而你總會有情人的
by fruitjuicer

而你總會有情人的

fruitjuicer

Summary

"If you have a choice in not having a choice about coming,” Fu Meng-po says, eyebrows cocked out from behind the frame of his sunglasses, “then it's not a kidnapping."

“You’re not fun,” Kuan-hung complains. “At all.”

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 31222151.

☼

The first thing Kuan-hung does once he’s disembarked his Shanghai Pudong-Kaohsiung flight is snap a picture of the gate from halfway down the jet bridge. There's a glare blotting out the upper corner from the midmorning sun streaming through, but he's not looking to capture the perfect shot. He’s not even looking to get a good shot— just a shot, any shot, will do, for the moment he’s far enough up from the plane that he can log into the wi-fi.

It’s not bustling, not like Taoyuan, but that suits Kuan-hung, here, just fine. It gives him a moment to idle around once the ramp has fed him out into open floor space without the worry that he’s obstructing foot traffic. If anyone gives him a double-take, self-cordoned as he is just off-frame, sunglasses pushed up high on the bridge of his nose and thumb toying with the loop string of his mask while he taps one-handed at his touchscreen, he doesn’t see it.

He works through his top nested WeChats, sends the image to each one sans any extrapolative context, then closes out of the app to switch his eSIM profile over to his local number and turn off DND. By the time he’s gotten through the arrivals lounge and is flagging down his transfer, his phone has buzzed against his thigh several times, but he keeps his hand clasped over it on the outside of his sweats until he’s finally sitting down before he caves in and checks his notifications.

There’s a new message in his ridiculously named group chat with Fu Meng-po, sitting somewhere in the middle of the pack of all of the rest of his threads. Kuan-hung opens that one first.

傅孟受:
               ┬┴┬┴┤•ᴥ• ʔ

官攻:
               call now

Fu Meng-po must have his own phone in-hand, or be bogged down with a lot of free time, because Kuan-hung’s barely got his seatbelt buckled up before his ringtone starts blaring, the speaker palm-muffled.

“No, call me back later,” is his hello once he’s answered and put his phone to his ear, all smiles and faux-dismissive distraction. “I haven’t finished catching up on all your posts yet.” Which is technically true; he hasn’t even opened anything yet that he usually can’t when freelancing to his own devices behind the great firewall. It’s also not at all important, given he’s got the real thing here live and on the air.

“There’s nothing good there,” Fu Meng-po says, never missing a beat, per usual. It’s hard to make out where he might be, with all his own surround sound, so Kuan-hung doesn’t try too much to plot and place him. “How long are you over for?”

“A week,” Kuan-hung tells him. That’s the sum of all parts of the plan, anyway.

He glances outside while he swaps his phone over to his other ear, squinting against the tint of his sunglasses and the pane. It’s not a far drive between the international terminal and Qianzhen District. He might end up talking with Fu Meng-po for the entirety of it.

There’s a crackling in the background, like Fu Meng-po is turning a page over, maybe, or opening something. “Any plans?”

“Not really.” Kuan-hung pins his phone between his ear and shoulder so he can push his sunglasses up just high enough to scrub over his eyes. Not at all, if he’s honest, but even in his head that doesn’t sound like something he should just say.

“Called your parents?”

Kuan-hung takes a bit too long, he’s self-aware enough to think, to find a committal answer that’s good enough to ring soundly true. “I messaged my sister,” he says. She’d been one of the WeChats he’d hit with his terminal snap. “I’ll call them when I’m checked in.” He intends to, anyway. He’s never intended to not let them know he’s home, however temporarily, it’s just— it’s a conversation he has to build himself up to.

Fu Meng-po doesn’t linger on it, if it even trips him up at all as awkward in the first place. He just breezes on through with a sigh, audible through the receiver. "I'm around. Put your hotel in the chat, I'll come pick you up."

"Uh," Kuan-hung stalls out, blinking. "You know, that doesn't sound like you're giving me a choice."

Fu Meng-po hums. "Do you want one?"

Well. Well, no. Kuan-hung takes a breath that he hopes doesn't tear out as loudly in Fu Meng-po's ear as it does his own. "Not really," he admits. Even if he had one, he'd probably choose this, anyway. Even without knowing any particulars. Still, "Where are you taking me?"

“Spending a few days in Yuchi.” Kuan-hung hears the rattle of keys, then the clap of a door thudding shut in the distance. “I can take you up to your parents’, after.”

“Sure.” Kuan-hung rights his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, then tweaks at the loops of his mask, fixing them behind his ears. His chest feels fluttery-light. It’s a little dizzying; discomforting. “Okay. Yeah. I’m at Silks Club.”

“Fancy,” Fu Meng-po comments, chuckle-bright. It’s a perfectly fair remark — probably too fair. “All right. Be there in a few hours. See you soon.”

“Bai bai la.” Kung-hung moves his thumb into place to end the call, but it’s Fu Meng-po who hangs up, first, before he brings himself around to it. He pulls his phone back down from his ear and swipes the screen to close out of the app, then holds it in between a loose steeple of his hands, tucked between his knees, for a minute, two, until he sees Kaisyuan Station pass by out of the corner of his eye, on his other side.

Kuan-hung unlocks his phone, braces his elbows on the table of his thighs, then folds in on himself to type.

官攻:
               send me where you’re staying in Yuchi

He gets himself not to expect a reply any time soon, which is good, because Fu Meng-po keeps him waiting. Kuan-hung is patiently propped up by the elbows over the high-flung counter of the Silks’ lobby reception when he sees the push notification marquee drop down on his unlocked screen, eating up a third of his pulled-up reservation. He swipes it away without reading it, then turns his phone back around for the clerk to better read the email, just in case.

Once his keycard is burning a hole in his pocket, he opens Fu Meng-po’s message up properly, making sure to keep himself close to the wall so he’s not milling around in front of anyone who might want to overtake him.

傅孟受:
               ʕ •ᴥ•ʔゞ*

官攻:
               setting my location. message me when you’re here

It occurs to him, not for the first time in as many minutes, as he gets in the door of his suite, that it’s a tremendous waste of space and place to be holing up in for a few hours only to leave again. It’s a smaller space than he’d usually book, but it still feels too big, emptied out, without the entourage he’s used to having in tow for company.

Kuan-hung doesn’t really want to touch anything, even though he knows that it will all have to be cleaned, anyway, regardless of his interference, so he settles for the compromise of being as unobtrusive as possible. Shoes kicked off at the door; jacket hung up; complimentary slippers on. He drags up his suitcase to the foot of the king bed, locks the wheels, then drops into a crouch to scrounge around one of the front zip pockets for his phone charger. Fu Meng-po said he’d be a few hours, which feels both at once like a lot of time and not enough time at all. Either way, Kuan-hung isn’t sure what to do with himself for any of it beyond the abstract of whiling idle. He doesn't want to shower, and eating isn't holding much more appeal.

That leaves him with his phone, then, he supposes. Kuan-hung plugs everything in, then flops down on the all too big for him bed, sinking into the duvet as he lets his slippers slide back off his feet. He sends a message to his sister, first, just to let her know where he's headed. He checks Weibo; he'd set a moratorium on no activity, work-esque or otherwise, on any of his rotation of platforms for twenty-four hours after landing, but that doesn't mean he can't lurk.

He might stretch the definition of lurk wafer thin when he opens Instagram and likes a few posts, but he made the rules, so he can break the rules. That's how it works.

He'll call his parents in a moment. A minute. Kuan-hung lowers his phone to his chest and pulls in a deep breath, mustering himself.

Kuan-hung’s ringtone and the rumble of his phone against the flat of his sternum almost sends him — and it, by associative momentum — flying off the bed. Kuan-hung scrambles up in a harried daze; just barely makes out Fu Meng-po’s name on his screen as he tries to get his hands to work enough through the heavy fog curtain of his roused sleep to answer the call before it rings out.

“I fell asleep,” he manages, skipping past all the niceties, tongue-tied and reedy-raw, “shit, sorry, I.” He clears his throat, then tries to swallow. He feels hemmed in somewhere tight and suffocating; his saliva lodges somewhere mid-throat, knot hard.

“Easy,” comes Fu Meng-po’s voice back through the receiver, calm as can be. “You need five?”

“I need fifty,” Kuan-hung blurts out, yanking his charger free of the socket while he toes around the floor, blind, looking for his slippers to slide his feet back into. “No, I’m. Where are you?”

Fu Meng-po’s breath gusts out, rough, like he’s biting back a laugh, or something along the lines of it. There's the percussion of bustling people and city noise playing out as a backtrack to his voice, just dimmed out. “Just outside. Come out, cross at the closest corner, you’ll see Yang’s. I’ll meet you there.”

“All right.” Kuan-hung gets himself upright, charger bundled up in-hand, slippers mostly on-foot. “All right, I’m. Almost there.” He takes a sharp breath in. “I haven’t showered. I haven’t anything. You can’t mention it. Don’t look at me.”

"Take your time," Fu Meng-po tells him, unruffled.

"I won't," Kuan-hung says. "See you soon." He’s the one to hang up first, this time. It treats him to a full-frontal view of all his missed call and group chat message notifications before he can stuff his phone into his pocket. It doesn’t feel good to narrow in on the timestamps and realise Fu Meng-po has spent the better part of a half-hour trying to rouse him. It feels worse that Fu Meng-po doesn’t seem to be at all ruffled by the lapse in thoughtfulness. Kuan-hung would have been scaling the walls after five minutes.

He tries to gather himself and his breath when he’s hauled himself at speed back down to the lobby, pausing and running his fingers through his hair while aside one of the many reflective surfaces until he thinks it passes well enough for purposefully tousled. Fu Meng-po has seen him looking a world of a lot worse, both in and out of on-work conditions and caveats, but still. Kuan-hung’s packed filming schedule is now drawn up to a halt, so it’s no longer an easy out for him to blame his bruising and discomposure on. It also means he has no makeup jiejies and geges around to pretty him up fit for public consumption.

It’s warmed up, outside, enough that Kuan-hung stops himself while still under the shade of the hotel’s overhang to strip his jacket, turning out the pockets to make sure he’s not leaving anything important in them before he packs it away. While he’s crouched down, he spares another moment to push his sunglasses up, too, so he can swipe at the sweat beading up against the rim and bridge of the frame and readjust his mask. With that, there’s nothing else in his repertoire to procrastinate either with or on — he’s looking as good as he’s going to look and getting as good as he’s going to get — so he rights himself and trundles off not-too-quickly to the crossing.

It’s not hard to spot Fu Meng-po from a distance, but for no special stand-out reason beyond there not being very many people hanging around Yang’s on the early side of midday. He’s wearing one of his many obnoxiously patterned button-up shirts that makes him so obvious he loops right back around to blending in, and he spots Kuan-hung almost as quickly as Kuan-hung spots him.

Kuan-hung is struck with the truly ridiculous thought that he has no actual idea what to do with Fu Meng-po now he’s got him here. It brings a baffled smile to his lips, which then breaks out into a full-fledged grin when Fu Meng-po redundantly hails him down with one hand as he lopes over to meet him midway. He’s glad the brunt of it is hidden behind his sunglasses and mask, though there’s surely no way Fu Meng-po can miss how his brow is crinkling with it, just like how he can tell Fu Meng-po is smiling in some sort of way at him, too, even behind his own obfuscating mask and sunglasses get-up.

“Xingnan-ge,” Kuan-hung stalls by way of greeting, leaning into the drawl of it, and then he doesn’t need to stall at all, anymore, to figure out what comes next, because Fu Meng-po is folding his hand over the back of his neck, fingers dipping beneath his collar as he squeezes down and gives Kuan-hung a shake.

“xiao Kuan,” Fu Meng-po teases back, leaning around him to jig the handle of his suitcase out of his grip. The pad of his thumb hooks down on Kuan-hung’s neck when he straightens, kneading over the jump of his pulse. “Not bad.”

“What’s not bad?” Kuan-hung finds himself asking as he’s tucked in against Fu Meng-po’s side. He slips his now emptied out hands into his pockets as Fu Meng-po turns him at the neck and starts steering them both back the way he came. His palm is clammy-warm with sweat; Kuan-hung arcs up into it with a shiver despite himself.

“You,” Fu Meng-po says, punctuating it with another shake that pushes Kuan-hung out from his side and pulls him back in flush so whip crack-quick that his head reels after the flow of it for a beat. “You look fine.”

“You haven’t seen the rest of me yet,” Kuan-hung objects, to his immediate and immense regret.

He feels Fu Meng-po’s laugh pressed into his side as much as he hears it, a rich rumble of a thing. “You look fine,” he repeats, and Kuan-hung decides to let him have the last word of it. Before he lets something even stupider slip.

They pass by Yang’s, and Fu Meng-po leans up against him, shepherding him left, down the one-lane alley cinched between the buildings. Kuan-hung can see Fu Meng-po’s Jeep, parked in one of the sparse spots littering the long lone line of bitumen.

“No Cool-ge?” he asks.

“Not for Yuchi,” Fu Meng-po answers.

“Oh,” says Kuan-hung simply, “I’m leaving, then.” He means to make a show of trying to squirm out from underneath Fu Meng-po’s grip, but it switches gears into a brief but valiant and entirely legitimate attempt when Fu Meng-po tightens the collar of his fingers, wringing out a yelp.

“No, you're not.” Fu Meng-po releases his neck with a little spurring nudge.

Kuan-hung tugs his hands out of his pockets and slants forward, pantomiming catching himself against the door. “Help!” he cries out, but he keeps it low enough that it's just for Fu Meng-po. The last thing he's in it for is to attract more attention than the amount he's already holding, let alone actual assistance.

Fu Meng-po pulls the driver’s side door open and Kuan-hung hears his own unlock. "Get in the car," he tells him serenely.

Kuan-hung watches him through the window as he turns away. "I’m putting in a lot of the work for my own kidnapping,” he notes while he nonetheless obeys, clambering inside.

The back passenger door opens. "You're not getting kidnapped," Fu Meng-po says distractedly. Kuan-hung glances over his shoulder to watch Fu Meng-po heft his suitcase up onto the seat one-handed.

"I feel like not having a choice about coming makes it a kidnapping," Kuan-hung points out.

Fu Meng-po seems to be holding on to his reply until he's sitting down, so Kuan-hung takes the opportunity to buckle his seatbelt and kick off his shoes beneath the dash. He folds his knees up and goes cross-legged just as he hears the door clap shut, and meets Fu Meng-po’s eyes when he looks up.

"If you have a choice in not having a choice about coming,” Fu Meng-po says, eyebrows cocked out from behind the frame of his sunglasses, “then it's not a kidnapping."

“You’re not fun,” Kuan-hung complains. “At all.”

Fu Meng-po laughs, turning away. “But you’re here,” he replies, like a gotcha, as he pulls off his mask. Kuan-hung follows his lead, reminded.

“I am here,” he says. “Here to not have fun.”

“You won’t be disappointed, then,” Fu Meng-po remarks, wry. “Watch your head.”

Kuan-hung does, going as far as to duck forward, just a bit, as Fu Meng-po reaches over to brace his hand behind the back of Kuan-hung’s seat, twisting to follow it, gaze tossed out through the rear window. Kuan-hung follows the line of Fu Meng-po’s arm, the flex as the corded muscle draws taut, before he looks away, locks his gaze head-on. There’s nothing wrong with looking, he just— doesn’t want to, right now, in this moment. And that’s fine. If there’s no shame in looking, it stands to reason that there must be no shame in looking away, either.

“There.” Fu Meng-po falls away from behind him, and Kuan-hung sees his hands close over the steering wheel, down in the blur-fraying edge of his periphery. “Good?”

It could mean anything. “Not bad,” Kuan-hung says back, which could mean anything, too. He closes his eyes; sinks back into his seat, lets his sigh seep out, wide-open and unguarded.

“How have you been?” Fu Meng-po asks him, sometime after. It could be a moment, a minute, more, for all Kuan-hung knows. Eyes closed, only the drift of the drive to go on that anything is passing on forward at all, time or them or otherwise.

“Tired,” Kuan-hung answers, smiling tentatively around the acknowledgement. He folds his hands into his lap, and tips his head towards Fu Meng-po, eyes fluttering open, neck arching up his headrest. “You?”

Fu Meng-po’s mouth twinges around a smile of his own, softened. “Bit tired, too.”

Kuan-hung turns his face back away, rolling to angle himself towards his window. “Is Yuchi work?” he has the presence of mind to ask. Not that it, well. It matters, but it’s too late, now, if he’s interrupting something: Fu Meng-po has already decided for him that he won’t be an intrusion, if it’s the case. But he’d like to know, anyway, just to have it to tuck away somewhere.

