Red Bean

    In the segue from summer to autumn, at 7 each night the sun sets over the Western Mountains overseeing Beijing, which each day at about the same time begins the revelation of its true contours, the disk shaped city switched on like lights of a carousel ride. In the dusk the sun’s vision hangs, quivers in the prolonged heat wave behind rugged angles of mountains, filtered by the geometry of the metropolis towards where people cast in the shade of skyscrapers squint, through people, then fog, then the glowing line that at last seals itself into the black earth. The nightlife begins, until at 5 the sun rises again, one rotation for another.

  Zitao has been looking down at his watch twice a minute, facing west where the glow spills into the narrow alley between two rows of flat buildings, but he can’t tell you the minute today when the sun last sizzles over the horizon.

  It started to rain at noon. In the hollow space of the restaurant the rain slams down and vibrates like the inside of a drum. Joonmyun’s napping at the round table with an arm propped and webbed fingers shielding an eye like he’s facing a pile of paperwork. A white standup AC unit shrinks into the corner, much like the one they had years ago in the practice rooms. The family restaurant is decorated humbly, genuinely, but the artificial chill reminds him all the same of the windowless room sealed in saturated clouds on three ends, and another end with enormous panes of mirrors reminding you of your place among them.

  So he’d decided to step out.

  Over the ledge the water rolls continuously, overflowing the waterworks of gutters long rotted by bad maintenance. Zitao watches a big droplet fall on the tip of his black shoes, scattering the puddles collecting on the oil polished surface. He stomps his feet, and the sound echoes on the hard metal of the emergency staircase. He checks his watch again, habitually. He doesn’t register the time, just checks it. 7:26 at a glance, or 36. He wishes it was digital.

  When he looks up again, hand stuck back in his pockets and rocking on his heels, four figures round the corner. He lifts a hand, not sure to block the sun or wave. Zitao hopelessly brushes some water off the railing and leans, waiting for the footsteps to ascend, and for them to find him hopelessly waiting for some unknown which he holds in like a mouthful of smoke. Chanyeol first, then Baekhyun, Jongin, Jongdae. He nods as they pass. “Anyone here yet?” Zitao only points past the plastic drapes, where the squared form of their leader holds without collapsing, even in sleep.

  Then he breathes out, alone again. Zitao doesn’t smoke, never has. 12 years later Sehun still tells him over the phone, “you never got over that habit of posing cinematically, even when no one’s paying attention.” So he pushes off the railing, shakes his head at himself. He’d never managed to shake many old habits. Sometimes when he’s in public, Zitao’s acutely aware that his own attitude is a little affected, mimicking some windswept male lead like he always did back in the days when he liked to pretend he wasn’t himself.

  “Maybe if you wore someone else’s character long enough, it’d start blending in with your own.” He hears in a voice in his head, hands tensing out of reflex, but it’s not the voice that calls him back to the present. He looks down, and registers Lu Han’s Audi parked beside his own in the lot. He appears in the passenger’s window briefly before getting out the other side, opening up a black umbrella.

  He greets him by the foot of the stairs.

  “Not cold?”

  “It’s worse in there.”

  Lu Han pats him on the arm, a solid, evaluating pat. Zitao smiles, and Lu Han smiles back. “If you get wet now, it’ll be worse later.”

  “Worry about yourself, Xiao Lulu.”

  “There you go again.” Lu Han shakes his head as he walks up the stairs, Zitao behind. Under the ledge he retracts his umbrella, shakes it a little. “Don’t worry about Yixing, he’s stuck in traffic.”

  Zitao shakes his head. “You go on.”

  Lu Han watches him for a second, before giving another smile. “Don’t wait too long.”

Twenty minutes after Yixing arrives, the sky’s dark enough he can’t see his watch anymore. He’s spinning the glowing block of his phone in his hand when Baekhyun comes out and tells him to get back up because they’re ordering.

