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Song Lan had not wanted to come to the party. He hadn’t wanted to dress up, although he let Xingchen braid his hair back and he looks very cute, and he’s frowning, now, sitting next to Xingchen in the circle, gripping a Solo cup like it might bite him.
It’s not that Song Lan doesn’t like to have fun, but that he has trouble having fun around people who aren’t Xingchen. And around Xue Yang, who is here as well, sending little smirks at them from across the circle.
Xue Yang circles the lip of his beer with his tongue. Xingchen doesn’t know why, but Xue Yang uses his tongue more than most people. At least, he always seems to be doing something with it.
If he had known that Xue Yang would be here, Xingchen might not have been so insistent on coming. He’d just imagined spending another evening alone with Song Lan, and anything seemed like a better idea. The way things get when they’re alone... Maybe if they could be like normal friends and watch movies or play video games—Xingchen has never played a video game—but what they do is sit outside in the cooling twilight and talk. Song Lan gets quiet and thoughtful, his voice going soft in the way it only does with Xingchen. Xingchen can hardly stand it.
He has wanted Song Lan to kiss him for years. It’s getting to such a crisis point that he sometimes has to excuse himself, pretending he has to use the bathroom so he can go inside the house, put his hands over his face, and breathe through the desire for his best friend to touch him.
So coming to the party seemed better. But now they’ve been roped into some kind of elaborate kissing game. And Song Lan really hates Xue Yang.
Xingchen entered public school two years ago, as a sophomore. It was his choice—he’d wanted to try having the kinds of teen experiences everyone else was having, after a lifetime of gently directed unschooling. But there was a lot of culture shock, and Song Lan was there, in the placid, unsmiling, kind way that he’s there for every lost cause he can find. That’s what Xingchen loves about him—his dogged devotion to being good, not superficially, but by finding useful things he can do, and then doing them.
Song Lan let Xingchen drag him to the homecoming dance, so Xingchen could get his iconic high school experience in, which is where Xingchen saw a freshman who he now knows as Xue Yang pour something into the punch bowl. He immediately went to tell the faculty chaperone, and the next day Xue Yang got pulled out of class to see the school counselor. He was missing from lunch—in detention, Song Lan explained—for three weeks. Xingchen counted the days, wracked with guilt.
But he shouldn’t have been. After the punishment, Xue Yang managed to break into the school at night and set off the sprinkler system, and in some way that Xingchen still doesn’t understand, he had framed Song Lan. Song Lan was suspended for a week. A week that Xue Yang spent making smoldering, triumphant eyes at Xingchen from their separate empty lunch tables.
So. None of them get along.
Xue Yang gulps from his beer, slants his eyes at Xingchen again, and laughs to himself. Incomprehensible. Xingchen scoots closer to Song Lan and puts a finger on the rim of his Solo cup. He would have liked to touch his hand.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” he says. “We can go home if you want.”
“I want to,” Song Lan says. The crease between his eyebrows relaxes. “It must... be fun,” he says hesitantly, glancing around at everyone who is here, crowded around the empty bottle on the carpet.
Xingchen’s heart twists. Song Lan is so cute. He inhales carefully, the rush of affection followed immediately by the urge to scream. He takes a sip from his own cup, something that tastes like cherry Kool-Aid but stings the back of his throat as he swallows.
The rules of the game are as such: Someone is picked randomly via bottle spin, blindfolded, and put into a dark closet. The bottle is spun again, and a second person enters the closet for seven minutes. After seven minutes, the first entrant passes the blindfold to the second and leaves, letting a third person enter. Then the second person leaves and admits someone new. And so on.
That’s how Xingchen ends up with a bandana tied around his face, gently but firmly guided into a small space that smells of wool. The door latches shut behind him. He feels behind him for the wall and slides down it, sitting with his knees up. His heart is pounding. The air tastes like dust.
He’s a little off-balance from the drink, but only a little. His mind is sharp and clear.
He wants to kiss someone. He wants it so badly he can feel his pulse in his palms and the bottoms of his feet. It doesn’t matter who. There is one person he wants, and he can’t have him, so everyone else seems about equivalent.