“Sort of.” Fu Meng-po pauses for a moment, then, “More than not.” It’s a bit more definite an answer, but only just. It’s enough, anyway, for Kuan-hung to have something to ponder. “Let me know if you need to stop. Change the radio, too, if you want.”

The conversation peters out, after that, to their comfortable, natural quiet. Kuan-hung has to wonder how he was ever worried at all, even the slightest bit, that it would be different. Some things change, but Fu Meng-po is an endurant constant. Rooted in, sure of himself. The coolest of my friends, Kuan-hung had said, once. Who I think I want to be, eventually, he hasn’t admitted aloud. Not properly, anyway. Not yet.

The line between be and be with thins out to a messy, all-too-complicated non-existence when it comes down to— this. He needs more time with it. He needs more of a lot of things.

It seems like they’ve only just gotten out past the outskirts of Kaohsiung when Fu Meng-po turns off the freeway into Gukeng. He forgets, sometimes, just how small home is, up until the moment he’s back here, moving through it. Kuan-hung perks up and out of the daze of watching the scenery scroll at the unexpected switch, stifling a yawn within the tight-lipped clench of his jaw as he stretches his arms up, shrugging the torpor off.

"What's up?" he pries, tossing a look over at the driver’s side. He sees Fu Meng-po's eyes dart behind the frames of his sunglasses, listing to Kuan-hung in his periphery before he slots his stare back on the road ahead.

"Nothing," he says, in a shrug of a voice, casual and unpressed. "Been driving for a while. Don't want to drop off on the road."

"Oh," Kuan-hung replies. "Yeah, fair. Okay."

The rest station isn't all that much further from the exit. Fu Meng-po pulls up to a stop almost as soon as he's in the parking lot. Kuan-hung swivels his head around, giving a squinting once-over to their surrounds through the Jeep's tinted windows.

"Want anything?" Fu Meng-po asks, unbuckling his seatbelt.

“You keep asking that.” Kuan-hung rolls his bottom lip between his teeth as he unbuckles himself, leashing the awkward curl of his smile as he turns to face Fu Meng-po again. “Still no.”

“Might catch you out changing your mind yet,” Fu Meng-po quips back.

“Keep hoping!” Kuan-hung says brightly, smile surging to the fore of his mouth. “Jiayou!”

Fu Meng-po clenches his fist, giving it a consolatory pump in Kuan-hung’s direction as he starts to climb out of the Jeep, and Kuan-hung tries but does not particularly succeed in muffling his ugly snort-laugh with the back of his hand.

Left alone to his own devices, as it turns out, just leaves him a hollowed-out sort of inert. Kuan-hung opens WeChat and closes it again, a few times, in variations of inattentive and indeliberate, before he finally tabs over to his chat with Fu Meng-po. He opens up the listing Fu Meng-po sent him and reads it over. It looks quaint — what people might call quaint, anyway, if they were passing through.

It looks like something he thinks Fu Meng-po might pick for himself. Surrounded by forest; close-by to the lake, one of the temples. A snapshot of emulated rusticly historic countryside with wi-fi to bring it up to the modern-day present. Kuan-hung definitely sees a few dogs in some of the outdoor pictures. A cat, too.

He closes the listing before looking into the rooms, setting his phone face-down on his thigh. He’ll look at the actual rooms on offer in a minute, just— it keeps catching in his head, what Fu Meng-po said, about not wanting to drop off on the road. Fu Meng-po hadn’t said anything earlier save that he was around. Hadn’t gone into it past that he’d be taking Kuan-hung to Yuchi.

It’s not panic making his throat all gripped-tight — he doesn’t want to call it panic. But Kuan-hung feels himself running a little cold, and his breath coming a little quicker, as he turns his phone back over, reopens their group chat, and scrolls his way back up to his snap of the arrivals gate. He picks over their few text exchanges; rattles through what he can rummage back together of their phone call. There’s nothing that stands out to him that might be— that could be seen as a concern. That could be saying something that Kuan-hung isn’t quite ready to say.

Maybe that’s why Fu Meng-po is here, though: he’s pretty good at reading between Kuan-hung’s lines. And there’s a lot being telegraphed in Kuan-hung’s unsaid that he can appreciate might be seen as a series of red flag warning signs, sure, but he’s fine. Getting the first flight out, that just so happened to be in Shanghai, was not a cry for help. He was simply recognising his own encroaching burnout. He is practicing intuitive self care. His scripts are in his suitcase! People know where he is! The degree of arrangement undertaken undercuts the supposed salt-sowing spontaneity!

...He’s so apparently well-adjusted that Fu Meng-po is going out of his way — to the tune of a five hour round trip — to loop Kuan-hung in on whatever he’s doing and keep him company. That’s. That’s, just. Great. What is he supposed to do with that? What can he even do with that?

Not a lot. Nothing at all. Kuan-hung tries to school himself into something that, barring calm, is at least not overtly nervous, or guilty. He still all but jumps in his seat, anyway, almost kneeing his phone out of his lap and onto the floor, when the driver’s side door opens.

Fu Meng-po ducks his head in and holds something out across the seats, only half-looking. “Here.”

Kuan-hung clears his throat while he takes a moment to set his phone down carefully in one of the cupholders. “You bought me something,” he points out. Fu Meng-po hums his affirmative, and Kuan-hung reaches over and takes the packet off his hands, turning it over. They’re glutinous rice strips, a brand he buys sometimes — not a lot, not his preferred, but good in a pinch if he has a blue moon craving and they’re what’s available.

“I did.” Kuan-hung hears the door shut again, and he glances up just as Fu Meng-po sets a water bottle down in the other cupholder, by Kuan-hung’s phone. He pulls his sunglasses off, running a hand through his hair to comb it back from his face, then throws Kuan-hung a look. “Is it the right one?”

Kuan-hung looks back down at it. “I didn’t want anything,” he reminds Fu Meng-po. He’s trying for a sulky tease, but it comes out a little too— touched. Or maybe he’s just overthinking it, now, even more, what with, well, everything. “It’s good, it’s fine, I eat these.”

“It looked familiar,” Fu Meng-po replies absently. “The packaging. There’s water, too.”

Kuan-hung thumbs at the corner of the wrapper, then commits to placing the packet on the floor beneath his seat, for now. “I’m good,” he says, uselessly, really, he thinks, filling a space that doesn’t need to be filled.

Fu Meng-po locks the doors, then settles back in his seat, adjusting it back to put him on a slight angle. He closes his eyes; folds his hands together over his chest. Kuan-hung’s eyes track the absent twitch of his laced fingers; trail off to the way his shirt is popping between the buttons where the fabric is drawn taut over his chest.

“Give me thirty,” he mumbles over to Kuan-hung, before he sighs out softly. “You need the radio on?”

“I think I can entertain myself for that long,” Kuan-hung scoffs at him, sardonic. He’s smiling too much into it, though, to make it stick the landing. It’s strangely sweet, and more than a little funny, that Fu Meng-po thinks he needs to provide enclosure enrichment activities for him in the Jeep for a half-hour of stationary downtime. But he’d think Kuan-hung would need to be accommodated regardless of whether or not he was also, maybe, handling him with gloves on, like a vulnerable thing. Fu Meng-po is… it’s just the way he is. That’s all there is to it. That’s all Kuan-hung has for it; that’s all he’s ever needed for it.

Kuan-hung tries to get comfortable, as courteously quiet as he can manage. He fishes his phone out of the cupholder, holding in the worst of his hiss when the hardcase clacks loudly against the console casing. He opens his apps, cycling through them, aware of the way his legs are cramping from being tucked underneath him, the squeak of the upholstery when he shifts, how his breaths seem to fill out the whole car, drowning out Fu Meng-po’s. He swears he spends at least ten minutes in that, but his clock display is saying otherwise.

He sets his phone back down, wincing, again, as it bangs around like a mallet to a gong. He tries to sink back into his chair, closing his eyes with a sigh through his nose.

Kuan-hung is honestly not all that sure how long he manages like that before he hears Fu Meng-po move around, his breath kicking up. “Sorry,” Kuan-hung preempts, in a way he hopes translates as appropriately contrite. He certainly isn’t feeling rested; he imagines the run-off of his disruptions is having much the same effect on Fu Meng-po.

“You’re good.” Fu Meng-po trails off into a yawn. His voice is low, gravel-rough from where he’s scraped up close to sleep.

“I can’t.” Kuan-hung stops himself with a huff, wrenching his hands out of his lap to gesture, vaguely, towards nothing in particular. When his glance darts off to the side, unbidden, he catches that Fu Meng-po has opened his eyes, now, too, and is watching him with a languid, half-lidded stare.

"Can't?" Fu Meng-po prompts, and Kuan-hung startles, his cheeks blushing bright red-hot.

"I can't—" what? He can't… what? Kuan-hung shoves his hands back into his lap roughly, rolling his thumb against his inseam while he flexes his fingers for focus' sake. "I can't get comfortable." Which is not untrue, however misleading it might be as long as it’s left unelaborated on.

Fu Meng-po, awfully, but not unexpectedly, really, starts angling himself up on his elbows, at that. “Come here,” he says, waving him over. Kuan-hung assumes, at least, it’s waving him over, from the loose fan of his fingers and how they furl in towards himself.

“What?” he says, still, even though he’s already shuffling over, anyway, to lean over between their seats. He doesn’t flinch back when Fu Meng-po’s fingers brush his cheek, by way of a bare miracle, and he manages, even, to not embarrass himself all that much, he thinks, complete with a convincing pout, as Fu Meng-po plucks his sunglasses off his face and stretches out just enough to set them down on the dash, next to his own.

“You want to sleep?” Fu Meng-po asks him, which answers Kuan-hung’s not-question, but also doesn’t, really. He sinks back into his seat, refolds his hands, but the lace of his fingers is loose, lazy.

“I’ve been sleeping a lot,” Kuan-hung acknowledges, because he feels like he should acknowledge that, maybe, somewhere. Sleeping more than his of-late usual, anyway. But, well, “I could sleep.”

Fu Meng-po opens his hands back up from themselves on his chest again, then reaches for him. “Then come here.” His palm flattens on Kuan-hung’s bicep, giving him a little spurring nudge, before he just takes the initiative of reeling Kuan-hung in the rest of the way. “Just lay down.”

“On you?” Kuan-hung doesn’t stutter, but it’s a near miss of a thing. He doesn’t take a lot of cajoling: one tug and he’s hoisting his midriff over the centre armrest and twisting over onto his side. Between the two of them, Kuan-hung manages to get himself in some sort of comfortable configuration, cheek pillowed in Fu Meng-po’s lap, knees drawn up in his own chair. The lid of the console is digging into his side, a bit, but it’s low-set, a tolerable enough discomfort for the payoff.

“On me,” Fu Meng-po says, now he’s already there. His hand comes to rest on Kuan-hung’s neck, thumb teasing at his hair.

Kuan-hung takes a deep breath, then sighs it out, trying to blanket his shiver. “I’m just going to annoy you more from down here,” he warns harriedly. Skirting towards a rambly panic. “I’ll keep moving around. I’m pointy.”

“Your cheekbones are so high,” Fu Meng-po agrees, nonchalant. His hand drifts up, just a fraction, and the pad of his thumb traces the shell of Kuan-hung’s ear in a leisurely swipe. “You’re fine. Just close your eyes for a bit. You’ll drop right off.”

“Well, now I won’t,” Kuan-hung mutters contrarily. But of course he closes his eyes just as he’s been told and promptly does.

Fu Meng-po’s fingers are curling under his jaw when Kuan-hung stirs, trying to coax him up. He’s saying something that’s not supposed to make sense, Kuan-hung thinks, because it’s all soft, sweet sound, and he’s not so groggy that he can’t make words out. He is groggy enough, though, or just— opportunistic, or opened up, or any combination of any manner of things, that he pushes his face up into the cup of Fu Meng-po’s palm. He can feel the crease on his cheek from his jeans. He can feel Fu Meng-po’s callouses catch on his lips when he purses them around his exhale.

He can hear the sound Fu Meng-po makes, too, when Kuan-hung wriggles further into his lap as he’s trying to get the memo down the chain of communication to the rest of his limbs that he’s awake, now, and it’s time to move. It is— it’s an unmistakable little gasp, sucked in. Shocked and hot and hungry. Kuan-hung is familiar with those sorts of sounds, most of all, maybe, when he’s got his head in someone’s lap. He’s good at making those sorts of sounds. He’s good at getting those sorts of sounds made.

He doesn’t— Kuan-hung doesn’t think. Or, he thinks so much he wraps himself right back around to a trembling blank slate state. There is so much in that sound to get his head around that he’s stopped still at the start. There’s too little in it to fill up the hole of want that’s dug into his body.

The moment goes on and on and on, and Kuan-hung doesn't dare breathe for the life and longevity of it. Not once, not throughout the hour-long seconds that it takes him to turn over, until he's no longer curled up facing the dashboard but tucked into Fu Meng-po’s lap improper.

It’s a mistake, or close enough to one to count, and he watches himself make it, anyway, detached, in high definition and surround sound, as he meets Fu Meng-po’s eyes and slowly, slowly stretches himself forward. He drags his cheek up Fu Meng-po’s thigh, the scuff of the coarse denim on his skin a vague pang that pierces the haze rolling through his head and runs his mouth dry. It takes him an age and it takes him no time at all, and then he’s nosing at Fu Meng-po’s zipper and Fu Meng-po is cupping the back of his neck, his fingers tightening down when Kuan-hung tries to jerk back into retreat, holding him in his place.

“Hey,” Fu Meng-po murmurs, “hey, hey,” and Kuan-hung stops trying to run, accepts that he can’t. He closes his eyes against it, anyway, as a final act. His chest feels so tight, wound up around a sob that won’t come out.

“You want this?” he asks him. It’s careful, soft. His thumb circles against Kuan-hung’s nape, toying with the downy hairs, and his fingers dip shallowly beneath the collar of his shirt. Kuan-hung feels his answering shiver ride over the trembles that have already seized him whole.

If he speaks, he thinks he might actually cry, if he doesn’t choke on trying, first. Then it won’t even matter what he wants. But he can nod, so he does, squeezing his eyes shut tighter as he bites at his lip. The pinch of pain reminds him that this isn’t a dream; that he really is this— irrationally irresponsible. And Fu Meng-po is folding it into his easy stride that is rapidly outpacing Kuan-hung’s already questionable control.

“Let me see.” Fu Meng-po’s fingers slide further in underneath his collar, fanning out, trailing heat down his spine. “Let me see how much.”

Kuan-hung knows what he’s really asking, beneath the almost-telling. He opens his eyes, still, despite it, and lets himself be seen. Tries to show, despite how he must look, that he’s sure. He's sure enough, as much as he can think to be. It’s all happening too much, and not enough.

Fu Meng-po’s expression is— Kuan-hung doesn't know what it is. Gentle and open but held back, too. Considering. It would be unnerving if he had any nerves left to be parted from, but Kuan-hung is past that, now, careened off into the thick of terrified excitement. He can't stop himself from shaking, but Fu Meng-po’s hand on his neck is evening it out to something more survivable, held in the check of his body.

"Up," Fu Meng-po says. "C'mon." His fingers slip back out from his shirt, and then the heft of his palm shifts to something urging, guiding him into lifting his head from Fu Meng-po’s thigh. Kuan-hung scrambles to follow, barely registering anything but that one touch, the dig of the armrest into him and the cramp that clenches up the backs of his thighs all dimmed down, faded out. He gets himself into a bowed kneel as best he can, one hand taking up a white-knuckled grip on Fu Meng-po’s knee for some sort of anchoring. The other tangles with Fu Meng-po’s as he reaches between them to take it in his own.

Kuan-hung watches, head down, with a distant disbelief, almost, as their fingers tangle together. Fu Meng-po tugs the join of them further into his lap, and Kuan-hung feels the pant of his breath gust his hair as they both fumble with the button and then his zipper until they’re undone. Fu Meng-po’s hand slips from his neck to palm his cheek, and he makes a small shushing sound, presumptive, when he starts to lift Kuan-hung up, just the slightest bit. Kuan-hung makes the sound, anyway, that Fu Meng-po preempts; something needy that catches in his throat when it is angled out of the way of the flat of Fu Meng-po’s thigh. He tries to dip his chin again, to watch, through the blur hemming his eyes and the fan of his lashes, when Fu Meng-po’s thigh flexes taut, when it arches to follow the rise of his hips.