  When Zitao gets back to the room, the temperature has significantly risen, maybe from the heat of a dozen bodies huddled in the small room. Lu Han’s spinning the tea around the rotating glass, talking in Korean about the importance of authentic, backalley family cuisine. Joonmyun’s awake now but barely, dozing off with some tea in hand. Zitao dodges Yixing with his torso pulled over the back of his chair, pointing at things on a laminated menu to the old shopkeeper in her apron. He tries squeezing back into his seat by the window, patting Sehun’s shoulder to let him by. Lu Han’s flipping channels on the flatscreen TV that hangs out of place on the opposite wall, and he grabs his coat off Zitao’s chair when he comes.

  “So, tell me about the poetic sunset.” He takes Zitao’s cup off his plate, pours him some of the chrysanthemum tea. Zitao drapes his own jacket over the chair and shivers almost instantly.

  He turns around, brushing aside the leaves of a potted plant to look at the AC unit up and down, trying to find some controls. “I wasn’t paying attention.” He prods at a button with a faded label. “Do you know how to—can we get them to turn this down? This coldness is getting between my joints, I feel like I’m gonna end up having back problems—”

  His last words drag across the abruptly silent room, and when Zitao straightens back around he finds Lu Han’s eyes on the door, expression something hard to read in the instant before his eyes naturally wander in the same direction and fall on the sight of the man in the doorway with rain dripping off his fingertips. His dark hair sticking flat to his forehead, the otherwise minute rise and fall of his chest accentuated by the sickly lighting and elongated shadows outside the threshold. Yifan’s face gleams, washed by a layer of rain, unnaturally shiny against the dark grey of his turtleneck. Zitao can’t see his expression, only the familiar facial structure and physical stance he could always recognize from a distance.

  “You came,” he blurts, without thinking.

  The table’s gaze instantly swings towards his direction, and he registers Baekhyun’s troubled gaze, closest to the door before noticing the frozen expression on Yixing’s face, which seems, among all the others asking answers, to be the only one staring right into him for an explanation. Another inch to the right and he realizes Lu Han hasn’t looked away from the door. He looks back to his guest in the doorway, heart rate accelerating the way he’d prepared himself for pulling his shoulders back and wide on the stairs. Yifan looks strange, not a warm awkward, gelled on the edge of this impenetrable atmosphere. Suddenly Zitao stands and looks around, frantic.

  “Where’s the other chair?”

  Beside him, Sehun lowers his face into his hands. “Of course you would do something like this.”

  “Where’s the other chair? I told them we need twelve—”

  “Ah—”

  The old lady returns from the hallway and almost backs out as she stops, noticing the new addition, and the prominent silence. The grill in her mittens sizzles, and they quickly jump to action, making room for her on the table. Zitao’s pushing past Sehun again, this time pushing, and Kyungsoo catches his sleeve to tell him they moved it back out in the hallway.

  “—sorry auntie, can we have the extra chair back again?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She leaves. The bamboo door swings behind her. Zitao stands in the space before the TV which mumbles still imperceptibly in the background, standing on the side of Yifan facing the table, frozen yet again in question. And then Yixing stands up. And almost just as he’s straightening his legs Lu Han’s hand flies to catch his wrist, his own eyes cast down on the lone dish on the table, mouth set in a strange line.

  A moment later, Yixing grabs his coat off his chair, turning just the slightest while he does, but Lu Han’s hand slips off his wrist. He picks up his tea cup, blows on it, while Yixing squeezes along the wall out the circle. He gives Yifan one look and no more as he straightens his collar, before shrugging his coat, and leaving down the hallway out the swinging door.

  Chanyeol audibly swallows. He looks to Joonmyun, as most are doing, but Joonmyun stares in the general direction of the door, looking pained and troubled and hesitant. The rain patters on outside, and Zitao wonders if he messed up more than he predicted, but along with this is a wave of anger, and disappointment—

  The owner returns with the chair, and it’s the first time Yifan speaks that night when he finally steps into the room and reaches forward, “auntie, let me.”

  He stands with the chair in both hands.

  And then Lu Han lets out a long sigh. All eyes turn to him, but he lifts his head, and when he does he looks lethargic, resigned in a sardonic way. He leans back into his chair, unwrapping the sanitary wipe, looking down at his hands as he cleans them.

  “Past is past,” he just says.