He swallows, and it makes him notice that his throat is dry, so he swallows a few more times, trying to moisten it. Is it unpleasant to kiss someone with a dry mouth? He has no idea. The cherry taste has gone sour on his tongue. If only he had breath mints, or if he could rinse his mouth out in the bathroom. Never before has he had to consider how welcoming his mouth might be. It makes him self-conscious in a new way, a way he’s never had the opportunity to feel before.
The sound of the door opening makes him jump. He can hear bodies moving—clothes shifting against clothes, feet stumbling. Then the door closes again, and someone is in here with him.
The person heaves a little breath, not quite a sigh. Xingchen hears them sit on the floor as well, feet knocking against Xingchen’s sandals. Xingchen is sweating right at the nape of his neck.
He doesn’t know who this person is, but they know who he is. Xingchen knows he’s not bad-looking, but he’s not exactly a heartthrob. He’s the weird kid who takes his shoes off whenever they have class outside and only has one friend.
“I,” the other person starts. Xingchen cuts them off.
“Do you want to kiss me?”
There’s a pause. He strains to hear some kind of reaction, but there’s nothing.
“Yes.”
A boy’s voice, maybe? Maybe not. Xingchen gets up onto his knees. He’s wondering how to kiss someone he can’t see when he feels a hand on his cheek, another at his shoulder.
“Wait, really?” The voice is hushed, a little throaty. Maybe someone trying to disguise the sound of their voice.
“Please.”
He’s close enough to feel the other person’s breath as they exhale at that. It makes him shiver.
What if it’s Song Lan?
He lets himself entertain it for a second, and then pushes the thought away. Song Lan is so straightforward. He would just tell Xingchen who he was, and they could spend a nice, chaste time together. In a dark closet close enough to feel each other’s body heat. And Xingchen would die. No, it’s better that it’s not Song Lan; it’s something new.
He leans forward, and then someone’s mouth covers his.
The hand on his face is so warm. It anchors him as he’s kissed, several soft, slow, closed-mouth kisses. The other person barely draws back between them, reluctant to break contact. Heat floods Xingchen’s chest.
He opens his mouth and deepens the kiss. The other person makes a small noise and surges forward. Xingchen can taste beer on their tongue. His body is so alert, his senses so tuned in.
He thought, maybe, he wouldn’t like it. Maybe it wouldn’t work to try with someone else, and he would go home and feel more alone than ever.
But instead he wants more and more. It’s not enough to kiss this person, to feel their teeth graze his lower lip. He wants them to touch him. He wants to press their bodies together, shoulder to groin, and just feel.
He raises his hands clumsily to touch the other person’s hair. It’s long, messy, a little coarse. He buries his hands in it, grabbing hold so he can kiss harder, startling another little noise out of his partner.
And now the person is touching him back: his face, his neck, one hand dipping to clutch his waist. Xingchen puts his own hand there and squeezes, encouraging his partner to grip harder. The only sound is their heated breaths and the wet slide of their mouths. It should be weird, but Xingchen likes it, which makes him flush warmer.
This, he thinks, is what people mean by making out. Kissing that turns into something else, a gentle push-pull of their tongues and lips. He thought it would be just a physical connection, but it shocks him how much communication there is in this. A sense of trust in how the other person gives themself over to him. A little teasing in the way they nip. Overwhelmingly, a sense of being wanted. It’s burning in the base of his throat, something he didn’t fully know he was chasing until now, when it’s being given so freely it makes him lightheaded.
The other person pulls back, and then Xingchen feels both of their hands on his body, splaying across his lower back. A face is pushed into the curve of his throat, and the voice says “Xiao Xingchen” in a rushed whisper.
It stops him. Everything holds still for a moment: he forgets to breathe, his heart pauses.
He softens his hands in his partner’s hair, running his fingers through, stroking. The body pushed against him shudders.
There’s a fragile awe trembling in his chest.
“Oh,” he says. He leans down and kisses the person’s hair. They open their mouth against Xingchen’s throat and press their tongue to his skin.