Fu Meng-po wriggles, huffs, curses out something that’s all roughened profane, and then he’s settling back down and leading Kuan-hung in to follow, the waistband of his jeans ridden down just enough to free the bulge of his cock. Kuan-hung makes another sound as he takes in how it looks, a wrecked little whine that’s equal parts intimidated and intrigued. He’s already so huge, and barely even hard, and it isn’t as if Kuan-hung didn’t know this before now, just — it’s different, when it’s with hope but without intent. He's seen it in glimpses of undress; had it pushed and pressed against him in glances, brushes and embraces. It's just something that happens when you're close, in contact. When you're working together and living together by extension in tight-knit spaces. You see and you touch and maybe you wonder, just a little bit, as to what it might be like if there was more. If there was purpose; if it was all something meant.

He's seen Fu Meng-po, and Fu Meng-po has seen him, and it hasn't been anything so momentous before. It hasn’t been real while it has remained unacknowledged. But he’s overthinking the actuality of it, he knows; trying to talk himself back out of somewhere that’s past any point of return. He’s here midway, whatever the impulse that has carried him may be or mean, and he might as well follow through. It can’t be worse than a half-done, a not-knowing. Kuan-hung leans in, and in, and in, feeling too keyed up and locked into the tight fit of his body. Fu Meng-po’s hand slips from his cheek, spills over back to his neck, then settles there with a flinching scratch of his blunt nails to skin as Kuan-hung mouths tentatively at him through his briefs.

Fu Meng-po breathes out, harsh, tight, but his grip gentles out with the beat of it, fingers petting tender circles over and across his skin. Kuan-hung feels held in and down, but not trapped, not urged or caught, just, left to take his sweet time and set his slow pace as he laps and mouths at Fu Meng-po’s cock. It’s not a good position for him to leverage himself in, but he makes do with what he’s been given, folding his other arm up to brace over Fu Meng-po’s thighs as he closes his eyes and tries to fall forward into it. Tries to shut out everything else from his focus but the work of his jaw, the drag of his lips and tongue, the heady weight as Fu Meng-po twitches against his parted mouth, swells thick, pushes up into his face.

Fu Meng-po’s other hand finds him again, fitting itself in between his thigh and Kuan-hung’s head to cradle his cheek, and he says something that might not be something at all for how Kuan-hung can make no sense of it, the pad of his thumb brushing at the corner of his mouth where it’s stretched wide. His heart is hammering so hard against his ribs he feels like it’s about to break out; the rush of his blood is static in his ears, and he can’t breathe through any of it. Kuan-hung moans out, raw, then noses in tighter, sucking and kissing at Fu Meng-po’s shaft until the cotton is soaked sheer with spit and Fu Meng-po is so hard, so hot and heavy and huge because of it. He can feel Fu Meng-po’s thighs quaking under his arm; feel the strain in his hips as he tries to leash in the little rutting hitches that keep pushing his cock up harder and harder into Kuan-hung’s mouth, against his tongue.

It has to be the worst blowjob he’s ever given — he hasn’t even gotten Fu Meng-po’s cock out properly yet — but Fu Meng-po sounds so good, harsh ragged breath and torn-out broken sound above him, and Kuan-hung can feel his own cock leaking where it’s pinned up between his legs. His sweats are going to stain— Fu Meng-po is going to be able to see, the moment he shifts up in any way, just how much he’s liking this, only this, and that thought makes Kuan-hung shudder with another whine that cuts off short when Fu Meng-po’s fingers twist in and tug at his hair.

Kuan-hung tries to get himself up just enough that he can suck on the tip and lave at the precome beading up on the slit; that he can take in the scratch of the damp fabric on his tongue; the heaviness and heat; the taste of salt. He means to— he means to, then, next, but, Fu Meng-po makes a keening, rent-open sound, and he’s coming. His hand fists viciously in Kuan-hung’s hair, the palm of the other turning down from his cheek and reaching away, knuckles kneading up into him as he finds one of Kuan-hung’s hands in his lap to squeeze it in a sweaty, shaky grip.

It’s a shock, and it’s the hottest thing Kuan-hung has ever seen or heard or felt or anything in his life. He’s feverish with pleasure and punch-drunk on the power of it, utterly, as he swallows Fu Meng-po’s come, sucking and licking the clinging taste of it clean from the cotton. Fu Meng-po gasps wretchedly, wrecked, and Kuan-hung’s eyes snap open in a swimming daze as Fu Meng-po takes his face in both hands and tips his head back, arching him away from his softening cock.

“Shit,” Fu Meng-po breathes. Kuan-hung, stunned, can only groan out in a way he means to mean the same sentiment. Maybe it gets across; maybe it doesn’t. Kuan-hung breathes out and out and tries to take something back into his chest in the trade-off, blinking until his gaze focuses enough that he can see, through the fall of his sweat-tacky hair that Fu Meng-po is combing back from his forehead, how flushed red Fu Meng-po’s cheeks are, how blown dark his eyes.

“Shit,” Fu Meng-po repeats, louder, and Kuan-hung is struck brittle cold with the sudden thought that he just might die if he doesn’t get to come. His cock is so hard it’s aching, leaking filthy wet, sticking his briefs to his thighs, and he nearly bites through his tongue to stop the beg of a sob as Fu Meng-po grapples him under the arms and starts hauling him up.

“Hey, hey,” Fu Meng-po croons at him, hoarse, his breath slamming out of him when Kuan-hung catches himself against his chest, heavy-handed. His legs are still half strewn towards the passenger’s seat, one knee forcing itself between Fu Meng-po’s thighs to counterbalance the swagger of his weight. “Wow— look at you. Easy, take a moment. Shit.”

Kuan-hung tries to sag into his kneel, gritting his teeth around a yelp when pain lances up the inside of his thigh, bent wide, and then Fu Meng-po is taking all of his weight back in on himself again, like it’s nothing at all to bear. He lifts him; manhandles him back into the passenger’s seat with some awkward lifting and twisting, and then clumsily follows him over and through. Kuan-hung’s back has barely hit the upholstery when Fu Meng-po clips his knee on the armrest, and he jerks to attention, sobered immediately by the sharp way Fu Meng-po has to catch himself between the roof and the headrest to stop himself from slamming fully into him. There’s something about it, that— it taps into and breaks open the wellspring of whatever it is bubbling up in Kuan-hung’s chest.

He laughs, bumping his head when his body tries to throw him back into the cracking peal of it only to find nowhere to go, not between the seat and Fu Meng-po’s now unprecarious hover.

“What are you doing?” Kuan-hung manages to get out, giggly, throwing an arm over his eyes to take the edge off the glittering glass shard of sunlight glinting through the window. The skin of his forearm smudges at his eyelashes; comes away specked with tears. He’s hard, and hysterical, and a mess, and he’s going to make it worse the moment Fu Meng-po gets a hand on him, if Fu Meng-po even still wants to get a hand on him, after being treated to a show like this.

He must still want to, though, because, “Trying not to crush you,” he hears Fu Meng-po tell him. There’s a pat of his hand against Kuan-hung’s thigh, pushy, then, “Put your legs together, c’mon.”

Kuan-hung bites back at least three things he can say to that, clears his throat as the filler instead, then tucks his thighs together tightly, trying to make himself even smaller as Fu Meng-po straddles his lap, knelt up, bracketing him in by his knees. The next laugh that hiccups out wrenches partway into something too close to a sob, and he feels his chest shudder painfully around the hole it leaves there.

“What do you want?” Fu Meng-po whispers, close; there’s a hand on his neck to follow it, and Fu Meng-po strokes behind his ear, thumbs at his jaw. Kuan-hung breathes in, clenches his fist, and presses his tensed bicep down harder against his eyes.

“You?” he tries, hating it in its entirety.

“You have me.” Kuan-hung can hear his smile so well that he can see it blind. It’s picture-perfect in his head.

Kuan-hung lowers his arm from his face, slow, and warily opens his eyes. The tears he’s smeared around are clumping his eyelashes, now. He can feel the burn of more at the edges, waiting to fall. His cheeks are burning hot from the embarrassment of his own need; the hungry contortion he feels pulling at his face and the pulse of his cock where it’s trapped flush to his thigh. He needs Fu Meng-po to touch him. He needs Fu Meng-po to touch him in ways he can’t bring himself to the brink of asking for yet. “Please,” he snaps, “please, just—”

Fu Meng-po cradles his face between his hands and kisses the rest of the plead from his mouth before he can finish lowering himself to it. It’s sloppy, open-mouthed rough; Kuan-hung gasps into it, feeling the damp mess of spit and everything else on his chin smear between them as Fu Meng-po licks in past his teeth.

He whines out, like a warning, that he’s a mess— that he has to taste like— but Fu Meng-po just holds him in place, curling his tongue over Kuan-hung’s with a knowing deliberateness to it, a want that rends him breathless. Kuan-hung scrabbles, flails, finds Fu Meng-po’s broad shoulders and puts the claw of his fingers to them in a desperate hold. He has to hold on, or he’s going to fall, no matter the grip Fu Meng-po has on him.

Fu Meng-po twists his face away, breaking the kiss, then leans back. Not far— not too far, just enough that he can get their eyes to meet. “Good?” he asks. “You’re good?”

“I’m.” Kuan-hung grimaces. He’s good, he just— “I’m, I just. I need—”

“I know,” Fu Meng-po assures him. “I know.” He ducks back in, kisses the corner of Kuan-hung’s mouth; nips at it. Kuan-hung gasps, kicking out against the floor, then groans when Fu Meng-po just kisses the corner of his mouth again, the barest hint of a touch. It’s a tease, and it’s torture, and it’s not enough.

“Then touch me!” he demands in a blustering rush, an anxious impatience starting to muddy the heady thrum of his arousal. “I’m going to die.” Kuan-hung laughs around it, the ridiculousness of it, though the threat feels very real right now in his frantic mind. “Are you— trying to right a wrong? Because I made you come in your pants?”

Fu Meng-po’s surprised laugh huffs out against his cheek. He kisses over it, once, twice, again, then, “It’s returning the favour.”

Oh, god. “Don’t!” Kuan-hung wriggles between his legs, kicking out again uselessly. If Fu Meng-po makes him come in his pants as a turnabout he will never recover. He’ll have to get out of the car and walk — bowlegged — back to Kaohsiung. Maybe even block Fu Meng-po’s number. “Don’t, you keep it. I don’t want it back.”

“All right,” Fu Meng-po says, “hold on,” and then he’s fumbling between them for the buttons on his shirt, shoulders drawing up under Kuan-hung’s hands. There’s not a lot of room — there’s no room at all, really, for him to move, so Fu Meng-po stays bowed over him, pinning him between the drape of his body and the nice upholstery. Kuan-hung feels his muscles flex and jerk up into the cups of his palms as he moves; presses his lips to Fu Meng-po’s temple and mouths his whine into the sweat-stuck strands there as Fu Meng-po strips his shirt off and drops it away— somewhere, wherever, out of his sight and well past his care.

Kuan-hung paws at now-bared skin, then tangles his fingers up in the straps of Fu Meng-po’s singlet, squirming between Fu Meng-po’s knees. “I’m gonna scratch up your back,” he warns breathlessly.

“S’all right,” Fu Meng-po tells him, all melted warm and easy-like. “You can do that.”

“I’m going to anyway,” Kuan-hung tests him tartly. All well and good to have permission, but he wouldn’t— Fu Meng-po would have to do something about his hands if he didn’t want to be scratched up. It isn’t as if Kuan-hung thought to do his nails before this. This wouldn’t have been within a mile of his itinerary if he’d even thought to have one. Fu Meng-po doing something about it, though— “Oh.” He fists his hands even tighter, shivering.

Fu Meng-po turns his head, nosing their faces back together. He kisses Kuan-hung with the same infuriating interim softness; sucks lightly on his bottom lip before shifting away. His hands find Kuan-hung’s sides, fingers tracing his runged ribs through his shirt.

“Can I kiss you?” Fu Meng-po noses at him, breathes it out into his cheek.

“You’ve already kissed me.” That is definitely something they’ve done. Kuan-hung’s lips are still tingling from it, even. They might never stop.

“I mean,” Fu Meng-po starts, but then he doesn’t finish it at all; decides to show, instead. His hands drag up Kuan-hung’s chest, his fingers hook in his collar, and then he’s tugging it down and Kuan-hung bucks up at the hot slap of Fu Meng-po’s breath over his collarbone.

“Yes,” Kuan-hung rushes out, “yes, you can, you should— oh!”

Fu Meng-po sets his teeth to Kuan-hung, his tongue, and sucks. The sound Kuan-hung makes— he hears it, hears himself, and he burns with it, the frail shock and the feral hunger. It’s sweet and sloppy and filthy and stings, and then Fu Meng-po is everywhere, hands skimming his slender sides, nose pushing his shirt further down so he can get his mouth on more and more of his skin.

“Oh god,” he’s saying, “oh god,” because he can’t shut up and he wants, he wants, he wants. And Fu Meng-po is giving, is dipping his thick fingers in underneath Kuan-hung’s sweats and his briefs, is freeing his cock just enough that it can slap wetly against his belly.

Fu Meng-po takes his mouth away with a wet smack and Kuan-hung keens, tries to chase him blind, clawing at his shoulders, urging him back. Fu Meng-po’s breath shakes out of him as his stare lowers down between the jumble of them, narrowing onto his cock and Kuan-hung tries to close his already closed legs in reflex, shying. He has nothing to be shy about. Fu Meng-po would never think anything about him that would make him shy. But Kuan-hung is so hard, and so bare while barely naked, and he wants to come, and Fu Meng-po’s entirety is so heavy where it’s all bearing down on top of him.

“You’re…” Fu Meng-po stops, licks his lip, then, “No, no,” he soothes, sudden, dipping back in to push their mouths together. He parts Kuan-hung’s lips, licks back into his mouth, curls his tongue up behind his teeth. It’s slow, sweet. Torturously gentle. Kuan-hung whines, pushing at him, and Fu Meng-po takes it, unwavering. Kuan-hung’s mouth feels swollen plush; still slicked with his own spit. He must still taste like Fu Meng-po’s come.

Kuan-hung is dizzy, dizzier, when they part for breath, and then Fu Meng-po’s hand is closing down on his hip, holding him still, leaving nothing left in his head but the whir of whining static.

“You’re so wet,” Fu Meng-po breathes out, ragged, like he’s rebounding from a blow. He drags his thumb up the underside of Kuan-hung’s shaft and strokes at where his foreskin is drawn back, smearing his precome, rubbing it in. “You get so wet.”

Kuan-hung feels his mouth fall slack, but his tongue curls around nothing, just the faux-shape of a sound. “Oh,” he finally manages, and it’s all squeak-high and shamed. He’s. He’s never thought about it before. He doesn’t think anyone has ever made that comment to him before. “Is that. Do you like that?”

“Yeah.” Fu Meng-po rolls his thumb over the slit, then presses down on it and Kuan-hung’s hip in tandem. Kuan-hung hisses, animal, and bucks, throwing his head back into the writhe. He feels himself drip.

“I’m going to—” He tries to push at Fu Meng-po’s shoulders, digging the heels of his palms in, feet skidding along the floor. “Everywhere, I, if you keep going, I’ll come—” Which, he wants to do, he very much wants to do, but he doesn’t want it to be all over himself and Fu Meng-po.

“I’ll handle it,” Fu Meng-po reassures him. Kuan-hung wants to ask how — feels more than a little punch-drunk from the possibilities his mind throws itself open to — but then Fu Meng-po’s nuzzling into the crook of his throat, mouthing over the rattle-race of his pulse, and Kuan-hung turns his face into him and whimpers into his hair as he listens to snatches of Fu Meng-po fumbling around somewhere beside them. His breath is very hot, even on his scalding skin. His stubble is scratching at him, leaving blotchy friction burns that are going to cling maddeningly to the pale plains of his neck and rub even rawer against his shirt and seatbelt.

Fu Meng-po turns his face away, and Kuan-hung moans, craning after him, nose burrowing against his ear. Beneath his nails feels— grimy. He’s taken skin off Fu Meng-po’s back. He tries to find the welts with the pads of his fingertips, thrilling in a dirty, deep sort of way at the raised, hot lines as he charts them, and how Fu Meng-po’s muscles ripple beneath as he shifts and stretches.

He’s almost lost in it, the indolent, repetitive lull, but Fu Meng-po’s hand on his cock again surfaces him with a start. It feels— Kuan-hung looks down between them and groans. “You— god. You have condoms on you? In here?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, but only because Fu Meng-po stops, as if anything that is coming out of Kuan-hung’s mouth right now requires consideration now or accountability later. Kuan-hung keens miserably, trying to push up into the circle of Fu Meng-po’s fingers where they’ve paused around the tip of his dick.