  His eyes flicker up to Yifan, just a moment afterwards before dropping down again. The room starts up into a quiet murmur, and the ice is officially broken. The few by the door stand, Jongdae out of his chair first, probably to pull Yifan into a hug. Lu Han doesn’t watch. He wipes his hands, and once he’s done wiping his hands he refills the tea for himself and Zitao, and even Yixing, who would stubbornly come back only when his tea has gone cold. Jongdae squeezes a chair in between Minseok and himself, and Zitao comes back grave faced, rims of his eyes reddening faster than he probably would have wanted.

  Some things just don’t change. “You and your dog shit ideas.”

  Zitao chuckles, coarse like he’s on the verge of tears, and he shoves Lu Han back in the shoulder before he sits.

  Past is all past. This was something Lu Han had come to peace with years ago, longer even before the day Zitao’s naivete had pushed him to say, and admit to himself alongside, it was time to let it go. Time waxes over everything: nicks and pricks, and what had been at the time a gushing wound. They would all be lying to themselves if they said, after a certain amount of time, they didn’t make an effort to keep up with Yifan’s rise, and the titles he accumulated, the carpets he walked, the girls he dated, the speeches he gave. He looked good still. Healthy. They all did. Yifan was an old friend, and this was merely something like a college reunion. In a decade’s time, many things gradually settled on their own. They were so different now that nothing remained in Lu Han but a curiosity to understand how differently the twelve of them, as children growing into men, now corresponded together. How differently their second meeting would happen when he stood up and steadily smiled the way he couldn’t in the past, and offered a firm hand across to bridge the 10 year gap that would have eventually sealed itself, one day or another.

That’s why it makes no sense that right now he can’t lift his eyes from the table.

  They hadn't planned on such hardcore shopping on the first day, but even jet lagged and eye bagged Kris' phototrophic cells lure him out the comfort of the hotel room and into the blazing LA sun. Luhan the roommate suffers on the way.

  "No, get me away," he babbles to some large hands trying to roll him off the bed, which had just yanked the cord to the blinds and unleashed the laser beams of morning. Luhan knows distantly as he's forced to redress what he just shucked off that he should've just taken the farther bed and stayed out of the fiend's path. He grabs a can of chilled coke from the kitchenette on the way—strawed. He could always look uglier accidentally spilling things down his throat.

  But the fact remains that no one can look uglier than Kris with half a leg of his jeans hacked off, and he carries the forest mauling escapee look for the whole day plattered with neon orange J's while Luhan watches, sipping lethargically on his straw. So what's new? He tries on a shirt or two. He tries on a shirt Kris tries on. He buys a shirt and walks out with it on his back. Waiting for the car ride back, they stand on the curb with some fans a few steps behind with their phones raised. Sometime during the day Kris had their manager take a photo of himself flying and Luhan's so used to it he doesn't bat an eye. Now he does, a step behind Kris finally about to say something he won't remember in an hour. Somewhere in the crowd, their manager takes a photo.

  When Kris decides to post it, they're both burritoed in their blankets, clicking away at their phones. Luhan's in their group chat discussing the day's loot, and Kris watches green chat bubbles pop from Jongdae's enlarged face as he recites his convenience store receipt, to the care of no one except Luhan who gets on his knees and bangs the wall behind him thrice before sliding back down. The culprit laughs, muffled by wall, and that's when Kris speaks. "What brand's watch did you wear today?"

  "Why?"

  "No reason."

  Luhan tries to peek across the bed, but he gives up, crawls out his warmed blanket and javelins mercilessly into the other bed, watching Kris update an instagram photo he didn't know had been taken. Kris looks over, waiting for a finishing answer. Luhan shrugs. He pulls his black tee over his head and throws it across the room before sliding into bed as far as the tip of his nose. Under the blanket, he yawns. "Audemars." Sleepily, he watches for an update on his screen, and a moment later laughs as he types some generic response. He nudges back gently with his toes, "Good night", and has it echoed.

  At 4 AM Luhan wakes from a light sleep, and arms warm and heavy around his waist. He tries to turn, but Kris shakes awake as well, rubbing his eyes in the dark. "Did you manage to fall asleep?" 

