight. It’s the very seam of the year. Nothing is being asked of either of them.
Lu Guang makes a small sound into his mouth. Almost nothing.
Cheng Xiaoshi chases it. He can’t help it. He presses a little closer and Lu Guang’s hand shifts against his face, thumb moving in something that is almost a stroke, slow and thoughtless, the kind of touch that doesn’t know it’s a touch. The kind that happens in the space below intention. Cheng Xiaoshi feels it go through him like a frequency.
There’s a big firework outside—he can tell by the light, the way it floods the room suddenly gold and then white and then gone—and the sound follows three seconds later like a distant door slamming, and neither of them pulls back. Neither of them even flinches. The city can do what it wants. The city can come apart completely.
Lu Guang’s mouth is soft. That’s the thing that keeps arriving at him, the fact of it, the specific quality of softness that belongs to sleep, to the undefended hours, to the version of Lu Guang that exists before the day has put its full architecture back in place. Cheng Xiaoshi has kissed him in the mornings and in the evenings and in the sharp-lit middle of arguments that turned somehow, the way arguments between them sometimes turn, but he doesn’t think he’s kissed him quite like this before. In this particular key. Unhurried, and half-dark, and the year being new somewhere outside while they stay still.
He becomes aware, slowly, of the texture of details. The faint rhythm of Lu Guang’s breathing through his nose, still carrying the pattern of sleep, still deeper than waking, his body not entirely here yet. The way his fingers have curled slightly at Cheng Xiaoshi’s jaw—not holding, still not holding, but the fingers have curved, a reflex, the loosest possible architecture of a hold. The wrinkles of his shirt under Cheng Xiaoshi’s palm. The warmth. The warmth that’s different from body heat, that’s specifically him, the particular temperature of Lu Guang, which Cheng Xiaoshi knows now the way he knows things that have been true for long enough to stop feeling like knowledge and start feeling like solid ground.
At some point—he couldn’t say when—Lu Guang has tilted his head. Just slightly. An adjustment. The kind of adjustment that is not a decision, just a body knowing what it wants, finding the angle, settling. Cheng Xiaoshi feels the shift and follows it and they fit together a little more completely, and for a moment it’s just that. Just the fit of it. The quality of something that has been done enough times to know its own shape.
Lu Guang makes a small sound into his mouth. It’s everything.
When they pull apart it’s barely pulling apart at all. An inch. Less. Lu Guang’s eyes are still closed. His lashes are still doing the thing with the orange light—catching it, holding it, each one separately illuminated, which is the kind of thing Cheng Xiaoshi notices and then wishes he could stop noticing because there is nowhere useful to put that information, no place in a reasonable life to store the fact that Lu Guang’s eyelashes look like that in firework light. He stores it anyway. He’s been storing things like this for years. He must have a warehouse somewhere by now.
Neither of them speaks.
The space between their mouths is warm. Cheng Xiaoshi is breathing slightly unevenly, not from exertion, just from the way the body sometimes forgets its own rhythm when something asks too much of its attention. He can feel that Lu Guang’s thumb has stilled against his cheek. Just resting there now. A comma.
“A’Guang,” he says. Barely any volume. He doesn’t know why he says it. Just to say it, maybe. Just to put it in the air of this specific minute, this first minute, the way a flag is put in the ground.
Lu Guang exhales. Slow.
“A’Shi,” he says.
Which means nothing. Which means everything.
“Happy New Year,” he says, after a moment. His voice is even rougher now. It sounds like sleep and Cheng Xiaoshi could probably survive a direct hit from one of those fireworks right now and feel less obliterated.
“Yeah,” Cheng Xiaoshi says. He’s not sure what he’s agreeing to. He agrees anyway.
Lu Guang is asleep again in under three minutes.
This is not surprising. This is, in fact, completely predictable, and Cheng Xiaoshi had known it would happen, had promised it would happen—sixty seconds and then you can go back to sleep—and he’d meant it. He does mean it. He just hadn’t quite calculated for the fondness. For how it would lodge somewhere in his ribcage, watching Lu Guang’s eyes fall closed again. Watching the small effort of staying present—that tiny, valiant effort, because Lu Guang had tried, had surfaced all that way up from wherever sleep had taken him, had found his face in the dark and pressed his palm there—watching that effort finally release, finally let go, his face smoothing back out into the unguarded terrain of sleep.
Watching him go.
There’s something about it that Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t have a clear word for. Not quite tenderness, though it’s that too. Not quite grief, though there’s a shape to it that rhymes with grief—the way watching someone sleep always carries the faint structural echo of watching someone leave, the stillness of them, the way they’re present and somewhere else at once. But it’s not grief. It’s the opposite of grief. It’s the feeling that sits on the other side of grief’s architecture, in the room where everything is still here, still intact, still breathing slowly in the dark beside them.