Then there’s a loud knock on the door. Xingchen instinctively scrambles backward, and the other person does too—he hears them hit the opposite wall.
“Time!”
Xingchen can’t catch his breath. He reaches for the knot on the back of his head, and it takes three tries before he can get his fingers to work.
Then something presses over the bandana at the front of his face. He feels fingers on his forehead.
“Don’t look.”
“I won’t,” he promises. He pulls it off, eyes closed tight, and it’s taken from him. He pulls himself up by the door, turns the knob, and stumbles into the light.
Xingchen walks back to the circle in a daze. His mouth feels kissed. He didn’t know that was a way he could feel until now. Is it visible on him? Is his mouth red, his cheeks pink? He has no idea.
It’s too bright out here, shockingly bright for a basement that seemed dim seven minutes ago. He collapses next to Song Lan and gives him a smile.
Song Lan looks murderous.
Everyone thinks Song Lan frowns all the time. Xingchen usually knows how to read him better than that. But he is angry, his shoulders high with tension and his hands gripping his knees like he’s trying to bruise them.
“Hey,” Xingchen says softly, nudging him with his shoulder. He peeks around the circle to see who’s missing, left back in a dark closet with their hair mussed by Xingchen’s fingers.
It takes him two goes around the circle before he gets it.
Xue Yang.
Xingchen’s muscles all seize at once. He closes his eyes, head spinning in a way he wishes he was tipsy enough to justify.
He thinks of the way Xue Yang touched him, the reverence with which he said Xingchen’s name, and he feels buoyant, giddy hysteria rising in his throat.
If he laughs, Song Lan will be even more upset. He digs his fingernail into the pad of his thumb to keep quiet and then thinks, uncontrollably, of the way Xue Yang always puts his tongue on everything.
Is Song Lan going to ask? A glance suggests no. Song Lan is looking away from him, staring into the center of the circle. Nie Huaisang is reaching for the bottle, about to spin it to choose who is going to go into the closet with Xue Yang—Xingchen has a wild urge to raise his hand and volunteer.
But it’s Song Lan who reaches a hand out and stops the bottle before it can turn.
“I’m doing it,” he says.
Nie Huaisang sits back on his heels. “You can’t do that,” he says. “Otherwise anyone could just go and make out with whoever they want. That’s completely against the spirit of the game.”
“I’m going,” Song Lan says again. “Time me.” He stands, and stalks over to the closet door.
--
When the door opens, Xue Yang considers peeking, obviously. But he’s glad he didn’t, because the other person sits down and immediately demands, “Did you kiss Xiao Xingchen?”
So, it’s Song Lan. Obviously. No one else cares enough about who Xingchen is kissing to say it in such a dramatically anguished tone.
“That’s none of your business,” he says.
He hears that hit. Song Lan grunts, like Xue Yang’s punched him in the chest. Xue Yang wants to know how Xingchen looked when he walked out—if he said anything. If he said he liked it. That would make seven minutes with Song Lan potentially fatal.
The fun must be over by now, anyway. Xingchen has probably realized it was him, and if Song Lan wasn’t here, he’d be getting his feet licked clean by his boyfriend in penance for daring to stray. It doesn’t matter. Xue Yang still got to do it.
“He didn’t know it was you,” Song Lan says. “That’s not fair.”
“That’s how the game works. I didn’t tell him to put on a blindfold and put his mouth on whoever was closest.”
“I don’t believe you,” Song Lan says decisively. “I don’t think you even did anything. He wouldn’t.”
Xue Yang only meant to tease, but this hits, flint striking steel and making a sharp little spark. It makes him want to get nasty. Xingchen wouldn’t touch someone like him?
“Then I guess you don’t know your boyfriend as well as you thought,” he spits.
Song Lan is quiet. Xue Yang can hear his breath, heavy and strained. If Song Lan cries, that really might make this the best party of all time.
Finally, Song Lan says, “He’s not my boyfriend.”
It knocks the air out of Xue Yang; for a moment he’s genuinely speechless. “What do you mean?”