“Yes?”

“I just.” Kuan-hung is an idiot. This is it. Fu Meng-po is going to take his hand back off Kuan-hung’s dick and drive him back to Kaohsiung and Kuan-hung is never going to get laid ever again. He is so dumb. “I was surprised?” he tries to justify. “I mean, I didn’t, I don’t think I’ve had them on me in— this is saying, a lot, that I didn’t want to say, actually.” Nevermind. It’s not going to matter that Fu Meng-po is going to let go of his dick, now, because Kuan-hung is going to die. He feels himself twitch in Fu Meng-po’s loose grip, and flushes cold with mortification, because of course he’s somehow still painfully hard and desperate to come.

“Okay,” Fu Meng-po says. He’s smiling, a bastard-bright smile that he presses into Kuan-hung’s mouth when he leans between them for a kiss.

“Please move,” Kuan-hung begs against his lips, “please move your hand, put it on, please, or I really will—” Fu Meng-po hushes him, regrounds his palm on Kuan-hung’s hip, then moves, rolling the condom down the rest of his shaft before he wraps his fingers around the base, squeezes down, and,

“Oh,” Kuan-hung moans, raw, trying to push up past the pin of Fu Meng-po’s hand on his hip so he can fuck into his fist. Fu Meng-po doesn’t let him move, though, keeping him down nice and stilled. “Oh! You’re big. You’re everywhere.”

“You gonna come?” Fu Meng-po asks, squeezing down on him tighter. Kuan-hung chokes on his tongue, writhing; has to close his eyes so he can’t watch anything, anymore, his chin tucked to his collarbone, as Fu Meng-po finally starts jerking him off all rough and rushed and sweat-slick grip perfect. His jaw nudges against one of the bruises Fu Meng-po’s left when he swallows, and Kuan-hung yelps, bitten-off muffled behind his teeth sinking into his smarting, swollen bottom lip.

“Close,” Kuan-hung babbles, clambering to hold onto Fu Meng-po’s back, his hair, anything and everything he can put his hands to. He can’t stay still, he has to keep— moving, touching, he feels like if he stops then the rest of this is going to stop short with him and he can’t— he can’t— “Close, close, I’m close—”

Fu Meng-po kisses the rest of it out of his mouth, sucks it right off his tongue, and Kuan-hung shakes out of the bounds of his skin and wails and finally comes so hard he whites out. He comes back to himself in parts, pulled together; to Fu Meng-po’s hand still rubbing his cock, working him through the last pulses of his orgasm; to Fu Meng-po’s mouth on his cheekbone murmuring his praises.

Kuan-hung makes a despairing sound, and Fu Meng-po turns back to him, seeks out his mouth. The kissing definitely takes the edge off the crash of his comedown. It makes him no less sticky, though.

“I’m— I’m really, gross,” Kuan-hung manages, breathless, when he can find an opening in the steady, rhythmic way Fu Meng-po has fit their lips together, is kissing him down.

“All right.” Fu Meng-po leans back a breath of an inch, then leans back in, takes another whisper of a kiss. It’s barely anything. It burns Kuan-hung up like a blaze. “All right.”

He rears back up onto his knees, and Kuan-hung’s jittery giggle as he overshoots and has to duck his head and catch himself on the dash fractures off into a grunt as the rest of him catches up to the sight. And it’s definitely a sight: Fu Meng-po, muscles straining, his legs spread out, his clothes all rumpled up and fuck-mussed. Kuan-hung can see, now, the angry red lines that he’s already felt out, where his nails have staked their claim on Fu Meng-po’s skin. Can see the bulge of his cock, too, framed obscenely by the vee of his zipper.

“What are you doing?” he croaks out, because he needs to ask, absolutely needs to work his mouth around something that’s not wrapped up in leaning over and pressing his face back into Fu Meng-po’s lap. Kuan-hung can see that Fu Meng-po’s worked back up a bit just from jerking him off; it wouldn’t take much more to get him hard again with his mouth. It’s really all too much. They’re never going to make it out of Gukeng if he lets himself have more of his way about it.

“Cleaning up,” Fu Meng-po says. He starts to turn; stops when Kuan-hung protests it in the back of his throat, borderline nonsensical, his thigh tapping out at Fu Meng-po’s knee. “I’m coming back. Don’t worry.”

“Who’s worried? You’re not even going anywhere, anyway,” Kuan-hung says, but it’s a hopeless endeavour, trying to spare the last of his face. He tosses his arm back over his eyes again, to hide himself as much as to hide Fu Meng-po from him as he listens to him open the glovebox. He’s starting to cool off, and everything is drying tacky to his skin. It’s all an uncomfortable paradigm-realignment to the reality of his and this situation. It means Fu Meng-po’s hands on him again come as an all-new shock, anticipated but unexpected, and he jars up between Fu Meng-po’s thighs.

“Easy,” Fu Meng-po coaxes, palm kneading his hip. He presses a wipe into Kuan-hung’s hand, starts lifting his shirt with the other to pat down his belly, up his chest. Kuan-hung lifts his other hand, eyes still stubbornly shut, and haphazardly manages to clean his fingers off just before he derails off-track at the swipe of wet cloth over his collarbones.

“Ah—! Did you maul me?!” Kuan-hung gasps. He flinches out, all elbows, grunting when he smacks into the side of the car. His skin feels reignited from Fu Meng-po’s touch, raw red sore.

“Might’ve.” From the casual way he says it, his conscience is clearly free of contrition. Kuan-hung opens his mouth around a complaint, a chastisement, something— he has to clamp his jaw back shut tight around the whimper it turns into when Fu Meng-po’s hand closes over his soft cock.

“Oh—”

“Got you,” Fu Meng-po gentles.

“I’m sensitive,” Kuan-hung yelps, bristling, cheeks a slapped blush-pink.

“I know.” Fu Meng-po doesn’t touch him any more than he needs to, cleaning him up and tucking him back into his briefs. “I thought you would be.” And Kuan-hung— he’s all cotton from the neck up, so, it’s not like he gets to think about that, that admittance, as Fu Meng-po’s hand slips just a little further into his sweats to dab at Kuan-hung’s inner thighs.

“Then be gentle!” Kuan-hung berates. “Gentler.” Fu Meng-po pulls his hand out, tugs Kuan-hung’s waistband back up, and, “Good boy,” Kuan-hung blurts, mouth a mile away from his better judgement.

Fu Meng-po’s recovery is practically flawless, full marks, but Kuan-hung is paying attention, so he catches him out. And, well. That sure is— something to think about. He’s definitely going to think about it. Maybe more than think about it, later.

“Here." Fu Meng-po picks the wipe out of Kuan-hung's fingers, and, empty-handed, Kuan-hung lets his palm drift down to pet over his belly, righting his crumpled shirt back into place. He shifts a bit, opens the door, and Kuan-hung makes a bereaved sound entirely by accident as Fu Meng-po starts to get out, stopping him short halfway.

"You— don't go out like that!" Kuan-hung lashes out, latching his fingers in Fu Meng-po’s belt loops. He hasn't even zipped himself up. That’s not something that needs to be broadcast to the greater gathered public. "Look at you!" he exclaims, and Fu Meng-po blinks down, does, then snorts out a laugh. "Still can't wear clothes. Do you want to be seen like this? Come here."

Fu Meng-po lets him pull up his zipper, rebutton his jeans, and even generously fields some fussing with the hem of his singlet. Kuan-hung's hands feel somewhat less flighty when he finally deems Fu Meng-po presentable enough for release.

“I’ll be back.” Fu Meng-po goes low, snatches up his shirt from the floor, and then starts shrugging his shoulders into it as he rights himself. “Just going to toss this.” He gestures, once he’s a semblance more dressed, with his half-fisted hand for emphasis. Upturning it, as if to show Kuan-hung the evidence of what his fingers are pinning down in the cup of his palm. Kuan-hung doesn’t need to see the detritus of what just happened; he’s still coming down from it first-hand.

Kuan-hung bites down on his bottom lip, committed to not laughing out his giddy glee just once, just this once, as he waves Fu Meng-po off. He is— sweaty, and probably smells, and definitely looks a fucked-out mess, and feels dreamily delirious with all of it. He just. They just. At a rest station. Kuan-hung hasn’t done anything along the lines of that since, well. It’s been a long, long while. He tends to be far more discreet, now.

Fuck. Fu Meng-po just came in his pants on Kuan-hung’s face. This is now an experience he has lived of which the words to explain it only make sense to him individually. In a sequential sentence they’re utterly incomprehensible.

He tries not to touch at his own chest, to push down on the bruises there as if the proof of the marks Fu Meng-po's teeth and tongue have left will gain further clarity by aching to a sting. He puts his hands to everything and anything else, instead. He gets his phone out of the cupholder and puts it in his pocket. He gets his rice snacks up off the floor and seats them in his lap. He picks up the water bottle, uncaps it, takes a drink, then wipes his mouth dry on the back of his wrist.

Fu Meng-po is gone for an age that likely only clocks up to a few minutes. Kuan-hung holds the water bottle out to him once he's climbed back into the driver's seat. It's only when Fu Meng-po's taking a drink, though, that he feels sufficiently brave enough to actually pipe up with anything.

"Thanks. For picking me up," he clarifies, after a beat. Though the sex was gratitude-worthy, too, he doesn’t want Fu Meng-po to misconstrue his meaning, whatever that meaning might be.

He watches Fu Meng-po’s mouth purse in thought for the beat it takes for him to recap the bottle and set it down in the cupholder. Then, with a tentative mirth, he says, “Was that my thanks, then?”

Well, so much for that meaning, then. And maybe what’s left of his dignity. Kuan-hung feels something ease up off his chest, still, though, anyway. Like a hand, almost, unclenching, leaving only the pleasant little panging pains of the marks Fu Meng-po sloppily sucked into his skin. The new lightness yanks a barking laugh out of him, too. It feels good. It feels—

"If you're that easy to thank," Kuan-hung says, "then, sure. Pass me my sunglasses?"

Fu Meng-po claps his hand down on his thigh as he laughs back, thumb teasing at the crook of his knee before he pulls away. He plucks Kuan-hung’s sunglasses off the dash, hands them over, then leans up for his own. It's not weird. Kuan-hung's not made it weird. Or, if nothing else, Fu Meng-po's not going to let it be made weird.

It's good. They're all right. It’s more of a relief than Kuan-hung expected it to be, now that he’s got it. He slips his sunglasses back on, belts up, and sags into his seat. Legs kicked out in front of him; ankles crossed; toes pointed up.

☽

Kuan-hung makes it through two songs on the radio before he drifts off mid-chorus to the third. It's a deep enough sleep to hold him under for the rest of the way: it seems like all his body wants to do for him is sleep, now he’s got company that he wants to keep.

The next time he stirs, the Jeep is parked beneath the shade of some underwood, and Fu Meng-po’s got the passenger’s side door open. The hand on his shoulder that’s shaking at him gently is half-closed over the packet of rice snacks that Kuan-hung definitely remembers he was death gripping in his lap before he fell asleep.

“How did you even get those?” he mumbles out blurrily.

“Very carefully,” Fu Meng-po confesses. “You can sleep in the room, c’mon.”

Kuan-hung scrubs at his face and fumbles at his sunglasses, cramming them back on over his eyes where they’ve been knocked off-kilter by the pillow of his head to his shoulder. They take the edge off the glare of the sun, slung lower in the sky, now, for the later afternoon hour. By the time he stumbles out, teetering sleep-drunk, Fu Meng-po has his suitcase out in hand. He swerves out of the way of Kuan-hung’s reach when Kuan-hung tries to take the handle, jabs at him with the point of his elbow to muster him away, then closes and locks up the Jeep behind him.

It’s the confirmation Kuan-hung more or less didn’t need, when they head down the driveway and bypass reception entirely, that Fu Meng-po really was already settled in here at Yuchi and took a round trip to Kaohsiung to get him. The fact that he leads them both right to the doorstep of one of the wooden bungalows and pulls out a key from in his wallet cements the fact he’s already checked in. And— well. Kuan-hung still doesn’t know what to do with that, even after— Gukeng. So he’s not doing anything with it, unless it becomes too undeniable to ignore that he’s going to have to.

He does his own inspection of the place when he gets over the doorsill on Fu Meng-po’s heels; tapers off into a circular tour that mills across the open-plan floor to the cordoned off sitting area with a tea set and water bottles lined up on its low-slung table. It looks nicer than any pictures would have made it out to be, at least. That’ll be the excuse he uses to himself as to why he never managed to get around to checking like he intended. Fu Meng-po drops Kuan-hung’s suitcase on the mattress set up closest to the wall on the step-up platform, then putters off to the bathroom to give Kuan-hung what he supposes is some privacy to round back, dump out his pockets, toss off his sunglasses, and start rifling through his things.

By the time he’s fished his cosmetics and toiletries out, Fu Meng-po is coming back out and around the corner, dabbing his already dried hands on his thighs, so Kuan-hung slips past to swap out with him, giving an errant swing of his elbow just to hear Fu Meng-po’s answering snort cut off by the swing shut of the door.

Kuan-hung takes a peek at everything while he sets his own cases out on the counter, because they’re there. He’s still not surprised that Fu Meng-po’s skincare routine still seems to be a three-step ‘if he feels like it’, even after a, well, a year and a bit, because Fu Meng-po is both blessed and a bastard. Kuan-hung practically packed a one-man beautician studio, because he’s been forsaken by God and also the weather. He pauses for a moment, eyeing himself off in the vanity mirror, before he opens one of his cases to pull his toothbrush out. He uses Fu Meng-po’s toothpaste to save his own, then gives his teeth a perfunctory brush, just to get the stale taste of— of the whole day out.

Fu Meng-po is reclining on his mattress when Kuan-hung comes out, having apparently changed out of his clothes the moment he was out of appraisal purview. It’s kind of really funny and also incredible to think about, that Fu Meng-po changed out of sight, given the blinds aren’t drawn and their bungalow is more glass than wall. So Kuan-hung laughs about it. It just feels like something he needs to do before he bursts with it.

Fu Meng-po lofts his eyebrows at him, and then points at his own bottom lip, the tip of his tongue flicking out to wet it. Kuan-hung takes the hint and mirrors it, tasting mint. Fu Meng-po just points again, his smile growing more crooked, deeply amused. Kuan-hung licks more to the left, but that’s supposedly just not good enough, either, still landing short and off.

“Can you give me proper instruction?” Kuan-hung complains, huffy, after the fourth time, he thinks, or so, of the whole back-forth. His bottom lip is starting to feel swollen; his cheeks are hot.

“Can you follow it?” Fu Meng-po laughs. It is, unmistakably, a laugh. This is all on purpose. Fu Meng-po is playing with him, a turnabout of karmic retribution. Kuan-hung almost, almost turns around on his heels and beats a retreat back to the bathroom to preen in the mirror, but that would mean not going over to the bed when Fu Meng-po beckons him with a crook of his fingers.

It takes all of a second, once he kneels down into range, for Fu Meng-po to lap at the pad of his thumb and rub it on the corner of Kuan-hung’s mouth until it comes away streaked with dried flakes of toothpaste.

“That was nowhere near where you were pointing!” Kuan-hung protests. The skin of his mouth is tingling, hotly, where Fu Meng-po’s spit has smeared it damp. He gives Fu Meng-po’s arm a shove before Fu Meng-po can retreat, then flops down on his back in revenge. He wriggles up close against Fu Meng-po’s side in stilted, short bursts, letting his elbows go well out of the bounds of him and into everywhere. His heart is quickening because he’s mildly frustrated, not because he’s flustered. This is not— some first crush, or some schoolyard boy fumbling. This is his former colleague almost a decade his senior whose cock he had in his mouth a few hours ago. Whose hand was on his cock a few hours ago. Kuan-hung is completely zen about this and all of its associates.

His phone is plugged in somewhere out of reach— or, well, it’s a reach he doesn’t want to make, so. Once he’s made his way up, Kuan-hung rests his cheek on Fu Meng-po’s shoulder instead to get his fix of mindless scrolling by proxy as Fu Meng-po thumbs through various apps. Fu Meng-po doesn’t go into anything private — Kuan-hung would avert his eyes, anyway, if he did, but he’s looking but not seeing, really, for the most part. Almost dozing, with his eyes half-open, his body warm all-over, limbs a little loose even as aimless anticipation starts building in the floor of his gut.

Sometimes Fu Meng-po angles his phone a bit his way so Kuan-hung can look at something Fu Meng-po must think he’ll like, or find interesting. He doesn’t always hit the mark, but he’s never made secret that he thinks Kuan-hung’s humour is a bit young for him, at times. It’s nice, anyway, just to be thought about. It’s nice to just— be.

