Mar. 17th, 2023 at 3:40 PM
Summer vacation was halfway through, and everything was still the same. He passed the time lazily, unrestricted and unwilling to conform. He stayed in the attic, climbed up the windowsill, wrote in his diary, doodled, planted flowers, practiced the skateboard, learnt to ride a motorbike, visited adult websites, watched horror movies all night, and played video games with his friends, then was unwillingly dragged to do volunteer work in the community.
The thing that was somewhat different from before was that he seemed to have made new friends, setting aside some time and feelings for his new relationships. He even took the girls up on their invitation for the first time, agreeing to go play table tennis with them, although his motives had been rather selfish.
The results of this had undoubtedly been disappointing. He wasn’t able to find out any of the things he wanted to find out during the long, tedious, and tormenting interaction. Girls were not the ideal research subjects, he couldn’t substitute or deduce anything from them, and they were too different from his target person, so he wasn’t able to get anything worth referencing.
As a result, he went back disappointed, downing two full glasses of non-alcoholic drinks and returning home early with the scorching sun overhead and complaints in his heart. It was only after getting to his door that he realised his parents had gone out just like last week and the week before last, giving him a rare day off to spend by himself with no one home, and it just so happened that he hadn’t brought his keys.
Perfect, it was the right place, the right time, and the straw that broke the camel’s back.
He didn’t hesitate in the slightest to seek shelter with the neighbour.
It should be said that he was “very proactive”.
“I humbly request you shelter your homeless neighbour.” He saw the man opening the door from afar, but still made a big show of knocking on the door, acting exaggeratedly in imitation of a failed drama actor as he knelt on the ground and sighed in despair, “Do a good deed, mister.”
“Come, come on.” The man was called out to ceaselessly, so he half-stood from his seat and placed a pair of slippers by the other’s feet, “I would be happy to.”
“How happy? Are you welcoming me to stay?”
“In case you’re like the princess and the pea?”
Their current relationship had already turned into one that allowed them to joke with each other like this, they had a mutual understanding in which they indulged each other and weren’t afraid of stepping out of line. However, although he spoke like that, his attitude and conduct was still considered conscientious. He sat down respectfully and supressed his excitement as he looked around the man’s residence, only relaxing once the other took the initiative to ask him to, then laying down on the corner of the sleeper sofa.
——Sure enough, the place was just as he expected, neat, simple, with distinct areas, a visual balance, and very few superfluous things, with plain and orderly masculinity.
He could never find the right or coherent language to describe the feeling the man gave him, but he was infatuated with this “feeling” itself.
“I’m sleepy.”
“Then just sleep.”
The man turned the temperature of the AC slightly higher until it was comfortable enough to sleep with without feeling cold, then fetched a thin blanket for him, covering him below the shoulders, light as a flower petal, smoothing out the wrinkles and edges. Then, the man sat down next to where he rested his head, separated by a seemingly unintentional yet hard-to-ignore small distance, crossed his legs, put his hand on his knee and opened up a book with a cryptic title.
“I’ll wake you up in an hour.”
“Half an hour…”
“Okay.”
He didn’t usually take naps, and he shouldn’t have stayed in a house he wasn’t familiar with. Before closing his eyes, he thought back to the first time they spoke, with the wind blowing through the patio under the July sun.
He opened his eyes an hour later after a deep nap, feeling so limp from head to toe it was as though his bones had been removed. His gaze focused and he took in a deep breath, finding that the man had changed positions and was now sitting on the carpet, one leg bent and the other straightened out, his back leaning against the leg of the sofa, extremely close to him. The man noticed it as soon as he moved — it seemed like he’d been paying close attention all along — so he turned his head to look at him, his shoulders slanting along with his movements, until they were practically nose to nose.
“Awake?”
The man’s voice was deep, he switched his sitting position, bending his arm and propping his hand against the side of his head. They were even closer together now than the last time they stood close, as if with an unspoken understanding. He lay on his side, bleary-eyed, at a loss but not cowering, his heartbeat speeding up until it was out of control as an indescribable feeling suddenly filled his chest, inflating like a balloon, simmering, reaching a tipping point. He didn’t move, he would definitely do something if he moved, the consequences of which would be hard to predict and hard to recover from. He wasn’t entirely sure if he could bear it. He knew full well that he didn’t have the sense adults did to control their impulses, but he also knew full well that we wasn’t planning on controlling his impulses in the first place.
So, in the endless and bright summer afternoon, with their backs against the sun, they hid in a corner nobody knew about, absorbed in each others eyes, sinking, sinking, seeing nothing else, undisturbed by anything else. Even though the cicadas still chirped noisily, and the window curtains moved with the wind, and the water boiled, and the bookmark slipped from the pages, and the thousands of other things the world tried in a vain attempt at intervening, it could not.
They owned this moment.
His eyelashes trembled, his breath hitched, and he grabbed the man’s sleeve like a domestic feline, fingertips tightening inch by inch, not intending on letting go.
“Can I go to your room?”
The man was a little startled, but quickly restored his cool, placing a hand at his nape but not using much force, as if afraid of hurting him, and replying in serious, clearly enunciated words, “As you wish.”
He stood up and stretched, undoing the two buttons below his Adam’s apple. The man walked ahead, leading him by the hand as they walked through the long corridor, until they reached the sun-facing room at the end.
“Please, come in.”
He giggled quietly in a rare attempt at not being found out, and placed his other hand behind his back, closing the door.
[END]