Song Lan doesn’t respond, which Xue Yang figures means Refer to previous statement.
Xue Yang has had fantasies about Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen breaking up for years. Not because he has designs on either of them, at least not anything he’s seriously considered. It’s just the way they are with each other—so comfortable that they don’t even have to look at each other half the time to have the same reactions. It makes Xue Yang’s teeth itch. When he was fourteen and stupid he thought maybe hurting Song Lan in repayment for Xiao Xingchen’s slight against him would make them turn on each other. When it didn’t, he gave up.
All these years, and they aren’t even together? He can’t help but start laughing.
“Shut up,” Song Lan says. His voice is rough; he clears his throat. “You took advantage of him. He’s never kissed anyone before.”
Neither had Xue Yang, but he’s not going to say that. He just laughs harder, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth.
“Stop it,” Song Lan says. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s very funny!” Xue Yang says. “You’ve never kissed him in two years of school together, and I did in thirty seconds? It was really fun! You’re missing out!”
A sudden flat hand on his chest shoves him backward.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” Xue Yang says. There’s laughter still leaking out of him. “It’s wrong to hit me when I can’t see it coming. I thought you cared about those things.”
“I really hate you,” Song Lan snarls. “I really hate you.”
Xue Yang bares his teeth at him like an animal. Song Lan shoves him again, hand against his upper arm, and Xue Yang slaps him away. He kicks out blindly, his foot connecting with something solid, and hears a grunt.
Xue Yang braces himself for another impact, but as he waits, Song Lan’s side of the closet goes absolutely silent.
It lasts long enough for him to cautiously lower his hands, his shoulders relaxing.
It lasts long enough for him to start getting bored.
Song Lan clears his throat again. When he speaks, his voice is low and grim.
“Did...” He stops. “Xingchen. Did he... like it? Is that what he...”
Xue Yang wants to laugh again, but it’ll make Song Lan clam up, and he’s curious to see where this is going.
“Yeah,” he says.
“You’re just saying that to bother me.”
“Oh no, I’m not,” Xue Yang says. “It was obvious.”
Song Lan goes quiet again. Xue Yang again entertains the possibility that he might cry. Song Lan seems like a silent crier. Xue Yang would take off the blindfold for that. He’s considering it when he hears the rustling of Song Lan moving, and then there’s a warm body crowding into his space. Xue Yang’s reflexes kick into high gear again, ready to fight, but Song Lan’s hands cup his cheeks, and then he’s being kissed for the second time in his life.
Song Lan crushes their mouths together like it’s a punch. Xue Yang shoves back, slapping his hands over Song Lan’s on his face. He sticks his tongue in right away, thinking it might scare Song Lan off, but instead Song Lan makes a muffled noise and pushes forward against him. He bites down on Xue Yang’s tongue, which drives a yelp from Xue Yang that gets swallowed between them.
Song Lan kisses Xue Yang like he’s chasing the taste of Xingchen. Xue Yang gets his hands on Song Lan’s shoulders and bears down; to his surprise, Song Lan actually lets him push him backwards. Song Lan’s back hits the ground and Xue Yang climbs on top of him, his hands gripping hard. He feels Song Lan’s fingers clasp the back of his neck, and then Song Lan drags him down to recapture his mouth.
When the call of “Time!” comes, Xue Yang’s got the collar of Song Lan’s shirt pulled down and is biting his chest. Song Lan pushes Xue Yang away with a hand on his forehead.
“Get off,” he says. Xue Yang snorts. It’s a little late for that. Xue Yang’s mouth feels bruised.
“Okay,” he says. The rustling from the other side of the closet sounds like Song Lan sitting upright. Xue Yang unpicks the knot on the bandana and crumples it in his fist. It’s still too dark in the closet to see anything, but he leans in towards Song Lan’s approximate location and drops his voice to a whisper.
“If you don’t make a move on him,” he says, “I will.”
Song Lan reaches out to grab him, but Xue Yang presses the bandana into his fist instead.
“I’ve got at least a seven-minute head start,” he says. He pulls the door open and walks out before Song Lan can respond.