It’s all a little bit like Hengdian, if he lets himself start to think about it along those lines, except Kuan-hung’s running on more than four hours of sleep at the moment; hasn’t got pounds of makeup and false hair weighing his head down like a stone. It’s a little bit like after, too, the roadshows, for the mindless monotony in a hotel room away from home. Though, those had ended up lonelier, save for when they’d had the call-in interviews, the show watchalongs. Maybe it’s more accurate to say, then, that it’s a little bit like the trip to the coast Fu Meng-po took him on. Because Kuan-hung thinks he could fall asleep again, like he did then and he’s done today, and he’ll wake up and Fu Meng-po will still be there. It’ll be like no time has passed at all, just for them.

It’s nice. He sleeps again. Or naps, at least, though the distinction feels irrelevant when all of its roads lead to a lapse in consciousness. He knows he does, anyway, or must, because that’s still all that explains how he blinks awake and the room is a little darker, the sun a little lower. He’s had his mouth open on Fu Meng-po’s shoulder. For a while, feels like. His tongue’s thick in his mouth, uncomfortable, sore where it must have rested too heavily against his teeth.

Kuan-hung makes a creaky noise of complaint, blindly reaching up to rub at the spot his mouth has left with the heel of his palm. It comes away dry, which is a small silver lining, at least. He rubs at his face with his other hand, rough.

“Hungry now?” Fu Meng-po asks, like it’s only been a minute or so, like his arm probably isn’t half numb from having Kuan-hung curled up against it. Like he hasn’t probably got some terribly embarrassing picture of Kuan-hung’s open-mouthed sleeping face newly saved and secreted away in some gallery folder on his phone.

“Ugh,” Kuan-hung says. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then swallows. “Yeah. I could eat.”

“The cafe’s still open, I think,” Fu Meng-po says, thumbing down his phone’s toolbar to better see the time. Kuan-hung makes a sound, caught in the cup of his palm over his mouth, and Fu Meng-po’s arm jostles him as it arches up with his laugh. “I’ve got leftovers, too.”

That sounds like it involves a lot less effort on his part, and Fu Meng-po’s, too, he supposes. Kuan-hung angles his face so he can slot his chin in on Fu Meng-po’s shoulder and butt his cheek up along the column of his throat. “What leftovers? How old?”

Fu Meng-po tilts his head, flattening Kuan-hung’s fluffed up hair with a rub of his cheek, purposefully casual. “Mapo doufu, from Mingtan. Bought for dinner last night.”

Kuan-hung curls his hand up around Fu Meng-po’s chest so he can rub at his own eyes again, humming to dispel the last clinging dregs of sleep. “How much is left?”

Fu Meng-po’s laugh knocks at him again. “All of it.”

“It’ll do,” says Kuan-hung, slanting back so Fu Meng-po has an opening to disentangle himself. He does, pocketing his phone in the same motion he gets up on his knees and half-turns so he can pinch Kuan-hung’s chin between his thumb and fingers.

“xiao Jiche,” he tuts, snorting when Kuan-hung crinkles his nose and makes a show of wrenching his face out of his grip. “Do you want it cold?”

“Cold’s okay.” Cold’s okay, but he also feels a need to prove Fu Meng-po wrong, now, a little. It’s transparent and the both of them do know it, but Fu Meng-po makes his awareness plain with the chase of his fingers to give Kuan-hung’s chin another tweak before he rises the rest of the way.

Kuan-hung sinks low, sprawls out, and props himself up just enough so that he better can watch Fu Meng-po make his way to the sitting room and crouch down behind the slatted wooden divider.

“When are you going to cook for me?” he thinks and asks at the same time, for the sake of efficiency.

“Depends,” Fu Meng-po calls back. Which, Kuan-hung supposes it does, sure. “How long are you sticking around?”

Huh. Fu Meng-po doesn’t say it like it’s anything dangerous at all, but Kuan-hung can’t help but feel— like he’s skirting a snare in the brush. “How long can I stick around?” he fires back, a little jittery with the actual heft of it, behind the casual veneer.

Fu Meng-po stands up, and there’s the crack of plastic as Kuan-hung watches the broken-up line of his arms open the container through the partition. “For about a week,” he replies.

Kuan-hung’s laugh scratches up his throat despite himself. “Okay,” he manages. “All right. Then when are you going to cook for me?”

“I’ve got work in Taitung,” Fu Meng-po answers, He pauses, briefly, and Kuan-hung watches his head dip as he sniffs at the container. “Heading down morning after next. Comes with a kitchen.”

“Guess I’ll just have to wait.” Kuan-hung sighs. "Hope it ends up worth it."

He doesn’t even bother not to smile up at Fu Meng-po, pleased, as he resurfaces back into the room proper, the half-opened container and a spoon in hand. Kuan-hung sits up enough to take it, both handed, when it’s offered out, before he promptly slumps back, using the slouch of his chest and the shelf of his knees as a shoddy table. Fu Meng-po settles in again at his side, close enough that they're only just not touching, but he feels warm and very much there. He picks his phone back up off the side table, then leaves Kuan-hung to it.

He’s maybe hungrier than he realised, but he’s definitely a little bit distracted in his own head, because it doesn’t seem like any time at all before he’s finished what’s in front of him. He feels like he blinks, once, twice, then Fu Meng-po is taking the container out of his hands and thumbing his bottom lip. That snaps him to some sort of attention with a start, for sure.

"Mess," he murmurs, his smile broadening so wide it makes his eyes crinkle.

"Who?" Kuan-hung mutters back, faintly rattled.

"You." Fu Meng-po leans back; his hand falls away. "Go shower."

It doesn’t quite click all the way into place in the first beat, but by the next Kuan-hung's got it, got what he means by it, and thankfully it’s before he can mouth off something that Fu Meng-po would more than happily take, with no hardship, as an indicator he should elaborate. Explicitly. To Kuan-hung’s outright death if not detriment.

“Oh,” Kuan-hung says instead, a little less stupidly than his alternatives. “Sure.” He pushes up onto his knees, and then past Fu Meng-po, who doesn't do much in the way of making room for him. He definitely doesn’t nearly trip over his own legs as he disentangles himself from the last of the bed. He absolutely walks, not runs, not strides, not anything more than a sensible moderate unhurried paces his way to the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him.

The half wall-wide glass window with a full-frontal view to the forestry outside is a bit of a confronting sight, but he gets the blind down with minimal fuss in-between getting his clothes off. The shower’s an open stall filling out the gap between the head of the granite bath and the furthermost wall, easy enough to get in and out of and easier still to figure out.

Kuan-hung has the most scalding and thorough and environmentally unconscious shower he’s had since— it has to have been a while, now, at least. He brushes his teeth again, too, to get the spice out as best he can, just in case. There’s a little bit of hot water left when he’s finished, though it’s in the sense that he hastily turns it off at the tap when it starts to run lukewarm down his back. He’s completely zen as he dries off and redresses. There’s no lump in the back of his throat that could very well be his heart that he needs to try breathing around. He’s not nervous. There’s nothing to be nervous about.

Maybe they should talk about it. It feels like they should— that it’s something to talk about. It also feels like they’ve already talked about it. That they don’t need to talk about it. Kuan-hung feels ridiculously and irredeemably childish for his being at a loss on this. It would be fine, maybe, if he was simply inexperienced instead of feeling as if his experience was devalued and discredited, but. Then again, maybe not. Always something to be said of mountains and comparing heights.

When he comes back out, he heads straight for his phone, takes it off charge, and deposits himself on Fu Meng-po’s bed while Fu Meng-po swaps out with him for the shower. It makes sense for him to go for Fu Meng-po’s bed over the other one, his one, technically, since his suitcase is still tossed out on it.

The blinds have been drawn while he was in the shower. It's closed in the room, made it private. Intimate in a way that prickles the back of his neck and kicks his breath up.

Fu Meng-po doesn’t take nearly as long as he did, but it sure does feel like he took longer by the time he comes out, still towelling off his damp hair. Kuan-hung peeks up from his screen as Fu Meng-po pads over and steps up onto the platform, casual, like he hasn't been thrumming to breaking brink with anticipation. Fu Meng-po bends over to drop his towel to the floor, then runs his hand through his hair as he straightens, fluffing it out and combing it back from his face. His hair is much longer than Kuan-hung’s at the moment, which is another check on the list of things about Fu Meng-po that Kuan-hung has decided to take umbrage with at this given point in time as monumentally unfair.

The mattress sinks in at his hips as Fu Meng-po climbs into the bed to straddle over him, bracketing him in with his knees. Kuan-hung puts his phone down, fumbling it somewhere underneath his pillow, tucked away, then folds his hands loosely across his chest. He thumbs at his nails in a way that’s definitely not nervous. Nothing to be nervous about.

“All right?” Fu Meng-po asks, quiet.

“You—” So much for willing an aura of calm into actuality. Kuan-hung exhales, aiming for exasperated and falling well short at an antsy sort of raw. “Can you just come here?” He needs— he needs, and he’s going to break if he doesn’t get.

Fu Meng-po does, with a smile and without a complaint, and Kuan-hung at least gets to enjoy that thrill for all of a second or three. Then Fu Meng-po is palming his neck, the heel of his hand kneading down on the collar of his shirt in a way that digs it into the still-tender bruises on his skin and burns him all up inside-out. By the time Fu Meng-po actually draws their mouths together and takes his bottom lip between his teeth, Kuan-hung’s toes are curling, and he’s got a wild suspicion that maybe he should have been a little more careful about what he asked for. Maybe. Only maybe.

Kuan-hung kicks his legs out wide with a flail and a gasp right into Fu Meng-po’s mouth, hooks a knee over his back, contorting himself in a way that’s hot and perfect now but he’ll be belligerent at himself about later. He fists both hands in Fu Meng-po’s shirt, nails skimming his ribs.

“Fuck.” He breathes in; out. “You’ve got even more muscles, now.” It just comes out. “Are you sure you’re real?” It’s not as if he hasn’t said that already before, or as if he hasn’t remarked on it on several occasions over the course of this trip alone, but it’s a whole different flip of perspective when Fu Meng-po is actually on top of him while he's prone as part and parcel of the observation, and so he thinks it requires reiterating.

“Bit thin again,” is Fu Meng-po’s amused counter. He thumbs at Kuan-hung’s jaw, pets his throat, traces behind the shell of his ear. “All the diving. New projects, now. Haven’t had much time for the gym.”

Kuan-hung knows all about the diving. He follows Fu Meng-po’s Instagram. He can credit the fact he didn’t chafe his dick raw over any clips while he was in China to the fact he didn’t want to scroll down and start sifting around on his VPN to get to them to begin with. Looping Action Together’s IGTV between one-handed feed updates probably wouldn’t clear any bars relating to business purposes, so. Better for him — and his dick — to not attempt the vault in the first place. He’s got a vivid imagination, anyway, so it isn’t as if he’s ever needed to see Fu Meng-po in anything practically painted on to get his gears turning. So to speak.

“Learn to take a compliment, already,” he snaps, heatless, shoving at Fu Meng-po’s chest. “You’re huge. You’re huge and— you know it. You’re actually, just, baiting me on purpose.”

“Maybe,” Fu Meng-po admits, all pleased and shameless with his opaque deception.

Kuan-hung bends his knee in a way that makes the inside of his thigh burn up with a tight ache and digs his heel into the dip of Fu Meng-po’s back, relishing the little grunt Fu Meng-po makes. “Well, stop it, it’s working.” He takes a big breath that sits off-kilter in his chest. He feels hot, all over, skin pulled too tight over his bones, packed too small for the fit of his body. It’s exhilarating, and more than a little terrifying. But not like before. Before was— this is good, now. He feels good about this, all the way through, in a way that shores him up steady and sure. In a way that he feels safe from the thought that he might be ruining something on purpose because he needs to.

“What do you want, anyway?” Kuan-hung teases. “Are you just going to annoy me? Is that what gets you off?”

Fu Meng-po noses at his cheek while he hums out a note, as if it’s a ponderance that requires serious thinking. He’s shaved in the shower, or sometime between it to now — Kuan-hung admittedly wasn’t paying it close enough attention to catch the change before he was rounded up close to it, face-to-face. Fu Meng-po wasn’t very scruffy to begin with — enough not to scratch him up too much, earlier, when Kuan-hung was mouthing at every inch of his jaw that he could put his lips to — but now there’s only a slight scrape of stubble that roughs at his skin when Fu Meng-po shapes an almost approximate kiss into it. His breath is warm and a little shaky, shallow. Affected. Kuan-hung is exerting a lot of effort into resolutely not looking down between them just to take a peek at how affected. He can pace himself. He’s in no rush to take it all in all at once. He’s already had Fu Meng-po’s cock in his mouth — sort-of — in as many hours; he’ll look at it in something more than through-clothes up-close abstract when he’s good and raring ready.

He’s really expecting Fu Meng-po to follow the annoyance branch of this conversational path down to its inevitably teasing conclusion, so he’s got a few nascent retorts on standby. They promptly dissipate into blank state nothingness, though, when Fu Meng-po says, low, to the shell of his ear, “Want to turn you over, get you up on your hands and knees and rim you until you come.” His breath gets harsh around it, thready, like Fu Meng-po’s already there in the thick of it in his head and he’s only just now saying it out loud to invite Kuan-hung along to the party. And— and.

“Fuck,” Kuan-hung chokes, “yeah, okay, that’s—” that’s the hottest thing he’s ever heard in his life down to the dated minute, said in the hottest voice he’s ever heard in his life. It’s something nobody else has ever really done for him, to him, whatever, before, either, maybe also because he’s never really figured out how to ask for it. He definitely can’t admit to any of this, though, not aloud, even if he doesn’t know why it’d be so bad, so he just unhooks his leg from Fu Meng-po’s back with a groan instead. He rolls over underneath him until he’s belly down, cheek pressed to the pillow, knees half-cocked towards his chest. There’s a tremble in his fingers that clutching down at the sheets only makes billow up the backs of his knuckles, his arms, his shoulders.

Fu Meng-po’s hands come up to rest on his hips, and he moves him, again, again, in gentle little increments until he’s bowed over in supplication to Fu Meng-po’s apparent satisfaction. He’s heavy against the arch of Kuan-hung’s back, hot and huge, pinning and perfect. He smooths a palm up the fan of his ribs, tugging the collar of Kuan-hung’s shirt down with the other to press a kiss to the knobbly chine of his spine.

“Tell me if it’s too much,” he says, soft and sweet, into the tender-alight skin there.

“It’s too much of nothing,” Kuan-hung snips, whiny, still clinging on to the misconception that he’s not now absolutely abased. He can’t pace himself at all. It was rather stupid of him to think otherwise. “Oh my god. Please hurry up already.”

Fu Meng-po does not hurry up. At least, he doesn’t go fast enough for Kuan-hung, who has now decided he absolutely wants it all at once, and he wants it several minutes ago, and that Fu Meng-po should have known this and adjusted accordingly already. Fu Meng-po doesn’t hold him down, not exactly, but he doesn’t need to — he’s so big and broad and everywhere, overwhelming, that anywhere Kuan-hung tries to move just brings him in closer and up tighter into the bent over brace of him bearing down across his back. Fu Meng-po rubs his hands up his sides, over his chest, and the brush of his fingers there strings a whimper out that seems to motivate Fu Meng-po enough to take a detour from his stated track plan of the proceedings.

Kuan-hung doesn’t get more of a warning than the damp press of Fu Meng-po’s mouth to his nape and the lap of his tongue before he’s snaking his hands underneath Kuan-hung’s arms. He cups the slight swells of his pectorals in a massaging squeeze of a grip, pinching his nipples between his rough fingers and the rucked cotton of his shirt.

Kuan-hung keens, kicks out, trying to buck up away from and burrow down into the sensation at the same time. He manages little of either, the flinch of his hips bringing his ass up against Fu Meng-po’s cock, hot between all the too many layers and so heavy and huge that Kuan-hung’s mouth runs dry with a frantic, helpless little moan.

Fu Meng-po rolls his thumbs over the peaking nubs, and Kuan-hung chokes around another clotted sound, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. “Oh god,” he gasps out, “oh.” He ruts up into the thick line of Fu Meng-po’s cock, nearly biting through his own tongue when he feels it nudge between his cheeks, parting him a bit. He’s big. He’s so big. He’s too big and Kuan-hung wants him inside so much.