  "No...can't sleep, jet lagging."

  Kris lights his phone for the time, then dims it again, puts it back on the nightstand. They lie there for another little while before Luhan sighs long and deep, and pries Kris' arms loose to slip out onto the bed he abandoned and snatch the phone on his pillow. He worms back into the doubled warmth. The sky's still dim from the cracks in the blinds, but Kris dials on the nightstand lamps now, setting an artificial glow just soft enough to make out Luhan's features. He picks his own phone back up, propped on one elbow while he watches Luhan lying flat with his phone raised, honeysuckle lips mouthing the words he reads off his screen. 

  The click of a shutter is loud in the room.

  "Let's give them a gift."

  Luhan looks over to him, brows knotting before frowning, then snatching the phone out of his hands. There he is looking pale and bloated, half awake and lips set in a childish pout and undeniably naked at the collarbones, and there it is being pearl filtered on instagram. "Stupid," he clicks his tongue once, "just watch your hand slip. Then bop."

  He exits the screen, but lets the picture stay in his album. Yifan flops over to find another one he can play with, and spends a long time dragging clumsy stripes over car plates. Luhan offers to help, and accepts his phone to a caption in English. "Mr. Galaxy?" Kris just laughs. "What does the rest say?"

  Kris thinks about it, and decides smugly on "Nothing." Luhan eyes it awry for another second before tossing the block back onto Kris' chest. It lands with a thud.

  "Whatever." Luhan tries to sleep again, switching off the lights. In the darkness with his glaring screen, Kris finishes up his post. It's nothing close to what Luhan really says, but he knows one day he'll win him over, and Luhan will find his eccentric hobbies worth something. He's half sure he already has, anyway. He leans over, sloppily grinning, sloppily kissing the boy on the temple before whispering against his ear.

  "You're my Mr. Galaxy," he says in English.

  "Fuck, what the hell," Luhan says in vexation. He swims away to the edge of the bed where he threatens to roll over. Kris reaches for him, laughing, but he gives up. In a few minutes, limbs hanging over, Luhan's fast asleep. 

    1.

How long does it take to get close to someone?

  A night for starters:

  "No, you can't have this," Sehun absolutely can't have this is what Joonmyun's thinking as he sweeps under his arms in the narrow kitchen hall and plucks the offence out of his hands. In a moment Sehun panics, is looking up at Chanyeol that he misses the act of confiscation, yelps thinking he dropped the prize to shatter. "Where do you think you're going with a whole bottle of tequila?" In the doorway, Joonmyun's looking at him like a disappointed parent, swirling the liquor with a wrist, and with a cry Sehun leaves and follows.

  It feels as much like a workplace party as it is one—year end company artist get together, like the office potlucks he's often imagined himself a part of, trying to make merry with a bunch of people he shares nothing but a desk with. For people like Jongdae it meant seeing seniors. For people like Sehun it meant seeing seniors.

  And suddenly Joonmyun doesn't feel so old to him, in this kind of crowd. He crashes onto an empty couch, almost subconsciously slides to one end, making room for Sehun before he opens his tipsy mouth and demands something outrageous. Like Move or I'll sit on you, or "So...", but he stretches himself across the couch shoes kicked, legs draped over Joonmyun's thighs like a little child. Joonmyun watches his messy limbs flounder, moving the bottle away from his kick, his dirty bottomed socks.

"So let's talk about her."

  He sounds beyond smug, and Joonmyun chokes on nothing, wants to disappear into the background maybe. He scans quickly for some save, but no Tuxedo Mask waits behind a door hinge, no one to take Sehun's inquisitive stare away. It's the fifth time he's asked since two days ago. A reaching tide, a cold reminder, again and again washing over his consciousness lying ten feet from shore, trying to sink into the quicksand.

  He takes an abrupt swig from the bottle.

  "No more her," Kim Joonmyun waves dismissively, face a blotchy red. He drinks again—and this time the water carries him like a buoy, until the rising sting retreats, and he slowly sinks back into the sand. "No more her."

