“You found me.” The almost suffocated inanity that spills out of Tang Fan’s mouth cuts down all other riotous, competing sound in the room, in Sui Zhou’s head. “I called out to you.”
“I heard you,” Sui Zhou murmurs. Even this is too much to give his voice to. He gives it over despite himself. He gives himself over in spite of many selves for Tang Fan.
Sui Zhou has been working surveillance on the case for three days when Tang Fan knocks on his passenger’s side window.
Over the years and across the provinces, they have explored together every li of what there is to offer in this between them.
The fever breaks that morning, spurring Tang Fan from the bridge between death and dreaming.
Sui Zhou must rise eventually, of course.
Sui Zhou and Tang Fan attend all manner of gatherings with great regularity, but it is rare for them to partake in much mingling as themselves.
Everything is going to plan up until the precise moment it starts to fall apart.
No inch of his bared skin is a revelation to Tang Fan, but stripping before him still feels like an unveiling, marital. A deification of the profane.
If he cannot ask, if he cannot even bring himself to, to say, I want this of you, then how can he expect Sui Zhou to answer? Sui Zhou is a man of fewer words than he is motions, but talking is an act that most often transcends tactility in its clarity.