“Don’t,” he stutters, as Fu Meng-po keeps single-mindedly playing with his chest, every twist and tweak sparking a frissioning heat to pool low and lower still. “Don’t, oh, please—”

Fu Meng-po slows to a stop, loosening his grip, but he doesn’t release him. He just leans back a bit, lets Kuan-hung breathe, tipping his face so he can tuck his chin over Kuan-hung’s shoulder.

“Too much,” Kuan-hung manages to concede after a few shuddery gulps of year. “Oh. Yeah. Um. That’s too much. I’m going to, if you keep…” he trails off, a little flustered. It’s not as if he’s particularly sensitive about being sensitive, but. Well. It’s a little embarrassing, maybe. In that same way all bodies are embarrassing, and sex is embarrassing, even when you’re not letting it be.

“Oh,” Fu Meng-po says. “Huh.” He shifts a bit against his back, tilting his face towards his ear. Then, “Have you come just from your chest before?”

Kuan-hung groans, because he can’t just— ask that. He can’t. Does Fu Meng-po want him to die? Is he killing him? “Yes,” he admits with a hiss, ripped out of him. “Yeah.” Sort of. Really— it’s a close enough thing to be a yes, and it makes him feel nauseous, upended, to say it.

Fu Meng-po makes a considering sound, then his hands drift down from Kuan-hung’s chest, dipping low over his belly. They stop where the hem of his shirt has started to ride up to his waist, and Kuan-hung has a— he has a moment where he jerks in on himself, trembling. He’s not afraid, when Fu Meng-po tugs up his shirt and pulls it off over his head, but he does ease, breathing out a faint sight of relief, when Fu Meng-po’s hands don’t start back up to his chest to rechart now bared skin.

“I could make you come again like that after I’ve eaten you out,” Fu Meng-po observes against his throat, thumbs teasing at Kuan-hung’s waistband. “You know. If you want.”

Kuan-hung shudders, squeezing his eyes shut. He bunches his shoulders, trying to cringe into himself even as he rocks back firmly against Fu Meng-po’s cock. The whole motion just nudges Fu Meng-po’s chin up with a scrape of his teeth that he then licks over while Kuan-hung whimpers plaintively and cranes into it.

“Aren’t you getting a bit ahead?” Not that Kuan-hung minds it, but he needs— he needs to take the edge off of all of it, or he’s going to end up coming before Fu Meng-po even gets his mouth on him. And that would be— hot. That would be incredibly hot, but also horrifically humiliating, and potentially unsurvivable. So he’d like to avoid it, if at all possible. “Are you actually planning to come at all?”

“That’s up to you,” Fu Meng-po murmurs breezily as he lifts himself up on his knees and pulls Kuan-hung’s sweats down over his hips and the curve of his ass, slow.

“Oh.” Kuan-hung fists at the sheets harder, clenches his jaw so he doesn’t bite down on the pillow to gag himself, and tries to steady himself through the spin of his head.

“You like that?” Fu Meng-po asks. He sounds very much like he already knows the answer.

“Yeah,” Kuan-hung tells him anyway. “Yeah, yes.” He thinks of how Fu Meng-po’s hands stalled on him back in the Jeep at Good boy, and adds in, “You knew I would.”

“Good guess,” Fu Meng-po dismisses, humble. One of his broad hands fetters Kuan-hung by the sharp jut of his hip, then he’s kneeling back and he’s got his mouth right on the dip of his lower back. Kuan-hung is so held immobile by that one point of sudden contact that he can’t do anything but moan and strain against it, caged, as Fu Meng-po sucks a sloppy, stinging bruise right over the crest of his tailbone.

“Oh, god,” Kuan-hung pants out, still praying and cursing in neck-and-neck measures to either an indifferent or indulgent higher power, he hasn’t yet settled on which. Then, “You had better,” he threatens, toothless. Fu Meng-po just chuckles, unconcerned, dragging his mouth a fraction of barely anything lower to press a soft kiss to the soft skin there.

“How do you want it?” He pushes through, gets it all out there. “My mouth again? I’ll do it better this time.”

“It was good the first time,” Fu Meng-po says, “you were good,” and, oh. “Let’s deal with you, first.” He presses another kiss another stutter of an inch lower. Kuan-hung’s throat burns with the sharp breath he sucks down.

“Oh, please,” he begs, and that’s a whole new dam to break that he’s only now tripped over because the water’s flooding out at ankle-height. He’s been begging before now but not like this. This is begging that opens him up with it and lays him out on display for perusal, for persecution. “Please, please— fuck.” He swallows. “I could ride you? I could ride you.” He would like that. He would like just about anything, right now, he thinks. Could take just about that much, too.

Fu Meng-po’s breath stutters out, a hot lash against Kuan-hung’s damp skin. “You look,” he starts. Stops. Takes another breath that slams all the breath out of Kuan-hung in turn. “You’ll be tight,” Fu Meng-po finishes, low.

Kuan-hung bucks against the damning pin of his hand with a wheeze. “I’m— yeah, tight,” he rasps, raw. Wrecked, a little bit impossibly more, by hearing that out of Fu Meng-po’s mouth with the kind of confidence Kuan-hung has wanted to hand over to him since shortly after they first met. The confidence he hasn’t gotten around to giving up, yet, and didn’t think he would for a while longer even after this— this rapid reorient of their relationship as of a few hours ago.

Fu Meng-po’s got an idea of him that speaks close to the grain in ways that are humiliating and horrifying and right. “Yeah,” Kuan-hung goes again, “I’m always— and you’re so big.” He wishes he would shut up; he wants to get this out like it’s something physical thorning in through his skin. “Oh, fuck, I want— please tell me, you brought more than just—”

Fu Meng-po’s chin traces down the dip of his back as he tips his head up, the pad of his thumb kneading at Kuan-hung’s hipbone. “Hey,” he gentles. The sound is soft, slow; soothing, like his other hand when he draws it up between them to rub along Kuan-hung’s flank. “Shh, c’mon. Slow down. Take a moment.”

Kuan-hung chuffs a clipped laugh as he turns his face into his arm, pressing his forehead into the hinge of his elbow. The blindfold of his bicep against his eyes makes him feel a bit more substantial where he's otherwise suspended weightless between Fu Meng-po's hands.

Slow down; take a moment. What an absolutely hysterical joke of a thing to say to him. Fu Meng-po should add comedian to his ever-expanding list of talents and proficiencies if he hasn't already.

He takes a breath and takes his time. The seconds flatten back out; the minutes refix together. He doesn't feel any— calmer, for all it's calming to just be. To expand and contract between the coiled urgency that has whittled him fine and the roam of Fu Meng-po's hand along his side. But he listens to their breaths in off-beat tandem while he relaxes into the feeling of the warmth washing down his thighs and the weight of his head where he's set it down on his arm, and he feels less and less like he's about to break out of the boundaries of his own body at any premature moment.

Kuan-hung lifts his head, turns it back over, cheek scraping over the sheet as he strains to see Fu Meng-po over his shoulder. He tilts his hip up against the hold of his hand, making an impatient sound when Fu Meng-po presses him back down, in place.

"I've got it," Fu Meng-po says. Kuan-hung can only see a third of his smile but he can hear the rest of it in his voice, pleased and promiseful. "I've got you."

Kuan-hung kicks back at him, spurring, and lets his head drop back to the bed with an unwound groan when Fu Meng-po bows low again, slips out from underneath his line of sight. His chuckle is pressed into Kuan-hung's hip, fed between the fan of his thumb and forefinger. He kisses at the jut of bone; tongues at it wetly when Kuan-hung hitches up with a hiccuped gasp. The hand idling against the flare of his ribcage starts to trail down his side, stroking the plains of bared skin until it brushes up against the bunched waist of his part-shucked sweats and briefs, pooled mid-thigh.

“Open your legs wider for me.”

He does, all unsteady wobble and watery legs. The approving sound Fu Meng-po doesn’t seem to realise he’s made makes the burn skinning his knees worthwhile.

“There.” A breath. “Now bring your hands down here,” Fu Meng-po’s voice lilts, just for a fraying beat, as if he’s going to illustrate here with something more tangibly substantial, but the touch Kuan-hung ends up bracing for doesn’t come. “Hold yourself open for me.”

Kuan-hung bites down on his bottom lip, but it fails to stop his whimper from slipping out and on through. He does that, too, slow, shaking; makes an aborted reach between the wide spread of his thighs before he changes his mind, changes course, pulls back to readjust so his hands are skimming down his sides instead. He tries not to burn up into ash with shame or sob out when he finally, finally, finally— he digs his fingers in until they dimple his skin, and he feels his hole twitch as his cock drips wet onto the sheets.

Fu Meng-po kneels back, shifts lower, down and down and down farther still, until Kuan-hung can only perceive and place him by touch and sound, blurs of colour and movement in his periphery when he cranes and contorts his neck, folding his shoulders in against the slip of his frame. It’s all so muddled loud: the crackle of the sheets; the creak of the platform beneath the mattress; the rattling heave of his own breath. A storm that sweeps through his head and washes every thought out in the downpour until he’s clean, refined into narrow, pure spun glass sense. Fu Meng-po’s hands slide up the backs of his legs to grip him, thumbs curling into his thighs underneath the curve of his ass. Kuan-hung feels the sound that falls flat out of his mouth snap down the middle; hears it only after, delayed, underwater.

Fu Meng-po says something, but the words are somewhere too far away, leaving only the gentling cadence muted under the burbling brook of his own blood rushing in his ears. Kuan-hung moans again, voice pitching up vice-tight. His hands start to slip as he shakes apart, and he refastens his grip roughly, digging in, the strain plucking burn-hot down the two-stone bow arch of his spine.

It’s an effort that is nearly all but entirely wasted when Fu Meng-po presses a kiss to where the fold of his palm meets the furl of his fingers, tender, obscene. His lips trace each of his fingers; he mouths damply over every knuckle, and it’s so, so slow. Slow and still not nearly enough to make up a forewarning for when Fu Meng-po moves and then the rest of everything else moves with him; when he breathes out there against his hole and follows it with his tongue, teasing at the rim.

Kuan-hung almost jackknifes up and off the bed, a garbled, choking noise half snared in the back of his mouth. He gets as far as an abortive jerk of his hips before he meets the tether of Fu Meng-po's hands, curled around his thighs so snugly they almost wrap the whole way around, or feel like they do, at least, and that's— that's not something he can hold onto in his head. Fu Meng-po tugs him back into the space he never quite left and pins him in place, spread wide and held down for him.

It's slick, and wet, and unrelenting, and it splinters between sound and sensation, discordant and sequential. Kuan-hung tries to nose under the sheets, tries to cringe and cower in hiding from it, cheeks scalding shame-hot. He can't get his bearings. He can't reach. He can't do anything but sink back into Fu Meng-po's face between his legs and claw down on his handholds holding him open until his nails bite in through skin. Just has to sob silent and slack-mouthed against the sheets and take it as Fu Meng-po licks at him again, then again, then again, clenching around nothing, yet, at all when he presses the broad flat of his tongue over him.

It is— he feels so open and so full just from what the probing pressure of Fu Meng-po’s tongue stroking over his hole is promising, and it’s making him too hot and too wound up knotted taut, his stomach flipping over itself and his throat lacing up. His eyes hurt; his face is wet. He’s a mess, he knows it, and that’s the worst part of it, that he has to be aware of Fu Meng-po’s ruining of him at his apparent idle leisure. How he’s leaving him bereft of everything but just enough sense to grasp how mortifyingly needy he is, debased desperate. His fingers slip against his skin, smearing sweat, and he whimpers, pleading and apologetic, when Fu Meng-po tips his head back and pulls away.

“Hey,” he murmurs. He sounds hoarse himself, hungry, barely held in his own check. It makes Kuan-hung feel so helpless and so powerful, in turns of dizzying and dangerous. “Just let go if it’s too much.”

It’s too much, so he does, dropping his arms to the bed with a grunt. He feels a static numbness bloom behind his knuckles that vines up the backs of his arms, a shock of an almost-cold to the blaze burn inferno of his skin.

“That’s it,” Fu Meng-po praises, all crushed velvet and deep rumble and actual audio porn, and Kuan-hung sucks in a sharp breath that lances like ice through his lungs, then spits out an incoherent curse. It’s unfair, it’s unfair that Fu Meng-po looks like that and sounds like that and if he was a decent man he’d give some of his everything back up to the rest of them.

“Please,” is what Kuan-hung chokes out on his next attempt to wrap his head and his tongue around the fine art of using his words. Fu Meng-po hums as he presses a kiss against the curve of his ass, just above the knead of his thumb. He chases it with a nip of his teeth, breath gusting out in a satisfied huff when Kuan-hung writhes, fucking his hips down into nothing, held up and held fast by Fu Meng-po’s hands.

“Good,” he murmurs. He flexes his hands on Kuan-hung’s thighs, adjusts his grip, and then he’s got his thumbs dragging up between his cheeks, spreading him back out again. “You’re doing well. Being so good.”

“Oh—” Kuan-hung snarls, face scrunching up in— in not pain, not pain, but he’s aching without hurting, all burled up in on himself, mouth dry and temples throbbing. Fu Meng-po's mouth traces up the inner back of his thigh, then he sets his teeth in, hard enough to throb when he bites down and sucks a bruise right over the skin, then another, until he's trailed a strip of marks that has Kuan-hung's nerves singing a stinging symphony.

“Ah, ah, please," he whimpers, "don’t tease, don’t make me—” He doesn’t know what comes next, what’s supposed to or what even should, head scattering between beg and come.

Fu Meng-po doesn’t make him beg, at least, which is nice, maybe, save for how he goes about it in the worst bastard way. He laps at his rim without warning, fingers tracing his thighs. He’s almost, he thinks he’s almost— but he can’t get himself over that edge, just feels his arousal building and building up from somewhere bottomless, never breaking the surface. Kuan-hung whines pitifully, strung out and up, toes curling around air, hands twitching down somewhere at his sides. Once, again, ceaseless, fever-pitched, and then Fu Meng-po’s finally sliding a hand between his legs, palm cupping his balls, rough fingers scraping up the underside of his shaft. He pins Kuan-hung’s cock to his belly, and Kuan-hung strangles himself on his own sob as he comes, spilling messily up his chest and onto the bed and all over Fu Meng-po’s hand.

Fu Meng-po lifts his head and says something that lilts all soft and sweet and fond but doesn’t stick in Kuan-hung’s head, and it just keeps going on and on and on, Fu Meng-po’s hand rubbing his cock gently, working him through the waves until it ebbs and flows away. He’s left drained, stripped down and used up and relieved of some too-heavy weight he didn’t even know he was holding in the first place until he dropped it here at Fu Meng-po’s inclination.

Fu Meng-po kneels back up and bears back down over him, and Kuan-hung feels his arm winding in underneath to brace over his chest, palm smoothing up to curve against his shoulder. There’s something about that, of all of it, after everything, that just— lets him let himself go. Catch and releases that last secret shadow of an inch. Kuan-hung’s legs tremble out from beneath him, knees slipping along the sheets, and then Fu Meng-po is helping him kick the rest of the way out of his clothes, rolling him over, gathering him up against his chest.

The still clothed bulge of Fu Meng-po’s cock nudges up the crease of his ass when Fu Meng-po pulls him closer, blunt and thick and burning hot, but he does nothing more than slot their hips together, the bar of his arm across Kuan-hung’s chest bracing him steady. Kuan-hung can feel how rigid Fu Meng-po is along the line of his back, the way his hips keep trying to hitch up for friction, to push into tight heat. Fu Meng-po’s heartbeat thuds through his back, and his hands pet at his belly, his chest, his hip, dabbing at the come still streaking his skin with a handful of the sheet. He’s doing anything but rushing him, but that just makes Kuan-hung feel all the more rushed, all the more aware and narrow-knifed down to how Fu Meng-po’s still clothed. To how the cotton of his shirt and sweats are sticking tacky to Kuan-hung’s sweat-damp skin, how Fu Meng-po’s still hard, how he’s still waiting.

“Oh,” Kuan-hung croaks, after he’s collected enough of himself back in together beneath his skin, shaping him into something more resembling coherently human. “Fuck. Huh.” His voice cracks around it, and he swallows to wet his mouth and ease his throat.

Fu Meng-po presses a kiss behind his ear, cheek scuffing at his hair. “That good?”

“Oh yeah.” Kuan-hung gets one of his hands up and flops it over Fu Meng-po’s where it’s dipped from his shoulder to fold loosely over his pectoral. “Guess I can fly back now I’ve come like that.”

The breathy gust of Fu Meng-po’s laugh against the shell of his ear tickles, and Kuan-hung squirms with a grumble, nose scrunching. “Glad to be of service,” he says.