  When he looks over Sehun hasn't moved, still watching him bright eyed, gentle smile on his small lips beguiling, fooling him into believing the hushed voice which says, "you can trust me, hyung." Fools the sting to his head again, his eyes, fools him into thinking Sehun's not as young as he has to be, "You can lean on me, hyung, it's okay."

  Oh Sehun. He's young but he's now broad chested, Joonmyun couldn't remember when it was Sehun started bowing while he fastened scarves around him, or when it was he stopped fitting his own jackets. These days if Joonmyun knocked on the hardwood door of his chest he would probably get an answer as full as the sound of that warm, familial echo. Sehun is the echo of the conches, bugles and horns that call the fishing boat back to shore and the sound of the ocean in his water-clogged ears in a crowd like this and Joonmyun...has watched him fish since he was fourteen. Sometimes things that've been a certain way too long have to stay a certain way, or the music chops, and he'll be forced to find his footing on the dance floor again when he's barely keeping his own two feet out of the quicksand.

  At least he thinks, until they're kissing.

      2.

"I don't really like Mac's." Sehun mumbles from his bed out of the blue. "Okay, I really don't like Mac's."

  Joonmyun's pulled from his doze, hand mechanically scrolling the forum page stops, and he dangles his eyes up across the room at the boy mimicking his motions, except rigorously. "This—scrolling?! I can't even find Jongin's settings before I get to change them."

  Joonmyun sits up against his headboard, "You used a Mac before it broke, too."

  Sehun's jabbing the trackpad mercilessly, brows knit, little tongue poking out the side of his mouth. "Dad said he'd buy me an HP laptop if I ended up going to college."

  A silence later, Joonmyun speaks again. "Isn't it a little weird, using a fangift? So...intimately..."

  "Yeah, what if something goes wrong and they find my porn collection?"

  Joonmyun is stunned speechless.

  Sehun smirks at him momentarily, then looks down in embarrassment and reprimands himself, thought he'd gauged their comfort level wrong. Too much too fast. Too lame.

  "I don't have a porn collection."

  He says, red faced.

  "Mac's can't even open half of those videos."

  "Talk to me, hyung."

      3.

The morning that they're both in bed past 9 comes a knock on the door to rectify the arrangement.

  Sehun groans under the blanket, detaches his face from some musky warmth before breaking out into the sunlight. Joonmyun wakes from the itch of his skin when Sehun pulls away, and he feels all of a sudden too sweaty before the blanket's flipped without care. He cradles his tumbling junk, sun in his squinted eyes, toes struggling to tug the blanket back over his bare legs, under which the faint scent of Sehun's healthy adolescent oil lingers.

  "This hell's this?" he hears by the door frame, wonders if Sehun's got some clothes on before he's dishing out morning attitude like this. "Has your goddamn name on it," Baekhyun's voice drifts, and a moment later Joonmyun sits up, suddenly aware. Sehun stares at the package, puzzled.

  "Don't shake that." Joonmyun says weakly, cheeks red in uneven places. He scratches his neck, his hair disheveled, and something about it makes Sehun's mouth turn up. He crawls back into the cave of his blanket, knocking into Joonmyun again, flips him over with his large hands until the marks of his last night's love blossom yet again in cute little flower patches, besides the blood swelling in the places their bodies touched while they slept. Sehun buries his smiling face in the cleft of his leader's ass and Joonmyun itches to grabs the keys on the nightstand and slash the box open for him, but he refrains. Sehun blows raspberries until he rolls over from laughing. He takes apart the package to find another box within, this one with a Hewlett Packard logo on the side length.

  "You didn't actually," he leans back, mouth hanging open. He slowly slides the box out, eyes not leaving Joonmyun, and Joonmyun looks like he probably didn't expect things to turn out like this. 

  "You've grown up," he eventually says, tugging on Sehun's ear. Sehun halts for a moment, before his face lights up, too bright. 

  "I know."

  Yixing wouldn’t even have noticed it in the first place if there wasn’t two of the same bags circling around the pickup belt.