He watches Lu Guang’s chest rise. Fall. He watches it again.
Cheng Xiaoshi decides to stay awake a little longer.
He turns off his phone screen. The room goes back to just the window, just the orange-dark, just the city noise coming through in waves—fireworks tapering off in ones and twos now, the year spending its first minutes quietly, like something newly born that hasn’t found its voice yet. He sets his phone face-down on the edge of the sidetable. He won’t need it anymore tonight. Tonight is done with needing things.
He shifts—carefully, slow, with the particular quality of care that belongs to not waking sleeping people, the held breath and the incremental movement, every adjustment negotiated in advance with gravity—and lies down beside Lu Guang. Close. The bunk is narrow and has always been narrow and this stopped being a problem a long time ago, stopped being anything other than just the fact of it, the given condition, the way the world is shaped here in this specific latitude of their lives.
He fits himself against the familiar architecture of him.
Because that’s what it is. Architecture. Cheng Xiaoshi has thought about this before, or not thought, exactly, but known in the way that bodies know things, has understood that there is a specific geometry to the way they occupy the same space, a grammar to it, subject and object always finding the same arrangement. Lu Guang’s shoulder. The line of his back. The warmth that pools between them in the narrow bunk like something the two of them are jointly generating, a thing that belongs to neither of them alone.
Lu Guang, in his sleep, moves.
Just slightly. An adjustment. It happens the way tides happen, the way roots happen—imperceptibly and then completely, a process with no visible seam between before and after. His arm finds Cheng Xiaoshi’s. His shoulder comes back an inch. His whole body doing the unconscious thing that it does, the seeking, the slow gravitational drift of him in sleep, always toward, always toward, and Cheng Xiaoshi has thought about this too—has tried, occasionally, in the privacy of his own half-asleep mind, to think about what it means that Lu Guang spends his waking hours precise and measured and carefully arranged and then spends his sleeping hours moving toward Cheng Xiaoshi like that’s the one direction that requires no navigation, no decision, no deliberate choosing. Like his body already knows where it’s going. Like it’s been going there for so long that the going has become the foundation.
Cheng Xiaoshi lets himself be sought.
He exhales. Slowly. The breath leaves him and he feels some structural thing leave with it, some last held tension he hadn’t known was still there—the low vigilance of the night, the watching of the clock, the steering of himself and Lu Guang both toward midnight and after—all of it going, going, leaving him lighter, leaving him here.
The fireworks are almost done. One somewhere to the east, a distant bright crack. Then silence. Then a smaller one, almost apologetic, like a coda, like someone who couldn’t quite let the song end. Then the city begins to settle into itself, the particular texture of deep night reasserting, the hum of it, the low constant aliveness of their area at rest, which is not the same as quiet but is its own kind of peace. He thinks, fuzzily, about years. About how they end and how they begin, and how those things are not really endings or beginnings at all but just the places where people put their markers—little flags planted in the continuous moving field of time, arbitrary and necessary, both, the way all rituals are both. A way of saying, here. I was here. A way of making the continuous into a story, of insisting that this particular second and not the one before it is where something new starts.
We were here, he thinks. At this exact second. We were here and I woke him up at 11:59 and he came up from sleep for me and then he went back down and I am lying next to him while the new year spends its first quiet minutes just being the new year, just being new. And we were here.
He thinks he’ll fall asleep soon.
Lu Guang breathes. In. Out.
The solidness of him. The sleep-warmth, which is different from any other warmth, which is the specific warmth of a person not performing anything, not constructing anything, just existing at their most essential temperature. Cheng Xiaoshi has spent a long time—longer than he’d admitted for a long time—wanting access to this. The unperformed version. The one that moves toward him in the dark without deciding to. He has it. He keeps having it. Every night it is still true.
He closes his eyes.
The city breathes outside. Lu Guang breathes beside him. Cheng Xiaoshi breathes, and feels his body understand that it’s allowed to stop now, allowed to put down whatever it’s been carrying through all the numbered hours of the ending year, and he lets it, he lets it go, he follows the breath down and down toward sleep.
Here, he thinks.
The word sits in him warm and complete.
Here, meaning the bunk, meaning the room, meaning the orange window and the settling city and the new year that is already several minutes old and getting older. Here, meaning Lu Guang’s body under his hands and Lu Guang’s warmth against his side and the slow proof of his breathing, in and out, the most reliable thing Cheng Xiaoshi knows.
Here, meaning, of all the places in the continuous field of time, of all the seconds that have ever been or will ever be, this one. This exact one. He would plant his flag here. He would say I was here and mean it as the truest thing he knows.
Here, he thinks, and means all of it.
He’s asleep before he knows he’s gone.