“Five stars,” Kuan-hung chimes, mock-recitative, “would come again.” He still feels a bit spread thin, raw-nerved, his breath sifting heavy in his chest. Like he’s taking in more cloud than air. But excitement is edging at his fringes, eagerness picking at his hems. Kuan-hung flails a hand back and smacks blindly at Fu Meng-po, catching his flank. “Your turn?”

“Here,” Fu Meng-po directs, but then he just palms down Kuan-hung’s side before Kuan-hung asks what and where, sliding his arm behind his knees and folding them up towards his chest. Kuan-hung breathes out in a rush, then laughs, stunned dizzy and burning a bit warm. It’s hot, how Fu Meng-po just moves him around like he’s nothing, but he’s still too early into his rebound from his last orgasm for it to do much for him yet. It’s going to do a lot for him, though, later, he’s very, very sure.

“Here?” Kuan-hung repeats, drawling it out in a playful little prod. He wiggles his toes and Fu Meng-po pivots his wrist to scratch at his calf, mussing the downy hairs. Kuan-hung kicks out against the bar of his arm again limply and finds no new give in it, but then, he didn’t really expect to, anyway. He certainly didn’t want to, especially.

“Perfect,” Fu Meng-po teases him back, “good job,” and it is absolutely not Kuan-hung’s fault that those words said in that configuration with that voice pressed that close to his ear derail him from getting another swipe in.

So he doesn’t reply, instead, short of a little scratch of sound, a shadow of a whine, as he feels Fu Meng-po’s other hand slide down, down, until it has sunk in between their bodies, a stopgap separating their hips. The backs of his knuckles keep nudging at him, sliding against him, drags of pressure and pangs of heat as Fu Meng-po paws at his sweats, his briefs, easing everything down just as far enough as it all apparently needs to go. Kuan-hung feels his grip shift again in the way the tension runs up his arm as Fu Meng-po fists his cock, then the blunt prod of the head as it starts to push in between his legs.

“Oh,” Kuan-hung heaves out. He freezes up. “Wait, wait, I’m, I’m not—” and, and, look. He doesn’t even know why he says it, why it’s the first thing he whiplash bails into as he coils all up and starts fraying in cottony white-out panic. It makes no sense. Fu Meng-po’s not going to hurt him, isn’t going to fuck into him before he’s actually stretched open wet and ready and sure for it, he doesn’t think that. Why would he think that? But the first scrambled instinct that jars into him apparently has enough resemblance through the face-blind to fear, so he latches on firm to scared, then feels awful in the comedown for it. Rattled stupid; worse, when Fu Meng-po just pets his knee, his thigh, anywhere his hand can reach, stilling the slide of his cock and the slot of his hips. Shushes him as he kisses at his hair, in no apparent hurt or hurry.

“Just your thighs.” He rolls his hips gently, lets Kuan-hung feel, slow, how it rocks him against his ass, how it fucks his cock between the plush press of his legs, snubs his tip up behind his balls. “Like that. That’s all. All right?”

“Yeah— yeah.” Kuan-hung nods with it, chest unlatching. He lets his eyes fall shut, tonguing at the sore, hot swell of his bottom lip. Fu Meng-po eases his legs down, soothing the arch of Kuan-hung’s spine to sink him, slack, onto the breach of his cock as he feeds it into the tight tuck of his thighs. It feels— it feels— filling, full, all pent up around empty nothing and eventual promise.

He doesn’t trust his voice with what he says next, to be petulant and not stinging, but, “You promised,” Kuan-hung protests. It sounds all right, once it’s out. Not too sharp, doesn’t cut open his mouth.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, though, anyway, with Fu Meng-po, because he seems to take it as well as everything else as it’s meant even if Kuan-hung can’t manage to get it to him the right way. “I did,” Fu Meng-po agrees. Kuan-hung feels his other hand scuff up his hip, wind back between his rucked up knees to palm flat against his navel. His thumb traces the divot of his bellybutton as he shifts his hips, slight, with a shallow thrust. “I will,” he adds.

“When?” It’s punched out of him in a slam of a breath, all high and winched tight, when Fu Meng-po thrusts harder between his thighs, the drag of his cock rough, just dry enough to make the tender skin feel— feel hot, like he’s been pinched.

Fu Meng-po nuzzles down into the crook of his shoulder. He mouths at the join of his neck; scrapes his cheek against his throat. His laugh is really soft, damp, a little sweet. Muffled, somehow, despite being the closest thing to Kuan-hung next to the press of them together, the sound folding into his skin, threading into his trembling pulse. Kuan-hung feels his own cock twitch against his thigh; he shudders, squirms.

“Let me take my time with you,” Fu Meng-po says. It’s a little chastising, beneath the thick way his voice is tangling around itself. His smile is crooked, pleased. Kuan-hung feels his lips curl back to an almost-bare of his teeth as he starts to trail kisses after his words, delayed.

“How— how much time are you thinking of taking?” Fu Meng-po can take all the time there is in the world, but he needs to hurry up as well. Kuan-hung kneads at the sheets and the pillow and the air in reach blindly, writhing against Fu Meng-po’s grip as he ruts between his legs sharply, swift, smarting like a smack, a punishment without the deterrent. “Oh!”

“There’s no rush.” Fu Meng-po’s chuckle is all huffed, hitching breath. He strokes low on Kuan-hung’s belly, as if it’s for amends, in advance, for the bruising slam of his hips that he follows it up with. Kuan-hung groans, biting at his mouth weakly as he kicks his legs, crossing his ankles over. He tries to squeeze down more on Fu Meng-po’s cock as it works between his clamped thighs, tries to make the sleeve-vice tighter, the slide better. It’s starting to get slippery, now, all slick wet with sweat and precome.

He feels filthy again, again, like he’s never going to quite manage to be cleaned up, not after this, not from what Fu Meng-po’s done to him; is doing to him; will do to him soon enough.

“There’s every, every rush,” Kuan-hung pushes, hoarse. He’s getting hard. He’s getting hard, and he feels cold-hot whiplashed all over, caressed by a breeze and set aflare. Fu Meng-po’s just holding him in place and fucking between his legs and he’s so easy for it, feeling good and used and wanted, enough. It’s too much. It’s been seen without so much as being looked at, just known. It’s indescribable. There’s no way to hide from it.

“Hm,” he replies, noncommittal, breath jagging where it roughs over Kuan-hung’s throat. He teases at the tendon with his teeth, then licks over the reddening mar.

“It’s my holiday,” Kuan-hung complains— begs, really, for all practicalities it’s begging, his voice a sob-wet whine. “My kidnapping, whatever we’re calling it— oh, oh—” Fu Meng-po’s hips flex as he kicks down against the bed, bracing himself sloppily along the mattress, gathering Kuan-hung just that much closer, flush to his chest. He pins him down tighter on his cock as he hilts it, and there’s so much— or just not enough of Kuan-hung, or both, that Fu Meng-po’s cock spills over his thighs, out, past and through.

“Needy thing,” Fu Meng-po grates out. His breath is shallowing, running ragged. Kuan-hung feels how his jaw works around his swallow before he tips his face back the inch its left to nip at Kuan-hung’s neck, growling. “Is that all you want? To be filled up and fucked?”

And he’s— it’s funny, it will be funny to him, later, if and when he thinks back on it, but he’s not expecting it. He’s not expecting this, this break, almost, the one that he’s actually courted, tempted, provoked. Or— he wanted it, but he didn’t know it was going to be this, that— Kuan-hung rips one of his hands up to clamp down on his mouth, gagging his moan as Fu Meng-po thrusts against him, the shove of his cock blunt-brutal and breaching.

Distantly, he realises his eyes have slammed shut, but more distantly he can feel, muddied and muted underneath the slap of Fu Meng-po’s hips against him, the slippery slick-wet slide of his cock. Fu Meng-po’s hand grazes up his belly, his sternum, and then his fingers are wrapping around Kuan-hung’s wrist so he can wrench his hand back away from his mouth and pin it to the bed. He tightens his hold beneath Kuan-hung’s knees, rears up, getting his weight hefted in a way that cages Kuan-hung to the bed harder, a way that holds him too fast. He can’t fight his other arm up, can’t catch the sounds spilling out of his mouth as Fu Meng-po bears down rough on him, thighfucks him harder.

“Let me hear you,” Fu Meng-po grits out, as if there’s still a choice or a chance that he could not, that Kuan-hung might stop, “let me— open your eyes, let me see you.”

Kuan-hung does, obedient, and it’s all hazy, fogged-up stricken and unravelling. He turns his head, mouth slack around a sob that’s scalding his thighs and snatched up in the back of his throat, silenced. Fu Meng-po, the outline of him, the imprint, the presence, he is— flushed and sweaty and edging around animal, eyes blown black with arousal. His cock is pulsing thick where it’s sheathing between Kuan-hung’s legs, leakily messily, close. Still, there is— there is something wholly gentle about him as he hisses out, choked, “Look down, look at yourself.”

Kuan-hung’s head sags forward, chin tucking to his chest. He feels his moan scratch around his mouth, but all that gets out past his teeth is a gasp. It’s— looking is. Feeling, feeling narrows him down, but seeing flays him even thinner, to razorwire, gets him a glint off snapping entirely. He can see his cock, swollen dark, snubbed up into the crease of his hip; he can see Fu Meng-po’s, too, the flared head slipping out from between the press of his legs when Fu Meng-po sinks deep, dripping from the slit to smear Kuan-hung’s skin slick, the pearling white painting a pretty picture that’s all gut-knotting obscene.

“So small,” Fu Meng-po rumbles, awed. His hips stutter; Kuan-hung feels it in the glide between his legs, sees it in the jab of Fu Meng-po’s tip as it rubs up into him, angled. “So tight on my tongue, even after you’d come.”

Kuan-hung bucks in his grip, wild, writhing all over, and finds Fu Meng-po’s hand on his wrist gives at the resistance, letting him slide free. He doesn’t get far, his own hand falling back to the sheets, fingers folding around nothing in search of purchase.

“Thought you would be.” Fu Meng-po stutters when he pants out, like he’s been slapped. Kuan-hung watches through the tear-blur of his eyes and the fan of his eyelashes as the hand that released his wrist crawls down between his legs to wrap around his cock. The circle of Fu Meng-po’s fingers is painful. Perfect. “Thinking about you now,” Fu Meng-po grunts it in against his ear. Keeps going, and going, like he won’t stop as much as he can’t. “How tight you’ll be on my fingers when I open you up— how you’ll look on my cock, your face, when you’re filled—”

“Please—” Kuan-hung doesn’t even sound like, like anything, just an echo of a cry of a former once was, too full up to be anything but emptied out, “please, please— oh—!”

“Come.” Fu Meng-po grinds up, buries in, holding him down tight. “Come, I’ve got you—” He jerks him, swipes the pad of his thumb over his slit, and Kuan-hung comes with a wail he feels his jaw creak wide around but doesn’t get to hear, all the sound swallowed out of the room and slammed free of his head. Fu Meng-po curls in tight, bows his forehead to Kuan-hung’s neck, and it’s only after several shaky seconds, when sound and sensation starts to trickle back in to reintegrate with his surrounds, that Kuan-hung even realises that Fu Meng-po has come, too. He’s spilled between his thighs and over onto the mattress, his hips still twitching in little half-circle thrusts as he comes down and cools off, softening cock still nestled within the plush press of Kuan-hung’s messy fucked red thighs.

Fu Meng-po takes a gasping breath against his shoulder, then another. Winded, ragged, like he’s been kick-struck stunned. Then he’s unfurling, stiff, gradual, releasing Kuan-hung’s legs and his cock to slump over onto his back. Kuan-hung feels like how he thinks an overplucked harp might feel if it could feel as he tumbles out limply, grimacing. Everywhere on and at and around him is wet or drying stuck. He feels amazing. But he also feels disgusting, and the latter is cutting a bit too deeply into the former for him to let it keep standing.

“Shit.” Fu Meng-po breathes out. Kuan-hung can hear him rummaging and rustling around behind him, staggered, the mattress sagging out from underneath his side. He musters up the dregs of absolutely nothing he has left to give and hauls himself over onto his other side, groaning, just to catch the end eyeful of Fu Meng-po shucking his sweats and briefs. Kuan-hung’s not particularly subtle about his staring, either, as Fu Meng-po fumbles for the collar of his shirt to tug it off over his head. There is a lot to look at. If he wasn’t supposed to look at it then it wouldn’t be all out on show for him to see, now, would it?

Kuan-hung tries to stretch his legs out, which is a mistake for both the retaliatory cramp that bites down into the meat of his thigh and how the motion makes a cooling puddle of sheet slop over his skin.

“Oh,” he whines, reedy, face collapsing in on itself like crumpled paper. “I’m sticky. I’m sticking. Fu Meng-po, don’t fall asleep. Get up. Help.”

Fu Meng-po shakes his head, the slight sway of it disbelieving, then throws his arm over his eyes. It does nothing to conceal the smiling, self-satisfied way his mouth curls up. “I’m out,” he declares. “Decommissioning myself. Too old for service. You’re on your own Maomao-xiong.”

Oh, no. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t? He might, actually. “No!” Kuan-hung yelps, trying to bat at Fu Meng-po’s elbow with as little disruption to his— entire mess, situation, as possible. "Gege. Da shuai ge. Paul!"

He could maybe manage to get up and escape from his predicament, but it is a matter of principle that he doesn't. Fu Meng-po needs to take responsibility. It wouldn't do well to encourage him to develop bad habits.

"I'm broken," Kuan-hung presses. "You broke me. You have to help me." Fu Meng-po remains coldly indifferent to his terrible plight. Kuan-hung goes to put his shoulder into smacking at him again, but overextends; the sheet squelches under his hip.

Oh. “Oh.” Oh god. “Oh god.” He’s never having sex again. “I’m never having sex again.”

Fu Meng-po’s body shakes with his leashed laughter, livening in contrast to the way his own has frozen prone, mortified. He tilts the visor of his arm up from his face to look at him.

“Come here,” he mutters, all warm, reaching over with his other hand to get a passably good grip around Kuan-hung’s bicep. Fu Meng-po gives him a tug, hefting his weight to upturn into his chest, and Kuan-hung comes free of the bedding with some utterly unutterably unpleasant peeling sounds that will possibly haunt him, later, when he’s reconciled and compartmentalised the trauma of being covered in rapidly cooling come. Porn really failed him on this one.

“Oh, shit,” Fu Meng-po blurts out, “you are in a bad way, aren’t you?” Then he does laugh, cringing back to dodge the arc of Kuan-hung’s knee.

“And whose fault is that? Huh?” Kuan-hung mopes.

Fu Meng-po’s smile softens, losing its teeth, as though he’s actually contrite. He rolls Kuan-hung closer to him, knee danger apparently be damned, and pulls his shirt down from where he’d shoved it behind his head, between the wall and his pillow. He wraps his hand in through the sleeve before he starts to dab it tenderly over Kuan-hung’s belly. Kuan-hung huffs, and might, maybe, nuzzle into Fu Meng-po’s chest with a pout. Fu Meng-po’s skin is warm and clammy, and Kuan-hung can feel the hairs on his chest scratching lightly at his cheek whenever he breathes or strokes out with his hand.

“It was a group effort,” Fu Meng-po replies. His hand dips lower, brushing over Kuan-hung’s cock. He makes a crooning sound in answer to Kuan-hung’s discomforted grumble. “Look at you. You’re going to need the shower again.”

“There’s no hot water,” Kuan-hung grumps, churlish. They should have perhaps better orchestrated this entire set-up to cut down on their shower time.

He feels the purr of Fu Meng-po’s chuckle through his chest. “And whose fault is that?”

“Group effort,” Kuan-hung quips back, “and you were in there last, so. There.”

“Fair,” Fu Meng-po concedes, breezy and amused. Which, in effect, is winning, because it denies Kuan-hung the opportunity to have a very stylish last word. But he’ll let it slide, just this once. He has to let Fu Meng-po win sometimes.

Fu Meng-po finishes wiping him over wherever he can reach, tosses his sullied shirt off behind him to somewhere on the platform, then stretches back out flat with a sprawling yawn that butts his chest up against Kuan-hung’s jaw. His free arm goes back over his eyes; the other shifts around where it’s slung behind Kuan-hung so he can palm high at his arm, fingers petting idly at the bony ridge where his clavicle juts out like a shelf to the cliff of his shoulder’s slope.

“Can’t stay here,” Fu Meng-po tells him, voice all low and heavy. “Ten minutes, then up. I’ll change out the sheets.”