  Lu Han steps away from him in the split second he’s distracted by the neon yellow marking tape on a black suitcase. “Excuse me,” and Yixing turns to his direction, Lu Han’s tapping a man on the elbow, “I think this one’s mine, there’s another—”

  He turns and points at the one Yixing’s resting his weight on. In a moment Yixing straights, hurries to bring it over. They kneel and pull out the tag in the back to find it blank. On the other, the tag slides open to ball point blue ink, “Wu Yifan” and a phone number.

  They trade gladly. Lu Han shoves his laptop bag and binder case and notebooks back into Yixing’s hand and locks the luggage handle into place. He flips his hair and slides in a pair of shades from his breast pocket. Yixing looks him up and down and laughs. “Well, I have a lot of questions…”

  "He took mine," is what Lu Han finally says when they’re almost out of the airport terminal. “He took mine.”

    They were on a business trip. Honestly, it’s like he can’t get a break away from the other two even when he’s out of the office, especially Kris who ups and leaves before Minseok even issues his official two week absence, and Lu Han has to set up his answering machine. This is...Kris’ assistant, please leave a message or contact him at…. “I’ve been dying to get out,” was his excuse the night Lu Han phoned, “I gotta get out of the place, that accountant keeps skyping me when I’m on the phone with clients, I swear to you, Lu ge, she’s onto me. Pshew!” like a gunshot fire. It took a moment for his mind to glide past the name, which was cool when Minseok did it, but stressed him out from Kris for reasons he didn’t want to know. Lu Han had thought back to Minseok’s words. On second thought, as if on first thought sending Kris alone into the mountains was a swell idea, you guys should go with him. He’s good, most of the time, but it’s a tough case. Besides, a good duo sometimes does the trick.

  Which doesn’t explain why he’s here with Yixing, the guy who sits across his desk and always kicks his charger by accident until his laptop’s shutting down. He does know that this means there was an on third thought somewhere, and he didn’t want to know which one of the two of them Minseok didn’t trust on his own, going after Kris. The thought tasted acid, made him wonder whether the standoffish Minseok knew all the complications between the three kids she raised day and night in the marketing department, by some womanly intuition. On top of all this, the night he was due to go Yixing arrived like a ticking time bomb in front of his apartment building. “Jesus christ, go speed a lap, why the hell are you here so early, I haven’t even gotten my shit packed—” and Yixing listened to him crash frantically through the house until he swore a loud “FUCK” before hanging up abruptly. He dialed Kris, nails tapping sharp on his touchscreen, “did you take my backpack?”

  “...You mean this one?”

  And then came the sound of a familiar squeak from the Donald Duck keychain that hung off the side pocket zipper. Lu Han took a very deep breath, which Kris probably heard. “Are you sure this isn’t a dog toy? Okay, sorry. I have a spare one in the attic.”

  He was always doing things like that, swapping. Taking without asking, in some prehistoric form of flirting. Like baking the new hot neighbour some “family recipe” lasagna and strategically leaving the casserole dish. Sometimes Kris takes his stuff to the dry cleaning and doesn’t give them back until Lu Han’s out of suits or hangers. One time in summer he oiled up his old bike chains in his garage and liked the new feel so much he took it altogether and bought him a new one. This time it was Lu Han asking him to patch up his mountain climbing backpack months ago after a bush accident, and now he’s taking it into Shandong and up the Tai Mountain, trekking to the top whereupon a shrine in the sky will invite him into its alluring gates, and he’ll thence vanish like an urban myth. He thinks it’ll work out like DNA crossing, sharing everything until it becomes unconscious, a habit, thinks it’ll make Lu Han stay longer, but Lu Han’s wondering how much of himself he’s willing to leave behind the day he breaks away while he’s rifling around Kris’ apartment frustrated, following blind instructions from an irritating voice through the phone.

  “Could you…also bring a mosquito net?”

  Lu Han dabbed at his sweat, sitting on the edge of Kris’ unmade bed, quietly breathing into the receiver while he stared at his pink knees. His heart's pounding, his cheeks red. “I already did.”

  “Do you want me to pick you up at the airport?”

  “It’s ok.”

  “Ok.”

  “—Well, Yixing’s outside…”

  “Alright.”

  A pause.

  “Love you.”