Kuan-hung snorts against his chest; it whistles, nasally, and Fu Meng-po squirms with a chuckle. His eyes feel heavier almost out of spite, exhaustion setting in faster to be contrary. Fu Meng-po sighs out, then clears his throat. His fingers keep stroking at Kuan-hung’s shoulder, his collarbone, up to the hinge of his neck. Which isn’t that strange, really: Fu Meng-po is a fiddler. He fiddles. They both are, and both do. They fiddled all the time during filming; with set pieces, with props, with their phones, with their own and even one another’s costumes. Everyone usually pings Kuan-hung as the one that will tweak things and put them between his teeth, and rightly. It’s probably because he’s just kinesis manifest with a body tacked on in afterthought and a matching smile full of mischief. Fu Meng-po’s the dark horse that catches others out, Kuan-hung included. He settles still, and he’s got strong features, so it all makes him look serious. He’s older and distinguished with experience.

Kuan-hung gets his elbow beneath him; rears up, wobbly, off Fu Meng-po’s chest. He peers down at him and watches his face as he draws his arm back from over his eyes so he can look at Kuan-hung, too, out from underneath the shade of it.

He’s not sure where his line of thought is leading him, he just— he thinks he knows that he doesn’t want to think it, right now. At the moment, maybe. More or less. So he shuffles forward a little instead, cocking his head, and adjusts his weight so he can jab a slim finger against Fu Meng-po’s pectoral without losing his balance.

“Shower with me.” He definitely states it with all the authority of at least a demand-adjacent, but his voice cracks down the middle of it like it’s a request. It can hardly be called his fault that he’s still weak-throated, given that he’s only just left the right side of screamed hoarse.

At the questioning raise of Fu Meng-po’s brows, Kuan-hung scrunches up his nose, mock-scandalised. “Ugh, not like that, Selang, pi zai yang—”

“—I didn’t say anything!” Fu Meng-po barks out in defence of himself, laughing.

“You thought it!” Kuan-hung counters, jabbing at him again. It serves really only to reprimand him as his finger bends back a bit from the force of meeting muscle with no give. “You thought it, you—” Okay, all right. He could have phrased it better. And now he’s thinking about it, but, wow, he’s going to concede to a very resounding not now. He’s not too proud. He also might die if he comes again any sooner than post an eight-hour break and one meal intake minimum. “Whatever, stay here then, I’m going to do my face.”

Kuan-hung kneels up the rest of the way, tipping back, and Fu Meng-po rises to sit with him, catching him by the elbow. He was only fronting at being mad of course, but the sudden upend in postures has him second-guessing himself. He feels a bit hot in the face; put on the spot somewhere specificity pending.

He demurs, chin dipping so he can peek up at Fu Meng-po out from under his lashes. “What?”

Fu Meng-po’s shoulders jerk with his chuckle as he slants back, sinking his weight into the flat of his palm, propping him up on the mattress. He shakes his head, then lets go of Kuan-hung’s arm to cup his cheek instead, tweaking at the shell of his ear, feather-light.

“Meng meng da,” he teases, eyes crinkling.

Kuan-hung scowls, pouty, in the precise way he realises all too late just proves Fu Meng-po completely right. Then he opens his mouth to mime biting down into the meat of Fu Meng-po’s palm.

Fu Meng-po flails back, exaggerated, as though he’s really been chomped on. His enduring smile undercuts any believability to his apparent wounding. “I’ll shower,” he says quickly. “I’ll shower with you. Save water.”

Getting the rest of the way out of the bed is the heart of the struggle, but once Kuan-hung gets his feet underneath him and rises up the last leg of distance, Fu Meng-po tails along after, and it’s not much more of a feat to make his way to the bathroom. He’ll have to run the bath at least once before he leaves, he thinks to himself, glancing it over with more attentiveness than his initial assessment while Fu Meng-po starts running the water, hand held under the fall to test the temperature. It’s narrow and deep, with a step on the opposite side of the tap that shallows one end of it. He and Fu Meng-po could both fit in it. It wouldn’t necessarily be easy, but it’d be doable, and he’s definitely not mapping those logistics just for the sake of fucking in it. But, well, that’s an idea, too, to keep with the shower one for later.

The shower, when they get in, is a tighter fit for the two of them, with how tall they are coupled with how broad Fu Meng-po is. It’s not uncomfortable, though. It doesn’t even require any real acts of contortionism: once or twice, Fu Meng-po, just. Moves him. A little bit. In a way that puts his back up to the stone and wood slat wall or the glass pane divider, but it’s never more than a second of his hands stroking up Kuan-hung’s sides, never more than a step and a half in any which way.

He can’t remember the last time he showered with anyone that wasn’t in some sort of dorm or otherwise public— or private but necessitated by time scarcity. It’s not really what Kuan-hung thinks he might have been expecting, with Fu Meng-po. Fu Meng-po is just there, a presence, like there is no question that he would be as opposed to elsewhere. Maybe he’s just too fucked out to find all the close proximity and casual body contact while naked particularly exciting. It’s— nice, though. It’s the uneventfulness that makes it novel.

“Can you,” he says, once, pointing at himself. Fu Meng-po makes a committal sound, lathers his hands, and turns him around, helping scrub soap across the spot on his back Kuan-hung usually has to twist to reach in a way that feels right without a brush. Then, without so much as a prompt, he helps hold the detachable showerhead above him so he can bow forward and rinse the suds from his hair. The water is running lukewarm again, but it’s the lesser sufferance than staying half scoured, so he bears it while he waves a hand at Fu Meng-po to indicate he needs him pressed back against the wall so he can better get in between his own legs.

There’s a moment, when he straightens, and Fu Meng-po is just — looking at him, in a not especially discernable way, but when their eyes meet Fu Meng-po simply presses his thumb into one of the innumerable bruises he’s left littering Kuan-hung’s chest. Kuan-hung— yelps, and slaps out at him with the flannel, reflexive, earning a rejoining yelp in turn.

“Can you, just,” Kuan-hung snaps, without irritation or anything, really. Speaking for speaking’s sake while water runoff drips into his mouth. Fu Meng-po puts his hands up, beseeching, then slips around him to get out first. Kuan-hung stays in, sticks around, and doesn’t really watch, all that much, out of the corner of his eyes and in the reflection of the glass pane and the vanity mirror, as Fu Meng-po wipes himself down then leaves, ambling out with only the towel he’s drying his hair with for modesty.

Once the water has run cold, Kuan-hung gives up the ghost of his hesitation and steps out, shaking off his shiver. He dabs himself dry, wraps his towel around his waist, and tucks it in on itself to hold tight. Then, he gets out the two travel cases he keeps stocked with all the tinctures and hope-and-a-prayers he needs to keep the odds of his skin remaining presentable in his favour. He sets them down, and starts the arduous near-nightly ritual of reverse-tetrising them out onto the vanity. His thoughts catch on Fu Meng-po in the shower with him. His thoughts catch on how easily Fu Meng-po made his way around him, effortless with practice. They’ve moved and been like that for most if not all but the first beat of their acquaintance; that’s not strange. They’re easy. He’s grateful. Fu Meng-po is experienced, and Kuan-hung likes that about him. Fu Meng-po understands the desire for an autonomous existence, to want to be small but significant, to do no harm, to remain unchanged. These are things he— wants. But not as much as he, just, wants to stop thinking, right now.

Kuan-hung leans out around the countertop, and calls out loudly, “Can you bring me my phone? It was under the pillow.” The sudden spike of his own volume sometimes banishes; the switch flip of his attention changing tracks to a new direction. It works, somewhat, maybe. There’s some shuffling, some steps, and then Fu Meng-po is back in his eye line, holding his phone out to him through the doorway. He sets it down as prompted when Kuan-hung points vaguely.

Fu Meng-po smiles at him, he smiles back, and his thoughts catch on it again. He hates this, more than a bit: when he is happy and he knows it but something has decided to tell him What if?

What if what, he thinks back at it and himself, pettily, as he unlocks his screen. He taps his way to YouTube to thumb through his subscriptions, scrolling until he finds a video that looks interesting enough to be preferable over white noise quiet and the unpredictable percussion of Fu Meng-po moving around in the bungalow. Something with a runtime long enough to set his routine to.

Knowing what he’s doing in his own head doesn’t stop him from doing it. It’d be nice if it did, but nothing like this is ever that easy. So, he just— he dabs oil out into his palm and slicks up his fingers. He thinks what if what to a lot more things as he starts massaging his cheeks upwards, watching himself in the mirror. Really. Not everyone can be so blessed to have sulking over near misses and long time comings alongside crises of faith in persona and overdue calls to their parents be the most of their problems.

He ends up distracted by the video; takes double-time to finish his routine and pack everything back up. His thoughts have stopped catching, by then, at least, as more or less expected. He feels refreshed and spent. Lighter. Like he could sleep for a year. A little bit settled back into the shape of the idea he has of his own skin, how everything is supposed to sit on and around him.

The bed has been remade when Kuan-hung comes back out of the bathroom, complete with a duvet that Fu Meng-po is reclining on in much the same way as he was the bare-bones bed before. During the first round of, well. When they and this all started here. He looks up from his phone, then starts to get up, reaching for his charger to plug it back in and set it down while Kuan-hung digs through his suitcase for something he can sleep in that isn’t in too dire a need of a wash yet.

There’s two beds, yeah, but with the second one made up pristine save for his suitcase tossed on top, it all just feels like a pretence. Glorified surface room storage. A choice if Kuan-hung wants it, but not a choice anyone would choose if they had it offered up to them. It seems to be the common theme of this trip: choices that aren’t choices at all, because the choice has already been made long before it has actually been chosen.

“I’ve got an alarm set,” Fu Meng-po calls over.

Kuan-hung makes a scoffing sound, preemptively aggrieved. He wrangles his arms in through the sleeve of the shirt he’s picked out, then toes into his briefs, half-glancing and one-handed, while he turns off his own alarms for the morning. He’s leaving it in Fu Meng-po’s hands now. It’s not like he has to be keeping to any schedule, though; it’s not as if Fu Meng-po’s set one past his own, outside of some loose parameters. Fu Meng-po has places to be, so they’ll get to them, but it’s almost as if his timeline has sidestepped into the lane of when good and ready. Taitung, day after next. Then, who knows? Not Kuan-hung. He’s all right with that. Better than all right, if he’s honest.

With nothing left to it, Kuan-hung makes his way over to the bed. Fu Meng-po holds out one of the water bottles he’s swiped from the table to him, swaps it out for Kuan-hung’s phone and puts it on charge while he takes a drink.

“Roll over,” Kuan-hung says, a bit choked up clotted wet for coming out all too quickly. He gesticulates; recaps the bottle; hands it back. “I’m big spoon.”

“Are you, now?” Fu Meng-po asks, amused. He rolls over onto his side — towards him, so they’re face-to-face as Kuan-hung kneels down onto the mattress and starts bundling himself in under the blankets.

“I’m taller,” Kuan-hung answers, explaining, perfectly, he thinks, his preference, for the night if not necessarily overarching. He is also absolutely taller, even if the difference is literally splitting hairs.

“Hm,” is Fu Meng-po’s reply. Kept neutral, though the hood of his eyes and the smile tugging at his mouth hints at a sway of bias.

They’re close, Kuan-hung realises. Which is a rather stupid realisation to have, because it makes sense, and he watched himself move into the position that made it so. They’re in bed together, facing one another, and the bed’s not all that luxuriously large, and they’re both all long limbs even if the span of them differentiates, so of course they’re close. Fu Meng-po crooks his arm, slides it underneath his pillow, and sets his head back down on it. He breathes out, slow. Kuan-hung feels his own breath skip, quickening.

They’re close, and in bed, and facing each other, so the anticipation that coils up his back to nest between the wings of his shoulder blades is not a surprise. The way Fu Meng-po reaches across the sliver of space left between them to cup his cheek is to be expected. Kuan-hung presses against his palm; leans over, lets himself be led in, and in, and in. Fu Meng-po’s lips are warm and soft. He kisses him gently, close-mouthed and utterly unrushed. It was gentle, before, too, but this is ginger with time-taking, with the savour of every sweet second of it.

Kuan-hung lets his eyes fall shut, the curtain of something contenting closing around him, draping heavy. Fu Meng-po thumbs the blade of his cheekbone; kisses at the corner of his mouth; sucks on his bottom lip. Kuan-hung curls his toes in the sheets below; claws them between his fingers above. When he pants out, damp-hot and shuddery, Fu Meng-po presses in, and in, tighter, licking in behind his teeth, over his tongue. The slide is slick, wet, but the pace is still unhurried, unhungry. Fu Meng-po’s hand tips, his fingers fanning broadly, mapping the hinge of Kuan-hung’s jaw, the dip beneath to his neck. The knead of his palm keeps his mouth parted, keeps him pliant, open and easy for Fu Meng-po to suck on his tongue, to swallow the little moans Kuan-hung can’t help himself from making.

Fu Meng-po pulls back after a moment, letting him take a breath. He snaps the string of saliva strung between their lips with his tongue, then thumbs over Kuan-hung’s mouth to wipe it dry where it’s flecked back onto the skin. Kuan-hung arches into his hand, kisses the rough pad of his thumb, laps at it. There’s a chill settling in low within his chest again; a tightness to his throat and a heat in his belly. But Fu Meng-po doesn’t press back on and in; just leaves that heat to simmer out with a small smile on his face that Kuan-hung likes the look of but can’t get a full read on.

The anticipation unthreads from his back; bottoms out, fizzles flat. Kuan-hung goes lax again, lulled by Fu Meng-po’s hand cradling his face, the meandering brush of his fingers. He means to ask what Fu Meng-po wants, but— he’s glad he doesn’t manage it. Glad that his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth when the thought crosses his mind and nothing ends up coming out. It sounds accusatory even in his head. It’d doubtlessly come off worse after its ground over the whetstone of his tongue to become sharpened serrated.

So, he hums instead, sleep-softened, eyes fluttering shut. He only means to for a moment. A minute. Maybe two.

Two minutes becomes three, four, more, and he falls asleep like that. He must fall asleep like that. He keeps falling asleep like that.

When Kuan-hung blinks his eyes back open, blurry and a bit sore, the light has been switched off. Fu Meng-po is no longer touching him. He doesn’t know how late it is, or early; he doesn’t want to check his phone in case it wakes him up all the way.

Kuan-hung reaches out, tentative, and his hand soon finds the swoop of Fu Meng-po’s back, where he’s turned over in their bed. He feels his way across the gap until he’s pressed to the warm line of him, noses at the spill of Fu Meng-po’s hair, then tucks his face to his shoulder, snuffling tiredly. He feels Fu Meng-po shift against him, his breath kicking up.

"Sorry," Kuan-hung mumbles, when Fu Meng-po makes a croaky, quizzical sound.

"S'all right." Fu Meng-po's voice is all slurred honey-thick with sleep, raspy deep. It makes a pleasant shiver bead up Kuan-hung's nape. "What're you sorry for, huh?"

Kuan-hung huffs out, shaky. I don't know, he thinks. Does he need to be sorry for any reason more than that he's— tired, that he keeps sleeping the day away? That he just is?

"C'mere," Fu Meng-po rumbles, reaching back behind himself to palm at Kuan-hung's hip. Kuan-hung's already as close as he can slide in without crawling on up inside Fu Meng-po entirely, but the fumbling tug of Fu Meng-po's fingers makes him feel like he's been brought an impossible inch further in, tucked deep and intimate.

"I am," Kuan-hung whispers. Fu Meng-po does little more than shift with the steady rise-fall of his breath, soft inhales pushing the span of his back wide against Kuan-hung’s chest. He gingerly slings an arm around Fu Meng-po’s waist, then hoists his leg up over his hip.

He falls back asleep like that, and doesn’t stir until morning, when the alarm from Fu Meng-po’s phone starts to blare through his ears and his awareness cuts in at the damp spot of drool that’s stuck Fu Meng-po’s shirt to his chin.

End Notes

Revisiting my gratitudes in the re-up: all my thanks are still owed as always to the lovely S & J for encouraging my nonsense across the finish line. J gets bonus byline co-credit for Darren & Paul's in-joke WeChat aliases, and for tipping me over to being more vulgar with Darren's slang. All remaining mistakes and missteps are mine.

I wouldn't've gotten within a league of close to having something published were it not ultimately for the bullying support of N & J + the enthusiastic encouragement of C & P.

Some liberties have been taken to keep the timeline somewhat ambiguous and to suspend disbelief for the sake of fantasy fucktimes, but I've otherwise tried to be accurate. The title comes from the poem 你總會有情人的 by 鯨向海.